BigObjectPermanenceShill
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User ID: 4286
BigObjectPermanenceShill
6d ago
I want to clarify that I was totally against starting any military conflict with Iran to begin with. However, now that direct hostilities have started, we have to decisively finish any conflict with countries whose official slogan is "Death to America"
…if your problem is with the slogan, then why oppose starting the conflict? Their slogan didn't change, though I suppose they now chant it with more sincerity.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
6d ago
Yes, 36 hours. A few well-placed hits, and they surrender. They're just not realizing how they're outmatched, they think the US is bluffing, the "whole civilization will die tonight" stuff was a joke, but no, it's totally serious. If only liberals weren't in the way…
Sure.
It is edifying to reread the posts around the start of the war, when it was actually measured in hours. I suggest this one. I'll even quote it in full, it's so amazing.
Are we in a new age of hyperpower?
OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.
I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.
But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.
The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.
My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is an obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?
Anyone ready for Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? Salivating at the thought of more hyperpower dominance?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
6d ago
The actual obvious part is that Thiel has residences in New Zealand and Uruguay, and I suspect in more places (haven't checked). He's an eccentric billionaire with idle doomsday fantasies. He can afford a mansion in Buenos Aires as well, just for meme value provided by Milei and Nazi jokes alone.
More speculatively: this is, if anything, bullish on Trump. Argentina isn't some neutral safe haven. It cooperates with the USG under Democrats eagerly: consider that in 2022, they've arrested and extradited two random Ruskies, at the American behest, to the US. They'll extradite an American charged with some crimes even more readily. Thiel presumes that Trumpism will survive, and in fact succeed with the Donroe Doctrine program, the entire South America becoming integrated into the new security regime, as per the National Security Strategy document. Palantir will be key to this. And he expresses his enthusiasm by claiming a foothold at the tip of the cone.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
8d ago
Has anyone ever seen Terrance speak of Gemini or use a Google LLM math product
Yes we did, even recently:
Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Adam Zsolt Wagner, and I have uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale“. This is a longer report on the experiments we did in collaboration with Google Deepmind with their AlphaEvolve tool, which is in the process of being made available for broader use. Some of our experiments were already reported on in a previous white paper, but the current paper provides more details, as well as a link to a repository with various relevant data such as the prompts used and the evolution of the tool outputs.
or here you can see his comments on erdosproblems.com:
I asked ChatGPT and Gemini for literature review. ChatGPT DeepResearch basically just cited this web page and declared the problem open. Interestingly, Gemini DeepResearch reproduced essentially the same proof as yours (in the section under "Harmonic capacity"), but without directly citing the above argument. Also it seemed unaware that it had actually established the result, and instead devoted the rest of the report to explaining why the problem was difficult.
The entire OpenAI conspiracy theory is asinine. Tao isn't a shill, he's pretty restrained in his praise of AI, and his experiments have been going on for years now, gradually escalating from "neat paperwork automation" to "can assist in mundane bits of research" to recognition of autonomous discovery, in tune with AI gaining these capabilities. Eg here he talks about GPT-4:
Today was the first day that I could definitively say that #GPT4 has saved me a significant amount of tedious work. As part of my responsibilities as chair of the ICM Structure Committee, I needed to gather various statistics on the speakers at the previous ICM (for instance, how many speakers there were for each section, taking into account that some speakers were jointly assigned to multiple sections). The raw data (involving about 200 speakers) was not available to me in spreadsheet form, but instead in a number of tables in web pages and PDFs. In the past I would have resigned myself to the tedious task of first manually entering the data into a spreadsheet and then looking up various spreadsheet functions to work out how to calculate exactly what I needed; but both tasks were easily accomplished in a few minutes by GPT4, and the process was even somewhat enjoyable (with the only tedious aspect being the cut-and-paste between the raw data, GPT4, and the spreadsheet).
Am now looking forward to native integration of AI into the various software tools that I use, so that even the cut-and-paste step can be omitted. (Just being able to resolve >90% of LaTeX compilation issues automatically would be wonderful...)
