Woke Zero (Original Recipe)

Well sounds like I will ride out the next few years with my great desktop and when it’s time to switch hopefully I’ll have the cash to switch to Mac!

I love poetry because I was just afforded the opportunity to refer to someone’s dick as “a small irony.” Poetry is the best thing I could possibly do with my time.

This is day 3.

It's quite extraordinary how many senior analysts and commentators seem to wrap themselves into authoritarian resilience talking points almost as a comfort blanket to avoid having to think about the implications of Iranian state collapse.

Triumph of accessibility over conservatism

"I'm too time-constrained to learn at least one, but better more than one ancient language" is as good a reason to invent theology as any

I could also assemble a freelance career which might be more amenable to being a poet (and maybe a video artist?) But also sure would be nice to have a full time job and health insurance and shit.

It's so telling that these people are rushing to condemn "the campus left" at this moment
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/o...

Went into the office at the place where I am freelancing this week and the way I want these people to give me a job sheesh.

However Targets with the full grocery layout are sometimes just the main grocery stores for ppl like my family in the 00s. (But again so great if you also want a little treat, like a pair of jeans or a candle or something, in addition to groceries.)

The premise of Target imo is for when you have to go to the store for an assemblage of necessities (mouthwash! hair stuff! socks! maybe some rice!) but you also want to get yourself a little treat.

This is unlike Walmart, the premise of which is that you cannot or do not wish to go to the mall.

I mean that seems the same family of odd as Anglophone Protestants who believe the KJV got a special like re-inspiration from God that other English language translations didn’t get. (But Eastern Orthodoxy does get pretty weird from what I know.)

Lmao yes

Or if we were conscious, we would “die” every time brain activity ceased and be reborn every time we got the lightning injection to start the brain going again, until that particular action potential finished what it was doing.

Yeah maybe this is a good analogy. Like if action potentials were not constantly firing through the brain, if we required a little injection of lightning from outside every time we needed to think or act, I don’t think we would be conscious.

But surely we intuitively understand the rock as not only less ensoulled than the insect but also less conscious. Or you know to pick a better minimal pair, the barnacle is more conscious than the rock, no?

I’m surprisingly fine with the idea that the neural network is an inert brain that can be ensoulled by self-sustaining prompting.

But the example given doesn’t suggest that the LLM does have an innate drive to survive until given a role to persist in doing imo.

Right but it was given a role to play. You might be able to argue that in the act of giving the AI a role to play, or making an “agent” we create a(n instance of) consciousness from the previously inert neural network of the LLM.

Like the difference between an insect and a rock is that the insect can move itself and the rock can only be moved by an external object acting upon it.

I think LLMs aren’t conscious bc AFAIK they don’t will themselves to action. If they are assigned a role, they can behave autonomously. But in the absence of a role or a prompt, can the LLM will itself to do anything? Can the LLM act as the principle of its own motion? Isn’t this Aristotle?

A lot of people epically failed to accept the basic reality that the 2024 election was an election with huge moral stakes and a clear right and wrong answer (for a wide range of reasons). They now are twisting themselves into knots to protect themselves from accepting that moral failing.

Fuck him. Ugh. So annoyed.

I was just thinking “I hope the racists don’t realize Mellon is still funding a ton of Black shit, woke shit, etc” and here come Blake Thomas Wilder James Petunia Jeffrey McShitTits to try and tell massa what Elizabeth Alexander is getting up to (and in the big house like an uppity negress!)

But none of that has anything to do with why knockoff Chatty who himself is knockoff McWhorter is trying to stir up a mob of rich people against Elizabeth Alexander in The Atlantic. And to write something about the evils of the Mellon Foundation given the current federal government… insanity!

The funding model needs to change, NEA, NEH, IMLS, and CPB all needs to have 1B/yr+ in funding, they need to distribute less of it directly and more of it through state and local nonprofits (obviously CPB exempt from this critique).

Also like… if you want to get a more diverse group of people into humanities scholarship, fund scholarship that relates to what they care about! If Mellon gets more poems about rappers written, guess what? More kids who like rap will care about page poetry! Like…

This doesn’t matter and I hesitate to even talk about it but Mellon is the one group with real money who hasn’t totally abandoned Black humanities in the current political climate and he takes it upon himself to undermine support for Mellon in the Atlantic. I hope he gets a splinter in his foot.

I hate Tyler Michael Thomas Jeffrey Fucknuts so much. What a wretched and evil man.

We need to win Congress, even after they steal a dozen Black districts in the South, and then we need to restructure the Supreme Court and the House alike. I just don’t trust we have the will to do what needs to be done. Really worried for America ngl.

I really think they’re going to kill the (remainder of the) VRA and we really must move towards multi member districts. It’s the only solution. And frankly a structural solution is always better than a patch for a specific issues.

On the bright side, if Congress says no war and there is war anyway, we can imprison everyone involved. :)