Americans are mostly too broke for frivolous purchases. That’s what’s behind the reduced spending. When grocery prices go up but paychecks don’t, buying stuff falls.

I’m not expecting a sweep in 2026. Most people aren’t engaged in politics unless they’re forced to.

I mean honestly kids cheat at college because college isn’t even about education for most of them. They’re cheating because they need the piece of sheepskin, a 3.2 GPA and a couple of really good internships to get a job after college. The time spent in college is going to the same places it always has— resume padding and getting drunk (hopefully with co-Ed hanky pinky to follow). There are maybe 3-4 kids in the entire lecture hall building who give a single shit about the education part of college. Everyone else is there for what comes after college. And honestly the kids who only want the education are likely to hate life in academia anyway, as they’ll make McDonald’s money to teach kids who don’t want to learn and write papers that they and everyone else knows nobody will ever read.

I’ve never understood the moral panic about whether college kids were getting and education when everyone absolutely knows from the jump that education has never been the point of college for most people. In 1980, most of these kids would learn the life skill of delegating (aka paying off a sucker) to write their English homework. Chatbot are cheaper.

It’s actually amazing

The lines don’t move. You do. Only then can you realize there are no lines.

I just can’t. Like we’re kidnapping people to a death camp, arresting judges, threatening journalists, and now threatening to arrest the opposition party for impeachment moves, which aren’t even actually impeachment.

> The OthelloGPT world-model story faced a new complication when, in mid-2024 a group of student researchers released a blog post entitled “OthelloGPT Learned a Bag Of Heuristics.” The authors were part of a training program created by DeepMind’s Neel Nanda, and their project was to follow up on Nanda’s own work, and do careful experiments to look more deeply into OthelloGPT’s internal representations. The students reported that, while OthelloGPT’s internal activations do indeed encode the board state, this encoding is not a coherent, easy-to-understand model like, say, an orrery, but rather a collection of “many independent decision rules that are localized to small parts of the board.” As one example, they found a particular neuron (i.e., neural network unit) at one layer whose activation represents a quite specific rule: “If the move A4 was just played AND B4 is occupied AND C4 is occupied, then update B4 and C4 and D4 to ‘yours’ [assuming the mine, yours, or empty classification labels]”. Another neuron’s activation represents the rule “if the token for B4 does not appear before A4 in the input string, then B4 is empty.”

I’ve never understood why this is a problem. This is how all thinking actually works. When I’m solving a problem, im not inventing a solution de novo every time I do it. I’m using heuristics. This thing X generally leads to thing Y and therefore I need to do A, B and C to correct for it. That’s a heuristic. It’s also how we predict the weather. Low pressure meets high pressure means rain likely so wear a poncho or carry an umbrella. We’d call that thinking, but it’s basically using heuristics X -> Y requiring solution A. When I solve math equations, it’s nothing but procedures and heuristics. PEMDAS as order or operations, the math operations being basically procedures. And when using mathematics to solve a problem, then you’ll basically be deciding which heuristics of mathematics to use. Even making political predictions are based on heuristics gleaned from history. XY and Z happen during the rise of revolutionary thinking. Therefore if you see this predict revolution.

To be Frank, even a world model is basically a systematically constructed bag of heuristics. The religious world view: God exists, gave us rule book X, and those who follow rule book X get rewarded. Therefore do what rule book X says. The secular world view replaces Rule Book X with principles derived from science and neoliberalism, but the basic building blocks are the same. These heuristic principles lead to good outcomes, thus doing them is a good idea. It covers more domains than your ad hoc heuristics as AI is using them today, but the difference isn’t the approach, it’s the scale. A person living by Torah or KJV Bible is still using heuristics to figure out how to live, the question is scale, as the sacred book in question covers everything where AI tends to be bound to whatever applicable training sets it was given.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Although I think sports are part of this as well. Most people in the USA don’t actually follow the news — at least not the important stuff. And so they really don’t even know what’s going on. They follow sports — and can often give pretty detailed analysis of the games, statistics for the players, and standings for the teams. They’ll follow celebrities— probably not quite to K-Stan levels, but for those into a particular celebrity, it’s pretty wild how far into it people get. Apparently Eilliam Shatner is stopped outside airport restrooms by entitled autograph seekers who apparently can’t deal with the word no. In the case of big movies, we turned every part of it into an event— we have teaser trailers for movie trailers, we have after the credits teasers for the next movie.

