@59f9e828 amazing this conversation is happening at the exact moment AI’s biggest threat isn’t to “low skilled” jobs (lol, would love to see the average HN commenter on a factory floor) but literally programmers. Self-interest can’t even get them to drop their ideological posturing.
Something I genuinely miss from Twitter is being able to drop the URL of an article into search and instantly getting a fairly robust, wide-ranging discussion. Even as twitter went off the rails pre-Musk, it was a quick way to get a variety of perspectives. That doesn’t seem possible on Mastodon yet.
Now that every debate over the philosophical, political, and moral value of tech has essentially devolved into an MBA-style quadrant analysis of clashing business models, I miss Aaron Swartz’s voice more than ever.
I yeeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. But, as we all now know, mostly terrible. So, so, *so* terrible.
Still, “Don’t Build The Torment Nexus” was one of my all-time favorite sci-fi books as a kid so getting to work *on* The Torment Nexus was a lifelong dream come true.
As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, it often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, and reorgs — not to mention there was a strong contingency of people who didn’t want to build The Torment Nexus.
You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a Chthonic Priest of the Seventh Order who *did* want to build The Torment Nexus.
I yeeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. But, as we all now know, mostly terrible. So, so, *so* terrible.
Still, “Don’t Build The Torment Nexus” was one of my all-time favorite sci-fi books as a kid so getting to work *on* The Torment Nexus was a lifelong dream come true.
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