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Notes -
I apologise for the faux pas but I'm posting two top comments in succession since this one's kinda important and I couldn't find it anywhere on the board.
The death of the hacker ethos -
Three days ago, Suhail Doshi posted a tweet about a programmer named Soham Parekh who was caught doing the most stereotypically Indian thing ever, scamming people, this time, it's young yc founders. Soham is not a great engineer, he is probably good, better than me, at least as I am for now an amateur, though he is not a 10x mythical unicorn, given he resorted to this
Our /r/overemployed king
So for those unfamiliar, tech jobs pay a lot, by tech I mean jobs where you write code for a living, due to the world shifting more towards web apps, people do not need to be in a particular office to test out things on specific machines or OSes the way they did back then since its a web app after all. COVID-19 saw remote jobs boom, a peak that remote job seekers like me can only wish for. Enter Mr Parekh. He optimised the shit out of the interviewing process, and made a fake CV that made him look like an AI slop find since most YC firms now are just terrible. You can go on Hacker News, a board that was started via YC as its literal URL is news.ycomibanator.com, and there are different cases such as pear.ai and most recently glass that would make every sane man question the levels of evil present in the valley. We will return to these in a bit. Back to our scamster.
Now, cheating is not a new thing; over time, society has gotten less strict about deceit in many areas, just ask Zohran Mamdani, who claimed to be black to get into Columbia and is probably going to face zero consequences for it. The first big pro-cheating thing was this startup called Cluely, made by an Ivy dropout asian american, Roy Lee, whose idea was to embed an LLM in your computer so that you can cheat in any interview, as the language model can access both your screen and the speaker. A few days later he got a cool 16 million by a16z, a firm that invests money in startups that explicitly hate cheating and would never want to hire people who would ask a language model to write most of their code. Roy's startups database got leaked a few days later, and ever since, we have had countless cheating-focused startups.
When Sohams thing broke out, people, a large percentage of Indians went to defend him online for explicitly lying. We all have done bad things and I regret the one or two times I did something amoral, in this case, it was similar to a guy sleeping with an entire friend circle, the girls end up liking the guy which is unfortunately what our friends over at silicon valley did after they were done tweeting about ai god and their ai wrapper with 10s of dollars in revenue that justify the millions in investment. It got so bad that the daily news network equivalent of tech news, TBPN, hosted this guy, where he was given softball questions and turned into a hero overnight. "I took all those jobs because I have personal financial issues" to "I do not care about money and only like building" is self-snitching. We know the guy did fuck all for most of his gigs as he kept getting fired within months if not weeks, similarly, he has family in the east coast of the US yet is facing issues he cannot tell others about? Here is the cherry on top of this rotten fruitcake.
The guy got job offers, plenty of job offers, all by ai wrappers, but job offers nonetheless. He chose to go with a firm that makes the same product his last startup made, one he signed a non-compete since he had seen their entire codebase. I asked @FiveHourMarathon as a joke about what levels of scamming is safe in the US. Unfortunately, not only do people not care, but they also respect you if you pull off scams. Y Combinator has been seen as the bastion of hacker founder culture. Paul Graham's essays focus a lot on doing good, being honest, providing values, and other nice things that seem like worthless platitudes, given that the people in his accelerator are not only bad at these things but also lack any sense of honor.
Which brings me back to glass and pear.ai. Pear.ai was one of the worst-received startups of the recent LLM API calls as a startup batch since it literally just forked another repo completely and was touted as the next big thing by Sam Altman's replacement, Garry Tan. Ultimately, after enough hate, they probably changed since the founders are some sort of young e-celeb YouTubers, but it was a divorce from the Aaron Swartz martyr morals. Glass literally forked another cluely clone with the wrong license, slapped a new license and then later claimed ignorance.
Cheating and deceit are bad things; we should be fine with helping those who make mistakes, but these are malicious attempts. John Carmack released his engineers under GNU's public license, today's largest accelerator, where people use him as a PFP do their best to be the opposite of that. We are at this point, encouraging fraud.
edit - will link things in a bit. Apologies for the second top-level comment.
Ironically, this could be called a lie. Per the NYT article
This is a man born in Uganda, and lived in South Africa through his early life.
Whether or not he's African American, and likewise with similar non-black Africa > America immigrants is a difficult question given that he literally is an African who became an American, and it's really hard to even think of an alternate term to call them along the lines of what we would call other groups! Like do we say "African-place Americans" instead to make the distinction clear? I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.
This is realistically more the fault of terrible and misleading categories that are culturally outdated. It is weird, unintuitive and often nonsensical nowadays that Black people who have been living in South America or Europe for generations are considered "African" but someone literally from Africa isn't. And it makes for an interesting question, why do we call them African until they move then?
And if we want to say "well that's because they were originally African" or something, then it's a rather arbitrary cutoff that originally only applies to the great grandparent or great great grandparent or great great great grandparent (depending on the person's particular heritage) but is also a moving definition that applies to the great(x4).grandparent next and so on and so forth to where you could be great(x20) grandparent heritage now and be African but someone with great(X2) heritage now isn't, and also doesn't include we're all from Africa originally so why is there a cutoff to begin with then? Does that mean a black person in the year 300000 will no longer be considered African anymore because we've hit the time limit on African heritage? It doesn't make things much less confusing or weird.
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk. If the majority of your ancestors weren't enslaved Americans, you're not "African-American" and thus not entitled to any of the affirmative action schemes intended to benefit that group. You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
So it's pretty clear that neither Mamdani nor Musk is "African-American", but Obama (regardless of whether there's really a slave in the family on the white side) is.
IMO the census definition should be made more specific to include ADOS and ADOS alone, but "Obama, not Mamdani or Musk" is close enough.
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