Damn. You really transcribed the whole article.

Gary also funded the snuggling of a nuclear bomb in order to ensure his bet paid off.

For more retellings of US government atrocities, see the Relno the Storykeeper puppet shorts in Jason Steele’s Vulo Lives:

• The Shadow and João Goulart
• The Creature from the Northern Woods
• The Watcher and Juan José Torres
• The Hand that Guides the Butcher
• The Coming of the Valuable Fiend
• The Train on the Second Track
• The Falconer and the Dirty Bird
• The Story of the Midnight Hunter

• The Terraformers (2023) by Annalee Newitz. In lieu of a single simple reset, there is a continuous bargaining between capitalistic rentiers and enslaved residents who fight over hundreds of years throughout the final stages of a planet’s terraforming. Homelessness, mass transit, wealth inequality, and racism all are running themes.
• Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2018) by Ed Finn (ed.) and Kathryn Cramer (ed.) is anthology of several science fiction authors who submitted stories with the purpose of specifically counteracting the trend at the time of (post-)apocalyptic stories anticipating a bleak future for humanity. One particularly aspirational story that persists in my memory is Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl by Kathleen Ann Goonan; it is a story about the sociopolitical impact of universal literacy, achieved thanks to the release of an inexpensive medicine that enhances human cognitive abilities, allowing anyone to overcome learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Other stories in the anthology are optimistic for other reasons, but this story comes to mind when I read your post.

Source: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53435595/

Source?

Reminds me of the final pages of chapter 3 of the second volume of Maus (1991) in which a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust acts egregiously and unrepentantly racist to a black hitchhiker, surprising a friend who thought that the suffering would have engendered empathy for discriminated races.

Torture damages people, plain and simple; don’t expect victims to gain wisdom or empathy from the process. So, maybe don’t give them nukes and back the religious megalomaniacs among them who end up committing the same genocidal practices against others such as the Palestinians.

Traditional values are a crutch for the intellectually unambitious and a cudgel for the ambitious.

Antibiotics side effects if you haven’t had them in decades are wild. Suddenly inability to digest certain foods. Sudden clearing of sinuses. Sudden clearing of skin conditions.

Chat, are we cooked?

Hard mode: set time zone to UTC (or Reykjavik; it’s the same) and force yourself to add/subtract offset hours every time you want to know local time. Also, this forces you to track when exactly daylight saving time starts and stops.

Benefit: you know when space probe stuff happens because they’re almost always timestamped UTC. Also, playing Eve Online becomes slightly easier.

deleted by creator

That book was The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson and the solution involved assassinations at scale of oil and gas industry executives as well as destruction by drone of all fossil fuel tankers and egregiously polluting cargo ships. Also, massive releases of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, aggressive immobilization of Antarctic glaciers via water pumps, and the onboarding of all central banks to rebase currency according to how much CO₂ you can fix into the ground instead of capitalism’s belief in endless future growth. It is a very optimistic story, but one we’ll have to carry out eventually in some form to at least the degree described in the book.

An “advantage” of living under a mad king is that you can blame the consequences of your bad decisions on the king instead of taking responsibility and thinking for yourself.

In a separate study of 20 LLMs, Omar found that LLMs are more prone to hallucinate and elaborate on misinformation when the text they’re processing looks professionally medical — formatted like a hospital discharge note or clinical paper — than when it comes from social-media posts (M. Omar et al. Lancet Digit. Health 8, 100949; 2026). “When the text looks professional and written as a doctor writes, there’s an increase in the hallucination rates,” says Omar.

You can just make an Overleaf account (or install GNU TeXmacs) and start outputting academic-like papers for fun and profit. I would have thought LLM developers would have at least highlighted PageRank-like citation metadata as very important when training on academic publications; papers with no citations clearly aren’t reputable.

They vaguely wonder who “Vetinari”, “Weatherwax”, “Ogg”, and “Otto Chriek” were.

“On one hand those trans kids give me the creeps. On the other, I get to call high school girls hot without consequences!”

But… the market! Think of my investments!

By having your computer shipped to you, mostly.

And the highway is littered with potholes.