Feedback: This agent didn't really work well when I tried it with a specific non-famous, but definitely publicly known individual with known connections to Epstein. I'd rather not post a specific name here. I found more documents with keyword searches. I guess it did get me to the conclusion that there wasn't much out there, but it didn't even mention stuff that showed up in name keyword searches.
To replicate though, you might look at the list of individuals mentioned in the brief email from Epstein to Bannon a couple weeks before Esptein died containing ~30 names and phow your engine works with each one. See how a keyword search does on library of congress vs your agent.
Thanks for testing this. The Bannon email from June 30, 2019 is in there (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029622). Good stress test idea.
Couple things happening:
Semantic search limitation: Less-famous names don't have strong embeddings, so it defaults to general connections rather than specific mentions
Keyword search gap: You're right — raw grep can catch exact names I'm missing
I saw a similar problem. Roger Schank had some conversations with Epstein and the emails can be seen in Epsteinvisualizer.com but your site claimed there was no emails or connection. To be fair to Roger, who was an AI legend of his time and someone I knew personally before his untimely death, he really was not a pedo, and most likely never got involved with the girls, I think him and Epstein just talked about AI and education mostly.
I find Tolkein's depictions on his original jacket covers of the Rings of Power and the one ring and the "all seeing eye" that accompanies them quite evocative:
As many of you no doubt know, some people (did you know even 3 days after Hiroshima?![1]) likened Tolkein's One Ring to the power of the atomic bomb developed in the same era: a technology molded by hidden genius, capable of unspeakable power so deadly it must actually /not/ be used, but instead, must be carefully guarded by a small band until it can be destroyed. So that true peace is possible again.
Tolkein of course denied this[2] .... and the timing wasn't right[3] and ... he wasn't a big fan of allegory[4], right?
However, perhaps he foresaw, however unconsciously or through shadow knowledge shared by others or Bentham's Panopticon[5] or seen too by Orwell' 1985[6], the coming surveillance state.
After all, in the trenches of WW1 he took his place managing signals communications in a battalion[7] and when WW2 arrived was approached to be a cryptographer, (even taking four days of preparatory courses on the subject![8] Before getting turned down[9].).
Foresaw what and shared how you ask?
That other, subtler, great Tool of Power to come out of WW2 -- the use of, and covert exposure of, signals encryption.
Encryption exerts its power in a manner not unlike one of the key functions of the rings... Anyone bearing the One Ring or the nine, who then puts on the ring -- like using encryption -- instantly makes themselves "hidden" to the mortal fellows around you.
But tragically, the prolonged use and reliance upon such power deepens and ensures ever increasing temptations and corruptions.
And such ring (encryption) use -- most unintuitively and dangerously -- makes you more, not less visible to the maker of the rings.
(Just as cyphertext stands out in a sea of plaintext.[10] (See Tor today[11], or in WW2 the then-novel phenomena known as radar traceback.[13] Or the then-novel-but-even-more-covert encryption traffic analysis[14].)
Perhaps he saw. And knew.
...
And why too the numeric gap between 1 ring, 3 for elves, 7, and the 9? Nobody knows for sure[15].
Perhaps too some linguistic colleague had whispered to the maker-of-languages (languages as obscure at that time as those of the Apache Code Talkers[16] and similarly perhaps unappreciatedly utilitarian) that... we already had "5 Eyes"[17]??
Perhaps then Tolkein knew? And passed on the word, for those willing to hear...
Poor Tolkein, he became beloved by the very Morlocks[18], err, 'easily corruptible men of middle earth" he warned about.
...
[1...18] Out of time! References available upon request. Or web search... Don't get me started on how this all connects to the Eye of Providence[19] or the Eye of Horus[20]! ;)
> Tolkein of course denied this .... and the timing wasn't right
Just to expand on this, substantial portions of LOTR were written well before the atomic bomb became public knowledge, e.g. Tolkien had written first drafts of Book 4 (Frodo's journey to Mordor with Sam and Gollum) by 1944. In other words, it was already a fundamental plot point that the ring should not be used even as an ultimate weapon.
The depiction of war in LOTR is perhaps more closely associated with Tolkien's personal experiences in the war of 1914-18. The dead marshes in particular have similarities to the trenches of WW1
Just for the record, the remark in the webpage linked from that github saying that in 1996 "gopher was in its heyday" doesn't seem right to my memory. Gopher heyday in 1992-93? Sure! But gopher faded with the rise of Mosaic throughout 1994 iirc...
I acknowledge "dark" is a judgemental term... but the mix of extreme poverty, extreme relative wealth, and the blind eye towards the sex trade is... dark.
Such misery is not unique to Thailand but you may find it more open, deeply rooted, in your face palpable, or covert-in-troubling-ways.
If you are doing serious dev work of a leveragable nature, I would also be6 thoughtful about how to protect one's innovations in a heavenly land adjacent to China, full of friendly Russian expat hackers post-Ukraine-sanctions, with my hinkiness detectors already overwhelmed by cross cultural signals of a new environment.
