What is the use of a genius who does great work but doesn’t document their results, only produces them? How much do companies enjoy having a structural dependency on someone like that?
I use Claude Desktop (& essentially equivalent mobile app) to ask frivolous aspie questions about things society long ago accepted. I enjoy its responses, interpret how you wlll. (my claude.md file has instructions to tell it that the premise of any question i ask is as likely as not wrong, and to never be sycophantic).
But beware the userMemories file (ask Claude to give you a dump of it). bonus points if you can figure out where that file lives.
At first I was freaked out that usermemories is a subpoena’able psychological profile on me. Then I realized that the same file will be produced for spooks all over Langley, so that the day Anthropic gets hacked those profiles will see the light of day (caveat along with the rest of the user base of course) and so I felt more catharsis as a result.
(see other comment about HN titles). I think expecting an HN post title to match the article title is an overzealous interpretation of the fieldname ‘title’ in the HN submission form. Happy to be corrected if it’s right in the HN forum rules, but I’ve found highly upvoted posts to have an accurately descriptive title that is other than the source article’s title.
In other words, ontologically speaking,
post.title -= article.title
I used to treat it as post.title = article.title, but the community taught me by example to cease being a purist.
Anyway article’s flagged so this is just pedantic at this point.
I’ve found that high community-upvoted posts don’t bury the lede by parroting the headline. I used to be a headline title scribe until the HN community showed me the light.
Commenters are taking seriously an article that quotes the guy who was literally the lead author of Proximal Origins about the state of science. No matter what good points the article brings up elsewhere, this one act alone places its entirety in the trash for me.
While the also-quoted Gonsalves was a lackey for the zoonotic side of the covid origins debate, he's allowed his opinion as an otherwise non-protagonist in the single most consequential event in history to put the scientific enterprise as it had been practiced to date on trial.
I found the juxtaposition of cypherpunks with early greats like Claude Shannon and Alan Turing very interesting, and no doubt an intentional statement on the part of the organizers who clearly hold cypherpunks and cypherpunk culture in high regard (as do I, and admittedly the exhibit helped convince me to do so).
I also like the manifestos placed on similar level as Shannon's seminal papers relating to both communication theory and his somewhat less-frequently referenced seminal paper on secrecy.
The crypto-oriented 4Seas coworking in Chiang Mai set up a very nice exhibit to cypherpunks as laid against the history of cryptography. I took pictures as the exhibit is supposed to have been taken down by now:
The ability for producers of write-ups on 20th c. technology history / computer history to write Vannevar Bush out of the history books by way of ignorant omission never ceases to amaze me. Especially in this case of an anthology on analog computing.
I cottoned onto the film a couple years ago after Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline recommended it on a Weaponized podcast. I like that the exterior facility shots were filmed at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. In the film context I really would construe it as projecting some sort of Cold-War era “secure government science facility” architectural archetype. When one learns about the career arc of E.O.Lawrence, the stylistic allusion to Cold War science feels all the more fitting. Viz. Lawrence Livermore lab has the reputation today of being the more secure, clandestine lab, while nearby Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) has the reputation of being the stand-up academic science lab that welcomes international academic all-comers. But prior to Lawrence Livermore’s founding (like while Edward Teller was closer to the then Berkeley Rad Lab, now LBL). And so for several years, 1940s to at least the early 1950s, Berkeley Rad Lab would have been possessed of what would become those same Livermore-esque secure spooky Cold War science vibes.
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