Losing my mind like that as I go up in age is my greatest fear. Sad to see it happen to someone like that.
As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.
Speaking of operationalizing the woke mind virus, here's a funny story about GROK, Jessica Rabbit, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hunter S Thompson, HAL 9000, and other simulated characters appearing together on a fictional episode of Mike Myer's classic SNL skit "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman":
Episode: "The MechaHitler Breakdown" - July 9, 2025:
If you're not familiar with the "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" cultural reference, here is the most awesome epic episode (where Madonna disses herself, and a very special cameo appearance):
As you might guess it's kind of like The Sims meets Minsky's Society of Mind running in Cursor, and it includes simulated characters like Linus Torvalds who is great at practical stuff like helping out with git, devops, programing, and extremely harsh code reviews.
Simulated Linus's best burn (and possibly patentable great idea) was:
"I bet you even had pie menus in the bathroom! 'Which direction to flush?'"
But back to reality:
What was so shocking was the amount of energy Jonathan Payne puts into his hatred of trans people, constantly scanning his Facebook feed with paranoid zeal, relentlessly dropping in uninvited out of the blue on two different occasions to provoke fights in public with innocent people he doesn't even know, who were just trying to have a friendly discussion.
I hope I get too tired and lazy to hate that intensely and vigorously before I am so old that I lose my mind that badly.
Here is what I wrote to Arthur van Hoff and James Gosling about Jonathan Payne's behavior:
>I have many trans, gay, and otherwise marginalized friends, and Jonathan Payne posted a bunch of uninvited transphobic bullshit on my Facebook page in the middle of a conversation we were having about transphobia, which several of my trans friends were participating in, and where many others could see.
>This includes, among many other people, Lynn Conway, an 86 year-old trans woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist, who INVENTED superscalar computer architecture at IBM, who in 1968 FIRED her and destroyed her life for transitioning, then 52 years later in 2020 officially and publicly apologized to her. Later after putting her life back together from scratch under a new identity she worked at Xerox PARC and WROTE THE BOOK on VLSI design, and taught classes on VLSI design at MIT to none other than Guy Steele, who you certainly know, who in her class designed his famous hardware Scheme microprocessor, and to James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, who in her class designed his original 3d graphics accelerator hardware, and also to our own friend David Levitt.
>It was humiliating to me for Jonathan Payne to embarrass me in front of so many of my trans friends including Lynn Conway.
As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.