I think your average geek used to be like, somewhat academic and erudite and into arcane knowledge and had some level of good faith of wanting to engage in discussion
Now it’s all frauds and absolutely braindead elon stans and crypto dipshits and conservative freaks and people who enjoy and defend watching big tech destroy everything.
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Playing muds
This guy fucks 🫡
In VR
Can we discuss how the ladies look gigantic in VR porn or are we all just going to keep watching it?
with a box of scraps?
It happens in every industry: the passionate people who got in it for the love of the field get replaced by the people who got in it for the lucrative business opportunity. Experts get replaced by salesmen.
Nothing happened to them. Those guys are still exactly the same.
The difference is that there’s a ton of money in that sector now so a bunch of greedy assholes moved in and now look like they’re the folks actually doing tech stuff.
Oh also, there’s always been a fair amount of legitimately crazy among tech people (we’re strange folk) and those voices get more amplification due to the idiots at the top.
Tech bros like Bill Gates used open source communities like an all-you-can-monetize buffet to build a closed operating system. The rest is history.
What open source was in Windows?
I don’t have time to verify if the answer is in this link but it seems to be relevant
“Microsoft, a tech company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it.”
[emphasis added]
Bill Gates’ primary quest was to destroy open source right from day 1. See “Hackers” by Steven Levy for more.
Just an example, in 2020, Microsoft acquired npm, the Node Package Manager.
Definitely not relevant to the late 80s
I’m not seeing you specify the late 80’s as your reference timeframe anywhere here.
OP really is mixing metaphors is the bigger issue. Microsoft didn’t build their OS on Open Source, they only embraced it later, after getting in trouble for Embrace Extend Extinguish. Google built their OS on open source tech. Then more recently Microsoft followed the same path forged by Google.
That’s when Microsoft built Windows, so I’m assuming that’s the period OP is referring to
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What open source was in Windows?
You’ll never know, if they get their way.
Tech geeks have actual autism.
Tech bros microdose so they can pretend they have autism.
What I think a lot of people fail to put together, is that this is the end-game of the early ideologies of the internet. The ideologies of the tech nerds now are directly descended from earlier, more decentralized ideologies.
Think about internet piracy and the change from Napster to Bittorrent.
In the tech world, even since the early days, tech was seen as a way to route around bad laws. In the early days, copyright laws were viewed as overly draconian (they are, but that’s not the point), so piracy flourished by routing around the legal framework.
What has happened is the power and wealth of some people with those ideologies have grown so big, they now view all laws that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want as “bad laws to route around.” That’s why you have Musk buying Twitter and forcing his opinion’s down everyone’s throat (routing around traditional media). That’s why you have Jack Dorsey dumping his money into Nostr, because he thinks the worst sin on the internet is censorship (routing around attempts to rein in disinformation/misinformation).
It can be seen at OpenAI where they knowingly used books3 to initially train their AIs, which was well known to have been sourced from piracy. OpenAI doesn’t care about the provenance of the data as long as they can legally route around the copyright issue and make a fuckton of money in the process.
Anyway, it’s a deeply libertarian ideology that was accidentally spurred from earlier, more anarchist ideologies, within the tech community. I would peg tech nerds from the 90s as more anarchist, and tech nerds of the modern era as having bought into the technolibertarianism that began to grow out of it.
Like Steve Wozniak is your standard real tech nerd from the 70’s who was the actual engineer behind Apple products, while Steve Jobs was literally the marketing guy yet only the marketing guy got remembered.
When things shifted from being proud of server uptimes to being proud of constant push notifications and constant pointless updates, that’s when the tide turned. Engineers lost, MBAs won, and now customers suffer. It’s all subscriptions and lootbox mentality now.
I’m guessing somewhere around 2010, but it was a gradual relentless process.
Speaking of enshittification, I brought my nephew to an arcade last weekend as a birthday treat. I’m not going to get into the whole “the games are just cell phone games on gigantic screens”, there are a handful of games that are still fun and worth the tokens to play. But the worst thing I didn’t expect to see was this motorcycle racing game. It was your standard sit-and-lean motorcycle game with a throttle etc. But the surprise was that after swiping the card to play, after you choose your motorcycle, you get the option to swipe again for extra boosts. There were micro transactions. In the arcade motorcycle game. I was so mad.
Engineers lost, MBAs won
This is sadly so, so true. (from an engineer)
In the past you had to actually be smart to be a “tech bro”. The barrier of entry was higher.
Now any dipshit can get online and start being a “tech bro”.
It’s basically the same as the enshitification of the internet. Used to take some effort to get online. Now any dipshit can do it.
Tech bros before tech hoes, right chat?
My therapist said to stop talking like a streamer chat is this real?
There’s always been frauds and dipshits. I had a front row seat to the dot com boom and bust and it was not dissimilar to the bollocks going on now. Except the richest people made OS/hardware (Gates, Allen, Dell) or were traditional investors (Buffet)…
