netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
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User ID: 647
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I remember looking into this at the time. I think it was overstated in the headlines. The same source Wikipedia gives for “70-90% comes from this mine” also says
Spruce Pine quartz isn’t quite an irreplaceable linchpin in semiconductor manufacturing. But alternatives are all some combination of not yet developed, not quite as good, and not quite as cheap. Cutting off the supply of Spruce Pine quartz probably wouldn’t choke off the supply of semiconductors completely, but it would mean yields going down and costs going up.
Substack as a credible source. What’s the world coming to?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
To be fair, massive volcanic eruptions also have nasty effects on nearby lungs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I’ve been reading about the pivot to war production here in America and I’m less and less sure we could do that again.
If Nicolae Carpathia topples the French government tomorrow, half the U.S. calls him based and the other half says it’s a Russian psyop. No changes to consumer goods production, but prices still spike, leading outlets to argue over whether or not it counts as inflation. The DoW puts in an order for 12 new battleships, due in 2035. One and a half will be built. The fraction of GDP allocated to data center construction continues to climb.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe none of the struggles of the past decades have been enough to demand political unity. We certainly did something after 9/11, even if it didn’t last in any sense.
But I suspect public opinion can no longer survive in a filtered, hyperreactive media environment. There is always an angle. The more obvious a mainstream position, the more tempting it gets to countersignal. Don’t worry, the filter bubble will find like-minded people. As many as it can without breaking the illusion of a defiant minority. Rebels. Frontiersmen out of time.
All we have to do is wait.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
“…unlike the rest of humanity, who can definitely be trusted to rank apocalyptic AI risk ahead of their own sexual practices?”
Unless you can show a nexus between the practices and the handling of risk, ad hominem arguments are symmetric. Disqualify everyone who thinks more about pussy than x-risk and you’ll be left only with the scheming eunuchs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I mean, I don’t do that either.
But if I had to make the case, I’d say that the Sims AI is transparent enough to leave no room for consciousness. Someone designed it, someone implemented it as a series of instructions. It might take some work but those are comprehensible.
Frontier AI is on the wrong side of that boundary. We are extending the frontier faster than we can explore the area between the two. We’re doing so specifically by mimicking human responses and then obscuring the inner workings.
I can’t say I find the AI torture chamber existentially horrifying. I think our barely-incomprehensible models are probably not that far from the comprehensible ones. What bothers me about this is the idea that if it were possible to upload a torture chamber, people would want to do it.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
so much heat (from the woke left)
Now that the two minutes’ hate is out of the way, on to the real subject.
Scott is generally very good at avoiding the excluded-middle fallacy. There’s AI doom, and there’s AI utopia, and there’s nothing-ever-happens, but in between is a vast surface of something-kinda-happens. Outside of Scott’s actual fiction, I’ve never gotten the impression that he ignores this region, especially not for rhetorical effect.
It must be quite frustrating for him to read this tripe from Pinker.
This is the third or fourth exchange where Pinker has ignored everything Scott writes in favor of making half-assed claims on social media. I understand that’s very popular these days. It still sucks, and I can’t blame Scott for getting a bit tetchy. Even then, he has that really nice turn in the middle where he talks about Pinker as an inspiration. I hope the guy reads it.
seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker
This forum sees a lot of calls to take things “seriously, not literally.” Humor is usually the opposite. I don’t think invoking historical dueling culture is a particularly serious stance.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
3d ago
Oh, I’ve been! First time was back when they had the Pavia tapestries exhibit. Great museum all around.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
3d ago
It was a family visit this previous weekend.
When we went to lunch, the restaurant had a sign warning not to use the neighboring lot, which apparently belonged to a couple other businesses. There was a garage under apartments across the street, but the entrance controls made me think it was only for the apartments. We ended up parking in a random free spot on the far side of that building. Easy enough, though I'd have been annoyed if the rain had picked up.
What made me curious was the juxtaposition of completely free and completely restricted parking options.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
3d ago
The Control of Nature, John McPhee. I was expecting an essay about the New Orleans levees, but it actually covers the Old River Control System upstream. This is designed to keep the Mississippi from changing course, which is way cooler than just mitigating floods.
