A mill grinds grain, a windmill is just a mill powered by wind. It’s not technically correct to call a wind turbine or wind-powered pump a windmill, but that’s how it’s commonly used. So this comment chain is a pedantic correction leading into the ground water pun.

It’s a solid pun, but does require the background of pedantic Internet discussions

Certain types of stupid people get mean around computers because they are frustrating to use if you don’t understand what you are doing.

Computers are complex machines with a lot of options and no understanding of intent. When dealing with simple machines, someone can just poke random things until they get the outcome they want, limited understanding required. When talking to a person, the other person can recognize their question makes no sense and try to find their misunderstanding or explain in simpler terms.

A computer responds to these things with an error message they don’t understand or don’t care to understand. It won’t use simpler language if they seemed confused. It won’t try to calm them down if they start showing frustration. It will just keep doing what it’s doing and make them feel stupid, leading to frustration and anger.

On the flip side, a lot of stupid people love LLMs because they will accept any insane input and will output a reasonable looking answer(correct or not) while showering them in validation.

Before FTX was shut down for their other sketchy behavior, they were advertising using fortune cookies. The fortune would be something saying to take a risk and the back was an ad for FTX. Most manipulative cookie I’ve ever had.

If you don’t think you were an idiot 10 years ago, you haven’t learned enough in those 10 years

The email sounds like a college student participating in a sociology study for class and asking the professor for clarification. This is exactly the kind of thing that I’d expect to ask about gender along with a bunch of other personal information. The goal being to see if any patterns in the responses.

Sociology in general does have the problem that categories are important and helpful to spotting patterns, but people are very difficult to categorize. People just don’t fit cleanly into categories