This precedes Trump and discredits speculations about his recent financial motive.
He is also not locked into OpenAI ecosystem, as I've just demonstrated, and he's been on the board for AIMO, which is a Kaggle competition of tuning small open models for solving math problems. Progress Prize 1 and 2 were won using DeepSeek and Qwen models. I don't see how that advances OpenAI's agenda. Prize 3 seems to be won using gpt-oss, but it was unusually strong in its weight class in the relevant time window, so this is fair.
He has no reason to refuse participating in OpenAI-funded activities, he's got no ideological dog in this fight, so that proves nothing. Him, Gowers and other extremely successful mathematicians are obviously just excited about AI getting good, which is a very natural thing to be excited about. I struggle to understand the theory of mind that makes one see anything suspicious here. Probably if you're convinced that AI is a sham and all smart people ought to recognize it as well as you do… but that's such a fanatical viewpoint. More sane to just dismiss him as a washed-up crank.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
16d ago
They claim parity with Sonnet 4.6
It's not remotely the best Chinese model for software development, although it's all around smarter than Sonnet. This is just not a very hard capability to have, it's a matter of pedestrian post-training focus. By 2028, Mistral will be better than Sonnet or GPT 5.3. I think this is roughly fair to how it feels in agentic coding.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
16d ago
Yeah, I don't mean only the benchmarks either. Codex 5.3 is just behind the curve. If you think catching up to it can take up to two years, then I guess your idea of what makes Codex capable has to do with very superficial short-horizon polish.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
16d ago
Enough has already been said about errors of conservatism in this post. I feel bad that I'm not in the shape to offer counter-predictions. One detail.
Tech people start pivoting to finance and robotics slowly, from JavaScript. DeepSeek releases a model that is equivalent to 5.3 Codex
5.3 Codex is exceeded in its direct niche by a whole lot of Chinese models, credibly at least by Qwen 3.7, and definitely by Composer 2.5 (Cursor/xAI) which is a finetune of Kimi K2.5, itself a continued pretrain of Kimi K2, which is a year old base model using a two year old DeepSeek architecture.
Things are moving very fast, and the gap between China and the US, and frontier and open source, is measured in months, not years – at least on main axes of comparison; but these months contain a lot of distance (5.5 is way stronger than 5.3-Codex). I think you don't understand what's happening here. With RLVR (and its generalized form – terminal feedback, all program execution traces), we have an infinite source of ground truth. We can just have models try arbitrarily complex things and reinforce what has worked. We can have them strategize of how to do it and it won't be useless. We have the compute for enormous waste. We have absurdly capable and efficient models (eg said DeepSeek charges $0.003635 per 1 million cache hits, and they probably price slightly above cost; it is hard to imagine that the Western frontier doesn't have anything close, after all these techniques are openly published). So RL will keep improving models unexpectedly fast, by the end of 2026 we'll be discussing the perils of open sourced Mythos, not Codex. Sorry, this is reality, we're not close to any S-curve plateau. We won't have the time for this neat slowdown to do "theory".
BigObjectPermanenceShill
17d ago
Do you ever tire of this? I don't mean AI skepticism, I mean finding the least persuasive pretexts for it.
Enter Daniel Stenberg, the creator and maintainer of curl
from your own link:
Before this first Mythos report, we had already scanned curl with several different very capable AI powered tools (I mean in addition to running a number of “normal” static code analyzers all the time, using the pickiest compiler options and doing fuzzing on it for years etc). Primarily AISLE, Zeropath and OpenAI’s Codex Security have been used to scrutinize the code with AI. These tools and the analyses they have done have triggered somewhere between two and three hundred bugfixes merged in curl through-out the recent 8-10 months or so. A bunch of the findings these AI tools reported were confirmed vulnerabilities and have been published as CVEs. Probably a dozen or more.
I don't care to argue that Anthropic has greater AI than other players, I don't even believe this, by all accounts Mythos is pretty much Opus that's like 3x bigger. But Mythos finding anything on top of that is impressive enough, because presumably these tools have picked clean all curl vulnerabilities that are easy for AI to notice (on top of humans having hunted vulnerabilities in general for decades now). The real news for me here has been how tightly AI audits are already integrated into our core digital infrastructure.
