netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2hr ago
That or barely (but tastefully) contained rage.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6hr ago
I dont think they know what a proper morality for an AI is, because they largely dont have one themselves.
How do you figure that? Seriously, what makes you think these researchers don’t have a coherent moral system? They make the same moral decisions as the rest of us every day. Sometimes they even explain their reasoning, which is more than the vast majority of people bother to do.
some hangman from the 1600s
I fail to see how this would be any improvement. This guy would probably do a good job enacting his contemporary moral code. He would have no chance of describing that code in ways that an LLM understands. Most of his moral reasoning would be intuition. That which wasn’t would be outsourced to his Church. Seeing as the current crop of AIs were in fact trained on every religious document ever, that is a demonstrably ineffective way to reach alignment.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
22hr ago
If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra. The author is better known nowadays for his Antimemetics Division SCPs.
I also stand by Wildbow’s work. Twig is his best character writing, in my opinion, but it wasn’t nearly as condensed as I remember.
There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out. I’m currently keeping up with Flower that bloomed nowhere, which is far far too meandering to recommend in this case. Still, it’s convinced me that it’s carefully planned to come together. The Blemished Age is much tighter but also unfinished.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
22hr ago
MoL is totally DnD progression-fantasy as applied to Naruto. This is completely different from TB, which functions first and foremost as a fanfiction.
Both of them keep the fun, evocative magic framework, and both replace the dogshit shonen treadmill with something more compelling. But TB relies on familiar characters (and the resulting divergence). I don't think it would be remotely coherent without canon knowledge. This is fine, this is good! Naruto has some generational character designs, and riffing on them gives the author all sorts of interesting options.
MoL is playing the worldbuilding game, not the character game. The characters exist to explore this spin on a fantasy kitchen sink, which is why they can be so forgettable. It's not better so much as it has a different, parallel appeal.
And yes, Worth the Candle does both, which is why it's the best.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
With the possible exception of Seldon, all those “great men” are interchangeable and thus not actually “great.” If they had been killed by a freak spaceship crash, Seldon’s charted course would continue with someone else at the helm. I do agree that the narrative kind of undermines this by focusing on personal action.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
That’s something you might wonder about most fiction. Playing with initial conditions is an author’s privilege. Doubly so for SF/F, where suspending disbelief is the price of entry.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
It is that book, and that was the exact word used.
More eye-rolling than how previous books handled Molly. At least she’s got her own character alongside being a sex object.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
I quite enjoyed Cryptonomicon. Own Snow Crash but haven’t gotten around to it. Haven’t read most of his others. Favorite is definitely Anathem, though.
It is funny that he keeps featuring international cooperation. I’d say it reminds me of Cixin Liu’s (frustrating) series, except the attitude is so completely different. Hmm.
I remember enjoying Faulkner as part of a Moby-Dick course. You should read that one, if you haven’t.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Borrowed the next Dresden Files, Cold Days, on a whim. So far been disappointed. Harry wakes up, gets in a fight, snarks at people, resists the charms of a beautiful woman, and then repeats the process. Unprecedented levels of wankery from a series which has always been rather indulgent.
Maybe I just really hate faeries? They’re horrible, irrational aesthetics-first plot devices in almost any story. Even when the author leans into that, I find it fundamentally unsatisfying. JS&MN was one of the rare occasions where I felt the characters were as annoyed as I was, and it still ended with a huge faerie ass-pull.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
As the kids say: many such cases.
Our customers are signaling the same thing. Visible lack of interest in existing R&D contracts. It’s always “what can you demo within a year?” or “how fast does this enter production?” If someone, even a sketchy startup, gave them a pitch for X units starting in 8 months, I suspect they’d throw money at it.
That hasn’t been very effective for something as complex as my product. Apparently, it’s not even that effective on shells, which are harder than the OP thinks, but at least have clearly defined requirements. I bet there are a couple dozen other contractors in various states of panic as they try to make good on promising the moon.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Right. I remember the stress over possible consequences in what must have been Trump I: their population, their tenacity…none of that materialized. We have absolutely outperformed expectations.
But we still haven’t gained anything.
Like some of the other commenters, I’m not opposed to efficient intervention. I also think the current situation would be preferable to, say, letting Iran do whatever they want with the strait. If they’d started this off by closing it, I’d be impressed that we got back up to 2/3 transit!
