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Comment by boc | Hacker News Reader

Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine.

We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.

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Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.

When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.

The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.

Unfortunately, that subset is the tech community leadership.

Not leadership, just the loudest.

> Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.

I'm not convinced. In the past half decade or so this industry has veered hard toward outright fraud and grift. I see this trend all over--adtech, cryptocoins, "AI", security... These days I assume technologists are frauds until they prove otherwise. It's a blunt instrument, but it often works well.

I'm sorry, but your defense for the "not all techies" argument is that you flew to NIH and told them how to stop investing in their own infrastructure and funnel tax dollars to private hosting rentals instead? I cannot wrap my head around this as a defense of anything. Seems like the current crew is just cutting out the middleman.

Half the computers at twice the price!

Yeah it's a more involved discussion than we could really have in a form like this but I truly believe that the cloud is a better solution than self-investment and infrastructure when it comes to universities. I spent plenty of time working with closet clusters and grad students is admins when I was at the University and I just don't think it's a good investment of time or money.

When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.

I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science

There is a real schism in the SV elite community between the "tech right" and Google. You could argue that OpenAI was founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk to deny Google exclusive access to the GenAI.

"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."

- Altman to Musk, immediately before proposing what became OpenAI ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-and-openai )

"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."

- Musk to Altman, later ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-openai-path-of-certai... )

Google has always been the company that looms over whatever next-gen hyped things the VC crowd can invest in (or whatever field Elon can pretend to be far ahead in). I even think it being perceived as so liberal has moved these people to the right instead of "libertarian" as they used to claim so they can hit it politically

Stop playing along with this farce. Their goal is not to improve anything or reduce waste, it's to destroy the apparatus of governance entirely, privatize everything, and rule over a destitute, terrified populace as unto gilded age kings lording over fiefdoms.

What came after the gilded age, again?

It may be a bad assumption to think HN comments reflect the broader tech community's opinion on what is happening in the US government right now. That being said, there are far too many commenters that seem to be okay with what's happening, especially when it comes to DoE and Musk taking over the treasury.

There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.

And (as a complete side note) it has all worked out very poorly for Twitter, as a revenue-generating platform.

No reason to think it will be better when applied to the federal government.

Twitter wasn't purchased for it to make money, it was purchased to get Musk in the Whitehouse.

In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.

But was the complete annihilation of all safety measures on twitter and chasing away most advertisers necessary to accomplish that? Couldn’t he have bought twitter, truly kept it an open place to discuss topics with less misinformation, kept his advertisers, and still shit post and donate his way into the White House?

He undoubtedly slashed spending, but didn’t he also tank revenue? The question I have is was any of that really necessary for him to get to where he is right now?

What's the name for that principle/rule where someone blithely removes rules or regulations without any context for them being there in the first place? It's on the tip of my tounge. I feel like we're seeing that a lot in the US Federal govt at the moment.

Chesterton’s fence. But I think “ungodly hubris” might be appropriate in this context

Chesterton's Fence

Even that assumes good faith.

neoliberalism

The strategy is: Shut down everything, and see who complains.

If the complaints seem well reasoned, then you adjust course.

You can certainly argue that it is crude, but it’s simpler than trying to deeply analyze and understand a very complicated system.

Carl Icahn has a story[0] about firing 12 floors of people that seems relevant

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o

>You can certainly argue that it is crude, but it’s simpler than trying to deeply analyze and understand a very complicated system.

Exactly.

They don't care how it works and they're overt nihilists, oddly disguised as "rationalists". The intent is to break anything that contradicts them.

Technologists and engineers can be so damn arrogant. Learn some humility. You probably aren't that smart or valuable and people like you aren't the only people adding value to society.

Turncoat Zuck's Meta had posters on the wall in every building: a picture of a rocking horse with the caption: "Not all motion is progress."

The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.

Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.

That feels like a No True Scotsman argument after decades of chasing VC approval, prestigious jobs at those huge companies, and adopting their practices and software. I don’t like the oligarchy either but it’s a huge part of the tech world under any definition I can come up with. We’re having this conversation on a board run by one of the VC firms with partners who are openly supportive of what’s going on, after all - is this not part of the tech community?

I mean, HN doesn't have a leg to stand on, but I would say there's a difference between "big tech" and "tech startups", community-wise.

People who love working at Big Tech love it for everything people who go for the Startup World hate, and vice versa.

Sure, but there’s a lot of shared culture even though they have distinct subgroups. I don’t think the guys in the news wouldn’t be welcomed at most startups.

Honestly fair enough. Pay package over principles does pretty well describe the policy of far too many of the colleagues I've worked with over the years.

You need to get to know your own industry.

"These folks" can absolutely be described as the tech community:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_Tunney

> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.

DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.

Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.

Honestly, this is exactly how Silicon Valley operates. Uber broke the laws until they could fix the laws (in their favor). AirBnB did the exact same thing. Meta knew their platform was causing damage to children and teenagers, and they gave zero fucks.

Move fast and break things...

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