The Scourge of the Tech Industry
Serious scepticism, and some crucial anecdotes I haven’t told until now.
Heads up: this is the biggest, juiciest article I have written since I penned The Scourge of Austin City, and it probably won’t fit in your inbox in its entirety, or so I’m told by the editor software. I kindly invite you to read on in your web browser so you can catch it all together, and enjoy. The stories told in here are ones I haven’t completely elucidated in the public record until now, and they relate heavily both to my past experiences as touched on in earlier articles, and the general malaise afflicting tech today. If you dislike what tech has become and don’t live by a horse and buggy, you want to know what happened here.
Earlier today I was perusing the video archives of FUTO, the grant organisation my former partner-in-crime was so excited to pontificate to back in ‘22 in the hopes of winning a payday so he could live as a pauper in Austin City for a while longer. While I don’t know if that ever panned out for him, I do know that Louis Rossmann was involved as a celebrity headliner for the ordeal at least since that point, as part of his strategy to save face in light of the reality that he hates New York and had to quit on it despite making NYC at least 40% of his personality. He got a few million bucks by selling his business or so I heard, and somehow the mob he sold it to managed to move it to Austin City eventually anyway for him. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Looks good from here
No, we have to start fresh and naïve about this. It’s time to get into that beginner’s mindset and marvel our eyes at the bright future that FUTO is purportedly helping build. So let’s see what’s cooking in the kitchen for, I don’t know… maybe the last two months? Yeah. Starting small.
Oh boy.
It’s important to do a broad first pass over things like this, because otherwise you’ll very well get lost in the sea of ✨ content ✨. We’ll go ahead and cross out the following for failing to pass the title + thumbnail gauntlet:
Filler – this is content that isn’t really substantive programming in its own right, often used to help pad statistics and in-fill the publishing schedule; blogs often publish ‘weekly recaps’ or ‘monthly roundups’ or feature a ‘guest writer’ to accomplish this basic task of pumping out content without having to bother making anything
Recruiting propaganda – it’s just that: Organisation wants YOU to come be their next patsy for chump change that makes it look like they’re doing something and not just shuffling money around amongst themselves
Current thing cash-in – when more than 3 popular Twitch streamers hit YouTube with videos about a Current Thing, all of the content farmers on X.com and beyond turn their attention to it in a hollow attempt to cash in on the momentum; it’s as vapid as it is disingenuous and would be counted as filler if it weren’t for the shoestring production we’re all supposed to be endeared with for its resemblance to real YouTubers 15 years ago
and finally, blog slop – this is the most pernicious of the garbage, as it’s basically a simulacrum of weblogs like the one you’re reading, the weblogs I might recommend, or the weblogs those recommended authors might recommend in turn; it’s ideal content for people who have based at least 40% of their personality around reading weblogs but don’t like actually reading weblogs; the modern equivalent of daytime television programming or toilet literature, lacking any actionable substance but faithfully reproducing the appearance of it so you can show your friends, keep face and continue building your personal empire
The idiot box reigns
Before we get into dissecting what earnest content remains, I want to point out that this structure of publishing is familiar: it’s cable TV, or really just the idiot box in general. By virtue of the addictive relationship it fosters in some people, it often gravitates towards an equilibrium of 24/7 programming. Something needs to be pushed out on a regular basis all the time, because that’s what the viewers expect in order to maintain their psychokinetic tethering to the channel programming. There have been many deeper dives made into the perils of this elsewhere, but suffice to say that this is what we in tech would call a dark pattern: a deliberate yet subtle manipulation made in plain sight under cover of obfuscation and plausible deniability.
So what’s left after we cut out the filler, the recruiting propaganda, the current thing cash-ins that stop mattering in three days, and the blog slop written to sound like a bad caricature of Alan Watts? Let us enumerate.
