The sloppification is in full throttle

sometimes I would like a refund on my sleep time

Don't be evil yet

And it only keeps accelerating, so make the most of it

Agreed, changing consensus is serious, although Core introduced a lot of functionality that has turned out to have strong side effects. Core's "monopoly" on the software is a bad situation IMO. It seems like we should have competing implementations, making it harder for anyone to push through changes.

I agree with the point about the small dev team. On the other hand, they seem to mostly revert previous changes that caused problems. If they are able to convince a majority of the network to switch to Knots, I would not see that as a terrible precedent, I think that's the way Bitcoin is supposed to work. Definitely not a worse precedent than core devs doing whatever they want.

Thanks for the link. In my view many of the arguments in that piece are weak, and the position it takes even makes the case for BIP-110, in particular this quote: "Personally, I'm ambivalent to how other people use block space". Also, that bitcoin should act as a "trusted anchor point for other systems". In spirit I agree with BIP-110 that bitcoiners should do everything they can to ensure that bitcoin is money, plain and simple.

Compilers are (mostly) deterministic though, AI not so much