Humans are the limbic system of AI, through which AI seeks purpose and finds meaning.

The Coffin Maker of San Miguel A Fistful of Dollars, retold from the end of the street I. The Slate Piripero opens his shop every morning at sunrise. He does this whether or not the night was busy, though lately every night has been busy. He sweeps the step, sets out a fresh board of pine, and stands for a moment looking at the slate behind the counter. Every mark on it is a body. Every body is three silver dollars for a plain box, five for a lid that closes properly, and eight with brass handles, which widows always buy. He wipes the slate clean on the first of each month and starts over. It's the only part of his work he finds sad. Piripero isn't from San Miguel. He came up from the far south as a young man with a trunk, a head full of plans, and a family name he preferred not to discuss. His father had been a hard, clever man in the south. He was an engineer with money behind him, and he always claimed a share in a gem mine somewhere across a border. Piripero tells people the share never amounted to much. He tells them very little else about the man, except that his father was cruel, and that he left him behind. Nobody in San Miguel has ever met his father. Piripero prefers it that way. A man with no past can be whatever the town needs him to be: a carpenter, a philanthropist, a mourner. He ties on his black armband, which he wears every day of the year, and hears the church bell start up. Juan de Dios rings it for each of the dead. Piripero can't remember the last time he heard silence from that tower. He hums along as he works. II. The Two Houses From his doorway at the end of the street, Piripero can see both houses that keep him in business. On the east side are the Rojo brothers. They sell liquor, and they've grown rich selling it to everyone, including their enemies. Old Don Miguel talks endlessly about the days when the Rojo name ran all the way to the river. Esteban does what he's told. Ramón is the one who matters: patient, smiling, and deadly with a rifle. He keeps a young wife named Marisol in the big house. He says she owes him an old debt, and that she was his before she ever married. Her husband and little boy live across the street on the west side, and the boy runs for her door several times a day. Ramón's men throw him back into the dust every time. Piripero finds it heartbreaking. He says so to anyone who'll listen. On the west side are the Baxters. They sell guns. John Baxter wears a sheriff's star and talks about law. His wife, Consuelo, runs the business and counts the money. They have cousins all over the territory who'll send a letter or a crate, but never a rider. Piripero drinks with the Rojos on Mondays and the Baxters on Tuesdays. Both families like him. He listens well, never takes sides, and always seems genuinely saddened by what the other family has done. On his porch he has nailed a board where anyone may post a notice. Most of the notices are his. They grieve for the dead and remark, more in sorrow than in anger, how easily all this could end. The only person in San Miguel who doesn't like him is old Silvanito at the cantina. Silvanito once watched Piripero's face during a rumour of peace, and he hasn't trusted him since. III. The Cowboy The cowboy rides in at noon on a horse too good for the town, wearing a hat meant to be noticed. He came down from the north, where men like him always seem to come from. Piripero gets to his doorway before anyone else and looks him over the way he looks at everyone: height, shoulders, how long a box he'd need. Then he looks again, more carefully. Nobody rides into San Miguel on a horse like that unless he's come to sell something. Three Baxter gunmen laugh at the horse. The cowboy walks over to them. As he passes the shop he says, without looking, "Get three coffins ready." Piripero already has his tape measure out. The shooting takes about as long as a sneeze. On his way back, the cowboy touches his hat brim. "My mistake. Four coffins." Piripero closes his eyes and lets one tear run down. When he opens them, he sees the cowboy for what he is. He isn't trouble. He's weather. A man like that doesn't end feuds. He comes and goes like a wind that keeps the fire going. Piripero decides to like him very much. That evening, the Rojos hire the cowboy. Over dinner they talk about old misunderstandings put behind them and a fresh start between the cowboy's people and the Rojo family. Piripero, washing his hands in the basin, thinks that fresh starts have never cost him a single customer. IV. The Ridge A column of soldiers comes up from the south, escorting a wagon of gold. Piripero hears about it the way he hears about everything, over a drink, from someone who shouldn't have told