Sorry, I give up.

In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all.

But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It's too many. I can't disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I'm not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each.

One of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They're all the same. They've all paid the danegeld to some set of unions and interest groups, then put up some kind of incredibly generic platform about how they're compassionate but also a fighter. I can't bring myself to name any of them or discuss them further.

More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning. They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch. They all promise to Take Back California for the forces of America and its god, Donald J. Trump. None of these people are actually interesting, but honorable mention to Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose name is Italian for "white Chad". He might be the perfect Republican candidate:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-types-of-candidate-you-find-in

In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist's.

He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the "eyeball kick" - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader's attention and "wows" them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing:

• "There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences."
• "When the jar of Sam's laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter—ripe with fireflies and porch wine—now seeping into the cracks, fermenting."
• "And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens."
• "The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke."

Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models:

• "An overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random."
• "Conjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and/or sensory."
• "Repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms…the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit."

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes