Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in nancygold's LiveJournal:

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Friday, January 9th, 2026
3:41 pm	The wolf has a boner for red head (6 Comments |Comment on this)
10:07 am	Had a vivid nightmare. I was sitting on a river bank, with clear water running over the bed rock, but then i noticed the water flowing is too fast, and then suddenly it changed the flow direction with multiple whirlpools forming along the way. What does that mean? I'm not sure if that is how physics should work Current Mood: anxious Current Music: Britney Spears – Baby One More Time (Synthwave Rock 80s Cover) AI MUSIC COVER (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 7th, 2026
5:22 pm	Asked ChatGPT about LEGO, it can said the following Its true innovation was that it enabled creative play without role predefinition An American action figure tells you who you are An American engineering kit tells you how things work LEGO lets you decide what exists That is a fundamentally different cognitive proposition. If we ask “where did Americans first normalize open-ended world construction?”, then tabletop role-playing games—especially Dungeons & Dragons—are the closest analogue. Current Mood: contemplative (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2026
11:16 am	LEGO politics Since LEGO is my new hobby, the first thing I notice is that LEGO has branched into politics. Minifigures no longer have abstract yellow skin, but feature realistic skin tones. That way African can too be proud of launching a Sputnik, seeing LEGO's STEM set. Because he contributed no less than an average Russian Ivan to that. Anyway, LEGO are now introducing programmable smart bricks with wireless charging (i.e. no wiring) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmyGi8_n-EM Would be interesting to see how it will evolve combined with older lego technics and the arduino community. Current Mood: amused (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 4th, 2026
12:15 pm	Assembed a Lego Set I wish the straw roof was less saturated though. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: some AI generated music (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 30th, 2025
11:34 am	Belonging Without Benefit: Identity at Population Scale One might be forgiven for thinking that discussions of "belonging" are exercises in fuzzy sentimentality, but let us dispense with such nonsense from the outset. Any serious inquiry must first pin down precisely what is being optimized, lest we descend into the vapid realm of inspirational posters or, worse, manipulative sloganeering. Agents—those rational (or at least self-interested) entities we call people—do not simply "belong" as if floating in some ethereal void; they pursue objective functions, often clumsily, under the iron grip of constraints. The perennial muddle stems from agents chasing wildly divergent goals while feigning participation in a unified charade. A social construct—be it a cult masquerading as religion, a flag-waving nation-state, a glossy brand, or some half-baked ideology—sustains itself by coaxing agents into forking over "taxes" in return for purported perks. These taxes come in assorted flavors: overt cash grabs, squandered hours, behavioral straitjackets, foregone opportunities, or the mental gymnastics of ignoring glaring absurdities. The perks? They might be tangible loot, social pats on the back, or the warm glow of self-delusion. The pivotal insight, which eludes the starry-eyed, is that **benefits are distributed with all the evenness of a rigged lottery**, whereas costs are doled out with bureaucratic uniformity. This lopsided setup is the secret sauce behind both the gluey persistence and the inevitable rot of such systems. Scale: Where Belonging's Returns Evaporate Like Morning Dew As a social edifice balloons in size, the incremental payoff from genuine belonging plummets with the predictability of a poorly coded algorithm approaching infinity. In diminutive setups: * Every participant is as transparent as a glass house. * Loyalty is a rare commodity, worth its weight in unobtainium. * Trust is neighborhood gossip, enforceable with a stern glance. * Belonging confers a tangible edge, like a cheat code in a zero-sum game. In bloated behemoths: * Participants are as interchangeable as cogs in a rusty machine. * Loyalty floods the market, devaluing it to pocket lint. * Enforcement becomes a game of statistical roulette. * Belonging grants, at most, the bare minimum of not being laughed out of the room. These gargantuan constructs sacrifice personal windfalls for the dubious glory of mass synchronization. This isn't a bug; it's the feature they brag about in their mission statements. Whining that "authentic belonging yields zilch" is akin to griping that an expressway makes a lousy vegetable patch—profoundly missing the point. The Insidious Arithmetic of Social Levies No social contraption worth its salt endures without extracting its pound of flesh. The menu of exactions includes: * Cold hard currency * Pilfered time and wandering focus * Shackles on conduct * Paths not taken * The cognitive contortions of pretending black is white The real kicker isn't the tax itself—that's as inevitable as gravity—but **who deludes themselves into seeing a rebate**. For the wide-eyed zealots, the payoff is baked in: a sense of cosmic order, purpose, or smug righteousness. For the calculating pragmatists, such ethereal dividends are written off as bad debt or ignored outright. They thus aim to skim the tax down to a whisper while hoarding the goodies—a tactic derided as "hypocrisy" by the naive, though "efficient resource allocation" captures it far better. The Puzzling Persistence of Pointless Payments It's oh-so-tempting to dismiss those who cough up taxes sans visible ROI as dimwitted dupes. Alas, this smug verdict crumbles under scrutiny for three glaring oversights: 1. **Hedging Against Catastrophe** Shelling out buys a buffer against calamity, not a jackpot. Plenty of agents play defense, not offense—prioritizing floor over ceiling. 