I’ve written before about McPhee’s talent for English and I have not yet been disappointed. Still, there haven’t been any lines as quotable as Levels of the Game or Rising From the Plains…yet.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Ah, this is why your refrigerator is running.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Even in smaller towns? There should be a marginal plot where the land is currently undervalued, but not by enough to justify a rebuild. Maybe those situations are rare?
I think there’s a coordination problem here where some businesses really benefit from subsidized parking. It’s still a distortion, but that’s the kind of distortion which breeds opposition to a reform.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
4d ago
Inspired by last month’s guest post and my own trip to Fort Worth this weekend: what does a land value tax do to parking?
In the long run, of course, it’s going to push for more productive developments than a flat slab of asphalt. I’m interested in the short run. Whoever owns the lot loses their subsidy, raises parking prices accordingly, and/or sells to someone with the capital for an improvement. A business which currently relies on the cheap lot down the street is not likely to enjoy that process. I suspect a lot of small American operations rely on such setups. Does this give them a reason to oppose LVT?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Do you think the OP was treating them as a CW topic?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
It’s gotten an unfortunate amount of mindshare in the last year or so.
If it makes you feel better, substitute with whatever euphemism they used in the 1800s.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
First: sex and sexuality topics are quintessential CW material and therefore banned from the Friday Fun Thread. This includes but is by no means limited to discussion of sexual assault both real and imagined, discussion on the sexualization of minors, erotic AI prompts, and so forth. This is a final mod warning.
Second: Someone reading this warning will probably wonder whether this means that gooning material is fair game for the CW thread. It is not. This is a discussion forum for testing shady thinking, not for sharing gooning material. You can talk about the CW, but not wage CW; you can talk about the sociocultural development of gooning (ugh, if you must) but this is not the place to goon. We understand that there are communities which focus on sharing smut and smut accessories. We are not, and do not intend to become, one of those communities. This is a mod comment.
Third: We will be employing the Supreme Court's own standard in enforcing this rule. You have demonstrated that your intuition does not always line up with the users' or the mods'. If you are unsure about a particular topic, ask in modmail first. This is a mod suggestion in hopes of avoiding further mod warnings.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Okay, knock it off.
For a lazy CW snipe, I’d normally give a short time-out to cool off. Your history makes it pretty clear that this isn’t a matter of someone getting your blood up. You are consistently dropping in with sneering one-liners against the spirit and letter of the rules.
Seven day ban. Be civil or don’t chime in at all.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Block-quoting naked CW is still CW.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Bavitz has also been posting edited-Fargo as Magical Girl Machine Gun on RR. I…don’t know if it’s the same version as DX, but it looks like it started going up at the same time.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
but in the dawn of the decade, in a particular Western country, a nationwide Kristallnacht-style movement was killed in 3 rounds
To what is this referring?
Other than that confusion--good post.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
14d ago
Yes, but that’s separate from appealing to Stanford philosophy articles about paradigms.
When Georgioz says there’s no The Science, no privileged position, that gets him to neutrality. To get back to pro-lab-leak he has to adopt some other paradigm.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
14d ago
Does autism qualify as a disability?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
14d ago
Underdetermination is exactly why reversing stupidity doesn’t get you intelligence.
But contrastive underdetermination (Section 3 below) involves the quite different possibility that for any body of evidence confirming a theory, there might well be other theories that are also well confirmed by that very same body of evidence.
Let’s say your opponent is a rock carved with the phrase “DRINKING MERCURY WILL KILL YOU.” It would be fair to say “I can’t trust that the underlying paradigm here is compatible with mine.” Great. That gets you back to a state of Cartesian doubt; feel free to ignore the rock and do your own research. What it does not endorse is reversing the message. The most information you can get by rejecting paradigms is zero.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
15d ago
Using AI to translate a tool which uses AI to measure the AI usage in a book.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but
No! It only converges on the same threat if the AI commander is roughly as capable as a human!
Right now we’re around the Saddam Hussein level. AI is too expensive and incompetent to replace a real military leader. The competence barely matters; to paraphrase a philosopher, I have yet to meet one who could outsmart JDAM. But that first one is the real problem.
If AI gets cheap enough to replace trained losses, modern decapitation tactics fall apart. America can no longer bomb any Iranian who knows how to plan a missile strike. Ukrainians can no longer hollow out Russia’s entire officer corps. Competence becomes materiel.
I can’t decide if this favors any particular strategies other than decapitation. I do think it turns a lot of winnable fights unwinnable.
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