That little man has eroded any respect that he might have been a priori granted with his publicly documented descent into a vibecoding mania. I'm still in disbelief that the very silly photographer guy is the CEO of ycombinator. Ah well, it was a good era.
isnt it the same sort of reason you guys have actors for presidents? its about how well you can sell the message, not how good you are behind the scenes, thats what normies are for.
Thats a big part of it. Customers go into a flock demo with motivated reasoning. "Im scared. Im not sure i should be this scared."
Seeing a vulnerable set of kids happily playing and hearing a confident voice say "A shooter could end all this. We can prevent it" validates that and closes the sale.
If a cautious pragmatist goes to the demo thinking "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology." Then a performatively confident person says "this is a component of a massive surveillance state ripe for misuse. It will give us footage of crimes and only stop a small percentage of them," how well do you think it would sell?
That strategy didn't work out well for Makerbot. Tech companies actually need competent leadership with a tech background. You can't pretend they are interchangeable with some run of the mill commodities producer and adopt the same leadership practices.
To the best of my knowledge Linus Torvalds isn't posting walls of text to Github breathlessly announcing he's 810x-ed [1] his "logical lines of code/day" compared to what he was doing in 2013.
And, lest you think generating "600,000 lines of production code in 60 days" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Andrej Karpathy, once and for all: "Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered." [1]
As someone who has experienced mania, including with a programming bent specifically, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at the idiosyncratic human-y bits of his thinking floating up from the sea of em-dashes and it's not X it's Y in his manifestos.
Plus volunteering this [3] in an interview:
“I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (Tan’s assistant confirmed to us that he was joking. ...)
It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil...
(Not who you responded to.) You clearly don't know anyone who lives with a condition that would cause manic episodes.
They're terrible. Imagine being super focused and productive and excited by how much you're accomplishing as you're banging out innovative code and solving complicated problems with brilliant elegant solutions. Next thing you know you've been awake for two days and your mind no longer works but you're still super motivated and trying to make sense of what you're working on but it no longer tracks and you literally can't keep a line of code in your head long enough to combine it with the one that comes after it. And then you give up and try to watch streaming content for the next two days while your body begins to hurt terribly and you're dehydrated because you kept forgetting to drink water and you can't follow any plot-lines and your mind is mush and then when you finally fall asleep you wake up feeling like you got hit by a truck because you're so undernourished because you had no appetite for much of the episode and your body is literally failing / on the way to starvation.
For bonus points, you might even experience disordered thinking with hallucinations and paranoia and think someone has hacked into your computer and is trying to frame you for crimes and then destroy all your devices and drives, which I did once late at night before things got much worse and I came to in an ER and had to be restrained. It's super cool.
Calling out signs that someone might be experiencing this type of disorder is not being critical of their passion. It's putting notice out that they might not be operating in the same reality that you and I currently occupy.
Just commenting to say, from a place of empathy, that you're right and that it's hard for people to understand what mania looks like in someone if you haven't experienced it first-or-second-hand. You see it a few times and it becomes obvious. In the moment it can be disorienting and cause you to question your own reality because theirs seems so influential and motivated. I hope you're doing well these days.
> My mother has bipolar disorder, but please, tell me more about my life experiences.
I told you about mine, not yours. And her bipolar experience also isn't yours. You didn't go through that, but I did and she did. You experienced it by proxy.
It's it anything like the comments I see on here defending Flock, it'll just be a bunch of attempting to scare people with the idea of crime, and disparaging anyone in favor of privacy as being pro-crime.
