mozz

Yeah. The axis of “powerful writing vs waste of time” is for some reason not really related to the axis of “hard to read vs easy to read”.

“The Great Gatsby” is actually a really good example of the powerful + easy to read corner of the chart. I suspect that they chose it having no idea what they’re talking about, and that doesn’t give me a lot of faith that they will be able to tackle the extremely difficult task of getting an LLM to not completely ruin the artistic merit of what comes out of it, regardless of how much easier to read it made it.

It's just part of an engineered drumbeat of various reasons not to vote for Biden. He's the worst president for leftists in a whole generation. Okay actually he's the opposite of that, but he can't beat Trump. Okay he could have beat Trump but now he's too old and can't beat him anymore, and now we need someone else. I'm just pointing out all these problems because I want to help the Democrats. Now here are 10 different bad things that Biden did (of which it turns out, on examination, that he only did 2 of them and those 2 have asterisks). See, I'm helping the left!

None of it makes any acknowledgement that Trump will be actively destructive to the goals they say they care about, in a way that's a hundred times worse than even the most outlandish of the false things they said about Biden. And, if the DNC did decide to replace Biden with Andrew Yang or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders, or fucking Che Guevara for that matter, they would instantly pivot to saying it is SUPER PROBLEMATIC that Bernie said this thing about trans people in 1988, and anyway he's too old to appeal to most Americans, and he screwed up this other thing last week, and anyway bottom line I'm staying home, I could never vote for a fake leftist millionaire who lives up in some rich person's community up in New England and I'm voting for Cornel West and you should too.

It's all just a bunch of shit. I mean, in this case they actually have something genuine to load into the cannon (Biden really did do a pretty incredibly poor job at the debate and it's a real problem). But that's not why they are firing the cannon this week. They are firing it because it's Sunday and every day that ends in a Y from now until November is a good day to fire off the cannon.

I have yet to meet IRL a single left-wing politically engaged person who says anything other than that Trump will be such an objectively guaranteed catastrophe for everyone in the world that we should vote for whoever’s running against him, whether that person is Biden or Kamala Harris or a blind dog dressed up in a business suit. All the people who say Biden’s old and so they can’t vote for him are fairly un-politically-aware types who aren’t especially left wing in their personal beliefs.

And yet the internet is full of these super left wing people who feel real aggressive about not voting for Biden, like even more aggressively about that, apparently, than they do about any particular left wing cause, about immigration or going to the Palestine protest or what have you.

It is curious

That part, I won’t say you are wrong about. The American electorate is wrong enough in how they set their priorities that I think Biden’s performance at the debate was a massive problem.

What I am saying here is that it’s weird that the stories are “why Trump’s felonies are not important” and “why Biden’s elderly nature is hugely important,” when the data points the exact opposite way. Honestly, I think maybe people’s understanding of what is important in politics may be quite a few ticks ahead of the media is giving them credit for when they publish stories like this.

1. I’m as surprised as anybody, but the non loaded-to-elicit-a-particular-answer framing of the question showed basically no change after the debate. Polls from the day after the election which asked, who do you want to vote for for president, showed basically no change in the answer (respectively, 45/43 for Trump, and 45/44 for Biden). I will continue to be surprised if that keeps happening but definitely that’s how it actually objectively happened, so far.
2. It is highly notable to me how unanimous in the media is the narrative “Biden’s in trouble because he fucked up the debate” - which, however much of a very real problem it is that he’s old as fuck, isn’t borne out by polling data - whereas they didn’t write too much about “Trump’s in trouble because he caught a bunch of felonies”, even though that was reflected in a few percentage points’ drop in his polling (remember? that was when Biden started ticking higher than Trump in national polls every now and then, which he’s still doing, which he hadn’t been able to do before?). As a good example check out this lapdog bullshit

It seems very clear to me that the media is, as they often do, pretending that they are reporting on trouble for the Democratic candidate, when actually what they are doing is finding a way to frame a legitimate story to do their best to create the trouble that are pretending they are reporting on.

Agreed

Lookin at you “Ulysses”

There are books that are too hard for me. I get that and I’m comfortable with it. Anything above short story length from James Joyce or William Faulkner is simply beyond my abilities and not enjoyable to me. It is fine; I don’t read them.

(1) I would obviously never in a million years decide that the answer was for someone or some bot with no literary abilities whatsoever to pre-chew it for me and spit it back up into my mouth like a big mama bird, and for me to choke down the resulting product (2) The Great Gatsby is not on that list my man. It has some deeper themes, allegedly, but that’s not a hard fuckin book. I suspect they just chose a “classic” book at random, unaware that the specific one they chose is a pretty easy and enjoyable read, because they have never read it, because they are to a man a bunch of un literary morons and thieves.

The Belgian Congo also came to my mind. They were teaching Christianity, too, at the same time as they were cutting people's hands off. I read someone not that long ago who was talking about his firsthand observations of some of the results and how Christianity tied in with it. It wasn’t good.

Regardless of all that, it's not a contest. US slavery and this particular instance of trying to brainwash people into support of it can be horrifying and the founding fathers can be hellbound for their support for it, without any kind of reference to what anyone else in the world was doing.

Right is right. Wrong is wrong. "Best" or "worst" or "look at what these other people were doing" is rarely relevant, in my eyes.

I don’t even think they stand to benefit. I think when he blows up the US their assets will lose value, and depending on how bad it gets they may start having to hang out in some other safer country like a Russian oligarch spending all his time in Western Europe.

I think it is just pure force of habit at this point, like “Biden’s gonna tax the rich fuck him let’s get behind this disaster instead.” I mean, it worked for other disasters like Reagan or W, but I think they haven’t really absorbed how big a disaster Trump 2 would be.

Yeah. It is fairly weird to me that it’s such a common thing to do to take the raw output of the LLM and send that to the user, and to try use fine-tuning to get that raw output to look some way that you want.

To me it is obvious that something like having the LLM emit a little JSON block which includes some field which covers “how sure are you that this is actually true” or something, is more flexible and simpler and cheaper and works better.

But what do I know

The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed.

A few things about this, It didn't pass. It never came to a vote. It was an executive order. Centrists didn't want it.

Wait, hang on. I may have misunderstood you.

If your central thesis is that Democrats in congress are mostly an uninspiring pile of centrist bullshit, and that Biden has to contend with them as well as the GOP in order to get progressive things done that he is trying to accomplish, then I will 100% agree with you. I thought you were including Biden in the centrist fakery.

Your description of getting behind Democrats because you wanted good things to happen, only to see the reality that comes to pass be mostly watered-down corporate-friendly garbage, sounds pretty accurate to me. It sounded like you were blaming that on Obama and Biden, instead of Manchin and the Republicans, is why we are disagreeing. But if you’re saying we need to get rid of the GOP in congress, and replace Manchin and Sinema with actual liberal people, as the solution, I will 100% agree.

Biden, in the only surprise of his presidency so far, listened to progressives on student loans

IRA? NLRB with teeth? Trillions of dollars worth of corporate tax increases? Those were not surprising to you?

And I just got to the paragraph where you call me Goebbels. Conversation's over. Godwin.

I said that super confidently asserting something which seems to me to be the opposite of true, and relying on the assertion itself to be the explanation of why people should believe it, is a Goebbels tactic.

Like I say, I actually agree with you about the massive gap between what Democratic presidents get done and what they should be getting done. Where it falls apart for me is where to assign the blame for that.

Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there's no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It's basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole "debate" survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.