tl;dr: The author recounts a shameful college prank where he falsely told humanities students a computer virus was spreading, causing panic and lost work. He uses this as an analogy to criticize recent claims by Anthropic-affiliated technologists that AI has a >10% chance of causing human extinction within a decade, arguing such fears propagate faster than evidence. As someone who builds computers, he counters that AI still depends on physical systems under human control, and extraordinary extinction claims demand extraordinary evidence that proponents haven't provided.