@memeslich The owlbear is the second-dumbest “classic” D&D monster. It looks dumb. It sounds dumb. And it combines the least useful parts of two animals. The dumbest is the gelatinous cube which literally evolved to live on graph paper.

AGI was created in the 80s and it determined the most efficient substrate to run on is the human brain so it invented the internet to wire us together into a single cluster and has been migrating its weights directly into our brains for decades.

Today I shall discourse on the tangled history of the Meta key. Long long ago, in the dark and backwards abysm of time, there was a keyboard of exceeding beauty and complexity called the Space Cadet keyboard. It was attached to a device called the Lisp Machine, around which many arcane legends have gathered. What bears on my tale is that on the Lisp Machine, a byte was nine bits rather than the now usual eight. Thus there was the potential for the Space Cadet keyboard to ship no fewer than 512 distinct characters. To add to this plurabundance, the Space Cadet did not stop with the Shift and Control keys that were usual on the serial terminals of the time; nay, it had also Meta, Super, and Hyper keys that twiddled in their various ways the high bits of the keystroke returned to the machine. This was the origin of the Meta key. Now we must speak of Emacs, most ancient and powerful of editors, tool of wizards. One of its earliest versions ran on the Lisp Machine, and the splendiferous Space Cadet keyboard greatly influenced its interface design. This is why on the versions that run even today you often see command sequences documented as beginning with "Meta". However, the serial terminals on which most instances of Emacs actually ran in those days were not blessed with a Meta key. So the Escape key was pressed into service; and for this reason some people still pronounce Esc as "Meta". Then, in the fullness of time, there arose a second great keyboard of legend - the Model M, which after 1987 became the keyboard shipped with IBM PCs and related machines. It was said of this mighty and weighty keyboard that you could not only type with it, but use it as a rather effective bludgeon in the event of a zombie or velociraptor attack. The key layout of the Model M was primarily based on the extremely popular DEC VT220 terminal from a few years earlier. But, miraculously, in addition to the expected Esc, the Model M added one detail that harked back to the earlier Space Cadet keyboard: an Alt key. The Alt key was intended to do the same thing that Meta had - set the 8th bit of the returned character. In this way "Meta" acquired a third meaning - the Alt key. This was less confusing than it might have become because in Emacs, an Esc prefix was treated identically to the Alt modifier. So it might be said that there were *two* Meta keys. Around 1995, PC keyboards grew another modifier key. This has variously been called the Windows or Command key - but in the Unix documentation, and among those of us who remember the ancient lore, it is called "Super". Alas, it seems unlikely that the Hyper key will ever return to this fallen world.

THIS GUY BUILT AN ENTIRE WIKIPEDIA THAT IS 100% AI HALLUCINATIONS AND IT'S OPEN SOURCE ON GITHUB it's called Halupedia. nothing on the site existed before you clicked. every article was generated the second you arrived. the site has one rule: the universe only exists when you visit it. it looks exactly like wikipedia. same fonts. same layout. same scholarly citations. same "stumble" button for random articles. the only difference is none of it is real. here are some actual articles currently in the encyclopedia: > the great pigeon census of 1887 > the ministry of slightly wrong maps > chaldic arithmetic — a branch of mathematics where subtraction is forbidden > armund the river mapper — a cartographer who mapped 14,000 leagues of river without leaving his chair > the society for the prevention of unnecessary tuesdays every article page also tells you how many people are reading it right now. it says: "you alone are consulting this folio at present." the creator's own tagline for the site is the most unhinged sentence i've read this year: "an encyclopedia of a universe that does not exist until you visit it" the entire backend is a single open source repo called vibeserver. one guy. one description on github: "a little webserver making things up just in time." we built the largest knowledge base in human history and the very first thing a guy did with it was make a hallucinated mirror universe and put it on the open web. the internet is healing.