fizzyfizz

letzten Monatdiscuss

The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project.

OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.

Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.

Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.

They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.

The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.

Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.

fizzyfizz

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Tools: Claude Code and various VS Code derivatives, and Cursor at work. Generally Opus 4.6 now.

I feel it made me better and other people worse.

GOOD:

I feel that I’m producing more and better code even with unfamiliar and tangled codebases. For my own side projects, it’s brought them from vague ideas to shipped.

I can even do analyses I never could otherwise. On Friday I converted my extensive unit test suite into a textual simulation of what messages it would show in many situations and caught some UX bugs that way.

Cursor’s Bugbot is genuinely helpful, though it can be irritatingly inconsistent. Sometimes on round 3 with Bugbot it suddenly notices something that was there all along. Or because I touch a few lines of a library suddenly all edge cases in that library are my fault.

NOT GOOD:

The effect on my colleagues is not good. They are not reading what they are creating. I get PRs that include custom circular dependency breakers because the LLM introduced a circular dependency, and decided that was the best solution. The ostensible developer has no idea this happened and doesn’t even know what a circular dependency breaker is.

Another colleague does an experiment to prove that something is possible and I am tasked to implement it. The experiment consists of thousands of lines of code. After I dig into it I realize the code is assuming that something magically happened and reports it’s possible.

I was reflecting on this and realized the main difference between me and my current team is that I won’t commit code I don’t understand. So I even use the LLMs to do refactors just for clarity. while sometimes my colleagues are creating 500-line methods.

Meanwhile our leaders are working on the problem of code review because they feel it’s the bottleneck. They want to make some custom tools but I suspect they are going to be vastly inferior to the tools coming from the major LLM providers. Or maybe we’ll close the loop and we won’t even be reviewing code any more.

fizzyfizz

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

I'm sure it's a coincidence that their graphics make it look like the "arc reactor" from the Iron Man movies.

fizzyfizz

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Thank you for a response in the spirit of good discourse.

Anyway, I don't even know if he has moved on from Adjoint.

I agree there's something odd about this, but I've also seen how people who are vocal critics on the internet have to be less public about their associations. Not sure what to think about it.

fizzyfizz

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

I was surprised by the claim about Stephen Diehl so I did a little googling. I don't think it's correct to say he "works on his own blockchain company". However, relatively recently he was working on smart contracts with a company called Adjoint.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171955/https://www.steph...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y

He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found the current implementations appalling. He wanted to use functional programming, particularly Haskell, to create something like a smart contract with better guarantees. But he is also careful to say that a smart contract doesn't imply a blockchain; he's talking more generally about code that executes over distributed databases.

This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.

That said, having examined blockchains in depth gives him more credibility, not less. And it would be a rather bizarre business model to continually decry blockchains if he was actually working on one.

---

EDIT: Found an interview where he distinguishes cryptocoins from other technologies sometimes labelled web3, like IPFS. https://www.coywolf.news/podcast/episode-12-stephen-diehl-in...

I think it's fair to say the guy is not an indiscriminate hater. On the other hand, I also personally was already convinced that crypto "currencies" are terrible but IPFS and decentralized organizations might be cool, so I guess I like him more now.

fizzyfizz

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Prank submissions aren't cool here.

As far as I know, there are no "crisis actors", in the sense of a conspiracy that pays protestors. At least not anywhere that has a functioning free press. While protests are sometimes organized by shady groups concealing their true funding, protestors tend to be actual people who believe they're gathering for some cause. Anybody paying protestors directly could be easily exposed.

fizzyfizz

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

There are lots of reasons why a startup might fail. Technical competence and disorganization are way, way down the list.

In my experience engineering at successful startups is often subpar. A successful startup engineer is above all productive, flexible, creative, and ships often. Their code gets the job done but probably wouldn't pass muster at a corporate job.

Management at startups is always flailing about. If things aren't working, then you should be taking random stabs at doing something else. If things are working, you probably have many more problems you did yesterday and you should feel under-resourced.