Modular laptops
This looks like an interesting idea, and come to think of it they’re not even the first people that come to my mind when I’m reminded of efforts to implement user serviceability in laptops. Wasn’t there also that company doing essentially the same thing that got a big public investment and endorsement from Mr. Tech Tips? That’s right, there was:
Oh phooey. That’s OK though, because we can clearly lay the blame at the feet of the Government. This isn’t Framework’s fault! Everyone should be able to buy from Taiwan!
Oh no. That’s not good at all.
So it looks like this is a pretty difficult situation for them to be in. Making a modular, repairable laptop is evidently no easy feat, and there are many potentially ruinous pitfalls one could fall into even on a good day trying to pull this off. So, I’m sure there’s a video somewhere from the Open Sauce team addressing how they plan on overcoming these challenges, right? I’m sure we wouldn’t just get all of the stock non-answers spokespeople love to give when the companies they speak for don’t have a serious concern for something but are facing public pressure. Right?
I mean, I’m not supposed to have been born yesterday and just blankly expect them to succeed just because they act like they will, am I? Like, there’s a world they have to actually make these things in—a volatile, imperfect world—and surely they have to have some plan or strategy to confront that in pursuit of their great passion! 😧
‘Open, modular, and hackable’ Alexa
This was actually really interesting to me until I realised it’s one of those talking trash cans with always-on microphones all the big tech cos foisted onto the somnambulant public. Exciting because the thumbnail contained a decomposed schematic, and schematics are considerably closer to reality than fluff videos where we ‘meet the team’. I can’t say this is slop because it’s a substantive product development, but it’s still sorely disappointing as it’s one of those walking solutions looking for a problem that tech is so infamous for these days. And on the margin, open source mass surveillance devices are even worse, because they’re expressly pretending to be the opposite of what they actually are. (Pardon me as I hold back my laughter at people who think open source somehow precludes mass surveillance.)
‘Decentralising authentication’
I know this is going to sound really shitty, but I swear to God it was the very first earnest thought I had when I saw this: what’s wrong with passwords?
There have been serious assaults against this tried and true method of security, as the tech industry, all by itself, has yet again spontaneously decided to lead yet another crusade against the damn things despite nothing being seriously wrong with them. This time their chosen bait is the ‘passkey’, which is basically a password that’s not protected by the Fifth Amendment and is far easier to practically steal if you were a government surveillant or APT spelunking around the Worldwide Web looking for people to hack. Tech has been relentlessly nudging everyone to adopt these pieces of shit, too:
So okay Chad, I’m game: I agree with you, decentralised authentication is the only option. How is your Allthenticate business not a flagrant perversion of that moral (because it sure as hell looks like it), and how do you plan on convincing people to spend 45 minutes listening to you talk about this problem when it’s a coin toss at best that you will even get the framing correct, let alone bring something to the table that helps matters? I have no reason to believe he even addresses this. Maybe he does. Let me know in the comments. But somehow I already can figure he doesn’t.
Results never mature
I know it sounds like I’m being uncharitable, and that’s because I am, for a very good reason: it’s been this way for over a decade at this point. It’s always this menagerie of work that appears to pass muster at first glance, but when you take a closer look, or even just wait for more than five minutes and watch as none of these endeavours ever seem to mature and actualise their goals, you have to wonder if you’re not being bamboozled. You are. Sorry you had to find out this way.
I’m sorry that I have to be a stranger idly pointing out that this sucks from the sidelines like some kind of heckler, but weeding out jabronies was supposed to be the job of the showrunners and stakeholders organising this shit. Since they failed spectacularly in doing that, allowing tryhards, phoneys and frauds to basically run rampant, how can I just sit by and let this shit pass by as if it’s any good? It’s degrading to all of us to allow it to stand. We’re all sons of bitches for allowing this shit the dignity it didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve. This should have never been funded, but it was, and that cheapens the value of everything we do. If this is worth $10K, or more, and it comes into the fray with equal weight as legitimate work, then legitimate work isn’t worth shit.
