46 chunks · 34 episodes
... I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong. It's striking to see how far the tech industry has shifted in this late stage era. I don't recognize the industry that used to inspire me. Can there be any doubt that the modern tech industry has ...
Someone this week described today's tech industry as having reached an equilibrium that isn't even evil in an interesting way, but in a sad, banal way. It's not even grand ambitions any more, it's ju...
In the tech industry we talk about "Software Patterns." Very few know about the Gang of Four book that popularized the term. Even fewer know that the reason we call them ...
Most of the things the tech industry builds are just CRUD apps. Anything more complex is science, it takes an order of magnitude more effort.
...xt, and should have long-term alignment and responsibility for the outcome. The tech industry seems relatively naive in this domain. The tech industry tends toward "figure out a single objective metric and simply make it go up." There have bee...
...u're trying to solve intractable human problems with technology" It sums up the tech industry's approach to the nuance of human / social problems. One ply thinking that misjudges the nuance and complexity by an order of magnitude or more.
The tech industry deeply believes in bottom-up meritocracy. Good ideas can come from even junior engineers. I wonder how much of this culture is downstream of the hist...
...to rely on quantitative signals to scale. Those can't be whole and nuanced. The tech industry is fundamentally about scale. LLMs allow qualitative nuance at quantitative scale, which means for the first time we could make human scaled systems....
...] The emergent effects of tech are more important than the tech itself. But the tech industry doesn't think about emergence. Social media, crypto, etc… the goals were good, but the emergent effects were treated like a "whoopsie!" We must do be...
...becoming engineers?[gr] With vibecoding maybe the latter is more important? The tech industry has a baked in assumption of "of course people with a CS degree are at the top of the totem pole and always will be". But the tech industry as a whol...
I find the term "users" that is common in the tech industry to not be a great term. It feels like talking about people who are addicted to a drug. "users" and "consumers" are not about humanity, it's about the...
...wth makes it easier to have an infinite mindset. This is one of the reasons the tech industry historically cared less about titles. Everything was growing, so why sweat it? More mature contexts, like on the east coast, or academia, are way mor...
... on timescales larger than your professional experience. Anyone who entered the tech industry circa 2008 or later only knows the late-stage era of centralization and aggregations. This is a "winter". But a new disruptive technical paradigm ush...
...ransport than atoms. This one fundamental fact explains the majority of why the tech industry behaves so differently from other industries. For example, winner-take-all dynamics show up because the force of preferential attachment, a weak mino...
In the tech industry everything is always on fire. If it's not on fire, you're supposed to turn up the heat until it is. Then you step back and you realize if you would h...
...s not, you'll die. So you have to assume it's winner-take-all just in case. The tech industry acts like every domain is winner-take-all, just in case.
...ould possibly matter?" "Stopping to think about implications is for losers" The tech industry has been increasingly infected by this vibe.
...ntrinsically distrustful of aggregators, even if they don't know that word. The tech industry, in a nutshell, to them: a massive aggregation of power combined with a "go fast by not thinking through the implications of our actions" Having expe...
...The women have no recourse but to do clever strategies to get ahead. Why is the tech industry not particularly self-reflective about the implications of its actions? Because the tech industry has all of the money and power. The tech industry i...
There's a whole class of people who joined the tech industry not to use the internet to change the world for the better but because they would have gone into finance in a previous life. The optimizers, the peop...