The net result is a (mostly) American business model predicated on Celebrity C-Suites doing highly visible things while those doing the hard work of creating value are shunted into offices and paid less compared to productivity gains over time. It shouldn’t be a surprise that social media and the internet have supercharged this, especially with groups like YC, Softbank, a16z, and other VCs splashing out Capital on flash over substance, exploitation over business fundamentals, “disruption” over societal benefit and symbiosis.
The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.
Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today.
This discussion circles around it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074389
but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive.
One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.
Got it in one. Would I like to travel First Class and stay in fancy hotels? Sure, but I’d much rather have a house that I can improve to meet my needs instead. Would I like a fancy luxury car with all the trimmings over my sixteen-year-old Honda? Absolutely, but the latter is paid off and gets us around just fine. Would I like that spiffy Hasselblad X2D and some lenses? You betcha, but I’d rather take a proper holiday for the first time in fifteen years instead of buying another thing.
The problem is that society at present isn’t organized to prioritize necessities like shelter and healthcare, favoring wealth extraction and exploitation instead. Workers don’t want megayachts and hypercars and butlers, we just want to live more than we work.
It can mean moving within a class.
Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.
Huh, I think I read a book about that once. I forget who wrote it. Carl something, I think?
Many things changed around that specific time, and I think it does deserve scrutiny. Implied cultural factors seem to be merely correlates of greater historical tide, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Nixon_sho...
My take here is a monetarist.
Understanding the interconnectedness of systems beyond your own realm of expertise is how you learn what needs to be done to fix issues - and avoid falling for snake oil “silver bullets”/“one weird trick” populist positions.
Naturally, unmentioned are those shut out of reasonable opportunities for meaningful productivity, regardless of technical potential (but largely in line with (lack of) social capital). A few years of this maybe encourages an entrepreneurial spirit. Two decades is quite convincing that there's no place for them in the current order.
The upwardly-mobile opportunity hoarders need to understand, much as the wealth hoarders ought to, that the whole thing falls apart without buy-in from the "losers".
Tang ping bai lan.
Steinmetz contributed heavily to AC systems theory which helped understand and expand transmission. while Scott contributed a lot to transformer theory and design (I have to find his Transformer book.)
In addition to the limits of human planning and intellect, I'd also add incentives:
as cynical as it sounds, you won't get rewarded for building a more safe, robust and reliable machine or system, until it is agreed upon that the risks or problems you address actually occur, and that the costs for prevention actually pays off.
For example, there would be no insurances without laws and governments, because no person or company ever would pay into a promise that has never been held.
It's not even limited to modern technology. If you go talk to certain grievance-driven individuals from tribal backgrounds (for lack of a better term) who have produced nothing for the last 10000 years, they will levy similar accusations against the very institutions that are providing them with healthcare their ancestors could only have dreamed of. In some areas, even agriculture is seen as suspect. It's ridiculous.
It's scary to me how both sides of the American political aisle have suddenly turned anti-tech and are buying into the same arguments. Gross.
That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.
Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year.
Linux is still written by a couple of people.
Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire web browser behind the scenes…
Eventually you’ll have lead engineers at Apple who don’t know what computers really are anymore, but just keep trying to slop more JavaScript in layer 15 of their OS.
I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.
Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.
Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.
There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.
Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.
All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux
Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.
I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.
Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.
I was there in the DOS days. I was there when Windows 3.1 came out (others too but I didn't use them). I was there when Windows 95 came out.
Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds it produced that ran on cheap beige PCs. Not excellence. Mediocrity. Cheap, but mediocre.
At some point 95% of all machines sold with an OS had Windows and the times were incredibly dark. Thankfully things changed and now Windows is only present on something like 11% of all devices sold yearly that have an OS.
We dodged a big one and many of us shall never ever forget how slow, insecure, horrible and mediocre the products of that company were.
This is certainly false. There are plenty of young people that are incredibly talented. I worked with some of them. And you can probably name some from the open source projects you follow.
How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).
In fact today on GitHub alone you can find hobbyist OSs that are far far more advanced what Linuses little weekend turd ever was originally.
Their success is not gated by technical aspects.
I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff, but there's an entire industry of deep tech software and the payouts are excellent.
Rent-seeking and Promo-seeking is the only motivation for the people with the power.
None of that class wants to make a better product, or make life better or easier for the people.
Nowadays there are no tastemakers, and thus you need to be a public figure in order to even find your audience / niche in the first place.
That's always been the case depending on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to be Corporation Employee #41,737, or work for the government, you don't need a "personal brand"; just a small social network who knows your skills is good enough. If you're in your early 20s and trying to get 9 figures of investment in your AI startup, yeah you need to project an image as Roy from the article is doing.
It's amplified a bit in the social media world, but remember that only ~0.5% of people actively comment or post on social media. 99.5% of the world is invisible and doing just fine.
That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.
Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.
He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.
This has to be an exaggeration.
I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.
> secure the internet...
Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.
Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...
I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.
I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.
The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.
I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.
I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing