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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • I think you are vastly overestimating his base. They are looking for convenient excuses not logic or evidence. As long as there is a convenient excuse to trot out, Trump is still God Incarnate and the delusions continue. Someone looking for the truth won’t be swayed by the obviously bribed testimony of someone who has repeatedly lied under oath, but these people aren’t looking for the truth- they already have it in whatever Trump is saying that day. They just need something to point to and say “See? She says he wasn’t involved so he wasn’t involved! You liberals are just making things up to hurt Trump again!” This is a world where evidence isn’t what matters, it’s quips. As long as there’s a quip to shut down any disagreement the fantasy that Trump is a saintly hero of democracy can continue.










  • I got Persona 5 Royal in the Steam Summer Sale this year and I’ve been obsessed. I wanted to play Persona 4 when it came out but I was a teenager and didn’t have any realistic way to get ahold of it, and then I was just super busy when Persona 5 came out but it is truly an amazing game. It definitely takes some getting used to and I would definitely not recommend to someone who isn’t already a fan of JRPGs or anime but if you do like JRPGs and are okay with an anime aesthetic it doesn’t really get much better than this. I knew basically nothing about Persona going in other than that it’s about teens with JoJo-style Stands and it has a cool art style with interesting character designs, and I was pleasantly surprised at every turn. My only complaint is that the combat is really more about style than difficulty and the game is sort of easy even on hard mode. Definitely worth it for $15 even on its own.




  • This isn’t actually the problem. In natural conversation I would say the most likely response to someone saying they need some meth to make it through their work day (actual scenario in this article) is to say “what the fuck dude no” but LLMs don’t use just the statistically most likely response. Ever notice how ChatGPT has a seeming sense of “self” that it is an to LLM and you are not? If it were only using the most likely response from natural language, it would talk as if it were human, because that’s how humans talk. Early LLMs did this, and people found it disturbing. There is a second part of the process that gives a score to each response based on how likely it is to be voted good or bad and this is reinforced by people providing feedback. This second part is how we got here, because people who make LLMs are selling competing products and found people are much more likely to buy LLMs that act like super agreeable sycophants than LLMs that don’t do this. Therefore, they have intentionally tuned their models to prefer agreeable, sycophantic responses because it helps them be more popular. This is why an LLM tells you to use a little meth to get you through a tough day at work if you tell it that’s what you need to do.

    TL;DR- as with most of the things people complain about with AI, the problem isn’t the technology, it’s capitalism. This is done intentionally in search of profits.


  • The full article is kind of low quality but the tl;dr is that they did a test pretending to be a taxi driver who felt he needed meth to stay awake and llama (Facebook’s LLM) agreed with him instead of pushing back. I did my own test with ChatGPT after reading it and found that I could get ChatGPT to agree that I was God and that I created the universe in only 5 messages. Fundamentally these things are just programmed to agree with you and that is really dangerous for people who have mental health problems and have been told that these are impartial computers.



  • The views of the US Libertarian Party are essentially summarized by “taxes and regulations are bad” with few other guiding principles. As a party, it is largely separated from any sort of political theory (even libertarian political theory), and sort of relies on a politically disenaged and uninformed populous who vote for the people promising lower taxes and legal weed without really understanding that the Libertarian Party’s approach to “taxes and regulations are bad” are primarily in favor of large corporations rather than individuals. They posture themselves as a true alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties when practically they want most of the same stuff Republicans want for the most part, with token acceptance of progressive social ideas.

    Libertarianism more broadly is an ideology that believes that individual rights are the most important thing to creating a better society. This can be left wing (extending individual rights to include things like the ability to use land and other natural resources without being limited by property ownership) or right wing (believing that the right of the individual includes the right to accumulate wealth and power through accumulation of capital), and the distinction primarily depends on the approach to ownership and property. Libertarianism differs from Anarchism in that libertarians believe that a state is required for maintaining and guaranteeing individual rights through the use of laws and courts, and defending those rights from external threats via military action.

    All in all, my personal view is that libertarianism, along with anarchism and other “min-archist” movements, is unable to answer the question of “how do you prevent someone from accumulating material and social power and using that power to enforce their will upon others?” For many libertarians the answer seems to be that social norms in a libertarian society would prevent people from doing this and that they would be able to withstand external attacks from groups that do not hold their views. I do not believe this, and I think that human nature means that some people will always want to gain control over others through whatever means they can, and that only a government can effectively combat these tendencies. Social norms are powerful and are a required part of a functioning democracy, but ultimately the law, backed by the ability to apply the use of force in a way agreed upon by the public, is what allows the weak to resist domination from the strong.


  • The views of the US Libertarian Party are essentially summarized by “taxes and regulations are bad” with few other guiding principles. As a party, it is largely separated from any sort of political theory (even libertarian political theory), and sort of relies on a politically disenaged and uninformed populous who vote for the people promising lower taxes and legal weed without really understanding that the Libertarian Party’s approach to “taxes and regulations are bad” are primarily in favor of large corporations rather than individuals. They posture themselves as a true alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties when practically they want most of the same stuff Republicans want for the most part, with token acceptance of progressive social ideas.

    Libertarianism more broadly is an ideology that believes that individual rights are the most important thing to creating a better society. This can be left wing (extending individual rights to include things like the ability to use land and other natural resources without being limited by property ownership) or right wing (believing that the right of the individual includes the right to accumulate wealth and power through accumulation of capital), and the distinction primarily depends on the approach to ownership and property. Libertarianism differs from Anarchism in that libertarians believe that a state is required for maintaining and guaranteeing individual rights through the use of laws and courts, and defending those rights from external threats via military action.

    All in all, my personal view is that libertarianism, along with anarchism and other “min-archist” movements, is unable to answer the question of “how do you prevent someone from accumulating material and social power and using that power to enforce their will upon others?” For many libertarians the answer seems to be that social norms in a libertarian society would prevent people from doing this and that they would be able to withstand external attacks from groups that do not hold their views. I do not believe this, and I think that human nature means that some people will always want to gain control over others through whatever means they can, and that only a government can effectively combat these tendencies. Social norms are powerful and are a required part of a functioning democracy, but ultimately the law, backed by the ability to apply the use of force in a way agreed upon by the public, is what allows the weak to resist domination from the strong.