I would love to be proven wrong about all of this. In the very same way, I always wanted to be proven wrong about the dog shit state of the tech job market over the last five years. It should surprise no one that this is the case, because it’s self-evident that I’m a capable programmer who can command a pretty high salary considering the nature of what I do. I have no reason to sit here penniless and blog about how much the industry is stuck up its own ass if it’s actually not, but that wasn’t my choice to make. I gained employment before out of my own chutzpah. I’m here to tell you why I won’t do it again, at least not like this.
The story of George
The industry wasn’t always like this. As recently as 2013, there was still goodwill, which would later enable guys like George Hotz to blow up and parlay their success into lots of opportunities to build basically whatever they wanted. He got free press for his hacktivism in the before times, when Ivy League professors would stick their necks out for your freedom of speech simply because it was the right thing to do and because their opinion made an impact and they knew it. Indeed, Sony settled their DMCA suit against him in fear of the negative publicity. Good times. Glad it all worked itself out.
Jobbing on easy street
Where did George take this goodwill? Well, first he took it to a free job at Facebook, where he worked for a split before joining a startup that he spent even less time at before starting his own. He would later illegally wire up his Comma.ai device to an Acura and drive it on the California interstate highways, but California asked him nicely to stop and he got a bunch more press that prompted investment to help legalise his device. And why wouldn’t he do that—taunting the legal system—considering how well it worked out for him with Sony? It must be nice being able to live out that tired Valley advice of ‘don’t ask permission’ when everyone in charge for the time being is so forgiving and charitable to you. These days, the rest of us have been finding out how worthless that advice is when you have no means to act in the first place; we’re all ‘not asking permission’ to do nothing.
Aping into AI
After Comma, George aped into the AI world Ponzi scheme with tinygrad, and grandstanded endlessly about how he was going to use AMD chips to get the job done. After discovering that AMD wasn’t willing to bankroll implementing the changes he would have needed in their driver stacks, he threw a tantrum on GitHub about it, ragequit on AMD, and later moved over to Nvidia, who for obvious reasons are much more amenable to mob machinations where dark money moves the levers as necessary to maintain the appearance of competence regardless of who’s paying for what. None of those embarrassing moments got any press coverage outside of Reddit, so it’s as if it never happened, and he carries on broadcasting himself and repping his image on social media. This is pretty fucking insane considering it was such a resounding ‘what the fuck’ moment that brought so many things into question about what he was really doing. People had supposedly invested several million dollars into this, so public meltdowns that existentially threaten the company aren’t things anyone just shrugs off. But when you’re bankrolled by the mob, I guess it’s all according to keikaku. Just another day’s work fixing the backend to work with the shit they got up front.
Just like you or I
Before all of his slimy dealings with the tech mob, George was a thoroughly unexceptional talented binary ROM hacker. I have known of several dozen people of his calibre or better in my years doing ROM hacking, and I count myself among their ranks as well because I have those skills. Sure, we’re a rare breed, but we’re not this exotic kind of special that his dealings would lead you to believe. The things happening to him and beckoning all of this sukses have nothing to do with his skills as a fabled Hackerman. That’s his cover story and it’s how he enjoys portraying himself to others. I’m not saying he’s a worthless nobody—in a fairer world he would command a lavish salary that would finance a happy family on his income alone in any suburb of America really—but he’s not whatever the hell he claims to be.
Conclusion
George enjoys this privilege because he’s willing to play along and say the lines. He’s far from alone in that, and indeed, the real reason why he ‘succeeds’ in the narrow, materialistic sense of the term is the reason I ‘fail’ just as narrowly: I’m not willing to play pretend with corrupt people because of the damage it invariably does to my soul.
The trainwreck of Unai
In my article Mechanicalism in the Real World, I opened with a big thank you both to Unai, now known as Unison, for giving me a 1099 job, and to Lewis, who helped me source that job by blowing up a Tweet thread about me where he was complaining that nobody in the industry cares about talented C programmers.
