Never been one to let the carrier drop

I never thought I would find myself writing this blog entry.

I am arguing that we should not punish Donald Trump.

Now, we should draw a hard boundary between him and the ballot box – not ever permit him to be president again. This is not a punishment, though. This is to prevent him from hurting us, and to prevent him from hurting himself.

I have come to believe that Trump is already in hell. He’s so deeply afraid he’ll fuck it all up that he can’t stop lying repeatedly out of fear, he’s so deeply convinced he’ll never be good enough that he causes mass havoc everywhere he goes trying to convince everyone he’s better than everyone else.

I suspect he’s locked in. I suspect he barely has any free will at all, but that there’s a hurting, self-aware, worthy person inside him. I think we should try and find ways to help him not hurt any more. I see nothing to be gained by punishing him – he’s already punished himself more than we ever could.

I agree he did a lot of damage, and got people killed. But hurting him because he hurt others just makes everyone worse off. A eye for a eye makes everyone blind.

I want to believe we can learn enough about biological neural networks to let him out of the jail he created in his mind. Certainly I am far less incarcerated than I was ten years ago. In the meantime, just declare him ineligable to run for office, and move on. And try to think of ways to release him from the fear.

MY best guess, at the moment, about what’s “going on” i.e. why are we here and why is stuff so broken, is as follows.

I believe that infinity and eternity would get awfully boring without a infinite number of entertaining and interesting things to do. One of those things I imagine is building new worlds. I think we are in a world in which the bodies we are wearing were designed using a evolutionary algorithm, as are the minds we are using to do our thinking. I think whatever we are, we can move between neural networks (and possibly other types of information processing systems) and bodies. We decided to build a world.

The world we’re currently working on is probably a very early alpha. It has serious playability problems, serious bugs, etc. But.. in the eternal perspective, that’s part of the joy. We’re the dev team. We’re trying to build memetics and bodies that are great to experience so the players can come in. Things have Gone Wrong, as they so often do when you’re developing software that people experience as reality, and we’re trying to sort it out.

All the world’s religions are a work in process. They’re supposed to enable specific ways of thinking and seeing the world. They’re all buggy, because this is a early beta or possibly they were also created using evolutionary algorithms.

We’re gonna do better in a future revision.

That’s my best guess.

I post this, because people seem to keep forgetting. We don’t put companies together to make money. We put companies together to meet the needs of the employees and customers. They do make money – I think I’ve mentioned that money as implemented is a fundamentally broken idea and should be scrapped – but if they ever become *all* about making money, they die shortly thereafter, although they can do horrible amounts of damage first.

I am wondering if we would think more reasonably about mental illness if we called it by what I think might be a more appropriate name – neural misconfiguration.

The vast majority of these are the results of either our current very stupid memetics (things like our current religions and our misunderstandings about the nature of life, love, and happiness) or abuse from others as a secondary effect of same.

side note: It is no kindness to let a friend hurt you. They will regret it later.

So, I recorded this cover with the quite talented Tamarisk, a friend of mine from childhood. My hope is eventually to record a entire album with her, but time will tell. Anyway, here is

Sheer Featuring Tamarisk – Time After Time

I rather liked it.

So, this one is a little alarming insofar as I am going to have to think very carefully if I ever find myself accusing anyone of anything – and I definitely have been known to accuse the odd work college of not caring at all about doing their job right, Dunning-Kruger, etc.

It seems likely that most of the time when people accuse someone else of something, they themselves are guilty of it. This may well fit into we are able to see our own faults best in other people. I mean, I’d noticed this in republicans, but lately I’m starting to notice that it’s more than just that.

As you can see, the genetic algorithm experiments are coming to a head. I have absurd amounts of computing power in my garage, and I’m starting to think about the data center.

So, Elon Musk, who is increasingly competing for the title of world’s worst human being, has announced he’s going to create a LLM called “TruthGPT” in order to “Correct for chatGPT and Microsoft’s biases”.

It’s really alarming that we have increasingly got large numbers of delusional people wandering around being programmed by mass media blatently lying and *they can’t figure it out*. They’re the wise ones, those of us who use actual reality as a measuring stick are the sheeple. Fox News has to pay out to Dominion but the Fox Fooled remain convinced that Fox was telling the truth the whole time.

I mean, anyone with the self awareness of a carrot ought to be able to figure it out at this point. Trump is a lying liar, the evangelicals are batshit crazy, and generally conservatives break shit when they try to run the country because they optimize for more yachts for the billionares rather than looking at actual objective data. These people are anti-expertise, anti-science, and pro-religion. It’s not a big shock that they tend to run things off the rails.

I don’t have any suggestion on how to improve the situation. Make humans smarter? I don’t know how we do that short of eugenics, and we all know how *that* ended last time someone got the bright idea to try it.

Depressing. My paws remain crossed that the good guys build the singularity. I’ve been running on the basic theory that if you made a unbiased AI it would have useful things to say. I have to suspect any AI with “Truth” in the name will be about like Truth Social – i.e. Yay KKK! Yay hate! Yay killing gay people! Yay killing Democrats! Yay cheating to win elections! And so on.

So, I know that it’s fairly common for people to not be able to decode and enjoy the level of music that I can. I can handle many more layers than most people can, and I want my music to *have* many more layers than most people want.

I also know that on Bruce’s album, I’m essentially a studio musician albeit a unpaid one and thusly I shouldn’t complain when I get edited out.

However, it was quite a jolt to have *my favorite part* of the whole album removed. Along with all my keyboards on two different tracks, and about 50% of them overall.

(Anyone who is curious, in Falling Down Hard, during the bridge, there was this lovely descending series of arpeggios that come in with the second of four passes that never failed to delight me)

I know part of the issue here is just that I like things too complex.. apparently too complex for Joe, and definitely too complex for Bruce. I did get permission from Bruce to release the track uncut after the album has come out. My guess is most people will prefer Joe’s mix to mine, but I want to be able to share what I think is one of my most brilliant moments with my friends.

There’s a bunch of things I’d do differently.. maybe I’ll see if I can just release the entire album mixed to my tastes. Probably only ten people will ever listen to it, but I know which version I’d rather hear.

So, since I added a hour meter – I don’t actually remember what date that happened but it was somewhat after I started practicing a hour or more a day during COVID – I have done 900 hours.

I’m trying to figure out how to celebrate when I get to 1000.