I don't know, this is just speculation. Mainly because the cost of producing a duplicate letter (for ones actually sent, not this case) was sufficiently high that I assume there wasn't a culture that could make use of such duplicates.
I don't think this is a reasonable interpretation of an unsent later. The point of creating documents for the purposes of CYA requires them to be publicly recorded otherwise there will be accusations that the document was created after the fact.
There's really no reason to believe this was a motivation for Lincoln to write a letter, particularly because there is no clear reason for him to be concerned for CYA. The only people Lincoln would be accountable would be the voters, and I don't see producing a letter blaming Meade for letting Lee escape to be something that would pass muster. I mean, what's the argument here? "I was angry at Meade at the time, and here's the letter proving that I was angry"?
So it seems reasonable to conclude that this is an example of anger management, and not a political back up plan.
There's a guideline about this, at least in spirit:
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
If you feel so strongly about it, email the mods with your suspicions. Repeatedly posting this kind of thing, based on effectively nothing at all (lots of people write general audience articles without indexing every bit of research they've done) is just lame and rude. You owe the author an apology.
No, I don't owe him anything, and it is not "based on nothing" -- it's based on its being a piece with no original reporting. And he says "out of print" as if to excuse the lack of any content from those books.
And as for "without indexing every bit of research they've done" is just gaslighting, or something. How about anything that a casual web search wouldn't turn up?
Absolutely none of this supports your accusation that this was 'generated by AI'. It's a completely unfounded aspersion. It's a little rich to be reaching for 'gaslighting' when you just made something up about an article and keep repeating it.
I talk about sources in the piece. I own Osborne's books. The only picture in it is one that's credited to me, a photo of my personal copy of Hypergrowth. I have done interviews with people who knew him. I quote a number of people who did. I've spent many years trawling old issues of Byte, Infoworld and more on this era (because a lot of this stuff outside of the common Apple/Microsoft narrative is obscure or badly covered in modern books - if at all).
I don't know why AlbertCory reacted that way to your article, but I loved it. One correction: Pournelle showing off the Osborne to others covering the Voyager encounter with Saturn occurred at Caltech, not at NASA's DC HQ.
They can call it whatever they want but it’s essentially IFTT + DOM scraping /automation (“teaching” lol) for places without an official API with a super thin AI veneer. Mostly for suggestions.
I don’t think they’re saying anyone is forgetting anything. Rather they’re saying if they turn it in for some specific reason they just don’t bother to turn it off once that reason is past. Which seems insane to me but to each their own.
Except in this study they were comparing writing on a paper to writing on a tablet so it seems that somehow the fact that the writing happened to a piece of paper makes our memory better and its not just the act of writing itself.
That's testable, but if it turns out to have a benefit, you'll have to implement that effect on all tablets and phones, and make corrections more difficult (???).
However, I don't think it has a benefit: people don't correct themselves on tablet/phone, so I think the cost of a mistake is the same as on paper, namely 0, unless people are really more careful when writing.
I think the "other" in the Wikipedia articles refers to that the six listed (Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and Harvey White) are in addition to the "leader" Irwin Jacobs, not that they are in addition to seven unlisted founders.
