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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 6 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.789s | source | bottom
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hermanradtke ◴[28 Oct 24 22:23 UTC] No.41977109[source]▶
> Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial

I really want to see this video, but I cannot find it anywhere. I checked https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGKfGEEONaDvuLDFFKRf... but I believe Gary asks that his videos not be shown (which I am fine with). I also checked https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks but I do not see it there either.

Should I be looking somewhere else?

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1. hyperhopper ◴[29 Oct 24 02:06 UTC] No.41978661[source]▶
His "using you're types good" talk being censored is my go-to example for how "cancel culture" and "wokeness" has gone too far, a good useful talk not meant to be harmful to anybody, with no evidence that anybody was hurt by it, is removed from the world for the far reaching fear that one day some person might not be happy about it.

The fact that years later people still want to learn from it and nobody has every talked about it being an issue shows we have gone too far as a society on the side of caution and never doing anything that wouldn't stand up to a fortune 10 HR exec panel.

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2. spookie ◴[29 Oct 24 03:02 UTC] No.41978955[source]▶
What was "wrong" about the talk exactly?
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3. hyperhopper ◴[29 Oct 24 03:15 UTC] No.41979018[source]▶
He effectively pretended to be dumb. And that included using the wrong "you're" and very simple dialects of English and mannerisms which he thought could potentially be seen as disparaging some groups.

I think it was so generic and so clearly a joke it would be insane to pretend it was making fun of a group that existed in real life.

For reference in the talk he also listed strongly typed languages as "weekly typed", static as dynamic, and had a MacBook on stage display a BSOD.

The talk was comedic genius and a fun tongue in cheek commentary on the industry in 8 minutes. But it has been deemed to dangerous to society to be allowed to exist.

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4. gs17 ◴[29 Oct 24 04:58 UTC] No.41979519{3}[source]▶
Is this a real thing that happened? It's framed as a young child making a lot of misconceptions, you'd have to be pretty darn sensitive to get offended by that.
5. great_tankard ◴[29 Oct 24 05:19 UTC] No.41979619[source]▶
I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When was Gary "cancelled?"
6. Jgrubb ◴[29 Oct 24 12:03 UTC] No.41983008[source]▶
Look, I don't know the video but how do we know - or why do we assume - that it was taken down out of fear of future weaponized wokeness? Maybe Gary took it down for Gary's reasons.

Edit: from the couple of descriptions in this thread I could totally envision an empathetic individual waking up one day and deciding that talk felt too much like punching down and taking it down because they felt like they could do better.