Honestly the most surprising part was when she went "of course we know fanfiction can be used for cult indoctrination, ever since that other cult did it"
I skipped that episode because it seemed boring, but now I might come back to it.
There's just something so ... basic about HPMOR. Oh, so you wrote a Harry Potter story? Targeted at emotionally vulnerable neurodivergent young people? That's playing fanfiction on easy mode. Meanwhile, people are out there inventing a whole sui generis fandom about humanity being force-femmed by communist space plants. I don't understand it, but (stirring brass band) by Gad, I respect it.
I liked that part where Harry's happy memory for powering his Patronus was his absolute certainty that we will defeat death and "no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again" - that's cool shit.
Right up until the Patronus animal was a human and I cringed so hard I had to take a break from reading.
be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck
proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses
>proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses
So, the very concept of "defeating death with technology" has probably been thoroughly discredited as impossible, inherently ghoulish, or a combo of the two.
It is technically correct to call Yud a "renowned AI researcher", but saying someone's renowned in a pseudoscience such as AI is hardly singing their praises.