Gregory's Serversilicon valley VCs' best ideas of the 2020s:
-put a drone on something
-wrongness generator 3000 (uses more energy than a small nation)
-fraud
-space pollution
-self-crashing cars
-an app that is actually criminally underpaid workers in another country
-an app that is actually criminally underpaid workers in this country
-fascism
-vrchat but it cost 20x to make and it fucking sucks
-layoffs
 123 comments
this looks like it's getting around so here's the obligatory Hire Me :ablobfoxhyper: @ReasonableMustelid @chrisisgr8 "Yes, we've had fraud, but what about Second Fraud?" (My apologies to Pippin. Even that Fool of a Took was better than Venture Capitalists.)  tech people need to find more ways to get money than from a bunch of coked up fascists who think they're going to live forever on mars. could you imagine how much cool shit we could be working on  @chrisisgr8 it’d help if so many tech people’s goals weren’t secretly to join the coked up fascists. I wish more people wanted to become thousandaires instead. @chrisisgr8 I think the central allure of "look you could be lesser nobility if we, the actual nobility, think you have something we want" is quite strong for most people. It's basically what everyone calls the american dream, which is extra ironic because a lot of folks in the US hate nobility (even though their entire upper class *is* nobility in all but name) Edit: You are absolutely right. Should have led with that  Americans don't hate nobles. They think they *are* temporarily embarrassed nobles. They hate equality because, with equality, they won't be nobles any more.  @argv_minus_one @canteen @chrisisgr8 in the spirit of "musk isn't a smart guy he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy", america isn't freedom it's an authoritarian's idea of freedom
@chrisisgr8 There was that time the government just gave money to scientists and engineers hand over fist at NASA which gave us people on the moon, space blankets, the microwave, better computers, and a lot of other things. And then we stopped giving them so much money for ... reasons? @Matt5sean3 @chrisisgr8 That money was spent when the top income tax bracket was 70% and there wasn't an entire international industry dedicated to tax evasion. All the money that took us to the moon? The rich just keep that now. Thanks Reagan. @Mrw @chrisisgr8 There's that, but not really. The government can and does literally print money and the extent to which that drives inflation is over-stated. The government also already does this via the DoD, but the DoD gets the same perrenial AI and surveillance panopticon fetishes that silicon valley does. @Matt5sean3 @chrisisgr8 That’s a really great point! Thinking about that, it’s probably because a dollar spent on the space program doesn’t eventually enrich the ruling class. @Mrw @chrisisgr8 Absolutely, also don't forget that the military is probably the biggest collection of pork barrel projects in US history. Shut down a military base and you're sometimes closing the biggest source of good jobs for an otherwise poor community. @Matt5sean3 @Mrw @chrisisgr8 @Matt5sean3 @Mrw @chrisisgr8 "Biggest collection"? No no. The problem (from an actual market perspective and not crony capitalist perspective which, fuck both I'm a socialist) is that it's the smallest. See Matt Stoller here: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-america-is-out-of-ammunition?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=11524&post_id=138078817&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1t5ww&utm_medium=email That's an important perspective. I was talking about bases in mainland US mostly. For many states it's undeniable that the military bases prop up the economy because areas with the bases are doing well and similar areas away from the bases are a reference for how the economy would do otherwise. For a place like Ohio, you get a Beavercreek near Dayton attached to Wright-Patterson AFB that is doing well while the surrounding area is mostly run down and disinvested. (1/2) You do see perhaps a little of what you’re talking about in Virginia, which does wildly well in northern Virginia in large part to military expenditure, but also has a healthy economy in central Virginia that stands mostly on its own merits. Government shutdowns demonstrate the usually invisible disruption the military plays in parts of the state as the economy of northern Virginia crumbles during such shut downs. (2/2) @Mrw @Matt5sean3 @chrisisgr8 that, and the motivation for spending it that way was to demonstrate technological superiority that could be applied to missiles that can reach anywhere on the earth with high precision and low delay @Matt5sean3 @chrisisgr8 Neoliberal reasons. They did all that before Reagan. He then proceeded to leg hump the Chicago school of Econ for eight years and here we are. I was curious, so I looked up NASA's budget over time. For once I don't think we can actually blame Reagan for that budget cut. JFK gets the budget rising, LBJ sees the budget peak and start falling, then Ford and Nixon preside over it continuing to fall and level out and then every subsequent administration except Bush Sr lets it shrink.  @Matt5sean3 @LeftistLawyer @chrisisgr8 Recall that Nixon hated Kennedy, so when budget concerns threatened Apollo 18 and 19, well, that was an easy decision for Nixon to make. Then the shuttle program came along like an industrial money vacuum hose, and Carter didn't really care about the space program, and Reagan's only semi-creative space thought was Star Wars, which was a defense program. Sigh..... I've heard that theory posed before. I'm a little skeptical just based on the fact that the Soviet Union seems to be a credible threat in the popular imagination until 1989 and coked up finance bro is kind of THE meme of the 80s and wages get decoupled from productivity well before 1989.  @Matt5sean3 @chrisisgr8 reasons been the moon landing happened and the Soviet threat of a military platform in orbit ended so they shifted funds to "problems at home".
