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> First of all, Google is a shell of the company it used to be.

Isn't that squarely at odds with Google's supposed AI prowess? Is the rot really so severe that their advances in AI (including things they've yet to make public) are insufficient to overcome it? Or are the capabilities of Gemini and AI systems in general being oversold?

It's not saying much, but this website is really nice, succinctly telling you what the project is about and what it can do, making all of the relevant links accessible, and having a nice slide show and video demo, and looking fairly slick while doing it.

> coin flip

No, you have to consider the non-genetic, environmental factors that also influence the development of political ideology, specifically the households in which children are raised and the schooling and media to which they're exposed, all of which will increasingly become conservative.

Being a draft, it deprived Gates any opportunity to respond, so it's possible Epstein was playing "4D Chess" and planting defamatory disinfo in anticipation that his emails would be subpoenaed in some civil suit and leaked to the public, but that seems much less likely than Epstein boorishly bringing up an unpleasant episode that in fact did happen to use as emotional leverage over gates. (Epstein was known to be very pushy.)

It's also crazy to see a man like Bill Gates willingly compromise himself in this manner. Even setting aside the Epstein affiliation, did the Russian spy angle just not occur to him?

> People know about the escorts because he asked for help getting STD drugs from Epstein.

Technically, this was something Epstein alleged in an email to himself, one that he never sent to Gates, but apparently contemplated sending, after Gates broke off their relationship. It does call into question how many escorts he had affairs with, though. He publicly only acknowledges two, one with a Russian bridge player (who took selfies with Ana Chapman (!)), and another with a Russian nuclear physicist: https://nypost.com/2026/02/25/us-news/inside-bill-gates-sord...

> Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products

Have you not used target.com or walmart.com recently?

A lot of the interest in Ladybird and its parent project, SerenityOS, stemmed from the bespoke, "from scratch" approach Andreas advocated. If they're going to start vibe-coding everything, then what's the point of the top-to-bottom wheel reinvention they're doing? E.g., why even bother maintaining their own, custom XML parser instead of using any of the multitude that already exist (including in Rust) if they're ultimately going to lean heavily on AI in the course of developing it, since that inherently involves laundering existing implementations?

This project, of all of them, throwing in the towel on AI makes me fear AI abstainers have no future.

It shows you how sociopathically shameless they are.

Since no one's mentioned it, this was tried once before by a company called Micro Focus, which sold software to modernize "legacy" COBOL-based mainframe applications so they could run on x86, and while somewhat successful, they failed to disrupt IBM's mainframe business, because these legacy systems traditionally relied as much on the idiosyncrasies of the mainframe hardware itself and not just the COBOL language.

If all Anthropic is offering is some kind of smart language translation, I'm not sure they will have many takers. And whatever you think about mainframes, it is quite nice that our credit card networks work as efficiently and reliably as they do.

> waves of immigration

It's not just immigrants. Mamdani did extremely well with the college demo, a great many of whom are transplants paying through the nose for the "big city college experience" who have as little of a stake in the city as many recent immigrants.

> What's your point?

I'm not sure how much more clearly I can spell this out for you. The NYC of 20 years ago never would have elected someone as soft as Mamdani. Look at him, and then look at his immediate predecessor. Look at his opponents. Look at how they crafted their messaging, how they emphasized their "toughness" in a vain attempt to a appeal, in accents fast fading, to a city that is likewise fast fading.

> The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.

So you're saying migration changes a society's culture, sometimes to the point of ruination?

There was a high-profile example of this phenomenon recently in NYC, where a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.

And it was telling how differently his opponents presented themselves, emphasizing, in their dying outer borough accents, their "toughness"--an attribute once thought essential for the mayor of America's largest city to possess, especially for anyone with a memory of the city before (and during) 9/11. Now? Apparently superfluous. And the victor's ever-present smile, rather than off-putting to the city's voters, who in the past might have perceived it at best as phony, and at worst, as more befitting one the city's countless mentally ill transients, instead unexpectedly found it endearing.

This clown couldn't be bothered to write their own blog post about the suitability of European infrastructure and instead, ironically, outsourced it to a US-based AI giant, Claude/Anthropic.

I flagged his submission for being AI.

This is the same Cuba that sent forty thousand mercenaries to kill Ukrainians in the furtherance of Russia's war effort, is openly allied with both Russia and China, and has a well-documented history of willingly serving (in exchange for oil or other assistance) as a platform for hosting foreign military and intelligence assets hostile to the US, including just recently with Havana Syndrome--and it's a mere 90 miles from Florida. And you seriously don't understand why the US wants this regime gone, for good?

And that isn't even to speak about its rampant human rights abuses.

Hopefully the "puppet regime" will put a stop to the rampant "jineterismo," especially the exploitation of Cuba's children, that the current regime tacitly endorses and allows to flourish to the point where it ought to raise eyebrows when some foreign guy (especially older, uglier, and Canadian) simping for the regime also makes a big show of how often they've been to Cuba and how much they "enjoyed" it, just as it would raise eyebrows if they disclosed that they frequented (and loved) Thailand.

