posted on March 09, 2021 06:01 AM by
u/AlienneLeigh
95
u/foxaru64 pointsat 1615275661.000000
Having figured out a font and mastered Altman’s Ratio, your next step
is to find something to say. For outsiders this can seem daunting, but
it’s very easy, since every one of Silicon Valley’s self-styled radicals
thinks exactly the same way. In fact, when you study their output
carefully, you’ll find endless variations on the same three ideas:
Free speech is under attack.
A wealth tax is a bad idea.
To beat China, America must not become France.
This segues nicely into your third and final theme: American
greatness. Today the Silicon Valley elite is obscenely rich; with a
wealth tax in place, it will become merely extremely rich. This fear
will undergird all your work as a VC intellectual. You won’t admit this,
of course; instead, you’ll sell yourself as singularly obsessed with
maintaining American hegemony in business and technology. The challenge
for America, you will argue, is to beat China. And the sternest
cautionary tale for an America on the precipice of Sandersism is France:
a living hell of high-speed trains, immaculate town centers, public
health care, excellent higher education, five-week paid vacations,
progressive taxation, and abundant, low-cost cheese. All of which sounds
pretty good until you consider that up to a few years ago, the French
had failed to produce a single startup unicorn this century—the result
of a (thankfully now-abolished) wealth tax and decades of addiction to
bureaucracy that have left the country’s business culture as clogged and
unimaginative as the pores of its inhabitants are enragingly clear.
What’s the point of taking long vacations if your society doesn’t have a
retail economy built on Groupon vouchers? The French have developed no
good answer to this question, but America must continue to ask it.
The ‘immaculate town center’ bit is wrong but the sneer is otherwise
perfect
>And the sternest cautionary tale for an America on the precipice of Sandersism is France: a living hell of high-speed trains, immaculate town centers, public health care, excellent higher education, five-week paid vacations, progressive taxation, and abundant, low-cost cheese.
They still manage to have issues with massive racism in their police force, though...
French town squares seem to be well maintained, but the housing around them tends to the scruffy, for (or so I was once told, I have no idea whether it’s true) the purposes of tax avoidance.
there is no absolute moral evil that cannot be playfully reframed on
irrelevant grounds as a net historical good.
This is decades old at this point, the fruit of mid-90s libertarian
“dEbUnKiNg” of conventional wisdom. But it is indisputably Silicon
Valley’s space now, so we can credit it to them.
From another discussion of the article: [Is anyone in SV weaponizing
these rhetorical tricks to make good things happen, somehow convincing
the folks out there that it is imperative to implement socialism ASAP or
else Roko’s Bolsheviks will murder them?]
(https://www.metafilter.com/190685/Expecto-Reductio#8075401)
I keep being surprised how many people don’t realize that PG is just not smart.
My favorite bit is his obsessive worshipping at the altar of Lisp, since Lisp is what “hackers” use. Never mind that this hasn’t been true for almost half a century, PG went out and created himself a new lisp which literally *nobody* other than PG uses. The only place I know of it being in production is HN, which is famously primitive both in design and function.
Agreed that he’s not that smart, but speaking as a (recently) former lisp programmer, while there are few people using it, but if they’re using it they’re using it for cool things. His books on lisp are consistently being sneered at in the community, though. See this [classic sneer that tries to cushion the critique in faint praise](https://courses.cs.northwestern.edu/325/readings/graham/graham-notes.html).
That praise is wrong, btw: the coding style in his books is bad and results in unreadable code.
Having been paid to work professionally in lisp before, I’m pretty convinced that lisp is overrated. There is no doubt that it was revolutionary, but most of its good ideas have been copied by now, and a lack of continued support for libraries and tooling have left it in the dust for professional work. Things like Ruby on Rails might lack the elegance or street cred, but on the “getting shit done” scale they absolutely crush most lisps.
I’m sure there are some cool things being done at the edges where macros are needed or CLOS is a necessity instead of a massive footgun, but for most of us Lisp really shouldn’t be anything more than a novelty.
Yeah, that’s an accurate assessment. It’s what I used to reach for if I wanted to prove out something (or do something silly with clos), but yup: it’s not that extremely novel anymore.
All that said - arc, his lisp dialect suuuucks and its only redeeming quality is that it kept pg’s most frothing fanboys away from a community I used to care about for about as long as it spent as vaporware.
Depends on when you started your career. Back when I got started, before the nodejs hype train started, things like lambdas were actually fairly rare in the wild. Some languages had them, but not that many. Of course now Java has caught up in some ways, which is a real sign of how things have changed.
Some other features are relatively unparalleled today. Very few languages have macros, and few are as easy to use as lisps. Of course it turns out that macros are one of those things that most people don’t need, which is why they never really took off outside the land of parenthesis.
In a world where mainstream thinkers often present climate change,
the incompatibility of growth-driven economics with our planet’s
ecological limits, or conflict between China and the United States as
the greatest global threats, Balaji Srinivasan instead spent much of
2020 zeroing in on the real danger to humanity’s future: New York Times
journalist Taylor Lorenz.
Oh my god I love this. That fixation of his was so creepy
Masterful.
The ‘immaculate town center’ bit is wrong but the sneer is otherwise perfect
I thought the ur-sneer was “look at these extremely offended dorks.”
My god it’s full of sneers
This is decades old at this point, the fruit of mid-90s libertarian “dEbUnKiNg” of conventional wisdom. But it is indisputably Silicon Valley’s space now, so we can credit it to them.
From another discussion of the article: [Is anyone in SV weaponizing these rhetorical tricks to make good things happen, somehow convincing the folks out there that it is imperative to implement socialism ASAP or else Roko’s Bolsheviks will murder them?] (https://www.metafilter.com/190685/Expecto-Reductio#8075401)
Wow. Much epistemology.
No wonder a large percentage of tech workers turn fasc.
Which one was this? Jared I assume right? Our alt-right party (Baudet) leader also dined with him.
Oh my god I love this. That fixation of his was so creepy
You had me at “Peter Principles”
oof this satire is almost a little too believable
Kill it and all the thralls will die too like a vampire