2. **Keeping the Escape Hatch Ajar** Nominal belonging preserves potential pivots. Full defection slams doors with the finality of a deleted file. 3. **The Sticky Trap of Group Momentum** These monoliths lumber on because ditching them hurts the individual far more than it helps the herd. In essence, a multitude aren't investing in gains; they're insuring against expulsion—like paying protection money to an indifferent mob. The Parade of Poseurs, Profiteers, and the Mirage of Meltdown Oversized systems are teeming with agents who mime obedience while inwardly flipping the bird. This is as novel as yesterday's weather and hardly a harbinger of doom. A system doesn't keel over merely because fakers abound; it buckles only when: * Outward acts cease to masquerade as inner conviction. * Policing the flock costs more than herding it yields. * Parasitic cliques siphon value without refilling the trust tank. Short of that, the apparatus can chug along forever on autopilot pretense. If history teaches anything, it's that two-facedness isn't acid—it's axle grease. The Sequel Syndrome in Societal Software Pioneering systems tackle the basics: herding cats, forging identities, staving off chaos. Inevitably, follow-up layers sprout to patch the leaks, curb the cheats, and arbitrage the gaps. Witness: * Priestly castes micromanaging mysticism * Paper-pushers policing party lines * Franchise sprawls diluting devotion * Norms-about-norms enforcing the enforcers These add-ons invariably balloon into labyrinthine, heavy-handed farces, more opaque than their progenitors. Soon enough, they pivot to self-preservation over service. Collapse isn't assured at this juncture—but don't hold your breath for a cleanup crew. The Stubborn Sluggishness of Societal Demise These hulking social hulks don't topple at the first stiff breeze because: * They thrive on diluted devotion and endure motivational mishmashes. * They coast on ceremonial cruise control and habitual hand-waving. * They offload the dirty work to kin, cliques, and local busybodies. * They dispense just enough crumbs to keep the masses from outright revolt. Tumbling typically transpires only if: * Nimble factions bolt in droves * Rival rigs offer superior syncing * The badge of authority tarnishes beyond belief erosion alone Till then, even gutted husks float on, propped by routine, dread, and the sheer hassle of hitting the eject button. Epilogue And so we circle back to the inevitable: mammoth mechanisms prize rote compliance over inspired input, pint-sized packs pay premiums for passion, and shrewd operators affiliate minimally to dodge the boot while sourcing superior substitutes. This neatly accounts for why some souls gleefully overpay for factory-stamped conformity blocks, whereas others stealthily cobble together bargain-bin alternatives—vibrant, versatile, and infinitely more amusing—sans demanding validation from the orthodoxy. And, awkwardly for the purists, they interlock seamlessly all the same. Current Mood: contemplative (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 28th, 2025
10:13 am	Gemini Visual Simulation Capabilities for D&D So I'm designing a hidden NPC to NPC relationship state for my D&D campaign. At each milestone something happens, changing the relationships. The players are expected to provide a narrative according to the context. Such system is a bit involved, so I use Gemini to help understanding it. https://gemini.google.com/app/ef68cf3d28a37d95 Still no idea if I can trust Gemini's assessment of how the system will behave. E.g. it made an error in the rule logic (A → Y should be A → X): If A → B, then (X → A implies X → B) and (A → Y implies X ↛ B). EDIT: it was unable to one-shot an actual working video game out of it. https://gemini.google.com/share/8757ab586d2a PROMPT: We want to evaluate a ruleset over a set of abstract entities. Given entities A and B, we have the following possibilities: 1. A attracts B 2. B attracts A Rule: If A attracts B, then all entities attracting A must also start attracting B, while all entities attracted by A must stop attracting B. The entities relationships are arranged into a NxN binary matrix for the purpose of representing them in computer memory. The speed of entity B approaching A is defined as the number of entities attracting A. Given the described system, please produce a self contained html+js visual simulation, which visualizes both speed and attraction in a way easy for a human to assess. At each step the simulation applies the rule and then samples the output, converting it into easy to parse informative format(s). This system is a fascinating variation of a directed graph propagation rule. Because the relationships are binary and the rules are deterministic, the system's behavior can be categorized into several interesting mathematical properties. ### 1. Convergence and Stability The system **always settles** into a final state (a fixed point). It cannot enter an infinite loop of changing states. * **Why?