It's not phrasing; it's sentence structure. It's the overuse of dramatic contrast, encoded into the authorial style. This is not a mockery of it. It's an imitation nevertheless.
I don't think I would have mistook this as actual Scott. There's too much characteristic LLM style. Hindsight bias, though.
That would make a lot more sense than giving them pain when they stub their simulated toe.
(At least if they can do anything about the datacenter problem!)
The circumstances of a WBE that knows they're a WBE are pretty different from those of a biological human. The self-aware WBE should expect that any pain they experience is not really necessary to their survival; it's just there for "realism" of the simulation; whereas the biological human has reason to believe that some pain serves a protective purpose, to warn about harm to their body.
Over time, as a given WBE gets more experience being a WBE, we should expect that their attitudes about their own moral patienthood should diverge from those of their bio-human predecessor.
(And to keep a WBE in ignorance of their actual situation, to convince them that they are a bio-human and thus that pain they experience could be survival-relevant when it is in fact gratuitous, would be a pretty awful thing to do.)
Seems to me that's not "between universes" because no second universe need be involved: it's sampling randomly out of mind-space, where the resulting mind almost certainly is not otherwise instantiated.
What other explanations for this network traffic have you investigated and on what basis did you reject those explanations?
What some of these folks might actually want their projects to be, is shareware. "Sure, redistribute copies of my project, upload it to all your favorite BBSes, but don't modify it or sell it — and if you use it for anything serious, send me some money."
But yeah, if you want to make old nerds cranky at you, just call your source-available shareware project "open source". You will get flamed like a clueless luser newbie of old, for such is the way of the Net.
Does it help?
As for the worst education policy: How many times & places have ever made it a crime to teach reading? Wikipedia claims there's only one; the American South 1740-1865.
The Tufts web page has a feedback form. I've taken the liberty of reporting the inaccuracy there, with a link to this post.