I'll admit these "far right" labels don't hold much weight, usually just a way to expose yourself (the author here). But I agree with much of the overall sentiment of the article. The AI hype feels a bit dystopian and I say that as someone who has been heavily using LLMs since 2023.
They're very useful but we also have to ask ourselves what the world will look like if we automate everyone out of a job.
Everything that exists now is just a product of what was. You don't have a bunch of people acting as religious fanatics with AI replacing God unless there was a real culture that was okay with that to begin with.
Don't think that has being the case when the rent start to compete with NYC. It is a shame, but that is how gentrification has ruined another city.
From where I'm sitting (SoMa for coming up on two years) the city is still relatively empty compared to past booms where apt. hunting involved bidding wars. But RTO pushes are clearly progressing, albeit slowly.
Personally I prefer it empty, billboards are easy enough to ignore.
I’d say the main sad thing is once the Bay Area was taken over by VC bros in fleece vests and mega corps it lost its soul. In some ways the place became the thing it started out fighting against, and so have many of its companies. Eg Salesforce started as the rebel solution to big bloated clunky tech, and now Salesforce is the big bloated clunky tech that a new generation groans at using.
SF turning into an almost literal dumpster fire hasn’t helped as any good “hub” also needs a clear downtown, and most folks actively avoid going into SF these days.
Actual SV always was and remains much more interesting, though perhaps less so than the 90s heyday. The fact the associated vibe difference is so perfectly demonstrated by the state of their airports is quite brilliant.
They are less than an hour apart (roughly) and it’s all a connected continuum. It’s trivial to move between them several times a day for different appointments. I thought people were much more used to long drives than in EU, I suppose it varies by region.
Of course for now the AI companies are bleeding money, as it costs more per user than they charge, but that will change as soon as they accomplish the necessary lock-in.
I got into tech because I wanted to help make the world better, not worse. I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that. That's not what it is. It's not what it's ever been about.
Almost everyone I know in tech is not happy, and works non-stop, expected to give their all for a company that could fire them tomorrow for no reason. They have been doing this for years. If anything good comes from AI, maybe it will be a release? A release from the hell of being chained to a laptop screen for most of our lives?
A ton of money? Easy to forget about that if you don't have to worry about where next month's rent is coming from.
> I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that.
I can confidently say that it has made the world better. You've just forgotten about all the things that sucked. Remember how we used to have to get taxis?
I remember that taxi drivers used to make a semblance of an income back in the day, but working in the gig economy now is essentially modern day digital serfdom. I had a buddy who got into Uber driving before the pandemic, got involved in some of the Uber social media communities in our area, and wound up knowing so many people who committed suicide because they were given auto loans by Uber to buy a car they'd never be able to pay back on Uber rides.
Not everyone benefits from this tech-driven world.
Nobody is claiming that.
I can confidently say that it does. Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap, but there are pockets of good, and they make all the difference.
From my IBEW recollections, this was probably true for our membership.
>there are pockets of good, and they make all the difference
Most-definitely. It took me my first four decades to realize this, but having spent the majority of my adult life blue collar, I certainly empathize with burning out (better than e.g. my lawyer/tech brothers "just lazy"). We cannot all be on good teams, it's statistically impossible, but surely more of oughtta.
The way I think about it is kind of like security: 99.99% of the time security guards are just standing around not doing anything or patrolling. They’re still needed even though they technically don’t do anything because there’s no way to predict when and where a breach will occur.
Likewise with productivity. Sure half the work might be done by a small minority but you can’t grow or sustain a business by trying to predict who those people are, especially as that minority changes over its lifecycle. Nor can you reliably predict which support roles are actually keystone roles without which the productive people are useless.
>99.99% of the time [we were] just standing around not doing anything
So much time I voluntarily spent sorting parts / carts, in preparation for the few hours each week we were actually needed — most just dove into their phones, idly. Everything was dual-feed power, so most of the year was spent unrushed.
When someone uses the Internet to do something positive, like learn something or make something or contact an old friend, they typically don't say a thing. Nobody talks about this. Everyone talks about all the negative uses. They capture our attention better.
This bias is something that's probably been selected for through humanity's evolutionary history. There's a saying: "if you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you're dead." You are the descendent of paranoid people who made the first mistake, not the second. Being hypervigilant about dangers is going to be adaptive on average in most environments.
But the feeling of the entire industry being anti-humanity is growing too strong.
I'm happy I moved away from advertising/other tech shit I don't agree with and found a position at a company whose work I respect.
I really enjoy mentoring the younger engineers. And because all tech basically looks the same to me at this point (I.E. it's very rare I encounter a new pattern after 15 years of startups, personal projects, and big cos, and freelance) I spend a ton less time focused on learning and more time focused on creating opportunities for others.
I'm also really thankful to have a mostly remote work style, opportunities to volunteer through work (and other events like game nights, happy hours), and a product people know and like.
It is of course not all roses and sweet teas. Promotions are scarce, the stock's volatile, sometimes people can suck to work with, and the organization can be hard to work in due to complexity and coordination challenges. But that's okay, can't have it all I suppose.