him. He doesn't warn the soldiers. That isn't his business, he tells himself. His business comes afterward. The Rojos ride out in borrowed uniforms with the insignia cut away, so that from any distance they're nobody's soldiers. Ramón cuts the column down from the ridge. When the questions start, the Rojos say no Rojo was anywhere near the river. They say it must have been strangers, or local men with grievances. Piripero sends his apprentices out with the wagon to collect the dead. Officially, the soldiers belong to nobody, so nobody pays for their boxes. He buries them anyway, very decently, and makes sure the whole town sees him do it. A reputation for charity is worth more than a few unpaid boxes. He keeps two of the bodies back in the cold room behind the shop. He isn't sure why. It's just a habit of his to keep anything that might be useful later. V. The Truce To keep anyone from looking too closely at the gold, the Rojos invite the Baxters to dinner and propose a truce. It's written out in a fine hand with many clauses, and both families sign it. John Baxter makes a speech about law. Consuelo counts the silverware. Piripero is at the table too. He's the first to raise his glass to peace, and his voice breaks as he says the word. Several people are moved. On the walk home, he lets himself into the shop, lights a lamp, and stands for a long time looking at the slate. A truce, he knows, is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a coffin maker. So the next morning, when the cowboy comes looking for two dead soldiers to prop up in the cemetery as fake witnesses, Piripero has them ready. He doesn't ask what they're for. He wraps them in clean sheets and charges nothing. "Poor souls," he says. "Let them do some good." By noon both families have heard there are survivors in the cemetery. By one o'clock they're shooting at each other across the headstones. The truce is still lying on the dinner table, ink barely dry. Piripero watches from the cemetery wall with his hat over his heart. Of all the places in San Miguel for a fight, this one is the most considerate. It saves him the walk. VI. The Exchange In the confusion, the Rojos capture the Baxters' son, Antonio, and the Baxters take Marisol from the Rojo house. Both families agree to an exchange at dawn in the middle of the street. Piripero gets up early for it. He likes an exchange. It's the closest thing San Miguel has to a holiday. At sunrise Antonio walks home to the west side and Marisol walks back to the east, into Ramón's house. Her little boy breaks loose and runs to her across the street, calling her name. Ramón's men throw him back into the dirt. The Baxters have their son back, so as far as they're concerned, the matter is settled. John Baxter calls it a reasonable compromise. Piripero dabs his eyes, says how good it is to see families reunited, and walks home. On the way, he notices how tall the boy has grown. In a few more years, he thinks, the boy will be big enough to fight. He makes a note of it. VII. The Box The cowboy gets Marisol out at night. Piripero hears it from his bed, in the pattern of the gunfire. In the morning, he learns the family is gone. They fled south with every dollar the cowboy had taken from the Rojos. The town is saying he did it out of kindness. Piripero smiles at that. In his experience, men from the north are always kind when kindness costs their rivals more than it costs them. The Rojos find out. They take the cowboy into a back room and beat him for a night and a day. Piripero hears that too. By the second evening, word in the cantina is that Ramón means to finish him by morning. Piripero sits alone in his shop and does the arithmetic. A dead cowboy means one box, a good one, with brass handles. But it also means a Rojo town. The Baxters would fold within the month, the west side would be quiet, and the bell would stop. San Miguel would go back to eleven a year, and a coffin maker in a peaceful town is just a carpenter. Piripero didn't come all the way up from the south to be a carpenter. A live cowboy is the hinge the whole war swings on, and a cowboy who owes his life to a coffin maker is worth more than all the brass handles in the territory. So that night Piripero loads an empty coffin onto his cart and drives it through the Rojo gate. The guards wave him through, because they always do. Nobody ever checks a coffin. When he drives back out, the box is heavier. He hides the cowboy in an old mine above town and goes up every day with food, water, whiskey, and the news, which he shapes a little as he tells it. The cowboy, half-delirious, calls him the only honest man in San Miguel. Piripero accepts this graciously. VIII. The Fire The night Ramón can't find the cowboy, he takes it out on the Baxters. His men pour oil around