8 ms·

Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE): "great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking

Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE): "great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems, if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . self deception, ( necessary to prevent accidental disclosure of inate algorithms. WE need more hackers , also interested in biological hacking , security, etc." Damn! I once worked with a guy that was exactly like this. Not just writing but his style of speech irl was like that, incoherent loosely bound ideas around one topic. Ironically, the harder he tried to appear smart the more idiotic were the things that spewed out of his mouth. We were working with GPUs, trying to find ways to optimize GPU code, he called the team for an informal meeting and told us dead serious, "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better". :O I don't know if this has a name, I just thought the guy had schizophrenia. So glad I moved on from that place.

EFreethought 9mo ago
When he was alive a lot of people said Epstein was really smart. But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
- astrange 9mo ago
  He was probably dyslexic. I know people who type like that too but normal in person.
- throwjefferey 9mo ago
  He was probably more impressive in-person.
- moralestapia 9mo ago
  I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings. So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about". But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.
  - actionfromafar 9mo ago
    It's on a different axis to stupid. These people play another kind of game, like scammers, they filter away people who can see through their bullshit. To them, actually learning a "normal" topic is a distraction. Their game is finding and exploiting weaknesses.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
      It's literally a marketing funnel for corruption. Having Smart People™ at your "parties" adds a layer of legitimacy and social proof you wouldn't get if you were Bubba from Nowhere Town. Some people will be attracted by the menu, some people won't realise what's happening until they see the video they're starring in. Either way, you own them.
      - prawn 9mo ago
        It's seemed to me that he was a habitual/obsessive networker. Someone up-thread described it as an urge to collect smart/impressive people, with the advantage being as you described. I suspect if you took away his horrible other interests, he'd still have been extremely sociable. Maybe aspects of blackmail/control are near-inevitable at the conjunction of criminal behaviour and power?
        sallycarmen 9mo ago
        Sociable if you’re dumb like prince Andrew. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot. Said he was inane and a fraud who could only respond with stupid adolescent comments. Maybe somd like that sort of person and think they are fun. No doubt lots do, the guy down the pub who’s a laugh. Appeals to similarly dumb folk.
- razingeden 9mo ago
  I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes. Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me. Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend. Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.
- palmotea 9mo ago
  > But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that. I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.
  - optimalsolver 9mo ago
    Or SBF playing Legends on investor calls.
  - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
    Funny. Sam Altman is also accused by his own sister of being a diddler!
- lebca 9mo ago
  I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities." I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.
  - PlunderBunny 9mo ago
    I remember being told that many of the spelling/grammar mistakes in (English) menus for ethnic restaurants were deliberate to make the (English native speaking) customers feel superior. (Also not saying I believe this at all, just relating an anecdote).
  - ddq 9mo ago
    In addition, it broadcasts that the sender is too busy with all their important work to spend time refining and proofreading, that you're getting their raw, unfiltered thoughts directly from them, not through an assistant, and that their time is more valuable than yours so the burden is on you to parse their stream of consciousness jumble for precious nuggets of their exclusive wisdom. The semiotics make sense, plus it's just easier and faster.
    - lifestyleguru 9mo ago
      The same with medical doctors. Funnily once in financial subreddit someone claiming to be a doctor from maybe Croatia asked for financial or early retirement advice, but the post was a word salad with misspellings and errors. Commenters immediately reacted that their writing is as illegible as probably their handwriting is, by the way the person reacted one can see that's really a doctor. Some people have superiority complex and reeky pile of irate thoughts in their heads, and you're very lucky if nothing in your life depends on these kind of people.
- andrewflnr 9mo ago
  I've found that problem solving intelligence and language skills are not that strongly correlated. He clearly had some kind of skill to keep his operation running, even before you consider the more cynical explanations in the other replies.
