By extraordinary coincidence, I was just a moment ago part-of-the-way through re-watching The Matrix (1999) and paused it to check Hacker News. There your reply greeted me.

Wild glitch!

It's not you specifically, but there's a broader sociological problem where we anthropomorphize countries and then claim they are doing things.

The average person in the US is not threatening Iran, and rationally the US cannot be said to be threatening Iran. What's happening is that an elite clique of Epstein-adjacent legacy-power-trolls (aka The US Government) are threatening Iran.

The US does not have legs, arms, or hands, it cannot do anything. This turn of phrase in which the US (or any country) does something is a semantic-contraption of legacy-power designed to make citizens (whether left, right, or undecided) feel psychologically-responsible for the actions of a entrenched-class of elite-warmongers who do not represent them; and have not represented them for, likely, thousands of years.

Ideally: local; offline.

Or do I have to wrestle it for 250 hours before it coughs up the dough? Last time I tried, the AI systems struggled with some of the most basic C code.

It seemed fine with Python, but then my cat can do that.

I can run circles around everyone in any social gathering, and life in general, because I live in reality, where they live in a simulacra.

Of course, I don't openly brag (except here) about no longer being a node on the fear-grid; no longer behaviorally-programmed by salaryman-psychologists at Facebook, Apple, Google, and the other major state-adjacent surveillance companies.

Instead, I watch society from an anthropological perspective; with a calm detachment. Listening with quiet amusement to the smart-phone-people as they decant paraphrased versions of whatever madness they were told to believe that day by their 'feeds'.

There are now two new classes in society: Delineated by those who carry smartphones, and those who remain conscious. Those who are lost in the map versus those who still see the territory.

Sure, but we're dealing in oral-folklore that's over a century old here. I don't see any reason to value the earthquake-theory over the ghost-trap theory.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Except, of course, that modern academia is opposed to accepting, or investigating, anything paranormal (see Wikipedia etc).

I first visited the Winchester house in 1985, as a child, and it sure felt ghost infested to me back then. You can't get more scientific than that. My sister (also a child at the time) peer-reviewed my findings.

Three months ago they were still using Wordstar on IBM XTs. Block is a retro-computing powerhouse.

That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.

Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.

True. Everything has backdoored CPUs as its foundation. Consider, for starters: (Intel's 'Management' Engine); AMD's (PSP); Apple/Arm (black-box hardware).

You can layer as much theater as you like on top of the hardware-surveillance-layer in modern computers; it still won't grant you privacy.