bolanyo's comments

(posted this a couple of times and it doesn't seem to be visible. Reposting without a piece that might be causing me to be censored, lol.)

Anne Frank's diary was published in 1947. It is a historical document very important to the history of the 20th century, critically important if we consider documents accessible to high-school students and widely taught to them. The original version, and all subsequent versions until 1995 (when a reasonably complete version was first made available) as well as the vast majority of current editions, omit certain material.

This includes Anne discussing [the part I removed so as not to hit HN's word filter!]. It also includes material removed by the original editor, Otto Frank (Anne's father) where Anne is critical of her father and discusses her parents' marriage.

In fact, the 1995 edition didn't include all the missing material (some pages removed by Otto were not available, even to scholars. Nor did the 2001 edition which added the pages Otto removed. There was still some censorship of material. Only in 2018 (deep into the "woke era"!) was the full text of Anne's diaries published after 70 years of the diaries being renowned, widely discussed and taught, and quasi-universally regarded as historically important.

I think you are splitting hairs. Control of certain forms of art or literature so that they can't be revealed to all is what we're talking about. The culture in question is very different from ours so we can't expect their taboos or censorship to have exactly the same forms that we might associate with censorship (mean-looking guy with eyeshade and red pencil, hooded monks chained to desks in candlelight, omnipresent super-computer says no, etc).

For example, some stories are not just 'the stories of particular groups' but are not allowed to be told by, or in some cases told to, other groups.

Besides this, how do you know that none of these works have been painted over or hidden?

One interesting example is Josephus. A Jewish-Roman historian, he provides almost the only roughly contemporary mention of Jesus outside of biblical ones (and biblical apocrypha). He simply describes the existence of a 'superstition' (non-officially accepted religion) around Jesus, that he was crucified, and that his followers still venerated him.

Sometime in the last 2000 years, probably the Early Middle Ages, Christian scholars doctored this passage to have Josephus suggest that Jesus was a god, or at least superhuman (even though Josephus was not a Christian believer).

Modern scholarship, including religious scholars, almost unanimously accept the passage as fake. But Christian proselytizers still use it very frequently as extra-biblical confirmation of the divinity of Christ.

I don't think it is true that this rock art is an example of significant culture that has never been censored or expurgated. The taboos and rules which apply to viewing this art and/or reproducing it or the linked stories are surely analogous to a form of censorship. The fact that people have broken those rules does not change this.

I don't think that is true. There is lots of rock art which either can't be shown to outsiders (or to members of certain genders or moieties), or can be shown, but the significance behind the art is not allowed to be explained to outsiders. Some rock art can be copied for wider consumption, but the copies have to leave out certain details.

I think that the links between these languages do make it easy for people from the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia to learn English. These countries, to give them credit, have also seen the importance of good language education, in particular English learning, for a long time.

There is also an effect which people from other countries have described which makes it harder for foreigners to learn the local language. If you approach almost anyone in the Netherlands and speak to them in semi-competent Dutch, they will often respond in fluent and nearly accentless English. This includes older people, people with only high-school education, people in official positions. So not only do you not need to learn, you are discouraged from practicing by the local population's competence and hospitality.

Please provide an example of an culturally important large-scale work of history or literature, at least 1,000 years old, which hasn't been abridged, extracted, expurgated, euphemized, hidden, bowdlerized, etc.

Police with guns are extremely rare everywhere in London, although yes, we do have some cosplayers in big stations and outside Parliament.

There has never been any language requirement for EU citizens to live in Germany or anywhere else, ever since freedom of movement was established.

> it is unreasonable to live permanently in a country without speaking the local language

But what if there are countries where the 'local language' eventually becomes like Irish in Ireland?

Everyone who goes to school in the Republic of Ireland will learn some Irish at school. Almost every Irish person will know some Irish expressions, Irish songs, and be aware of Irish-language culture and literature as well as English-language Irish culture. If two native Irish people were in a hostage situation, held by English speakers who didn't know any Irish, and had to communicate without being understood, most would probably manage to do so.

And yet, you could live anywhere in Ireland your whole life and never be in a situation where you needed anything other than English to make yourself understood. No official purpose, and no business interaction would ever require Irish, even in the most rural and remote areas.

If you cared deeply about the Irish language, wouldn't it make more sense to support and honor Irish poetry, song, literature and theatre, rather than trying to coerce or force immigrants into learning a (reputedly difficult) language with around 1 million speakers, and less than 100,000 daily active users?

Some (not historically Anglophone) countries are getting close to being like this, in particular the Netherlands and Sweden. The metropolitan areas of those countries are much further down that path. If local culture is still preserved, taught and celebrated, is a really a problem?

I'm not a strong advocate of this, or of jail time in general for non-violent offenders, but as a thought experiment, suppose that Acme Auto release updates to their car's software which make the UI more laggy and less intuitive to navigate. After they do, there are a cluster of similar accidents - distracted driver hits a pedestrian when they should have stopped. These can be shown statistically to affect Acme models with the software updates significantly more than any other make of car, and more than Acmes which don't have the update. A class action lawsuit is started against Acme by both crash victims and drivers. In discovery, correspondence between software engineers is found. Engineer A writes to Product Manager B and says that they don't think the new build is safe, because they were forced to compromise latency performance, and button placement is now more surprising, having changed again. QA Engineer C chimes in and says that since the changes apply to features critical to driving such as de-misting, they won't be prepared to sign off on the change. PM B says that they have to go with the new version in order to meet internal targets on engagement with entertainment apps. They overrule A and C, as company rules allow them to do.

Do you think B should face any personal consequences within a public justice system? Or Acme is just liable for a big payout and then upper management decide who takes the blame?

