It’s not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.

The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate’s campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn’t as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.

This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you’re rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you’ll never play the game.

More isn’t spent because it doesn’t need to be, not because it isn’t effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.

How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10⁹ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.

You are either vastly overestimating the Language part of an LLM or simplifying human physiology back to the Greek’s Four Humours theory.

If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It’s like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog’s reasoning.

While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).

Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it’s designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don’t have the tech to make a synthetic human.

Here’s a wrench for you: the Luddites were 100% right

Forget 1914. Try 1905. George Cove’s solar electric generator is remarkably similar to modern solar panels.

Spank the monkey?

Someone needs to make an inverse-xwitter platform. You’re only allowed to tweet if you prove you’ve been banned on X.

I’m sure, but a watch is 1000% more convenient if you don’t need any normal smart phone functionality (social media, games, internet access, media player, etc…). Its simpler to not have the option to use those features at all than to blacklist everything.

On top of that, it’s less likely to get lost or dropped/damaged like a flip phone. Probably has better battery life too. For small form-factor messaging + GPS its the most functional package.

You just described what the minimum wage was supposed to be, and plenty of red blooded American patriots already hate that.

Don’t knock schizophrenia till you try it. 9/10 voices in my head recommend it.

I see this in various flavors of anarchism and I don’t get how it would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.

As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.

Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives (“Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?”), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.

Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?..

And if you don’t do anything to bridge the ocean, what’s to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.

Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there’s nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.

I’m not sure how that link is supposed to refute anything? It says basically what the comment above says without using the phrase “mixed economies”.

If you meant the power structure and public/private balance is heavily capitalist for Nordic countries then you’d probably want to post something else supporting that statement.

What a weird, self defeating line of thought. Yes, wielding the collective power of a larger group of people will do more damage. Was anyone under the impression that a loose tribe of 30 dudes could physically accomplish the same feats as 30 million?

Again, that is an incredible technical achievement but it’s not inherently good or bad. A ton of problems today come from the proliferation of tech, maybe we’d be better off if he studied something else. Coming from someone who studied and can professionally appreciate his work: it’s not exactly discovering lifesaving vaccines.

He’s a relatable role model, especially for people who can are unfairly persecuted today. But that’s not the same as being a notable figure playing a role on the historical stage.

Edit: I’m not mad about down votes, but disappointed nobody has provided any argument all.

Is there any evidence that he tried to use his discovery to advance the wellbeing of the human race? Does his estate do any public outreach against the atrocities of the information age? I genuinely cannot find that. Even Alfred Nobel is still doing penance for inventing a new way to blow up rocks, and he’s been dead for nearly 130 years.

Taken alone, creating the theoretical model for modern computer science is as laudable as inventing the internal combustion engine. Both are the innocuous roots that directly sprout to massive problems in our modern world. Not sure why that in particular needs celebration?

Its telling that your example is someone explicitly kept out of the public eye during his life. Basically any account of Turing is from personal friends or his professional work. He was a generally good person and great scientist that helped defeat the nazis, but he’s only celebrated by progressives for his persecution as a gay man.

I struggle to find any major social cause he publicly championed or records of his views on controversial topics. I’d like to be wrong, but it’s easy to not have a mixed record as a private citizen. Nobody was grilling him to free slaves or asking his opinion on systemic injustice.

Einstein is a contemporary comparable. He was a great scientist, opposed the nazis, and by most accounts a decent guy. He was even had to flee his homeland to escape persecution as a jew. Clearly lots of parallels. The main difference being he was an idol in his own day so we have way more first hand accounts.

Turns out he was a socialist with varying views on communism, had shifting support for zionism and wrote rascist shit in his travel diaries. You could probably find a quote like Roosevelt’s and slap it on a picture of him, that doesn’t sum up his life.

Lmao what the fuck is this take? Somebody tell Egypt to start tearing down the pyramids. There are 1000s of Roman monuments still standing that celebrate specific conquests of slavers. Why are there still statues of shitty imperial colonizers all over Europe?

You only get your blood-monuments torn down when your state is systematically destroyed.

You must hang with a pretty progressive crowd, which is exactly my point. You could pick 10 of the poorest quartile of Americans and I’d bet the house that every single one wants to redistribute that money to themselves.

They’ve probably never left their state, let alone visited another country. You don’t have to benefit from an injust system to want to perpetuate it.

Why do you think ending USAID resonates with the poor? Why would someone struggling to pay rent volunteer a huge chunk of their nation’s wealth to go halfway across the world?

61% of Americans explicitly don’t want to increase foreign aid, which is a much less controversial topic than actual reparations.

In 200 years, after theoretical major reparations, would it be unfair to call 61%+ of Americans people of their time? Or are they all demons for participating in a regressive system?

Getting back to George W., total abolition was a severe minority position at the time. Even up to the divisive start of the Civil War, estimates are well under 10% support for northern voters and functionally 0% for southerners. Add in the 18% of the population in slavery, and a random sampling would get you in the low 20% supporting total abolition.

Washington was a third generation slave owner, and by all accounts he died supporting the gradual abolition of the slavery via ending slave trade. Not exactly a paradigm of virtue but it made him a tiny bit progressive relative to most of his peers.

We can’t retroactively apply our modern moral framework just because there are a handful of historical peers who were more progressive. Save the fire and brimstone for the people that actively deserve it.

For example Mark Twain built his career around being a racist funnyman, and held genuinely regressive views for the time. He doesn’t get half as much shit because his face isn’t carved on a mountain. He literally fought in the Civil War for the slavers. Why do we care more about Washington’s dentures?

??? Do they really though? I rarely see the sentiment that literally all ill-gotten gains forming the foundation of their nation’s power and stability should be returned (and definitely not from people benefitting). Mostly it’s just tossing a few cultural artifacts, some meager reparations, and cutting back on some luxury like chocolate because it makes them feel bad. That’s the same as freeing a few slaves after you profit off them for your whole life (and we established that makes you a demon).

Or are you arguing about injustices in classes? If everyone being exploited by the rich agreed to dismantle that system it would be done by now. Doesn’t matter if you’re poor, you participate in the problem.

You probably just want your exploitation to be marginally less than the guys on the bottom, you don’t care about the core issue. Therefore being opposed to the compete dismantling of our current economic system is regressive and 90% of earth’s population are demons