> The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.
So you're saying migration changes a society's culture, sometimes to the point of ruination?
There was a high-profile example of this phenomenon recently in NYC, where a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
And it was telling how differently his opponents presented themselves, emphasizing, in their dying outer borough accents, their "toughness"--an attribute once thought essential for the mayor of America's largest city to possess, especially for anyone with a memory of the city before (and during) 9/11. Now? Apparently superfluous. And the victor's ever-present smile, rather than off-putting to the city's voters, who in the past might have perceived it at best as phony, and at worst, as more befitting one the city's countless mentally ill transients, instead unexpectedly found it endearing.
This clown couldn't be bothered to write their own blog post about the suitability of European infrastructure and instead, ironically, outsourced it to a US-based AI giant, Claude/Anthropic.
This is the same Cuba that sent forty thousand mercenaries to kill Ukrainians in the furtherance of Russia's war effort, is openly allied with both Russia and China, and has a well-documented history of willingly serving (in exchange for oil or other assistance) as a platform for hosting foreign military and intelligence assets hostile to the US, including just recently with Havana Syndrome--and it's a mere 90 miles from Florida. And you seriously don't understand why the US wants this regime gone, for good?
And that isn't even to speak about its rampant human rights abuses.
Hopefully the "puppet regime" will put a stop to the rampant "jineterismo," especially the exploitation of Cuba's children, that the current regime tacitly endorses and allows to flourish to the point where it ought to raise eyebrows when some foreign guy (especially older, uglier, and Canadian) simping for the regime also makes a big show of how often they've been to Cuba and how much they "enjoyed" it, just as it would raise eyebrows if they disclosed that they frequented (and loved) Thailand.
> Cuba I don't think will fall, even if it's reduced to the Stone Age.
As in, the regime will cling to power, damn the cost (which the people, not the oligarchs, will incur)? Or do you mean to imply the Cuban people support the dictatorship?
Here's the full text of the letter Ted Kaczynski sent to Gelenrtner to explain his motives or taunt him, depending on your interpretation:
> Dr. Gelernter:
> People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are. If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source.
> In the epilog of your book, Mirror Worlds, you tried to justify your research by claiming that the developments you describe are inevitable, and that any college person can learn enough about computers to compete in a computer-dominated world. Apparently, people without a college degree don't count. In any case, being informed about computers won't enable anyone to prevent invasion of privacy (through computers), genetic engineering (to which computers make an important contribution), environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth) and so forth.
> As for the inevitability argument, if the developments you describe are inevitable, they are not inevitable in the way that old age and bad weather are inevitable. They are inevitable only because techno-nerds like you make them inevitable. If there were no computer scientists there would be no progress in computer science. If you claim you are justified in pursuing your research because the developments involved are inevitable, then you may as well say that theft is inevitable, therefore we shouldn't blame thieves.
> But we do not believe that progress and growth are inevitable. We'll have more to say about that later.
Gelernter is also a prominent neoconservative thinker (but with paleo sympathies) and an avid painter of roughly the same skill level and taste as Paul Graham (i.e., low and bad). He impressively had to re-learn how to paint with his non-dominant left hand after the blast (so unlike pg, he has an excuse), because it permanently damaged his dominant right hand enough to render it useless, along with his right eye.
As someone who's admired him (with reservations) for a while, I find the disclosure disheartening. However, the fact that he named his pet programming language after a porn star (Linda Lovelace) does suggest his attitude towards women isn't the most enlightened.
The Epstein scandal is being managed to create a state of hysteria, which chaos seems to be serving Trump by impugning so many others that his culpability disappears into the noise.
Everyone has somehow forgotten Hugh Hefner and Playboy being a cultural and business masthead in a media empire built on the same principles of fetish and control as Epstein's little Deutchnyland. Where did Epstein learn his ways?
The term "survivor" is generously espoused when remarking on "victims" of Epstein's network in the midst of 500 years of an enormous overwhelming elite class war, which at this moment in history is manifesting, again, via enormous funding for centralized domestic policy of jackbooting and human trafficking capping a foreign policy of literally blowing people up to preserve narrow ideological and monied interests.
By every measure, Epstein was a modern, well-loved and accepted central figure in the business network that manifests in policy of wrecking lives and we all take pride in this network.
The Epstein outrage might be understood as justice if it were in any way related to these larger abuse networks, but it cannot be understood this way. It's instead sequestered to an Epstein-island of hysteria that's being carefully managed by the same policy makers and media complex that runs the war networks.
Even when we denounce Epstein we're still taking pride in this system.
The needed awareness of this could not be closer to home than here at YC, but like Chomsky, everyone thinks s/he is above and beyond the horror.
I changed the title because most people have never heard of David Gelernter.
He's a professor of CS at Yale (emeritus, I guess?) who created the Linda programming language and came up with the concept of "Life Streams," a forerunner to temporal feed-based social media, like Twitter and Instagram: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html
And he was also famously attacked by Ted Kaczynski, presumably because Kaczynski anticipated the significance of Gelernter's ideas (that, or the old Harvard-Yale rivalry got a little too heated).
> The AI companies won't just scrape IA once, they're keeping come back to the same pages and scraping them over and over. Even if nothing has changed.
Why, though? Especially if the pages are new; aren't they concerned about ingesting AI-generated content?
Possibly because a lot of “AI-company scraping” isn't traditional scraping (e.g., to build a dataset of the state at a particular point in time), its referencing the current content of the page as grounding for the response to a user request.
So you're saying migration changes a society's culture, sometimes to the point of ruination?
There was a high-profile example of this phenomenon recently in NYC, where a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
And it was telling how differently his opponents presented themselves, emphasizing, in their dying outer borough accents, their "toughness"--an attribute once thought essential for the mayor of America's largest city to possess, especially for anyone with a memory of the city before (and during) 9/11. Now? Apparently superfluous. And the victor's ever-present smile, rather than off-putting to the city's voters, who in the past might have perceived it at best as phony, and at worst, as more befitting one the city's countless mentally ill transients, instead unexpectedly found it endearing.
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