What happened to techbros from the 90s to now?
What happened to techbros from the 90s to now?
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.
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
You emphasized the words well known but provide no links to back that up because I've never known
https://huggingface.co/datasets/defunct-datasets/the_pile_books3
This dataset is Shawn Presser's work and is part of EleutherAi/The Pile dataset.
This dataset contains all of bibliotik in plain .txt form, aka 197,000 books processed in exactly the same way as did for bookcorpusopen (a.k.a. books1). seems to be similar to OpenAI's mysterious "books2" dataset referenced in their papers. Unfortunately OpenAI will not give details, so we know very little about any differences. People suspect it's "all of libgen", but it's purely conjecture.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220522050247/https://huggingface.co/datasets/the_pile_books3
I emphasize "well known" because it was literally in the description when it was initially uploaded to the internet. It was always right out in the front that this was all the ebooks from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Shawn Presser/books3 never lied about where it came from. As you can see with the archive.org link, that description about it's sourcing was on the page in May 2022.
Bibliotik is a well known private tracker for ebooks and even peddles tools for removing DRM from ebooks. So, arguably, not only are the books pirated, but at some point, a DMCA criminal violation occurred when the DRM was stripped from them. So OpenAIs willingness to use it without question to get their company started should be evidence they're not concerned about where the data came from or getting it in more legal ways.
Thank you for the links and reading!