Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Old āSparkling Elitesā
New āFounder Modeā
mastodon has an appropriated twitter meme for this:
Image description: social-media post from āsophieā, with text reading,
This text is followed by an image of a man and a woman sitting in the audience of some public event. The man is talking at the woman while holding one hand on the back of her neck. The woman is staring past him with eyes that have seen the death of civilizations.
thank you! it completely slipped my mind to add a description (and the linked post doesnāt seem to have one), and the one youāve written is excellent
The manās fingers making contact with the womanās flesh have given him the first stirrings of an erection, but they cannot hold her soul back from fleeing her body.
Founder? I never even lost 'er!
itās still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldnāt figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site
Thankfully I have never tried to mobile his site, because those kinds of UI things really annoy the shit out of me. (Same with so many sites, including youtube for fucks sake, breaking the back button on mobile (Same is also happening more and more on desktop btw), just basic stuff we are all throwing away).
I think the suggestion that delegating is the problem is hilarious. Like, from everything Iāve seen, what happens when successful startups start floundering is less because anything has changed and more because the fundamental problems with the business finally catch up to the amount of money they have to burn. The problem isnāt that founders are hiring liars as managers and delegating to them, itās that the founders themselves are primarily bullshit artists rather than people with good plans.
What finally got me to post this here was somebody on bsky saying "āWhat is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?ā
most tech ābusinessesā donāt make money. they canāt figure out what people actually will pay for, but they get huge wads of cash to fuck around with until they make something useful or threatening enough that a megacorps buy them" and āi consider working at a startup a negative signal for success in actual business (aka selling things for a profit)ā
Which reminded me of this founder mode post. Which also reminded me of how the founder moders have even stranger priorities than the manager moders (Who often also just are too much number must go up). Paul just saying āwe need more bullshit artistsā while running a bullshit artist factory is quite something. (Also, that Musk proofread the article is just the cherry on top).
Iām always a little bit torn, because there is definitely a specific skill set involved in running a business, and a lot of those skills should be pretty consistent regardless of what the business does. Like, there is a lot of finance, contracting, negotiation, communication, etc. work that has to be done to go from a theoretical model of a light bulb to experimenting to make a working product that can be mass produced. And thereās a specific skillet needed to go from there to replacing all the gas lights in New York City with GE electric lights.
But at the same time, the recent trend to prioritize those skills by rewarding absentee shareholders, venture capital, and āfoundersā has created a situation where if you have those skills you can get impressively far and do a lot of damage to the overall economy and the lives of your customers and workers, even if those business skills are completely separate from an actual concept of what the business should do. You get all the Edison exploitation and bullshit but with no light bulb.
Yes there certainly is a skill to running a business (some of it applies to all businesses, some skills are business type specific, runnign a research lab is different from running a franchise vs running the company on top of the franchises vs SV style tech companies etc). What makes it sneerable for me is that PG only sees the later as valuable, and then makes up a Rationalist style binary option for managers which is also nebulous as fuck. It is the sparkling elites + hedgehog/fox style thing.
It also feels very post hoc, you have founder mindset if your company is āsuccessfulā (that he picked Airbnb as an example caused me to eyeroll so hard my optic nerve now has a knot in it). The talking about being gaslit now means I have a Gordian optic nerve.
Well, he is a founder of companies like PayPal and Tesla, legally speaking.
Yes but does he have founder spirit?
Sure Andrew Eldritch claims he is not Goth, but he certainly has Goth spirit.
Lmao āwe donāt know what founder mode is but once we figure it out itās gonna be awesome and business school books are gonna start teaching itā
Yeah the idea that businesses donāt know about tech CEOs and them running tech startups is amazing. Esp as they were teaching about this kind of shit ~20 years ago already.