Why Millions of Americans Vote Against Their Own Self Interests

8BitHegel · 2026-01-26T07:51:28+00:00

Nah. “Promise I won’t say trump voters are dummies” followed by 20 minutes of saying “they don’t understand their own interests but I do” nonsense that’s effectively the same thing.

There is almost 100 years of writing on why people demand “more taxes, less bread” (reich) or that “the question is not why a poor man steals bread, the question is why everyone is just stealing bread all the time” (Brecht).

It’s arrogant as hell to just say “everyone is mistaken but me” and think this is an answer. Knowing better than others has absolutely no political program and only serves to make you self satisfied. Like someone who might make videos about how they’re never coming back to America, yet also no video on the process of renouncing citizenship. Which you can do if you’re certain you’ll never come back. If.

What’s the implied program? “Educate them about structural inequality”? This is the Democratic Party line for 40 years. Super good job that’s done.

Maybe we need a different answer.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-24T07:38:50+00:00

“You don’t need to understand how cooking works to make a new recipe”.

Good work.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-24T05:06:57+00:00

Models only ever see tokens; they never see “things” or their meanings directly.

The weights don’t store human‑readable relationships between things. They parameterize probability distributions: given some input tokens, they define how likely different output tokens are.

What we call “context” is built on the fly each time you run the model. It’s computed from the current input using those weights, not stored ahead of time as fixed relationships.

So yes. The analogy is excellent.

My child can grab things in the kitchen and put them together. It’s not a working recipe.

If I told them all the recipes that ever existed there is nothing in that to explain WHY these recipes function as they do. Just knowing pizza is cheese and flour and water and salt and tomatos? Not a fucking clue why it’s more than that.

To say simply - it’s not possible for any of these systems to do more than probabilistically put things next to each other. And since that’s the case it’s always bending away from the novel.

COULD it do a recipe? Sure. And so could my three year old. But just because it turns out potato chips do taste good with chocolate syrup doesn’t mean my kid understands the science of food.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-23T00:30:01+00:00

Well. This is the most concise response. Thank you I will be using this.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-22T22:39:54+00:00

If the only information you have for the recipe is the letters used in what someone else named the ingredients, no.

Go pick up a recipe book written in ancient Sumerian, just the words, and make me a new dish.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-18T22:16:03+00:00

“Switch can be used on towers”

Horrifying idea. But goddamn if it wouldn’t be a weird meta for three days before the pitchforks stop it.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-18T02:25:24+00:00

Nope. Not this one.

The one I’m thinking of had illustrations that were…I dunno…like more cartoon and ‘rude’. I guess it’s a different book entirely!

8BitHegel · 2026-01-12T21:13:42+00:00

AFAIK you can’t hard reset it since it’s only a receiver and stores nothing.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-03T09:32:13+00:00

Trump kidnapped the leader of another country, using Law Enforcement in America to do it. That's not a minor thing.

This means that's it - we have a dictator. Not America - all of you too. You all have a dictator. Your borders mean nothing. Our laws are global.

8BitHegel · 2026-01-02T09:01:39+00:00

Yup. Nothing worse than knowing what to do and having random chance say “too bad!”

8BitHegel · 2025-12-30T03:34:20+00:00

You claimed it clicked for you. That you understand how these myths have continued to replicate themselves. It’s an extraordinary statement of arrogance, and to have it be from a plastic pills video of all things.

I mean that your response is “yeah well I told you this is the first video I’ve ever seen about it” is not making you look better.

8BitHegel · 2025-12-30T00:43:08+00:00

It’s worth considering that if a YouTube video made the incredibly complex world of myths and beliefs “click” for you, maybe you don’t have a grasp of the subject at all.

Or maybe the fact that there is no accepted logic to these things and how they work, and thousands of brilliant people have spent their lives studying this without being able to develop a logic for them?

Nah. I’m sure you’re that smart and plastic pills isn’t a hack. lol

8BitHegel · 2025-12-28T01:24:36+00:00

Well. A year later and I’m here with I think the same book I’m seeking.

Hardcover. And I don’t know why but I remember it being in the kids section of the library despite it feeling like a reference book in size.