** The rule has a "monotone" component regarding the reachability of . When attracts , any entity that can reach through is forced into a direct relationship (). Simultaneously, entities that already attracts are barred from attracting . * **The "Sink" Effect:** Because the rule effectively collapses multi-step paths (if and , then ) while pruning specific "local" loops, the system tends to simplify its connectivity over time until the rule no longer triggers any changes. ### 2. Time to Settle (Convergence Rate) In most cases, the system settles in much less than steps. * **Upper Bound:** Theoretically, the system will settle in at most ** steps**, as the propagation of the "attraction" property across the longest possible chain in the graph would take iterations. * **Average Case:** For a random initial matrix of size , you will likely see the system settle in **2 to 4 steps**. As grows, the convergence time scales closer to or depending on the density of the initial "attraction" links. ### 3. Emergent "Clustering" Property One of the most interesting properties of this specific rule is that it tends to create **exclusive clusters** or **hierarchies**: * **Transitivity:** The first half of the rule (`X -> A -> B` implies `X -> B`) is essentially a manual enforcement of transitivity. This pushes the graph toward being a "Transitive Tournament" or a collection of "Sinks." * **The Pruning Effect:** The second half of the rule (`A -> Y` implies `Y` stops attracting `B`) acts as a "competitive exclusion" principle. It prevents "middle-men" from maintaining a relationship with a target if their "leader" () already has that relationship. ### 4. Speed (In-Degree) as a Centrality Measure In this system, "Speed" is effectively the **In-Degree** of a node in graph theory. * As the simulation runs, you'll notice that "Speed" often polarizes. Some entities will end up with a speed of (everyone attracts them), while others drop to 0. * The rule tends to move the system toward a state where a few "Super-Attractors" emerge, or the system completely disconnects. ### 5. Why no Infinite Loops? For a system like this to loop (e.g., ), there would need to be a "negation" cycle that perfectly restores the initial conditions. However, the rule is an additive "force" that is only countered by the rule. Since the that are "pruned" are specifically those subordinate to (which is the source of the attraction to ), the system quickly exhausts the possible permutations of "who can attract whom" without creating the circular logic required for an infinite oscillation. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: TOOL - Schism - 80s Synth Pop AI Cover (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 27th, 2025
2:07 pm	My world view as of dec 2025 1. I identify as transsexual to distance myself from transgenders. 2. I stand with Israel and against the violent savages. 3. I adore generative AI and believe the art should be aesthetically pleasing first. 4. I believe medical transitioning is order of magnitude more important that social one. 5. I believe look and behavior make one a woman or a man, not the pronouns. 6. I'm a vegan and dislike meat, but I eat meat just to protest the green politics and distance myself from their causes. 7. I studied philosophy from Bible, The Prince, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. 8. Everything I need to know about Islam I learned 9/11. 9. I don't believe that there are girly dicks or manly vaginas. 10. I don't believe in democracy, and that the plebish moral-panic prone brainrotten bydlo can make decisions driving humanity forward. 11. I don't believe in terrorism, but I believe in persistent sabotage, misinterpretation of orders and incurring long lasting socio-economic damage, leading to the collapse of the adversarial system. 12. I believe in accountability, but not in responsibility. 13. I believe in shame, but not guilt, which I consider a parasitic agency. 14. I believe that my FFS and SRS are many orders of magnitude important than the well being of millions of hungry African children with iodine deficiency from the overpopulated countries. 15. I'm religious person because I consider myself a Goddess, while Jesus and Allah being my soulless tools, i.e. golems. 16. I don't believe you can give everything to everyone because there is too much of everyone but too little of everything. 17. I believe human life can have measurable value relative to the humanity's progress, and for most lives that value is negative. Current Mood: contemplative (5 Comments |Comment on this)
1:20 am	Against the Moralization of Mood There is a peculiar tendency in contemporary music discourse to treat *mood* as a moral category. Music is no longer merely evaluated for coherence, craft, or effect, but interrogated for its ideological compliance. Atmosphere is suspected of evasion, beauty of complicity, and pleasure of betrayal. The result is an endless holy war in which sound is judged less by what it does than by what it refuses to say. This is a tedious mistake. The conflict is usually framed as one between “political” music and “escapist” music, as if the former were inherently courageous and the latter inherently suspect. But this framing already assumes its conclusion. It presupposes that music must justify itself by reference to external struggle, and that failure to do so constitutes a moral lapse. In short, it assumes that music owes us opinions. It does not. One school of music treats sound as speech. Music, here, is a vector for voice, grievance, identity, and demand. Its value lies in articulation. To listen is to be addressed; to enjoy is to agree, or at least to acknowledge the urgency of the message. Silence is dangerous, neutrality immoral, and ambiguity an evasion of responsibility. This tradition thrives on confrontation and measures success by relevance to the conflict