Comment by skrebbel
1 day ago
I'm not a big sucker for this kind of un-nuanced "us vs them" rhetoric, but I gotta admit, the title is a stroke of genius.
1 day ago
I'm not a big sucker for this kind of un-nuanced "us vs them" rhetoric, but I gotta admit, the title is a stroke of genius.
Perhaps the nuance is in the eye of the beholder? I don't think it's sustainable to go about our lives wearing blinders and averting our gaze from the misuse of technology because one might be afraid of unhappy feelings creeping in.
One must not be so cowardly as to deny that materials and technology can be misused or deny that their purpose is of oppression for fear of being attacked by group-thinkers.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" as Socrates put it. So, I invite you not play the usual game of narrowly looking at a single if statement and conclude "there's nothing political in this"; but rather look at the bigger picture... the asymmetry in access to information, resources, weapons, and how that impacts everyone's lives...
If we don't admit that there's a couple dozen people with immeasurable wealth and resources who have questionable intentions and opinions that affect our day-to-day lives, then we won't be able to prevent worse outcomes in a timely manner.
>deny that their purpose is of oppression...
A lot of the uber-nerds are just regular nerds who got lucky, not part of some evil genius cabal. By all means keep an eye on them but I think for the most part they are regular people.
Look at Germany 1933++ and Eastern Germany 1945++ to see how regular people act when they get power over their neighbours. I don’t have a position on the book, but your argument isn’t supporting what you think your position is - quite the contrary.
People don't stay 'regular' for long after gaining immense power or money. I imagine it's quite difficult to stay grounded and humble in such situations, especially with legions of sycophants and yes-people hyping them up.
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Is there anything 'regular' about walking onto stage wearing a cap and sunglasses and then brandishing a chainsaw as a 'symbolic' gesture (at anything other than a chainsaw conference)?
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See: banality of evil
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I completely disagree with this thesis. In my years as a founder (>40), it was very clear when I saw many forks in the road. One would lead to me getting more wealthy and one would lead to me being able to sleep at night. I chose the latter. Clearly the tech titans have chosen the other path.
I also witnessed many other founders doing really terrible things. It’s a meme around here that technical founders mostly get screwed by the time IPO or M&A proceeds are divvied up. I saw that time and again. Yes, there are exceptions, bit they are rare.
EDIT: was on mobile, wanted to add more:
IMO, the system we have sorts for sociopaths. The people with the power (politicians, CEOs, etc) are far more likely to be sociopaths than in the regular population because the rewards are so great. Look at the Paypal "mafia" (as they are called by many), and their exploits after Paypal.
Here's the way I look at whether someone got lucky or not: were they a 1-hit wonder or did they serially create companies with vast wealth? The former are people that got lucky. I've known some. The latter are mostly sociopaths. I've met many. They are predators. Some of them actually triggered my flight/flight response, and until that happened the first time, I had never in my life (in a business setting) experienced that. I now know what it means, when I feel that feeling. What is interesting is that my body sometimes knows it before my brain.
They're some of the most powerful people in America and, by extension, the world. Wielding such power required immense restraint, control, and consideration.
> A lot of the uber-nerds are just regular nerds who got lucky, not part of some evil genius cabal.
With the help of the CIA. /s
>I'm not a big sucker for this kind of un-nuanced "us vs them" rhetoric
Everyone usually has this stance by default until they think some batshit crazy redlines have been crossed regardless of what end of the political spectrum they reside in and decide to adopt an "us vs them, hope for peace, prepare for war" approach.
I'm sure you have some "if they actually do <xyz> then I'll adopt a more alarmed stance" line in the sand, it's just drawn at a different point probably. That's why it's best to talk specifics of the case instead of declaring an abstract high-road stance.
You misunderstand my point. I made no remark about whether big tech bosses behave harmfully or not (and in fact I believe that many do). My point is about blaming “nerds” or “Silicon Valley” for power grabs by a few asshole billionaires.
As a nerd running a startup, I dislike the tendency of many journalists to blanket blame “nerds” for the behavior of nutjobs like Musk. It’s pure “us vs them” thinking, blaming the group for the behavior of a few.
Fair enough, but you have to admit it's virtually impossible to infer your two paragraphs here from that one sentence above. The calling out of "us vs them" rhetoric is what's stated clearly (as well as the fondness for the title).
The uncomfortable reality is that there does exist an 'us vs them' situation in every other aspect of society today, and those who ignore it end up on the losing side.
It's not new. Quoth one of the best lyricists of the past century:
> There is a war between those who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't
- Leonard Cohen, 1974
A statement so vague and ominous it could have been uttered at any point in human history by persons of any ideology without loss of meaning.
Yet you have to admit that 4 days lecturing about the Antichrist is an order if specificity greater than the tangle of European alliances before WWI.
There is a better one. It was about how the far right was trying to take over Furry Fandom... The title was "the Furred Reich".
hah, had to look this up to make sure this was a real thing. But disagree on which is better, the Nerd Reich has a better ring to it. When you say the other one out loud it sounds like "deferred Reich".
Not really, the "nerds" aren't in control any more. It's just typical assholes, cosplaying as "nerds", ruing everything.
