The actual linked wikia article is short on the actual detail and background of exactly why the Butlarian Jihad actually happened.
I’m an avid Dune fan. Sidebar/background: The son of the Dune writer, Brian Herbert, and his cowriter Kevin J. Anderson wrote the setting, events, and conclusion to the actual Butlarian Jihad conflictt. It’s largely derided by scifi fans, but is highly entertaining. It’s actually still ongoing almost 3 decades later. And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out. But I digress…
Here’s how it went down in the dune universe (I’m certainly messing up some details, but these are the broad strokes):
Humanity has spread to the stars. No FTL involved, just good old fashioned sublight engines. The dune universe takes place about 50-60,000 years in our future. Mankind has spread across a couple dozen solar systems and everything is going peachy. However, mankind gets complacent, fat, and happy with their success and society stagnates. A handful of eager, ambitious humans scheme about how they can take it all over. They do, and then eventually start turning themselves into cyborgs, or disembodies brains in a jars that swap bodies and are effectively immortal. One of the cyborgs gets lazy and makes an AI to manage things, which promptly takes over, overthrows the cyborg rulers of humanity, makes the cyborgs it’s slaves (who have great autonomy/are conspirators) and generally rules over everything. A small group of solar systems is left under human control, who fall back to a feudal-ish type system of government with lords and dukes and whatnot.
The AI does all sorts of nasty shit to the humans in it’s dominion. Unit 931 and Auschwitz type experiences, slavery until death, etc. Untold billions, if not trillions, of humans live in animal-like conditons worked to death. The human group of systems isn’t cool with this, but they can’t do much and are vastly overpowered by the cyborgs, so a fragile peace is held. One day, the son of one of the subservient cyborgs knocks up a human slave, and they have a kid. In the background, all sorts of rabble rousing and shenanigans are being done to stir unrest amoungst the slaves by the free human system. The human systems develop FTL, with spice as a catalyst, except it doesn’t work 10% of the time and kills the pilots. The AI’s main henchman (who does all of the nazi and Unit 931-type experiments) decides it would be cool to kill the baby of the cyborg son and the slave. The slaves last name was “Butler”/ This sparks a massive revolt by the slave worlds. The free human systems then go on to fight a prolonged war against the machines, using the FTL drive at great loss of life, to begin a “Butlarian jihad” to free the humans from thinking machines. Lots of other stuff happens, and humanity eventually wins, but this is why machines no more advanced than a desktop machine are allowed in the dune universe, and why they technologically hobble themselves.
>And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out.
Hard disagreement.
My issue is not with the work on its own merits (although I think its pretty generic mass-market SF), but rather that it is wearing the skin of something it is not and to which it has no honest claim. It is one thing for an author to take a well-regarded prior work and attempt to complete or expand it. For example, Brandon Sanderson's work completing Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time is very respectable; he tried to complete the series as Jordan would have done. It is quite another to take the name and setting of such a work, steal the surface detail and use it to dress up one's own story that shares nothing of the underlying body or soul of the work - such enterprises are an insult to the original author, the reader, and the self-respect of the new author.
Interesting backstory about this name. Of course, it is an "occupational surname" and means "bottler" or "cup-bearer". The Butler Dynasty was a notable and very influential noble family in Ireland, beginning a century after the Norman Invasion of England.
Now Franklin Patrick Herbert, being of Irish and German descent, and naturally a student of history, would've been quite aware of the power and influence of the medieval Butlers in history. And some of this renown was brought to American shores, as well.
In learning of my birth family and tracing our origins back to the birth of America, I discovered that my paternal line had come from Butler County, PA. They arrived in the late 18th century and homesteaded large swaths of this region near Pittsburgh. They had prospered, especially from mineral rights on the land, and the Irish Catholic immigrants had intermarried with German Catholics who homesteaded nearby. (Often, entire counties in the area were pioneered by immigrants from a certain part of Europe. And the intermarriage was a natural result of sharing a common faith.)
So for several years before 2024, I was known as the guy in genealogical circles who was hunting down information about Butler County, and I was fairly proud of finding my family roots in that county, and I mentioned it all the time in the Irish pub and everywhere else. Well, imagine my shock when the little incident happened on July 13th, 2024. I have been more reticent to discuss Butler County since that time.
Anyway, I find it interesting that Herbert chose that particular name for the "Anti-AI crusade". And that is partly why I chose the moniker for my own, despite not being particularly anti-AI (remember, all my comments are generated by a neural net), nor having read any of the books, or seen the films. (I did attempt to watch the Lynch film, but it really did not hold my interest! So sue me!)
RIP to an actor who was not defined by his disability in the show, but also at age 16 managed to hold his own against veteran actors dean norris, bryan cranston, aaron paul, and betsy brandt.
If I give you 10 dollars, and then you put it in your pocket, and then you take it out again and give me 10 dollars back - no actual economic growth occurred. It's simply shuffling money around; the amount stays the same.
Two economists are walking down a forest path and they come across a piece of animal excrement. The first economist turns to the second and says "I'll give you $100 to eat that!" The second one eats it and the first one gives him $100. They start walking again and a few minutes later they come to another piece of animal excrement. The second economist now looks at the first and says "I'll give you $100 to eat!" The first one eats it and collects his money.
They walk a bit more and the first one says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, and you gave me the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but think we both just ate shit for nothing." The second one responds, "That's not true at all! We increased the GDP by $200!"
It's not an argument, it's a joke. And the crux of why it's not a real argument is if you're willing to do Job X for $N, there is basically no scenario in which you're also willing to pay $N out of your own pocket for someone else to do Job X.
But it’s not just dollars changing hands. If I invest N dollars in your hot-dog business, and you use some of that capital to buy equipment from me, I get revenue from the sale, and I still own an investment in your business. If you succeed, that investment can also make me money.
If I loan you 10 dollars at 50% interest rate and then you use the 10 dollars to buy a product I am selling and you proceed to make $11 billion dollars with that product, you just made $11 billion dollars from $10 investment and I made $5 - not bad
I would argue that it is not underfunded, as most big pharma companies with oncology products have dumped enormous amounts of money into research pipelines and clinical trials. Immunotherapies like nivolumab or ipilimumab or pembrolizumab have varying (but often very decent) efficacy data for metastatic disease across tumor types.
Ask the oncologist directly. Also, try contacting Revolution Medicines directly (the manufacturer), and/or go through their early access page: https://www.revmed.com/expanded-access-policy/
Thank you for sharing, the oncologists are saying that at this point in the diseases progression the same things that disqualify him from getting chemo also disqualify him from this drug. That in his current state it would do more harm.
I hope many others are helped by daraxonrasib, the key factor seems to be how early the cancer is detected, because it is an extremely fast acting disease.
Yeah, no shit. As a non-tech person who has tried to use it for non-tech stuff: Having the compulsively-lying, halluciating POS algorithm that everyone thinks is the second coming of Christ burn an obscene amount of non-renewable energy to create said lies while my company wants us to train it to steal out jobs is kinda something I'm not interested in.
How is training my replacement on a plagiarism machine that is actively putting people (including myself) out of the job while destroying the environment (but whose results are still not as good as a human) in any world a good thing?
There is no boost in productivity for non-tech related stuff. If you need to double-check the output, it is de facto not as productive as a human, since you need to effectively do the work twice.
Also, it adds nothing of value where is is being crammed into everything, and just seems to be a cynical techbro PE driven buzzword play.
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