I think your average geek used to be like, somewhat academic and erudite and into arcane knowledge and had some level of good faith of wanting to engage in discussion
Now it’s all frauds and absolutely braindead elon stans and crypto dipshits and conservative freaks and people who enjoy and defend watching big tech destroy everything.
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Tech bros like Bill Gates used open source communities like an all-you-can-monetize buffet to build a closed operating system. The rest is history.
What open source was in Windows?
yeah he bought dos and im pretty sure even the folks at that company did not have open source on the radar with what stallman was doing. Maybe by late nineties but if anything they resisted it. Kept on doing versions of open standards with a spin so that they would not interoperate correctly.
people still arguing about how much of MS-DOS was copied from CP/M
that would have nothing to do with open source though.
I don’t have time to verify if the answer is in this link but it seems to be relevant
“Microsoft, a tech company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it.”
[emphasis added]
Bill Gates’ primary quest was to destroy open source right from day 1. See “Hackers” by Steven Levy for more.
Just an example, in 2020, Microsoft acquired npm, the Node Package Manager.
Definitely not relevant to the late 80s
I’m not seeing you specify the late 80’s as your reference timeframe anywhere here.
OP really is mixing metaphors is the bigger issue. Microsoft didn’t build their OS on Open Source, they only embraced it later, after getting in trouble for Embrace Extend Extinguish. Google built their OS on open source tech. Then more recently Microsoft followed the same path forged by Google.
That’s when Microsoft built Windows, so I’m assuming that’s the period OP is referring to
That sounds not much different from the tech bros back then. The vast majority of them were always posers. Anyone with any talent has made their money by now and dropped out of the rat race, the rest of them are either in middle management or drunk themselves to death.
Crypto bros are a subset of the cryptocurrency community. Some of us managed to make enough money to retire, and now we spend our days contributing to open source projects
If all you’re seeing are crypto bros, it says more about the media you consume. Serious technologists / engineers are out there, keeping the lights on.
Crypto bros aren’t the geeks, they’re the popular kids who did well by cheating and copying off other people’s work. None of them actually helped make anything even vaguely useful, they memorized enough technical jargon to sound convincing and got lucky betting on digital ponzi schemes.
Sounds like marketing
apple started with stuff done by woz. googles algorithims came from their founders. gates bought but put a lot into it. hardware companies where engineering firms. google is the only one where its product was not bought and owned by the user (mostly) but they basically set the stage for flipping the whole thing on its head with the user being the product. this further set the stage for the idea is that if you get the people into your ecosystem then it will be to hard to compete as people are lazy and don’t want to change. this lead to emphasis not being on the tech but instead on building the monopoly.
Microsoft in the late 90s was an acquisition machine, but the roots of Microsoft were 100% Bill Gates and Paul Allen being computer savants legitimately trying to push the boundaries of human technology past is limits.
What are you smoking, and where can I get some?
Not to diss Gates or Allen, but neither is a savant of any kind.
Their first product was a BASIC interpreter for a very early Microprocessor, which they wrote without ever getting their hands on the hardware (because the Altair 8800 was basically vaporware at the time, with no software there was no demand), and Paul Alien wrote the bootloader for the program on the flight to the product demonstration.
Frankly, that sounds like legit computer wizardry to me. Yes, they made their billions on business more than tech, but they were legit tech guys at the start.
Legit tech guys, sure.
You called them “computer savants legitimately trying to push the boundaries of human technology past is limits” [sic] in the previous comment and that is what I was calling out.
You sounded like an awed cultist talking about their leader!
. . . and forcing people to pay, through relentless licensing schemes.
What they created wasn’t great, it was standard fare. Their “genius” was in ruthlessly demanding you didn’t own what they made, you only got to run it by paying tribute. It worked.
Other systems and hardware from that era were either absorbed or destroyed because microsoft becamse a monopoly quickly, and used that power to do so.
I’m a technerd from the late 90s and early 00s. We’re all still here living our best lives, making money off the newest hypes, and then going home to chat on IRC and fiddle around with our old, soulful protocols.
This, but be safe. Wrap it up (in TLS)
Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.
They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.
Nothing happened to them. Those guys are still exactly the same.
The difference is that there’s a ton of money in that sector now so a bunch of greedy assholes moved in and now look like they’re the folks actually doing tech stuff.
