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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

194 点作者 hacksilver大约 4 年前

30 条评论

dang大约 4 年前
All: please respond to the substance of the article, not the baity title. The latter leads to boring flamewar, while the article (and we all) deserve better.<p>To help with that, we&#x27;ve changed the title above to the what high school English teachers would call its thesis statement.
AussieWog93大约 4 年前
I started a PhD in biomedical engineering back in 2017, coming from a EEE background. The topic I was studying was the application of machine learning for neurosignal decoding.<p>Imagine the development of a &quot;thought keyboard&quot; that could be used by someone with motor neurone disease to communicate with their family or drive a robotic arm - young me was excited!<p>While it&#x27;s true that the field had shifted towards machine learning in the decade preceding, that wasn&#x27;t because ML techniques showed any amazing promise or were likely to be the foundation of any breakthrough. Quite the opposite, in fact - there was strong evidence to suggest that the &quot;ML revolution&quot; would go nowhere, but that&#x27;s where all the grant money was.<p>So day after day, year after year, hordes of researchers would churn out ML papers they knew would yield no fruit simply because that was the path of least resistance. Occasionally they would get a &quot;breakthrough&quot; result that never generalised to other datasets. It could be the case that ML is showing genuinely amazing results in other biomedical fields, but after going through that I&#x27;m always a bit skeptical. (For anyone wondering, I left after a year and basically gave up the right to ever study a PhD in Australia again.)
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Apocryphon大约 4 年前
The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23657403" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23657403</a><p>I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” Not to mention, I would wager most commentators are not equipped to address his point about SV being unable to deal with medical regulations, seeing as there’s been medtech startups that have already attempted to flout FDA regulation.<p>&gt; The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley<p>Isn’t South SF a biotech hotbed?<p>His points about regulators actually doing able something substantive towards big tech platforms, and the end of “casino capitalism” also feel too Pollyannaish for our current lamentable moment. Maybe it has to all get worse before it’s foreseeable.<p>O’Reilly certainly calls it out as he sees it with the social commentary:<p>&gt; When the “superstar firms” ruthlessly compete with smaller firms that come up with fresh ideas, not only starving them of talent but often introducing copycat products and services, there is decreased innovation from the market as a whole. Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers; wages and working conditions of workers in less profitable industries are squeezed to drive the growth of the giants. Their very jobs are made contingent and disposable, with inequality baked in from the beginning of their employment. Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance. The list is far longer than that.<p>Honestly, this article’s a great read.
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helen___keller大约 4 年前
There are countless takes on this, but I&#x27;ll add one more: Silicon Valley&#x27;s failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building.<p>For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers.<p>Monoculturalism is a failure to diversify, and it stems from an inability to build an effective dense urban region. The bay area could have had human AND financial capital rivaling NYC, a megapolis perhaps in league with Tokyo, but this failed to materialize so instead the region will likely go the way of Detroit: rising and falling in step with the industry it&#x27;s built around.
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networkimprov大约 4 年前
This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather &amp; climate disasters. And it&#x27;s expected to get much worse this year.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mnmnotmail&#x2F;status&#x2F;1372201054213787660" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mnmnotmail&#x2F;status&#x2F;1372201054213787660</a><p>Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime.<p>References:<p>Cybercrime, $945B: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;cybersecurity-202-global-losses-cybercrime-skyrocketed-nearly-1-trillion-2020&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;cybersecu...</a><p>Climate, $258B: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaleclimateconnections.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;world-hammered-by-record-50-billion-dollar-weather-disasters-in-2020&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaleclimateconnections.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;world-hammered-by...</a>
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shinkim0914大约 4 年前
There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and encouraged.
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sradman大约 4 年前
At the heart of progressive thought is concern over the twin evils of oppression and exploitation. O&#x27;Reilly’s piece focuses on the latter but relies on the assumption that profit==exploitation. I’m not convinced it is that simple.<p>I wish I could have had a chat with Milton about the Friedman doctrine [1]. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective, shareholder value is a relatively easy measure that acts as a proxy for the true goal of a corporation: creating sustainable customer value.<p>Within the context of his original article, Friedman was arguing that customers, employees, and shareholders could choose to give to charity, for instance, but it is wrong for a corporation to do it on their behalf. The concept is not intuitive but it is far from promoting selfishness.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Friedman_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Friedman_doctrine</a>
cblconfederate大约 4 年前
&gt; The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there<p>Is it? I think it&#x27;s dying with the generation that believed in that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects created by young inventors?<p>Even this article is written by someone who is of an older generation
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spoonjim大约 4 年前
It honestly doesn’t really matter to the world if “Silicon Valley” moves to another or multiple other locations. What’s far more important is, “does the ever-accelerating dominance of a small number of companies show any signs of weakness?” and this article doesn’t seem to think so.
