Don't blame the computer.  Blame the programmer.  And not necessarily the app programmer either.  Things that are done through web forms are a mix of the tech standards for HTML, etc., and implementations that often try to match one or another specific need, rather than remaining general.

Stupidity seems to appear out of complexity by spontaneous generation in the layers and layers of services of which these things are wrought.

There are two routes to explaining the discrepency: inside the story and in the author's words outside the story.  It sounds like you are leaning toward the latter: What if we are reading something wrong?

Sounds a bit like the Mormon afterlife, Celestial/Terrestial/Telestial.

Redemption requires achieving that state where righteousness and holiness mean the same thing, and embracing it fully.

Not Joules McRock ?  Or was that another nickname that turned up?

There is one problem with joulestones that may endear them to you.  Some forms of Otto Korrecditt may insist on turning Joule into jewel.  Personally, I'd relish the dragon to be slain!

Depends who names them.

Rate them by capacity: exa, zetta, yotta, ronna, and quetta.  Exas are only curiosities.  Serious capacity begins with the yotta, but for heavy work you want the quettas.

Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, Yotta, Ronna, Quetta .

Heinlein shamelessly used "Shipstone" and then claimed it was named after his its inventor.

Gatestone, gapstone (after "bandgap"),  ion stone, joulestone, jumpstone, hsi-stone (high/ultrahigh specific impulse stone) ... ... ... drivestones, arcstones, boundstones/bondstones ... Einstones, singularity stones ...

Everyone's lost when they first try to understand all the problems and mysterious solutions of character sets.  Even traversing the Basic Multilingual Plane is a trip through the Twilight Zone.  (Is an umlauted vowel one character or two?  Or both either or?)

Oh, emoji are admitted to Unicode (part of the basic multingual plane) as they are popularized.  Look up 'emoji' on WikiP.

Blame Microslough.  Instead of hewing to the international standard for character codes, and character code binary encodings, they remain stuck in the cement of their pre-ISO 646 program code with no readily accessible off-ramp.  It's possible that those boxes indicate a binary encoding that is disallowed under ISO 646.  (Such are often alternate and ambiguous coding that have the potential to carry malware.)

Once programming for mass market apps spread around the world, character sets became a huge problem.  The Chinese (Han) ideographs number over 30,000; Japan mixes two character sets of its own with Han-derived symbols and the latin alphaber, the different slavic nations use alphabets with different characters added to the basic Cyrillic set, and I have no idea how click-speakers' utterences are represented. ISO 646 defines a 64-bit encoding and a subset (Unicode) that, by sharing Han symbols across language boundaries, can be encoded in 16 bits, or a variable number of 8-bit bytes.

Basic competence in ISO-646 probably requires study equivalent to 45 undergraduate credits--a three semester sequence.

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(13 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

Proof claimed that present AI models are inadequate because they cannot reason and do not actually understand: https://instapundit.com/677702/ .

Dirk B wrote:

The demonic spirits and nastiest humans (past and present) will also enter the lake but wind up on nasty frozen or burning worlds, and their portals will be one way only. smile  I can't wait to figure out what kind of world to put Satan on.

Didn't Dante have some ideas?

There's an old joke about a fellow with his feet in a freezer and his head in an oven.  On average, he's comfortable.  Or you could assume a spherical cow ...

Why wouldn't the Father of Lies lie to himself?  And to anyone else he could ensnare for eternal damnation?

Which is more extrinsic, size or costliness?  Size is an explicitly extrinsic quality.  Here, costliness is an attribute attributed to the trucks.

But consider "He loves rare, dangerous, expensive pets."  The order is 'rare' (how many abound), 'dangerous', 'expensive'.  We could exchange the latter two; the effect would be a change in emphasis.  The adjective closer to the noun has the greater emphasis.  That we can exchange them calls for the second comma.   Why the first comma?  The order "expensive, rare, dangerous" also works.  The distinction here between the "extrinicality" (eek!) is not strong enough to fully mandate one order over the other, though putting 'rare' last feels to me weaker than the other orders.

"Six large, expensive red trucks" -- The modifiers are ordered extrinsic (number, size) to intrinsic (color).  Try changing the order.  You can swap 'expensive' and 'large' with minor effect, but moving the others reads like a bad translation from Yoda.  The comma feels right to me, perhaps because 'large' and 'expensive' are (mostly) swapable.

More generally, the most intrinsic modifiers are placed nearest the nouns they modify, and the most extrinsic (e.g. number) are placed furthest away.

The rule about commas only between modifiers of like or near-like category isn't absolute.  Sometimes the modifier sequence reads best with a non-canonical comma somewhere.

Intrinsic: related to a property inherent in the thing itself, without regard to how much you have or how it relates to other tbings.

Extrinsic: what is not intrinsic, per above

Intrinsic and extrinsic are endpoints on a scale.

I first read about this 'rule' in the 1980s in a paper out of Bell Labs.  It described how speakers and writers of prose regarded (or measured?) as clear (comprehensible?) actually wrote.   I presume it was part of their studies in readability.  So it's not an arbitrary rule, but the description of observed common and good practice.

Is the action deliberate, or automatic, or habitual?  In the first case, the person is the actor.  In the second case, since it was not a deliberate choice, the person is not the actor, and should not be the subject of the sentence, any more than you would say that someone sufferring from back spasms "spasmed his back".

Dirk B. wrote:

Demonic teddy bears! Great idea.

Theodore Sturgeon: The Professor's Teddy Bear

Having to pay up front might also dis ourage the ad-spammers.

I suppose Doctor Caliogstro is out?

Hmmm.  It seems unlikely that Freud would have won out over everything and everyone.  There are so many to choose from.  Of course, you could just use Kafka, or that destructive fraud, Bruno Betterheim.  Or you could go with Oliver Sacks, if you mean them to be places of dignity and true healing.

njc wrote:

Would someone who's actually involved with Grammarly (-ly constduction there!) please feed it Strunk's "Vigorous writing is concise" paragraph and see what kind of coffee the civet cat produces?

Another interesting test would be the first couple of pages of Volume 1 of Manchester's =The Last Lion=, which may be found here: https://ethanrussell.com/americanstory/?p=4030 .

In case you're wondering about civet cat coffee, it's called kopi luwak and appears briefly in the story =Directionally Challenged= in the collection =Your Honor, I Can Explain= (Volume 1 of the Andrew Spurgle Chronicles)

Would someone who's actually involved with Grammarly (-ly constduction there!) please feed it Strunk's "Vigorous writing is concise" paragraph and see what kind of coffee the civet cat produces?

Sadly, I've read of college English teachers who don't know the difference between a passive or a present progressive or a gerund.