If you want to deboonk AI hype, you've got to try harder. I propose attacking this.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
27d ago
You can manually enable any third party model in Codex if the model's endpoint offers a responses API. DeepSeek and a few others don't, but I see there's a converter.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
27d ago
Many harnesses now support subagent calling. I have built and recommend building your own from pi-agent with a small set of packages, because everything else feels bloated, excessively opinionated and cache-inefficient. Also pi was shown to sometimes perform better with GPT 5.x than Codex itself, so it's not a big compromise. OpenCode is supposedly good now, I don't have the patience to check it out. If you want server-side execution without being locked into a specific lab's ecosystem, I've heard credible praise for Factory Droid.
One note, all this is likely not viable for your scenario, because DeepSeek's cache pricing is limited to their own first party API (Chinese). I am hopeful that in time Western providers, with their superior hardware, will also figure out effective cache compression and serving from disk, or be compelled to grow more generous if they have figured it out already. But this day is not yet here. (Claude Code plans treat cache as free but has obvious usage limits).
BigObjectPermanenceShill
27d ago
I mean aggregated across multiple models. I don't use Claude much anymore (only occasionally API via OpenRouter) and don't think their offer is economically viable. Now, GPT 5.5 is the orchestrator, DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash is the workhorse. Their 1M context and new prices, especially context caching, make long agentic projects basically free. Cache persists for a whole day too, so speed is of no issue if the top-level plan is reasonable.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
27d ago
While it is true that high AI performance and thus automation making certain busywork obsolete will cause some demand destruction, there are so many ways to use tokens.
It's been a slow day. I've "used" something like 75 million tokens. Of those maybe 72 million were cache reads, true, but also about 2.5M input and 500K output. If you look at modern benchmarks like Artificial Analysis or MathArena, you'll see that even very best models use tens of thousands of tokens to solve problems. We have enough problems. The cheaper intelligence is, the more problems become economical to solve by throwing tokens at it.
Better yet, look here.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Not a very good way to open a post by the way
You're welcome, I believe honesty is the best policy.
Well I’ve been assured that Donald Trump is uniquely destructive to American prestige and other countries can no longer treat negotiations with America as routine
If you need to resort to such snark, it kind of gives the game away. What is the point? Initially, you've said: "In the middle of the war he secured an alliance with Indonesia. America now controls Panama, Malacca, and Taiwan and is in the process of controlling Hormuz. The world’s great supply chain chokepoints. These are not isolated events but obviously part of a greater vision. Tariffs and manufacturing and industrial policy are all related."
So i'm commenting on this idea, not some general principle that Trump makes every country committed to tearing down every possible deal and MOU with the US.And as I've said, Indonesia gains more in this partnership (it is not clear what the US gains). Prabowo is a pragmatic guy, he'll accept handouts, from Trump, Xi, Putin or anyone else. So long as they don't get to put a leash on him.
and now you’re arguing about the implications of an Indonesian poll
Minor nitpick: it's a Singaporean poll, of Indonesians. Specifically of those with good information access and influence on making decisions:
A total of 2,008 Southeast Asians completed the survey from both non-panel and panel providers. Respondents came from five affiliation categories: (a) academia, think-tankers, or researchers; (b) private sector representatives; (c) civil society, NGO, or media representatives; (d) government officials; and (e) regional or international organisations personnel.
It's not a survey of third worlders in the streets.
Trust me when I say the vast majority of MAGAworld I interface with is extremely skeptical of the war
I salute your loyalty to the cause, then.
But I guarantee that outside of Twitter OSint third worldist groupchats nobody serious is watching the American military put Iran through its paces and concluding America is weak.
But you are weak. Not relative to Iran, that'd be ludicrous and nobody except unironic third worldists predicted that, but relative to the inflated image which you have created.
