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.
Crypto bros are a subset of the cryptocurrency community. Some of us managed to make enough money to retire, and now we spend our days contributing to open source projects
That sounds not much different from the tech bros back then. The vast majority of them were always posers. Anyone with any talent has made their money by now and dropped out of the rat race, the rest of them are either in middle management or drunk themselves to death.
Crypto bros aren’t the geeks, they’re the popular kids who did well by cheating and copying off other people’s work. None of them actually helped make anything even vaguely useful, they memorized enough technical jargon to sound convincing and got lucky betting on digital ponzi schemes.
Sounds like marketing
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)…
If all you’re seeing are crypto bros, it says more about the media you consume. Serious technologists / engineers are out there, keeping the lights on.
I’m a technerd from the late 90s and early 00s. We’re all still here living our best lives, making money off the newest hypes, and then going home to chat on IRC and fiddle around with our old, soulful protocols.
This, but be safe. Wrap it up (in TLS)
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.
It’s been true for a while now that if you speak with confidence people will listen to you.
We still exist, but you gotta look. Tech has gotten a lot more mainstream since the 90s.
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.
Engineers lost, MBAs won
This is sadly so, so true. (from an engineer)
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.
Didn’t games have “pay money to get extra lives” since forever?
Sure, but paying extra for more turbo boosts in the one race that you get to play is something new. Normally if you want extra boosts you need to learn the course or the game. On that same subject, now if you come in 1st place, you don’t even get to continue. (old man voice) back in my day, when you game in 1st place you got to go onto the next race. That was the point of getting good at the game.
It’s a tale as old as Capitalism. People who geek out about something do it because they enjoy it, then somebody finds a way to improve distribution of their work and suddenly there’s a skyrocket in demand. Vultures swoop in and suck out whatever life might be left in their passionate work to make it profitable, and then all the passion is gone.
“Tech bro” is the term used to describe those vultures. People who try to monetize the shit out of everything with an ounce of human soul in it. Passionate tech nerds are still out there, mostly in FOSS circles, some in hardware hobbyist circles building cool form factors for their own computers.
Honestly, odds are you’ll find passion only in someone who’s not looking to monetize.
I think it’s important to note the difference between “make a living to keep things going” vs. “I want to make ‘fuck you’ money.”
I have no problem with people who make a good product and seek donations or sell their product at a reasonable price.
Hell, take uBlock Origin. I’d easily pay $10 / month for this but they do not want money. So I do what they request and donate to the people who make the filters.
This is the first year in perhaps a decade I won’t be giving to the Mozilla Foundation because they are enshittifying their product. I wrote to them and told them why I won’t be donating. I don’t know if it will make a difference but I’m keeping an eye on them over the next year.
Tech bros before tech hoes, right chat?
My therapist said to stop talking like a streamer chat is this real?
Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.
They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.
Your view of tech bros is largely from YouTube. On the ground it’s still a ton of really smart people with real engineering degrees working really hard. Brogrammers are much more common, but they are still widely regarded as a scourge.
Tech geeks have actual autism.
Tech bros microdose so they can pretend they have autism.
You left out the autists who microdose so they can see into the matrix
how do I get someone else tested for autism
Start leaving information about trains out for them and see if they bite
It’s kind of a joke, but ask about how they arrange their sock drawer.
What does it say about me that I only buy two kinds of socks: black Carhartt work socks and white Hanes ankle socks, so the drawer is just divided into two piles?
What’s the autist’s answer to that question?
Any answer other than “huh?” is a dead giveaway.
“Actually, I don’t have a system because the time it takes me to pick a valid pair of socks is…” is as autistic an answer as “Left-to-right by increasing wavelength color, dark colors in the back” or “All socks are paired up and perpendicular for easy overview”.
I am learning from Lemmy lately that being clean and organized means:
I am gay
I am autistic
Well congrats on your new obsessively gay life lol
Well congrats on living in filth you hetero ableist fuck lol
A real tour de force of systems theory.
apple started with stuff done by woz. googles algorithims came from their founders. gates bought but put a lot into it. hardware companies where engineering firms. google is the only one where its product was not bought and owned by the user (mostly) but they basically set the stage for flipping the whole thing on its head with the user being the product. this further set the stage for the idea is that if you get the people into your ecosystem then it will be to hard to compete as people are lazy and don’t want to change. this lead to emphasis not being on the tech but instead on building the monopoly.
Microsoft in the late 90s was an acquisition machine, but the roots of Microsoft were 100% Bill Gates and Paul Allen being computer savants legitimately trying to push the boundaries of human technology past is limits.
. . . and forcing people to pay, through relentless licensing schemes.
What they created wasn’t great, it was standard fare. Their “genius” was in ruthlessly demanding you didn’t own what they made, you only got to run it by paying tribute. It worked.
Other systems and hardware from that era were either absorbed or destroyed because microsoft becamse a monopoly quickly, and used that power to do so.
What are you smoking, and where can I get some?
Not to diss Gates or Allen, but neither is a savant of any kind.
Their first product was a BASIC interpreter for a very early Microprocessor, which they wrote without ever getting their hands on the hardware (because the Altair 8800 was basically vaporware at the time, with no software there was no demand), and Paul Alien wrote the bootloader for the program on the flight to the product demonstration.
Frankly, that sounds like legit computer wizardry to me. Yes, they made their billions on business more than tech, but they were legit tech guys at the start.
Legit tech guys, sure.
You called them “computer savants legitimately trying to push the boundaries of human technology past is limits” [sic] in the previous comment and that is what I was calling out.
You sounded like an awed cultist talking about their leader!
