Root Beer Man

@sharonk.bsky.social can i do a list of books read thread too or is that too much your thing? feel absolutely free to say no!!

#RootBeerMan

‘This guy is going to destroy civilization as we know it, and the earth, and all because of these people who don't have any idea why they're alive.’
- Michael Shannon in 2016 predicting the hell we’re in now
www.rogerebert.com/interviews/y...

socrates’s daimon was basically the first tamagotchi

i mean, for its time

plato’s republic is about as good as harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban yeah

kids today always ask me how it was living in the 90s. it’s like, ok, imagine the best thing ever. now imagine that but 50% better, and more funner. now add MTV

plato‘s republic was unquestionably the greatest book of the ancient world. their ”prisoner of azkaban,” if you will

new testament? it’s basically like ok, imagine the avengers infinity war part two, of bible

aaron and moses are so classic. if you haven’t read it i’d basically sum them up as the beavis and butthead of Bible

when you think about it, hard to deny that jesus is basically the “JFK” of heaven…

damn i read all that shit

did you ever think about how in the middle ages they didn’t even have tv? pretty mindblowing

that’s how i did it, to the point of, i don’t get the joke. are others not??

this convinces me

you’re an imbecile

personally i’d settle for a qualium

there’s a good take my wife for example joke slumbering in these precincts but it’s not the right economy for it

i want a qualia for my birthday

there’s a documentary about this

trump was like this too, once. it's worth the effort to take such things seriously

some isomorphism betw the various weird thoughts and feelings people have re: what it means for llms both to ‘speak’ how they do yet not be conscious, and the weird thoughts and feelings that accompany any reflection on how the iliad and odyssey ’speak’ the way they do even if ‘homer’ did not exist

the damage that accumulates along the way when he does this is truly horrible, but he really doesn’t ever tie his own hands in a way that prevents him from doing the exact opposite or retreating quickly at the next setback, and we should devise a language to criticize him that captures all this

it’s irritating that we trump critics can’t internalize that he is good at pivoting on a dime so as to minimize consequences, and so every time he does something stupid, we gloat for 2 weeks on the premise that immediate events lock him into this and that, thus making us look stupid when he pivots

pun-region of brain tingling… ICE sounds like ISIS... something of immense Power about to emerge… uh… fuck ICIS… is this anything…

(“to be sure” statement about how there are “social” anarchists too, who are nice people, and who do not and cannot ever matter)

exhibit #873638849 of how the psychological basis of anarchism and fascism are the same: the common, as such, is by its very nature opposed to my will

i have an underdeveloped couple of thoughts about how drives in the sense you’re using it and desires in the sense i’m using it aren’t quite the same, but i think if i tried to express it today the convo would quickly come to circle around familiar undefinable points. but i’ll think more

i don’t understand enough yet abt the basic (logical?) structure even of the human ‘on my own behalf’ to know how to evaluate whether llms show it if their memories get longer (or in incipient forms now), but i have some intuition, today, that this point is smwh overlooked in these discussions as is

the first-personality of things seems inextricably tied up, for us, with ‘wanting’ and somehow being a ‘center’ and ‘starting-point’ of wanting-activity. ’qualia’ isn’t something that ever grabbed me as a concern, but if LLMs had this ‘desiderative’ quality, that would be a big deal (and dangerous)