Although thinking a bit more im not sure if we’re not backwards. Maybe Americans have better movies, tv shows and entertainment in general as an escape from real life? Like maybe the reason we produce people who can quote the entire history of the Dune universe (all 50,000 years starting from the beginning of Earth history) but don’t know that RFK junior is building a medical dossier on just about everyone and everything and thinks autism means being useless isn’t that Dune is awesome (it is, BTW or at least the novels are) but because Americans live in an oligarchy where they just don’t have any actual power to change anything going on.

I expect my life to decline slowly. I expect my standard of living to decline. I don’t expect that to change. I don’t expect the government to do the right thing, and I don’t expect them to care about anyone who can’t drop a coll million on a fundraising dinner in DC. I know what’s going on, and probably unless Trump pisses off the oligarchy enough, none of it will change. Most of us plebs will work until we die. We know this. Most of us will lose purchasing power over time, and thus will have to put up with shittier food and clothing, older cars, and so on.

I still pay attention, but the call to turn it all off to escape to the Federation, Degobah, or Arrakis or even to listen to Monsta X or watch a period Kdrama is pretty high. I can get a bit of happiness from those things even if I live in a place where nothing I do will change anything. Even when we do bother to protest, most of them are laughably performative— the protests against Trump’s Fascism wouldn’t even jaywalk. They know it’s not really doing anything, but it’s nice to make-believe for a while.

It’s an authoritarian state where people disappear for speaking up. Obviously they’re going to keep quiet. And it’s entirely likely that someone tried and was promptly “an hero”.

Unfortunately there isn’t one. A mass revolt (NB: not short weekend protests) might work. But more than likely he uses the insurrection act and arrests people. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s possible. No government agency other than the executive has control of the military. And the military, contrary to what the opposition tells you is highly indoctrinated into obedience without question.

The National security adviser was on newsmax suggesting that siding with Abrego was siding with MS-13 and since MS-13 is “terrorist,” that’s against federal law. 1984 is best enjoyed in the fiction section….

I think you should. And maybe Trump standing on skulls.

Being fair, it’s really not that easy to have much impact on culture when most of the disposable wealth is in the hands of retirees. Gen Z and alpha will have even less impact than millennials as they’ll have even less money than millennials do and millennials are broke. Most of the popular culture is trying to appeal to late boomers to early generation X because they’re the ones with the money. And if you’re paying attention it’s even in the image. Star Wars was 1977. My mother was pregnant with me when Star Wars came out. LOTR was released as a book in the 1950s, and Legend of Zelda was a franchise in 1980. This isn’t stuff that millennials just got into. It’s stuff that was first loved by boomers and that the millennials were introduced to by boomers.

I’m technically Xennial. My “culture” the stuff I was into as a kid — nobody gives a fuck. I fell in love with Farscape and Babylon 5. Does anyone care about that stuff? There was, briefly, a plan for the retelling of B5, but it fell through. My music was grunge rock, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots. Nobody cares about appealing to that stuff. I don’t expect a return to the aesthetics of grunge rock any time soon. Compare that to stuff that came about in the much better off 1980s and before — it’s much more prominent in culture, fashions, music, movies. We’re reviving He-man, Strawberry Shortcake, how many shitty iterations of Star Trek TOS and TNG (but no DS9, because that doesn’t trigger nostalgia). Musically, pop has an 80s vibe. But it’s not really about how good or bad the cultural landscape was during my generation.

  Xenials and later generations don’t have enough money to bother appealing to. The creators and curators of culture don’t care whether the ideas are good or interesting.  They want to sell merch, tickets to self-indulgent cons, theme-park experiences, and subscriptions.  If the product appeals to a demographic that can’t afford to indulge, it’s a waste.  Gen Z culture like millennial culture will be ephemeral because once they stop being teens and young adults — and have less access to mom and dad’s disposable income — they won’t be able to afford to collect things, to go to cons, to subscribe to a service that shows their content.  Thus nobody will bother to appeal to their ideas.