  - colechristensen 9mo ago
    He was an asset being managed by intelligence service officers, this is the only explanation. A failing math teacher at a New York prep school leading to a job at Bear Stearns and then as a wealth manager for billionaires... let's say it doesn't add up unless there were other reasons than his own ambitions and organization skills. Mossad or the Russians engineered his life.
    - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
      John Kiriakou Openly says he had to be mossad.
      - colechristensen 9mo ago
        John Kiriakou talks a lot. Not that I don't think things he says are convincing, but he sure has a lot to say for a former CIA officer.
    - fatherwavelet 9mo ago
      It only doesn't add up if you are viewing him like Warren Buffet in terms of finance. Obviously, his audited track record of returns is nowhere to be found. It very much all adds up if you view Epstein as a financial genius in terms of financial crimes. This idea he was some intelligence created stooge is just absurd. I would suspect he was an intelligence asset exactly because of his ability to launder money and commit financial crimes. His wealth came from taking a cut. The size of his wealth was a reflection of the amount of financial crimes committed. That level of financial crime is how you get a sweetheart deal to keep those crimes in the shadows. Also the kind of thing that would get you suicided. This podcast/social media narrative that he was a created intelligence asset to blackmail the rich and powerful is probably misdirection to not focus on the actual financial crimes. The cover up has been executed to perfection considering the misdirection narratives have taken on a life of their own and we know basically nothing about the financial crimes he commited.
- jalapenoi 9mo ago
  somehow he was allowed to teach college classes without a degree, doors just open like that when you’re part of the tribe of pedophiles
- doublerabbit 9mo ago
  An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk. The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched. Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.
- bawolff 9mo ago
  > But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that. I'd more focus on the ideas being expressed being incoherent. Spelling is surface level, but that word salad made no sense.
  - rob74 9mo ago
    Spelling is a courtesy to the person who has to make sense of what you send them.
- imetatroll 9mo ago
  It has to be a "my time is worth more than your time" flex.
- fatherwavelet 9mo ago
  I listened to the two hour interview that was posted. It sounds nothing like this. He was extremely well spoken. How carefully he spoke is what stood out most in the interview to me.
- furyofantares 9mo ago
  > I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
- clownpenis_fart 9mo ago
  [dead]
- commandlinefan 9mo ago
  > full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.
  - sallycarmen 9mo ago
    I can’t stand people putting a man on a pedestal just because they are ‘rich’. Lots and lots of men pimp others to do the work, mafia style. You don’t need to be clever to do that, just nasty and in his case very dirty.
- sallycarmen 9mo ago
  Agree. Steven pinker the Harvard professor said Epstein was not an intellectual and incredibly stupid. He couldn’t have a conversation either him and Epstein spoke like a teenager.
rawgabbit 9mo ago
Pseudo-intellectual aka bullshitter. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo-intellectual https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo-intellectu... computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems,. He is confused about software/programming/hacking. Hacking absolutely involves intercepting messages e.g., man in the middle attack. I have no idea what he thinks biological systems is; does he think that bacteria/viruses intercept chemical messages that our brain sends to different organs in our body? if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount. Free energy -- yuck -- that is what happens when scientists give a terrible name to "usable work" or "usable energy". Free energy is about the usable work you can get out of a e.g., coal powered steam engine. He is mixing physics/thermodynamics with biology.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  biology is all about thermodynamics. Why do you think we eat?
  - rawgabbit 9mo ago
    Not the same. We eat to get macro nutrients: fats, protein, and carbohydrates.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      Why do we need those? Oh right thermodynamics. Don't let the label fool you. Thermodynamics is the study of energy flows at the fundamental level, not only heat.
      - rawgabbit 9mo ago
        Ummm. Sorry I don’t agree. Nutrition is vastly more complex than heat or calories.
      - accidentallfact 9mo ago
        Thermodynamics doesn't apply to the body in any meaningful way. It sounds like a 19th century idea of how the body might work that people repeat with no understanding. And, you not only need to get fuel from the food, but also the materials to build the engines, and for making spare parts and consumables. And everything that actually uses the energy. There will be no energy spent on lighting if you can't get the indium needed for making LED lights, and the body only knows how to make LED lights.
