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Sharon

@sharonjohn

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Sharon
@sharonjohn
Normies are people who want to go back to 1999. Weirdos are people who want to skip ahead to 2050.
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@sharonjohn
We need more of what Satya Nadella did at Microsoft. Revitalization of major institutions needs to go up in status. Hypernormal solutions are part of the puzzle.
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@sharonjohn
There’s more personal upside in starting your own company so a lot of people do it and yes they wouldn’t have the permission to make the changes they desire if they joined Boeing. But abandoning them to the most incompetent people means catastrophic failure for society.
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@sharonjohn
And in this world, relegating important companies like Boeing to the dust while working on plane startups in YC seems like a case of misaligned personal incentives more than something the world needs.
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@sharonjohn
Even the non-software examples associated with SV like SpaceX or Tesla ride on massive institutional knowledge from industry veterans. Musk won’t acknowledge this because it doesn’t feed into his brand as the first-principles disrupter but it’s true.
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@sharonjohn
I think a few years ago, in either naïveté or optimism, I used to think we could take the YC model and reconstruct vital institutions from the ground-up from the SV playbook. I no longer think this: SV playbook is a narrow recipe for success in a domain with zero marginal costs and inexpensive iteration.
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@sharonjohn
@vgr post about hypernormalization vs weirdness as two opposite modes people are using to navigate the world in 2024 articulated something I’ve been trying to get at. Ties into the institutionalist vs anti-institutionalist groups as well. Though many anti-institutionalists simply want their point of view in power.
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@sharonjohn
And within this conservatism you would include things like the techlash which is one expression of a liberal nostalgia for the 90s. That arguably is another movement that fits within the trend: the center-left’s attitude towards technology as an optimistic force for change changing into anti-big tech status quo.
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@sharonjohn
The discussion about where LLMs will go next seems to boil down to those who believe ChatGPT was the start of AI so it can “only improve from here” or actually the cashing out of 5 years of transformer architecture R&D at its peak.
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@sharonjohn
Noticed a character use vibes in the modern sense in an episode in Season 2 Sopranos. Kind of surprised because I thought vibes was a 2010s thing.
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@sharonjohn
Global left still has neoliberalism and post-Reagan/Thatcher capitalism left to fight against, no? I agree that anti-capitalism is mostly a US left phenomenon right now but why hasn’t this coalesced across the West?
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@sharonjohn
Bruno Macaes had a similar one he posted soon after Gaza conflict started: https://x.com/macaesbruno/status/1724817833035526512?s=46&t=ASVUcQnuPbttS9fQ6SRtNw
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@sharonjohn
Crypto seems like a debundling of platforms, which everyone realized became rent seeking, into interoperable protocols which could then be reassembled client-side per use case both to redo existing platforms and to solve “collapse” future use cases in a world without fiat or monoliths
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@sharonjohn
Humanity is like a high budget CGI movie with poor writing. The tech keeps getting better but nothing else make sense.
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@sharonjohn
I feel like it does capture a real subset of blue America that isn’t captured by the elites from Succession or the more typical laptop job class. The main avenue for Michelin-class dining are top 3 Blue America cities but unlike in say Machine Learning or piano, excellence in food IS more accessible?
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@sharonjohn
Was driving from Utah to Vegas to make it in time for a hard to get dinner reservation after 2 days of hiking, looked unlikely and then like magic the timezone moved back by an hour and all was well with the world
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@sharonjohn
It’s also tempting to say this is because capitalism is itself amoral. It actually does have one core value: the growth imperative. “Things getting bigger is better”.
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@sharonjohn
The weird thing about capitalism is that it gets stronger when you make media railing against it. This is also Mark Fisher’s point in the cult classic capitalism realism: Wall E performs anti-capitalism for us safely in a box so we don’t have to. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/adam-curtis-on-the-dangers-of-self-expression/
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@sharonjohn
I had blindly assumed it was going to be a BJP rout again until I tuned into a few analysts in the last few weeks and realized there was talk of BJP flailing in the north this time. Good instance of “India disappoints the optimists and pessimists” haha
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@sharonjohn
All language standardization is basically an act of top-down centralization. Human language does not organically homogenize across space and time. So nation-states throw their muscle behind an enshrined version and then disseminate it through society. The way French is maintained and policed is a good example.
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