The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph:

> Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

Believing this feels incredibly unwise to me. I think it's going to do more damage than the AI itself will.

To any impressionable students reading this: the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well. No AI can take it away from you, and the more powerful AI will get the more you will be able to harness it's potential. Don't let these people saying this ahit discourage you from building a good life.

<< The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.

I genuinely like the author's style ( not in the quote above; its here for a different reason ). It paints a picture in a way that I still am unable to. I suck at stories.

Anyway, back to the quote. If that is true, then we are in pickle. Claw and its security issues is just a symptom of that 'break things' spirit. And yes, this has been true for a while, but we keep increasing both in terms of speed and scale. I am not sure what the breaking point is, but at certain point real world may balk.

>The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

I recently traveled to San Francisco and as an outsider this was pretty much the reaction I had.

    I think that I shall never see
    A billboard lovely as a tree
    Indeed, unless the billboards fall
    I’ll never see a tree at all.

      Song of the Open Road   -  Ogden Nash

This hits especially hard for projects like OlenBSD and FreeBSD. The unsung heroes.

Linux gets some fame and recognition, meanwhile OpenBSD and FreeBSD are the ones they power routers, CDNs and so many other cool shit while also being legit good systems that even deserve attention for the desktop.

Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.

This was good. The author found a way to say what we are all thinking - and isn't getting canceled for it. That's true talent.

The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.

In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the same city which Kerouac, the Beats or Hippies ran around in. Or even the historically wealthy but cultural old money class, like Lewis Lapham’s family, or Michael Douglas’s character in The Game. Nope, all gone, and certainly no one there has ever read On the Road.

I suppose you could probably just blame this on how the people at the top behave: totally uninterested in funding culture, unlike the billionaires of yesteryear that built concert halls and libraries. And so a city which is hyper focused on one economic activity has no space for anything else.

Great article.

I do have a deep fondness for SF billboards being building-stuff oriented. I don't care for consumerism.

The vapidity of the products created is remarkable, however.

> "We're big believers in protein," Roy said. "It's impossible to get fat at Cluely. Nothing here has any fat."

Clueless.

Brilliant article.

Now consider Reddit.

On r/hacking people tend to understand the danger of mindlessness and support war against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...

In constrast r/programming is full of, let's call them "bot-heads", who are all-in on mindlessness: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r8oxt9/poison...

I read Sam Kriss' substack and he's a wildly unique and talented writer.

The quote "this...is...necessary" reminded me about this song. Wonder if the person who as singing it:

https://youtu.be/CmJYZ1NIn1Y?t=150

Great article. I recently went through Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon; the sequence of eccentric personalities in this article reminded me of a similar section that Pynchon has in the bay area. Unfortunately the personages interviewed here are not only real but climb beyond any fictional parody.

To be fair SF has had incomprehensible (to normies) billboards since at least the early 90's.

I can't tell if I find it funny or sad how obvious it is that Roy needs to be on several psychiatric medications that he isn't on, and that he's on a fair amount of cocaine (or insert whatever uppers the kids are into nowadays) that he shouldn't be on.

I'm not sure I can trust the author's characterization of Roy, though. I got the impression that they don't like any of the people they interviewed (which, you know, fair), but that doesn't get even close to the depths of hatred towards Roy that they sub-textually exude throughout the article.

If their portrayal is even half accurate, though, that's a perfectly reasonable amount of hate.

> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.”

Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?

I'm skeptical that this fully replaces thinking, though. It may replace certain forms of effort, but historically every increase in leverage just shifts where the bottleneck is

We're doomed

I had always thought that Kai Lentit's characters were at least somewhat exaggerated and not a 1:1 copy of the real thing...

"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."

I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.

> Not long before I arrived in the Bay Area, I’d been involved in a minor but intense dispute with the rationalist community over a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction

Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?

> The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window.

Witnessed this first hand on the train the other day. A woman on her laptop. On the left half of the screen, Microsoft Word. On the right, ChatGPT. Text being dragged directly from one to the other.

I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that people with useless bullshit jobs have found a way to become even more useless than they already were before. It's impressive, in a way.

Consumers have accepted any addictive non-essential or useless web app until 2023. This time CEOs like Pichai and Nadella are going too far.

There is a red line and it is AI. People viscerally hate it and pushing it will just make people question whether they need computers or the Internet at all (hint, they do not).

CEOs fell validated by the mediocre psychopath parts of their developers who always push the latest fad in order to gain an advantage and control better developers. Fads generally last about two years, and this is it.

It will be very gratifying if the AI hubris is Silicon Valley's downfall and completely needlessly ruins the industry just because the same CEOs who read a couple of science fiction books and had rocket envy now have AI envy.

> A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation.

Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.

Not sure about the end of thinking, would say that this is the start of managing ever more stochastic systems

The description of cluely's office makes me think of Sugar Ape magazine in Nathan barley.

Beautiful article.

I think the "agency" the article talks about is really just "willingness to take risks". And the reason some people are high outliers on that scale is a combination of:

* Coming from such a level of privilege that they will be completely fine even if they lose over and over again.

* Willingness to push any losses onto other undeserving people without experiencing guilt.

* A psychological compulsion towards impulsive behavior and inability to think about long-term consequences.

In short, rich selfish sociopaths.

Some amount of risk-taking is necessary for innovation. But the level we are seeing today is clearly unsustainable and destructive to the fabric of society. It's the difference between confining a series of little bangs to produce an internal combustion engine versus just throwing hand grenades around the public square. The willingness to take chances needs to be surrounded by a structure that minimizes the blast radius of failure.

Devolution.

Wow this guy can write. I don’t even agree with his point or pessimism. I just enjoy reading this.

> "The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage." (From the Cluely ad)

JFC kill me now that is NOT a future I want to live in.

Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, LLMs are "simply" pseudo-semantic search engines; if you know what you're looking for, they work pretty well for fulfilling "satisfiable" searches, that is, those aimed at content produced by some other human scattered across the infosphere.

The generation of code and images fits right into this; the famous, historical "astronaut on a horse" is, in substance, a collage of images, images produced by other humans and "assembled".

On a broader scale, this means that humanity will more or less be able to count on Conrad Gessner's Universal Library/Biblioteca Universalis/Library of Babel, and generally speaking, we can aim for a future where humans produce knowledge and machines put it into practice. Like any evolution, this will lead to some losses while gaining something else.

The current explosion is mostly hype and a nazi-managerial wet dream; as for universities, the reality is that they are largely obsolete, so it's only natural that students, rather than seeking knowledge, which is of little use to them as it's disconnected from the present, are just looking for a piece of paper to build a career otherwise.

It seems people have figured out that sociopathy and self-promotion are rewarded in the current culture and that being a con artist has essentially no consequences anymore. And all of it is done by ambitious people who are p-zombies, lacking an inner life or curiosity about anything but how to make more money.

the article treats agency like it's new but founders have always been delusional risk takers. the difference is VCs used to demand a working prototype before writing the check

That's all satire, right? I don't believe the author describes a reality, even in a sarcastic way.

"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines."

What people really think about Silicon Valley. Not so fun to devalue people now is it? Tech is biggest group of assholes.

I mean is it any different from 15 years ago?

Silicon Valley has been a parody of itself for long time now

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

This article is a portrait of three Sociopathic Zoomers : the twitter poster, the cheating app guy and the teenage scammer. All three are net negatives to society.

Wordcel backlash, basically.

I had an AI summarize this article, and it said it's super pessimistic. It’s basically arguing that summarizing is a bad idea. yet I did it. ( I am happy )