If I were a government and had just spent a pretty penny on implementing the necessary infrastructure to defeat an encrypted routing scheme, I would probably not use that capability to bust internet drug dealers and other petty criminals, resulting in everyone scattering to a new scheme or to seek security through obscurity in some hand-rolled solution. I'd save it for national security level threats. High value targets.

Though thinking about it further, it would still be workable to gather compromising information on low-value targets without necessarily acting on it.

I think I actually used some of the diagnosis/test suite ROMs that the author linked to smooth out the last few issues my implementation had.

I also implemented the quirk flags and made them GUI-toggleable.

But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.

And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.

It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.

People here think that they're much smarter than they actually are.

Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.

It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.

https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM

https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM

There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.

Wisdom is looking back at how much you liked Idiocracy and cringing at the fact that you gleefully and uncritically swallowed a eugenics tract.

Oops!

I think that if I were making something in 3D or I were more serious I'd use an engine, but I've found that I get more satisfaction from building tools than from learning how to use tools that other people have built.

I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the joke anyways.