> This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots.
Only an idiot would read the piece in that way.
>It should be flagged and taken down.
Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?
>The main value of modern ape coding appears to be recreational. Ape coders manifest high levels of engagement during coding sessions and report feelings of relaxation after succeeding in (self-imposed) coding challenges. Competitive ape coding is also popular, with top ranked ape coders being relatively well-known in their communities.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college.
I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.
(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment
I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in
You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people
Every online social problem was first experienced by Usenet. Every social protocol contains an informal bugridden incomplete implementation of half of Usenet.
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.
I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.
I wonder if LLM analysis could help with moderation automation if well implemented. It can still be human-in-the-loop and you need to apply it tastefully (!!!), i.e. not letting just the most hardcore dogmatists discuss in some extremist group, but those are another issue entirely in some sense. Also, beware malicious users wasting tokens.
It depends what you consider a problem. Deliberate trolling is probably uncommon, but annoying people regurgitating what they've been told by mainstream media was, and is, all too common.
> The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts),
> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
> This is what killed Usenet,
You've got to be kidding!
The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".
Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.
The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.
At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
I'm not particularly convinced, a mention of the arpanet is a mention of the arpanet, and keeping quiet means keeping quiet.
I can believe that Pournelle was being the kind of person about whom one might write "most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two" and that was the real reason he got kicked off, but that's a long way away from being censored for politics.
It's odd that Bradford DeLong copied my original file of email that I put together without giving any attribution or provenance where it came from, and stripped the introduction I wrote that contextualized it, then omitted the first email from Chris Stacy to 11 different people including Pournelle, which established the actual context.
DeLong is a UC Berkeley economics professor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Clinton, and prominent blogger who should know better than to strip attribution from the compiled primary sources he's plagiarizing and posting to his blog.
Here is the original file he copied without credit (without his unreadable css):
- Removes my authorial framing without attribution
- Omits the January 1984 email which provides crucial administrative context
- Strips formatting that helps establish authenticity
- Presents it as his own curation on his blog
The missing 1984 email is particularly important because it shows the guest account policies were already being tightened before the Pournelle incident, making the eventual account termination part of a broader pattern rather than a purely personal vendetta.
The January 1984 email he omitted was sent to 11 recipients including Pournelle himself, which shows he was directly informed of the TACACS policies over a year before the incident.
Regarding ylee's post and the filfre.net discussion: I was there, I personally know the primary actors, and I'm the one who compiled the original document that DeLong plagiarized. The interpretation in stepped_pyramids' comment and Yeechang Lee's defense of Pournelle in the filfre.net comments are both wrong.
It wasn't about "mentioning ARPANET in Byte" or politics. It was about behavior.
GUMBY (David Henkel-Wallace), an HN regular and old friend who founded Cygnus Support (the pioneering open source company that developed GCC, acquired by Red Hat in 1999), and the youngest hacker to have his own office at the MIT AI Lab, was in the original 1985 thread:
>>I wonder if this is the first instance of politically motivated mobbing behavior to take place over a digital communications medium?
>It was not politically motivated (I am in that thread from 1985). Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard (which is hardly a crime, but doesn't make people sympathetic when you call them assholes and then tell them to do things for you).
>As for the proxmiring: he was one of the common offenders; he loved to talk archly about how he was part of the insider elite, while claiming that that was proof of his democratic ideals.
>gumby on Sept 10, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>I love that excerpt since it was classic Pournelle: included a nice extra bit of detail that showed he was "in the know" yet was not actually true (RMS was never a grad student). He used to boast he was part of Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" of space advisors, and talked about their EOB meetings -- but i knew folks on the NSC technical advisory committee and it was nothing like he described.
>I never let on that the person he "knew" online and the person he knew offline were the same me.
The irony of quoting Pournelle complaining about "a handful of people" causing "most of the irritation" on online forums is rich - Pournelle WAS that handful of people. He was widely known in SF fandom as a belligerent drunk at conventions, and he brought that behavior online.
Pournelle literally asked to be kicked off: "If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." They did. He got exactly what he demanded.
RMS personally wrote custom software for Pournelle and patiently tutored him. Pournelle's thanks? Telling John McCarthy that MIT was "run by a bunch of communists."
Pournelle violated the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy on multiple counts: commercial use for his BYTE column, promoting his books on SF-LOVERS, and anti-social behavior. The policy explicitly stated: "Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."