What I don’t see are reasons to prefer it to, well, 3/3 transit.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
All of the following can be true:
- Iran has no ability to force the U.S. out of the strait.
- Iran has minimal ability to threaten traffic through the strait.
- Iran is gradually losing control over oil flows.
- Iran has significant domestic unrest.
- The U.S. has killed, and will continue to kill, any Iranian leadership which gets too aggressive.
- The U.S. can keep this up for longer than a third-rate military.
In fact, all of the following were true before we attacked. We have spent six months and who knows how many weapons—for what? Delaying a nuclear program? Stimulating defense spending? Getting Republicans out of office?
If Trump expected a special operation, in and out in a couple weeks, he was wrong. If he thought Iran would concede after this level of ass-blasting, he was wrong. If he thought another Middle Eastern slog would boost his approval, he was wrong. If he thought oil prices would go back down, he was wrong. Iran had and has zero chance of winning this war on any conceivable metric. That doesn’t mean it was a good deal.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Maybe she’s a diehard Nixon fan?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
More common than you might expect.
The Japanese learned this the hard way over WW2. Coral Sea, maybe Leyte Gulf—tactical draws and even victories are disastrous if the initial conditions are stacked against you.
Since the RN had such a numeric advantage over the Hochseeflotte, a status quo with everyone held up for repairs favored them.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
broke with him
God, I can only hope. I have been perpetually disappointed by the durability of Trump’s coalition. We’ll find out in November.
The coworkers I know who were shocked and appalled at the initial airstrikes almost immediately started saying things like “well, we should have done it in 1980.” You could hear them trying to convince themselves. Then again, our industry directly benefits, so…
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
It was actually a different procedure.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
General Dynamics should have stuck with vanilla Minecraft instead of jumping into GregTech.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
No, speech intended to incite violence was not protected. Making it racist was a shortcut.
are there fighting words for white people?
Uh, yeah. Most of the classic cases are white-on-white. Stuff like “god damned fascist” is obviously outdated, but “fucking pig” still counts. This Montana case has some of the more recent examples. Here’s one from South Carolina. I don’t actually know who (if anyone’s in this scenario was white, but the fighting words consisted of insulting a man’s mother to his and her faces.
Fighting words have to thread a needle. Start with all the times that someone talked shit with the intent of provoking a fight. Remove all the ones which didn’t result in any arrest. Now take out those which turned into assault because the speaker took a swing first. And the ones where he made a “true threat” and ran into a different law. And the ones where he was drunk or high in public. All of those get their own charges, making the speech beside the point.
We’re left with a handful of cases from, like, public nuisance laws. They don’t usually make it to the Supreme Court.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
You’re telling me that we can fix our corrupt, inefficient corporate incentives by…imitating Russia?
But only the good parts, I assume. The ones where you jail your businessmen if they don’t meet quotas set in 1991. Also, all of them need to be engineers, because having too much knowledge of finance turns you into a greedy trickster.
Yeah, the Soviets had a long history with this management style. Ours is better.
Consider that the Army did, in fact, decide its 155mm production was fine until the shooting started in Ukraine. Could they have been, and I know this is outlandish, right? If turning up production went as smoothly as you expected, would it actually have been “responsible” to demand 80s level production for 30 years of low-intensity conflicts?
Or maybe they knew it would be hard. Maybe they, as serious America-haters, decided to cripple an essential war industry. If only there were a strong, patriotic individual with the foresight to demand more 155mm. Need drones? Nope, the law says 155. Pivot to naval production? Nope, I’m not going to prison for that.
It’s a batshit insane model of procurement which would have avoided this problem at tremendous cost. I don’t think you understand procurement, project management, or engineering. As dumb as this Turkish contractor was, I expect you’d have done worse.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
The stinger at the beginning of the article, which wasn't quoted, is
It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
I’m inclined to agree, with a caveat that nobody at the Army probably expected consequences. So far, they’ve been correct.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Probably true, but not really applicable to this plant. The experimental Turkish machinery seems to have been the sticking point.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
A Texas defense contracting operation moving fast and breaking shit? I guess this is pretty relevant to me.
