The Paul Graham vs Nigerian Twitter Saga; Lexical racism and language bias masked as ChatGPT hysteria

TIL Paul Graham has never read a book.

These are the same people who want to remove the humanities from education.

I'm sure he read "How to Maximize* Achieving and Synergy of Disruption" or something like that

using the wrong spelling of maximise derogatorily

🇬🇧 English (Traditional)

🇺🇸 English (Simplified)

And evidently:

🇳🇬 English (Magnified and Embellished)

The 'kids learn english from movies' line is just insane. Yes they learn it from movies, and music, and books, and the internet, and etc. That is how it works. A lot better than duolingo in fact (Free yourself from the terror of the owl, you have been keeping your streak for over year and you still can't speak the language well enough to watch a movie. Streaks, progress bars, challenges, making the app sad, experience points, achievements, shit thought up by the utterly deranged).

Pauly G is telling on himself here: what he means is that his kids learned English from movies.

my armchair linguist ass loves this post

The dildo of consequences rarely comes lubricated

Okay, Nigerian Twitter is something else and I am so sad I'm learning about it only after Twitter died.

Well fuck, guess I'm just a chatbot given flesh according to this guy.

Anyone else feeling the urge to learn Naija Pidgin?

like I suddenly learnt where a pile of local east London speech patterns come from

So a real fucked up layer to this is that part of the reason chatGPT talks the way it does is because it's been fine-tuned to do so.

And a lot of that fine tuning is done by outsourced African labor. We know about Kenyan and Ghana workers at minimum.

yep! And lots of people told pg this

Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well. This writeup has pushed me to distrust Graham's ability to design Lisps. In a previous sneer, I wasn't impressed by his languages, but now I'm fast-rejecting them. (Also previously folks seemed keen to defend him when they thought his essays sounded smart. Maybe those essays just sound white!)

He sure has a lot of sycophants. "You cannot easily dismiss his accomplishments! He is wealthy." Yeah wealthy for being on the internet in the 90s with one of the most obvious ideas of all time.

Arc and Bel are as blub as lisps can get. That says a lot about how their author must think in blub language.
my thoughts on paully’s output are along the same lines — it’s really a shame that he’s the guy a lot of people learned Lisp from, because it’s very clear he’s just a rich white guy bullshitting on that and every other topic he’s famous for

also, this stood out from a quote in your first linked post:

Server-based deployment of software was a central theme in Graham’s essays, and his continuation-based web framework was an interesting and fairly novel way to create continuity across multiple requests in a single session.

Seaside did this first, though it never got a ton of traction. if naive continuations are how the orange site’s doing sessions and state tracking, that goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so incredibly bad at scaling and has such weird performance characteristics. there’s ways to make continuations more performant in this role, but it takes a degree of low-level understanding paully’s never demonstrated, since his languages have always been built on top of Racket (which is a fine language for making languages! it’s fun as hell! but one day you will run out of runtime to repurpose)

(I should see if Racket finally has good LSP support for #lang languages. I’d seriously use it so much more if I could bring my own editor)

also, holy shit those responses to your second linked post really haven’t aged well at all, have they?
- Back when I was an active part of the lisp community, it was very easy to spot the people who learned CL from his book because they were without exception the arrogant weenie stereotype.
The essay uses "delve" multiple times, so it must have been written by ChatGPT.
Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well.

This is why I love Perl. Larry Wall has a linguistics background and created the only programming language where you can conjugate variables.

(I know it sounds like I'm making fun of perl here, and I am, but I also legitimately do love perl)

This reminds me of the reaction when I point out that to non-native English speakers that Canadian students may not have had as much English grammar instructions as they did.

Also this brought to mind all those times I've been taken to task about my own phrasing.

Gatekept by non-readers indeed.

This was entertaining as heck.

FWIW I'm pretty colloquial in my English, but I do enjoy employing slightly unusual Swedish words. The writer Peter Englund (not especially ancient) is good at unearthing archaic words.

I don't get a feel that PG is a stereotypical AI booster, but I do think his visceral distaste for getting a pitch he thinks is written with the help of an LLM is quite funny. Maybe if he'd been a bit more harsh towards his fellow VCs this wouldn't have happened.