Oh also, there’s always been a fair amount of legitimately crazy among tech people (we’re strange folk) and those voices get more amplification due to the idiots at the top.
It’s been true for a while now that if you speak with confidence people will listen to you.
In the past you had to actually be smart to be a “tech bro”. The barrier of entry was higher.
Now any dipshit can get online and start being a “tech bro”.
It’s basically the same as the enshitification of the internet. Used to take some effort to get online. Now any dipshit can do it.
It’s a tale as old as Capitalism. People who geek out about something do it because they enjoy it, then somebody finds a way to improve distribution of their work and suddenly there’s a skyrocket in demand. Vultures swoop in and suck out whatever life might be left in their passionate work to make it profitable, and then all the passion is gone.
“Tech bro” is the term used to describe those vultures. People who try to monetize the shit out of everything with an ounce of human soul in it. Passionate tech nerds are still out there, mostly in FOSS circles, some in hardware hobbyist circles building cool form factors for their own computers.
Honestly, odds are you’ll find passion only in someone who’s not looking to monetize.
I think it’s important to note the difference between “make a living to keep things going” vs. “I want to make ‘fuck you’ money.”
I have no problem with people who make a good product and seek donations or sell their product at a reasonable price.
Hell, take uBlock Origin. I’d easily pay $10 / month for this but they do not want money. So I do what they request and donate to the people who make the filters.
This is the first year in perhaps a decade I won’t be giving to the Mozilla Foundation because they are enshittifying their product. I wrote to them and told them why I won’t be donating. I don’t know if it will make a difference but I’m keeping an eye on them over the next year.
There’s always been frauds and dipshits. I had a front row seat to the dot com boom and bust and it was not dissimilar to the bollocks going on now. Except the richest people made OS/hardware (Gates, Allen, Dell) or were traditional investors (Buffet)…
We still exist, but you gotta look. Tech has gotten a lot more mainstream since the 90s.
There’s a difference between tech geeks and tech bros.
The tech bro is selling you NFT web 3.0 AR experiences, the tech geek might be learning Docker to self host a Lemmy instance, not because he needs to, but because it’s fun.
Both have always existed: one was selling you some horrendous domain during the .com bubble, a plot of land on Second Life or even a perfect marriage based on a secret algorithm running on his Commodore 64, the other was busy playing muds and learning how to make free calls by ringing weird tones into a public telephone.
Steve Wozniak was the tech geek
Steve Jobs was the techbroExactly.
Wozniak did the real work, he was an actual computer engineer and programmer.
Jobs was literally the fucking marketing guy who made his entire career about how marketing guys ruin companies.
Yeah, he really ran Apple into the ground. You barely hear about them today. 😔
Found the techbro
“wealth = virtue”
I’m not saying that at all.
You guys need to calm down 😂.
Ruined doesn’t have to mean “made not financially successful”. Like… see all of enshittification to see why that notion is ridiculous.
Aaron Swartz was the tech geek That jackass sp*z is the tech bro.
:(
Rip Aaron
Playing muds
This guy fucks 🫡
In VR
Can we discuss how the ladies look gigantic in VR porn or are we all just going to keep watching it?
All I wanna do
Is see you turn into
A giant womanAll I wanna be
Is someone who gets to see
A giant womanHow have I never realized the chorus was a haiku
with a box of scraps?
Tech geeks have actual autism.
Tech bros microdose so they can pretend they have autism.
You left out the autists who microdose so they can see into the matrix
how do I get someone else tested for autism
It’s kind of a joke, but ask about how they arrange their sock drawer.
What does it say about me that I only buy two kinds of socks: black Carhartt work socks and white Hanes ankle socks, so the drawer is just divided into two piles?
What’s the autist’s answer to that question?
Any answer other than “huh?” is a dead giveaway.
“Actually, I don’t have a system because the time it takes me to pick a valid pair of socks is…” is as autistic an answer as “Left-to-right by increasing wavelength color, dark colors in the back” or “All socks are paired up and perpendicular for easy overview”.
I am learning from Lemmy lately that being clean and organized means:
I am gay
I am autistic
Well congrats on your new obsessively gay life lol
Well congrats on living in filth you hetero ableist fuck lol
A real tour de force of systems theory.
Start leaving information about trains out for them and see if they bite
