It’s not limited to young people, unfortunately. About fifty years ago, executive leadership became far more visible in the public eye and combative with workers, all to juice share prices for their own compensation bumps. Conglomerates built on monstrous estates of interconnected business lines were gradually gutted and slashed to promote price bumps on shares, at the expense of profitable lines of business.

The net result is a (mostly) American business model predicated on Celebrity C-Suites doing highly visible things while those doing the hard work of creating value are shunted into offices and paid less compared to productivity gains over time. It shouldn’t be a surprise that social media and the internet have supercharged this, especially with groups like YC, Softbank, a16z, and other VCs splashing out Capital on flash over substance, exploitation over business fundamentals, “disruption” over societal benefit and symbiosis.

The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.

You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers that cook themselves and everyone around them. Hurricanes that blow half the grid into the sea in 5 minutes etc etc etc. We learn things the hard way. And always have. There was never any master plan. Beauty happened inspite of it with huge hidden costs that only historians tabulate and very few have the time and luxury to study. Individual Mastery is not magic. Because complexity and unpredictability in the universe is way more than what one 3 inch chimp brain can fully comprehend or ever handle. But we create more problems by pretending limits to what chimps can do dont exist. Look up Theory of Bounded Rationality.

> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.

I thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.

This idea seems to be lost on a lot of people. It's a shame to see mastery (and by extension, quality) becoming an anachronism and frankly, terrifying. There's a certain hubris associated with all of this that seems to be blinding people to the reality that, no, you actually do want humans around who actually know how things are put together and work.

That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.

An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.

He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.

Has it ever been any different? In school, the majority of kids just wanted to have fun. As one example, in 9th grade I took "yearbook class". This was a long time ago, no idea if they do yearbooks still but I'm old and so this was before desktop publishing, it was 1979. In any case, of 30 kids in the class ~3 of them did all the work. The others couldn't or wouldn't follow the print company's instructions for layout.

Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.

The original system that created those folks was also quite hype driven. I think more signal than "is there a lot of hype" is needed to determine if the system is broken.

The scary part is that you can't just "hire mastery" on demand. You have to grow it

Have you seen "Tech Ingredients"? People like that and Dutch scientist/engineer who runs "Huygens Optics"

Just wanna say, I love this paragraph so much, I created HN account just to upvote it.

Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.

> The folks who keep the power grid running ...

I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.

> secure the internet...

Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.

Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...

I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.

I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.

The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.

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We have AI now. The machines will manage their own infrastructure.

This part was a long description of the zeitgeist in SF; it was not meant to be the author’s own opinion.

"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well."

I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been told that the advice to think critically wasn't meant for me.

<< Believing this feels incredibly unwise to me.

This. Just thinking that those with power would even allow that leveling seems on the verge of impossible. In a sense, you can already see it practice. Online models are carefully 'made safe' ( neutered is my preferred term ), while online inference is increasingly more expensive.

And that does not even account for whether, 'bozo' will be able to use the tool right.. because an expert with a tool will steal beat a non-expert.

It is a brain race. It may differ in details, but the shape remains very much the same.

In the context of the rest of the piece, I read this as sarcasm. The author is making fun of the species of narcissistic silly con valley techbro who actually believes such nonsense.

I don't think that this is supposed to be a statement of the author's beliefs. The whole article is dripping with contempt for AI bros and silicon valley culture in general.

Maybe if you read past these paragraph it would have been clearer?

I mean it’s theoretically true. Will we get there? Who knows.

The first time an LLM solves a truly significant, longstanding problem without help is when we will know we are at AGI.

Historically, tools that made thinking cheaper didn't eliminate thinkers...

He writes an excellent blog: https://samkriss.substack.com/

I think there has always been some truth to that, long before AI. Being driven to get up and just do the thing is the most important factor in getting things done. Expertise and competency are force multipliers, but you can pick those up along the way - I think people who prefer to front-load a lot of theory find this distasteful, sometimes even ego-threatening, but it's held true in my observations across my career.

Yes, sometimes people who barrel forward can create a mess, and there are places where careful deliberation and planning really pay off, but in most cases, my observation has been that the "do-ers" produce a lot of good work, letting the structure of the problem space reveal itself as they go along and adapting as needed, without getting hung up on academic purity or aesthetically perfect code; in contrast, some others can fall into pathological over-thinking and over-planning, slowing down the team with nitpicks that don't ultimately matter, demanding to know what your contingencies are for x y z and w without accepting "I'll figure it out when or if any of those actually happen" - meanwhile their own output is much slower, and while it may be more likely to work according to their own plan the first time without bugs, it wasn't worth the extra time compared to the first approach. It's premature optimization but applied to the whole development process instead of just a piece of code.

I think the over-thinkers are more prone to shun AI because they can't be sure that every line of code was done exactly how they would do it, and they see (perhaps an unwarranted) value in everything being structured according to a perfect human-approved plan and within their full understanding; I do plan out the important parts of my architecture to a degree before starting, and that's a large part of my job as a lead/architect, but overall I find the most value in the do-er approach I described, which AI is fantastic at helping iterate on. I don't feel like I'm committing some philosophical sin when it makes some module as a blackbox and it works without me carefully combing through it - the important part is that it works without blowing up resource usage and I can move on to the next thing.

The way the interviewed person described fast iteration with feedback has always been how I learned best - I had a lot of fun and foundational learning playing with the (then-brand-new) HTML5 stuff like making games on canvas elements and using 3D rendering libraries. And this results in a lot of learning by osmosis, and I can confirm that's also the case using AI to iterate on something you're unfamiliar with - shaders in my example very recently. Starting off with a fully working shader that did most of the cool things I wanted it to do, generated by a prompt, was super cool and motivating to me - and then as I iterated on it and incorporated different things into it, with or without the AI, I learned a lot about shaders.

Overall, I don't think the author's appraisal is entirely wrong, but the result isn't necessarily a bad thing - motivation to accomplish things has always been the most important factor, and now other factors are somewhat diminished while the motivation factor is amplified. Intelligence and expertise can't be discounted, but the important of front-loading them can easily be overstated.

I've been to SF three times, and each time the oddest thing was going down 101 from the airport and seeing cURL commands and "you sped past that just like we sped past Snowflake" and such on billboards. It's like being on another planet where everyone is at work.

(on the other hand, in DC there's ads on the metro for new engine upgrades for fighter jets, and i've gotten used to that.)

    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

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It's a numbers game. You only need one in twenty con artists to become wildly successful before they're caught, and your overall con artist portfolio is guaranteed to win out.

And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.

Salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Con artists are the easiest to swindle. The people who believe they're immune to being tricked are always the ones who get tricked the most.

Have you been paying attention to what has been happening for the last year? Now is the era of con artists: break the law, pay a small vic, and you're free to scam again.

Why wouldn't investors give these people money? It's not like being an investor implies having morales, all they care about is making money whether it's legal or not and luckily for them crime not only pays but it's legal now too.

Building a successful startup is very hard, and not just in the "it's a lot of hard work" sense, but also in terms of making good decisions. For the average person who went to college and worked in some other industry/capacity, the good decisions are very counterintuitive.

Most VCs have no idea how to accuratly judge startups based on their core merit, or how to make good decision in startups (though they may think they do), so instead they focus on things like "will this founder be able to hype up this startup and sell the next round so I can mark it up on my books".

Status anxiety.

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