Their entire comment history reads like AI to me.

> Cuba I don't think will fall, even if it's reduced to the Stone Age.

As in, the regime will cling to power, damn the cost (which the people, not the oligarchs, will incur)? Or do you mean to imply the Cuban people support the dictatorship?

Here's the full text of the letter Ted Kaczynski sent to Gelenrtner to explain his motives or taunt him, depending on your interpretation:

> Dr. Gelernter:

> People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are. If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source.

> In the epilog of your book, Mirror Worlds, you tried to justify your research by claiming that the developments you describe are inevitable, and that any college person can learn enough about computers to compete in a computer-dominated world. Apparently, people without a college degree don't count. In any case, being informed about computers won't enable anyone to prevent invasion of privacy (through computers), genetic engineering (to which computers make an important contribution), environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth) and so forth.

> As for the inevitability argument, if the developments you describe are inevitable, they are not inevitable in the way that old age and bad weather are inevitable. They are inevitable only because techno-nerds like you make them inevitable. If there were no computer scientists there would be no progress in computer science. If you claim you are justified in pursuing your research because the developments involved are inevitable, then you may as well say that theft is inevitable, therefore we shouldn't blame thieves.

> But we do not believe that progress and growth are inevitable. We'll have more to say about that later.

Gelernter is also a prominent neoconservative thinker (but with paleo sympathies) and an avid painter of roughly the same skill level and taste as Paul Graham (i.e., low and bad). He impressively had to re-learn how to paint with his non-dominant left hand after the blast (so unlike pg, he has an excuse), because it permanently damaged his dominant right hand enough to render it useless, along with his right eye.

As someone who's admired him (with reservations) for a while, I find the disclosure disheartening. However, the fact that he named his pet programming language after a porn star (Linda Lovelace) does suggest his attitude towards women isn't the most enlightened.

I changed the title because most people have never heard of David Gelernter.

He's a professor of CS at Yale (emeritus, I guess?) who created the Linda programming language and came up with the concept of "Life Streams," a forerunner to temporal feed-based social media, like Twitter and Instagram: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

He's also arguably something of a patent troll: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-prof-loses-625-5m-ap...

And he was also famously attacked by Ted Kaczynski, presumably because Kaczynski anticipated the significance of Gelernter's ideas (that, or the old Harvard-Yale rivalry got a little too heated).

Even better, you don't have to worry about ICE jackboots trying kick people out. (However, egress may prove a tad bit more difficult.)

> The AI companies won't just scrape IA once, they're keeping come back to the same pages and scraping them over and over. Even if nothing has changed.

Why, though? Especially if the pages are new; aren't they concerned about ingesting AI-generated content?

Does anyone know if DrPizza is still in the clink?

It's ChatGPT telling you that you should keep it well-fed.

> lower risk, instant settlement

That's ridiculous. Why should I, as a consumer, care about the merchant's "risk?"

Your post is pure victim-blaming, as well as normalizing an exploitative state of affairs (being aggressively DDOSed by poorly-behaved scrapers run by Big Tech that only take and never give back, unlike pre-AI search engines, which previously, at least, would previously send you traffic) that was unheard of until just a few years ago.

Well, it's heartening to know that AI is making your life at least somewhat less enjoyable.

Thanks to all the OSS projects that adopted this in preference to mailing lists to better appeal to zoomers. (And note that while these projects often do still have mailing lists, most of the actual discussion now takes place on Discord, behind an authwall.)

I'm not sure why this was downvoted. The MIT license, which many devs (and every LLM) treat as if it were public domain, still requires inclusion of the license and its copyright notice verbatim in derivative works.

The "Anti" stance is only tenable now if you believe LLMs are going to hit a major roadblock in the next few months around which Big AI won't be able to navigate. Something akin to the various "ghosts in the machine" that started bedeviling EEs after 2000 when transistors got sufficiently small, including gate leakage and sub-threshold current, such that Dennard Scaling came to an abrupt end and clock speeds stalled.

I personally hope that that happens, but I doubt it will. Note also that processors still continued to improve even without Dennard Scaling due to denser, better optimized onboard caches, better branch prediction, and more parallelism (including at the instruction level), and the broader trend towards SoCs and away from PCB-based systems, among other things. So at least by analogy, it's not impossible that even with that conjectured roadblock, Big AI could still find room for improvement, just at a much slower rate.

But current LLMs are thoroughly compelling, and even just continued incremental improvements will prove massively disruptive to society.

> huge sea of started, maybe completed, student and open source project.

Which is easy to filter out based on downloads, version numbering, issue tracker entries, and wikipedia or other external references if the project is older and archived, but historically noteworthy (like the source code for Netscape Communicator or DOOM).

> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal

Note that even MIT requires attribution.