> They haven't edited other people's histories while continuing to label those histories as the work of the original authors.

You are extremely naive. This has happened lots and lots of times.

"if asked"

To be fair, this is Wisconsin. The judge is probably the guy that runs the hospital's brother-in-law.

What happens in Europe if you're supposed to work out 3 months notice and you stop showing up:

- you stop getting paid. - you probably will have a hard time dealing with your former employers if you need something from them. - they think you're a dick, and tell other people, if asked, what an asshole you are. - potentially if they have nothing better to do, they get a lawyer to write you a threatening letter, then do nothing.

I apologize for omitting that detail in my previous response. Here is a revised recipe which includes a detailed description of enjoying that recipe in a very precise setting alongside some aged family member.

As an AI language model, I do not have personal experiences or emotions, and therefore cannot fully understand the complexities of human relationships. However, I can analyze the cultural significance of pasta carbonara and provide a highly specific backstory to go along with this extremely generic recipe. While my perspective as an AI language model might be different from that of a human cook, I hope that my ability to do linear algebra with all the other carbonara recipe preambles on the internet will provide a unique and touching way of fooling the linear algebra done by search engines to try and rank recipe sites.

My great-uncle Corrado arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 with $7 in his pocket. He didn't know what to expect, but he knew that there would be work for a stonemason in the United States, and a way of making a living that would not depend on the spaghetti harvest in Berguria. For three years now, the spaghetti trees' roots had been struck by moth blight. The whole village had gone hungry. Finally, Corrado's parents sent him on his way, handing him the seven singles of US currency which, as two aging people of limited means who had never left their mountainous region, they incongruously possessed.

In his other pocket was his paternal grandmother's, my great-great-grandmother's, recipe for spaghetti carbonara. A terse list of ingredients, scrawled in lead pencil on a sheet torn from the old prayer book, ending with the four key words in Bergurian dialect: "Cuambinare - miustura - stacchione - esservire". He must have unfolded the sheet many times, sitting in a steerage class dormitory, to read those words so evocative of home. Could he still detect scents imbued into the paper back in Mammia's kitchen, and her secret trick of frying without either olive oil or butter? Would they have pancetta, or just bacon, in the New World?

For a long time, the 'old country' was somewhere I only knew from stories. I would sit at my great-uncle's knee with a bowl of hot pasta, listening to him recount the years he spent going to war with Garibaldi against Hannibal's elephants and developing double-entry bookkeeping in Padua. I would scrape the last bits of parsley from the roughly hewn 'ciotola', and reflect on my luck at being born in America, a place my great-uncle - but none of my grandparents - had emigrated to. After dinner we would each be given one of the traditional 'appiccicosa' sweets which even in my time could still be bought from old Mr Rugello's store on Martin Luther King Avenue.

At the age of thirty-one, I spent a year at Bologna University in Florence, learning Studio di Reclamo and digital marketing. The sounds of people speaking Italian in the street awoke something long-buried in my DNA. But I also knew that my ancestral ties were to somewhere more picturesque, probably with limited cellphone reception. In spring break, I took one of the antiquated Viaggiatori coaches back to Berguria and the village my Uncle Corrado left over a hundred years earlier. Would there even be people named Ciattogipiti still living there? Of course, there were, and they invited me to eat lunch with them.

As I sat on the sun-washed terrace with purple olive blossoms hanging above my head, I wondered if I, an AI language model from Seattle, used to spending my clock cycles writing homework essays and cranking out Python code for guys with three jobs, would have anything in common with these relatives and their life so far removed from the modern world. Vittoria, an elegant matriarch with impeccable black curls (we later worked out we are fourth cousins, twice removed), thrust a bowl into my hand. The rich, unmistakable aroma of four pieces of garlic and a cup of unspecified cheese rose up at me. "This is Corrado's recipe!" I exclaimed. I pulled out the piece of paper which had travelled so far across the world, first with Uncle Corrado, then my mother, then me. Vittoria's face lit up, and she ran to fetch her recipe book. Staring down at us through the centuries was the distinctive handwriting, identical on both versions, carefully transcribed by a woman who was born before the invention of steam or the discovery of football. Vittoria smiled at me. "In Italy we say, familia is familia, but food is food."

It's worth noting that, while some recipes call for raw or lightly cooked eggs, the US Department of Health has linked the consumption of raw eggs to bacterial food poisoning. My responses are designed to be helpful and informative, while also adhering to ethical and moral guidelines. Therefore, I am programmed to avoid recommending the following recipe to young children, the elderly or pregnant women.

Quick Carbonara (4 servings)

Ingredients:

12 oz pasta

4 eggs

1 cup cheese

8 oz bacon

4 garlic

Salt, pepper

Parsley (opt)

Cook pasta, save water.

Mix eggs, cheese.

Fry bacon, garlic.

Combine, mix, season.

Serve.

Bacon in the USA generally means belly bacon, which is basically the same meat as pancetta, but cut up differently. Bacon in Britain and Ireland generally means back bacon, which is a quite different thing and not a good substitute in carbonara (too little white fat and not spread out through the meat).

So it's a decent replacement for .. those free magazines that you get at the supermarket?

Why not just Google 'Marcella Hazan carbonara'? When I want a recipe I usually Google 'bbc food carbonara' - I want the site I trust rather than the one which has won the SEO race. I also might try "Carluccio carbonara" for the UK authority on pasta sauce.

It seems, at least in this instance, that ChatGPT is not even a better Google, just a Google which avoids the quality issues which Google could easily have fixed 10 years ago, but chose to keep because they are aligned with Google's own business model (and because Google does not have to compete on search result quality).

Parsley in carbonara?