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Comment by alpineman | Hacker News Reader

>> “I’ve been thinking about writing an essay on the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or otherwise dissing AI,” he said. As if speaking to all of Gen Z, he added: “You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you"

Quite patronising. Maybe they really do know it a lot better than you, Reid, but not in the way you think. Maybe they see through the hype and hustle culture and are more interested in working towards fulfilling lives and jobs.

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People like Reid Hoffman do far more damage to the Democratic party than he does helping it. Also don't look well that a member of Epstein's tech leadership, and personal friend, is telling workers how to feel and think.

It's time to give up your silly cynicism, embrace being a professional slop shoveler and doing work with higher volume, more repetition and less creativity than ever.

The sloppings will continue until morale improves.

I've embraced it, and I'm coding faster than all my colleagues, some days I open more PRs than the rest of my team combined.

Are your colleagues slower because they're spending all their time reviewing your PRs?

Are you earning more money or working fewer hours? Are you eating healthier meals, with better sleeping quality? Because all I read is that you are generating more money for the shareholders.

The true american dream. Generating as much money for shareholders as humanly possible and then going home to your rented apartment to be surveilled by AI companies finding ever more intrusive ways to shove ads in your face.

Even more importantly, generating even more wealth for the already beyond ultra-wealthy, to whom those "shareholders" are simply a necessary annoyance in their quest to be the last to die with all the wealth. :sigh: :sadface:

I sincerely hope this comment is satire.

I forgot the `/s` and now my Karma is gone...

Ha, well you've restored a fraction of my optimism about humanity.

The last decade has been quite a workout for Poe's Law.

The slip mines need more PhD labour to label stuff - that’s your future and you better learn to love it.

This is going to be the GenX equivalent to the boomer meme about not spending money on avocado toast and save for a house instead.

If you kids could stop wasting money on Spotify and Xbox Live, you could pay $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro to become AI-native.

You should rewatch Office Space, The Matrix or Fight Club to remind you what a typical office job was like in the 90s and what Gen X grew up with. Thinking you are entitled to a fun and creative job is more like a Millenials fantasy to me.

Yeah that struck me as shallow, tone-deaf and ignorant.

People have very good, very legitimate reasons for "booing" GenAI.

Most human interactions with GenAI are either with corpo sludge or overly cheerful, dangerously useless text generators.

The technology is steadily eroding businesses from the inside out in the same way offshoring did in the 90s.

There's a massive crash looming that is going to crater the economy for years... caused by criminally irresponsible circular investment and silicon valley grift.

Not really what I'd want to tether my identity to.

He is just being solipsistic and talking to a small circle of wealthy and well-connected Gen Zs that he probably knows in real life or who are part of his acquaintances. Or do you really think that people with his level of wealth remotely care about real career paths for the average youth?

I don't know anybody with Hoffman's level of wealth, but I have come across a fair number of people with close to a billion dollars of wealth that now split their time between enjoying time with their own family and then trying to pursue philanthropy and non-profits meant to improve everybody's life in the community.

I run into them because of their attempts to improve the community. And there are those who do it super quietly, give big, and do everything they can to avoid getting credit for it; there's another Silicon Valley Reed that does this in my community. Steve Jobs apparently did this too, big donations but anonymously.

Do not take the blabbering idiots on the All-In podcast as representative of all of Silicon Valley, the old Valley was far different than those people and there are still plenty of people that pursue wealth not for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement and power.

Ive also run into a few and they were without question some of the biggest assholes I ever met in my life.

I don't think theyre special. Years of being surrounded by yes men and sycophants will probably do that to most people.

One of them in particular was much less toxic and relatable pre-billions.

> I don't think theyre special

Where did you get that from the comment you replied to? They merely pointed out you couldn't paint everyone with the same brush, which is pretty much the definition of 'not special'.

I didn't. The point was that that amount of money turns most people into assholes.

Many of them donate money but it doesnt make them any less of an asshole.

If we're casting aspersions, I guess based on my personal experiences of people in poverty, lower, middle and upper classes, then

> most people into assholes

might just be a you problem. Get out and meet more people, and if you're still surrounded by assholes, then the real asshole is probably you.

People are people everywhere. Money really doesn't change that as much as you're implying.

you seem weirdly committed to defending the billionaire class.

most people probably do have the capacity to be raging assholes but society doesn't indulge their every whim and prejudice or stroke their ego constantly. so they aren't.

Power, including financial power, reveals who people really are without constraints. President Johnson has to be my favorite example of this, he spent a political career kowtowing to racists, enforcing racism where he needed to in order to acquire power, and then when full power was finally thrust on him by JFK's assassination, he flips and pushes through key legislation from the Civil Rights Movement.

I certainly didn't put forward an idea that having money makes people less of an asshole. Somebody who gives it away in a non-assholish way certainly makes them less of an asshole.