You've started a war and clearly want out of it already. Abandoned bases in a wide radius around Iran. Your soldiers have been hiding in civilian hotels. You're unable to open the Strait, so you instead resort to blockading it This Chad Thundercock attitude towards "beancounting" is very funny when three digits is a good volume for annual production of your standoff munition. This is all material, papable weakness.
What we observe, actually, from Latin America to Oceania to the Middle East to Asia is everyone scrambling to become more closely attached to American power.
I don't know what bubble you are in if not the MAGA one. I also notice the absence of "Europe", but ofc that's not as important as "the Middle East". [Speaking of the Middle East, though](https://archive.is/2criR.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Oh, Trump has fired plenty of competent people and replaced them with the likes of Kash Patel. But that doesn't much help against asymmetric harassment of commercial ships, which makes passage unsafe. This kind of finegrained large area policing without boots of the ground is a whole dimension of capability the US hasn't been building, because it's a somewhat absurd capability which would not be of help against any realistic threat to the US.
The US has largely lost its capability for WWII-level minesweeping too. On the other hand, the US has proven to be excellent at killing enemy leadership. A shame that this power also doesn't stop an IRGC dude in the general vicinity of the Strait from launching a drone from some foxhole here and there, and is the reason he's doing this in the first place.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Iran’s negotiators believe Trump is a liar who can’t be negotiated with which is why they were… negotiating with him?
Well, they reportedly walked out in Islamabad, and they're saying they aren't interested in more bullshit.
What are they to do? Just maintain radio silence because Trump is fundamentally untrustworthy? You're grasping at straws. They are simply open to communication. Maybe they are waiting that you guys have a coup and surrender. Would make a lot of sense if Trump was pacified somehow by the cooler heads.
And he’s postponing Bridge and Power Plant Day.
The reason he's postponing is that they are not surrendering, and they are not surrendering not because they still don't get that you can bomb them, but precisely because they do not consider him trustworthy, ie do not expect any viable terms of surrender to be honored (eg, among all else, they want to maintain their capability to use drones and missiles for deterrence, which the US and Israel can proceed to attack at any time). Until this changes, your hope for "a faction" amounts to hope that cretins and/or open traitors somehow prevail against rational actors who operate based on very recent and very raw evidence.
if you want to argue that the Iranian regime is more reliable than Trump I’ll still call that TDS.
You can call it what you want, but I find it obvious that Iranians look and act like educated white professionals, whereas Trump has the credibility of a fent junkie, appoints inept alcoholics to positions of power, and seriously takes the counsel of Laura Loomer and FOX News. It is possible to negotiate with Iranians like with dignitaries of any normal Western nation, but it is not possible to "negotiate" with Trump unless you have some blunt coercive instrument on the table, such as a nuke or a gun to the stock market's temple, and even then he can convince himself it's a bluff. We have seen this in October, with China and rare earths.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
America eliminates the artificially cheap source of oil China was using to industrialize at our expense. America eliminates a major provider of arms to Russia.
This is getting sad.
Russian drones are made in Russia (with Chinese components). Modern Gerans have little in common with Shahed-136, Iran provided the initial IP, not current supply. You're literally just regurgitating propaganda headlines, in this case "primitive Russians can't make drones and depend on Iranian industry".
And what "at our expense"? You mean at the expense of sanctions you put on Iranian oil, making China the buyer of last resort?
The return on investment here is immeasurable. It almost can’t be measured in money because it is the thing on which money itself has value. America will be in the most dominant global position it has ever been, a new apogee of power.
Very well, let us see.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
People on Twitter might treat Trump like a liar who can’t be trusted. Interestingly this perspective is not shared by e.g., Iranian negotiators
However, Araghchi and Ghalibaf do routinely post on Twitter to the effect that he's a liar and can't be trusted. And given that they did not reopen the strait, nor surrender, after the "civilization will die" threat, and instead issued a pretty ludicrous list of demands (and we know now they did issue that list, since they refused to open the Strait until terms like Lebanon were honored, for one thing), I'd say they believe he's a liar who can't be trusted. So what are you talking about?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
You sure could nuke them. In fact, as a non-Iranian, I wouldn't mind seeing this. It is a very flashy way to admit (an unnecessary) conventional defeat and speed up nuclear proliferation and the collapse of your world-system.
