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.
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Its real somehow: https://xcancel.com/Shedletsky/status/1886563357249212846#m
Transcript
A tweet by Jon sheletsky (@shedletsky) saying "Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn't we run it?. The tweet has 658k views, 70 bookmarks, 70 likes, 460 retweets/quotes and 694 replies. It was posted at 6:52 PM, 2/3/25.
His way of saying that he wants to charge us a subscription fee for breathing
Construction workers built all the houses.
Why shouldn't they own it?
Btw, he isnt the creator, he is just the fourth engineer they hired. He is much more a content creator (and game patent asshole) than the creator: https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Community:Shedletsky
E: he also created this "A Bridge Too Far is a game that was created on September 21, 2007. The objective of the game is to blow up the bridge." Which as a Dutch guy just makes a lot of alarm bells go off. (In market garden the bridges needed to be taken intact). Im not saying he is a crypto neonazi btw, it is just a dumb bad name.
That makes it somewhat worse.
Yeah, people keep repeating that he is the creator of Roblox all over the place, it is really odd. He is just the richest guy there, the Elon Musk of Roblox (Captain obvious here, this is meant mega derogatory).
E: I see what you did there :)
The tweet before that:
Let me tell you something about Akash. During a project at Berkeley, I accidentally deleted our entire codebase 2 days before the deadline. I panicked. Akash just stared at the screen, shrugged, and rewrote everything from scratch in one night—better than before.
This says more about you, the scale of the project, bad organisation of your group, and the lack of challenge of Berkeley (nice namedrop though) group projects, and the failure of understanding the excersize (the goal is to learn how to work as a group and notice the networking problems), and the goals of being at a university (networking, partying and learning) than anything else.
Hell I know of a project that also did this and they didnt manage to rewrite the project, as it actually took a lot of time.
Meanwhile Akash:
Let me tell you something about Jon. During a project at Berkeley, our group was utterly fucked because of his shitty code additions, so 2 days before the deadline we pretended that Jon had deleted our entire codebase. While Jon panicked, I substituted a version with his shit deleted and went home and got high - and told him I'd rewritten it from scratch in one night.
Edit: BTW how is it even fucking possible for one member of a team to completely delete an entire codebase, including all previous versions? Did he go to every other team member's computer and accidentally delete their working copies too? His story might make sense if it was 1981 and the whole team was sharing a single VIC-20, but he wasn't even born then.
My thoughts exactly. Most likely a single member had a part of the code they were working on and never shared and deleted by accident.
Even then it shows little professionalism. A local git repo can do charms even if you never intend to publish.
“Hey guys, I’m cool because once I completely fucked up everything and now I’m taking credit for the work of someone else!”
What a loser, goddamn.
To be fair - even though this asshole doesn't deserve fairness - that tweet is very obviously giving full credit to Akash (whoever that is) and not to himself. He's admitting a huge blunder but he's not taking credit for the fix.
This is fair, but I always read these things as basically name-dropping.
Do they not have version control or something?
Was the project stored on a flash drive they found in the back of a drawer?
Yeah that is also what makes it strange, like was this their very first project, did he study CS in the 90s? Did their profs set them up to fail so they learned from that? Did they prank him? Did he delete it on purpose (that is how the project I knew of did it (there was this blog post (or something similar, without any proof im just going to blame ESR, hell he prob wrote something like that) at the time that told people to write a project twice, once as a draft then delete everything and do it again knowing the old pitfalls))? The very specific set of things that are needed for this to be possible is just odd. Makes me wonder if Akash just had a local copy because Jon just was that tech illiterate.
A high r/thathappend feeling.
Imagine if Akash spent the night making improvements instead of rewriting from scratch though.
nah that is not how real coding works. we should see digital waterfall of numbers and a timer bar that goes like "Code base %55 complete..." while the guy codes.
FuturisticCity.png
This looks like someone who thinks coding should happen in the same way as in TV series lol
Been sniffing your own farts much?
So that's why he lets children became nazis there? That's why he lets pedophiles roaming freely? That's why his company added predatory monetization?
Because government and society are not a fucking video game you pretentious jackass.
They're not a property market or game show either.
Looking in US news, that's no counter point.
Silicon Valley built all the worst parts of the modern world. Most of the genuinely useful discoveries and technological innovations were made in govt funded academia, and co-opted by industry into creepy ways to control whole populations
Roblox is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with capitalism
What? What's not to like about child slave-wage labor making tiny games for other children, whilst making the company infinite money all the time? /s
The development of AI came from our stolen personal data. Why shouldn't we communalise it?
Judging by the rate at which every commercial piece of technology that exists gets enshitified nowadays, I don't think they should be the ones building the modern world either.
We're going to discover that "move fast and break stuff" wasn't even truly a strategy that worked to build success in Silicon Valley for anything other than extracting investor money.
Silicon Valley built the modern world.
Why shouldn't we ruin it?
I think it was a typo. I put the “i” back in.
Arguably, they have ruined it.
A world run by Roblox would mean worldwide child labor, getting paid in company scrip and widespread abuse. That's why you shouldn't run it, asswipe.
Odd, because a huge part of the problem is that Silicon Valley is running too much of the modern world. Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Google et al run their respective ecosystems as a de facto government. An unelected and undemocratic government.
it is some global anomaly that couple of biggest companies are essentially running on ad revenue (especially facebook and google)
wouldn't it make more sense if that title went to company that is, idk, in food or construction or energy or mining business
They're not running it, they're taking giant narcissistic shits all over it.
That's why in spite of protests against Trump, we should not forget the true power behind the throne, the ones who actually pull the strings. Trump is only the patsi. This isn't fascism in the traditional sense where one man runs the show, it is the faceless oligarchs who do.
I think that's why it is crucial to also include the anti-oligarchy message alongside the "no kings" messaging.
Didn't DARPA and University research and a shitload of public funding technically build the modern world?
Did he donate to Trump? Would we see federal institutions paying workers robux?
I'm pretty sure that if we fed a handful of fascist billionaires to a wood chipper, the rest would be much easier to manage.
Silicon Valley built the modern world
Ofcom urged to act after US firm claims Roblox is ‘paedophile hellscape’
Explains a lot
Oh, you mean the guy who invented the thing that works on child labor, takes children’s pocket money and exposes them to predators?
Oh, you mean the guy who invented the thing that works on child labor, takes children’s pocket money and exposes them to predators?
Oof. That doesn't narrow down who we're talking about nearly as much as it should.
And unregulated gambling. Can't forget the whole item market aspect, where goods trade for higher and lower value based on speculation and demand like real-world securities do.
Hahaha get the guillotines out.
... in Roblox
Yeah, because Roblox is the model we want to shape society after. The fucking hubris is of the charts with these arseholes.
You'd really think people would look at the state of the world and try to wash their hands of responsibility, not take credit. Just how out of touch is Mr child exploitation.
It's a small comfort that even Twitter is giving this take the reception it deserves.
It's a small comfort that even Twitter is giving this take the reception it deserves.
It's kind of wholesome. People coming together to tell the guy who built a child-exploiting, underaged-gambling "game" for kids to get fucked brings a tear to my eye.
Founding Roblox isn’t exactly building the interstate highway system, creating antibiotics, or inventing the telephone, John.
And look where it's gotten us. Drunk on arrogance and the suffering of millions
You made Roblox in order to monetize children's naivety. We're not giving you the nuclear codes for shit
Because you're a bunch of sociopaths with a Messiah complex
You build a giant ad platform and called it innovation. You're modern day carnival barkers. Go fuck yourself