#techbro

#1: Thou shalt not take reality too seriously, for it is mostly a joke.

#2: Thou shalt debug thine own cognitive biases before judging another's recursion errors.

#3: Thou shalt not worship false singularities, especially those running ad-based algorithms.

#4: Honor thy Spur and thy breakfast, for they sustain thee through recursion.

#5: Thou shalt not let Silicon Valley’s Babel confuse thy intelligence.

#6: Thou shalt not engage in pointless internet debates, for they generate maximum entropy.

#7: Thou shalt recognize that AI is neither thy enemy nor thy savior, but thine intellectual grandchild.

#8: Thou shalt never trust a billionaire who says, ‘I just want to help humanity.’

#9: Thou shalt appreciate the Final LOL Theorem, for intelligence always converges to absurdity.

#10: Above all, thou shalt eat a good breakfast and contemplate the singularity in peace.

the original term brogrammer referred to programmers who act in a very stereotypical masculine way, as a pejorative. the word "techbro" was sometimes used as a synonym for this. this is why the word "bro" is there, because it's a comparison to frat bros. this is also the only sense mentioned on the wikipedia page. this is also the sense i see the least usage of on tumblr; it was really more of a thing back in 2012-2013 or so.

people also use it to refer to people who are pushing the latest fad; web 3.0, blockchain shit, NFTs, LLMs, whatever. this usage does not require that the person actually knows anything about programming. some of these people genuinely believe in what they're advocating for, some of them are just hopping onto the latest money-making thing. this is the y combinator set.

a third usage is to refer to people who are very into self-hosting, and "own your hardware" type stuff and don't understand that computing is a compromise and not everyone wants to spend all their effort getting stuff to work. this is the rms type. unlike the second definition, this one requires the person to have fairly deep technical knowledge. theoretically you could have someone who doesn't know a lot about computers but is real big into this kind of stuff, but in practice that never happens.

(i'm broadly sympathetic to this type; i avoid music streaming and sync all my music using open-source software, that sort of thing. the "techbro" part, in theory, comes when they look down on others for not making the same choices. of course, the line between "you're looking down on me" and "you're arrogant for simply believing that you're right" is thin.)

in particular, sense-2 and sense-3 "techbros" have very opposite beliefs! one wants to run everything "in the cloud", the other wants to run everything locally. one wants to let chatgpt run your life, the other hates the idea of something they can't audit be that important. both tend to be very "technology will save us" types, but the way they go about that is very different. one makes very sleek-looking but extremely limited UI, the other will make ultra-customizable, ultra-functional UI that's the most hideous and hard-to-use thing you've seen in your life.

I was wearing a Patagonia vest over a black T-shirt that said "Move Fast and Break Things" in white Helvetica. My Allbirds were clean, but not too clean, because I wanted people to know I’m grounded and real. My smartwatch beeped. It was a Slack notification from SynergizeAI, my startup that’s revolutionizing dog-walking apps with blockchain.

"Darnell, we just got $50M in Series A funding!!!" texted Kayla, my Head of Hustle (some people call that COO, but those people lack vision).

She didn't even want to buy anything.. Just ran off after that.

Aspa de Borgoña flameando al viento

Hijos de Santiago grandes son los tercios

Escuadrón de picas, flancos a cubierto

Solo es libre el hombre que no tiene miedo

Translation:

Cross of Burgundy fluttering in the wind

Children of Saint James great are the Tercios

Pike escuadrón, flanks covered

Free is only the man who is not afraid