I came here to find out what happened in the game, which I eventually figured out, and also found this extremely valid point about Bluesky.

But four years after the fires, getting this one small glimpse into the ongoing work of the people trying to put everything back together has also left me with deep gratitude for the untiring nerdish dedication of the librarians.

Bless em.

The archivist informed me that the David Marais collection was partially damaged in the fire, so I'd been feeling Rather Virtuous. But reading through the account of the losses -- I just feel sad. This little act of restoration is nice symbolism. But measured against the true loss to memory? Pfft.

As of that 2023 article, the full losses had yet to be fully counted, in part because the fires claimed the exact records which would helped: about a third of the catalogue files were destroyed, along with the "beautiful, redbound volumes" which gave a seven-decade record of all donated items.

You'll recall: UCT's Jagger library's vast archive of rare books, historical papers, and assorted Africana was gutted in a fire 2021. The archivists called it " tragic and irreparable loss to South African research and historiograph." www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Anyway, I didn't know what to do with the cartoon, but couldn't bring myself to get rid of it. I discovered there was a collection of his papers in UCT's Manuscripts and Archives; I wrote to them and they agreed to accept it as a donation.

A brief search established the cartoonist as David Marais, who worked for the Cape Times. (Apparently first as their Parliamentary correspondent, but they eventually started publishing his Press Gallery doodles, putting him on double-duty as cartoonist/reporter: africacommons.net/collections/... )

The image shows apartheid PM Vorster on a therapist's chair, surrounded by a cloud of ... anarchist bombers? The doc asks: "And which one do you call Centlivres?”

(The deeper meaning is lost on me, but Centlivres was chief justice in the 50s - presumably this dates to when Vorster was an MP.)

The comparison is doubly true because both outbreaks are overwhelming the obvious results of a set of voluntary and avoidable choices.

I realise AI product features are like CGI in films - we tend only to notice them when they're really bad. But Jesus wept, it feels like we're beset on all sides by really bad AI product features. Almost always as the default, mandatory user experience.

Who are the people who are enjoying this??

Refuses to pay his debt to society. Shellfish.

I'm certain with better prompts or a more powerful model I could get better outcomes. But brief excursions like this really shore up my GenAI curmudgeonliness.

I can't lose any more time on this nonsense so won't factcheck the summaries properly (some of which disappeared after I aborted the query), but even these appeared to be at least partially hallucinated. F'rinstance, Equal Education appears not to have litigated in the Makhanda High Court.