Lar Van Der Jagt

This is especially frustrating when you realize that Watergate did many of those same people a huge favor by supplanting all the stuff coming out of the Church/Pike investigations at the time.

I am so confused by the Erie Canal bit.

Was looking for this one. I suspect he’d show up in way more replies if he hadn’t been so consistently cryptic about what his work was supposed to mean.

And mining! Lots of mining, both for the chips and the energy that powers them.

What We Lost When We Lost the Greatest Generation It's no coincidence that democracy is backsliding in the US exactly eighty years after the end of World War II.

As we mark the 80th anniversary of WWII's end, I’ve come to believe that in losing that Greatest Generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat. We are losing the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/what-we-lo...

That “I assure you this is something I know a lot about” bit reads like a gambling addict explaining their foolproof strategy to beat the house.

Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 Government regulation of the railroads is probably the most important example of federal intervention in the economy from the Civil War to World War I. It is also a key to an assessment of the impulse...

Not a perfect match but perhaps books.google.com/books/about/...

Also the Korean War is literally nicknamed The Forgotten War.

When they did the reboot an named a series of episodes “My Struggle” I realized that stuff probably wasn’t just harmless entertainment after all.

The only thing I’d add is that he did it with the help of the same Saudi investors who first bought into twitter during the Arab spring.

The Segway was supposed to be the future of transportation.

I am convinced that this is how “brainwashing” and the whole MKULTRA program came into being.

In my gloomier moments, I suspect we don't want to think about systems because we would have to acknowledge connections we would rather ignore.

Kathrine Graham rolling in her grave while Nixon dances in his.

Just wait until you find out who Stewart Copeland’s dad is!

I hope the backlash puts enough spotlight on her that it spills over onto her awful crypto bill as well.

A reflection of America’s love affair with the Prosperity Gospel I suppose, more Malthus than Nuremberg.

A spectre is haunting New York…

I can’t remember where but I’ve read that withholding vaccines from non-Aryans was an explicit part of the Nazi regimes racial policy. So, probably sounds like one because it was one.

“The trouble with I.Q. testing is not that it is entirely spurious, but that it is incomplete. It measures certain intellectual abilities that large, politically dominant segments of western European societies have elevated to the very stuff of human worth and hence to the sine qua non of success. It is incomplete in two ways: first, in that it fails to take into account that human creativity depends not only on intellect but also crucially on an interplay between intellect and other modalities of thought, such as intuition and wisdom; second, in that it characterizes intelligence as a linearly measurable phenomenon that exists independent of any frame of reference.” Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

As Weizenbaum lays it out here, the whole idea that “intelligence” is measurable and quantifiable is bullshit

In my mind the people at the top of this pyramid absolutely know that to “get better” will require exponentially more training data and compute resources, because that is where the real money is, not in productized chatbots.

The phrase “provocative weakness” comes to mind.

Yes! They’re doing Accusation in a Mirror as executive policy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusat...

Basing your moral understanding of resisting authoritarianism on a Star Wars is the same picture as tech billionaires basing their ideas of a techno-utopia on an Asimov story

Nobody likes talking about the real issue here, being that trying to structure your understanding of reality on fictional plots (or rhetorical quotes) is not an effective way to make sense of reality or of how we ought to participate in a society

I would especially like to see some focus on how the entire Thiel network seems to be a Lord of the Rings fandom using their practically unlimited funds to remake the world in line with their fantasies.

IMO there should be a lot more outrage about the tech industry pushing “drop out of school and do a code bootcamp” while simultaneously building LLMs that would sabotage the job prospects of graduates.

Oh I cannot wait to read this!!

Facebook, a computing pioneer, a secret government program, and a strange coincidence How one man’s quest to remember everything helped usher in a new era.

Took em 20 years but they
finally looped back to LifeLog whyy.org/segments/fac...

To take control of the heroin trade from the French? Something about dominos?