Comment by gruez
2 days ago
He probably being sincere. If you're logged in (or use something like xcancel), you can see the full thread, where he starts off with
> Flock Safety currently solves 700,000 reported cases of crime per year, which is about 10% of reported crime nationwide
> And they're just getting started
His profile also says:
>President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @Initialized—designer/engineer who helps founders—SF Dem accelerating the boom loop—haters not allowed in my sauna
Gary has some unhinged politics with regards to "public safety" even excepting the Flock boosterism.
If it benefits Surveillance Valley, Garry Tan is all over it like Trump on a 13 year old
He’s being sincerely greedy and nihilistic, if that’s what you mean by “sincere”
It's really interesting the different cultures "YCombinator the startup incubator" and "Ycombinator/HN the internet forum has". A comment being so oblivious about surveillance would probably be flagged here, at least heavily downvoted, while this guy is actively the president and CEO of Ycombinator today?
pg, what happened? Ycombinator used to be a beacon of sense in a sea of uselessness, but now uselessness is running Ycombinator?
Another case in point is most commenters are incredulous about AI, often coming from people who try and use it and see its shortcomings. Then you scroll over YC startups and I believe every single one at this point is some dumb AI startup.
> pg, what happened?
Don't look to pg for anything that can be seen as "woke" - he wants that mind-virus eliminated forever[0]. Many billionaires revealed their true colors after November 2024, remember this when they adjust their public posture to follow the political winds.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780223
Did you link the right comment? He seems to argue against "aggressively performative moralism", something a lot more specific than the common "woke-ism" conservatives in the US is yelling about which is basically about anything with "social" in it's name (for them, in their eyes).
This is not woke, no matter how large you define woke. You can see links with the ACLU or various human rights defense groups, but those groups may have become woke, without “global surveillance” becoming a woke topic.
Wokism is about making racist accusations of dominance over an audience who didn’t do it. It’s about unfairness and hyping factions against each other. The global surveillance is not about pitting groups against each other. To wit, 1984 has always been a very right-wing torpe.
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