It's cute but are there any actual nerds left in big tech leadership? Of the magnificent seven we basically only have Jensen Huang left as a technical leader and maybe you can count Zuckerberg.
> maybe you can count Zuckerberg
I think that you definitely need to count him. He's always been a massive nerd, his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding.
>his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding
a lot of us nerds value physical strength, it's 2025, we're not mouthbreathers anymore.
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Google has some tendencies - Sundar Pichai was a materials engineer, Brin is back working there who considers himself a computer scientist. Maybe Hassabis - depends how you define it I guess.
Hassabis is absolutely a nerd. Joint honours physics and maths from Oxbridge and a PhD in neuroscience (and a Nobel prize in none of these fields).
His driving interest was always games (master standard in chess at 13, five-time winner of the all-round world board games championship, video game programmer in his teens then his own studio in his 20s).
He's the end game boss of nerdland.
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I thought it was super cool when a few years ago I found out that Eric Schmidt was the author of Lex! I struggled mightily with lex and yacc in college, but that was a me thing, I think.
When I watch Ex-machina the degree to which I loathed Oscar Isaac's character surprised me. While much of it was because the character was objectively loathsome, part of it was because I felt the type of person he represented was infecting the tech world.
The thing that seemed really inconguous to me was that he actually made the amazing tech. I don't think I have ever encountered a personality like that who actually made things. Certainly I've seen them talking about how great the thing they made is, but invariably, to them, I made means 'my employees made'
Which is not to say that there aren't toxic people who do actually make things. They exist, but it presents somewhat differently to the 'Tech bro' archetype.
It shouldn't matter whether the leaders are actual technical nerds. They are highly focused and motivated individuals who are harnessing tech for the stated purpose. Maybe this is by design and a coordinated movement - or maybe it is the inevitable consequence of uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism.
If profit maximisation is the ultimate goal every smart individual chases, the current trajectory seems inevitable?
Carmack? Also ended up drifting right, but you can't fault his technical credentials.
Wozniak is still alive and seemingly not in the rightwing set, although also too retired to count as "leadership".
Yeah, as I recall Carmack came out against some of the anti-trust actions of Lina Kahn, soecifically blocking certain type of acquisitions and mergers by big tech companies.
Though I'm curious what the take of "founders first" type of VCs like YC on the Figma IPO is, after the acquisition by Adobe was blocked. Whatever the stock price of Figma is now, would they specifically argue that of the two outcomes the Figma IPO was worse for the founders? To be clear, if that acquisition wasn't blocked the IPO wouldn't have happened.
One of the reasons I enjoy coming into HN. Is to read comments stating that the guy that created Facebook, alone in his dorm room, could “maybe“ be counted as a tech lead.
Elon Musk must be one. Seems enough techy to me: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink - software being used for the hardware in innovative ways.
Edit: Oh, wow, mentioning this guy is surely controversial, sorry. However discussing whether he is a nerd, understands engineering on very deep level/gets his hands dirty OR he only manages people - there must be some psychological aspect related, a form of disagreement to discredit or have a hard time believing it can actually be true.
Here is a list of credible persons commenting on Musk whether he understands engineering or not. With all the sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
The list is missing my #1 quote from Jim Keller (an epic engineer type) although unfortunately quote is in middle of a long YouTube vid. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33662764
Aside: I don't understand why they even mention what journalists think - only engineers opinions matter when judging engineering ability.
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Maybe he used to be one, who knows. But I doubt he read a book or seen a movie in the past few decades. He got roasted by Joyce Carol Oates on X recently for being an oaf and he immediately started replying to tweets about acclaimed movies. And nothing insightful that proved he had seen them, just 'this is a great movie' or some other stupid oneliner. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad that the richest man on earth is such a pathetic little man.
I think Elon Musk just wants to be Tony Stark and cultivates the appropriate image for that.
And possibly a genuine obsession with (rightwing-ish) meme/youth culture, which I think got him a lot of his initial followers on twitter/reddit/4chan/etc.
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> Elon Musk must be one
Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it.
Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ).
He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.
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Except that he didn't invent any of it.
Just a savvy investor, and as far as I understand, hasn't really worked on any of it. His contributions were rants until he just took ketamine.
His work was making a yelp clone.
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Zuckerberg? The genius coder according to the movie. Programming in PHP.
There are numerous criticisms you can level at Zuckerberg, but writing the first version of Facebook in PHP is not one of them.
Are you new? PHP was the standard for that type of app at the time.
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At the time your choices for dynamic server web apps were php or perl. The LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl) was very popular back then (early to mid 00s)
Classic example of humour as stop-think
You're replying to a single-sentence comment that both calls out the ridiculousness of this book's argument and its funny title. Clearly I can hold two ideas in my head at once and maybe, just maybe, other people can too.
I struggle to imagine that anyone not already sympathetic to the high school classic "nerds suck" world view is going to suddenly be swayed by this funny book title.
Classic example of motivated reasoning as stop think. Condescend at your own peril.
As far as I knew I was agreeing with the commenter not condescending. The title is a great example of it's kind. It's funny enough to stop one interrogating the proposition it makes.