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simonebrunozzi大约 4 年前
I have been a long time fan of Tim O&#x27;Reilly for the past ~20 years or so. Recently I had the opportunity to interview him [0] for a podcast&#x2F;videocast I run, in which we covered his friendship and work with Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, how the O&#x27;Reilly Media company came to be; but most importantly, Tim&#x27;s &quot;political&quot; involvement in keeping the internet free and open.<p>In particular, I really like his way of looking at good startups and good companies: the ones that don&#x27;t simply intercept or capture value, but that instead create it.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4</a>
627467大约 4 年前
&gt; The final, and perhaps most important, reason why Silicon Valley as we know it may be over is that its current incarnation is a product of the extraordinarily cheap capital of the years since the global financial crisis of 2009.<p>Seems to be implying that cheap capital is ending? Isn&#x27;t the narrative everywhere right now that capital will remain cheap (almost) indefinitely and one of the reasons why many fear inflation and money is rushing to wallstreet and sv-casino (SPACs)?
azinman2大约 4 年前
What I don’t understand about the article is saying that SV is doomed because other areas are likely to be so huge is to ignore that there are already so many other areas of the economy even during SV’s growth. True FAANG grew at incredible rates over the past decade. It’s unclear that’ll slow down at all as software and computerization continues its current path. But all these biotech &#x2F; green economy jobs it talks about will still run on software and microchips... in R&amp;D, manufacturing, logistics, etc. Why can’t this be an AND versus an XOR? The article also implies there’s no biotech in SV - the Bay Area is home to many world leading biotech companies. Yes there are other gravitational pulls in SD, Boston, NJ (and I’m sure others internationally), but it’s not like that mix doesn’t exist here. And once the green economy starts really going, why wouldn’t there be places for new companies for follow in SV?
1vuio0pswjnm7大约 4 年前
&quot;To be sure, a great deal of content on the World Wide Web and in social media is produced and consumed with commercial intent, but a remarkable amount is produced entirely without a profit motive. Google economists have told me that only six percent of Google search result pages carry any advertising at all. The other 94% of pages are the product of the joyful exuberance of humanity, creating and sharing for the joy of it.&quot;<p>I have been repeating the second part of this statement as a truism for decades as internet advertising keeps growing.<p>Apparently I have have been living it too because nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero targeted ads.<p>To the gatekeeper companies controlling the www today there appears to be no commercial&#x2F;non-commercial distinction.<p>For these companies and all those who ride their coattails, data collection for the ultimate purpose of internet advertising is fair game anywhere and everywhere.<p>&quot;Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and corporate governance, not the cause of it, or even the worst exemplar. (Tobacco, oil, and pharma companies vie for the top spot.)&quot;<p>Tobacco, oil and pharma are all highly regulated industries. SV is highly unregulated.<p>It is curious to me why financial services did not make the the list of exemplars. Meanwhile the author then proceeds with a criticism of &quot;casino capitalism&quot;.<p>Perhaps there are links between the rise of &quot;casino capitalism&quot; and the rise of the www as a promoted commercial prospect, in the late 1990s&#x2F;early 2000&#x27;s and again more recently.
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davmar大约 4 年前
LOL @ rabois being a harbinger of things to come.
onethought大约 4 年前
Isn&#x27;t another growing&#x2F;bigger centre for technology innovation now in China&#x2F;Taiwan? Are we just pretending that Silicon Valley is still Mecca?
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mempko大约 4 年前
Overall this is a really good piece. O&#x27;Reilly is wrong that the world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it Amazingly. It&#x27;s not just communist governments that did well, New Zealand and Australia did well too.<p>However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it&#x27;s people... Especially the USA and UK.<p>O&#x27;Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development. And he may be right the skills needed are elsewhere.