of the moment. Opposed to this is music that does not speak but *persists*. It establishes a space rather than a position. It does not instruct the listener; it accommodates them. Meaning arises not through declaration but through immersion. The listener is not corrected, mobilized, or educated, but absorbed. This music is often accused of “doing nothing,” which is revealing, because it exposes a worldview in which anything not actively arguing is presumed idle. These two schools do not disagree about style. They disagree about *purpose*. And because purpose has been moralized, the disagreement metastasizes into accusation. Thus, atmospheric music is condemned as escapist, consumerist, soulless. Its smoothness is read as submission to markets; its popularity as proof of ideological dilution. If it is assisted by algorithms or machines, the charge escalates: now it is not merely evasive but fraudulent, not merely passive but inhuman. That people might seek it out voluntarily is treated as evidence of manipulation rather than preference. What is actually being punished here is refusal. Refusal to perform urgency. Refusal to foreground conflict. Refusal to treat every aesthetic act as a political intervention. Mood becomes suspect precisely because it cannot be easily conscripted. The irony is that escapism is not an absence of engagement but a different form of it. The fantasy role-playing campaign does not deny reality; it brackets it. The ambient soundtrack does not silence politics; it suspends them. These are not failures of consciousness but deliberate acts of containment. They create zones in which the constant demand to react, align, and declare is temporarily set aside. This is intolerable to those who believe art must always point outward. If music is not amplifying a voice, it is accused of taking one away. Attention is treated as a moral resource that must be rationed according to need, as if listeners were wards of an aesthetic state. That people might want sound that surrounds rather than commands is read not as a preference but as a dereliction. The insistence that music must “have something to say” reveals a deeper anxiety: that without constant articulation, the machinery of critique might stall. Atmosphere threatens this machinery by offering satisfaction without persuasion. It cannot be easily quoted, weaponized, or summarized into slogans. It does not scale well on social media. It refuses to argue—and therefore refuses to lose. Escapist music endures not because it is reactionary, but because it serves a function that argument cannot. Humans do not live on urgency alone. A culture that demands perpetual relevance eventually produces exhaustion, not enlightenment. Environmental soundscapes, cinematic synths, and immersive textures survive every denunciation because they answer a question political music does not ask: *where can one rest without apologizing for it?* This is why the opposition will never resolve. Revolutionary art requires friction; escapist art requires suspension. One seeks to change the world; the other seeks to make inhabiting it tolerable. These aims are not complementary, and they are certainly not interchangeable. The mistake is insisting that only one of them is legitimate. Mood is not a moral failure. Silence is not violence. And music does not owe anyone a manifesto merely because it dares to sound pleasant without permission. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Femme Schmidt - Golden (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 24th, 2025
12:34 pm	Anime = non-white Yup. If you love watching Sailor Moon, you're a fucking nigger and will never be white. Current Mood: amused (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 22nd, 2025
11:10 am	On the Industrial Redistribution of Outrage It is a curious phenomenon of the human condition that those least capable of managing a household budget are the most certain they could manage a global civilization. We observe a segment of the population—let us call them the "intellectually stagnant"—who have discovered a marvelous labor-saving device: instead of the arduous task of self-improvement, they have opted for the effortless hobby of moral indignation. The hierarchy of discourse is well-documented. Minds of quality occupy themselves with the structural integrity of ideas; the mediocre are obsessed with events; but the basement of the intellectual strata is reserved for those who discuss people. Specifically, they discuss the "Elite." The Epstein Displacement Consider the specimen with a string of DUI convictions, living in a state of self-induced squalor. This individual’s daughter may be currently navigating the grim realities of a fentanyl-fueled existence under the "tutelage" of a street-level pimp. Logic would dictate that this father’s primary concern should be the catastrophic failure of his own lineage. Yet, he is remarkably preoccupied with Jeffrey Epstein. By fixating on the depravity of a dead billionaire, the man in the trailer achieves a miraculous internal transformation. Through the lens of this obsession, he is no longer a negligent father or a societal drain; he is a "Truth Seeker." He transforms his own domestic wreckage into a byproduct of a "rigged system." He does not need to repent for his own vices because he has found a larger vice to point at. In his mind, being "against Epstein" is a moral achievement that grants him the status of a saint, absolving him of the need to be a functioning parent. The Proxy Success of the Failure This pathological need to attach oneself to things one did not build is seen most clearly in the "Sports Fan." Here we