I didn’t know a16z was so devoted to developing new hires! Don’t you just love to see it.

incredible, where is this from?

another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning

wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:

Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues…

… nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.

yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that

kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum

but one that instead

attempt[s] to maintain an empire.

how you may ask?

An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:

1. Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

2. Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.

sadly, Hotz isn’t exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:

[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet

Quality sneers in these (one, two) response posts. The original posts that these are critiquing are very silly and not worth your time, but the criticism here addresses many of the typical AI hype talking points.

hells yeah it’s time for some action - Drew DeVault is organizing a sit-in protest of Jack Dorsey’s keynote at FOSDEM 2025.