@NunavutBirder Oh, yikes.

Good health and best wishes to all involved.

@cstross I find it hard not to wonder if the attraction of AI doesn't include so much forcible normalization of text that there is never anything unfamiliar, and thus never any reason to question a self-assessment of "smart".

(So much gets so messed up by mistaking responses for properties.)

@NunavutBirder This one really made me laugh.

@ekuber Preach!

By and large, the motivation for efficiency to maximize the amount that can be extracted from that step of the process; the brittleness and fragility of the machine upon which everyone's lives depend has been put in so people get rich as much as possible. (It's not even "get rich", it's "as much as possible" or maybe "as soon as possible" if you can tell those apart.)

If we want to live through the time of angry weather, we're going to agree that nobody is or gets rich.

@cstross Agriculture, minimally anything resembling field agriculture, is one with Thebes the Golden. (No, not yet, but sure as death.)

Alternative food supply is essential, and direct synthesis isn't (likely) everything but it's an awful lot.

@dacig @Salty

@maggiechapman Epstein was bankrolled and who or what did so has not been made public if it is known.

I think that was ought to be at least as interesting as the contents of the files.

@clew the thing that makes TeX what it is is metafont, which is allegedly elegant if you happen to be the kind of math genius who can understand it in the first place. (In whose number I am not!)

I'd argue that perl is inherently simple, too; it's like that so you can best express the True Laziness for whatever coding problem you happen to have. It's not hard to argue that this expectation of philosophical discipline prevents perl from being a general purpose programming language.

@suetanvil

@fazalmajid Well, that, probably, but also "power broker".

The Epstein files function to identify the de facto real power structure. (As he saw it, but considering how long he kept what running, he can't have been too far off.)

(It also identifies the help and the wannabes.)

@gbargoud @cstross @tony

@petealexharris It is, alas, nowhere near 99%.

The distinction may have operational utility in opposing their policies; for example, the "all these babies will die! look at the tombstones in old graveyards!" response to anti-vax policies functions to confirm the objectives and purposes of the anti-vax movement. It's about killing babies; that's what it wants. Telling its members that babies will die is not an effective means of dissuasion.

@cstross

@petealexharris A death cult is about everybody dying, usually because $DIETY has become disgusted with mankind and will slaughter everybody and the goal of the cult is to bring about that end of the world.

The Right contains some death cultists (Premillennial dispensationalism is extremely death cult) but most of what we're seeing is eliminationist; they want to extirpate everyone else and dwell alone in the earth. They themselves don't want to die or the world to end.

@cstross

@cstross Not precisely; they're not about generalized dying, they're willing to kill a lot of kids to maintain their status.

Can't enjoy that status if they're dead.

(Real death cults tend to be powerless people who want everyone to die as a means of escaping their circumstances. There's certainly some death cult members getting sucked into the grift but even those are mostly built on histrionics about a lack of white supremacy rather than material misery as such.)

@cstross If you want to reverse the demographic transition, you have to kill a lot of infants.

If you don't reverse the demographic transition, patriarchy goes away.

("The environment produces the organism" is always the case; other things are the case, too, but what you can have is constrained by the environment which exists, not which could exist. And for humans, cites are an environment and culture is an environment.)

Anti-vax is a "kill babies, keep patriarchy" movement.