You bring this up like it's a well known incident, but my googling can find no evidence of it? The only reason not say the name of the project would be if it's common knowledge, but it's not?
ChatGPT research reckons you're making it up, and I'd be curious if you have evidence to the contrary?
So what happened here is basically... AI told you that something that made you suspicious because you have zero subject matter expertise is suspect?
I'm not really sure how to react to someone who has a robot affirm their anxieties other than to stand by my previous statements and give a polite pointer at some terms to look up on Wikipedia rather than feed into a clanker.
If you type one thing and expect people to understand that you meant something else then I will have to assume that by this:
>>people who do post grads tend to be well rounded enough to have read a bit of philosophy, or at least, they did in my day.
you meant you once visited a university but never enrolled in any classes?
You can complain that people on the internet misunderstand on purpose (and I agree it is far to common), but that complaint is only valid if you communicate clearly yourself.
You said it was “named after a pedophile”, that is wrong
>>The word panopticon derives from the Greek word for "all seeing" – panoptes.
The concept was invented by Jeremy Bentham, who died before Foucault was born.
Interesting that you named your HN account after a famous homophobe.
that guy is no longer with the project and does brave now iirc
(it's super interesting to us that two different people took such a wild leap btw)
Foucault is dead.
>>(it's super interesting to us that two different people took such a wild leap btw)
It's super interesting to me that you expected people to make the wild leap from “named after a pedophile” to a project that wasn't even named after a person.
You chose to communicate poorly to make a point and are now complaining when the point turned out to not even be true.
You could have said 'Panopticlick' and people would have known what you were talking about. Instead, you left the name out and instead pointed out the rename and the “fact” that it was previously named after a pedophile. The obvious implication is that it was renamed to cover this up.
The smug tone of your follow-up leads met to the conclusion that you had some “fun” trivia from a class you took one time, and you prioritised showing that off over clear communication (while falsely implying some kind of cover-up of wrongdoing by the EFF).
https://lundi.am/The-Black-Masses-of-Michel-Foucault-the-Bul...
Plus as others noted, even if true your original statement would still be a lie since a Panopticon is a concept not a person.