dnautics 9mo ago
i don't think its schizophrenia? i mean working in tech you haven't run into that CTO or vp eng who snowjobs the c-suite with a word salad of hot button technical terms that don't quite add up? hell ive even interviewed developer candidates for positions who are like this.
- moralestapia 9mo ago
  >i mean working in tech you haven't run into [...] Yeah, it's on my comment.
lifestyleguru 9mo ago
My brain farts are more cohesive, yet I'm never drunk enough while writing them down to use spaces before punctuation or after a bracket.
- rob74 9mo ago
  Maybe this style indicates that drugs other than alcohol were involved?
  - lifestyleguru 9mo ago
    Put away that pill Jeffray . It's NOT aspirin ,, Donnie took it.
mmsimanga 9mo ago
Reminds me of that academic paper that was generated by a computer, this was before current wave of AI agents. The paper was just word soup but was accepted into a journal. Apologies I don't have link typing on mobile.
- throw310822 9mo ago
  Postmodernism generator: https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
  - bigfishrunning 9mo ago
    lol reminds me of the new-age bullshit generator https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/ https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/
cyode 9mo ago
Sounds like it could be narcissistic personality disorder.
direwolf20 9mo ago
Maybe he was saying remove the plastic shrouds for better cooling? In a server, it could work
cubefox 9mo ago
Sounds like he was confused but genuinely interested in cryptology, which contradicts the cynical narrative about him only donating for social reasons.
- vee-kay 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tdeck 9mo ago
    Any links to help us get started?
    - vee-kay 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - tdeck 9mo ago
        I really don't understand why this is being flagged. There's a long history of people conducting medical trials without informed consent to save money and it's something we need to keep an eye out for when trials are conducted in poor communities.
accidentallfact 9mo ago
It's called "a stupid man with money". It's really quite simple: * He has money * People want a share of his money * He has enough people to tell him stuff to make his bullshit seem to have some connection with reality * Anybody who argues with his stupid bullshit is no longer welcome and gets no chance to get a share of his money
- Aerbil313 9mo ago
  Ugh. I worked for a guy like this, he was a full-on cybersecurity paranoiac. You need to be a special type of person with near-infinite patience of stupidity just to be able to work under them.
arjie 9mo ago
Well, it's a prompt to his assistant. It's more short-hand communication than anything else. My self-notes often look like that. They're just phrases to bring to mind some ideas rather than others or direct towards something. Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went back to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him. He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular. A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2]. Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10 1: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epstein-last-interview-with-steve-bannon-transcription-20260206T035211&speaker_1=Steve%20Bannon&speaker_2=Unknown&speaker_3=Jeffrey%20Epstein https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste... 2: https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loans_and_investment/loans_and_investment_US/chapter_3_accounting__1_US/33_classification_of_US.html https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540
- throw310822 9mo ago
  I took your transcript and discussed it with Claude Opus 4.6, after removing both Epstein's and Bannon names (not that it mattered, it understood perfectly who they both were, but didn't mention it until after I asked it explicitly). Claude suggested an interesting pattern: on several topics, Epstein starts with some medium level concept (not naive, but not expert-level), then distracts with a metaphor or a short anecdote, then drops some hint that he has great authority on the subject ("I was in the room", "I had insider knowledge") and finally changes subject or claims that nobody really knows, without ever going deeper.
xorcist 9mo ago
Word salads can be very intimidating if the words are extremely technical and the person behind them carries a lot of clout. It's a bit of a trick that some people are very good at. Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details. Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct. I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.
bhelkey 9mo ago
> "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better" I don' know what "turn them outside out" but it sounds like they are suggesting removing and replacing the heatsink. Funnily enough, replacing thermal paste can improve temperatures [1]. [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/finally-replaced-gpu-thermal-paste/ https://www.xda-developers.com/finally-replaced-gpu-thermal-...
- andrewflnr 9mo ago
  That's a very generous interpretation. Excessively so. He may have heard of someone suggesting that and repeated it in garbled form, but that would not refute the accusation of bullshittery.

