I woke up with such a bad feeling..

I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.

OP, this looks very comprehensive, and too much to look into right now, but I'll explore it later.

1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer.

2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.

> if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents

Pretty much a "Yes, and?" scenario. See above.

> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")

I get where you're going, but precisely this. These things always start slow... then fast. The old adage "first they came for x, then y" is not a joke or an exaggeration. It is pretty much historic observation. I've lived long enough to know that whenever someone invokes the "think of the children" defense, there's always a catch.

We're getting drowned by "good enough". Not "good" mind you, just "good enough".

For small greenfield stuff and throwaway code though, its generally very useful. For bigger projects, seems to be i tend to have more success with it mocking stuff, populating structures with test data and combing through logs to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement when i've exhausted my tricks.

Running this on the dev console makes it snappy again:

    let allElements = document.querySelectorAll('\*');
    allElements.forEach(element => {
        element.style.filter = 'none';
        element.style.backdropFilter = 'none';
    });

Never stopped people overengineering :P

Good point. There are many "local versions" of Mary, for example, in Latin America. All of them display unique traits indicative of "synchretization" (sp?) of say african Orishas, probably dating back to the time of the slave trade.

This reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong . Its a classic categorization mistake. Its not exactly wrong (its also not right, mind you...), its just non-constructive and almost not worthy of a reply. But since this is a discussion forum, I'll bite.

It judges others on their "ignorance", while embracing it. It talks about religious "narratives" and compares it to belief in the "one true capital G god" (the "real" truthy truth). Meaning it puts one set of beliefs (subjective experiences) above all others, and seems completely unaware of the contradiction while doing so.

It also misunderstands the concept of a mitochondrial Eve. She was not the first, and not the only one alive at the time, she was just the one whose direct lineage survived. Before her there were others. The name "Eve" is doing a lot of work here...

> Fun facts all of the main major religious scriptures Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist has description or prophecy of Muhammad one way or another.

You mean that $HOLY_BOOK also has a description of the prophecy of the One True Prophet Bob? It must be true, because I'm pretty sure it is.

There's also your point about monotheism.

> overtime by ignorance, people started worshipping idols alongside the original God.

Being someone with a certain admiration for the scientific method, i'm inclined to point out that as far as the history of religion goes (and please correct me about this statement), monotheism seems to be a more recent development (I'm pretty sure hn has people far more qualified than me to add substance here).

-- signed, rest of the world :|