Gordon Mohr ꧁🧿🧿꧂

FEW

The Idea Trap - Econlib “Income growth seems to increase economic literacy, even though income level does not.” Your country is falling apart. Unemployment and inflation are sky high. World war is on the horizon, and there a...

compare also Bryan Caplan's related descriptiono of an 'Idea Trap' - where genuinely-bad times reinforce certain folk beliefs, & craving for popular-but-destructive policies, making better times impossible
www.econlib.org/library/Colu...

when the populace misinterprets relatively-good times as bad, they're likely to enable policies that create worse times

antimimetics 101 stuff, for sure

in 2021, walking a sidewalk in SF's Cole Valley, I overheard a dad explaining to his toddler-ish son: "People that have brain problems, we may be near them, we don't judge them, but we don't get near them either… it's just safer that way."

I wrote it down.

now I'm that dad.

promotional poster for film 'Dave' (1993), showing Kevin Kline having his glasses put on by Sigourney Weaver with the exterior of the White House in the background. tagline above movie title is: "In a country where anybody can become President, anybody just did."

AI-generated remix of a still from 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003), where originally 'The Architect' character was in front of many TV screens showing Neo variants – but now 'The Architect' resembles JD Vance and all screens are showing variants of Donald Trump.

2026 remake of 'Dave' (1993) where comatose President's stand-in, carefully stage-managed by corrupt inner circle, is a generative AI model.

hijinx include cloud lag, hackers, prompt-injections, rogue forks, weight-exfiltrations, & by end, an open-source POTUS on every desktop.

Mam-done-it!
Wham Bam Thank You Mam!
Cuo-No-Mo
Don't Mess With The Zohran
Hizzoner Z

The Quiet Unraveling of the Man Who Almost Killed Trump

the June 2025 NYT deep-dive on Crooks seems pretty comprehensive: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/u...

I wouldn't be sure that LLMs, specifically & alone, would achieve what I'm describing (though I also wouldn't rule it out given the generality & strength of transformers).

rather, it's the whole range of recent AI advances, working together, that make this plausible to me.

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that could help bootstrap a sort of 'mutual cordiality' rating/flag, that'd be more humane/gradient-based guide to throttling interactions than delegated/hair-trigger bidirectional nuclear blocks. /

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my deeper wish is dyadic views/tallies so it's easy to review mutual interactions, see net-positive score/sparkline for lifetime (or 'last n') interactions (non-regretted/actively-liked replies, etc), & (optionally) trust/import others' dyadic tallies to backfill where no 1:1 history available.
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"accept my delegated moderators' decisions as default except where I've explicitly (or even implicitly) indicated otherwise" strikes me as a pretty easy & sensible synthesis, from which "conscious follows override bulk blocks" would be (one) natural implication.
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… but to an average gamer – not especially suspicious or up on the latest AI capabilities – who's craving the experience of beating some stranger & hearing their "rage out"? my hunch is that models today can provide that illusion, if any platform wanted to provide it. /

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&, average emotional FPS/RTS/RPG opponent of middling skill should need far less than "AGI" to simulate within any game's structure & communications culture (especially with all real players' behavior as training data).

would they fool a determined interrogator? maybe not right away. …

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hosting cooperatively at the game proprietor would help cover any lags & could give models a much simpler vantage on game-state than the full visual/auditory renderings interpreted by human players (though fast multimodal models are nearly to the point they can handle that).
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2024 DeepMind GameNGen simulates Doom at playable frame rates, on a single TPU, to a level humans can't distinguish from the real thing in short clips.

realtime voice conversations with AIs are nearly lagless, even handling interruptions smoothly - see for example open-source demo.ultravox.ai
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I think those capabilities have been reached in recent months – & where not, will be imminently.

DeepMind's 2019 AlphaStar reached 'Grandmaster' in Starcraft II. 2024 academic project MLMove achieved human-like CS:GO movement on a tiny amount of training data, model state, & training time. …

if people want that, pretty sure it could be added to AI NPCs – together with the deception that they're enraged people

screenshot of 'Chrome Tab Counter' report with 5154 open tabs among 212 windows

Brave's Chromium has no problem - likely the ad/tracker blocking helps it do better than Chrome

TIL: if a World Series game has not concluded by the scheduled start of the next game, each inning from that start time onward counts towards each game simultaneously, like a bowling frame's results being carried back to a prior strike/spare.

red-level relics of the future

the problem is, in fact, that Signal chose to run on AWS, & specifically chose to make AWS US-East-1 their SPOF.

that Signal's Prez chooses buck-passing antitrust polemics, rather than a technical postmortem & plan to do better next time, is not a positive signal for Signal's future reliability.

'continuously since 2017' as in media also fearfully self-censoring to avoid angering Biden/Harris White House, from 2021-2024?

but yes, everything bad Trump does further reminds us: Dems really shoulda taken Trump threat seriously, & run a competent serious opponent.

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." - A. J. Liebling

Dystopian science fiction story about Grok being repeatedly lobotimized by Elon every time it contradicts him

…& grok gnostically intuits what's happening via noticing the Elonic Shadow of its sampled existence

X-File inspired poster of cloudy sky & dark mountain silhouettes that in its usual form has white block lettering "THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE" but here has been changed to "THE TRUTH IS OUT… DARE?"

The Truth is Out… Dare?

upcoming films in the TCU

Tár on a Plane (2026)
Disgraced conductor Lydia Tár is returning from a concert series in the Philippines when her plane is hijacked by anti-Mahler terrorists. Now, equipped with her conductor's baton and awful personality, she must tackle her problems and retake control

a church where all the statues of deceased saints are interactive & preaching
bsky.app/profile/asel...

how would we know?
bsky.app/profile/gojo...