EFreethought 9mo ago

When he was alive a lot of people said Epstein was really smart. But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

astrange 9mo ago
He was probably dyslexic. I know people who type like that too but normal in person.
throwjefferey 9mo ago
He was probably more impressive in-person.
moralestapia 9mo ago
I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings. So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about". But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.
- actionfromafar 9mo ago
  It's on a different axis to stupid. These people play another kind of game, like scammers, they filter away people who can see through their bullshit. To them, actually learning a "normal" topic is a distraction. Their game is finding and exploiting weaknesses.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
    It's literally a marketing funnel for corruption. Having Smart People™ at your "parties" adds a layer of legitimacy and social proof you wouldn't get if you were Bubba from Nowhere Town. Some people will be attracted by the menu, some people won't realise what's happening until they see the video they're starring in. Either way, you own them.
    - prawn 9mo ago
      It's seemed to me that he was a habitual/obsessive networker. Someone up-thread described it as an urge to collect smart/impressive people, with the advantage being as you described. I suspect if you took away his horrible other interests, he'd still have been extremely sociable. Maybe aspects of blackmail/control are near-inevitable at the conjunction of criminal behaviour and power?
      - sallycarmen 9mo ago
        Sociable if you’re dumb like prince Andrew. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot. Said he was inane and a fraud who could only respond with stupid adolescent comments. Maybe somd like that sort of person and think they are fun. No doubt lots do, the guy down the pub who’s a laugh. Appeals to similarly dumb folk.
razingeden 9mo ago
I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes. Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me. Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend. Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.
palmotea 9mo ago
> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that. I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.
- optimalsolver 9mo ago
  Or SBF playing Legends on investor calls.
- Der_Einzige 9mo ago
  Funny. Sam Altman is also accused by his own sister of being a diddler!
lebca 9mo ago
I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities." I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.
- PlunderBunny 9mo ago
  I remember being told that many of the spelling/grammar mistakes in (English) menus for ethnic restaurants were deliberate to make the (English native speaking) customers feel superior. (Also not saying I believe this at all, just relating an anecdote).
- ddq 9mo ago
  In addition, it broadcasts that the sender is too busy with all their important work to spend time refining and proofreading, that you're getting their raw, unfiltered thoughts directly from them, not through an assistant, and that their time is more valuable than yours so the burden is on you to parse their stream of consciousness jumble for precious nuggets of their exclusive wisdom. The semiotics make sense, plus it's just easier and faster.
  - lifestyleguru 9mo ago
    The same with medical doctors. Funnily once in financial subreddit someone claiming to be a doctor from maybe Croatia asked for financial or early retirement advice, but the post was a word salad with misspellings and errors. Commenters immediately reacted that their writing is as illegible as probably their handwriting is, by the way the person reacted one can see that's really a doctor. Some people have superiority complex and reeky pile of irate thoughts in their heads, and you're very lucky if nothing in your life depends on these kind of people.
andrewflnr 9mo ago
I've found that problem solving intelligence and language skills are not that strongly correlated. He clearly had some kind of skill to keep his operation running, even before you consider the more cynical explanations in the other replies.
- colechristensen 9mo ago
  He was an asset being managed by intelligence service officers, this is the only explanation. A failing math teacher at a New York prep school leading to a job at Bear Stearns and then as a wealth manager for billionaires... let's say it doesn't add up unless there were other reasons than his own ambitions and organization skills. Mossad or the Russians engineered his life.
  - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
    John Kiriakou Openly says he had to be mossad.
    - colechristensen 9mo ago
      John Kiriakou talks a lot. Not that I don't think things he says are convincing, but he sure has a lot to say for a former CIA officer.
  - fatherwavelet 9mo ago
    It only doesn't add up if you are viewing him like Warren Buffet in terms of finance. Obviously, his audited track record of returns is nowhere to be found. It very much all adds up if you view Epstein as a financial genius in terms of financial crimes. This idea he was some intelligence created stooge is just absurd. I would suspect he was an intelligence asset exactly because of his ability to launder money and commit financial crimes. His wealth came from taking a cut. The size of his wealth was a reflection of the amount of financial crimes committed. That level of financial crime is how you get a sweetheart deal to keep those crimes in the shadows. Also the kind of thing that would get you suicided. This podcast/social media narrative that he was a created intelligence asset to blackmail the rich and powerful is probably misdirection to not focus on the actual financial crimes. The cover up has been executed to perfection considering the misdirection narratives have taken on a life of their own and we know basically nothing about the financial crimes he commited.
jalapenoi 9mo ago
somehow he was allowed to teach college classes without a degree, doors just open like that when you’re part of the tribe of pedophiles
doublerabbit 9mo ago
An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk. The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched. Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.
bawolff 9mo ago
> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that. I'd more focus on the ideas being expressed being incoherent. Spelling is surface level, but that word salad made no sense.
- rob74 9mo ago
  Spelling is a courtesy to the person who has to make sense of what you send them.
imetatroll 9mo ago
It has to be a "my time is worth more than your time" flex.
fatherwavelet 9mo ago
I listened to the two hour interview that was posted. It sounds nothing like this. He was extremely well spoken. How carefully he spoke is what stood out most in the interview to me.
furyofantares 9mo ago
> I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
clownpenis_fart 9mo ago
[dead]
commandlinefan 9mo ago
> full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.
- sallycarmen 9mo ago
  I can’t stand people putting a man on a pedestal just because they are ‘rich’. Lots and lots of men pimp others to do the work, mafia style. You don’t need to be clever to do that, just nasty and in his case very dirty.
sallycarmen 9mo ago
Agree. Steven pinker the Harvard professor said Epstein was not an intellectual and incredibly stupid. He couldn’t have a conversation either him and Epstein spoke like a teenager.

