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by bogzz 55 days ago
That little man has eroded any respect that he might have been a priori granted with his publicly documented descent into a vibecoding mania. I'm still in disbelief that the very silly photographer guy is the CEO of ycombinator. Ah well, it was a good era.
2 comments
globalnode 55 days ago
isnt it the same sort of reason you guys have actors for presidents? its about how well you can sell the message, not how good you are behind the scenes, thats what normies are for.
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diydsp 54 days ago
Thats a big part of it. Customers go into a flock demo with motivated reasoning. "Im scared. Im not sure i should be this scared."

Seeing a vulnerable set of kids happily playing and hearing a confident voice say "A shooter could end all this. We can prevent it" validates that and closes the sale.

If a cautious pragmatist goes to the demo thinking "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology." Then a performatively confident person says "this is a component of a massive surveillance state ripe for misuse. It will give us footage of crimes and only stop a small percentage of them," how well do you think it would sell?

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FireBeyond 54 days ago
> "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology."

Garrett has said that Flock's goal is "zero crime", "made possible by Flock". It's full Minority Report, 1984, Stasi stuff.

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kevin_thibedeau 55 days ago
That strategy didn't work out well for Makerbot. Tech companies actually need competent leadership with a tech background. You can't pretend they are interchangeable with some run of the mill commodities producer and adopt the same leadership practices.
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nailer 55 days ago
He's using AI assistants and excited about it. So is Linux Torvalds, and all my other programming friends.
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toraway 55 days ago
To the best of my knowledge Linus Torvalds isn't posting walls of text to Github breathlessly announcing he's 810x-ed [1] his "logical lines of code/day" compared to what he was doing in 2013.

And, lest you think generating "600,000 lines of production code in 60 days" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Andrej Karpathy, once and for all: "Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered." [1]

As someone who has experienced mania, including with a programming bent specifically, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at the idiosyncratic human-y bits of his thinking floating up from the sea of em-dashes and it's not X it's Y in his manifestos.

Plus volunteering this [3] in an interview:

“I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (Tan’s assistant confirmed to us that he was joking. ...)

It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil...

[1] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

[2] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/docs/ON_THE_LOC...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/17/why-garry-tans-claude-code...

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