His response to getting called out was threatening to sic his "Pentagon friends," "reporter friends," and "the House Armed Services Committee" on grad students running a free service he was abusing.
The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty.
KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old."
The real damage from DeLong's sloppy plagiarism (I won't link but you can google for proof): his stripped-down version has now propagated to places like Kiwi Farms, where trolls cite DeLong's copy as evidence that Pournelle was "the first person banned more or less for wrong think on DARPAnet." The exact opposite of reality. This is what happens when you strip context and attribution from compiled primary sources - bad-faith actors weaponize the gaps.
>Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers. And thus smaller ability to promote its innovations or be selected because of them.
Columbia University during the 1990s was a SunOS/Solaris shop (and, before then, VAX <https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/>). My first year, AcIS (Academic Information Systems, IT for faculty/students) set up a single computer lab in the engineering building <https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...> with HP workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.
The boxes used the same Kerberos authentication as the Sun systems, so I presume I must have been using context-dependent filesystems for binaries when logging into the systems locally, or when I chose to remote log into one specifically from elsewhere (just for novelty's sake; I preferred the Sun cluster, or the Sun box dedicated to staff use).
MAE—the raison d'etre for the HP boxes—was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced HP, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.
If this is true, it will be a significant change in strategy. The company has always played upmarket. Average iPhone prices have risen since the first iPhone 18 years ago, as opposed to falling. Around that time, I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
But Apple had already released a $799 laptop - the eMate 300 in 1997.
Ahead of its time - ARM processor, 28-hour battery life, flash storage, wireless modem card. Its curved, translucent case design (with a handle!) was echoed in the iMac (1998) and iBook (1999).
It also appears to have come with a decent keyboard.
I have strong nostalgia for the eMate. Yes, it had a nice keyboard (at least comparable with the era); smaller pitch than standard keyboards. And, of course, resitive pen-based touch screen.
It _was_ a PDA with a keyboard though. It had a good office suite, a web browser, printer drivers, and a vibrant developer community. But you probably still expected to dock it with Newton Connection Utilities on a computer to add software and get data off it.
When I started at Goldman Sachs, I was told early on of an "Israeli discount" and "Canadian discount"; that is, investors were more skeptical of companies based in those countries.
I was not told of any more details than that at the time, but I now wonder if the VSE contributed to this?
>Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.
I was told right after the bombing, by someone with a large engineering firm (Schlumberger or Bechtel), that the bombers could have brought the building down had they done it right.
>but you could just plug MX-80 series in to Windows 9x and pick any of the same fonts as you would for a laser printer, and it went bi-directional laying down overlapping dots like Adobe bricks, near-letter-quality enough to where they could hardly tell the difference once you faxed the page to somebody
I am happy to report that I was doing the same thing in 1986 with GEOS on Commodore 64! And again in 1990 with PC/GEOS on Tandy 1000!
(Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)
I have pleasant memories of using SpeedScript on my C64 to write several papers in high school. What an amazing piece of software: a word processor in 5 KB.
I used Applixware on Linux during college. Here's what I wrote to someone else at the time:
----
I've been using Applixware 4.2 then 4.3 to write papers and such for a year and a half. Bear in mind that I've only used the Words module, not anything else.
In many ways Applixware is a superb program. Great interface, great looks, multiple-language support, including dictionaries and thesauruses (important for a Spanish major like me). The only major deficiencies are 1) inadequate filters support (Word 6/7 import and export is pretty buggy; I hear 4.4.1 will do a much better job, and handle Word97 too) and 2) missing some basic features like a simple way to do single/double spacing (you have to type in the measurements yourself).
----
Another notable omission is word count; I used a macro as substitute.
Despite the flaws (4.4.1 did not fix the inability to do simple line spacing, and I was told by the company that there were no plans to change this), Applixware was good enough. I produced .rtf files that I printed via Word on campus laser printers, and .pdf files for job applications during senior year.
I think Applixware was the corporate standard office software at Sun Micro in the late 90’s. This was during the Sun-on-Sun initiative that “banned Windows” and had all employees running Solaris on Sparcstations. There was grumbling. Sales, admin staff, basically anyone not technical, well let’s say they were not pleased.
Sun switched the standard to StarOffice around ~2000 iirc, it was a nice improvement but still not great for folks who only knew MS Office.
Only an idiot would read the piece in that way.
>It should be flagged and taken down.
Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?