Hard to ignore how much it depended on a steady infusion of federal dollars and the fact that a lot of tech leaders were red pilled by the faintest hint of regulation or popular discontent with their products.

I think it’s one of the paradoxes of tech because for so long it’s been an industry where you could get a middle class life kind of easily, but the salaries and perks are something that capital and management kind of loathe. They’ve always wanted to break the relative power ordinary devs have.

big tech's combination of centralized platforms, gameable recommendation algorithms, and monetized attention-grabbing helped create the conditions and incentives for the rightwing echo-chamber-gonzo-grifter industrial complex

(Yes, I'm noodling with a piece I want to write).

One thing I care about that no one else cares about is that the hierarchical, network, and relational database models were *all* explicitly developed to handle manufacturing data.

This is all vibes on my part but I think STEM folks are having a crisis partly as a result of this austerity; the scale is new to them, whereas humanities folks have weathered austerity on this scale for a while now (not that they’re not suffering too)

100%. It is far more like Harvard than say the University of Montana.

If I recall, their cuts to degree programs were brutal

And I think in some places they are doing well! So don’t fall into the trap of being that NYT writer who only ever writes about Ivy Leagues; frankly, I could give a shit what happens to them.

It’s a lovely place! Sadly just transiting through, but I love it here and always have.

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The man knows how to smize perfectly.

That he has no political principles or notions beyond "strength is good" and crude racism certainly works out well for them in the aggregate.