Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

I'm surprisingly still at ~40% of canon, although aging out rapidly [in my day, The Soul of a New Machine (1981) would've been part]; however Titan had exactly the opposite effect from inspiring emulation: my takeaway from that one was that JDR (compare Fred "FedEx" Smith?) made one very poor bet ("oil will not be discovered anywhere outside Pennsylvania") that paid out handsomely[1], nevertheless you won't find me going down to the track to go all in on trifectas.

Schlep vs sexy (gedile?) certainly models the remaining humans in agriculture: when it took many families[2] to work a farm the least human was above almost all animals[3], but now a farmer's main job is (farming) to connect and disconnect the tractor from various implements, and to intervene during all the myriad ways something can go wrong in the field, and (ranching) to wrangle the cattle in those (two-sigma) situations where their knowledge of how pasture and milking work doesn't suffice for whatever mess[4] they've gotten themselves into.

Peeking into the back of a chain gas station/convenience store furthers this impression: they've got every available wall plastered with (a) instructions for how to deal with all the machines/inventory according to the normal schedule, and (b) what to do in the most frequent cases that something isn't working normally.

Finally, all the special note-taking apps and even hardware devices which HN loves are IMNSHO yearning for the sexy: we'd had little enough experience with personal computers that we had thought they'd be bicycles for the mind, but people growing up now must think of a laptop the way we thought of work uniforms, and hence must project their inchoate desires onto a different device?

EDIT: how large is the dot product between the Appleby/Hacker dynamic and the Jeeves/Wooster dynamic?

EDIT2: looks like I dot-product higher with the Dynamicland bookshelf ( https://dynamicland.org infra) —despite their maker tribal allegiance— than with Collison's, so maybe I shouldn't prematurely count myself as aging out?

EDIT3: note that Brand, How Buildings Learn (1994) says much the same thing regarding samsara for traditional architecture that http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland... says for computer architecture.

[0] I would maybe not have squicked so quickly on "Comrade Yarvin Thoughts" if he hadn't embraced the small time grifter vibe so thoroughly. Really, pinning your substack subscription? Why not go all the way to "like and subscribe", or "ask me how"?

[1] for some reason, I do admire Frederick II, despite the fact that before winding up at Sanssouci (proof of fortune?) he once had to keep his dog quiet while hiding under a bridge as a russian[5] patrol went over it; probably because I judge that bridge incident as having been, not up from or at, but 3 or 4 sigma down from objectively reckoned mean outcomes?

https://www.mediastorehouse.com.au/p/690/frederick-great-pru...

[2] in those days it was to the farm-owner's advantage to encourage the help to get knocked up young: as long as they were single they'd be living in the farmhouse and he needed to pay them in cash; once they paired off they'd be renting an outbuilding from him and he could cancel that out against working for produce. (the destitute were stuffed into an attic and also sustained via un- or less-marketable produce)

[3] "beasts aren't christians" was once a local saying; I wonder if some of the yearning for the-good-old-days comes from people who would've been around the middle of the living beings on the farm heap, but in our industrialised age find themselves on the bottom of the homo sapiens in the suburbs heap?

[4] mountain farmers work the ski resorts in winter; I often wonder how much difference they see between wrangling the occasional cow and wrangling the occasional tourist (who also generally knows how lifts work, but still runs into specific problems from time to time)?

[5] this specific incident was very lucky; in general russia's exit on Elizaveta Petrovna's death was also luck.