If I felt like you do... I'd... do something else I think, or look for a new gig. (Easier said than done I know). Hope you find some peace friend
Small idea: Have you looked outside of the Tech industry towards other areas where companies need tech workers?
noname123 on March 27, 2016 | parent | context | un‑favorite | on: My year in startup hell
>It's brilliant, I'd never want to work for a corporate company! We have regular parties, play table tennis daily, beers on Friday. It just makes work so much more enjoyable.
When you leave or a bunch of your friends who used to go to happy hour together leave "for better opportunities," you'll realize that most people who are your work drinking buddies didn't really know you or felt or thought deeply about your personal experiences. (It's not that they're bad people, it's just what happens when people are put in an artificial social environment where people slap high-fives after work rec dogeball and shout out witty one-liners).
Also when you realize after 5 or 6 years of working, and the startup mantra of "changing the world," your other friends whom you laughed at before, toiling away in their fields have started coming on their own. You have only pushed bits for marketing, spam, online shopping, on-demand on-gig economy for people like yourself to get a stick of gum delivered in an hour. You can try to justify how you are promoted from junior all the way to lead to technical product manager, or how you led your team to switch from Rails to Node, SQL to Cassandra, Java to Scala. But you'll begin to see the thin-veneer of how little management cares about tech and how most of it is a pep-rally, a race to the bottom for those at the top of the Ponzi scheme to enrich themselves.
You look at other people in other fields or in other area's of tech. At work cafeteria IKEA lunch table (after a lengthy morning standup where there was yet another pissing match about React vs. Angular), People shoot the breeze about AlphaGo or that Tay twitter bot, and someone else shoot another witty one-liner comeback, everyone laughs, one person groans - in between the silence after the reactions settle in, it dawns slowly on your mind that we've all become spectators in the real information technology revolution.
That what you are toiling away when you go back to your desk after this lunch conversation is just another Twitter stream, another HN comment, Instagram heart, albeit decorated in syntax highlighting to the "AWS/Google Cloud/Azure Twitterverse."
That is just the same as the well-dressed girl or guy sitting in the next row over in the open-office environment, whom you never talk to but to make yourself feel better, secretly put down in your mind because what they do "is so much BS, social media customer engagement"; but they are the same, and you're all the same...
You call your friends up from college and hear their stories at the precarious precipice of 28-30. How many hours they stayed up at the hospital during a rotation, and a critical debate they had with their attending whether to admit a patient; or how many e-mails they had to sent to get their 15 minute film considered at 50 different film festivals; or staying on after getting finally their PhD, to work for free to do the technology transfer to industry the physics research they worked on in their group; and always, the one-liner remark, "tech has it so much better, you guys make so much money!"
Of course, the response begets a begrudging smile or another sequitur to equalize the conversation; but come work Monday, the habit to don on the noise canceling headphones, the cursory checks on social media to keep abreast fantasy football leagues/stock portfolio's, the internal monologue of the recalculation how much your employee stock options are going to be worth/vest, have all become instinctive rituals to not let the existential dread set in.
Sadly, I struck out badly in the startup lottery. So I'm broke and can't afford to move to a farm or something like that. Wish I could do things differently now.
Crucially, you're not really even learning anything that matters. You're just learning new UIs, a new query language, a new framework, etc, and all are equally meaningless; they aren't applicable to other parts of your life, and aren't necessarily even applicable to your job a few years from now.
* Physical therapist (5+ years of training)
* Nurse (5+ years of training)
* Pharmacist (Out of the picture at this point)
* Plumber (5+ years of training (to actually get to a point
* where I would be pulling in good money))
* Electrician (same)
* Carpenter (same)
Or... continue to languish here. It really sucks right now. I've been doing 9x9x6 for the past several months because my company fired most of the US staff and are left with a skeleton contingent picking up the pieces, and of course now everything is on fire and everything is an emergency. Lunch meetings, 7AM, 9PM, weekend meetings aren't even blinked at in terms of being abnormal.
I can't stand AI and what it has "done" for society.
:-(
There's a lot of companies out there. Many of them are doing useful things. I've worked in security for a long time; not as a "security expert" but for a company doing that. While I'd rather live in a world where we didn't need security companies, and it sucks that it's a problem, it's also something I know is actually contributing to the world, even if that contribution is solving problems that shouldn't exist. There are other companies doing useful things.
It may take a while to find something better but it'll take less time if you're looking than if you aren't.
Your job may or may not be pointless but it probably provided a very nice quality of life for you and your family.
Things are pretty dire for a lot of professions right now...
It’s not gonna be fun for my joints, but breaking my back on my own house will probably the most useful skill I will learn in my life than clicking my life away sat at a keyboard
Over the last two decades the startup scene has gone from trying to improve nearly everybody's lives at very low cost to consumers (ad-supported services like maps and email) to trying to improve the lives of the upper middle class with debatable impacts on everyone else (gig economy stuff) to something whose most obvious application is destroying jobs (ai).
That's a pretty quick shift from utopian to dystopian rhetoric, and people who bought the line are right to find that jarring.
