Yiren Lu's Brilliant View of Silicon Valley

 

 Yiren Lu nails it.  She brilliantly analyzes current Silicon Valley "app" culture and the collision between old school and new school.  Btw, yes, that is her on YouTube at age 12 playing Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu.  Verbatim highlights appear below:

·        I am a grad student in computer science at Columbia University — with several friends who will be working at Dropbox and Facebook this summer

·        The rapid consumer-ification of tech, led by Facebook and Google, has created a deep rift between old and new, hardware and software, enterprise companies that sell to other businesses and consumer companies that sell directly to the masses.

·        In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which all of Web 2.0 rests. Without a good router to provide reliable Wi-Fi, your Dropbox file-sharing application is not going to sync; without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh. The talent — and there’s a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps.

·        Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app.

·        The face of web tech today could easily be a designer, like Brian Chesky at Airbnb, or a magazine editor, like Jeff Koyen at Assignmint. Such entrepreneurs come from backgrounds outside computer science and are likely to think of their companies in terms more grandiose than their technical components.

·        And it followed what was for decades the highway that connected academia to industry: Grad students researched technology, powerful advisers brokered deals, students dropped out to parlay their technologies into proprietary solutions, everyone reaped the profits. That implicit guarantee of academia’s place in entrepreneurship has since disappeared. Graduate students still drop out, but to start bike-sharing apps and become data scientists.

·        Much of this precocity — or dilettantism, depending on your point of view — has been enabled by web technologies, by easy-to-use programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Node.js and by the explosion of application programming interfaces (A.P.I.s) that supply off-the-shelf solutions to entrepreneurs who used to have to write all their own code for features like a login system or an embedded map. Now anyone can do it, thanks to the Facebook login A.P.I. or the Google Maps A.P.I.

·        The sense that it is no longer necessary to have particularly deep domain knowledge before founding your own start-up is real; that and the willingness of venture capitalists to finance Mark Zuckerberg look-alikes are changing the landscape of tech products.

·        There’s a glass-half-full way of looking at this, of course: Tech hasn’t been pedestrianized — it’s been democratized.

·        Companies like Uber and Airbnb, while properly classified as interfaces and marketplaces, are really providing the most elevated service of all — that of doing it ourselves.

·        Recently, an engineer at a funded-to-the-gills start-up in San Francisco texted me to grumble about his company’s software architecture. Its code base was bug-ridden and disorganized — yet the business was enjoying tremendous revenue and momentum. “Never before has the idea itself been powerful enough that one can get away with a lacking implementation,” he wrote. His remark underscores a change wrought by the new guard that the old guard will have to adapt to. Tech is no longer primarily technology driven; it is idea driven.

·        increasingly short product cycles are things Jim attributes to the rise of Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.), a collection of servers owned and managed by Amazon that hosts data for nearly every start-up in the latest web ecosystem.

·        “But now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.”

homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto

Leslie Jamison submitted an essay regarding her tattoo quoting the Roman playwright Terence (195/185–159 BC) stating "I am human: nothing human is alien to me," which appeared in NYT Sunday (4/13/14).  It can be found in his play Heauton Timorumenos ("The Self-Tormentor").  Terence was the first Roman playwright of North African descent.  This may be the ultimate example of cultures in collision.  Jamison (b. 1985) attended Harvard and just released essays in "The Empathy Exams."  She got the tattoo to mark a break from her partner, to brand herself to mark a new era.  She was reclaiming her body, in a sense opposite from being pregnant, it was "the residue of intimacy."  The tattoo was to serve as epigraph for her new book.  While the article focuses on her need to explain the tattoo to observers, it is light on explaining what it really means. 

Rayner Teo in a 2009 blog opines on the second line "nothing human is alien to me."  It alludes to a universal quality that we all share - humanity.  It is an embracement of everything human.  It implies that one is familiar with all the joy and suffering that is the human condition.  Perhaps we can strive for this as the culmination of a lifetime of experience.  It is a worthy goal without passing oral judgement.  Teo is sympathetic to sinners who writer difficult literature or make gritty movies, rather than moralising self-righteous preachers who repress their own humanity in pursuit of false goodness.

Jamison does say it's about empathy and camaraderie, a denial of singularity and exceptionality.  The implication is that we're all in this together, but do we need to discount exceptionality ?  Jamison feels her tattoo is not yet true for her but it establishes a goal, an asymptote, a horizon, in line with Teo's vision.  Jamison recalls a drugstore clerk saying "you will leave a little piece of yourself with everyone you imagine."  Is this what Terence had in mind ?