I'm not surprised, but what is surprising is we're now in a period in which the mask is slipping and no one seems to care enough to try to put it back on.

For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.

The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.

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lacksconfidence 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It seems like different people? The early tech scene was defined by people who got into tech because they loved it, jobs were paying under six figures. Then it became a gold rush, and the tech scene became defined by the newcomers who were after cash first, tech second. It's not that the old timers gave up on their ideals (well, some did), they were simply supplanted by larger numbers of people following the money.

In my opinion there is no "slipping mask", merely a changing of the guard that always happens when massive piles of generational wealth are at stake.

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shimman an hour ago | parent [-]

Nah, we knew back in the 90s that the tech industry had open disdain against American workers (pressuring congress to expand immigration to depress wages) and children (supporting charter schools while attacking children (yes when you attack public schools you're attacking the only people that benefit from it: children)). Not too mention all the horrid, extremely hostile business pursuits we saw from companies like Oracle + MSFT + Apple.

SV has always operated on exploitation of their workers, they just hid it well from the public.

	▲	lacksconfidence an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Having been there i have to respectfully disagree. Probably because, as far as i can tell, you are warping their intentions to be what your intentions would be if you did what they did.

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worldthruword an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I sometimes think, speeding up the Red Queen hypothesis to accelerate Cambrian Explosion by printing money from the top so that high-agency people would develop new products and services to capture more of the newly created money is a good thing?

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SpicyLemonZest an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I just don't understand how to connect this analysis to what's happening. What OpenAI and Anthropic both say, loudly and repeatedly, is that they're working on one of the most impactful technical problems in the history of humanity. The reason they have lots of money is that lots of investors believe they're right.

Perhaps you've seen under their mask, and you know they're scamming the investors. After the NFT bubble it's a plausible hypothesis. But I don't know what it means to say that the mask just isn't there and it's naked pursuit of wealth.