>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak?
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed."
AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
For the last 15 years you could take a picture of a lightbulb and pop it in google search and it would tell you what kind it was.
I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.
There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported
> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011
AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.
However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.
In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
I imagine how you intended your comment to come across and I get it to some level. But I can't help feeling that there's something a bit dystopian in a world where all friction is removed just to more quickly get to the juicy bits.
There are some of us who still prefer actually learning stuff, even about light bulbs.
AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.
Or you take the old bulb to the store and buy the same kind. Funny how everytime someone says the AI made their life easier, it really didn’t seem like it when you paint out what the “old way” actually looked like.
You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.
I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not. If so, great job. If not - destroying the world so you can look up a lightbulb is not worth it, and you could have done that before anyway.
"AI has had a limited improvement over my life, so I'm happy fucking over the rest of the world by polluting water, using huge amounts of energy, and reinforcing class hierarchies, just so that I can change a lightbulb a bit easier" is peak tech-bro
Additionally, Schmidt is not just opining that this future is inevitable, he represents people in a position of power to actually impose this future upon the grads (as opposed to something more mutually beneficial).
I agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
A lot of people work extremely hard towards their dream to fail. Which is fine, but when you start out life being told if you just keep trying and it'll happen then it can quickly destroy the golden years of your career/life. This is often varying per goals too. Just because you love football does not mean you're going to be able to be a pro player just because you spent every hour on it. You're probably better off e joying football, doing enough to get a scholarship, and finding something else to build your life goals around.
If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
Truth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But…
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
Yes, and potentially extracts the wealth at the cost of the new grad’s job prospects.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
The college graduation version of the company owner speaking to an employee:
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
> Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
Up until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
Eric Schmidt has no clearer a crystal ball than Woz has; to say one is telling the truth while the other is lying is not particularly objective of you.
Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
Even if Schmidt was telling the truth, and Woz was lying, there is a time and a place for everything, and Graduation speeches are a time for celebrating the graduates, not telling them their lives will suck.
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
The economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.
Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs.
From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?]
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
Wozniak, every time. Gigantic financial success at the expense of everything Google has negatively impacted isn't something I would be proud of.
Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others.
There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
I'm fairly allergic to advice in general, but if I were to take some, I'd take it from the happy extremely rich guy over the ridiculous ultra rich guy.
Google turned from company that at least pretends to not do evil ... into one who does it without care.
I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.
TBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.
I agree, this is why you need to tell students a realistic outlook. And of these two I believe Wozniak is in fantasy land and Schmidt is closer to reality.
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
You should step out of SV bubble for a while, check how rest of humanity fares compared to our ultra comfy extremely well paid jobs and maybe be a bit more humble, not expecting whole world to roll exactly as per your expectations, whatever they are.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
>you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century.
Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains.
>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.
>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.
And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late.
>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.
Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.
>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.
So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
> how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak?
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed."
AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
>If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they.
Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?
1 reply →
For the last 15 years you could take a picture of a lightbulb and pop it in google search and it would tell you what kind it was.
I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.
There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported
> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011
> It's reduced technical debt
I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.
AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.
However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.
In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
1 reply →
Nitpick, but it's not <your> AI. Would be nice if that were true, but it's not
I imagine how you intended your comment to come across and I get it to some level. But I can't help feeling that there's something a bit dystopian in a world where all friction is removed just to more quickly get to the juicy bits.
2 replies →
There are some of us who still prefer actually learning stuff, even about light bulbs.
AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.
I've been making some good use of this stuff, but identifying light bulbs, really? That wasn't exactly difficult in the Before Times.
4 replies →
Or you take the old bulb to the store and buy the same kind. Funny how everytime someone says the AI made their life easier, it really didn’t seem like it when you paint out what the “old way” actually looked like.
You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.
I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not. If so, great job. If not - destroying the world so you can look up a lightbulb is not worth it, and you could have done that before anyway.
"AI has had a limited improvement over my life, so I'm happy fucking over the rest of the world by polluting water, using huge amounts of energy, and reinforcing class hierarchies, just so that I can change a lightbulb a bit easier" is peak tech-bro
Additionally, Schmidt is not just opining that this future is inevitable, he represents people in a position of power to actually impose this future upon the grads (as opposed to something more mutually beneficial).
I agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
A lot of people work extremely hard towards their dream to fail. Which is fine, but when you start out life being told if you just keep trying and it'll happen then it can quickly destroy the golden years of your career/life. This is often varying per goals too. Just because you love football does not mean you're going to be able to be a pro player just because you spent every hour on it. You're probably better off e joying football, doing enough to get a scholarship, and finding something else to build your life goals around.
If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
[dead]
Truth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But…
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
Yes, and potentially extracts the wealth at the cost of the new grad’s job prospects.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
The college graduation version of the company owner speaking to an employee:
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
> Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
Not only benefits from it, but the very one causing it to happen.
The graduation speech is a spiritual ceremony.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
As much as it costs Woz nothing to be AI sceptic, Erich Schmidt has to loose much if AI investments don't deliver.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...
Only correcting this because I’ve seen three people make the mistake now - it’s Eric, not Erich.
more like Erlich ;)
Which, one might argue, shows he believes it.
He's putting money where his mouth is.
Up until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.
4 replies →
More like his mouth goes wherever the money is.
Obvious to the grads he’s yet another “visionary” corporate hack waxing to them about how they’d better not miss the AI rocket ship.
i don't think you appreciate the degree of cynicism required to become a billionaire.
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
Doesn't that just mean that the merits will be unspoken and implied by what the enemy is saying as they speak to your deficits?
If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.
Eric Schmidt has no clearer a crystal ball than Woz has; to say one is telling the truth while the other is lying is not particularly objective of you.
Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
Even if Schmidt was telling the truth, and Woz was lying, there is a time and a place for everything, and Graduation speeches are a time for celebrating the graduates, not telling them their lives will suck.
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
How can you be sure Eric Schmidt is telling “the truth” and Wozniak is lying?
What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
The economy
And famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.
7 replies →
The economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.
Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
3 replies →
Economic, market and product results.
Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs.
From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?]
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
13 replies →
I want advice from the one questioning whether we should, not just whether we can.
2 replies →
Wozniak, every time. Gigantic financial success at the expense of everything Google has negatively impacted isn't something I would be proud of.
Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others.
There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
Dude: Eric schmidt is somebody who turned a cool technology company whose motto was "don't be evil" into an advertising company.
I'm fairly allergic to advice in general, but if I were to take some, I'd take it from the happy extremely rich guy over the ridiculous ultra rich guy.
Google turned from company that at least pretends to not do evil ... into one who does it without care.
I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.
TBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.
Trying to limit harm of something that is likely to happen 100% makes sense.
I agree, this is why you need to tell students a realistic outlook. And of these two I believe Wozniak is in fantasy land and Schmidt is closer to reality.
> ... unpopular truth...
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
You should step out of SV bubble for a while, check how rest of humanity fares compared to our ultra comfy extremely well paid jobs and maybe be a bit more humble, not expecting whole world to roll exactly as per your expectations, whatever they are.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
>You should step out of SV bubble for a while
I live and work in Europe.
We have internet here.
Harsh Old Geezer Take:
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
>you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century.
Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains.
>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.
>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.
And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late.
>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.
Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.
>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.
So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
[dead]
> how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.