Intended as abbreviation, but fair point. And no slight to any actual rattus rattus, if any are acasually lurking from the civilization they will build long after humans wipe themselves out. Impressive animals.
Reasonable explanation of why they write this kind of stuff, thanks. And of course such a culture attracts those who like to write such.
How bad can it be?
Search. Read a few paragraphs. Close tab in disgust.
Yikes. These people. Did they become rats because they couldn't understand other people existing and valuing their bodily autonomy or did becoming rats do this to them?
Oxford educating the creme de la creme of the murderous British empire for centuries got to have given them expertise in rationalisations. Before the genocides and the pillage can really get going you need an officer class who can order murder for the greater good without stopping to ask "Hans, are we the baddies?"
I am mostly here for the stupidity.
Crypto is entertainingly stupid, in particular now that it's crashing and burning, so why not.
(Assistant stage whispers: It's a vote, just say Aye)
I mean Aye!
He also writes: "The entire human body, faced with a strong impact like being gored by a rhinocerous horn, will fail at its weakest point, not its strongest point."
If a rhino comes at Yud, he can use his mighty cranium, which is not his weakest spot, to defend his weak meat parts. Since the rhino horn only impacts his head and not his weak points, his body can not fail, and thus he lives.
Reminds me of Cyrano de Bergerac's Travel to the Sun, where the protagonist encounters a thin chain carrying a great load. Since all links of the chain were equally strong, it couldn't break as chains always break in there weakest link. De Bergerac had the excuse of writing his sci fi in the 17th century (he also features some pre-Newtonian physics), Yud lacks such an excuse.
I must have missed the class in material physics where they explained that all material has a generic "strength" that determine which material can cut which. Is it perhaps abbreviated STR?
In response to the last sentence, you have a HG Wells story with from before world war one with pilots tossing nukes from the biplanes. (The nukes has smaller explosions but keep on burning for decades.) There's also Karel Capek's the God Machine from the 1920s where an inventor creates a machine that transforms matter into energy, but I'm the process creating a by product of God (turns out God is in all matter, but not all energy), leading to all sorts of problems.
But neither Wells nor Capek took their own writing seriously enough to create a cult around it.
Knowing just a smidgeon about how the statistical parrots work, I wonder were they will get the dataset for the animal languages.
This reminds me, I read an article in Nature about teaching dogs to read. Now, this was a 19th century article in a 19th century Nature, so it described how the author had written "food" on a note and placed it on the food bowl and placed a blank note on an empty bowl and eventually gotten his dog to fetch the note that had "food" written on it. Alas, due to unforeseen circumstances, it was hard to expand into more advanced literature.
So where to get the dataset? Nevermind, Magical AI to the rescue!
And poorly at that. Intelligence is a mugs game, if you put your genetic points towards longevity you can keep your initial crowd of scientist/explorers as research leaders longer, which gives a bigger boost to research and more advantages.
At least until the robot god restarts the simulation and/or Paradox releases a new patch.