Immigrants to the U.S. who changed the world

Another cut-and-paste from Twitter, this time from Rohoza (Дев'ятий) Mykhailo:

15 Geniuses Who Fled the Pogroms — or Were the Children of Those Who Did. 

 

All of them were Americans. Their ancestors were Jews from the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. They fled pogroms, restrictions, and antisemitism — and built a different life.  

 

Here is what their descendants became: 

 

1. Isaac Asimov — born in the Smolensk Governorate. Author of Foundation and I, Robot. One of the greatest science-fiction writers of the 20th century. 

 

2. Saul Bellow — son of refugees from the Grodno Governorate. Nobel Prize laureate. He wrote about the Jewish experience in America — and about the human condition. 

 

3. Kirk Douglas (Danielovitch) — son of poor immigrants from the Grodno region. He became a Hollywood symbol of strength and courage. 

 

4. Steven Spielberg — grandson of Jews from Odesa and Kamianets. Created Schindler’s List and Indiana Jones. Helped reshape the way the world remembers the Holocaust. 

 

5. Dustin Hoffman — descendant of Jews from Kyiv and Bila Tserkva. A face of the “New Hollywood” — a hero without muscles, but with a soul. 

 

6. Mel Brooks — son of an immigrant from Daugavpils. Made The Producers and mocked Hitler. Hilarious — and terrifying at the same time. 

 

7. Bob Dylan — grandson of Jews from Odesa and Lithuania. Nobel Prize laureate. A prophet of rock and roll. 

 

8. Leonard Bernstein — his parents came from the Rivne region. Composer, conductor, educator. A symbol of American music. 

 

9. Richard Feynman — his grandfather came from Minsk. A genius of quantum electrodynamics. He loved playing the bongos and challenging the academic establishment. 

 

10. Murray Gell-Mann — his mother’s family came from Ukraine. He discovered quarks. Without him, modern physics would have a massive hole in it. 

 

11. Michael Bloomberg — grandson of Jews from the Mogilev region. Mayor of New York City, billionaire. The Bloomberg name is known around the world. 

 

12. Larry Ellison — son of a woman from Odesa. He founded Oracle and became one of the richest — and most controversial — figures in tech. 

 

13. Bernie Sanders — his father came from Słopnice, Poland. A socialist with Jewish roots who came close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination. 

 

14. Ruth Bader Ginsburg — daughter of a Jewish immigrant from Odesa. U.S. Supreme Court Justice. An icon of feminism and liberal America. 

 

15. Noam Chomsky — his father came from a shtetl in what is now Ukraine. A towering figure in linguistics and a relentless critic of power, propaganda, and lies.  

 

And all of this grew out of the shtetls. Out of the Pale. Out of a world built around the word “forbidden.” 

 

They did not remain victims — they became authors of the modern world. 

 

 Remember it if you want. But never forget where it all began.

AI -- a giant boondoggle, and IP theft

I've copy-and-pasted a Twitter post from "Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist." He's not very happy about AI.

Once you dig into the “AI industry” it becomes clearer & clearer what it really is. 

It is an extraction project. 

It has already extracted the ENTIRE DIGITIZABLE OUTPUT OF HUMANITY. Our ideas. Our art. Our science. Our math. 

Through a clever algorithm discovered in 2017, Jensen Huang and Peter Thiel’s protege Sam Altman figured out how to accelerate existing “generative AI” technology with GPUs. This was NOT an innovation in accuracy or “intelligence,” it was a way to process an old algorithm in parallel. 

OpenAI was staffed in large part by “Effective Altruists”—a cult started based on the doomer science fiction of Eliezer Yudkowsky on the website LessWrong. 

Peter Thiel was the initial funding for OpenAI, EA, and Yudkowsky. 

OpenAI successfully convinced the market, and themselves in many cases, that they had birthed some new form of life. They just needed to make it BIGGER and it was destined to become “superintelligent.” 

Based on Yudkowsky’s goofy ideas, AI was gradually anthropomorphized and deified—despite the fact that it was just software regurgitating the exhaust of human beings. The entire “alignment” movement is based on the presumption that chatbots deserve “moral standing.” It’s exhaustingly ignorant. 

Eventually OpenAI employee Dario Amodei, a dedicated EA adherent, became concerned that OpenAI was not RELIGIOUS ENOUGH about AI being sentient, so he broke off to form Anthropic and named his chatbot after a person. 

This false premise, that an algorithm was somehow producing “intelligence” was further amplified by training the output to sound as human, and addictive, as possible. 

The combination of a kind of religious fervor inside, a deceptive product, and a flood of influence operations on the outside fueled a wild flow of speculative investment in both OpenAI and Anthropic—and especially into NVIDIA. 

This eventually poisoned the entire technology sector which came to believe that the “race for AGI” was existential, so they committed TRILLIONS to achieving it. The data centers are all a function of a misunderstanding of what they are building. 

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are NEVER going to be intelligent, much less conscious. All they do is take our stolen stuff and sell it back to us. They do not experience. They do not do anything—unless you send a string of text for them to process. 

Nevertheless, the entire financial industry, and now the federal government is pushing this dead-end project to engulf the nation in data centers and swallow the economy with “AI factories.” 

It’s downright insanity. All of that capital expenditure is already junk. It can physically never make money. It’s built for GPUs which are the wrong substrate for AI. 

Large language models are useful search engines for stuff we’ve already done. They are the compressed, digitized exhaust of humans with a clever language interface. That’s it. 

There is no moat. There is no real innovation. There is just an accelerationist delusion and no adults in sight. Chatbots are a software feature, a commodity, that has metastasized into a cult digging a $10 TRILLION DITCH. 

The reason this has gone so far is that rather than compete in a democratic capitalist system for the best technology product, this cabal of lunatics created an “internet alternate reality” that could “unilaterally change the world.” 

The current AI industry is the largest extraction project in history. It is strip mining humanity and selling it back to us as slop. 

“If you’re evil, you’re not bad, and maybe that means you’re kind of good.” —Peter Thiel 

Terminator scenario?

I've copy-and-pasted this from a Robert Reich Substack article entitled "AutoWar," subtitled "The nightmare." Let me take this opportunity to state how much I loathe Newt Gingrich, and how, more than any other single individual, I think he is responsible for lowering politics into the gutter in the mid'90s with his politics-as-warfare beliefs.

Imagine four of the most frighteningly irresponsible people in America deciding how AI will be put to use in the most frighteningly irresponsible way.

Pete Hegseth is one of them. Trump is another. The other two are Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich.

Hegseth says he’s tasking Musk and Gingrich with laying the groundwork for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command,” or AutoWarCom — a new Pentagon command operation for autonomous warfare. It would feature unmanned drones, autonomous sensors, unmanned boats, and other autonomous systems. Hegseth is proposing to triple spending on autonomous warfare to $74 billion.

Hegseth has also named as an adviser Palmer Luckey, a major Trump donor who designed the Oculus Rift, a virtually reality headset credited with reviving the virtual reality industry, and co-founded of Anduril Industires, a military tech company focused on autonomous drones and sensors.

The specter of autonomous lethal weapons — weapons that kill without human beings first deciding who, how, or when — is the nightmare of many who deal with AI. Autonomous AI weapons are fraught with unpredictability. And what happens when AI weapons escape their controls and go rogue, as recently occurred at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google?

Bad enough that Hegseth and Trump are pouring money into this. Worse that they’re setting up a separate military command for it. Worse still that they’re depending on Musk, Gingrich, and a virtual-reality game designer to tell them how.

I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare into a sane world.