38 chunks · 31 episodes
Silicon Valley is obsessed with optimizing for performance, so early agent use cases are "doing what you already do, but more efficiently." This is like a pain-kill...
AI allows you to go faster or go deeper. Silicon Valley has fetishized speed so much that it's culturally impossible for it to do anything else. Bits are orders of magnitude faster/easier than atoms, so it...
Wired: Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Why You Hate AI "Technology leaders don't seem to understand society's gripes about AI, but boy, are they posting through it."
Silicon Valley over-indexes on individualism vs social collaboration. But in many situations, social collaboration dominates individual preferences. Consider "Come ...
The Atlantic: Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Biggest Advantage "In the data-center age, the business of tech companies is more like oil-refining than coding." We take for granted th...
Overheard: "Silicon Valley in the age of LLMs feels like being in the Renaissance in Florence." There does feel like a sense of "we can do anything" joy with a sense of uh-oh o...
... AI is distrust due to wealth inequality. "Using AI will make those assholes in Silicon Valley even richer."
The law of physics that explains Silicon Valley: the lack of noncompetes. It might seem worse for an individual company but it's wildly better for the system overall. Therefore better for individua...
It seems that Silicon Valley is returning to the Shockley approach to employees. That is, treating talent as disposable and extractable rather than as partners to be retained. Ge...
... and of itself. That makes it easy to miss how tech is like any other industry. Silicon Valley will look like Detroit someday. Google will increasingly become Procter & Gamble.
... you intrinsically care about other humans or not? A mindset I've seen often in Silicon Valley: thinking that other people are inherently dumb. Deluded or stupid. That they don't understand and aren't worth listening to. This is, needless to sa...
Silicon Valley is a spiderweb. When you're on it, you can feel vibrations even far away.
...ins. Except for DevOps during an incident. Even normal fast execution prized in Silicon Valley was orders of magnitude slower twitch than watching a portfolio anxiously. But now we have it all day every day! The new normal, grinding us down wit...
Will AI be something that strengthens democratic or authoritarian impulses? Silicon Valley, time to decide!
In the last decade it feels like Silicon Valley lost its soul. Where is that soul still alive, as a faint glimmer? I think the answer is Berkeley.
A quote from Silicon Valley: "I want to make the world a better place. Better than anybody else!"
Berkeley has rebel energy. It's also adjacent to Silicon Valley, but distinct. So you get the Silicon Valley goals but the Berkeley rebel energy.
In the last decade in Silicon Valley, everyone just assumed that the consumer category was dead. Every bit of territory was gobbled up by the handful of planet-scale aggregators. Everyon...
Silicon Valley's lost decade: consumer ceded to aggregators, software "innovation" meant SaaSy CRUD for some vertical niche. We forgot software could be anything el...
A new book: The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. I haven't read it, but wow what a title.