Your original post mentions something about laws being passed to outlaw your business model. That seems much more concerning.

But in any case, here's what I'd look for

* Is there a market for the thing we're doing?

* Is our iteration fast and are we learning from what we do?

* Do I trust the people I work with? Do they seem ethical?

Even if someone here wants to oppose the idea of an ethical business, consider that there are about 10,000 ways to get screwed over as a startup employee and you want the people in charge to resist doing those things to you.

fizzyfizz

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I'm sure this person means well, and is very intelligent, but I stopped reading at the byline. I went and found what this person's expertise actually is.

    Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering 
    player who also held a developer intern position at Wizards
    of the Coast Magic R&D. He is known for having created 
    innovative and sometimes game-breaking decks TurboZvi and 
    My Fires.

Now, there is a balance between credentialism and amateurism. Amateurs can get a lot of things right. They can also get a lot of things wrong, and I at least don't have the meta-expertise to know which is which, especially when there's breaking news.

Do we need informed amateurs? Yes. But the crucial test is still whether they are accepted or promoted by the professionals. Zeynep Tufekci was vocalizing concerns that many professionals had, which is why her criticisms of health policy worked out.

In contrast, I have an extremely nerdy friend who has thinks it's her job to explain things to people, and thus writes deeply researched, well-footnoted blog posts about COVID, which are quite often wrong.

I for one can't tell what sort of person this is. But I also know that I'm not good at tagging facts with epistemic certainty. If I read a thing in a blog post it will probably stick, but I'll forget where I got that. So the simple solution it to not read it.

I think when it comes to writing explainers, it's 2021 and we have a wealth of resources and can wait for the professionals, including scientists who blog part time. I suggest that more people should be like me, and ignore the laypeople, indeed even most of the journalism, at least during the initial stages.

fizzyfizz

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

sometimes

fizzyfizz

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I've been tested and I'm a borderline case. Not enough for a diagnosis.

fizzyfizz

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I like this. I do have large ambitions, swelling even as my daily achievements dwindle.

There could be a sort of vicious circle there. If you respond to short-term failure by putting more pressure on yourself to be outstanding, you end up being the sort of person who lives inside a dream of changing the world that they can never realize.

fizzyfizz

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

You are the kind of person the authors are talking about. You're getting way too much of your information from social media. You think the people who are not in your defined tribe take cartoonishly extreme positions and therefore they must be stopped at all costs.

fizzyfizz

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

What is pg trying to tell us with this story?

I think it's evidence for "Billionaires Build", which is an apologia for billionaires. pg seems to think we are in a moment where billionaires don't have enough cultural respect.

I think pg is trying to show us that billionaires, at least the kind he funds, are just better people, or are at least more tenacious. The binder of credit cards is supposed to inspire admiration for their dedication (rather than horror).

And I think he's congratulating himself for being able to spot them. By extension, spotting billionaires (helpful, tenacious, people who love to build) and helping them - well, is he saying that he's a great person, squared?

fizzyfizz

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

If rich people are so great, why do founders not want to work for them?

fizzyfizz

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

I appreciate what Slava has written here. But I noticed something odd about his recommendation.

He noticed that doctors can get through the bullshit because they have contact with patients. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems common in caring professions. Why else would anyone be an underpaid grade school teacher?

But Slava doesn't come up with an exact parallel for programmers. He suggests studying the history of technology, and reacquainting oneself with the sheer fun of building things. These are maybe good, but he doesn't seem to be telling a story of how he recovered from disillusionment. At best he's speculating that these are things that might work. I suspect they won't, because they miss something important.

Nobody is sincerely thanking us for doing these things.

Unlike doctors and grade school teachers, if programmers had more contact with end users, they'd probably get burned out faster. The things we build rarely make anyone happier.

There are ways you can justify the work - creative destruction ideology, or maybe you can delude yourself into thinking that mashing together APIs is somehow getting the world closer to some better future. And maybe they are even right.

But are people really meant to work this abstractly? This detached from outcomes? There's nothing to propel you through the bullshit.

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