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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

- https://naacp.org/articles/spread-disinformation-and-how-we-...


Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation of id Software.


Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake, when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics. His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot. There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack


I loved MoD! The audio book read by Will Wheaton is also pretty good.


Another interesting analysis of EWS is https://timkreider.com/introducing-sociology/


That prick piano player Nick Nightingale ended up making some interesting movies of his own.


When your personal net worth is over 300 billion I don’t think the cybertruck will make any difference to Elons persona as a wunderkind.


Missing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Mind fucked…


For me that was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert was not just a movie critic... And it inspired Austin Powers as well!


Can’t forget Elon.


>Can’t forget Elon.

I try very hard to do so. And mostly I succeed until someone (this time you) brings him up.


Boo hoo


"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

https://naacp.org/articles/spread-disinformation-and-how-we-...


> "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

That honestly sounds like it is either fake or a joke taken out of context. If that were true, America (and thus the CIA) would collapse and become uncompetitive with its adversaries. The American public is the foundation of the American economy, and people who know only false things aren't very productive.

The naive reading also dovetails too nicely with the mood in some corners to view the CIA as a cartoon villain, which just does evil things all the time for no reason.


I’m not sure that being 50 has anything to do with it.


At least he's self-aware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8BJ8AufQt8

(arguable She-Hulk spoiler)


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