The people yearn for IoC

I don’t know, the whole thing about Santa keeping a list of good children and bad children (who get toys and coal, respectively) seems to be a primary component of the myth still. I actually think it evolved as a gauge of critical reasoning: there’s an age by which children are expected to stop believing in Santa, because the story makes no sense and won’t hold up to critical scrutiny. The reward for making this breakthrough is getting to be in on the conspiracy with the adults: secretly helping with the ruse while continuing to reinforce the myth with younger children. It’s a coming of age ritual. It’s also kind of a culture-wide prank that all adults continuously play on all children, like the tooth fairy who I think exists for similar reasons.

Unlike the tooth fairy though, who’s just there to help kids let go of their baby teeth, Santa’s largess is explicitly contingent on good behavior, which is where the manipulation comes in. Gifts that come with strings attached to behavior aren’t charity, they’re a transaction. Children are taught that goodness is rewarded with treats and badness is punished with coal and no treats. I guess calling it a bribe is a little harsh, but it’s certainly transactional. Santa also has the benefit of being all-seeing, so he can monitor your behavior even when the grownups aren’t watching, which is a pretty convenient way for grownups to control behavior in kids when they’re unsupervised. Sort of a spiritual panopticon. The whole idea is to trick children into behaving by making them believe they’re being constantly surveilled by a spirit judge, who will reward them or punish them according to his determination of whether they are good or bad.

I guess I don’t understand what you mean then, especially the first sentence. I think there’s a pretty broad agreement that we have a very limited understanding of how brains work, and that our current benchmarks of sophistication (tool use being one) aren’t the last word on brain capabilities, they’re just (relatively) easily defined behaviors that we can use to categorize what abilities different animals have at their disposal to survive. You also can’t really demonstrate that an animal (or a species) can’t use a tool, you can only know if an animal can use tools by observing tool use, which we have now done with at least one cow. Which is pretty cool.

I think the ability to amass, retain, and augment information learned by our ancestors is our killer feature. Storytelling is an important part of it, using rhythm and rhyme to help us remember and pass on those stories, being able to encode those stories as art and writing, they’re all ways to make it easier for the next generation to get up to speed quickly and then push the boundaries of understanding even further, instead of every generation having to relearn all the basics the hard way. It’s not perfect and it’s still incredibly lossy, but I think that’s why we broke out and became, I think it’s fair to say, the dominant lifeform on the planet. Is that the bar for sentience? I don’t think so, but I don’t really have a better one.

Also we invented santa claus to teach kids that every authority figure in your life will willingly engage in a conspiracy to gaslight and bribe you in order to make you behave the way they want you to.

I’m not sure why it being a newly recorded observation would diminish it in any way. It’s new evidence that cows are capable of what we (humans broadly) previously thought them incapable of. It’s important because it’s a concrete indicator that there’s more going on in cow brains than humans have generally assumed. How much more is an open question. Are other cows capable of tool use? Probably. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there are dairy farmers in the world who’ve seen cows use similar scratching tools and just never bothered to record it, if they even noticed it at all. I’ve only had limited contact with cows but they aren’t stupid, IME they are generally just content as long as they’re warm, dry, and have food. In the US the vast majority of cows are restricted to the point where they wouldn’t even have access to implements they could use as tools, much less the freedom to learn how to use them. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

It depends a lot on what you want to do and a little on what you’re used to. It’s some configuration overhead so it may not be worth the extra hassle if you’re only running a few services (and they don’t have dependency conflicts). IME once you pass a certain complexity level it becomes easier to run new services in containers, but if you’re not sure how they’d benefit your setup, you’re probably fine to not worry about it until it becomes a clear need.

It’s fun in a way that defies comparison.

That’s why I have one host called theBarrel and it’s just 100 Chaos Monkeys and nothing else

They aren’t a waste of money if investors can assume that there won’t be party changes in the future.

I like to imagine there’s a group of dark matter physicists out there trying to explain why their models of the universe are 5% off, and coming up with the notion of photons and the theory of photo-energetic matter. We’re the oddballs in this neighborhood.

lifeless as far as we can tell. Who knows what complexities arise in the dark places of the universe?

I am but a ceramic bead in the intergalactic weighted blanket floating through the cosmos.