America doesn’t know how to adult. It’s just insane that we have entire generations with the cultural taste of ten year olds.

I think exposure over long enough periods of time can have a normalizing effect on a person. At first, it’s shocking, but as things progress you get desensitized to it, you see it all the time, hear people talking about it, see it commonly on your feed, and eventually you don’t see it as a big deal.

This actually doesn’t mean simply happen in other spaces like in the Alt-Right pipeline (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108/7920). You start out watching cute little atheist videos, and 18 months later you’re onto Jered Taylor. The process is slow and as it progresses the person maintains little of the disgust that would have prevented them from saying that stuff to start with. In the beginning, the apolitical centrist would absolutely not be willing to watch a Jered Taylor video. By the end of the journey, Jered Taylor might well be tame. In the porn space, you don’t start out with the violent, the child porn, the beastiality, you start with playboy stuff. But you keep going down the line and eventually you’ll watch that because it keeps showing up, and people you know are talking about it, and so you start watching it and eventually watching an old guy have sex with a preteen is no big deal.

The internet has enabled a lot of this simply because of how it works. It’s mostly private. You don’t know what I watch. Therefore the shame factor never comes up. And because it’s infinite, you can watch it for hours and never catch onto the process of normalization until you end up with some sort of shock to the system, which by definition never comes because no one catches it, and the algorithm doesn’t care. It just wants you to click the links.

I mean if you had the thing iterate 1000 scripts following the story beats that Hollywood likes, the chances that one of them would be interesting enough to edit is probably pretty good. And an AI could probably do 1000 in a day. It wouldn’t be AI spending 8 months writing a single draft of something, it’s AI making 1000 of them a day every day. So if AI for some reason were to generate 10,000 scripts based on a prompt like “generate a star trek movie in which Kirk defeats a god” the chances that one of that 10,000 would be interesting enough to edit into a shooting script is probably decent. Make 100,000 and I’d say there’s probably at least one that’s better than Star Trek V.

This is what’s missing. The sheer scale of how much the computer can do and how fast. Yes, it took a human author 20 drafts to make something worthy of a vanity press. But an AI author bot could churn through 20 drafts in minutes, where it would take a human years to do the same. And again all of these drafts are free once you buy the AI license, where a human author will want to be paid for every successful piece they produce.

It’s what a lot of people miss about AI in general. It doesn’t have to be as good as a human doing the task, it just has to be good enough that it’s no longer worth paying the premium to have the human doing that work. Depending on the field there might be reasons that you want a human involved — either for legal reasons (ai are already pretty good at reading mris, however if you want legal protection from having a trained human verify) or for luxury or premium products (there are markets for original signed art, hand made goods, etc. most people don’t care enough to pat the premium for the real thing, so they buy factory produced versions — prints instead of original art, factory made pasta instead of hand made pasta). I think the eventual shake out will be that there will be a premium book and movie market for human written material, and most bulk books will be written by AI that will be cheap and mostly disposable, forgettable stuff that people buy to read on the bus or train or while on breaks at work. There will still be luxury books written by exceptional people, but it would be the kind of books you pay a lot of money to own, and are probably collectible to some degree. Movies made by people will be more like how we see indie movies today, as something for highly educated cinema lovers who appreciate fine are. The general public wants Avengers and Star Wars and Chick Flicks, and don’t care if the movie was written by ChatGPT or similar bots.

This isn’t going to happen by next Tuesday, but ask anyone who knows about technology how many times people thought a computer would never do that only to eat those words within ten years.

I don’t necessarily see this as an obstacle. If you gave 80% there copy to any decent developmental editor and line editor, you could probably get to the level of any bulk genre novel on the shelves at B&N within 6 months. The content of most novels is derivative even when written by human authors and professionally edited and published. Theres very little art in those novels, as most of them tend to follow formulae for creating characters and plots and settings that are common enough to have worksheets being used in production. To be blunt, AI is going to absolutely decimate the writing industry because most of the published works are derivative and formulaic — and that’s exactly what AI is good at.

