Specifically, you need to realize that the origin of the Secret Fourth Episode idea came from a BFI screening Q&A -- specifically a journalist (for RadioTimes, unless my memory fails me) asking the showrunners about the possibility of a Secret Fourth Episode. The Q&A where this hypothesis was first floated took place three days before the finale had actually aired. In response to this question, the showrunners laughed and denied it, but joked that the hypothetical episode could be called "The Lost Special", a reference to The Story of the Lost Special, a crypto-Holmesian detective story about a missing train written by Conan Doyle during the hiatus between The Final Problem and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Again: the hypothetical fourth Sherlock episode had been given a title by the showrunners three days before anyone except a screening audience had even seen the third episode. The idea, outlandish as it was, had originated with a question from a professional media beat reporter. The answer to that question was one of the few tidbits from the Q&A granted immediate release and not embargoed until after the episode aired.

In the lead up to the finale, this was absolutely mystifying information to receive -- why on earth would a journalist be asking about a secret fourth episode??? After seeing the finale (first when a leaked Russian dub was inexplicably shared by official BBC accounts for some fucking reason, then the official broadcast), the idea that they were attempting to prime hardcore fans for some kind of insane media stunt became one possible explanation.

All this to say: I was there, Gandalf. I watched the premiere of Apple Tree Yard with the best of them, feeling like a lunatic before, during, and after. There was a thread of reasoning that led us there, however tenuous, and it turns out watching a random show that is definitely not a Secret Sherlock Fourth Episode while feeling like a lunatic is still a pretty harmless place to be led in order to rule out a tenuous hypothesis about a tv show.

“what possessed you to write this?”

it was 2 am. i had spent the time i should have been sleeping watching lpl videos and reading through a book on christianity in the middle ages. one thing led to another. here’s the image that inspired me to make the post.

(wikipedia link)

“i can read it in his voice!”

i intentionally emulated his manner of speaking. this was because i had spent several hours that day binging his content. also it makes it much funnier.

“what did lpl do to end up in hell?”

be a lawyer. though breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s backdoor certainly didn’t help his case.

“he didn’t check to see if it was a fluke!”

doylist: yeah, this was an error on my part.

watsonian: the lawyer was trying to get the heck out of dodge before the angels realized he’d escaped.

“i can’t believe hell is locked up with a 5 pin tumbler lock!”

doylist: realistically it would be a warded lock, which is even less secure, but lpl doesn’t make enough videos on warded locks for me to know what he says while picking them.

watsonian: masterlock is in cahoots with the devil. a single spool pin separates us from the writhing masses of the damned.

“mcnally would just hit it with a rock!”

the rock method really only works with padlocks. i imagine this lock as embedded within the door. mcnally would use a single sided jiggler, or a pokey stabby thing, or perhaps a bump hammer. then, once he was out, you’d start to hear the intro of bfg division coming from no particular direction.

“that second- to-last line goes so hard!”

yeah it does. honestly i’m not sure where that came from. i’ve never cooked like that before or since. this person gets it though

“that last line goes even harder!”

For example, it’s very reasonable to be concerned about the new Twitter data center that’s poisoning Memphis right now, and single out the LLM, grok, as a source of it. However, generating an image using locally run stable diffusion does literally nothing to contribute to this. Conversely, using Twitter without using grok absolutely contributes to the polluting Memphis. If we try to simply boycott AI entirely and nothing else, we still contribute to that data center. However, if we single out Twitter/X as a company, then we can actually have an effective boycott.

If your problem is the environmental cost of all data centers, and you single out AI as the source, but still continue to stream video (ie Netflix, YouTube, TikTok etc), use social media, etc, you are still contributing to the stuff that’s at least 90% of current datacenter output. I know this is news to people but data centers didn’t just. Suddenly become a problem post-AI.

People pointing this out are not being contrarian for no reason. Current anti-AI thinking has done literally zero for actually combatting the issues we need to care about, because a lot of these problems go beyond AI. This is the tech equivalent of banning straws.

The point of this isn’t to go “oh and yet you participate in society…interesting”. The point of this is to show how you need to be thinking systemically about these issues beyond the superficial shit you hear in op-eds and tweets, which by the way, frequently misreport the actual data/info regarding the situation.