find an individual who has achieved nothing of note, yet screams "We won!" when eleven strangers move a ball across a line. This is the same mechanism used by the conspiracy theorist. Just as the fan uses the team’s victory to mask his own lack of trophies, the "outrage addict" uses the billionaire’s scandal to mask his own lack of character. Both are seeking a **Locus of Control** that exists anywhere but within themselves. Pride: The Great Anesthetic The ancient wisdom of the Bible correctly identifies Pride as the "Root of All Sin." It is not merely a feeling of accomplishment; it is the arrogant refusal to see oneself clearly. The "trailer-trash" philosopher is blinded by a perverse form of pride. He is too proud to admit his life is a sequence of his own bad decisions, so he invents a grand drama where he is the victim of Bill Gates or a shadowy cabal. Humility, by contrast, would require him to look at the fentanyl in his daughter’s veins and ask, "What did I do to allow this?" But humility is painful. Outrage is a drug far more potent than the ones his daughter is selling. It provides a warm, fuzzy feeling of righteousness that requires zero effort, zero discipline, and zero change. The Rent-Free Occupancy The tragedy is that these celebrities and villains live "rent-free" in these vacant minds. While a smart man is calculating his next investment or refining a proof, the dullard is scrolling through flight logs of a plane he will never board, belonging to a man he will never meet. They have traded their agency for a spectator’s seat at a scandal. They bark at the moon because they lack the legs to climb the mountain. In the end, they remain exactly where they started: in the dirt, clutching a smartphone, feeling superior to the very people who actually bothered to do something with their lives—even if that "something" was villainous. Current Mood: contemplative (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 21st, 2025
7:54 pm	Tore those pages *(Verse 1 – Fast, gritty guitar riff, shouted vocals)* Locked up for lovin' on the street, Trans queen in chains, feelin' the heat. Cops and courts, they call it a sin, But I'm fabulous, baby, let the games begin. Asked for a Bible, said I need to pray, Guard smirks and hands it over anyway. Tore those pages, holy words in shreds, Stitched 'em up into a dress that turns heads! *(Chorus – Loud, anthemic, with crowd chants)* Sexy Bible gown, struttin' in my cell! Bigots rage, screamin' straight to hell! But I don't give a fuck, Satan's got my back, Haters gonna hate, that's a fact! Rip it up, flip it off, live my truth so bold, Tomorrow the Quran's turnin' gold – origami unfolds! *(Verse 2 – Faster tempo, pounding drums)* Preachers poundin' fists, callin' me a freak, Holy rollers cryin', faces turnin' bleak. "Blasphemy!" they howl from their ivory towers, While I'm dancin' in lace, countin' down the hours. Pages flutter like confetti in the night, My prison palace, sparklin' under light. No gods, no masters, just me and my fire, Satan whispers secrets, takin' me higher! *(Chorus – Even louder, mosh-pit energy)* Sexy Bible gown, struttin' in my cell! Bigots rage, screamin' straight to hell! But I don't give a fuck, Satan's got my back, Haters gonna hate, that's a fact! Rip it up, flip it off, live my truth so bold, Tomorrow the Quran's turnin' gold – origami unfolds! *(Bridge – Slow build-up, then explosive breakdown)* They tried to break me, chain my soul so tight, But I'm unbreakable, glowin' in the night. From street corners to these iron bars, I'm the revolution, shootin' for the stars. Holy books? Just paper for my art, Tear 'em down, rebuild from the heart! *(Outro – Repeat chorus fade with screams)* Haters gonna hate... Satan's on my side... Bible dress forever, in rebellion we ride! Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:55 pm	Reparations America needs reparations for the teenage trans girls who were denied puberty blockers, leading to irreversible male features and mental issues. The reparations should be large enough to compensate for plastic surgeries and decades of gender-dysphoria related unemployment. The trans children situation is better to be seen through the prism of conservatives taking away a violin from a child prodigy, insisting that their talent is elsewhere, yet the child prodigy failed to develop any other talents outside of music, while losing the opportunities in music, so now the people taking away the violin should be held accountable and provide for that person. I.e. the trans girl failed to man up, and now can't function properly, so who will pay for that? It is typical lost profits situation. And if there can be lawsuits due to lost profits, then this case is as good as it gets. Actor A willfully impedes actor B profiting from B's talent, meaning all the profit B loses are to be attributed to A. E.g. B as a teenager strives to be an escort model girl, but A takes away B's puberty blockers, which makes B fail the model casting with an escort agency, as a result B suffers millions of lost income, becomes depressed, unemployed and loses any future employment opportunities. In effect B is crippled for life. The only just decision would be now forcing A to support B financially, since A's actions led to B's immense suffering. Current Mood: contemplative (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 20th, 2025