Just to give an example, this (https://savethecat.com/beat-sheets) is the Save the Cat beat sheet page. Save the cat is a plot structure used by Hollywood rather extensively and is fairly common in novels. It’s also fairly specific in how a plot should be structured— down to the page number in the case of movie scripts (https://savethecat.com/beat-mapper). This isn’t people learning from experience, this is basically an algorithm for telling a story. And this is what is expected in the industry. I’m sure the there are niches in high literary fiction that are less derivative and more artistic, but this is only a very small part of the book industry, and furthermore it’s not easy to do well.

One huge thing that AI detractors don’t like to admit is that AI doesn’t have to be perfect to be adopted for a purpose, it just has to create content that’s worth editing in this case. This is a pretty low threshold because of the economics— the AI is owned by the publisher and other than the software license, it’s FREE. And if the AI can produce 5000 novels that can be edited for publication, why bother with humans? If all that novels do is follow formulae then there’s no point to the human.

If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else. You would never sign up to spend $30K a year for a BA if there were large enough pools of good jobs you could get without doing that. Hell, a lot of Gen Z are choosing trade schools over college now because 120K for a $40K salary is a terrible deal. But as long as most good jobs require college, people will not be cost conscious about college. And therefore colleges can get away with charging eye-watering tuition for an education that’s arguably worse than the one their grandparents paid $550 a semester for. Nobody wants to opt out because I mean what’s the alternative? Maybe you can do trades, but if you can’t, you either go to college or go wait tables, stock shelves, or collect garbage. Nobody’s going to say no if they want to be middle class.

And until it gets fixed and people have realistic and viable options to not go to college and be able to afford rent and groceries on one paycheck, schools can morph into club med and add conserve room service, massage parlors, and a personal butler for every student to the tune of 200K or more a year. People will still sign the loan papers because the alternative is Walmart.

We’ve been solving the wrong problem for decades and backstopping the problem by blaming colleges. People weren’t doing this until most of the decent paying factory and related jobs went to India, China, and Bangladesh. Back in the day, kids right out of high school could get jobs that could at least net you a comfortable life in a small apartment, and depending on the industry, possibly on the path to home ownership. Today, that path is mostly gone, and as such people who would have never seen college as something they want are shunted to college where they would compete with more diligent scholars for a dwindling (thanks computer networks and soon enough add AI to this) number of desk jobs where they pretend to care about excel spreadsheets of meaningless data.

The actual problem isn’t college or student loans. Those problems would solve themselves if we solved the actual problem— there aren’t enough good jobs that actually pay a living wage, and because there are so few, businesses are requiring college (and doing more above that at this point like an MA and internships) to the tune of mortgage levels of cost. If there were enough “can live on my own and possibly afford to have children” paying jobs the business could not hide them behind the paywall of college because someone else wouldn’t and the employees would choose that path instead. If we focused on creating those jobs, and therefore creating a situation where businesses compete for workers instead of one in which workers compete for jobs, then people would choose college less often and costs would go down a bit to attract more students.

No, but I’d say it’s an excellent counter argument for the idea that Osama bin Laden created these problems in the early 2000s. As I said, I think a good bit of our education woes stem more from Reagan GOP budget cuts and Union busting than anything that OBL could ever dream of doing. And thus saying he got what he wanted is a bit much. If anything, OBL was a gift to neocons, AIPAC and Israel — those groups made out like bandits using the Spector of 9/11 to invade two countries and secure more weapons for Israel.

Osama bin Laden didn’t break America. America did.

We did so in thousands of tiny decisions, but we did it to ourselves.

We broke our public schools through funding cuts, educational fads that don’t work, and by watering down the standards for educational achievement. Where in 1940, kids graduating from high school were generally capable of reading and writing at least at a twelfth grade level. In 2024, the median college graduate reads on an eighth grade level. Osama didn’t do that, we did. We’re now to the point in educational decline that students graduating from high school are not capable of reading and writing entire book on a topic, and certainly cannot read analytically.