rawgabbit 9mo ago

Pseudo-intellectual aka bullshitter. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo-intellectual https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo-intellectu... computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems,. He is confused about software/programming/hacking. Hacking absolutely involves intercepting messages e.g., man in the middle attack. I have no idea what he thinks biological systems is; does he think that bacteria/viruses intercept chemical messages that our brain sends to different organs in our body? if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount. Free energy -- yuck -- that is what happens when scientists give a terrible name to "usable work" or "usable energy". Free energy is about the usable work you can get out of a e.g., coal powered steam engine. He is mixing physics/thermodynamics with biology.

direwolf20 9mo ago
biology is all about thermodynamics. Why do you think we eat?
- rawgabbit 9mo ago
  Not the same. We eat to get macro nutrients: fats, protein, and carbohydrates.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Why do we need those? Oh right thermodynamics. Don't let the label fool you. Thermodynamics is the study of energy flows at the fundamental level, not only heat.
    - rawgabbit 9mo ago
      Ummm. Sorry I don’t agree. Nutrition is vastly more complex than heat or calories.
    - accidentallfact 9mo ago
      Thermodynamics doesn't apply to the body in any meaningful way. It sounds like a 19th century idea of how the body might work that people repeat with no understanding. And, you not only need to get fuel from the food, but also the materials to build the engines, and for making spare parts and consumables. And everything that actually uses the energy. There will be no energy spent on lighting if you can't get the indium needed for making LED lights, and the body only knows how to make LED lights.

dnautics 9mo ago

i don't think its schizophrenia? i mean working in tech you haven't run into that CTO or vp eng who snowjobs the c-suite with a word salad of hot button technical terms that don't quite add up? hell ive even interviewed developer candidates for positions who are like this.

