ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
5hr ago
More cynically, the main thing Trump actually offers is breeches of decorum, which angry voters interpret as the best thing available. Not through any bad faith on his part, but his short attention span and lack of actual follow through. The US will be in approximately the same cultural and political position in 2028 as it is today, just as it was in the same position in 2020 as 2016.
The establishment is happy to use him as a useful patsy, and the hysterical shrieking about him being neo-Hitler confuses people into thinking he is a more substantial threat to the establishment than he is. So he's a vessel to channel discontent and anger into dissolution.
ThenElection
14hr ago
Local change seems critical, but the issue is that 99% of the attention of politically-interested people seems to be at the federal/culture war level, now. A debate about whether a road should be converted into a park becomes a debate of whether the pro-road people are crypto-Trump supporters. City supervisors spend hours debating whether they should pass a resolution supporting the Palestinians. Questions about how to best educate students during COVID get supplanted by questions about naming schools in a progressive way. And these abstract/cultural signifier questions are what people actually vote on even for local elections, instead of focusing on the concrete issues at hand.
ThenElection
14hr ago
The Puritans also engaged in missionary efforts, e.g. the praying towns and Algonquian Bible translation of John Eliot. That seems more like trying to bring Native Americans into the fold than genociding them.
ThenElection
15hr ago
It's useful for governments to be able to name and identify people, for tracking, taxation, etc. The name a person goes by is useful beyond a unique numeric identifier: it allows for easier resolution of the individual a government wants to interact with, as the knowledge of the name-individual link is dispersed in the community. Better to just capture a wide latitude of names than refuse to than to increase the number of hard-to-track people.
ThenElection
15hr ago
Interestingly, early 20th century Chinese linguists also invented a particular written third person pronoun to refer to a god or deity (祂), again pronounced the same.
Other pronoun tidbits: it was strictly taboo to refer to the Emperor with 他。Using that pronoun, or any pronoun, for him would result in "cancellation."
ThenElection
16hr ago
Looking at the allele frequencies of rs53576:
| Population | A allele freq | G allele freq |
|---|---|---|
| AFR (African) | 0.19 | 0.81 |
| AMR (Admixed American) | 0.36 | 0.64 |
| EAS (East Asian) | 0.65 | 0.35 |
| EUR (European) | 0.35 | 0.65 |
| SAS (South Asian) | 0.45 | 0.55 |
| Global | 0.39 | 0.61 |
It's true that Europeans have a relatively high frequency of G, but it looks like Africans have them beat.
Maybe the aggregation here is obscuring subgroup heterogeneity, and Somalians don't share the well-known cosmopolitan universalism of Bantu cattle herders.
ThenElection
1d ago
social welfare is too indiscriminate towards those it helps
On the contrary, it's too discriminate. Lots of people are in genuine need for help, but the government allocates funds on the basis of proximity to officials and how useful the recipients are to politicians, forming a toxic positive feedback loop. This money would have done more social good if someone drove through the streets throwing bags of it off the back of a truck.
ThenElection
4d ago
But if AI/AGI/ASI is a big deal, then America enjoys a decisive advantage.
AI technological knowhow diffuses much faster than AI-driven technology, though. Lets say China is a year behind the US in AI research and engineering when the US reaches AGI. How long does it take the US to integrate it wholesale through its economy, replacing pretty much all labor? China will have its own frictions, but plausibly China can cut through physical, infrastructure, legal, and cultural constraints faster than the US. It's not clear which effect would dominate, but it's not preordained that the US would win.
Even a true singularity, if possible, doesn't seem to change that. At some point the US may well have an ASI that has solved all the fundamental physical, engineering, and mathematical issues of the universe while still requiring human doctors, teachers, drivers, soldiers etc. to perform actual labor, while China at the same time is stuck with a year-behind AI that nevertheless has still replaced human labor in all relevant real world domains.
ThenElection
4d ago
We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.
Any theories, here? Does every country decide to just sit back, possibly import raw commodities and energy that aren't otherwise attainable, and live in blissful abundance?
ThenElection
7d ago
Per context window (though for projects I have a template). Psychologically, the process of re-prompting after failure is intolerable to me; probably I'm overdoing it, but it makes the interaction more pleasant to me.
I agree about the creativity it enables: every one or two weeks, my wife asks me for some browser extension or script for a narrow use case, and it's incredibly gratifying to be able to send her a solution in ten or fifteen minutes.
ThenElection
7d ago
+1.
People often claim that tests are an ideal use case for AI, but it's not at all my experience. My experience is more the opposite: it will write plausible or even correct code for a bug or feature but then write really bad tests.
I still use AI for them, but usually have to explicitly describe, in sometimes painstaking detail, what needs to be tested. I think that still saves time, but I'd guesstimate on average it ends up being half of my time (prompting, re-prompting, etc) to use AI vs just coding it up myself.
My experience: I would estimate around 80% of the code I submit today is LLM generated. It's very useful for reducing the time I spend actually writing code, as a SWE. But 1) that is a minority of the time I actually spend at work and 2) it's eliminating the part of the job that's most calming and pleasurable and even meditative for me.
I have quite good results with a workflow where I painstakingly describe what I want done. I'll spend a lot of time understanding what needs to be done, and then 15-30 minutes describing, in detail, what needs to be done, and supplying the necessary context. It's not quite literal NL-to-code--the LLM doesn't need to be told line by line what needs to be done--but I do not give it space to make architectural or design decisions. It then can more or less one-shot it, but not consistently enough where I don't need to review the code before sending it out for review. And, when it comes to testing, they're surprisingly bad: when I do change code it's written, it's typically adding new tests or deleting irrelevant ones (though admittedly through telling the agent that it's a retard and needs to do a specific different test).
So, my velocity is increased. But, at least for me, it means less time spent in the most pleasurable part of the job, and more time spent in requirements gathering, navigating bureaucracy, updating spreadsheets for leadership. I fucking hate it. Even though it's probably good for my employer, I have to shed a tear for the death of coding/implementation as an important job skill.
I can imagine LLMs, in the next two years or so, supplanting design/architectural decisions. That makes the situation worse: I'll not be a software engineer, but an engineering manager supervising LLM agents. That's a deep loss to me, and I'm happy that my target retirement date is in 5 years or so.
And the correct answer is yeschad. They were the good writers.
They are disproportionately the best writers: e.g. no writers really compare with McCarthy or Pynchon IMO. But it's a continuum, and there are non white male writers who are genuinely great. E.g. Didion, O'Connor. Still absolutely worth setting aside a couple hours for (and worth your time far more than another round of Netflix slop or shit posting).
Although, I appreciate the idea of saying "fuck you" to people who say I'm morally flawed unless I implement affirmative action in my reading choices.
ThenElection
8d ago
Close to the Machine, by Ellen Ullman.
ThenElection
8d ago
Christianity goes a lot further than "be kind to the less fortunate," though. The last shall be first, the meek will inherit the Earth, God chose the weak things to shame the strong, etc. That does seem like a radical change from, well, the history of the universe, and it doesn't seem crazy to see a connection between that and Wokeness.
ThenElection
8d ago
Not at all a gamer, but I am an avid reader. And contemporary literature has many of the same issues (with different inflections) as video games.
My solution: exit. For the past year, I've only read books written in the 20th century, and it's been such a breath of fresh air. Instead of endless variations of progressive morality tales adapted to different settings, you get genuine variety of perspectives. Mentioning this elsewhere, the usual response is "oh, so you're just reading dead white men instead," but it's not at all that. You get writers of both sexes and all races bringing new perspectives to the table. Currently I'm reading an excellent memoir by a bisexual, Jewish, female software engineer, and you get none of the drivel that would be put to the page today.
This may have limited applicability to gamers: games are more social, require a much greater investment to produce, and the average game in 2025 is better (I assume) than the average game in 1995, despite wokeness. Which points to the problem for people wanting better video games today. So long as people are buying the ones produced, that's what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do besides quit altogether.
The Official Account (Bugliosi) is that Manson was trying to trigger a race war.
The full schizo account is that he was a subject of MKULTRA and CHAOS, and the CIA nurtured him to discredit the hippie/anti-war movement.
What's interesting is that if you dig into his time in San Francisco, you do find some pretty weird stuff related to his parole officer (a grad student at Berkeley, studying drugs and collective violence, who had a single parolee he was supervising and who managed to keep Manson out of prison for violations as diverse as grand theft, drug dealing, and rape) and the clinic Manson and his followers went to.
In all likelihood, Manson wasn't some kind of intentional project, but a series of irresponsible fuck ups by government. And his killings weren't an attempt to start a race war, but some combination of an attempt to distract from a prior crime and a drug deal gone bad.
ThenElection
13d ago
Tate wasn't specifically targeted, though; they just wanted to kill the people in the house.
There's also reason to think the Helter Skelter scenario wasn't what actually happened. Maybe I should do an effort/schizo post on the Manson murders sometime.
ThenElection
14d ago
What does this look like? W2 income is already automatically taxed for e.g. FICA and to some extent income tax. And the government has plenty of well-exercised sticks to get compliance from both employers and employees.
The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.
ThenElection
15d ago
Even if you write off the harm of discrimination to the people being discriminated against, all of those positions (except TV writing) rely on status and prestige to accomplish their social roles. If the bulk of people come to assume that anyone who works at a university or in journalism is either a nepo-baby or an identity hire as opposed to someone hired by a more broadly accepted measure of merit, those professions lose credibility and support. And without that, they're nothing.
ThenElection
15d ago
Getting cynical, there's another reason old men might prefer hiring young women to hiring young men.
ThenElection
16d ago
Ron Jeremy, winner of the 2028 erection.
I read it not as a form of double think, but as a reflection of American hyper-proceduralism for criminal justice.
For this, the process matters every bit as much as the facts. You can have extremely strong evidence that someone committed a heinous crime, but a flawed process used to gather evidence, arrest the suspect, etc. is enough in itself to exonerate the suspect.
Mangione, then, is a hero for his act of murder. He's also a super genius who hid his tracks perfectly, and it was only through evil parallel construction and planted evidence that the government was able to get him. Therefore, since the process was abused, he must be found innocent, validating his genius and heroism.
ThenElection
19d ago
or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe
Your LLM detector is busted, I'm afraid.
Injection is for the benefit of the public, not the criminal. At some point we got squeamish about visibly physical punishment, and injection sweeps all of that under the rug, making execution a bloodless, bureaucratic affair.
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