Surely someone has done a thesis on this, good luck finding it with modern search engines. In principle a steady and significant rate of inflation could be positive, but you've still got to have some mechanism for people to build wealth or else the best you can achieve is that everyone stays poor together.

Being in denial about how people are is a big part of how we got here. I constantly run into people saying "oh I can't believe how hateful people are" and shit like that because they weren't exposed to it. I live in a part of California where logging is still a primary source of employment and spent a couple years fixing trailers and I heard all manner of ill shit that other people don't experience because they're not a big white guy wearing carharts and turning wrenches. If you think you have some idea of what kind of repugnant ideas are out there you haven't heard a damned thing until they take you to be one of them.

It's a simple fact that people who haven't had as much exposure to other people and cultures are ignorant about them. And it's also a fact that people who don't know shit typically don't have any idea how much they don't know. But that works in all directions, see?

You know, this irrational and aggressive "us vs. them" thinking does not become any better when done on the non-conservative side.

You have no idea what consequences I'm facing.

Why are we trivialize Microsoft fuckups? This should be called gross negligence and total incompetence. They insecure crap has no place in any professionally managed IT.

Oh, I've been looking carefully all right.

Thank you for proving my point there.

Looks like a really gross case of incompetence.

For very limited values of "useful". If these references were actually really useful, the maintainer would have known them.

If these artificial cretins could perform (outside of very limited circumstances), the worlds would already look a lot different. Instead it has all been smoke and mirrors and lies by misdirection. Sure, a lot of people fall for that but that does not say anything about LLMs, it says some not very good things about people.

This is a common strain of misunderstanding I see all over the place. People think that evolution is somehow magical and that what it produces is mystically better because it's "natural". That's all garbage.

Evolution is a random process. There's no intelligence guiding it, nothing that ensures that the "choices" it makes are the best alternatives or can't have horrific consequences. In fact, the vast majority of evolutionary changes are utter failures that immediately get selected out.

Also, it's silly to claim that climate change is moving "too fast for evolution". Evolution absolutely can and will respond to climate change... it might be that corals go extinct and something else evolves to fill their niche in ocean ecology, or it might be that corals do evolve in something like their current form. Evolution is fine either way and will produce something that settles into a new equilibrium. It might not be an equilibrium humans like, and it might not settle fast enough to make us happy, but we need to realize that what we're concerned about isn't the ecosystem -- that will survive regardless, unless we get into some runaway feedback loop that turns Earth into Venus, or Neptune -- what we're concerned about is maintaining an environment that we're accustomed to.

Given all of that, our potential creation of genetically-modified corals isn't somehow subverting evolution, it's just another evolutionary avenue. Rather than random mutations, we'll create some specific ones and then we'll throw them into the mix and see if they get selected for or against. The same mutations we create deliberately could also have occurred randomly and would that make the outcome any less "natural"?

And if we've already altered the environment so much that our preferred ecosystem is going away anyway, what's the harm in trying to use CRISPR CAS-9 to "guide" evolution in a direction we'd prefer, rather than letting it randomly go in whatever direction it will? Could our genetic modifications make things worse? Sure! Could random mutations also make things worse? Sure! Which is more likely to maintain an ecosystem of the sort we enjoy? No one can say for sure, but in general if you want to get from point A to point B you're better off aiming for B rather than just walking randomly.

Even better would be to stop changing the climate, but at this point all we can do is try to limit the amount we're changing it. And we should do that! But the best that we can do might still not be enough for corals as we know them, so if we like reefs and reef ecosystems (and we really do; I'm an avid SCUBA diver and I love reef ecosystems), then we should probably put some effort into researching modifications that can survive warmer and more acidic oceans.

It is also pretty crazy that somebody had that idea and then made it work. But Science is often very non-intuitive.

Who would have expected that. Well, only everybody with some rational understanding of things.

I think you have not been looking carefully enough.

I think we have a semantics issue here. To me "what should I have done" and "what should I do given that lesson" are just two consecutive steps. Also, "what should I have done" does include an analysis of "what could I have done". The first one is analysis, and as such necessary, the second one a decision in part based on the results of that analysis.

Maybe you associate guilt, shame or something like it with "what should I have done"? If so, that is not a required part at all. It is something separate and irrational.