Silicon Valley is falling apart – force feeding us lazy and derivative tech | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley is falling apart – force feeding us lazy and derivative tech

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39 pointsharambae10 comments

I kinda agree with Peter Thiel and this article. We are seeing a lot of more innovation in bits then in atoms.

And it kinda makes me sad for personal reasons. I studied business and economics and have experience as web developer. I would love to have a startup innovating in atoms, but I find it hard to transition there. I would love to go back in time and change my major to biotechnology, but as I am 27 I feel I already wasted too much time in the university. It kinda feels like a worst situation to be in. Im still pretty young, and dont want to spend the rest of my life making REST apis, but would have a hard time justyfing spending another 5 years learning something from scratch :/

And most likely you'd go back to tech anyway around age 35 after not earning enough to live comfortably (speaking as someone with a background in biology with lots of friends and colleagues who left the field). Don't get me wrong, it's tragic that the brightest minds are being wasted making dog-walking apps or whatever.

Big difference between biology and biotechnology though.

Biology is one of those fields that many people are drawn to yet the post-college career is not quite what they seemed. Recently interviewed a candidate for a low level tech job that has 2 BS in Biology and Aquatic Science from UW...after years of finding nothing but barely above minimum wage work she decided to look for a different field of study. A lot of wasted time and money for her.

Some of them were in biotech, and yeah it still doesn't pay nearly at the same level as engineering jobs. Also I was on the molecular/biochem side so pretty techy.

https://archive.is/zFi8w

All the money going to CRUD apps, easy to build and sell. Hard problems take a long time to solve, no VC wants to invest and have his money locked away for a long-time horizon. Hence we need government sponsored innovation, insane discoveries came out of Bell Labs.

The DARPA model which does out relatively large grants for risky ideas is the way to go. Avoid the European model, where government pork is the norm and fed through a massive meat grinder feeding a self-serving bureaucracy that wastes innovators' time. And because it's the norm, investors expect to be subsidized, so it's difficult to avoid.

This seems sloppy. Nothing but shallow criticism of popular tech, mostly social tech. There is a lot of positive tech development going on with the medical sector especially. It is also hard not to notice that some of the first potentially realistic flying cars are starting to come out. And not everything needing to be in the Valley is also a good thing.

Have you taken a look at YC’s latest batch?

The most exciting and truly beneficial work for humanity is not being done by YC startups.

Granted, YC =\= Silicon Valley, but it’s one of the highest profile investors and is one most people would probably associate with Silicon Valley.

Yes. Duh! That's part of it. But not entirely for the reasons that Thiel says.

You still have to make bits with atoms and like the fallacy of "zero cost" during the Dot Com boom, nothing is actually free - the atoms do matter especially if you don't directly control the manufacturing processes and supply chains. And the costs are still there and must be paid for somehow.

Because only the libertarian politics and rational common sense of the old Silicon Valley from its inception until ~2000 is remotely compatible with innovation and creating new technologies.

What tech is the actual basis of what passes for innovation now? Is any of it actually new? No!

* Functional Programming - invented in the 1960s, so 60 years old

* Databases - invented in the 1970s, so 50 years old

* Neural Nets - invented in the 1980s, so 40 years old

* Web - invented in the 1990s, so 30 years old

These are "old but repurposed" technologies. But that's not really innovation - it's turning the crank on what is already known and defined.

So mostly nothing new and nothing game-changing in the pipeline: it takes 20+ years from a truly new idea being proven in academia or R&D labs to make it to market and be economically relevant.

This is why I left Silicon Valley: it's no longer the future of technology because NOTHING that made it the center up until 2000 is still there "from Alpha to Omega". Things that enabled Silicon Valley to become a tech center included:

* Low Cost Land and Living - HELL NO anymore!

* Libertarian Political and Social ideals - again HELL NO anymore!

* Honest discourse rather than disinformation based on rationalism and empiricism - hey that's not woke!

It's informative to know history because history rhymes. What as the "center of electronics" between 1920 and 1960?

It was NYC and the greater tristate area. It was Chicago to Minnesota. Just like Upstate NY, Northern Ohio, Detroit, Milwaukee once were the world centers of anything Mechanical Engineering (now called the Rust Belt), so too the centers of Electrical Engineering were abandoned (the center of electronics in NYC was downtown Manhattan on Wall Street!).

Those were replaced, temporarily (for 50 years) by Silicon Valley. And now Silicon Valley's time is up, over, done.

The most likely US city to take the crown, such as it is, is Phoenix thanks to TSMC and Intel expanding there, and still having the libertarian ideals mostly intact.

I'm banking also on upstate NY/VT. The advantages include little things like water and agriculture to sustain the Maslow pyramid base better (see the drought news about Lake Powell, Lake Mead and Lake Havasu). Plus a renewed boost around GF, IBM, onsemi, et al. in our area as we discover having all our eggs in East Asian is suicidal in all ways.

COVID shows that nationalism based in ethnicity and simple observable differences is alive and well, and in a pinch, NO COUNTRY will stick its neck out for any other on a good day and in the worst case, nationalism is still the basis of rivalry capable of becoming war, either in direct military forms or any other form.

Globalism is a failure (and I say this as a former world-traveling globalist). In fact it was living overseas that showed me how far Silicon Valley had already fallen and that its ways now are not longer the "right/best" ways.

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