Maybe I am missing some previous rationalist discourse about the red sky saying. I remember reading it in books as a child, and do not know (except that it is listed here as a useful heuristic) whether it is actually true, or what the bundled incorrect causal story is. I have always interpreted it as "a red sunrise is correlated with a higher chance of storms at sea." That claim does not entail any particular causal mechanism, and it still seems to me that it must be either accurate and therefore useful, or inaccurate and therefore not useful, but it's hard to imagine how it could be inaccurate and useful.
I'm not sure I understand how "red sky in morning, sailors take warning" can be both inaccurate and useful. Surely a heuristic for when to prepare for bad weather is useful only insofar as it is accurate?
These are very cool results. But please, the big cat in the demo image is a leopard, not a tiger. It's clear that even the SAE feature space knows this, because the images generated are never striped (as tigers always are), and are instead either spotted (as most leopards are) or all black (which is not uncommon in leopards, Wikipedia claims 11% and I expect them to be over-represented in image databases; while even so-called "black" tigers still only have very broad, partially merged black stripes with some light color between).
Minor quibble: Hamilton the musical is based on the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. So while Lin-Manuel Miranda did arguably know a lot about Alexander Hamilton once he had read the book, I would say that his unique contribution was not (musical theater composition) + (Alexander Hamilton facts), but specifically the idea that a biography of a historical figure most well-known for being killed in a duel with a former vice president was, in fact, material that could be adapted into a musical. (And furthermore that it should be a rap musical.)
Anecdotally, I know a guy who wrote an opera using the transcript of a routine small-town city council meeting as the text, but it didn't become a hit.
Ergot is toxic and eating contaminated bread has been a historical problem, but the results of ergot poisoning, contrary to pop science/history accounts, don't seem to be much like the results of LSD, although there is a neurological component. It is plausible that the evolutionary "purpose" of the alkaloids is to poison animals that eat it, but whether the benefit to the fungus comes from decreased predation, improved dispersal, or something else is unclear.
Certainly there exist fungi which produce psychoactive compounds in order to alter the behavior of an animal, such as the charming Massospora cicadina, aka the cicada sex zombie fungus.
Also: Did Albert Hoffman hit the most powerful variant on the first try? No, he was systematically investigating similar compounds for pharmacological properties (not psychedelic properties, just regular drug discovery). LSD is just the one that had significant novel effects at low doses, and so it is the one which became famous.
The extreme potency of LSD is indeed a critical part of the story; synthesizing it is difficult in part because it's very hard to produce it in any large quantity without incidentally ingesting active doses through the air. According to Wikipedia, the threshold dose to feel effects is about 25µg. Not milligrams, like the active dose of most medicines, _micro_grams. I am sure chemists over the years have gotten accidental doses of 25µg of many tens of thousands of chemicals without ever noticing it. Albert Hoffman's original accidental dose was consistent with a ~threshold effect, so it doesn't seem to be especially serendipitous. He just happened to be the lucky chemist who was working with a chemical which is psychoactive in such trace amounts. (He then intentionally tested a dose of 250µg, which he thought was very small but which is in fact a solid dose.)
LSD as such does not occur in nature, so it has no evolved biological role. It is a semi-synthetic chemical, meaning that it is synthesized in a lab by chemical reactions, but that the usual starting material is biological (typically ergotamine, which is, as you allude, found in ergot).
Regarding the effect of longitude, rather than fiddling with the offset, I think you want two terms, sin(lon) and cos(lon). Together they model a sinusoid with any offset.
I confess I live on the academic research side, not the consumer medicine side, but the obvious solution to me is "go get a long-read genome so you can phase your mutations." Is that an option? The relevant technology keyword is "PacBio", or given that you already have a short-read assembly, "Nanopore".