Comment by yndoendo
3 days ago
Thanks for that. I can understand his disdain. Too many on here worship wealth and bad actors like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Sweeney who only care to propel their own wealth. There is a void of humanity and humility in such people.
Real intelligence must incorporate empathy. Lacking empathy means people lack real intelligence.
I respect people like Jamie Zawinski and Steve Wozniak. It is not about the wealth it about making a good product and solution. That is real value.
Also explains how he has the know it all to setup his site and fingerprint people logged into HN.
> Also explains how he has the know it all to setup his site and fingerprint people logged into HN.
Think most web developers who learned web development before LLMs would be able to do the same :)
Yes, that goldless monk Woz. Sure thing he never thought about propelling his own wealth while reaching 120 mln
There is a great deal difference between billions and millions. People have a hard time understanding powers of 10.
There is also giving away your wealth to others versus consolidating it and hording it like a dragon ....
But you know ... too many people look up to inhuman individuals like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Sweeney. Those that do are are detrimental to a civilized world.
You can create wealth by creating a good product that does not exploit the users nor those that assisted you on the creation and delivery. This is were our current large organizations fail to understand.
Exploit, exploit, to support that Friedman doctrine is the go to now. This were the three listed above support.
That’s unfair to Milton Friedman who, unlike the America. right wing retelling of his economics, would likely be aghast at the modern levels of inequality and concentration of power.
He did support what was basically progressive taxation, but suggested structuring it as a negative tax, where instead of increasing tax rates with income, you had a flat tax rate with minimal deductions, but you imposed a negative tax as you went down the income ladder.
You're trying to dress fanboyist attitude as some sort of moral stance.
Your statement was about people who "propel their wealth" vs those who somehow don't. With this in mind there's no difference between 10 mln and 10 bln - neither would happen for a person who doesn't want it to happen. "Good product" is irrelevant to moral estimation as well cause bad people can make good products, and vice versa. Finally, Starlink as an example is probably less exploitative compared to Apple's consistent walled-garden strategy. It doesn't tell us anything about Musk's morality, but rather clearly shows your logic as inconsistent.
Silicon Valley/tech used to be hippies, but the money-hungry noticed it's somewhere to make money, and swarmed to it.
Look at Cliff Stoll, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0
And no wonder those "money!" people hang out in a forum made by a venture capital company...
I wrote this comment the other day, it got flagged to death:
> As someone who downloaded, over 28.8K modem, a version of the Jargon File (1) as a plain text file (2) to read during a school vacation, in the "good old days" of my imagination Silicon Valley was a lot cooler for hackers. But people noticed it was a place to make money, and all the money-hungry MBAs showed up, and now the whole industry has a stench to it..
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File (2) https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt