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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’m not abdicating racism or sexism as part of the problem. But if you’re just going to capitulate to it, god, we may as well run 20 more white men. I think that if America is capable of electing Obama on the promise of hope and change, they can elect Kamala.

    If the DNC is going to put up a candidate that must deal with racism and sexism, wouldn’t the message be like ten times as important? But what was there?

    “What would you do differently than Biden?”
    “Hm, nothing really comes to mind.”

    People didn’t like Biden, so how was this meant to inspire anyone? I don’t reckon many people actually saw that specific interview, but this is the attitude the DNC gives us every. single. time. It’s always scraps and morsels.

    You realize, if those 10 million people had come out for Kamala and we had beaten Trump just barely, I’m still not satisfied with that. What I thought we had on election night was a coin flip, not the blowout that happened. A coin flip. Against a fascist.


  • Part of the reason that people don’t believe much happened under Trump is that the DNC is terrible about telling them.

    What motivates the right? Non-stop, 24-7, talk news radio propaganda about how badly the woke democrats are fucking everything up, about how your son is gay because of flouride in your water.

    What motivates the left?

    I mean that, sincerely. It can’t be our sense of righteous civic duty; as you just said, people don’t care. We don’t have a story. Biden passed the Stop Inflation Act? Okay. What even is that?

    You should ask those same people, I’m not saying it’ll be every single one of them, but ask them if they liked Bernie Sanders. It’s not impossible to reach these people, most of them anyway, they just need something to latch on to.



  • But we need an answer. Not from you specifically, of course, but we die if we don’t.

    Think about this for a moment:

    knowing it was a de-facto vote for Trump.

    Did they? Like, have you spoken to them? Your average voter is not even half as politically plugged in as you or I am.

    Getting people to begrudgingly vote for someone they don’t believe represents any fundamental change to the problems they’re dealing with is, unfortunately, just not that exciting. And if you don’t have excitement, how do you get the message to spread? If someone isn’t excited about cleaning up their dirty city, are you really surprised it never happens?

    If you’re refusing to pick fights with republicans, refusing to point out their obstructionism to the good you’re working for, refusing to acknowledge any of the problems people have had with your previous candidates—I can shit talk Obama and Bill Clinton, but the DNC is not capable of it, which might even explain why they’re so quiet about Trump’s connections to Epstein; then how can you represent anything new?

    Tim Walz’s Weird campaign was a massive step in the right direction, there was energy then, and the DNC muzzled him as soon as they were able to. How can you be excited about the fight against republicans when DNC leadership are barely excited about it themselves?

    I’m sorry for the rant, I really didn’t mean to write a wall of text. I’m just saying, it’s true that our people should have taken their medicine, they should have voted, but the reason so many didn’t has to be systemic. It’s not because they wanted Trump; if they did, they would have gone and voted for him. There is a rot at the heart of our current efforts that needs to be cut out before it consumes us completely.




  • First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

    Take a moment, a deep breath, some fresh clean air, and think about why you’re putting so much energy into saying… I dunno, all of the things that you’re saying.

    If this 4B thing were about liberating women from a literal slavery, if they falsly identified you as one of those nasty republicans, if they really did mean absolutely no men whatsoever: is it worth all of this anger you’re feeling? Is your quabble with them over your own love life more important than their fight for freedom? Do you not agree that they should be free?








  • Ah, but here we have to get pedantic a little bit: producing an AGI through current known methods is intractable.

    I didn’t quite understand this at first. I think I was going to say something about the paper leaving the method ambiguous, thus implicating all methods yet unknown, etc, whatever. But yeah, this divide between solvable and “unsolvable” shifts if we ever break NP-hard and have to define some new NP-super-hard category. This does feel like the piece I was missing. Or a piece, anyway.

    e.g. humans don’t fit the definition either.

    I did think about this, and the only reason I reject it is that “human-like or -level” matches our complexity by definition, and we already have a behavior set for a fairly large n. This doesn’t have to mean that we aren’t still below some curve, of course, but I do struggle to imagine how our own complexity wouldn’t still be too large to solve, AGI or not.


    Anyway, the main reason I’m replying again at all is just to make sure I thanked you for getting back to me, haha. This was definitely helpful.


  • Hey! Just asking you because I’m not sure where else to direct this energy at the moment.

    I spent a while trying to understand the argument this paper was making, and for the most part I think I’ve got it. But there’s a kind of obvious, knee-jerk rebuttal to throw at it, seen elsewhere under this post, even:

    If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?

    Evolution “may be thought of” as a process that samples a distribution of situation-behaviors, though that distribution is entirely abstract. And the decision process for whether the “AI” it produces matches this distribution of successful behaviors is yada yada darwinism. The answer we care about, because this is the inspiration I imagine AI engineers took from evolution in the first place, is whether evolution can (not inevitably, just can) produce an AGI (us) in reasonable time (it did).

    The question is, where does this line of thinking fail?

    Going by the proof, it should either be:

    • That evolution is an intractable method. 60 million years is a long time, but it still feels quite short for this answer.
    • Something about it doesn’t fit within this computational paradigm. That is, I’m stretching the definition.
    • The language “no better than chance” for option 2 is actually more significant than I’m thinking. Evolution is all chance. But is our existence really just extreme luck? I know that it is, but this answer is really unsatisfying.

    I’m not sure how to formalize any of this, though.

    The thought that we could “encode all of biological evolution into a program of at most size K” did made me laugh.