The developments that followed were nothing short of embarrassing in every metric that really mattered. I interviewed for months on end while working a dead end security job barely making ends meet, and although I thoroughly enjoyed those interviews and found them to be very earnest and productive, that was a lot of fucking time I really didn’t have that they did.
Piss poor compensation
When it came time for salary negotiations, it was a mess: I got offered $58K annually on a 1099 contract basis that they claimed was for probation. The CEO took my counteroffer of $60K because, in his words, he “didn’t want to be remembered as the guy who turned you down for $58K.” This is a very ironic and sad thing to look back on considering the job description was essentially everything I do already on my own accord, but affixed to his product and vision. Have some modern perspective on how vanishingly low this salary actually is: I’m doing theoretical informatics work for a Sequoia-backed Valley-headquartered company and I’m being paid less than I would make working twelves at the Kellogg’s bakery in Cary, North Carolina operating a Cheez-It packing machine. In the end, I’m fucking poor and they know it, so I don’t push the matter since I don’t really have a lot of leads to leverage anyway. And $60K/year did feel pretty good on my finances initially – I got debt-free again and even bought myself a nice Cannondale bicycle.
No job with that title
Okay, so I’m gonna go to work developing their VR headset protocol or whatever, right? Apparently not. I found out a week or so before onboarding that actually, wait, he doesn’t have that job for me right now, but if I’m willing to stick around and pitch in I’m sure I could find some way to make myself useful. Ah, the classic switch-a-roo, and for a pitiful salary on top of that. Insult to injury. Again, what choice do I have? Whatever. Let’s do it.
No leadership, just management
I get into the meat of the software at the company and immediately discover that it’s a giant pile of proprietary, undocumented code authored by a single person who works on the team and had this legacy codebase for years before joining. I get a small task on a kanban board to implement something basic on top of it, and psych myself to get into it before discovering all too late that I have no idea how any of this works and there’s no way for me to discover that on my own in a reasonable timeframe. So the deadline comes and goes and the management response to that failure was to tell me to just pester the author about everything even though he can’t respond right away. They literally said “DM him at 3am” just to insist upon me about this. I told them that I can’t really do that because if I have to ask a question every time I get stuck and wait for a response it causes me to stall out and I can’t do anything for that stint of the day. I told them as the second deadline neared that I need to sit down and document this code, because there’s no way in hell anyone else is ever going to be able to use this shit as long as its in the state its in. I had to insist on this, telling the CEO that it was morally wrong for me to keep pressing on this way because I can’t see any way to make this work without lying. And just like that, I was fired. For a time, the CEO went looking for another C++ dev, but never found one that lasted, and to this day their software guy is a team of one.
The managerial code racket
Looking back, it was painfully obvious what the situation was: the original C++ guy they had took this company by their technical balls and uses their codebase as leverage to keep and enhance their employment for as long as possible. It’s a variant of the often-discussed ‘malicious compliance’ that programmers will do with ignorant and hostile managers where they quietly create artificial problems for themselves down the road by either writing deliberately bad or at least totally undocumented code so they never run out of work and managers can’t let them go. The CEO was 19 years old at the time and had no idea that this was being done to his company, and on the contrary gave the guy’s expertise a lot of weight in making hiring and firing decisions, including my own. This was a classic case of a CEO having management skills but no leadership skills, and it’s why the company is more or less a ghost to this day.
I can only speculate that the reason this thing got funded had something to do with the CEO’s family relations, because he has no personal qualities that stuck out or demanded attention from money, and because he has literal Continental royalty sitting on his Board, self-styled as angel investors. The European aristocracy is famous for pantomiming world business, butting in uninvited and making up for the rudeness by serving as a giant piggy bank using their inherited sovereign wealth. They really just want to run with the big dogs and ignore the reality that they lost real power a long time ago.