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6gvONxR4sf7o大约 4 年前
I really wish I believed this article more, but it strikes me as too optimistic :( It says a bunch of changes are coming that I wish were coming, but don’t believe we’ll get soon. Weird to come away from a “SV will die” article with that feeling.
sradman大约 4 年前
&gt; as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered.<p>This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said:<p>&gt; Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.<p>The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce a lab-on-a-chip. Theranos failed to combine more than a handful of microfluidics together and scrambled to find alternatives to bridge the gap.<p>Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests.<p>Our collective small minds couldn’t focus on anything but the people involved. The core idea is still an outstanding hard problem.
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baby大约 4 年前
I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc.<p>I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...
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ping_pong大约 4 年前
Im so tired of random writers, even if it&#x27;s O&#x27;Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That&#x27;s like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I&#x27;ve been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world.<p>Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can&#x27;t be replicated anywhere else in the world. There&#x27;s a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out.<p>Do I like what Silicon Valley has turned into? Hell no. I like the 90s version so much better, where nerds were tinkering with cool stuff and writing software because they loved software, not because they want to increase engagement by 1%. But it is what it is, and Silicon Valley will change with the times, I&#x27;m sure. I would love to see another dot-com-bust and clear out some of the chaff, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like it&#x27;s going to happen this time around.<p>If there&#x27;s anything that will kill Silicon Valley it&#x27;s that people since 2010 have made *too* much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you&#x27;ve worked on. One of the factors I listed above, greed, is now missing for the most part. People have too much money, and with that they stop getting hungry. The hunger for making money, which propelled a lot of the advancement in previous decades, is absent in many people here. Even I&#x27;ve become a multi-millionaire over the last 5 years by doing nothing differently except buying a house and working at a tech company. This causes a financial convection current, which you&#x27;re somewhat seeing, of the bored rich Googlers moving on and doing other stuff. The incentive is gone for many.<p>But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they&#x27;ve heard about how rich people come, that will continue to fuel things for decades to come. These days, if you get funded by a VC, you&#x27;re getting $5 million for 20%, which is a lot of money. Deals like that can&#x27;t be matched elsewhere and another reason why you won&#x27;t see people trying to raise money elsewhere, they will just come to Silicon Valley with their greatest ideas and keep propelling it.<p>Silicon Valley will never die.
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nightshadetrie大约 4 年前
Maybe, at least people won’t be tied down 100% and can work remote. If you have a family you can now afford a home to raise kids in.
m0llusk大约 4 年前
Just a quick review of the four main points based on my own experience and also reworded hopefully respectfully:<p>1. Consumer internet founders are not great at life sciences<p>This is a distraction. Most of the money in internet has been with automating or supporting business operations for medium to large sized businesses. Life science tech brings unique challenges which is why so many life science tech companies are based in the valley or have offices here. Just to pick out one example the highest resolution ultrasound machines made come from a company based in the valley. This statement appears to be based more on the distracting powers of social media and consumer tech.<p>2. Internet regulation is upon us<p>This is good thing because regulations give consumers confidence in the reliability and safety of new technologies. Even the most care free developers do not expect that the current order of things will endure.<p>3. Climate response is capital intensive<p>This is a distraction from the fact that the most promising technologies for addressing climate response are extremely well represented in the valley. Analysis of orbital and aerial sensor data, automated sensors, control systems for solar and wind generation, modernized electrical grid support systems, and more were all led in part by companies in the valley. More to the point all of these technologies were initially developed by small companies for small applications. Real progress with climate response is likely to involve some big projects, but these projects will be successful because they are based on much smaller works.<p>4. The end of the betting economy<p>Economies are based on bets and consist of bets, as is said, all the way down. The difference is that the terms are changing. Instead of throwing money at pets.com or Facebook plugins or cryptocoin wallets founders are going to have to be more careful and sparing of resources. This is actually a good thing and is likely to at least in part lead to a return to business success competing with hype for available capital. The situation now is that investors can outspend customers in any sector so the venture capital space has become disconnected from genuine business success. Squeezing the slop out of the system should be good for everyone.<p>The analogy that comes to mind is being told that the future is being researched and started at universities and then concluding that frat parties do not yield meaningful tech progress, frat parties are consistently targeted for regulation, frat parties do not address social issues, therefore universities are not actually likely to host research and development that shapes the future. And yes, in this example the current giants in the valley are what amounts to a loud frat party.
