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Theme Radar

FatherOfCurses 2026-02-20 15:28 UTC link

>The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

I recently traveled to San Francisco and as an outsider this was pretty much the reaction I had.

voxleone 2026-02-20 15:37 UTC link

The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

lordleft 2026-02-20 15:46 UTC link

I read Sam Kriss' substack and he's a wildly unique and talented writer.

iugtmkbdfil834 2026-02-20 15:56 UTC link

<< The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.

I genuinely like the author's style ( not in the quote above; its here for a different reason ). It paints a picture in a way that I still am unable to. I suck at stories.

Anyway, back to the quote. If that is true, then we are in pickle. Claw and its security issues is just a symptom of that 'break things' spirit. And yes, this has been true for a while, but we keep increasing both in terms of speed and scale. I am not sure what the breaking point is, but at certain point real world may balk.

cleandreams 2026-02-20 15:56 UTC link

To be fair SF has had incomprehensible (to normies) billboards since at least the early 90's.

bakugo 2026-02-20 16:08 UTC link

> The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window.

Witnessed this first hand on the train the other day. A woman on her laptop. On the left half of the screen, Microsoft Word. On the right, ChatGPT. Text being dragged directly from one to the other.

I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that people with useless bullshit jobs have found a way to become even more useless than they already were before. It's impressive, in a way.

temp8830 2026-02-20 16:21 UTC link

This was good. The author found a way to say what we are all thinking - and isn't getting canceled for it. That's true talent.

doctor_blood 2026-02-20 16:31 UTC link

Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.

rootnod3 2026-02-20 16:36 UTC link

This hits especially hard for projects like OlenBSD and FreeBSD. The unsung heroes.

Linux gets some fame and recognition, meanwhile OpenBSD and FreeBSD are the ones they power routers, CDNs and so many other cool shit while also being legit good systems that even deserve attention for the desktop.

FloorEgg 2026-02-20 16:45 UTC link

I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph:

> Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

Believing this feels incredibly unwise to me. I think it's going to do more damage than the AI itself will.

To any impressionable students reading this: the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well. No AI can take it away from you, and the more powerful AI will get the more you will be able to harness it's potential. Don't let these people saying this ahit discourage you from building a good life.

xg15 2026-02-20 16:47 UTC link

I had always thought that Kai Lentit's characters were at least somewhat exaggerated and not a 1:1 copy of the real thing...

keiferski 2026-02-20 16:58 UTC link

The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.

In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the same city which Kerouac, the Beats or Hippies ran around in. Or even the historically wealthy but cultural old money class, like Lewis Lapham’s family, or Michael Douglas’s character in The Game. Nope, all gone, and certainly no one there has ever read On the Road.

I suppose you could probably just blame this on how the people at the top behave: totally uninterested in funding culture, unlike the billionaires of yesteryear that built concert halls and libraries. And so a city which is hyper focused on one economic activity has no space for anything else.

maxwell 2026-02-20 17:22 UTC link

> "We're big believers in protein," Roy said. "It's impossible to get fat at Cluely. Nothing here has any fat."

Clueless.

advisedwang 2026-02-20 17:24 UTC link

> Not long before I arrived in the Bay Area, I’d been involved in a minor but intense dispute with the rationalist community over a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction

Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?

pnathan 2026-02-20 18:10 UTC link

Great article.

I do have a deep fondness for SF billboards being building-stuff oriented. I don't care for consumerism.

The vapidity of the products created is remarkable, however.

bitwize 2026-02-20 20:34 UTC link

"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."

I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.

cadamsdotcom 2026-02-20 21:18 UTC link

The author managed to find the strangest people & phenomena in San Francisco and make it sound like they’re a complete picture of life there. But there are packed brunch spots and parks on sunny weekends that would disagree very strongly.

San Francisco is a tolerant place. Tolerance is how you get Juicero or Theranos and whatever Cluely seems to have pivoted to, but it’s also how you get Twitter, Uber, Dropbox.. and thousands of others.

So it is crucial to consider proportionality. Taking some bad with some good results in getting a little bit of bad and a hell of a lot of good. But if you aren’t careful, all you’ll see is the bad.

daxfohl 2026-02-20 21:22 UTC link

This reminds me of the vacuum substory in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, except vacuums replaced by AI.

Basically: nobody wants AI, but soon everyone needs AI to sort through all the garbage being generated by AI. Eventually you spend more time managing your AI that you have no time for anything else, your town has built extra power generators just to support all the AI, and your stuff is more disorganized before AI was ever invented.

culebron21 2026-02-20 22:08 UTC link

It was weirdly fascinating to read. And also now I get why tech journalism contemplates the idea of 20/40/60% people being useless -- they don't invent it, nor made scientific prediction -- they just saw those junkies in the streets of SF. The only mistake they make is that the whole world can't be SF, where many streams of money make this great flood.

stuaxo 2026-02-24 10:19 UTC link

Ah, the long form article - these should be published in parts, maybe this one in four.