You're using quite a broad brush with "non-conformist," so I'll assume you're referring to Roman Christian martyrdom. The perception of Christians in that era was more or less that they were being coerced to libel Christ and suppress his memory, who moreover had the vital Answer for humankind; and to dissolve their brotherhoods as conspiratorial organizations, including by incriminating friends and family and (in time, certainly by Diocletian) to libel their ancestors. This is quite different from the modern, essentially Reformation, view of them, which is that they were ideologues with an obstinate disinclination to lose the argument. Another misconception is that they were under continuous persecution, when in fact Roman enforcement was more like a limited number of notorious showdowns well spread out over time and terrain; however, this one is not just a modern view but was also promoted by fairly early hagiographers[0]. Finally, resisting even per the rationale I've described was quite controversial, and not all Christians refused to capitulate, even after it had become an established religious concept and practice. For example, see the Donatist controversy in re traditores[1].
The idea that Christianity equates to "very very clean" scholarship regarding "original texts" would surprise most Christians in most periods. It's also not plain to me how this could even amount to a religion, considering all the practical, anthropological value adherents naturally expect one to provide.
Executive fiat, given the right executive body, and undergirded by healthy autarkies or other cell-type self-direction, worked well in most locales for most of the years humans have been humans. Certain flashy civilizations, Sumer, Greece, have tended to draw the spotlight incommensurately with their population sizes. But even these functioned much more like what I describe above than anything modern.
There were and have always been trading and other exchanges all over the world. The Egtved girl was traveling from north to central Germany, probably for marriage. Now, if we mean most people did not do this, then sure. But there's a persistent idea that ancient cultures were not in contact with each other, and this is largely disproven.
Political movements can certainly be an important factor of modern power given the right instigators, but transferring the importance to oneself is, again, damaging mania.
In Hades, yes. Vanishingly few of us actually control our fates or societies even to a small extent. The modern tendency to think like we do is a form of mania. By indulging it, we damage the only control we really have, our relative health and peace of mind.
I agree it's useless for any final-draft user-facing copy. However, again, I'm much more concerned about a reliable software engineering process, which Claude (and me in the loop) gives me in a way I have learned not to trust (at least not yet) from others.
Am I alone in not prioritizing the quality of prose produced by my coding agent? My foremost and almost only concern is how well it can engineer software.
Not to endorse OpenAI's particular guardrails, but unless you're doing something groundbreaking, security best practices should be more than enough for web development.
> I'm also thinking of the 2017 novel "Void Star" where AIs who operate everything have long since left ceased bothering with human languages, and it takes a rare sort of direct matrix-gazing savant to be able to try and horse-whisper them into doing or revealing anything they didn't already plan to do.
This sounds irrelevant to LLMs as we know them, which are trained on human language--it's almost their machine code, in a way--while what you're citing, in stark contrast, sounds like machine code in the classic sense.
"Big mob connections" infiltrated the state, the "police force at a high level." To me, this in and of itself says the strength of a given state apparatus is orthogonal to whether that apparatus is used "to protect the commons."
While this is and has always been outstanding advice, be aware different readers tend to comprehend that advice differently. Make sure you understand your approach moving forward; do further research and hold discussions with seniors.
The fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.
I've been down this road many times over the years, and each new promised land of logging always fails to replace syslog for me. Nothing else is as widely-compatible and performant. Fortunately, there are some great tools out there to modernize the network-admin experience: syslog-ng is a favorite of mine.