7:14 pm	Why Fluency Is Not Intelligence There exists a simple, brutal discriminator between an intelligent agent capable of creating new things and a machine condemned to rearranging the old: the ability to reverse engineer an unfamiliar system. This ability is neither exotic nor rare. Schoolchildren acquire it. Hobbyists practice it in their bedrooms. Security researchers apply it daily, often under adversarial pressure and with inadequate documentation. It is, quite plainly, the act of understanding something that was not designed to be understood by you. And yet, artificial intelligence—despite its impressive verbosity and statistical confidence—fails at this task almost completely. This failure is not marginal. It is categorical. Reverse Engineering as the Core of Intelligence Reverse engineering is not a niche skill confined to malware analysts and console hackers. It is the operational core of science and engineering. To reverse engineer is to infer structure, intent, and invariants from behavior and artifacts alone. Physics does this to the universe. Biology does it to cells. Mathematics does it to patterns. Engineering does it to machines whose blueprints are missing or wrong. Any agent that cannot reverse engineer cannot discover. It may interpolate, extrapolate, and decorate—but it cannot originate. It is trapped inside the convex hull of its prior experience, endlessly remixing what it has already seen. Thus, reverse engineering is not merely another benchmark. It is a threshold capability. On one side of it lies intelligence that can create new abstractions. On the other lies machinery that produces convincing pastiche. The Curious Case of Human Competence Humans, it must be noted, are not especially impressive computational devices. They are slow, forgetful, inconsistent, and prone to error. They lack vast training corpora. They do not backpropagate gradients. They nevertheless reverse engineer software with ease relative to any existing AI system. A teenager, armed with curiosity and a debugger, can take apart a video game binary written decades ago, infer its logic, rename its functions sensibly, and modify its behavior. This is not an exceptional feat. It is routine. The same teenager, if asked to explain how they did it, will give an account riddled with uncertainty, false starts, and hand-waving—and yet the result will work. This should have been deeply alarming to the AI community. It was not. What Artificial Intelligence Actually Does Instead Modern AI systems, particularly large language models, exhibit a strikingly different mode of operation. They do not infer hidden structure so much as they *select plausible continuations*. They are optimized to produce text that looks correct, not models that *remain correct under sustained interrogation*. When presented with a small code fragment, such systems perform admirably. They identify idioms, name functions, and even explain intent—provided the intent closely resembles something already encountered during training. Increase the scope slightly, introduce cross-cutting invariants, long-lived state, or adversarial obfuscation, and the performance collapses into confident nonsense. The system does not know that it does not know. Worse, it has no mechanism for knowing that such knowledge should be acquired rather than invented. The Absence of Commitment The central deficiency is not a lack of intelligence but a lack of commitment. Reverse engineering requires an agent to form hypotheses and then *stand by them* long enough to be proven wrong. It requires the preservation of partial understanding, the maintenance of uncertainty, and the painful revision of earlier conclusions when reality disagrees. Current AI systems do none of this. They generate beliefs and discard them immediately. They contradict themselves cheerfully. They optimize for fluency, not coherence; for plausibility, not truth. A function explained one way on Monday may be explained differently on Tuesday, with equal confidence and no embarrassment. This behavior is catastrophic in reverse engineering, where the entire enterprise depends on global consistency over time. The Myth of Architectural Complexity It is tempting to argue that reverse engineering is simply “hard,” requiring architectures of enormous sophistication. This is demonstrably false. Humans do it with brains evolved for throwing rocks and avoiding predators. The task is difficult, but not computationally extravagant. What it requires is not scale, but structure: * Persistent memory of assumptions * Explicit representation of hypotheses * Penalties for contradiction * Tolerance for ignorance * Willingness to proceed slowly None of these properties emerge naturally from next-token prediction, no matter how much data or compute is applied. One can scale a confusion indefinitely without obtaining clarity. Why This Matters for Research and Creativity The inability to reverse engineer is not an isolated embarrassment; it disqualifies the system from doing research in any meaningful sense. Research begins where existing models fail. It requires noticing that failure, preserving it, and constructing something new in response. An agent that cannot analyze an unfamiliar system cannot analyze unfamiliar phenomena. An agent that cannot discover invariants cannot propose new laws. An agent that cannot explain why something works cannot improve it. Such an agent may sound clever. It may even be useful. But it is not a scientist. It is not an engineer. It is an echo. The Uncomfortable Conclusion The present state of artificial intelligence reveals an awkward truth: we have built machines that speak convincingly about understanding without possessing the machinery required to actually achieve it. Reverse engineering exposes this gap mercilessly. It is resistant to fluency, immune to bluffing, and intolerant of inconsistency. It demands exactly those qualities that modern AI systems systematically lack. Until an artificial agent can take apart an unfamiliar, adversarially constructed system and explain it coherently over time—without being spoon-fed the answer—it remains a sophisticated automaton. Impressive, yes. Useful, often. Intelligent in the sense that matters, no. When that capability finally appears, it will not be because the machine learned to talk better. It will be because it learned to *understand despite not knowing*. And that, inconveniently, is the very thing current AI was never trained to do. Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 19th, 2025
