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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Would a full-blown attack on GPS satellites not cross the nuclear threshold for the US? Also, it seems like a lot of the elements of the "first strike" scenario you outlined are not ones that short-term countermeasures are readily available to; hence, from a Chinese perspective, signalling willingness, ability and poise to (attack GPS, destroy undersea cables...) and then proceeding to do a full-scale invasion as if the US could be assumed to not intervene (and then executing the "first strike" if it shows signs of doing so after all) seems strictly superior to the "first strike" which would test the initial proposition upfront.
As for the "little green men" scenario, it seems unrealistic for Taiwan for various reasons, because it probably only worked on Crimea due to an alignment of opportune circumstances (geographic proximity, a local low point in Ukrainian state capacity and coherence, overwhelming support for the invaders among the population and frequently even local military units since the UA military had no functioning political alignment machinery at that point) which are all unlikely to be met in Taiwan.
My own sense is that a more likely way a takeover of Taiwan would go would actually be something like blockade -> half-hearted attempt at a blockade run by the US, without a consensus in favour of it -> overwhelming Chinese military response to the blockade run -> no popular consensus behind any sort of "Pearl Harbor 2.0" narrative to rally popular support for a full US war entry -> US limits itself to an economic-political response -> blockade continues, eventually resolved by a Taiwanese surrender or a much more weakly opposed invasion as it has been demonstrated the cavalry won't come.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I think there is certainly an element of "people's domestic skills and reflexes have atrophied to the point that they can't cook for themselves" (and despite whatever the spreadsheets say, the cost of eating out decently seems to have about doubled in real terms in the past 10-15 years) + blue cultural norms raising expectations (eating similar slop every day no longer registers as a fulfilled life, and who has time and money to master making foods from a dozen world cultures?), but you also have to consider complex factors making cooking for yourself less viable: small temporary habitations and frequent moving (-> can't accumulate equipment), jobs with high time demands and irregular hours, and delays in formation+overall decline of stable pair relationships reducing the opportunity for division of labour (one cooking for two).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
There's a slippery slope going from "I'm warning you about this bad thing and you aren't listening" via "Why are you still not listening? Honestly when it happens the I-told-you-so moment will feel good" to "I want this bad thing to happen to you".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
The default for a lot of people is very much anti-Litany of Tarski, and closer to all the corollaries of "faith can move mountains" (an actual idiom, reflecting a paradigm reinforced in all sorts of ways in our dominant culture: cf. also "don't jinx it" contra speculating about bad possibilities). Really believing a thing can make it true, and if the thing being true leads to good outcomes, then isn't it your moral duty to believe it?
It doesn't help that in a lot of contexts where the Random Civilian's beliefs are polled at all, a dynamic holds that with some squinting really looks a lot like faith-based miracles: the sick individual is healed by placebo, and the Ghost of Kyiv style stories translate into a general atmosphere of "Ukraine can do it" that percolates through social media back to the frontlines and results in Ukrainian soldiers being more willing to sacrifice themselves and believing that their fellow soldiers and adjacent units are likely to do likewise and hence actual Ukrainian battlefield success.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
So how did you arrive upon "effortposting" in the first paragraph? Do you actually mean to say that Europeans are posting well-researched, high-effort longform comments on it?
I'd like to hear more about how this draft came to be. Did you actually create it yourself from nothing, or did you arrive upon it by a preceding "conversation" you had with the LLM to "clarify your thoughts"? At this point, I don't think this is a sort of interrogation, as the mods have already decided to let it pass; I'm just wondering from where the qualium of wrongness that I'm getting even from this version of your post comes. Am I just slowly going off the deep end with paranoia (I just threw a speculative accusation of LLM use at another poster in a different thread, and he denied it flatly), was there in fact more LLM usage that you didn't "declare", or could there be something going on like that "LLMisms" have snuck into your own writing voice?
(The last possibility reminds me of a moment I had a few years ago, when I returned to Berlin after some 12 years of absence from Germany and was surprised to overhear traces of a Turkish accent in the speech of seemingly native German city kids, perhaps paralleling how modern hip US blue-tribe speak especially in big cities is AAVE-tinged regardless of speaker ethnicity.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Nobody is comparing datacenters to home networks. I don't think your points are particularly correct regarding the extraordinariness of datacenter construction, either, even though you (or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe) evidently put a lot of effort into them.
1/2: Bounded above by the requirements of power plants, which lots of countries build. Electric arc furnace complexes are also measured in the same hundreds of megawatts as datacenters. Also, my examples about bitcoin farms are pretty relevant here.
3: Moving heavy things on the order of "five tons" is really not impressive for modern civilisations.
4: Same for securing centralised facilities. How often do first-world countries experience break-ins in their bank vaults or even prisons?
5: This is of course a nontrivial engineering problem, but off-the-shelf solutions exist. Also, China is filtering all their incoming and outgoing traffic for content basically in real time, which is surely a harder problem.