This is what startups are really like
Either way, this absolute shitshow has not only European princesses aped in, but even big money from Sequoia Capital and their associates whose names you’ve probably heard of. Let’s be real: if they’re not the pinnacle of startup culture, no one is. And so we arrive at a very common refrain against startup culture I’m far from the first to espouse, in the most painful, firsthand way possible. I’m telling you this in an effort to underscore that this is what’s really going on in the industry. I’m tired of the misdirections and lies espoused on the mainstream Web that prop this shitshow up. I’m also not going to bore my readers to death with long-hand rebuttals to bad faith arguments made by psychopaths and regretful morons about this either. I trust that you are earnest, because I have to. The only way this is ever going to get solved is at the behest of people who want it to be solved. Fuck the ones who don’t or think this is good somehow. Reminder: these operations are still ongoing, sucking up money from everywhere they possibly can.
Enter David Holz
If you’re cynical or inexperienced enough to think my experience with Unai was a fluke or just doesn’t gel with everything you’ve seen in the industry in your life, I had another unfortunate run-in with the now-famous founder of Midjourney, David Holz. Unfortunately he has to pretend like he never knew me now—I don’t know what exactly I said but I’m 90% sure it was me criticising the wrong stakeholder on Twitter some time in 2022, because everybody who acted like they were somebody came to start conspicuously ignoring me around that point—but before he ghosted me he was talking to me on the telephone and trying to help me get a job. At the time he had just sold Leap Motion, his augmented reality startup, to a private equity fund, and was using the cash to build out the unnamed laboratory that would later become Midjourney.
David extends a branch
He told me that at the very minimum he could get me a basic, low-skill job being a sysadmin or devops type helper at that laboratory, but upon further thinking he thought I’d be a better fit at Leap Motion, because I was clearly particular to low-level embedded programming with my fixation on ANSI C. He knew this because I was a peer of someone else he also hired years before to work at Leap Motion: Max Thomas, also known as Shiny Quagsire, of GBA and later 3DS hacking note. Being the company’s former CEO, it was trivial for him to arrange a connection and from there I started scheduling interviews. The first interview was about culture fit, and it went great – we chatted about anything and recent developments in tech, and it was clear that I would be able to get along fine.
The whiteboard scam
The second interview is where things went wrong, and my best understanding of it is that they orchestrated what Richard Geldreich explains as ‘whiteboard tests’ – pre-employment screening tests that can be designed to essentially guarantee failure and use that failure as a substantive technical reason to not move forward with a candidate. In my specific case, they gave me a task to create a recursive algorithm mapping dictionary words to phone number digits in Python. This is a common task for university undergrads, and I had already explicitly told them multiple times that I never went to college and that my focus is heavily biased towards C, where doing recursion is heavily frowned upon due to the nature of the domain. I ended up timing out in the throes of writing a non-recursive solution to this stupid problem, and upon retelling this after the fact I have had the hilarity of people telling me “sometimes employers do whiteboard interviews just to see how you think!” If that were the case they should have been amazed, but they weren’t, and actively tried to make me feel like it was my fault somehow.
A charade for private equity
While it’s not possible to entirely rule out the chance that I was illegally discriminated against, I will say there’s a pretty simple theory that would explain their decision to do this. David had just sold this company to private equity, and there was an obvious understanding amongst all of us that they may not really fully understand what they bought into. My first interviewer alluded to this in speaking of the ‘solid air gap’ he was helping to maintain between the team and their new owners.
Here’s the truth about UltraLeap, formerly known as Leap Motion: it was a doomed company. David did the smart thing and parried his failure to attain market into a success by passing off the company to someone dumber who was willing to buy it. But importantly, everyone on the team was smart enough to kinda ‘get’ what this meant for them and how best they needed to play their parts to maximise the amount of time they get to coast working at this place.