Or is your contention that anybody with money is an asshole, without exception?

At the very least, I would question the motive of people who defend billionaires.

Who do you believe is doing this? The implication, I guess, would be me, but I wasn't talking about strictly "billionaires". What is the wealth cutoff here, and how?

zdragnar, not you.

I just thought of an interesting thought experiment. Inagine a politician who kowtows to racists and does their bidding for his whole career and then, just before grabbing the presidency, he has a heart attack and dies. How would you see his legacy? What can you say about the essence of this person?

maybe it doesn't turn them into assholes. maybe it just frees them to act naturally.

The rare few wealthy folk I've met who genuinely try to spend some portion of their wealth to actually improve the world around them are truly doing the right thing. It's their responsibility for the privilege of being allowed to accrue so much more wealth than everyone around them, which would be simply impossible to do without the hard work of the many folk who worked for (and sometimes with) them to achieve that wealth for them in the first place. Giving back a bit in genuinely positive ways to a society that allowed (and helped) their wealth to even happen is just simply the correct "thank you" (no matter how hard they may have worked or sacrificed themselves in the process, as they absolutely did not become that wealthy all by themselves). At least a couple few of the very wealthy folks I've known who "gave back in kind for their good fortune" were genuinely nice (but "wickedly" smart / "sharp as a tack") people who really did deserve their wealth, as they weren't just rich kids in adult bodies like so many of the "personality cult" folks that society so foolishly worship solely because they're rich and "cult-leadery" (and often for no other remotely valid reasons).

Such an out of touch attempt to get the youths onboard the hype train.. ok boomer.

> ok boomer.

Reid Hoffman is not a boomer. He was born in 1967. Also: ageism isn't sexy.

I'm old too, it isn't about that. He's desperately trying to guilt young people into glomming onto his profoundly uncool thing by playing on some ancient "digital native" trope. It's, well, some boomer type shit.

I suppose you likewise think of Sam A, Dario A, and Dennis H, as boomers because they're signaling the same, just not being as direct.

As far as I'm aware they never explicitly kicked the generational hornets' nest, but I'm not a scholar of AI goober drivel

The usage of the phrase has evolved past carrying about the actual generation (kind of like how people still talk about "millennials" like they're college students).

Also, Hoffman very intentionally opened the door to talking about generational differences, this kind of feels like the commenter may have touched a nerve

"Ok boomer", as I understand it, basically means "I'm not going to engage seriously with that outdated perspective", often used to shut down a conversation rather than to continue it.

I don't know that what Reid is expressing is an outdated perspective, but that's of course subjective.

> You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you'

Yeah, it was expressly my intent to shut this kind of nonsense down. This is just a different version of "get on board right now or you'll all be left behind". Enough with the lying.

This version is more effective in expressing your sentiment, FWIW.

I don't think it's a different version of that at all? Presumably what he has in mind is the Internet transition. Nobody got "left behind" from the Internet, even cranky 80 year olds are often pretty familiar these days, but people like Reid Hoffman achieved "fulfilling lives and jobs" by recognizing early that it was going to be a big deal.

> Nobody got "left behind" from the Internet, even cranky 80 year olds...

This is actually false. There are plenty of 80+ year olds in care facilities and living alone that are disadvantaged by the implicit assumption that everyone has a smartphone or an email address. Unable to communicate with their bank, insurance company, care providers, etc. All down to your "inclusive progress".

Call it what it is: an extractive, inhumane power grab meant to monopolize everyone's attention.

And that was tech's Big Success Story. Everything since has been trying to re-live those glory days.

> kind of like how people still talk about "millennials" like they're college students

Is that really an evolution? "Millennial" was coined to refer to the cohort that gradated from high school in the year 2000. Not all high school graduates become college students, of course, but if we are generalizing it isn't unreasonable to think of recent high school graduates as college students.

Now, there was nothing in the definition to declare if you must continue to recognize them for who they are going forward (i.e. 40-somethings now), or if you are to remember them in that moment as high school graduates, many of whom were college bound. So still thinking of "millennials" as being college students is a fair interpretation before evolution.

The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences and therefore culture because they were born around a specific time (early ninties).

So yes, it would be an evolution to refer to them as college student age today

> The term "millennials" referred to a specific cohort of people that all share similar experiences

Exactly. That experience being coming of age at the turn of the millennium, with high school graduation being considered the milestone where one comes of age. Hence why Strauss and Howe called them millennials. While the people who were labelled millennials are no longer recent high school graduates, it is linguistically valid to remember them locked in that moment in time. High school graduation was the point of significance associated with the term.

> because they were born around a specific time (early ninties).

Easy to miscalculate, I suppose, but the cohort who graduated high school in the year 2000 were born in the early 80s.