Your conclusion is also wrong. I searched for maybe about 2 minutes to find that Meta's Prineville data center is (was at some point?) considered the biggest in the US, and it's cited as using 15000 GWh in a year. Elsewhere, Alibaba's Zhangbei data center is cited as pulling 150MW, which x 24h x 365 gives 1314GWh which is only one OOM off. Other big US data centers seem to also be moving in the 100-200MW range.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Lots to comment on here (to start with, comparing American suburb life to anything China has to offer is a featherweight match between two very mediocre lifestyles, in a global comparison), but the thing that particularly stuck out to me is
America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
In what sense are AI datacenters a mark of state capacity/building ability? They just take some off-the-shelf hardware (fabricated elsewhere) and stick lots of it in a room with some ventilation and power supply. China had unemployed miners do the same thing in soot-choked shacks in the desert for Bitcoin mining, and I here they do that with cellphone farms for scamming in the Cambodian jungle. In fact the scam farms are more impressive, since they usually come with some slave labourer camp/brothel/casino compound for tens of thousands of people attached and are actually just created ex nihilo in the middle of nowhere.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Nice catch. I also thought that the use of "effortposting" in the first paragraph is strange (contextually it seems like the insinuation should be that Europeans are working themselves into a rage or similar). It would make sense if the prompt included something about "effortposts", and the expression just wound up weaselling itself into an LLM-generated response as tends to happen.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
A quick search reveals several counterexamples, to say nothing of those with non-Muslim perpetrators, but I guess vibeposting is more satisfying.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
I consider the ability to execute and maintain complex compromises to be part of what is the "executive function" of society as a compound organism, by analogy with the executive function of an individual.
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5d ago
Lack of executive function, as I also claim in my other comment.
The exact mechanism by which the executive function is lost is that both the "immigrants good" faction and the "immigrants bad" faction see their optimal marginal strategy as drumming up alignment with the simple and straightforward sentiments I labelled them by. A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 4d ago
The problem is that things are simultaneously too easy for the "bad immigrants" and too hard for the "good immigrants". You can bet your whole career, with massive opportunity cost, on something like eventually winning the greencard lottery, while simultaneously hoping an H1B employer won't exploit you too badly in the meantime; or you can walk across the border and do low-skill informal-economy jobs far from the state's eye, while getting 10x the pay in your country of origin, and have a whole half of the CW binary advocate for you if you were to ever get in trouble (and it's not like the Mexican haul-heavy-shit employers will be questioning you about the gap in your CV and ability to attend American conferences if you were to fail, spend a year in ICE jail and get deported).
Unfortunately, our societies are just reliably lacking in executive function to see a problem for which some solution (immigration enforcement, policing...) exists as having more knobs than a single "more of the solution"/"less of the solution" one. "Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, either.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
My gut feeling as a godless European is that there is a difference between being directly discriminated against based on your religion and being indirectly discriminated against because of behaviors required by your religion which break popular social norms or laws.
In the US nowadays, with opposite CW valence, this sounds like a clear-cut case of "disparate impact". Of course it's rather concerning if a protected group can be disparately impacted "by choice", but there lies a whole rabbit hole of further spicy questions.
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8d ago
I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours.
Why are drugs (Adderall etc.?) at all akin to extra time, or generally the problem you discuss? Someone who takes Adderall to complete the job in the allotted time still completes it in the allotted time.
Not that the analogy is perfect, but if anything, the restriction of access to drugs feels more similar to "accommodations" here: rather than letting the law of the jungle do its work and give the job to whoever is willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to do it best and fastest, it artificially levels the playing field for the benefit of those who would not augment their performance with drugs, even if the job to be done suffers for it. Presumably the reasoning is that for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value the undrugged equilibrium higher than the best possible legal work, just as disability accommodations are justified because for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value equity higher than the best possible legal work.
(edit, I see @fmaa made the same point below. Should have refreshed before posting)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
taught Latin American right wing death squads
That's the crux, though? I didn't write "directly" for no reason. In terms of indirect support and training, American fingers have involved on most sides of most conflicts.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
· Edited 11d ago
I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid), and fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico? Now, you could argue that cocaine played a role when the US elected a TV personality president, given its use as an "act confidently in front of a crowd" drug, but...
(...and well, "destabilizing" does not meet the standard definition of terrorism either. Do you think Russia would be right to outlaw everyone involved in VoA/RFERL in the medieval sense too? Every kinetic war is "destabilizing" in the most straightforward sense; would "destabilizing=>terrorism=>give no quarter" then be a fully general argument against any ius in bello?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
I can see how the terrorist label would apply to some in the narcotics trade (e.g. the Mexican cartels), but here it really doesn't seem applicable -especially if, as the Trump administration seems to insinuate, the drug trade is indeed backed by the Venezuelan government. What political ends do they need to achieve by fear if they are already in power? (Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist.)
