Silicon Valley’s problem is, in large part, that they’ve stopped fixing the average person’s problems. Tech hasn’t improved most people’s lives in a noteworthy way in over a decade, and has made an awful lot of people’s much worse.
Most people outside the Valley can see this decay, not just in a lack of new services, but also in the rapidly declining quality of existing services like how Google search is now basically unusable.
And the VCs know it, too. They tried to get people excited about Web3 because there’s nothing interesting coming down the pipeline and they gotta get new companies to grow. There’s a crisis in tech, and that’s why tech keeps laying people off while the rest of the economy is fine
I think the reality is that tech is now establishment and mainstream, but nobody in tech is willing to admit it or, god forbid, act like it because being outsider rebels is central to their myth making and marketing. Nobody wants to be IBM, but that’s largely what tech is now.
You aren’t going to get explosive growth and change everything if you’re a startup now, you’re going to hopefully get bought by a bigger company. You’ve just got a corporate job now and that comes with a very different set of behavior and responsibility that people aren’t doing.
My laptop is lighter, my phone has a better camera, but beyond that I use incrementally better versions of the same apps. Hell, people are still laying GTA V and Skyrim, two ten year old games. Not a lot has happed in the last ten years by a lot of metrics.
Lauren's getting at another important facet of SV's stagnation - any interesting innovations are limited to a small subset of enthusiasts or professionals. VR and 3D printing are the same way. They can't make things break through to regular people anymore
It’s worth paying attention to how many people see technology as a way to punish people they don’t like, instead of a tool to make things better. Stay away from those people and the tech they’re embracing.
If you read my tweets you might decide I’m a Luddite. I’m not! I work in tech and I’ve just done it long enough that I can differentiate between a useful tool that can be leveraged and something that’s both hyped and embraced by awful people. Look at crypto for another example.
Crypto was “I will be rich and you will be poor” and AI is “All of the people I don’t like will have their job taken by the computer. I will be safe by embracing it”. Just like how crypto guys didn’t grasp how money and finance works, AI guys don’t know what people do as work.
This isn’t going to happen, and it’s not going to happen because the dirty secret of AI is that it’s super expensive to run. Entry level trainable models start at $30k a month and they aren’t going to get cheaper. Add in the skilled labor to train the model and it’s not worth it.
ChatGPT is ridiculously expense to run (something like $100k an hour) just so you can get inaccurate information and bad poems. You can get text easily, but then you’re going to have to edit it so it’s not garbage. It’s still cheaper to just hire people to do the work.
What gives tech dipshits like Jason a hard on is the idea that if they hype AI enough, they’ll be the ones getting paid as a middleman instead of that money going to a copywriter. It’s straight up rent seeking disguised as innovation, don’t fall for it.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
It’s not about the sanctity of the constitution or whatever, it’s about staking out an argument that allows them to use the power of the state against the people they don’t like. The constitution’s just a useful tool for it because it was written by rich white slaveowners.
Pointing out the hypocrisy doesn’t matter. The hypocrisy is the point, the acknowledgement that they’re making up the rules so they’ll only benefit the people who are in on it, but it’s worth laying ou for the other people who might think that the constitution will protect them.
First episode of The Book of Boba Fett breaks the one rule they should have for the character, and something they respected in The Mandalorian - don’t ever show me Boba Fett getting his ass kicked. He should always be cool.
Oh cool, Jizz music has a Bossa Nova variation now