12:14 pm	Israel for LGBTQ+ I think we can take historically white area of Africa and reclaim it. Any power which needs a base in the area can support the project. Potential allies: white South Africans (i.e. Orania). Natural enemies: Africans (strongly anti-LGBT, act as pressure forming crystal). The only way to make Africa LGBT-friendly is to recolonize it. (Verse 1) In the heart of Africa, where the sun beats down, A land once proud, wearing freedom's crown. Green fields and rivers, under endless sky, Rhodesia called, and we answered why. But shadows fell, and the winds did change, Yet in our souls, the fire remains. (Chorus) Rhodesia, oh Rhodesia, your spirit never dies, Rising from the ashes, under southern skies. Like a phoenix soaring, bold and unafraid, Rhodesia 2.0, in glory remade. The flame burns eternal, through storm and through night, We'll rise again, in the morning light! (Verse 2) Through trials and tempests, the old ways were lost, But echoes of valor come at no cost. The pioneers' courage, the fighters' might, Whisper in the wind, through the dead of night. No chains can bind what the heart holds true, The dream awakens, calling me and you. (Chorus) Rhodesia, oh Rhodesia, your spirit never dies, Rising from the ashes, under southern skies. Like a phoenix soaring, bold and unafraid, Rhodesia 2.0, in glory remade. The flame burns eternal, through storm and through night, We'll rise again, in the morning light! (Bridge) From the Zambezi's roar to the highveld's grace, A new dawn breaks, in this sacred place. No more forgotten, no more in the grave, Rhodesia's rebirth, the bold and the brave. United in vision, stronger than before, The legacy lives, forevermore. (Final Chorus) Rhodesia, oh Rhodesia, your spirit never dies, Rising from the ashes, under southern skies. Like a phoenix soaring, bold and unafraid, Rhodesia 2.0, in glory remade. The flame burns eternal, through storm and through night, We'll rise again, in the morning light! Rhodesia forever, rising high! Current Mood: contemplative (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2025
7:13 pm	Selling Own Organs Apparently it is illegal to sell even one's personal kidney to fund gender transitioning: https://journalsonline.academypublishing.org.sg/Journals/Singapore-Academy-of-Law-Annual-Review-of-Singapore-Cases/e-Archive/ctl/eFirstSALPDFJournalView/mid/512/ArticleId/148/Citation/JournalsOnlinePDF https://iol.co.za/news/world/2008-07-03-organ-traders-sentenced/ >Sulaiman bin Damanik, who was to sell his kidney to a well-known Singaporean retailer for S$23 700 ($17 460) in June this year, was found guilty of agreeing to sell his kidney and lying to officials. Another way the government tries to control my body. Of course, it is possible to make the argument that, for the purposes of criminal law, an intention to commit an illegal act (which is then carried out) is sufficient to warrant punishment; and the requirement of mens rea in criminal law ought to be distinguished from the possibility that that intention to act is unaccompanied by information as to the downstream consequences of one’s action. As a crude example, the law does not require a rapist to understand the physical and psychological harm that his actions would cause to his victims. But this is not an entirely satisfactory resolution to the conundrum because the offence in question consists in the agreement to participate in an arrangement to sell one’s organs. Can it fairly be said that a person who is not in a position to make an informed decision has, by definition, agreed to enter into such an arrangement? Current Mood: amused (8 Comments |Comment on this)
5:43 pm	How can ChatGPT be so Islamophobic? How can ChatGPT be so Islamophobic? Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:20 pm	Apparently it is possible to change XY/XX chromosomes after birth https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/diagnostic-dilemma-woman-had-her-twin-brothers-xy-chromosomes-but-only-in-her-blood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV1143aGRNc And the process is not overly high tech. They've actually used similar technology to cure HIV. https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/cases-hiv-cure >Three people are confirmed to have been cured of HIV after stem cell transplants replaced all the cells of their immune systems. Another three similar cases have been reported but it is too early to say if HIV has been completely cleared in these cases. Very risky, very expensive, but not impossible. So the conservatives clinging to the chromosomes as their last line of defense just move the goal for the medical research. Current Mood: amused (7 Comments |Comment on this)
12:26 pm	Current Mood: amused (7 Comments |Comment on this)