TedShiller大约 4 年前
The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who have left have all peaked in their careers. The real loss would not be of people who have peaked leaving but of people who haven’t peaked yet leaving.
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betwixthewires大约 4 年前
I don&#x27;t think a lot of people quite grasp how big of a scam silicon valley is. I&#x27;ve pieced most of the information together from articles that I have seen here.<p>Do you know who owns the majority of rental properties in silicon valley? East coast and Midwest pension funds or investment firms using their capital. This includes office space and residential areas. Care to take a guess who&#x27;s capital the majority of VC firms are investing? If you guessed east coast and Midwest pension funds, you&#x27;re right.<p>Moving to silicon valley to get a good paying job? Prepare to spend most of it on rent, basically paying a significant portion if not the majority of your salary to the very individuals that own controlling interest in the company paying you. Going to silicon valley to start a company? Prepare to pay a significant portion of that funding you got right back where you got it for office space.<p>Imagine if you could take a significant share, potentially a controlling interest, in every major tech startup basically for free. You create an engine to suck productivity out of some of the most creative, technically proficient innovators in the US by owning land in northern California and convincing them that they have to go there and rent from you to get your money to make their big ideas happen. Now you get to own some of the most productive people on the planet. That&#x27;s one hell of a profitable scam. And the funny thing, we all forgot why you had to go there in the first place, that the silicon was made there, and we just take it as gospel that you have to go there to work in tech, even though the silicon is all made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China now. And let&#x27;s not even get started on the hypocrisy of pension funds that exist due to union lobbying doing this.<p>Now, if you&#x27;re still considering going there, as an added bonus consider that you&#x27;ll be surrounded by people that step over homeless people on the way to work where they will write social media posts about income inequality.
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armatav大约 4 年前
Nope.
ehnto大约 4 年前
&gt; The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” This is all the sadder, though, since the tech industry set out to model something better. The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there...<p>I don&#x27;t buy that at all, the tech INDUSTRY was the result of attempting to extract value out of technology. I have to scoff at the inclusion of &quot;algorithmically amplified intelligence&quot; as one of the egalitarian core values of SV. If you hadn&#x27;t caught on by then, you must have been heady off the fumes of it all.
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caslon大约 4 年前
<i>High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California.</i><p>Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars <i>putting literal lives at risk</i>, a figurative vampire (infuses literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a company that hasn&#x27;t been relevant since the 1970s all are leaving the Valley!<p>I don&#x27;t even live there, and I never plan on living there, but they&#x27;re not citing anyone all that meaningful. <i>Larry Ellison</i> is somehow the person who comes off the best out of that group! Larry Ellison! A guy who can best be described with a lawnmower metaphor! Come on!<p>And now a guy who corporatized free software to the point of it being completely unenforced <i>and also</i> coined Web 2.0 to sell you books is telling you to leave!<p>I&#x27;m skeptical about this &quot;end&quot; of the Valley, somehow. Almost seems like they&#x27;re trying to get you to leave to devalue the price of real estate, scoop it up and then advocate once more for the Valley.
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op03大约 4 年前
Its been in decline ever since outsourcing began. Inevitable in a connected world. Time to move on. Whats the Chinese&#x2F;Indian equivalent of HN?
pdimitar大约 4 年前
SV is a bubble and it will be defended by those who benefit from that status quo for quite a while still.<p>I do agree with the article decrying humanity&#x27;s chronic inability to act on preventable crises. But it seems (a) most of humanity is much more inert and passive than we are inclined to think and (b) the vested interests and&#x2F;or the powers-that-be are really that powerful so as to prevent the action of everybody else.<p>At the same time the article is overly optimistic: it claims that the consumer internet and social media are coming to an end.
EGreg大约 4 年前
Until 1988, California was ruled largely by Republicans.<p>Since 1988, it gradually cane to be ruled more by Democrats, with the notable exception of the &quot;moderate&quot; Republican governor Schwartzenegger.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;la-pol-ca-california-voting-history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;la-pol-ca-california-voting...</a><p>In both eras, its GDP and population went up, until it became the 5th or 4th largest economy in the world.<p>A bit of mean reversion occurs, after massive spikes in housing prices, wildfires and a pandemic and everyone loses their crap. Seriously, people... this is about as bad as cries of &quot;CARNAGE!!&quot; in 2016 when crime has a slight uptick after 10 years of decline.
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