"Millennial" did later evolve to be used where "Generation Y" was used previously. That represents a much larger age range — those born in the early 80s to mid-90s. Further evolution has seen millennial come to refer to those born in the latter half of the Generation Y, with "Xennial" showing up to refer to those in the earlier half. This might be where you had 90s kids in mind, but that is far from where the term originated. "Millennial" first appeared in 1987. Nobody was thinking about those born in the 90s at the time.

The usage of the phrase has evolved into a thought terminating cliche.

> Also: ageism isn't sexy

Biology is ageist. The youngest baby boomers are still in their early 60s, and not yet subject to a precipitous-decline cut-off, but the median Boomer is about 71 and probably past it [1].

Given every President since 1993—with the exception of Obama—was born in 1942 or 1946 [2], I think it’s fair to admit this whole an-eighty-year-old-is-the-same-as-a-thirty-year-old tripe has swung to an untenable extreme.

Race is a social construct. Age is not. Mixing them up is fundamentally wrong and, I’d argue, dangerous.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4906299/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...

> Race is a social construct. Age is not. Mixing them up is fundamentally wrong and, I’d argue, dangerous.

Even worse. Our entire society, hell our biology is based on old people retiring to leave space for the young to develop themselves. When you got gerontocrats in power for too long and after them boomers, all you'll end with in 20 years is a bunch of dead boomers and gen silent, and a bunch of gen y/z that never had the opportunity to actually learn leadership skills and failing spectacularly as a result.

> Our entire society, hell our biology is based on old people retiring to leave space for the young to develop themselves

This strikes me as a spin on the lump-of-labor fallacy.

The problem with a gerontocracy is you have masses in cognitive and physical decline at the peaks of power. Absent that condition, the model isn’t fundamentally broken. (You would probably see more patricide in hereditary lines…) Old people aren’t a problem, aged people in command are.

That’s what makes the comparison to race interesting—a society that brain drains gets wealthier for everyone. If we made our immigration 65+ only, on the other hand, it would be an almost-immediate disaster.

> The problem with a gerontocracy is you have masses in cognitive and physical decline at the peaks of power.

Well... that's exactly what we have been able to observe in the US. Trump and Biden are horribly old, both have shown serious cognitive and physical decline with Trump definitely being the more serious issue (I never heard rumors about Biden crapping in a diaper, with Trump the rumors are so consistent they're practically a meme, and now we get to look at his very weird hand with no explanation why it's weird all the time). A bunch of Congresspeople died of old age in office, with the most prominent being Dianne Feinstein. The Supreme Court is even worse, with RBG being the most infamous for not stepping down and allowing Obama to nominate a successor, thus handing the post to Trump.

> Old people aren’t a problem, aged people in command are.

Both are a problem. Old people are vastly more likely to fall gravely ill at any given moment, they take longer to recover, and they take longer to learn new things (or refuse to do so outright). Aged people tend to entrench themselves in their position and fear getting replaced and losing their privileges, often thanks to toxic work ethics.

your line of thinking isn't going to age well when your future self re-read this.

Oh, I'll go into retirement as soon as that will be legally allowed for me. I have zero desire of working myself to death.

> Our entire society, hell our biology is based on old people retiring to leave space for the young to develop themselves.

No it is not. People retire, because they dont have strength to work anymore. They have no duty to give up their lives just because you want to take it from them.

We have a duty to take it from them because their incompetence is beyond dispute at this point.

The gerontocrats running the US government are a complete disaster and need to be replaced as rapidly as possible.

> No it is not. People retire, because they dont have strength to work anymore.

That's part of the problem, we shifted from an agrarian to industrial and now service economy. Unlike the first two, in a service economy you can work until old age finally takes you.

> Also: ageism isn't sexy.

Typical boomer needing things to be based on sex all the time.

sex drives everything.

Ok boomer.

It’s not ageism. Don’t be so sensitive.

It is 100% ageism.

The entire point is to reduce the value of a person’s opinion to only their age.

Imposing AI on the young when you no longer stand to experience the negative consequences because of your age is its own form of ageism.

And even if they buy into what he is saying, that particular group are college graduates. They have already passed the window of opportunity one normally has to explore new ideas. They are in the phase of life where they have to hunker down and get to work. If this "generation AI" ever comes to fruition, it will be those who are still young enough today to be able spend most of their time playing.

People should stop exploring new ideas the second they graduate college??

Sounds like a sad way to live.

Should they? No. It is their life to live as they please. Imparting your expectations on them is of no use.

Will they? Generally, yes. Work, kids, partners, home maintenance, etc. tend to take priority once one becomes an "adult". There is only so much time in the day. That is, after all, why one seeks to front load their remaining life's idea exploration by going to college. Those who plan to explore ideas for the rest of their life simply do so. They don't need "hallowed halls".

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