I could try to sell you on the merits of low cost of living for English-speaking software hackers in other places like Vietnam or the Phillipines but have to remind myself you aren't asking for that and all I really have is anecdotes and observations anyways and so much of our options and choices are shaped by circumstances and personal tradeoffs. I wouldn't do it but I am me, not you. Good luck!
Python won because Google picked it over perl in the early 2000s, declaring that it was more uniform in having one preferred way to do things rather than allowing (in contrast to Perl) programmers having a zillion ways to do things.
Larry Wall, creator of Perl, coined the phrase, "make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible". But the things perl made easy were not always things that the market needed. Perl was very distrustful of enterprise disciplines and the perl culture "let a thousand flowers bloom" mentality (which they/we called "There's more than one way to do it"/(TMTOWTDI)) was not actually useful for organizations maintaining larger code bases/systems with large groups of mixed skill level people.
Python threaded that needle of centralizing a right way to do things (not just whitespaces) more effectively.
I also observed Scala suffering from similarly disfunctional "TMTOWTDI" dynamic in organizations I belonged to; different people had wildly different styles of solving even basic problems and it really made code hard to maintain even in smaller organizations where people came and went and new people were onboarded frequently.
Plus data science use cases saved Python's web/scripting lifespan in a way slightly analogous to AI/CUDA extending NVidia's 3D graphics-centric roots. (Although the python data science ecosystem nowdays does have some TMTOWTDI weaknesses that remind me of perl/cpan's choices of web development frameworks of the mid-2000s!)
I applaud the author for thinking afresh on this topic.
I am also comfortable with the closing comments that you can't always dumb down your code or you stagnate and never learn new tricks/techniques. It is a good thing to keep in mind.
But I have also seen people waste a lot of their (and others') time trying to be clever in ways which as an outsider from additional context I have I can anticipate won't pan out. And I've let it slide and watched it end "not-well", leading to long unnecessary debugging cycles, missing deadlines, and creating boilerplates of YAGNI abstraction and complexity that didn't "make the easy things easy and the hard things possible" but instead made the easy things complicated.
I myself have been accused of that when trying to design optimal "scalable" architectures up front. And I myself have patched over inherited "clever" things with flaws that I handled by adding yet more incremental "cleverness" when, N years later I wish I had just cut the knot of Gordian complexity on day 1.
I think Kernighan's Law is perhaps best applied as a cautionary question to ask yourselves or others in the journey: are you getting too clever, and can you
(and others around you) really debug the cleverness you are pursuing?
Complexity and cleverness may be needed, but have you considered re-approaching the problem from a standpoint that minimizes the need for cleverness?
Put another way, there is cleverness that brings "simplicity of code" that does not bring "simplicity of debugging or maintenance" by yourself or others. It's wise to be aware of that.
I view cleverness as somewhat like "innovation tokens"... you should "pick a small handful" of them strategically but not overuse them. I don't see that caution in a pure statement of "Kernighan's lever".
Also seemingly tacitly ignored in the poster's perspective is any acknowledgement that software is, or can be in a huge chunk of scenarios, a "team sport". It's all fine for you to get more clever by pushing yourself, but if you don't transfer your knowledge/cleverness to the broader development+support group, it isn't good for the organization, and perhaps not even you if you consider your code's value proposition will itself harden and stagnate and get refactored out.
(Of course, for some programmers, that's a virtue; write your code in an obscure language/style so that nobody else will take credit or touch it and mess it up. I literally had an acquaintance who, sensing in me a similar competence (or elitism?), boasted to me about his cleverness in doing this at his workplace. I was intrigued, but silently not impressed.)
The growth is a one time surge due to AI hype, like Y2K fears which required double hardware purchases for pre-y2k testing and the internet boom.
When Y2K passed, while the internet boom continued, all those test servers (and routers and other hardware) bought pre-y2k were freed up and reused, cutting growth #s and driving up P/E ratios for Sun instantly, and with Sun serving as a proxy for the internet boom, the boom was declared a bust in Q1 of 2000. Oh and low end x86+Linux competition didn't help.
Many emotional problems that are highly dysfunctional can be missed or masked by raw intelligence until a certain higher level of intellectual competition or pressure is present.
Having participated in frequent academic competitions in high school in a top-5-biggest metropolitan area in the US, there was one guy in my era who pretty much won city-wide awards in any subject he touched all the time. So bright. He got into an elite college and spiraled out and dropped out for what, in hindsight I'd armchair-diagnose, were a mix of ADHD/Autistic/anxiety-oriented tendencies that collided with online gaming that hadn't caused failures in earlier environments for him.
Agreed. And local NIMBY can get surprisingly personal and politically vicious fast.
I have a friend who argued in public forums (local newspapers+blogs) for denser housing being more walkable and sustainable (in a wealthy small neighborhood we both lived in.) "Small towns" was/is the nationwide name for the trend.
Unknown opponents dug up and published dirt on him that even his wife, friends and employer didn't know. It was quite sobering.
And so they keep blocking efforts by resorting to smear tactics. Own it and reverse it back on them. Debate class 101, they have nothing if they attack you personally.
It sucks that your friend had his closet ransacked for skeletons. This is why I’m completely honest with mine.
That might be why he hasn't mentioned it.
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