[Zelphyr]

I really hope the Bay Area keeps this attitude, and that other places adopt it if they haven't already:

"I live in the Bay Area. I'm biased, but this place is full of awesome engineers building things and you can just walk up to them and ask them to explain everything about their project and they will."

Edit to add: It reminds me of Jobs calling up Bill Hewlett at his home as a teen and asking him questions, and Hewlett not only answered them but gave him a summer job.

[bpiche]

I live here too. I'm biased, but 1) this place is not full of awesome engineers, it's mostly full of overworked contractors and newbies with eighth grader syndrome. And 2) you can't just walk up to them and ask them to explain everything about their project. That's a huge security issue and if it were true it would be a lot easier to social engineer places today. Not to say that it isn't possible, but this comment paints an unproductive, idealized, and inaccurate view of the bay.

edit: it is a very cool e-ink project, and there are some cool communities like the maker faire. Reflexively reacting against the generalization

[jonahss]

I didn't mean people who work at Uber explaining how their load-balancing works.

I meant walking up to a super cool music visualization at an outdoor art festival and they guy there happily explaining to me their entire system built out of a node flow diagram implemented on Max but adapted to visual graphics using a plugin called Vsynth.

Or going over to a friend's house and seeing their modular synth system and they happily explain to you how it works for an hour.

Just this weekend I met an amazing engineer with a street-legal steam-powered motorcycle which he patiently explained for an hour.

[remram]

That doesn't seem very bay-specific, any DIYer will happily talk about their project.

[bpiche]

Yeah that makes sense. Got me wondering to what extent it’s possible with something like load balancing too. Maybe meetups don’t have to corner the market on that kind of info sharing

[doubloon]

Whay do u mean i called Elon he said sure cmon over we smoked weed and made a cool double decker car and drove it to Tim Apples house and he hired me to work on m5 chip. its still like that.

[fortran77]

What is "eighth grader syndrome?"

[wwweston]

Possible:

https://theotakubox.com/blogs/articles/chuunibyou-eighth-gra...

I'm reading it as developing a level of capability which may (or may not) be genuinely accomplished but lacks requisite perspective and humility regarding its limits. Young teens (as in the 8th grade range) are famous for displaying this, and of course capable adults find it an easy mistake to make at many points in life.

[xeonmc]

It's most aptly described as edgyism

[fngjdflmdflg]

Pretty sure that term doesn't apply here correctly fwiw. My best guess is that it means GP is saying that the devs in SF see themselves as overpowered/magical in their dev abilities. But it seems like a stretch of the meaning of this term as far as I have seen it used.

[vermarish]

I don't know. I think the younger 20-somethings all have this same kind of dream, but the older people get, the more comfortable they seem hiding behind NDAs at FAANGs or staying in "stealth mode." They really don't owe anyone anything.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the younger 20-somethings.

[viraptor]

You don't "hide behind" NDAs. Either you have one or you don't. Whatever your position is on the NDAs in general, you really shouldn't break one you accepted.

[dataflow]

> Whatever your position is on the NDAs in general, you really shouldn't break one you accepted.

The recent OpenAI non-disparagement agreement ex-employees were forced to sign was itself covered by a non-disclosure agreement. Which current employees thus naturally had no idea about... until they were leaked to the press. Would it really have been better for these not to have been leaked?

[viraptor]

If it's in the territory of ex employees being forced to sign something, I don't count that under NDA anymore - it's just sneaky BS. You can twist anything in some evil scheme - that doesn't mean the original thing itself is bad.

The context here is sharing general technical knowledge, not the openai internal backstabbing.