moralestapia 9mo ago
>i mean working in tech you haven't run into [...] Yeah, it's on my comment.

lifestyleguru 9mo ago

My brain farts are more cohesive, yet I'm never drunk enough while writing them down to use spaces before punctuation or after a bracket.

rob74 9mo ago
Maybe this style indicates that drugs other than alcohol were involved?
- lifestyleguru 9mo ago
  Put away that pill Jeffray . It's NOT aspirin ,, Donnie took it.

mmsimanga 9mo ago

Reminds me of that academic paper that was generated by a computer, this was before current wave of AI agents. The paper was just word soup but was accepted into a journal. Apologies I don't have link typing on mobile.

throw310822 9mo ago
Postmodernism generator: https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
- bigfishrunning 9mo ago
  lol reminds me of the new-age bullshit generator https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/ https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

cyode 9mo ago

Sounds like it could be narcissistic personality disorder.

direwolf20 9mo ago

Maybe he was saying remove the plastic shrouds for better cooling? In a server, it could work

cubefox 9mo ago

Sounds like he was confused but genuinely interested in cryptology, which contradicts the cynical narrative about him only donating for social reasons.

vee-kay 9mo ago
[flagged]
- tdeck 9mo ago
  Any links to help us get started?
  - vee-kay 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tdeck 9mo ago
      I really don't understand why this is being flagged. There's a long history of people conducting medical trials without informed consent to save money and it's something we need to keep an eye out for when trials are conducted in poor communities.

accidentallfact 9mo ago

It's called "a stupid man with money". It's really quite simple: * He has money * People want a share of his money * He has enough people to tell him stuff to make his bullshit seem to have some connection with reality * Anybody who argues with his stupid bullshit is no longer welcome and gets no chance to get a share of his money

Aerbil313 9mo ago
Ugh. I worked for a guy like this, he was a full-on cybersecurity paranoiac. You need to be a special type of person with near-infinite patience of stupidity just to be able to work under them.

arjie 9mo ago

Well, it's a prompt to his assistant. It's more short-hand communication than anything else. My self-notes often look like that. They're just phrases to bring to mind some ideas rather than others or direct towards something. Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went back to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him. He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular. A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2]. Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10 1: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epstein-last-interview-with-steve-bannon-transcription-20260206T035211&speaker_1=Steve%20Bannon&speaker_2=Unknown&speaker_3=Jeffrey%20Epstein https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste... 2: https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loans_and_investment/loans_and_investment_US/chapter_3_accounting__1_US/33_classification_of_US.html https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540

throw310822 9mo ago
I took your transcript and discussed it with Claude Opus 4.6, after removing both Epstein's and Bannon names (not that it mattered, it understood perfectly who they both were, but didn't mention it until after I asked it explicitly). Claude suggested an interesting pattern: on several topics, Epstein starts with some medium level concept (not naive, but not expert-level), then distracts with a metaphor or a short anecdote, then drops some hint that he has great authority on the subject ("I was in the room", "I had insider knowledge") and finally changes subject or claims that nobody really knows, without ever going deeper.

xorcist 9mo ago

Word salads can be very intimidating if the words are extremely technical and the person behind them carries a lot of clout. It's a bit of a trick that some people are very good at. Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details. Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct. I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.

bhelkey 9mo ago

> "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better" I don' know what "turn them outside out" but it sounds like they are suggesting removing and replacing the heatsink. Funnily enough, replacing thermal paste can improve temperatures [1]. [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/finally-replaced-gpu-thermal-paste/ https://www.xda-developers.com/finally-replaced-gpu-thermal-...

andrewflnr 9mo ago
That's a very generous interpretation. Excessively so. He may have heard of someone suggesting that and repeated it in garbled form, but that would not refute the accusation of bullshittery.