Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

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Google search is no longer up to the task of making it quick on a mobile phone to find this, but the first time I read it out well was on Steve Yegge’s OG blog. I’m paraphrasing here but he basically made the point that spending your life mastering software doesn’t leave much scope for horizontal career mobility, and that getting heavily wired into a given programming language or operating system or whatever makes it existential to see it succeed. If I talk shit about a certain programming language here it’ll mobbed by people who owe their paycheck to its adoption in under an hour, please don’t make me prove that.

I appreciate that I elided a lot of the conjectures on the way from “Drepper wants static glibc not to work” to “mafia capitalist RICO shit is the upstream cause”.

Scandal-ridden mafia capitalist shit is the upstream problem.

I mean, Unit 5 of Thiel’s startup 101 lectures at Stanford is titled “Competition is for Losers”. He leads off with making sure everyone is crystal clear that “attaining a monopoly” aka anti-trust fraud is his “idee fixé”.

This isn’t hosted on InfoWars. It’s hosted on YC’s YouTube channel.

It’s not a secret what these guys are doing and plan to do more of: https://youtu.be/3Fx5Q8xGU8k?si=I04EIvC-8GGV-LXf

For what it’s worth Gary, Khan’s FTC and Gensler’s SEC are looking pretty DOA in February, but a lot can happen before then and Google is under enough pressure that people are talking seriously about Chrome being broken off. The fine print about what constitutes a monopoly that damages consumer outcomes as narrowly construed bench legislating in Texas doesn’t matter to the optics.

Even if distancing YC from sama isn’t realistic on a dime, it wouldn’t hurt to step up to the same yard-line Nadella has on “we do business, we’re not married”.

And yanking the Thiel lectures and other “you will do nothing because you can do nothing” stuff from the official channel isn’t just ethically mandatory (IMHO), it’s also basic risk management.

You get to be a hothead on Twitter because you’re too big to fail, but I actually empathize because I lose my temper on a text sometimes too.

Any time doing the right thing is also +EV for the portfolio? That’s the move.

> it’ll mobbed by people who owe their paycheck to its adoption in under an hour, please don’t make me prove that.

I kneel.

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