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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

Hey, congratulations SF. You spent over a decade whining about tech-bros and Google buses. Guess those problems are solved now!

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after the huggingface event last night a group of us wasn't let into a bar/club because "y'all are nerds, we don't want your patronage" I don't think it's solved enough yet for their taste, what a beautifully schizoid city, never change, we should just throw money at the problem forever as a monument to hubris XD

I'm super interested in this story. Can you elaborate more on the context please?

I will simply leave you with this image by way of explanation: https://thiic.cc/heavy/huggingface_bar.jpg

The resentment happening from society towards us is spiraling out of control, and I say this as someone who was also at that meetup event yesterday. Pretty sad but we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people.

The world is finding that they want to always treat us nerds how they treated us in our formative years...

> we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people

It has nothing to do with tangible harm and a lot with the attitude of techno public figures, as well as, in San Francisco, the civic detachment of its tech workers.

Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools, and now, they're starting getting bullied for being cerebral nerds by the bars of the one city that's supposed to be theirs.

I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and democratic AI, which is basically the only protection that the non nerds of SF have against the coming AI job apocalypse.

> Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools

You’re describing rich and powerful people. If someone with those resources can’t grow up, yes, it’s reasonable for others to dissociate from them.

What I’m describing is also uniquely San Franciscan. Tech workers in Berkeley, Oakland, Sunnyvale, Seattle, New York and overseas are civically engaged. They volunteer; join organisations, protests and campaigns; they run for office.

> the coming AI job apocalypse

It’s odd seeing AI embrace crypto’s language. Past revolutionaries for computers or nuclear power were motivated by the good they could do. They didn’t pat themselves on the back for riding a supposed pale horse. NLP has no more ability to bring an apocalypse than personal computers did, but it’s a call for regulation if this becomes mainstream.

unlike sf, tech workers in pretty much every city you listed tend to actually live in those cities. hell, half the tech workers in sf live in berkeley, oakland, sunnyvale, or other bay area communities. when i was a tech worker in sf, i wasn't civically engaged in sf because i spent that budget in berkeley, where i actually lived.

Please don't do regional flamewar on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not a society vs nerds thing. This is specific to SF and the SF tech scene and that scene's relationship to the rest of the community of SF.

I'm a hard core computer nerd and I'm from SF, grew up here. This is not the nerd city (although we have many fine nerds here!) It's the hippie city.

Anyway, we nerds help the normals despite their bullying and lack of respect because we are human beings and humane. It's not their fault they're stupid and ignorant, after all? And do we not enjoy pleasures and rewards beyond their understanding? It's not so bad, being a nerd.

- - - -

Did you watch "Avenue 5"? That scene where the folks are trying to leave the ship and the captain and chief engineer are trying to stop them... Wooo boy that was a horrifying scene, eh? But you can't just let them leave. You still have to help them as best you can, if only so you can live with yourself, eh?

Portland, Eugene or are hippy cities. SF isn't a hippy city anymore. The greatful dead went to Eugene OR ever year to "get away from it all" in SF.

> SF isn't a hippy city anymore.

Right, and that's my point: the old timers resent the new wave. The hippies didn't give us the city, we took it from them.

The argument that sways me (as an oldtimer who misses the way it was) is that this is the way of it here: The Ohlone were savagely fucked over by the Spanish, who in turn were run out by the Americans, then the Gold Rush folk gave way eventually to the Beatniks, who then yielded to the Hippies, who have now been displaced by tech bros. Seen from that perspective, we're actually making fantastic progress, in the sense that each wave is less violent than the last, eh?

> the one city that's supposed to be theirs

LOL. Since when?

SF existed in the 1850's. There was no such thing as a tech bro then.

It turns out the arrogant shitting on the rest of the planet by authoritarian techies in the Bay Area has some mild consequences about a dozen orders of magnitude less than the shit it has sprayed on everyone else. If "Flyover Country" has ever been in your vocabulary for a nanosecond, you deserve all that's being heaped on you and 1,000,000x more. You can't abuse humanity, tell them it's for their own good, and then whine when there's a slight bit of blowback against your arrogance and attempt to control and micromanage everybody's lives through technology.

1. I was born in "flyover country", I know what the great plains looks like and understand their economic struggles.

2. Again, huggingface open source meetup was the OPPOSITE of authoritarian tech bros. It's literally the people trying to democratize and keep this stuff available to the masses.

This post here is the resentment I'm talking about. The reality is that the average HF event attendee has done far more to help "flyover states" than most SF tech workers. They should be treated as such, not scorned like they're part of a "techno authoritarian future". The techno authoritarians are OpenAI and their cronies.

If nuance isn't possible from non tech bros who resent tech bros, maybe there is a reason why the world is leaving them behind.

Between pandemics, inflation, food scarcity.. I'm not sure the world is leaving non tech bros behind.

And I am a tech bro who moved to rural and bought the farm in 2020.

I support you HF guys though. Also if you want to get into clubs in SF, at least when I use to party there extensively in the 00's you either:

A) Go to a rave style club that lets anyone in

B) You wear nice "preppy" clothes. With a fresh haircut.

I've been turned away from clubs for not having a button down shirt on. Dress code is a real thing.

Can you please keep this sort of flamewar fodder off this site? We don't want tribes bashing each other and calling each other names here—none of it has anything to do with intellectual curiosity, which is what HN is supposed to be for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note that they ask you not to call names or fulminate.

I really wish that we could all just settle on using "whether or not someone is acting like an asshole" as our single tribal dividing line. Every other grouping scheme will lump lots of great people with lots of assholes all mixed together and then we cherry pick and make assumptions about the wider group that are generally unfair.

I think the fact that Prop J cruised to victory and Prop I went down in flames shows that the influence of the old guard is waning. There is a proliferation of groups trying to flex tech money in SF politics: Grow SF, Abundant SF, Together SF. And they are aligned with state politicians who get the goods like Weiner, Newsom, and Haney. Supervisor Peskin is termed out, again, in 2024 and Preston and his band of fake-ass socialists are going to get a serious challenger

I'd put Haney in the same bucket as Preston.

https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1410107988505890817

Yes, Haney was originally very NIMBY in his politics but has become more moderate.

Tech money should be flexed in politics more. We’re paying taxes too, right?

Way more than fucking Dede Wilsey is paying.

There has literally never been a time in the history of capitalistm when capitalist wealth from any industry wasn’t being flexed in politics for the interests of the particular capitalists (and, as a natural collateral effect, the industry) involved.

These parties are labor parties.

Because of SF's structure with its board of supervisors, I don't think tech had much influence in SF outside FiDi/SoMa/Mission Bay.

After this (SFUSD's delay of algebra 1 has created a nightmare of workarounds)

https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/put-algebra-1-back-in-eight...

It's pretty clear tech isn't making the rules.

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