this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
23 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2057 readers
407 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Alternatively:

Academia and advanced degrees are worthless; you can compress four years of study into a prompt the size of a tweet.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

a “cant tell you my ideas or you might steal them” guy

This reminds me of A Guy that I knew through an internship at a MegaCorp. After landing a job at said MegaCorp and moving to the MegaCorp Bay locale, former intern Guy hit me up for dinner when he was visiting. With no reason to say no and a plethora of free time, I said, sure.

It turned out that Guy was a total techpilled crank. He was talking like he was giving a TED talk the whole dinner. Some things I remember:

  • "billionaires are good people, actually."
  • "because of things that I know and have learnt, I know I will become a billionaire"
  • Guy was pitching me his "billion-dollar" startup idea of a payments layer for donating to charity. He was convinced that this was an ethical idea. He had no counterpoint when I pointed out that the idea was essentially to skim money off the top of donations.
  • Favourite moment of the night was when he said something to the effect of: "I'm going to tell you a truth that you might not be able to handle", followed by him saying something trivial or banal or otherwise forgettable; I remember reacting with indifferent silence and him going silent, literally shaking with anger, then him breaking the silence with "I'm sorry, I just got really angry for a moment there."

I don't know what guy has been up to since, but my money would be on something LLM based.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago

Now im reminded of the guys I met at a student association party (for a student association which had an active boardgaming club) who didn't want to tell me about the boardgame they were developing because I needed to sign an NDA first, and they had no papers with them, and they wanted to see if they could patent the ideas. Such a weird moment to be introduced to people because they are actively trying to develop a board game, and I also liked board games for them to go 'its all a secret'. Can't recall if I laughed in their faces (as well, from what I heard from reading about board game development, NDAs like this were unheard of, same with patents, and nobody is going to steal your idea (and you will not make much money on it)). I didn't even get the genre. (And like I would steal their ideas, I have my own unfinished ideas thank you very much).