The AI boom replaced the SaaS/Gig boom. We no longer have a dozen large caps in hyper growth at the same time and market conditions are less profligate so the hiring market is different https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mm40
Gig work was yesterday's punching bag, but I guess we're nostalgic for it now.
> Overall, it feels like we’ve drifted past a point of no return
Every day.
They never did. Anyway what else would you expect regarding the ads? The marketing people are just trying to get attention in an agressive manner (and it's working). This angle wouldn't be necessary if the AI was actually worth a damn for the proposed use case and sold itself.
It's actually really funny to see the last gasps before another AI winter. There is a future for LLMs, but it's probably customer engagement chatbots. Beyond replacing customer service, but also other junk people usually ignore like marketing surveys and other feedback.
You are indeed "building the future" (mind as a simple cogwheel, for sure you are not the one calling the shots in terms of products) but unlike the industrial revolutions that happened through the centuries there is no quality of life advantage of being near the epicenter of it all.
Each and every product is rolled out globally and in zero time, so a person from the opposite side of the world say Bali gets to enjoy the same product in a far better environment as far as quality of life, cost of life etc, plus they didn't even have to build the thing at all! They just get to use it, best of both worlds.
And although they are not at the frontier of tech and human advancement I imagine they own their business and they get to call the shots on how the gym/bakery/scooter renting is run
The only localized things which are only availible in SV are the "autonomous vehicles" which as of now are absolutely the most blatant failure of tech industry in this century considering that they kill occupants on a daily basis.
I expect people who currently populate SV to either wise up and recognize they are in a mouse trap or simply make the leap into an even higher intellectual ego dimension of theoretical physics and mathematics which can be done from everywhere and either way at that point SV would just unravel
I was just at a talk where they had "AI experts" judge a startup pitch for an AI call center company. None of them could admit that the obvious business model (bill the client based on number of tokens / seconds) would make customer outcomes much worse (by incentivizing the bot to keep the customer on the phone as long as possible and even encourage them to call back). But they refused to admit, or even consider, that business models can be exploitative and full of perverse incentives. These are people at the head of efforts at big-name tech companies and they're too caught up in the dazzle.
They won't accept that they are the ones making an entire industry available to grifters by couching all their language in this hope-and-change idealism. Or maybe we're watching how otherwise well-intentioned people can become grifters when they aren't able to reflect on their goals and their actions.
By 2015, the industry was fully infected with finance bros drawn to "easy VC money". This when we got non-viable startups like juicero, flower delivery, or one that would pick up your mail and scan it. Companies like WeWork and Uber being tech companies because they have an "app" made everyone think all you needed was an app to be a tech company, and having an app was defacto required to get VC investment.
The trends have always been evident from the billboards you'd see in the city and along 101. They have become more homogeneous with AI content more recently, but the blockchain/Bitcoin cycle was pretty homogeneous too.
I don't know that's there more far-right. But there is less of the free-spirit hippy branding (which was riding on 60s and 70s nostalgia anyway). Mention going to Burning Man and people say "Really?" rather than "Cool". The people who got rich over a decade ago got older.
The advertising/billboards do reflect/are the zeitgeist. There are conversations about working at an AI startup or how their pitch is based on AI at the coffee shop I frequent, which is outside SOMA/FiDi (and in view of the GGB). I don't think it's more sinister, SF still feels like California, at least in terms of the coastal relaxed attitude and hope if not in terms of being a big tech draw. Thanks to COVID, coming to the Bay Area to work in tech isn't required, or expected, anymore, which makes all the narrowly focused billboards seem odd: who are they advertising to other than other AI startups?
But now you're bothered? After 25 years of shit that city has put up with and all the evil it has pushed on the world, AI ads are your breaking point?
guywithahat•1h ago
Molitor5901•1h ago
Like the factory towns of the pre-digital era, when it's good it's great, but when they leave, innovate away, or move on it can leave those behind feeling cheated.
andy99•1h ago
treyd•1h ago
If you're a billionaire, your class interest in protecting capital usually overrides social interests and alliances.
eltondegeneres•1h ago
It's not uncommon either. Ernst Röhm comes to mind, but there are plenty of contemporary examples too.
cryzinger•57m ago
NegativeLatency•29m ago
throwirirmr•44m ago
But consensual vaginal piercing is genital mutilation!
Left has internal conflict where they hate "classes" they are "protecting"!!!
softwaredoug•1h ago
aeternum•1h ago
stego-tech•1h ago
OccamsMirror•1h ago
ThrowawayR2•1h ago
garbawarb•22m ago
MontyCarloHall•8m ago
softwaredoug•59m ago
grammarpolice17•1h ago
lenerdenator•1h ago
These people ultimately see themselves as the elite and those who have misgivings about their work as "less than". To oppose things like mass tech surveillance and mass unemployment through AI isn't just a thing born out of concerns held by many people, it's a literal attack on the order of nature. If your concerns were worth anything, you'd be sharing it with them at an esoteric corporate-backed technology foundation retreat or at a Mar-a-Lago lunch, but you're not.