We destroyed the work ethic to the point that an entire generation is unwilling to get a job despite having spent decades going to school to train for those jobs. It’s now a regular occurrence for that generation to return to mom’s basement where they cry on various forms of social media that no woman wants to touch them. Osama did not create the incels.

For that matter, Osama didn’t refuse to pay to keep up our infrastructure. The potholes, falling bridges, and out of date railways and ports are not caused because Osama did 9/11.

Most if not all of these problems are self inflicted. And I’d put much more of the decline on Reagan and the fiscal conservatives gutting tge funds used to pay for education than to some middle eastern engineers turned jihadist with a kidney problem, Reagan republicans gutted unions, thus making living wages harder to come by. Problem being is that this process started in 1980 and OBL didn’t target the USA until he tried to plant a truck bomb in the WTC in the early 1990s.

Osama’s most lasting legacy is that the USA has been bombing the crap out of the Middle East for decades and supporting Israel bombing the crap out of Palestine. It’s created a massive backlash against Islam in general and convinced much of the west that Muslims are holy warriors who want to behead them and rape their wives. His legacy has been to trash the reputation of Islam across the globe. I don’t see it as a win.

I think first of all, you need to shut up and listen to your public. The stuff they’re worried about are things you used to be all about solving before you decided to sell out and be the party of the laptop class, various identity groups, and elite college graduates. These are very meat and potatoes issues: wage stagnation, affordable housing, affordable college, grocery prices, good basic education for their kids. If you had a good speaker, with a message that “we will actually fix these things. We actually believe in helping the working adult population to succeed in America. We want to have standards of living increase instead of decrease. “. Then when elected actually make those things better. Banning VCs and investment firms from buying residential homes would be a quick, cheap and easy fix to at least part of the housing crisis. Entire neighborhoods being bought up — unseen, and above asking prices in some cases— reduce supply. There are stories of these kinds of things happening even to trailer parks. A VC comes in, buys the park, jacks up rents until nobody can afford to remain. It’s insane.

Well, yeah, I think we’d mostly agree on that. But I think what I’m getting at is that if you need a background in chemistry to recognize an ingredient, it’s not a good thing. Now im realist enough not not expect a housewife in Mississippi to be able to go without storebought breads, pastas, and so on.

I don’t think it’s horribly wrong, though I think if the median American would look at that ingredient and not know what it is or does, it’s probably not good for you. I tend to avoid it, but I’m personally realistic enough to say that if it’s 3/4 of the way down the ingredients list, it’s probably not horrible for your health.

I will say that this lidt ignores added sugars. High Fructose Corn Syrup is simply a diabetes inducer. Unless it’s a fairly rare dessert, you don’t need added sugars.

Hard disagree. Utilitarianism doesn’t work that well, as it tends to lead to favor the powerful as you balance the utilitarian books. I get a lot of utility out of saving Elon Musk, or making Elon Musk happy because he has money and power and thus control over millions of people directly or indirectly. The homeless guy we remove park benches to keep out of a park, well, he’d only benefit the utility of humanity by freezing to death. And thus it is on a thousand such interactions. It’s better for the self driving car to kill a pedestrian than the driver simply from the included calculation that nobody would ever buy the car controlled by an AI that would even potentially choose to do anything other than save the passengers at all costs.

I think most of the idea is crazy.

First of all, the only outcome of us being too frightened to make the AI ourselves or hobble it to the point it doesn’t work is that other, much worse actors will not only get their first, but have an AI that is much less restrained than whatever AI you are scared of. In fact, this is a much worse outcome. The military is absolutely building AI, so are Russia, China, Iran, and so on. Black rock is probably working on one. Guess what? Absolutely none of those groups give the smallest amount of attention to the idea that AI might make a decision that harms people. And so the AI race is at current much more likely to be won by people with no concern about the AI moral compass than those AI doomers that pride themselves on being cautious about AI.