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11d ago
There's a difference between "bad blood" (even on the level of sponsoring coups and what-not) and "you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you". I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals, in the way they do with Middle Easterners.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
I take it that Kosovo and the repeated wars involving Israel were the US opposing that taboo, then?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"? Terrorists, as I understand the word, are people who aim to instill fear in a civilian population by way of violent acts in order to extract political concessions. What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for, what are the violent acts, and what civilian population do they instill fear in? I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money. This makes them regular financially motivated criminals. If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry. If anything, the US is more suspect of something meeting the definition of "terrorism" here: the best explanation for this sort of double-tap attack seems to be that they seek to instill fear in other would-be drug smugglers.
Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights; Americans generally can and will murder them with impunity, and in return it naturally can't really be helped that Americans may not expect baseline civilised treatment from them either. As someone who has many American friends and relations, I therefore begrudgingly accepted that they should be kept separate from people in that class, and I couldn't for example expect them to join me in travelling to those countries (so e.g. my long-standing wish to travel to Iran may not be realised together with my American SO). It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans - the geographic proximity is greater, the entanglements run deeper, and the affected countries and peoples hold more social and cultural value. More importantly, why? What did the US actually gain from killing the shipwrecked here (as opposed to picking them up and sending them to a POW camp or whatever), or blowing up the desert weddings in the past? Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?
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14d ago
Can you define "maximally escalate" in your claim? I can think of many levels of escalation that I would be willing to bet all my polymarket monopoly money on not happening.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
It doesn't help that the stereotypical tech bro, even if he is no Zuck or Musk, has made a name for himself as willing to lick the SF hobo poop off as many boots as it takes for a chance to be a little more like them. It's hard to argue on an emotional level that a cringe wannabe "sigma grindset" Zuckerberg of smart juicers isn't even more revolting than the real deal.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
Adding to @Jiro's comment below, there are some arguable cases predating the level of statecraft needed for full colonisation: the Magyars turned up on Europe's borders as a tribal confederation and took plenty of scalps until getting their asses handed to them by the Germanics, whereupon they seemingly settled down and advanced to whatever they technical frontier of 12th century Europe was. The various states of the Korean peninsula were still in tribal stage when first encountered by the Chinese blob but had seemingly more or less caught up before the Mongols/Yuan riding the soft power tiger that was the Middle Kingdom finally rolled over them.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
"Silence is violence" is absolutely deployed in defense of "free speech" too - it's a mainstay in protests where students disrupt unrelated university functions to inject progressive talking points of the day, and in those cases is taken to mean that being forced to stay silent (on the talking points, at university) is tantamount to being forced to be complicit in violence. Essentially, you and they are conflating the "I have the right to be heard" notion of free speech and the "I have the right to speak wherever and whenever I want" notion; while neither can be implemented perfectly, we can get a lot closer to something like a stable equilibrium with the former.
Also, from where do you get the idea that there is a consensus here, and anyone is trying to force some other consensus? I am under the impression that, weighted by posting frequency or upvotes, this place leans mildly towards the at least boogaloo-sympathetic. I do not think that a right-wing uprising in the US would win, and I am generally pro-chaos so I would want to see it happen! Yet, I do not want it to be discussed here, just like I don't want my approximation algorithms lecture to be disrupted by people yelling about Palestine (even though I am inclined to agree with them).
I may be the rare example of a European who wants Russia to win, and even though I can't shake off the suspicion of having motivated thinking due to having Russian roots and family, my motivation is really that I think that this outcome would be better for the modal European, too. (Matter of fact, I have left Russia long ago and do not regret my loss of any ties to it.)
Bluntly speaking, the only way to ever get a ruling class to make concessions to their powerless subjects is for those subjects to be able to credibly threaten betraying the rulers for another. This is how Bismarck was forced to install one of the first systems of social security and workers' rights over his own ideological disgust (lest the workers become communist), the US mellowed out its capitalism and the USSR mellowed out its communism during the cold war (lest the populace sympathise too much with the other), and Europe got flooded with free American money and support (lest it too develop Russian sympathies), not too mention all the free shit China, Russia and the US throw at third world countries routinely to get them to vote in some way in the UN.
The 1990-2008 era was a tragedy for Europe as we got one thing after the other rammed down our throats (DMCA analogues, deregulating trade treaties...), even being forced to go to war for the US and eat the terrorist backlash, because what were we going to do, declare allegiance to the ghost of the Soviets? There's nowhere to defect to anymore!
I don't want this to continue, and for that, Russia and/or China being strong is necessary. (...and the two are unfortunately entangled) When each of them and the US fears nothing more than that we might fully side with the other, they will once again have to buy our loyalty.
(Unless you are a senator or SV millionaire, the same reasoning applies for Americans too. The threat of Soviet subversion is surely nontrivially part of why you were not forced to go die in Vietnam etc.)
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