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Nerds are the ones who warned you about cryptocurrency, and NFTs, and the internet of things. Nerds are the ones trying to explain to you that "AI" is just overhyped pattern recognition which we already had for years. Techbros are not nerds. They're predators.

Techbros don't create. They appropriate. They find someone else's thing and slap a logo on it. Techbros lie. They cheat. They say anything to convince investors to throw money at them. Techbros don't care about whatever tech they're flogging. It's all just a pretense to trick people out of money.

Techbros are happy for you to think they're the pioneers, the engineers, the inventors and designers. Elon Musk has never designed anything. Sam Altman is a professional investor. Mark Zuckerberg coded a webpage to stalk girls. These are not Jobs or Gates, and even they were thieving assholes.

Techbros are businessmen who learned just enough about technology to trick other people into thinking they could change the world. All they change is the numbers in everyone else's bank account to zero. Nerds create. They fix. They innovate. Techbros weaponize what nerds make.

Yup. The Internet of Things was a *huge* consumer scam. None of this stuff requires the ability to phone home to a server only a single company controls. They don't need your email, your logins, they don't need to track your usage data to sell. It was a pretense.

This fundamentally misunderstands the engineering tradeoffs*and* the value of said usage data. If you're going to blame anything for this, blame ISPs for making self hosting anywhere from hard to impossible.

Microsoft tried to normalize home servers for a hot second and it never caught on. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...

All of the Internet of Things junk was easy to enable with your own personal server at home. Later, they didn't even need that: they were their own devices with IP addresses and internet access. All you needed was an app to talk to them. But all the companies insisted on logins to THEIR servers.

Further, most Internet of Things devices are cheap, with security holes that will never be patched because they were designed with the idea you'd throw your cameras and light bulbs and shit away and buy new ones every year or so. But people don't DO that, so we have tons of insecure crap online.

At this point it’s almost impossible to get decent home security or automation that you control. The only real option is to roll it yourself. I won’t have IoT anything in my home but it gets increasingly hard to avoid.

Most IoT things I look at fall into 2 camps * Why does this device need internet? What do I gain from that? * This device doesn't need to exist at all

Best cartoon on the subject by @mooseallain.bsky.social