Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.
This naturally ends up being controversial, especially in tech, when some of our brightest minds are from other cultures. It doesn't help his case that he's not even from the places he complains about, so he's another outsider complaining about outsiders, which always looks bad.
DHH joined their board in 2024 [0], and is using this opportunity to purge people he disagrees with politically from the Ruby ecosystem. It really is as simple as that.
Specifically, it was in a meeting called by Jason Fried to address people who were concerned about the ongoing existence of an internal list of "funny customer names" (which by all accounts was extremely racist), in which Ryan Singer (who had reportedly previously posted a fair bit of politically right-wing content on internal forums -- those were all deleted when the "no politics at work" policy was rolled out) repeatedly asserted that white supremacy/privilege did not exist (he then resigned).
In the aftermath, DHH dug through old chat logs to find a time in the past when one of the people complaining about the list participated in a discussion about same without complaint, and posted it in a way that was visible to everyone saying that their prior participation meant that their current complaint was invalid.
Then they rolled out the no-politics-at-work policy in this post dated April 26 2021 -- I would encourage anyone interested in the specifics to read through the various versions and edits of this post made in the week following, all without noting that it was being actively changed: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
At a certain point intelligence is a loop that improves itself.
"Hmm, oral traditions are a pain in the ass lets write stuff down"
"Hmm, if I specialize in doing particular things and not having to worry about hunting my own food I get much better at it"
"Hmm, if I modify my own genes to increase intelligence..."
Also note that intelligence applies resource constraints against itself. Humans are a huge risk to other humans, hence the lack of intelligence over a smarter human can constrain ones resources.
Lastly, AI is in competition with itself. The best 'most intelligent' AI will get the most resources.
Thanks for the comment, it triggerred a few thought experiments for me.
For example, if you focus on oral traditions you experiment and create more poems, songs, etc. If you focus on preserving food you discover jams, dried meat, etc.
Is it useful to focus on everything, or global optimal? Is it possible?
Also regarding competition and evolution, what stopped humans to get more capable brains? Is it just resource constraints, like not having enough calories(not having mini nuclear reactor with us)? Or are there other, more interesting causes?
I don't agree with your premise at all so I don't think that the rest of it follows from it either. What evidence or reason do you have to bring me to accept that premise?
I wonder if those would be useful in identifying the potential contents of specific Marion Stokes tapes (my understanding is that they're sorted, but are only labeled with channel and date/time and are being archived slowly): https://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/post/5393
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