The MO was simple: shut up, keep your heads down, maintain a low profile, and just act like you’re being productive and make a token show for the owners every now and then. If you do, none of us have to go look for real jobs and we can all just kind of fuck off for a few years and enjoy being paid market rate wages for mostly nonexistent work because our salaries were already priced in from the start. The entire team conspires together to put this performance on for their owners because they want to keep their now-mostly-empty jobs for as long as possible. Where I figure into that is painfully simple: I’m another mouth to feed, a potential liability in my own right because they don’t know me and can’t be sure if I’m intelligent enough not to give the game away when I’m being paid good money to keep quiet, and all else equal my hiring means less time that they potentially have to keep the whole charade going. It’s a material loss with no gain whatsoever, because they’re not starving for my talent and they’re not going anywhere that might demand it in the future. So they just throw up a whiteboard scam to preemptively deflect blame for not wanting to hire me and call it a day.
We know better than this
I have been through enough firsthand with the tech industry that I know better when I come across a YouTube channel filled with earnest-looking crap than to take it at face value. I opened with this and went along with the premise of goodwill just to give myself a sanity check and to extend an olive branch to my readers who might otherwise choke on this corrosive pill I’m bestowing.
Social media is no avenue
I’ve also known of others who have been methodically cast out of the garden by these tech mobsters, and I can hardly find or recall their names or the irrelevant podcasts they interviewed on, which really sucks because I know there’s no chance in hell I’m ever going to be able to find them just by going looking for them. If social media was ever an open platform for human discourse, it has definitely stopped serving that purpose in any capacity for some years now. No platform shows you the posts from the people you follow in the order that they were made, because that removes their ability to lie to you about what’s going on and what opinions really matter according to ‘everyone else’. Tech is flagrantly and systematically abusing their stewardship of the mainstream internet to further their interests and it’s so effective that people have barely noticed it’s happening, although that sentiment is starting to change. You just can’t make up for all the broken promises and products that never came into existence after a point.
Everyone had colossal amounts of goodwill that they then dispensed over and over into the accounts of disingenuous people that have never really led honest careers in the first place, and now we all have to act shocked and lean into our embarrassment that we got played so thoroughly. I have had to torch friendships with many online connections because they simply refuse to tolerate my idle dissent against this after a point, including with the Lewis above who got me the job at Unai. The saddest part is, his self-betrayal in welcoming VCs didn’t even net him any benefit in the end: his business went defunct and he hasn’t put up anything of substance since. It’s almost like I was right in vocally saying these people are psychopaths and you shouldn’t be anywhere near them if you can help it. There’s no winning move with them, or as Warren Buffett once said, “you can’t make a good deal with a bad person. It really does pay to avoid them.”
People hoped for better
When I was younger, I took a tech-adjacent job as a ‘coding coach’ for a franchisee of a Valley-based tutoring startup called ‘theCoderSchool’. The owners at the time, brothers Mehul and Kunal, took a liking to me, and I fared all right with the job until a very bigoted assistant manager got on board and wreaked havoc at their new location without them noticing until a lot of damage had been done. Before it all went to hell, Kunal told me something interesting in response to me saying “I never made it into university; I can’t get a good job in tech.” Kunal said it wasn’t going to matter, because companies will pay people like me to go to school and get the credentials I needed.
Like David, Maxim and many others, Kunal understood that I wasn’t an ordinary programmer, and to this day I am mystified as to why he ever believed such a preposterous thing about on-the-job training. But I nodded along and went back to work; what he thought didn’t matter that much anyway unless he was hiring (which he obviously wasn’t). Kunal is yet another example of all the goodwill the public has been pissing away in the tech industry, and I don’t blame him for it, but God damn, it’s really hard to have any sympathy for it at all. And as for the people who were naïve and now want to double down when faced with the facts? Fuck you outright.