The problem is that Trump, for all his faults, doesn't really want to nuke anyone. And even if he could credibly threaten to nuke – the current Iranian leader had barely survived an attack that had wiped out his family. He's well aware the US and Israel have the means to kill with impunity. Do you seriously think more naked intimidation will work? Do you have no theory of mind for men?
In the middle of the war he secured an alliance with Indonesia. America now controls Panama, Malacca, and Taiwan and is in the process of controlling Hormuz. The world’s great supply chain chokepoints.
Oh, in the middle of the war. Way to undermine your "smart geopolitically sophisticated Trump voter" posture.
First, this is not an "alliance" but a defense agreement. Read the terms. Indonesia gains a capability boost. You get… what? For example, you don't get an overflight permit:
RRI.CO.ID, Jakarta - Indonesian Ministry of Defense confirmed that U.S. aircraft overflight permits are not part of the newly signed Major Defense Cooperation Partnership (MDCP) between Indonesia and the United States. Officials stressed that sovereignty remains the government’s priority.
The Ministry's Defense Information Bureau Head Brig. Gen. Rico Ricardo Sirait said that the agreement does not include provisions for U.S. aircraft to fly over Indonesian airspace. “The MDCP does not cover overflight clearances,” he said on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, as quoted by Antara.
Rico emphasized that any future decision on airspace access will be guided by sovereignty, national interests, and compliance with Indonesian and international law. “All cooperation must deliver tangible benefits for Indonesia without compromising sovereignty or independent foreign policy,” he said.
He added that the MDCP offers opportunities to strengthen Indonesia’s defense capacity, improve weapon systems, and enhance military education and training, while reinforcing long-standing defense ties with the U.S.
Second, such things are not done in a rush. The negotiations have started October 31 2025 at the latest. Moreover, it's a relatively routine continuation of partnerships between the US and Indonesia, following such deals as the 2010 Defense Framework Arrangement, 2015 Joint Statement on Comprehensive Defense Cooperation, and Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of 2023. A bit earlier in October 2025, Jakarta has claimed they'll be buying Chinese jets. They're friendly to the US, but rather opportunistic fair-weather friends and have deals with a large array of countries. For example:
Russian Navy vessels arrive in Indonesia for rare bilateral drills By Ridzwan Rahmat | 01 April 2026
In a statement on 31 March, the Indonesian Navy described the visit as a symbol of growing defence ties between the two militaries.
“The presence of three Russian Federation warships in Jakarta is not merely a port call, but a strong symbol of bilateral relations,” Rear Admiral Uki Prasetia, Commander of the Indonesian Navy's Third Naval Area Command, said.
“We hope that synergies between the Indonesian Navy and the Russian Federation Navy will continue to deepen and also serve as a platform for positive cultural exchange,” he added.
All vessels in the delegation are operated by Russia's Pacific Fleet and are scheduled for a series of bilateral engagements including subject matter expert lectures, mutual ship visits, and naval drills.
The deeper meaning of the visit lies in Indonesia’s continuing effort to practise multi-vector defence diplomacy, engaging different major powers across the maritime domain without binding itself into an exclusive security architecture.
That approach is particularly important for a state sitting astride critical sea lanes, because Indonesia’s geography makes naval neutrality, maritime access management, and diversified security relationships central to its broader national resilience. By receiving Russian naval units while maintaining other defence relationships across the region and beyond, Jakarta reinforces the message that its foreign and defence policies remain sovereign, transactional, and rooted in national rather than bloc priorities.
