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Comment by dghf | Hacker News Reader

> Get these scholars to train the AI, then have it automatically translate all the other tablets

Which is great until it blithely translates an ancient curse and initiates the apocalypse.

Klaatu barada... necktie... neckturn... nickle... noodle... It's an N word, definitely an N word.

That's not a curse, that's a 'stand down' instruction. I would be much happier to see that, than, say, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".

Unless as protection against hacking attempts at issuing the stand down command initiates a curse. After 3 attempts at the phrase, you must wait 30 seconds before your next attempt. After 5 attempts, you are personally frozen. After 10 attempts, all stand down instructions are wiped and the world is screwed at that point.

You mean that hasn't already happened? What the hell is going on then?

Just the usual stuff, unfortunately.

Given how chaotic people are, it's remarkable that millions of us working together isn't invariably a constant raging dumpster fire, and instead is only a bit of smoke here and there that sometimes flares up a bit.

That's very true. As a child, I was confused by all the chaos. Adults seemed to know everything, and yet there was constant war and famine and dysfunction all over the world. As an adult, I'm confused by the fact that anything works at all.

'Dysfunctionally functional' is probably a term that I read elsewhere. It's almost a curse because if things were to fully break, then everyone on earth would consider that a sufficient wake-up call. Instead, we limp along focusing all of our functional resources towards our dysfunction, almost like the most proficient addict who finds new and inventive ways to fight sobriety. It is truly a sight to behold.

Many cells have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contractile_vacuole

It's an organelle that periodically contracts to expel water from inside the cell, out. This prevents the cell from absorbing too much water through osmosis and rupturing.

Even the individual cells are bailing water, as if from a sinking life raft. Always have been. Life itself is a process of dysfunctional function. Actively resisting death. It makes sense that we see this reflected at all scales. It is not a disorder, it is the natural state of living in a universe with entropy.

Good observation! But then what do you call cancer? Life cannot happen without cell growth. So what happens when the normal functioning of cells turns malignant?

All kinds of different cancer, but the point is that the cells keep living and reproducing when they shouldn't. Which I think is very life-y. What's more surprising is the existence and generally reliable nature of apoptosis. The scales across which life exists are really staggering. All kinds of opportunities for weirdness in the abstractions.

Don't worry, you're still confused: nothing does :P

That's a relief! No, wait!

Does it work that way? Is a curse actually cast if it is a machine reading its text rather than a human?

Can machines curse?

This is a question addressed in https://unsongbook.com/

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