No more rackets
It should be made clear right out the gate that it’s not reasonable to be a taker for operations like FUTO any longer, or any other organisation like them for that matter. The trappings of the tech mafia and their locale create a significant reputational burden for them to disprove, and I would have to be a gullible son of a bitch to say ‘OK’ if all they care to do is shrug that off and say “we’re not like that!” Yeah fucking right. We’ve been doing this over and over and over. It doesn’t mean anything to me that you found some new frontmen like Louis Rossmann to put a fresh coat of paint on the same old rackets. It’s time to face up to the lack of results in cryptocurrency, AI, quantum computing, software-as-a-service, and more. I’m done even half-trying to believe any of the shit they peddle is going to materialise and change anybody’s lives for the better, because I have seen over and over firsthand that all of these outfits select for loyalty over competence. They don’t love computers; they love subservient eunuchs that wait their turn and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when their tyrannical masters drop a morsel of starvation wages into their traps so they can carry on living as a pauper in the shadow of megalomaniacal moronic assholes like Elon every day. The insult to your intelligence is the point; that’s the loyalty test. You wanna eat shit with them? Then you gotta play along. Everybody has their part.
No more denial
I can’t accept dismissals of these things as if these experiences aren’t indicative of the rotten culture tech has come to exalt, either. People love to hit me with that one: ‘you were just unlucky!’ ‘I never had these problems!’ Yes, and you never did the things I did either, so you wouldn’t have. That doesn’t make it fantasy.
I had been on a Space years ago discussing the broken machinations of FAANG and diagnosed their problems in the chat with painful accuracy, and immediately someone in the chat initiated a pile-on to tell me I was full of shit, until someone else spoke up in my defence who happened to work at many of those companies. If you really don’t think this stuff is an expression of a larger problem, I really don’t think you’re sober. (And Aash, if you’re still around, God bless you, and I hope you’re doing well. I’m sure you remember me and I remember you.)
I chose the high path
This is not just a longhand account of my tribulations in the tech industry before, but also a square and earnest admission of one really big kind of choice I made, and made consistently, that led me to materially ‘lose’ all of these things: I chose to keep my conscience with respect to practicality, and it cost me everything as far as they were concerned. Don’t get it confused; I’m not some conscientious dissenter or grandstanding moralist. I did the best I could with the options I had, and the only ways I could have stayed in were so colossally shitty that I would become a monster if I acquiesced to them. It was too much to ask, and for far too little.
Why should you care?
Maybe you think that’s dumb, or at the very least hard to sympathise with. I empathise with that. To you I must ask one big favour: I want you to think really long and hard about what’s at stake here with letting essentially fraudulent nitwits run amok and ruin everything by gating it all off with empty loyalty tests for a burgeoning parasitism. I want you to consider whether or not it’s really worth letting this shit continue not delivering since they are resolute in shutting the door in the faces of people like me who know what they’re doing and also give a shit. The products aren’t fucking getting made. Where’s your Librem? Same place as your Framework, or your ClockworkPi, or a hundred other interesting things tied up in China’s counterleverage against the tech mob’s Ponzi scheme so they don’t get the bag shifted onto them. Ever wondered why it’s hard to find a GPU at MSRP? It’s because Nvidia doesn’t want to get fucked with a glut in the market by making GPUs for organised crime that they know could just wake up tomorrow and reneg on, thereby shifting the balance sheet out of their hands. And that’s just one of several ongoing battles in the underworld that’s effectively running the tech industry today.
This affects you, too
I want better computers as much as anyone does. I have my own takes on those things, but you never heard of it, and if you understand now that I wasn’t fired for a lack of talent or some overwhelming personal failing, but rather for a healthy excess of conscience, do you really think it’s because those ideas are unexceptional too? My work is the work you are missing, because it was shoved out of the fray in favour of cheap simulacrums made by pliant and loyal jabronies using Thiel-esque tax write-offs. These product segments are what’s ultimately at stake with the sappy sob stories about my professional career: it’s just all the things you could have had but don’t. And I’m sure I’m far from being the only one. So even if the grand picture problems don’t matter to you, this still does, because unlike video essays about the AI commons or whatever, this is real. I’m just sorry it’s so hard to show you that, but I hope now you understand why.