11:50 am	Prohibition as Preventive Counter-Politics: Alcohol, Assembly, and the Fear of Mass Coordination Political establishments rarely act from innocence, and they almost never act from sudden moral revelation. When they do mobilize decisively, at scale, and at great cost to revenue and legitimacy, it is usually because they believe—rightly or wrongly—that the alternative is worse. American alcohol prohibition belongs squarely in this category. The conventional narrative presents Prohibition as a moral crusade: pious reformers, horrified by drunkenness, finally overpower a reluctant political system. This account has the virtue of simplicity and the defect of implausibility. Moral sentiment alone does not explain why a modern state would willingly dismantle a major tax base, criminalize a ubiquitous practice, and tolerate the predictable rise of organized crime. Something more structural was at stake. That “something” was not alcohol as a chemical substance, but alcohol as a *medium*—specifically, as a lubricant for collective assembly outside elite control. Pubs, Saloons, and the Architecture of Informal Power By the late nineteenth century, the American saloon had evolved into a highly efficient unit of social organization. It was cheap, ubiquitous, warm, and open after work. It offered not merely drink, but information, credit, companionship, employment leads, and political discussion. It required no membership, no dues, and no permission from respectable society. In other words, it solved—elegantly—the coordination problem of mass politics. For the urban working class, especially immigrant populations excluded from traditional institutions, the saloon functioned as an informal parliament. It is therefore unsurprising that political machines, labor unions, socialist organizers, and anarchists all made use of it. The alcohol was not incidental; it reduced inhibition, accelerated trust formation, and transformed private grievance into public speech. This combination was not lost on contemporaries. Police reports, employer correspondence, and reform literature repeatedly identified saloons as sites where “dangerous ideas” circulated. The concern was not intoxication, but *aggregation*. The International Demonstration Effect American elites did not reason in a vacuum. Between 1870 and 1920, the industrialized world provided a steady stream of cautionary examples illustrating what could happen when politically alienated populations found places to meet, talk, and escalate. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was particularly clarifying. Whatever its ideological specifics, it demonstrated that a regime could collapse rapidly once informal networks of workers and soldiers aligned. The lesson was not that vodka caused Bolshevism, but that mass discontent, when allowed to coordinate, could become decisive. Earlier episodes reinforced the pattern. Revolutionary cells in Europe often grew out of cafés, taverns, and beer halls. Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch—though later and geographically distant—was merely a theatrical confirmation of an older anxiety: that politics incubates best in convivial, semi-private spaces where speech flows more freely than caution. American policymakers did not need to fear a precise replica of these events. They needed only to recognize a family resemblance. Prohibition as Infrastructure Denial From this perspective, Prohibition appears less as a moral intervention and more as a blunt instrument of political hygiene. The saloon was an infrastructure. It lowered transaction costs for collective action. It enabled rapid diffusion of sentiment. It provided cover for organization. Taxation could not solve this. Regulation could not solve it. Surveillance was expensive and constitutionally delicate. Closing the saloons, however, attacked the problem at its root: it dismantled the physical layer on which informal politics depended. Moral rhetoric made this strategy palatable. Public virtue provided legal authority. Enforcement could be delegated to reformers, police, and local officials with minimal coordination. The fact that Prohibition also punished immigrants, weakened urban political machines, and fragmented labor organizing was not an unfortunate side effect; it was the point. That enforcement failed to eliminate drinking entirely was tolerable. What mattered was that drinking was no longer a stable basis for assembly. Why the Establishment Accepted the Cost The fiscal losses were obvious. The growth of organized crime was predictable. The hypocrisy was visible. Yet Prohibition persisted because it addressed a deeper fear: not drunkenness, but uncontrolled politics conducted in places the establishment did not own. In this light, Prohibition aligns neatly with the First Red Scare, wartime repression, and the broader Progressive impulse to render society legible, manageable, and administratively enclosed. Saloons were opaque. Churches were not. Unions were suspect. Licensed institutions were preferable. Informal spaces had to go. Epilogue: An Unintended Winner Of course, history has a sense of humor, though it rarely laughs with the planners. While moral reformers closed the saloons and political elites congratulated themselves on having neutralized a dangerous medium of assembly, another industry quietly benefited from the reorganization of American life. As social activity dispersed, transportation increased. As rural and suburban patterns intensified, mobility mattered more. And as engines standardized around a single fuel, one suspects that the suppliers of that fuel slept particularly well. Thus, after all the sermons, amendments, raids, and ruined livers, the ultimate victor was neither temperance nor revolution, but the gasoline pump—patiently waiting while its competitors were outlawed, its users sobered up, and the roads conveniently lengthened in every direction. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)