@chrisisgr8 This would be so much easier if anyone but the coked up fascists had any money  @chrisisgr8 I am already working on cool shit but the problem is only one person gives me money because of it and he's broke too.   @chrisisgr8 you could also just... make stuff. Retvrn to the days of making stuff in your garage, the tools are more accessible than ever.  @crzwdjk @chrisisgr8 computing is still an expensive hobby and few people are willing to pay unless it's something huge    VC itself is the problem. The only things that make sense for this entire pump and dump industry of hucksters is stupid bullshit that sounds cool and hypable, but is ultimately useless and unmeasurable in real return on investment terms. Forget making real stuff that would actually benefit the world because then who could they screw over and leave holding the bag?   @chrisisgr8  if "wrongness generator" is LLMs, bear in mind government is looking at facilitating regulatory capture for that. *someone* thinks they have enough potential not to let citizens finetune & run their own. well eventually they could ban ordinary computers in public hands. but what they're attacking first is: distributing the weights from large trainings run producing nets with >10billion parameters. It would kill opensourced AI. I'm running "13b" models now. They use fearmongering- "an uncensored 13b model can tell you how to make a bioweapon" but the info is online already and you need $100m's equipment (regulated already) 270 days to fix public opinion Lovely. The idiot politicians are once again trying to make math illegal. Yeah, AI has a serious copyright issue, namely that using it to generate copyrightable works for you will eventually get you sued. “This is totally not a derivative work; look how many if statements I laundered it through” isn't gonna fly in court. No need to make AI illegal over copyright; infringing copyright with it is already illegal. AI opponents say AI is just compression . in some ways it is, but at such extreme levels, to me it's qualitatively different. stable diffusion = 2billion images -> 4gb , just 2 bytes per image gen. video shows it really must be applying learned rules,way beyond 'collage'. it gets hands wrong because its generating (with mistakes), not cut-pasting compressed source. i am sensitive to the artists concerns but if they acheive regulatory capture of AI models, the result is that Disney will have image & video generators trained on 100 years of IP whilst individual artists are left behind. gen AI doesn't obsolete artistic skill. you still need design sense to use them well. real artists will be able to storyboard their own generated films etc. I want everyone to have these abilities on their own PC Right you are. Whatever harms AI may cause will only be amplified if megacorporations can use it and the rest of us can't. thanks to fearmongering and conflating unrelated fears, public opinion seems to be consistently around 70% against AI. I ran a poll here , and got "64% stop it over copyright issues" "16% stop it because of runaway ASI risks" and only 20% "we all deserved opensourced AI at home" the ability for a computer to hold a conversation seems to scare people more than they're seeing potential @chrisisgr8 oh come on, dont be like this, they still have 6 more full years to best themself. This is just the tip, if it hurt already, get ready for the shaft  @chrisisgr8 the creepy thing about these is actually that they are coated with a positive angle that people just gobble up. Nearly all of them have an upside that obscure the harm. That’s what’s actually scary — the idea that you can repackage various wrongs with “rights.”  @chrisisgr8 -a "seastead", but it's actually just a rubber dinghy full of crypto miner rigs and a diesel generator  @chrisisgr8 "pay for the same stuff every month" @chrisisgr8 Geniuses, everyone of them. I mean they’re so rich and so white and so male and… @chrisisgr8 I'm old as fuck and tech layoffs were around in the 80s so that's nothing new. Also the whole "thing is bad because it uses more energy than a small country" is getting old. Data centers and the internet exceed that power consumption metric, nobody says anything about that. Also technologies start out power intensive and then innovation reduces the power load. .e.g. CPUs. The Gartner hype chart is great for plotting out how technologies go from cool ideas to being over hyped. @chrisisgr8 I want to make [random selection from the list above], this time with micropayments.   "AI" is actually criminally underpaid workers in another country being flown around by solar-powered drones so they can't leave "the office" without plummeting to their dooms  @chrisisgr8 as if the world is not burning its forests, drowning in microplastics, drowning in e-waste, seething with viruses, polluting and exhausting its water, eliminating its species and throwing countless other survival problems that keep getting worse and none is solved Nay, silly con alley coming up with something remotely useful is forbidden. It would actually prove there is an alternative. At which point the whole house of cards would collapse immediately @chrisisgr8 I spent 5 years at a relatively large company and was blown away by the culture. They take the best and the brightest, give them excellent tools and pay them lavishly only to have the results weirdly homogenised and kinda average. I watched a team of 30 of the most talented designers and marketers I’ve ever worked with “evolve” a brand over a period of months that essentially resulted in the brand’s background of blue to green triangles changing to blue to green polygons. Seriously.  @chrisisgr8 You forgot buying apps that actually worked (for the most part) an making it worst in every conceivable way, but with a 1000% stupider name now.  @chrisisgr8 *Homer Simpson failing to comfort Bart meme* silicon valley VCs' best ideas of the 2020s _so far_ :(  @chrisisgr8 > 'an app that is actually criminally underpaid workers in another country' What're u referring to? @chrisisgr8 Based on all that came before it, the layoffs sound like a good thing. Why would any decent person work for such an industry? @chrisisgr8 let's not forget ads - hey subscribe to our deluxe package or just drown in ads. @chrisisgr8 It's interesting *why* the VCs are becoming ever more right wing and "anti-woke". Partially it's because they live in a bubble and breathe each others' farts, but it's also the realisation that the easy gains of the early 2000s internet are gone, the easy money is no longer there, and they need an authoritarian government to enforce the monopolisation, surveillance, tax avoidance and regulatory capture to keep them rich in perpetuity. @chrisisgr8 Honorable mention to the games that look and work nothing like the ads. And to reach level three you need to wait 16 hours to farm 40 blue gems OR just spend $7.99 for 100 gold coins which can be exchanged for blue gems at the rate of π gems = (√gold)^6 @chrisisgr8 I can't get over the dollar-store-vrchat existing. They could've likely bought and adapted / improved vrchat, but decided to burn money on their own crappy version. I think it's one of the most underrated failures of this decade.  @chrisisgr8 you forgot microphones straight to advertisers directly in your living room @chrisisgr8 a few months ago, they announced a "Streaming Atari" gaming service. It's nothing but games for the Atari 8-bit, 2600, 7800, etc. Average game size is maybe 500kb, they were typically distributed on cassettes. these fucking geniuses decided the way to distribute these games, was to create virtualized server instances which stream the entire game as constant 50 MB/S 4k video. Every single second expends 100 times the size of the entire game, in perpetuity. I hate technology.  @chrisisgr8  @chrisisgr8 but the tech was so cool in the future books from the 1960s and Blade Runner, 1984 and all the other sci-fi books. Also we want something to corner the market and become dictator. Finally we can do what we want. (Imaginary visit to a VC brain) @chrisisgr8 and we thought nothing could possibly top "second round fraud (uses more energy than a small nation)"  Also: rehashed Spanish 'botijo' (clay container which Super futuristic technology. Centuries if not    |
"what about nfts" i forgot those were this decade (it's been a rough decade)