I have incredibly low expectations for Trump, but virtually every day he somehow still astonishes me with his idiocy.

But, what’s a lot more disturbing is that nobody in this administration is trying to keep him out of the spotlight.

It was awful that when Biden’s team realized he was losing his mental faculties, they kept it under wraps and tried to act like everything was normal. But, at least they realized that he wasn’t normal, and that the world wouldn’t have confidence if the US president was in visible cognitive decline. Normally when an elder gets dementia, you take away the car keys. But here they’re letting Trump drive, and they’re sitting in the car with him as he drives down the sidewalk, and they’re grinning, acting like everything is normal.

The only slight hint of normality here is that he’s apparently taken a lot of cognitive exams lately. That’s not normal, so someone must be convincing him that it’s necessary, and actually managing to get him to repeatedly take that test. Maybe it actually will reach a point where he fails the cognitive test badly enough that they take away the keys. Then again, with MAGA if he orders the US to nuke Greenland, there’s a pretty decent chance they’ll do it rather than risk what could happen if they question his orders.

I find it telling that you don’t think India would have figured out some of the issues without the British’s “help” is pretty classic colonialist thinking.

Sometimes things are invented multiple times. But, typically it’s hundreds of years between their invention. I find it telling that you somehow think that India, which was hundreds of years behind in technology, would have magically discovered that technology on their own without contact with more technologically advanced civilizations.

And why do you keep going on about that one factor?

Because it’s widely seen as one of the most important changes in human history.

Constant internal wars are part of a nation figuring it out

Ah, ok. Figuring it out is good if it’s your own people killing you. It’s only bad if the person has white skin.

The way that sort of invention often works is:

1. Inventor thinks they have a world changing idea
2. Inventor spends their own time and money to build a prototype
3. Inventor shows the product off to the world.

If it truly is a world changing invention, step 4 is “world is amazed, inventor can’t keep up with demand”. There are also frequent cases where the world goes “meh, not for me”. Now occasionally those are when an invention is ahead of its time, and years or decades later the inventor is vindicated. The other case is when the invention really isn’t good, and there simply isn’t and will never be demand for it.

Somehow, the AI bubble is built with people ignoring the feedback from people that keep saying “meh, not for me”, and the various “inventors” burning more and more of their money trying to change people’s minds. Has that ever worked?

Has there ever been a true world-changing invention where the “inventors” had to beg the public to use it?

Capitalism says that the market won’t reward people making those things, and the companies might fail as a result.

But, we’re no longer in a capitalist world. We’re in a corporatist world where it’s closer to technolfeudalism where it doesn’t really matter how bad your idea is, because you aren’t out to make a profit, instead you’re out to extract rent.

This is the thing I hope people learn about LLMs, it’s all hallucinations.

When an LLM has excellent data from multiple sources to answer your question, it is likely to give a correct answer. But, that answer is still a hallucination. It’s dreaming up a sequence of words that is likely to follow the previous words. It’s more likely go give an “incorrect” hallucination when the data is contradictory or vague. But, the process is identical. It’s just trying to dream up a likely series of words.

I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets

That’s the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They’re good for basic numeric stuff where there’s a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you’re doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you’re storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.

If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don’t feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.

Let’s just say AI truly is a world-changing thing.

Has there ever been another world-changing thing where the sellers of that thing had to beg people to use it?

The applications of radio were immediately obvious, everybody wanted access to radios. Smart phones and iPods were just so obviously good that people bought them as soon as they could afford them. Nobody built hundreds of km of railroads then begged people to use them. It was hard to build the railways fast enough to keep up with demand.

Sure, there have been technologies where the benefit wasn’t immediately obvious. Lasers, for example, were a cool thing that you could do with physics for a while. But, nobody was out there banging on doors, begging people to find a use for lasers. They just sat around while people fiddled with them, until eventually a use was found for them.

The British might have killed grandma, but they also eventually shared medicine that ensured that junior didn’t die.

In 1800, more than 1 in 2 children in India died before reaching 5 years old. From 1900 to 1915 it dropped from 535 deaths per 1000 to 332. By the time India gained independence it had dropped to 260.

I’m not arguing that colonization is wonderful. But, it tends to happen when a technologically advanced civilization encounters one that’s technologically behind. The eventual result is that the less technologically advanced civilization has their technology level advance. One of the most dramatic results of that is that childhood mortality drops. Does that make you better off? In the modern world, most parents would say that the death of a child is one of the worst things that can happen in your life. Parents would do just about anything to avoid having that happen. Then again, in civilizations with high childhood mortality, there appears to be much less of a bond between parents and children, because parents don’t invest emotionally as much in their children because they know they might die.

So, maybe from the perspective of an Indian in the 1800s, the colonization wasn’t worth it. But, would a modern Indian be willing to go back to a pre-colonization lifestyle, not only with massive childhood deaths, but also with a rigid caste system, constant internal wars, etc.?

There you go, someone who is unwilling to actually think.

A bit less, but not a lot less. I’m definitely not interested in living in a place where people routinely walk around armed.

You are allowed guns

Which would be a red line for Americans who think that guns are an inherent right and that the very idea that the government might be able to say “no” is unacceptable.

Does anybody in the country have the right to go to a store and get a gun without question? What makes the US unique is that the constitution is currently interpreted to mean that gun ownership is a right, and that the government can’t do anything to regulate it.

Well, the post is about Denmark, so Denmark?

As someone who watched the Simpsons in the 90s, to me the modern version is unwatchable. But, it’s still on, so people must still watch it.

It’s pretty great that we have a cultural touchstone like this that multiple generations can understand. This image is a Darmok and Gilad at Tanagra for multiple generations of English speakers, who can all hear the voice just by reading the words, and understand the context in which they’re meant.

IMO the biggest cultural difference is guns. Apparently there are liberals in the US who think nationalized healthcare, cheap or free university, paid parental leave, guaranteed long vacation, etc. is all wonderful. But, they love their guns so much that that would be a red line. They’d forfeit all the great things that a European socialist country has to offer if the deal also requires that they give up their guns.

In the short run, no. In the long run, it depends.

Many countries that were colonized had absolutely terrible child mortality rates. Parents had to expect that a third of their children would die before they became teenagers. One in five didn’t make it to one year old. Being colonized eventually brought medicine which reduced childhood mortality so parents didn’t have to watch their children die.

How important that is depends on your point of view. Maybe you personally don’t care much about your children dying, and having unspoiled nature is more important. If so, then maybe there are no major benefits to being invaded / colonized, even decades or centuries later.

How many rallies has Putin held?

The interesting thing about this is that people are now stuck with whatever PC they had when the prices suddenly shot up. In the past there was always a hardware adoption curve, where some people had the newest stuff, other people waited for it to get cheaper before they bought it.

In the past, if a game company was developing a game that was scheduled to be released in 2 years, they could look at what hardware people were using now, and estimate what people would be using in 2 years. Graphics and gameplay that was possible on game studio machines running the latest hardware would be too much for home PCs when development at the studio started. But, by the time the game was ready, home machines would have caught up and people could experience these amazing graphics at home. Now, I assume game studios are going to have to re-think things and assume that most people at home will still be playing on the old gaming PC they built before the AI price apocalypse.

It’s not that the USA can’t host its own. It has already done that before. It’s more that multi-country things are apparently in favour at FIFA right now, for some reason.