Gayitri Ramesh’s Reviews > Uncanny Valley > Status Update

“It was possible that the tourists trawling the commercial strip mistook San Francisco’s homelessness epidemic for part of the hippie aesthetic. It was possible that the tourists didn’t think about the homelessness epidemic at all.”

“I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated.”

every page of this is brilliant. on the men of the “Solutions” team, Wiener writes:

“Deep house and EDM leaked from their oversized headphones. At team gatherings they drank whiskey, neat, and, the following mornings, were prone to pounding a viscous liquid jacked up with electrolytes—sold as a remedy for small children with diarrhea—to flush away their hangovers.”

Comparitive to AI today:
“Not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it.”

“Data collection and retention were unregulated.”

“Just as startups in New York were eager to build off their city’s existing cultural legacy, by creating services for media and finance… the same was true of the Bay Area, where software engineers sought to usurp older technology companies by building tools for other software engineers.”