all tech bros wanna be artists

all tech bros wanna be artists but they never actually make any art. they'll come back from work at insert big tech company here and then think hey, you know what would make me feel really creatively fulfilled if I made this cool looking website and then they'll open up Claude Code and say hey make me a personal website that looks kind of nice and has a really nice font that links to my letterbox so that everybody knows I have really good taste in movies and also shows what song is currently playing on my Spotify so everybody knows that I've really good taste in music then they'll record a video post it to Twitter get like 50 likes and then think hey I did something cool today I did something really creative these are people that have read Borges in college or at least claim that they have they've read if on a winters night a traveler by Calvino or at least they claim that they have they've watched through great movies or they claim that they have they may just be Larpers but they try to LARP like they have taste they'll own the books but the book's sole purpose is to be a signifier that yes this individual has taste they'll try their hand at writing they'll open up a substack regurgitate takes from other people for the first three posts and then on the fourth post when they have to say something that they actually believe in that they can stake their claim on that will maybe bring them disagreement and hate they'll give up because they don't know how to notice or say anything that they truly believe to them the idea of supporting the arts paying five bucks a month to subscribe to their friend Substack and then in the city that this is all likely happening in San Francisco the symphony does not have enough money the opera does not have enough money the de Young Art Museum does not have enough money and I'm not gonna pretend that I go to those places but this is the case this is all covered more in depth in this essay the laboratory and the artist by Lucas Gelfon that I read this morning and that's why I made this video but I think a lot of engineers do also seem to neglect one thing that being a good engineer is a creative work in and of itself if you make a really great piece of software it is creative and it is a work of art I think Linux is a work of art and that Linus Torvalds is an artist and he was creative in making it I think the engineers that were at Pixar that made it possible that Toy Story could be created were artists that they were creatives I think the original engineers at OpenAI that trained GPT2 as a model are creatives and artists because I think that base model was a work of art it is possible to be a creative engineer if you stop trying to cosplay being an artist you cannot both get the cultural cool factor of being an artist that has like some avant garde taste and makes things that people disagree with and also like the 500K TC that you would get as being a senior software engineer you can't do it unless you really believe in something and make real true art