TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

...In which I reveal my inability to rap.

(Edit: Wow, lots of downloads on this. I shyly hope they're mostly bots, I'm really stage shy and my voice is no good! And a few places are off in this and it needs a re-record...) My commute to work gives me lots of car time to sing songs in my head and rhyme stuff for fun, so I come up with raps, some of which I even bother to post on my Deviant Art page.

My latest excuse for a rap is slower than my usual "material", which was a change in pace. I'm also talking somewhat quietly over the beat (for which I'm making a fair use claim) from Eminem's leaked "Difficult", instead of just doing it a cappella. I uploaded my recording here.

Anyway, the subject matter is to go donate! http://singinst.org/tallinn-evans_challenge And for every dollar you donate before the 20th, it will be matched thanks to two donors Jaan Tallinn, a founder of Skype and Ambient Sound Investments, and Edwin Evans, CEO of the mobile applications startup Quinly. To see others announce their donations, check out: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gy/tallinnevans_125000_singularity_challenge/. Oh, and here are my lyrics:

don't pretend you have nothing,
if you can afford food you have something
skip lunch and donate, yeah resist that donut
do you really need a dozen, twelve of em,
think what else you coulda ate for those bucks
think how much it sucks to be one of them
in Africa, and if they don't traffic ya
you're gonna get aids or malaria soona or lata.
Bill and Melinda are doing good things, don't get me wrong,
But their efforts are corrupted and their change takes too long.

every second 1.8 people die
by gaining just a minute we save 100 lives
don't think about this too much, it nearly makes me cry
but instead of shrugging your shoulders or asking why
donate your dimes, mind, or time
anything right now, though money's the best
if you're not many times smarter than me,
let other brains take care of the rest
It's what I'ma do, even though I like AI
IA, meme-si tu vies en la France, donnez, je supplie
think how much better off humanity could be
yeah, donate for the Singularity

Donate to the Singularity Institute
of Artificial Intelligence, it'll benefit you
and all the women and men you know,
yeah save those cents, the pile will grow
and if you do it once you're more likely to give more

What do I even mean by Singularity?
Let's start with a dream of just smarter-than-me
Hee, and I mean much smarter, a higher branch on the tree
not just a higher IQ score, but an AI in a machine
Computer programs have their own readable source code,
Like DNA, but so much simpler for one to manipulate,
And one thing an AI might do, is improve, its goals
will keep it from wanting to want to harm you.
And this will be true by first-order logic,
Mathematicians will rescue us from this mosh pit.
And any idiots who don't consider it hasten our doom,
Their general AI won't be friendly, it'll just go foom.

Before you go off on a rant about misplaced idealism,
think about the money you give for prison
comes right out of your taxes, to keep people in cages,
the new slave ships, they don't even get minimum wages
for their labors, they're forced to have three neighbors
in a cell designed for singles, they have no choice but to mingle
And take a look at cancer research, how much money have they got?
How many years and pink t-shirts, and it seems like the best treatment's still pot?

so while our country's inmates rot, and cancer's more a business,
donate to the nonprofit that makes the most sense

Donate to the Singularity Institute
of Artificial Intelligence, it'll benefit you
and all the women and men you know,
yeah save those cents, the pile will grow
and if you do it once you're more likely to give more

Yeah

Donate to the Singularity Institute
of Artificial Intelligence, it'll benefit you
and all the women and men you know,
yeah save those cents, the pile will grow
and if you do it once you're more likely to give more


Apologies for lack of line-start punctuation, but I wasn't "in the mood" at the time and I like to preserve it as it is.


Posted on 2011-01-06 by Jach

Tags: personal, rap, singularity

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/152

Trackback URL: https://www.thejach.com/view/2011/1/in_which_i_reveal_my_inability_to_rap

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