Third, under Trump Indonesia has become even more pro-China than it was. In The State of Southeast Asia Survey Report, there's an annual question "If ASEAN were forced to align itself with one of the strategic rivals, which should it choose?". A year ago, 72.2% of surveyed Indonesians answered "China" (this was done right before the Liberation Day tariffs, where ASEAN in general and Indonesia in particular got fucked hard, and had to do a demeaning deal). Now it's 80.1%*. Malaysia slipped from 70.8% to 68.0%, though – good job there. Meanwhile Singapore, the only one which was more pro-US, has completely flipped, from 47.1% to 66.3% (what the hell, honestly). Those are the three states controlling the Strait of Malacca. (Overall ASEAN has gone to 52% in favor of China). Do you really think you're getting them on board with some blockade? When China is their economic lifeline, the natural regional hegemon and the 800 pound gorilla, and you've got a stable genius in control?
*correction, it was 80.1% before the beginning of the war with Iran, horrific fuel shortages throughout ASEAN, rapid depletion of US arsenal and the removal of THAAD from Korea (which, to remind you, had paid dearly for accepting said THAAD despite Chinese protests). I really wonder what ISEAS'2027 survey will be like! I predict 60% overall for ASEAN, and above 75% in the Strait.
This was just a little illustration of how much context there can be for every triumphalist Patriotic headline.
You have to realize that you're living in a MAGA information bubble where things get reported selectively and strategically, to construct a narrative. Things are even made happen to the same end. Trump urgently needs a Win to bolster morale of the Patriots, so he reaches into a cache of prefab "wins" and – aha, MDCP! – takes out one to present you as part of a 4D chess plan. It's not substantially different from his Truth Social posts where he says that the Strait is open or in the process of being opened three times a week. Trump himself is a victim of the same bubble, so he gets excited like a baby by videos of big explosions until it's clear even to him that the war is becoming a quagmire. You're expertly cheerleading for a pro wrestler who's deluded himself into thinking he really is a martial artist.
The might not, but clearly the theory that America is losing and will cut its losses is falsified already by the fact that America hasn’t surrendered yet.
The problem with surrendering to Iranian terms – or indeed, just ignoring Iran and leaving – is that this discredits the entire American Empire project, it is an admission of weakness following foolishness. You've already discredited the Empire a great deal with extracting THAAD missiles from Korea and freezing paid-for supplies to Europe, that's an unfalsifiable demonstration that you cannot currently sustain a high-intensity war against a peer adversary. But there's the cope that if Iran is vanquished or forced to accept some tolerable terms (which allow the US or Israel to repeat the aggression after replenishing the stockpiles, that is), the US will salvage its global standing. It's false, but just giving up will, of course, genuinely be worse. The longer this goes, the greater is the cost of cutting losses, and the greater the incentive to "see it through to the end". So you're simply stuck. It's not an enviable position to have.
Hard to imagine how American military planners weren’t aware that Iran would try to close the straits when this was the central fact of American war planning with Iran for 50 years.
Certainly, this was known, which is why everyone with half a brain in the admin told Trump that the war is a bad idea and Israelis are full of shit. However:
After a persuasive February briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Situation Room, and repeated conversations with a group of outside allies that included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had “won” in Venezuela, where the U.S. had, in a matter of hours, captured its president and ended with his more compliant deputy in his place. ---
Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable. He has publicly oscillated between demanding support from allies to help open it and insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need or want military assistance.
Trump is not the avatar of the great machinery of the United States Government. Remember: he's the guy you elected to drain the swamp.
P.S. It's unclear if you control Panama either.
P.P.S. Regarding the control of Taiwan, KMT is likely to win. Kuomintang Chair Cheng Li-wun has just met with Xi in Beijing, delivering a very interesting speech:
Today, after a lapse of ten years, leaders of our two parties are once again able to come together under the same roof for exchanges. …… The 15th Five-Year Plan has just begun, and it will surely take development to a new level. It is something well worth looking forward to. Although people on the two sides of the Strait live under different systems, we shall respect one another and also move toward one another. I believe that peace is a shared moral principle and shared value across the Strait. Both sides should rise above political confrontation and work together to think through and build a win-win and prosperous cross-Strait “community of shared future”, while seeking an institutional solution to prevent and avert war, so that the Taiwan Strait may become a model for the peaceful resolution of conflict in the world. …… Today I came to the Mainland at the invitation of General Secretary Xi as the representative of the Kuomintang. So, in my capacity as Chair of the Kuomintang, I naturally also hope that, following another rotation of parties in government in the future, I may be able to invite General Secretary Xi to visit Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu.
