i think one thing people miss is that counter culture movements sometimes win people over in the worst ways and they get really extreme ideas, or really extreme people get spun up in them and become little evil vorticies of power and influence. The sixties spawned the civil rights movement, peace movement. It also created the Manson family. There's a sort of yin and yang to these things IMO, creation and destruction. It's like a period of high energy and change and that can get used in many creative and destructive ways.
Some people see today as terrible and think socialism will fix it. Others, fascism. Two people agree that current leaders are failing, but for different reasons. And when everyone is demanding change, you can get some dangerous people to pop out of the wood work.
People like Musk and Thiel grow up in free thinking environments and in counter culture meccas and are a direct result of that energy. They dont run counter to it. They are a product of it.
Parents used to say, "go play outside" too and it wasn't demonized to let them survive for 12 hours on their own without phones until sunset then by god they better be back inside.
I think modern parents are judged way too harshly for not constantly protecting their children. Thinking an adult has to constantly watch them is kind of new.
Parents used to get breaks and it was just considered a part of growing up, being exposed to the world. I get being paranoid, but that's just how it was, and it was never 100% safe.
Yeah, i think we were raised in similar narcissistic households and maybe others didn't share that experience as much. My parents got a scent of the gifted child effect and tried to do everything to nurture it.
For so long they made me feel like I was super special but as an adult I can see how unhealthy it all was, and how much they fed off that attention.
Maybe for some children it was a normal gauge of how well the child is doing, but for myself every little achievement felt like, "oh so you felt okay with x? let's see how well you can do x+1. You know there's a kid who took college classes at 16? I think we should sign you up. What about astronomy? Have you heard of space camp?"
I felt like failure was terrible because of how disappointed they'd look if i didn't take well to some new assignment. Completely fucked way to grow up.
I never thought of it that way, but now that I look back at it, it's true. It was all way more for the parents. The kid was an essential asset for their ego. They were competing for who had the most successful child.
What can kids do? Read, and books=smart, so they were competing with each other at how good their kid was at... reading. So they came up with bullshit metrics like, "my child is in 4th grade but just finished a book at a 9th grade level... isn't your child in 8th grade? Wow, my child is reading books he can't even understand yet."
there is one financial bubble and it is purely about unsustainable investment, as that is what defines a bubble. Like when they started throwing cash at the pet food company pets.com because it had pets.com even though they were shipping pet food and selling it below cost... These companies are just doing bad business and surviving because people throw money at them hoping to get in on the action.
It's like if you had some uncle who drove a fancy car and said he had some big business k
idea and he was going to make the family rich, and your dad and grandma started giving him their life savings as an investment, but you knew there was no business, he leased that car, and he lost most of it gambling and continued to gamble.
At some point no matter how much hype he generates, your grandma and dad run out of money, and the entrepreneur ends up in debt.
There are companies right now with sound business plans, and then there are OpenAI's which sell their service below cost and wouldn't be able to keep the doors open if investors stopped investing. WebVan closed their doors the day the dot com bubble popped because they literally couldnt pay payroll anymore. One day similar will happen and some companies will collapse.
One will be the next Amazon, the survivor that proved it had a sound business, and everyone is hoping they invested in the next Amazon. But tons of people right now are investing in the next WebVan or Pets.com, which might have been good ideas but too much too soon.
He described waking up to thirty PRs every morning, each one pulled overnight by someone's AI, and needing to make snap judgment calls on every single one. The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: "at that point, what am I still doing here?".
This is the trap many fell into.
A lot of managers are waiting to see this playout so the human in the loop can get kicked out of the loop.
everyone with a lick of hindsight knew that eventually being a straight christian wouldnt be enough if youre black, or a white christian not enough if you're gay, or even a straight white christian man if youre not the right type of white or flavor of christian
i mean, there is a TON of money in this field. No, not teaching, not that one. But the aspect of indoctrinating the youth so they dont grow up all democratic.
For not doing 'real programming', it's a great example. You literally just need to pick a good simple project and work at it. That is the best way to learn.
i think one thing people miss is that counter culture movements sometimes win people over in the worst ways and they get really extreme ideas, or really extreme people get spun up in them and become little evil vorticies of power and influence. The sixties spawned the civil rights movement, peace movement. It also created the Manson family. There's a sort of yin and yang to these things IMO, creation and destruction. It's like a period of high energy and change and that can get used in many creative and destructive ways.
Some people see today as terrible and think socialism will fix it. Others, fascism. Two people agree that current leaders are failing, but for different reasons. And when everyone is demanding change, you can get some dangerous people to pop out of the wood work.
People like Musk and Thiel grow up in free thinking environments and in counter culture meccas and are a direct result of that energy. They dont run counter to it. They are a product of it.