I know that this is likely an unpopular thing to say nowadays, but I think this rhinoceritis thing has gotten out of hand. Between hearing radio announcements from local businesses proudly proclaiming to have become "rhinoceros native" and hearing news stories demanding that we should continue to trust rhinos even after several people have been killed for having done so, well honestly I don't think it's a good sign for things to come.
Look, infectious disease is not a difficult to understand concept. An infected individual passes it on to others, who in turn get infected. Outbreaks grow exponentially, and for a disease like rhinoceritis especially that fact is a terrible portent. The possible endgames are either that the outbreak is contained, or all but a lucky immune few and a handful of highly obstinate friends eventually succumb.
I remember when we all made fun of people who said that their very unfortunately rhinocerized loved ones were still the same and should for some reason be treated with respect even as their stampedes caused serious damage. I can't remember the last time I ever felt like I was in good company when making fun of the reckless fools who decided to become "accepting" of this new normal. How long will it be then, until our society has normalized stories of folks planning on intentionally catching this disease so that they can join the herd's immunity? I don't care if it's "inevitable" or "they hallucinate a lot less now," because the reasonable position has been—and will always be—that being a rhinoceros is awful.
Don't get me started on this "rhino art" nonsense. You've seen that stuff, right? I don't care if art critics are starting to embrace it—it's all just meaningless footprints on canvas to me. My stupid algorithm fed me a rhino "cover" of Careless Whisper the other day and I swear I wanted to vomit.
And the code. Oh, the code! We're bulldozing ecosystems to build special "rhino data centers" filled with expensive hardware to allow trained rhinocerized programmers to write code. Apparently, they're "really good at boilerplate" as if being able to recall certain specific pre-rhino neural pathways for writing repetive code is worth anything. I can't believe stock markets have made SVANNA the single most valuable company in the world over the amount of rhino-compatible hardware they've sold despite not having a pathway for rhinos to be able to maintain the hardware in the event that humanity is eradicated.
People are dying over this stuff. There is no world where 8 billion humans suddenly turning into rhinos could lead to anything but serious ecosystem collapse. This is a known quantity but it seems like everyone is just making their peace with dying an early death if it means not being made part of the permanent underclass of stampede trampling victims.
I don't care if nobody agrees. I don't even care if nobody reads this. Fact of the matter is if all who are left in the room have naught to say but "Guess I'll go rhino now," then I might as well use the silence to say something intelligible:
I'll never become a rhinoceros. It's not right.
Nothing you do could change your mind. Not FOMO, not incentive, not even force.
I'd rather get gored. I'd rather get trampled on. I'd rather die of starvation from a food chain collapse than sacrifice my humanity.
Earlier today, Linus Torvalds told AI haters to walk away from Linux kernel development.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds puts foot down on anti-AI comments (gamingonlinux.com)
This, to me, is a Rubicon moment. If the poster child of free software so readily discards issues surrounding the ethics of large language models as they currently exist and so brazenly ignores the mathematical fact that they are fundamentally unreliable, then that's it. I am calling time of death. Proprietary OSes have long been garbage even before this fad, and smaller free software operating system projects have always been a festering hive of the very kind of fashy weirdo who would have already adopted slopware development as a way of life long ago.
The whole field is rotten, hollowed out, shambling with its last breaths in ignorance that its fate is of its own making. Nothing will improve until these comically unprofitable tech companies collapse once they run out of venture funding, which will lead to the stagnation of language models and eventual abandonment by their users once the lack of further "training" leads to unfitness for purpose so great as to be even compel an admission of such from diehard vibecoders (instead of the unfitness being visible only to competent programmers today).
Unfortunately, today is not yet tomorrow. I must contend with the fact that in terms of impact on the world, I might as well be acting entirely alone. My refusal to join the pack will save my soul, but the soul of that which I have poured so much love into is already forfeit.
Anyway, rhinos.
In Eugène Ionesco's 1959 stage play Rhinoceros, an outbreak of infectious disease causes its human victims to be transformed into rhinoceroses. One by one, ordinary people fall victim to this plague and in their metamorphoses become perpetrators of destruction as stampedes cause more and more carnage. At the center of the play is Bérenger, a chronically drunken floozy. He is not special, other than how much of a loser he seems to be. He is also the only character in the play who steadfastly refuses to become a rhinoceros, proudly proclaiming during the play's denouement that he will not capitulate even when none remain who could understand his words.
Naturally, I love it. If it interests you, my recommendation is to watch the 1973 film adaptation of the same name starring Gene Wilder. It has a bumpin' soundtrack and a captivating finale.
While in university during the period leading up to World War II, Ionesco watched one of his professors recruit students one by one into the fascistic Iron Guard. Time and again, Ionesco witnessed his peers show their first symptoms by loudly claiming to "disagree" with the Iron Guard's politics "except for the Jews" only to then succumb to the disease and join the Iron Guard mere weeks later. To his horror, even left-leaning friends seemed just as vulnerable to the reactionary rhetoric and would soon denounce their supposedly sincerely-held views. As fascism crept up through Europe during the war, Ionesco found himself alone in refusing to embrace it. In 1942, he fled Romania to move to France. There he found that many French had effectively submitted to the occupying Nazi force, believing that to be the best way to ensure one's own safety at a time where people were being disappeared by authorities. After the war, Ionesco then saw that many French intellectuals would spout endless apologia for Joseph Stalin despite strong evidence for his regime's repression and violence.
Rhinoceros is Eugène Ionesco's reflection on the maddening dynamics of mass movements and about how even seemingly most staunch opponents eventually find themselves embracing reactionary violence.
Who Goes Nazi? (Harper's Magazine)
At the end of the day, I can't tell you who would go rhinoceros. All I can say is that I won't be among them.