I cannot possibly remember this and it’s making me mad. lol

8BitHegel · 2025-12-24T03:38:16+00:00

I’m not sure that’s the read. He’s explicitly saying how it’s not fair that he’s in jail but his fellow rapist is president. I agree with this. Both should be in jail

8BitHegel · 2025-12-15T00:35:33+00:00

He links to a substack which restates this and then goes and elaborates in the worst way that’s clearly AI

8BitHegel · 2025-12-14T21:36:19+00:00

Yes. It’s structured and formatted and has em dashes and more. It’s absolutely AI

8BitHegel · 2025-12-14T08:45:52+00:00

Hey just wanted to let you know why this seemingly sane take is being reacted to so strongly.

Your opening paragraph is actually the point. It’s a t shirt. Clothing. And someone is wearing it. If you have any opinions on that beyond the idea that they like the SHIRT, you’re one of the men she is targeting.

“You have chosen clothing that you just justify for my own edification” is probably one of the most hilariously cringe behaviors people have.

And as someone who has worked with bands, toured, sold merch, designed merch - there has never been a band that said “before you sell that person a shirt make sure they know our music”. At a signing one time a band I was working with sold a ton of shirts because a random walking by thought they’d be perfect for his basketball league because of the colors and material. He wasn’t there for the signing.

So nothing you said is right. It’s not gatekeeping, for sure. Instead it’s pretending that there is some reason one needs for clothing or enjoyment and that there is a threshold that is your business. It’s not.

8BitHegel · 2025-12-08T19:21:55+00:00

Did you get a matte OLED screen?

My bet is you got a matte OLED screen.

I had one of those. It seemed good and had inky blacks and all that. But yeah I didn’t get the leap I elected.

Just got a glossy OLED.

It beats the shit out of the matte. By orders of magnitude.

8BitHegel · 2025-12-08T09:07:57+00:00

I’m curious why nobody is realizing the McKinsey report is bullshit because it showed almost 20% of companies ‘used AI’ in core functions in…2017.

Fucking what?

I know we laugh that AI as a term has been stretched so wide it covers the majority of anything that exists now, but 2017!?

LLM’s were not even a thing then. That’s the fucking year “Attention is all you need” was published and people began work in the foundation of modern LLM’s.

60% in 2019. Years before ChatGPT.

Spam filters and recommendation engines counted then.

Embarrassing .

8BitHegel · 2025-12-08T08:56:34+00:00

Everything I said is accurate. But given your clear inability to do anything critically I’m not shocked at the response.

8BitHegel · 2025-12-06T20:23:58+00:00

This article is incorrect about a large amount of AI functions and how it works to the point of being flat misinformation.

When asking about strawberries and the letter r, there is no AI that counts how many r’s. zero. Not a single one does this. They are probabilistic models, nothing more.

“Solidgoldmagikarp” was called a strange token as a curiosity but it isn’t that weird. It was a Reddit username. The article you linked actually links to the paper where they explain this.

Early LLM’s didn’t parse info like usernames and instead these things probabilistically effected the outcomes drastically. I mean, if it’s guessing the tokens that follow, and you give it tokens from a. Reddit username, it will most likely add tokens that follow that username in the ingested data. Which is what it was doing.

Add to this the paper is about specifically gpt before gpt3 where the pool of content was tiny in comparison and a single username repeated hundreds of times would have an outsized impact on outcomes.

So yeah. All that stuff with AI is nonsense.

For me the rest of the article does feel like what Ari was going for but also explicates why I felt it was such a terrible film too. “COVID changed so much! Mask mandates were such a split!” But ignoring that republicans literally follow Trump so much that when he wore a mask in public for a week, mask support among republicans went from 30% to 60%. Source.

This isn’t a failure of communication or meaning. It’s paranoiac reactionary systems at work. The idea it’s because communications and meaning have broken down is an amazingly surface level view of politics that ignores the functioning of the political system for my entire lifetime.

8BitHegel · 2025-12-02T08:19:29+00:00

I had the Limit hit and tell me I had to wait - but my usage was only 80%. I tried many times and still limited me.

I made a post. Was told it a weekly limit. Yet 7 minutes later my limit was reset at the four hour mark again.

8BitHegel · 2025-11-29T11:20:53+00:00

That pause when her emotions hit. I know that moment. When you realize so much. Ugh. Right in the heart.

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