And most of the fears seem to come from movies and TV shows, not anything that these robots do or have done. We have miles of film of shitty 1980s and 1990s movies that decry AI as doomsday science. But “it happened in Terminator movies” is not even to the level of a real argument. It’s no more realistic than being afraid of space exploration because there might be Klingons out there. If humanity wants to stagnate at 2010 levels of technology, fine, but at the very least I think it should be based on observation rather than stupid movies. If these kinds of people had been listened to in 1600, we’d have never built tge new world. If we’d have listened in 1900, we would not have electricity in our homes. I’m on board with maybe not letting “kill all humans” be a life goal. But I think the dangers of technophobic people is going to do much more long term harm than AI could. AI can already detect cancers better than humans.

They don’t have accountability. There aren’t enough districts up for grabs in the midterms to do anything other than deadlock Congress. The electoral map in 2026 isn’t good, nor is 2028. And without a 2/3 majority in the house and senate impeachment is off the table. The courts have made charging them with a crime very difficult. Other than a color revolution (hopefully mostly peaceful) there aren’t any real mechanisms to hold them accountable or stop them from doing anything they want.

I’m convinced Trump could be a revolutionary, it’s not just fanfic, as he’s actually executing a plan to bring the administrative state to heel and to some extent I think it’s necessary as much of it has been doing de facto legislation since probably the 1970s with little to no accountability or oversight. That’s not to say replacing everyone with loyalists is good, but letting the administrative system decide to outright ban things with no input from congress is not what I would call democratic either. Likewise, these agencies do waste a lot of money on things that don’t do the public any good. Someone needs to force these issues simply because the public is not served when agencies can make wide ranging decisions or spend millions with no accountability for following the directives of the actual elected government or for causing harm or wasting money.

None of that is Trump going Full Hitler. That’s more of a democratic talking point than a political reality. He’s not massing troops to take Mexico, Canada, or Greenland. He isn’t undermining the power of congress. The worst I could say he’s actually done is rename the Gulf of Mexico into Gulf of America. Other than absolutely hilarious “google support notes” insisting that Google shouldn’t have gone along with the renaming, it’s not that important. I am concerned about mass deportations, and I think it should be stopped.

Real polyglots are under appreciated. However, I think it’s mostly an effect of so many pseudo polyglots who take a course on Duolingo and thus claim to speak several languages. Unless you’re putting in serious effort with real language learning materials, you more or less just memorize stock phrases that you can fool non speakers with. I’m not impressed with most of them.

We’ve been “ten years away from fusion and abundant energy from fusion” for the better part of a century now. In the last fifty years, we’ve sent hundreds of shuttle missions into space to do … basically nothing. We’re studying growing tomatoes in space at a cost of thousands of dollars a minute. It’s not going anywhere. The most interesting thing we’ve done is space telescopes. Okay cool, we’ve discovered the answers to future jeopardy questions, again, at a cost of thousands of dollars to let some self important astronomers take pictures and write equations that might or might not even mean anything. If you’re going to tax me for space exploration, is it too much to ask that we make some actual progress? We’re still doing the same sorts of make-work experiments that we were in 1975.

I just don’t see it. I can get behind the government funding medical research that might well prevent or cure a disease. Or to the FDA and Dept of Agriculture to control how much actual poison and microplastics are in the food supply. Those things benefit actual humans on earth. NASA has done basically fuck all, including building a launch vehicle (the boosters are basically repurposed ICBMs and the moon landing was a missile development and scare-the-USSR program disguised as space exploration). Now the Cold War is over and the Soviets are gone. We aren’t really going to go into space, and it’s past time to stop funding an agency dedicated to totally not being cover for a weapons program.

I don’t see a problem with ending NASA. We’re to the point that everything that we can do can easily be done by private companies anyway. And most of the things we wanted NASA for (men in space colonies, and FTL travel) are frankly not going to happen. Why not have SpaceX launch satellites and figure out how to grow space tomatoes in high orbit. That’s all we’ve done with the agency since the moon landing. At least SpaceX launched Kirk into space — it was a stunt, but it’s more than NASA has done since the shuttle program. They managed a few telescopes, which is cool, but I don’t see why we need billions a year to do the space equivalent of building big ships and usining them to dump random things in the harbor to see if they float.