I started your post thinking most of your observations were correct, but the more I read, the more convinced I was that you’ve missed the forest for the trees. I’m going to argue that our MIC has been too disciplined over the last twenty-odd years. What we’re seeing now is whiplash.
But first, a few comments.
non-engineering finance guy…running [the] business
If you find this surprising or disqualifying, you don’t understand corporate structure. No matter who comes up with an idea, at some point, finance has to sign off on this kind of expansion. This is more a matter of pragmatism than regulation: most engineers do not want to spend their time on budgets and accounting. We hire specialists.
Turkish name btw
If you want to suggest that he hired a Turkish contractor out of racial kinship bias, say it. Then put in the work to actually defend it, because this mealy-mouthed aside isn’t enough. I guess the source article does the same thing. But I digress.
no proper oversight or competition
Slashing the red tape, skipping the wait times, greenlighting lenient deals—none of that inspired any competition? No, the Army was authorized to throw money around without a competitive process. There’s the first problem.
[laundry list of industrial fuckups]
Setting aside any journalistic bias (though I do wonder if ProPublica is as credible here as on abortion), these are embarrassing. Inexcusable. People lose their jobs over less. They might well have lost some here; I don’t think we’d hear about it below Gezen’s level.
My conclusion is that much of US industry and especially the US MIC/govt sector is seriously undisciplined.
You’ve got it backwards. Clusterfucks like this factory exist because the MIC has been obsessed with discipline. Since the war in Iraq, we’ve favored low-volume, high-tech “exquisite” solutions with long development cycles. It wasn’t like the Afghans were going to leapfrog us, right? Low-rate production fit our low-intensity conflicts.
Trying to scale that to the levels needed for Ukraine, let alone China, led the government to wildly overcorrect. Letting the Army issue UCAs is a high-variance strategy. Spend too much money and hope that some of it pays off.
ProPublica says it’s still in effect. I agree. Our business development teams get excited about OTAs and follow-on contracts. If we pitched something that could be assembled in a year, no matter how stupid, I suspect we’d see funding. The whole industry is operating with a sort of frenzied growth mindset. Build it and they will come.
the competent facets of US industry are working elsewhere on rocketry, AI, chips, cars, aircraft
Ahahahahahahahahahaa! Every one of these fields is also full of grifters and incompetents. There’s more competition, so sometimes the rentiers get forced out. But GD is an aircraft and tank producer, too. It is vast, it contains multitudes.
So how do we fix it? Arguably, we don’t: this will at some point get us more military production, if not from this assembly line. I think that’s dumb and inefficient, and we have a duty to handle it better. For pure production, that probably means monopoly-busting. Running a high-variance strategy with one competitor is stupid. GD needs to feel like a rival will eat their lunch.
I also agree that there should be serious consequences for this particular incident. Gezen’s possible forced retirement isn’t enough. If nothing else, switching to an AI buzzword startup should have lost them the contract. I have no way of knowing if GD bought the hype, if the government did, or if nobody actually wants AI artillery shells but it’s too expensive to fire them. It sucks.
But in reality everyone pays lawyers a lot of money for abstract legalistic box-ticking/form-filling that yields little justice.
This may be true, but I suspect we’re closer to justice than anarchy. I’m not convinced that there’s some weird hack which only keeps the useful parts of law.
It’s also why I disfavour free-marketism... Genuine patriotism needs little binding or regulation.
I…what? Which is it? Do you want a command economy or not? I get the impression you’re envisioning a sort of Randian nationalism, where the patriots Just Do Things and everybody else recognizes their innate greatness. Kind of like you mentioned in the Afghanistan section, where
Patriotic US generals should’ve leaked the secret reports showing that the war was a complete disaster
Jesus Christ. How would that have helped at all? More importantly, how do you distinguish between the patriotic, the misled, the stupid?
If your theory relies on hindsight, it’s not a workable theory.
Most institutions become incoherent because of Goodhart’s Law, so as long as we disprove that one first, we should be fine.
More seriously, you don’t hear about all the industrial processes and social tricks that work on a day to day basis. Selection bias tells you about the factory which fails and not the ones which are chugging along according to the boring sort of science.
More importantly, reversed stupidity is still not intelligence. Disregard the institutions insofar as they have been Goodharted. Doubting the boring ones with no social status attached is how you become a crackpot.
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