Make of that what you will.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Looking at the situation from Mars – isn't it a bit bizarre how so much attention is paid to antisemitism, how it's studied, dissected, treatments sought? Jews are a tiny global minority, they're a tiny minority even in their region. Zionists are a small minority. Generally speaking, such a thing as non-Jewish Zionism shouldn't even exist – we don't have a lot of, I don't know, Magyarists among non-Hungarians, constantly working to ensure that Hungary survives and cannot face any strategic threat from their neighbors. If Jews reliably evoke "Antisemitism" among people with completely different belief systems, from Communists to the far right, from Arabs to Scandinavians, from boomer Democrats to zoomer Republicans, from Beijing to Madrid – isn't the behavior of Jews deserving of much more scrutiny? Isn't the onus on them to prove that they should not be hated? Any other nation so widely hated is usually known to be doing some transparently objectionable bullshit. Yes, Jews have some sort of internal discourse about antisemitism, about Amalek, online radicalization and whatever. But – why does anyone else need to care? Everyone has justifications.
Of course the masses can be wrong and often are when they oppose some select group or thing. But why would we assume that the masses of Jews are less wrong? En masse, Israeli Jews don't even have high IQ, nor do they belong to a Western culture. These are nth generation European transplants, locals, various peoples like Yemenites (eg the notorious Ben-Gvir), the Haredi who exist outside of any civilization…
I don't see the argument for even considering this as a real question. Zionists don't operate on a theory anyway.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Opus is increasing end-user costs, not just changing the tokenizer
Is it? Is it now? For example, on this bench Opus 4.7 is almost as strong as Opus 4.6 but 8.3x cheaper, because it uses vastly fewer tokens. How does this fit into your theory?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Sophistry is not religious either.
I don't want to make a definition for this category because it's very loose, but basically it's "attempts at recursively improving your understanding via introspective self-play starting from a given set of verbal premises, without any significant role for procedures of updating on empirical, physical evidence".
One can see how this might well work in fields which really don't need an empirical physical component, such as math. Physics can inspire new subdomains of math, but strictly speaking we don't need this. An AI could train on its own data (+ easy verifiers and just corrected majority voting), entirely autonomously, to become an ever stronger mathematician.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
We have a good idea of how to train AI to solve mathematical problems, of virtually unbounded complexity. In the course of this, AI clearly learns "techniques" as shown here, if not "theories". I don't think King's prowess is theory-driven either, but in any case we don't have a good idea of how to train AI to be a good prose writer. We have some ideas, but are unlikely to act on them. There's not much money to be made in it, and plenty of highly motivated enmity – AI is already widely hated. and yes, autoregressive generation for the prompt "write like King" is not like King actually writing a novel. We have such tricks though.
My point is, it's not a general principle that AI will only rehash human techniques in some uninspired "probabilistic" way. If there is a hill to climb, such that "good" and "bad" outputs with regard to the problem statement can be distinguished, AI can bumble its way up the hill and also find new tricks. We've seen this before LLMs, with AlphaGo and move 37, we're starting to see it with LLMs.
while AIs appear to generate text using probabilistic hacks.
Human mind runs entirely on probabilistic mush. Neural networks were invented as approximation of our own approximate learning. But probabilistic decision processes can have clear enough decision boundaries that they become able to operate with "abstractions", "symbols" or "theories". They also remain able to fail. For example, you are failing to update on evidence, because you haven't been trained to take input like "Terry Tao is surprised" seriously and think it's infinitely less interesting than your preconceived notions, basically some dweeb noise. Unlike an LLM, you can update at lifetime, so maybe you'll reread the above post and see how it contradicts your position.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
1mo ago
Could you at least add more substance than "Opus changed tokenizer, therefore, as I've already said, AI is a bubble"?
Most of it obviously happens in Latin America, Nessus is often mapped to Buenos Aires. There are alternative theories, of course.
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