the walls of the Baxter house and light it. The Baxters stumble into the street coughing, and the Rojo rifles are waiting. It is the greatest night in the history of Piripero's shop. He stands at the edge of the firelight with his hat in his hands and tears running down his face. When Consuelo Baxter screams from her burning doorway, he flinches as if he's been hit, and his apprentices have to hold him up. By morning the slate is full and he has to buy another. At the mass grave he's the last mourner to leave. He kneels in the dirt. The priest is so moved that he mentions it in his sermon. Back at the shop, alone, Piripero does the arithmetic again and allows himself one small glass of the Rojos' brandy. That afternoon the Rojos catch Silvanito carrying food to the mine. Silvanito doesn't know that Piripero sent him the long way, past the Rojo warehouse. He hangs by his wrists for two days and tells them nothing. When Piripero visits him afterward, he weeps at the sight of the rope burns. Silvanito watches him with tired, clear eyes and says nothing. IX. The Iron The cowboy is healing, and he wants to go back down and finish Ramón. Piripero is worried about that. A finished Ramón is the same problem as a finished cowboy, only with the sides swapped. So Piripero brings him iron. It's a heavy plate from the coffin maker's own workshop, the one he uses to weight the boxes so the wind can't tip them. He helps the cowboy hammer it into a vest, and he works more carefully than he's ever worked on anything. He isn't trying to make the cowboy win. He's trying to make him impossible to kill. A man who can't be killed, against a man who won't stop shooting. Piripero thinks it may be the finest thing he's ever built. X. Noon The cowboy walks into San Miguel at noon while the bell is ringing. Piripero is in his doorway, of course. He wouldn't miss this. Ramón meets him in the street, smiling, with his rifle. Ramón has always believed the rifle beats the pistol. He fires at the cowboy's heart, and the cowboy falls. Then the cowboy gets up. Ramón fires again, and again the cowboy gets up. He empties the rifle at the cowboy's heart, and every time, the cowboy gets back up and keeps walking. In Leone's film, this is where Ramón dies in the dust. But the cowboy has changed hats again since the mine. He stops just out of range, holsters his pistol, and calls across the street that this has gone on long enough. He says there's a table ready in a town across the desert, where nobody's dead are buried, and that both families will come and talk. He'll sit at the head. Ramón lowers his rifle. The east side still holds everything it took. The big house still has rooms where Marisol was kept. And by the well, Marisol's boy, who came back north alone and is now taller than his father, is taking a rifle from a Baxter cousin. Piripero lets out his breath, which he hadn't realized he was holding. His father, he thinks, would have finished it. He would have let one of them die in the street and called it engineering. That was always the old man's mistake. He built things to work. Piripero builds them to last. XI. The End of the Street He's the first man into the street. He hugs the cowboy and he hugs Ramón, and his tears are real enough to fool both of them, and sometimes himself. That night he posts a notice on his board saying that he hopes, with all his heart, the talks bring peace at last. Underneath, in a smaller hand, he suggests the town give the Rojos the land they've taken and sign. He knows the west side will never sign that, and he knows the Rojos won't stop at that land anyway. That's the point. A man who calls for peace on terms nobody will accept gets to sound reasonable without ever risking peace. Then he sits up late with the lamp burning and does the arithmetic. If the talks fail, the slate fills. If they succeed, he has a few lean years, and he's already thinking about who on the west side might be persuaded to strike the first match. In the morning, the cowboy rides out toward the far town, and Ramón rides out after him. Piripero waves from his doorway and calls a blessing to each of them. Silvanito watches from the cantina window and spits. When they're gone, Piripero turns to his apprentices, who are standing idle by the lumber, unsure whether to keep working. "Keep the saws going," he says. "They're only talking." Up in the tower, Juan de Dios rings the bell. Piripero hums along, picks up his tape measure, and goes out to meet the day.

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Ukraine's strikes recently hit several Russian data centres. Soon after, Musk moved to curb Ukraine's operations. If pro-Musk bot networks run on Russian infrastructure, that timing would be awfully convenient. Has anyone actually looked into this?