DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6hr ago
We have an ASI benchmark, courtesy of ByteDance Seed. Or rather, a framework for one. https://edge-bench.org/ has no ceiling.
Though what does it matter? The steam hammer won.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18hr ago
It's difficult to have a discussion about this when you ignore the details from the actual proposals in favor of advocating for stuff they aren't doing when it's convenient
You know what, fair enough. Let's ignore Starcloud since this is primarily about SpaceX. They've just issued a concrete design: Starmind
• 150 kW peak compute payload
• 120 kW average compute payload
• 70 kW per ton
• Wingspan: 70 meters
• Deployed height: 20 meters
• 110 m² deployable liquid radiator
• Redundant pumping loops
• Integrated micrometeoroid shielding
• 150 kW solar array
• 250 W/m²
• High-speed laser links interconnect satellites and beam AI results back to Earth through Starlink. Low-latency, high-bandwidth connection
• SpaceX-manufactured solar technology from Bastrop, Texas
So, that's 917 square meters of radiator per 1 (sustained) megawatt, and more importantly 70 kW of capacity per ton, at SSO. I see Starship has the theoretical capacity of 40-60 tons to SSO, let's say 50. At, say, $200/kg that's $8M to deliver 2.8 MW of compute. As per Jensen, 1 MW can go for $100M. There's plenty of slack in this. Even if Jensen is off by an order of magnitude, the "getting it into space" part is almost a rounding error and can make straightforward sense given terrestial/political constraints.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
23hr ago
Elon himself is very well aware of this. I sometimes say that he's spiritually Chinese, which is lost on his greatest admirers in the West, who imagine his success is due to some brilliant insights. No, it's similar to what guys like Lei Jun do, just with American capital scale and more chutzpah. It's maybe the most potent recipe there exists.
Fundamentally, manufacturing is underrated and design is overrated. So people generally think that there's like this Eureka moment of you come up with this idea and and that's it, now it's good. But as good as a design is, it could literally be that a thousand percent, maybe ten thousand percent more work that goes into the production system of the thing itself. So, how much effort we've put into say designing Rapor, versus the manufacturing system? Uh it's ten to a hundred times more effort to design manufacturing systems than the engine.
– Even for Raptor?!
– Oh yeah, absolutely ESPECIALLY for Raptor. The amount of effort that goes into the design rounds down to zero. Relative to the amount of effort that goes into manufacturing. Yeah. If this is not true, great, I'd like uh a thousand Raptors. Uh oh we can't make them? Oh alright. This is like just very fundamentally underappreciated. If people have not been in manufacturing, especially manufacturing of something that's uh relatively new, then they don't understand and they they think the design is the hard part and they think production is like the copier or something like that. This isn't said enough, I'm trying to correct the misconception that design is the hard part, it is not the hard part. Uh, there's been lots of great rocket engine designs. I've spent a lot of time looking at the Russian rocket engine designs. There's some amazing Russian rocket designs. They've been doing stage combustion for a long time, yeah. And they've done I don't know, hundreds of different designs. So the the hard thing is not any design of staged combustion. This has been done. Yeah. Um now admittedly our is higher pressure than before and it is a full flow combustion. But these are, that that's a relatively minor increment relative to what the Russians have already done. Right. What is super hard about Raptor is uh, how do we make a Raptor where the cost per ton of thrust is under a thousand dollars.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
I don't challenge your reasoning for making resolvable bets, my problem is that they don't have much relation to the interesting question. This is the usual forecasting problem.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc.
All of these efforts being meh (so far) is not very informative. Cybertruck is just a goofy car, there's only so much you can achieve by making a big electric pickup with edgy body panels. It adds very little to Tesla's current position. Car people are somewhat insane in paying so much attention to car models. FSD works, Waymo is reportedly great, so Tesla robotaxi also could work. Optimus is a legitimately good robot, it's just not the time for robots yet, and China is way ahead of Elon on the entire robot supply chain except high-end chips (both the brain and external compute). Starship is a categorical breakthrough in space logistics, which is the one area where Elon is far ahead of the competition already. There is no way for others to overtake him on any reasonable timeline.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out?
He did, and no doubt their data has contributed a lot. But the base model is in-house, and I see that RL was done on xAI's stack. This is impressive because the original xAI team has completely fallen apart, there was the impression that xAI has become a mere compute provider for Anthropic. He has crashed and rebuilt a near-frontier lab from the ruins. This suggests at the very least good capability for delegation outside the hardware domain.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
I don't really understand what drives a man to repost second hand all caps claims. I'm not even saying that he didn't say this, but surely you must understand that this is simply not convincing to anyone?
I was too lazy to de-caps it, and I hope that people of this forum will find the issue of the costs of 1 gigawatt of capacity on Earth more salient than the funny detail about all caps.
Problems of space compute have straightforward engineering solutions, the costs of which can be estimated. Whether these solutions are worth the cost depends on the costs of building the same capacity on Earth. So arguments about radiator area, micrometeorite damage or coolant mass are kind of… weightless unless grounded in comparison to the baseline.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
The orbital centers may look cheaper in back-of-napkin calculations right now, but only because battery prices haven't yet crashed as far as solar panel prices have and chip prices are so high that you want to run everything on a 100% duty cycle
Solar prices are already creeping up as China has ended subsidies and the global demand is surging. The Chinese will do all they can but at the end of the day PV panels have scarce physical inputs (like silver). The lowest realistic price for batteries that I've seen was something like $15/kWh (if Sodium-Ion works out at scale). That's about $300000 for year-round battery+solar 1MWh supply (given seasonality and losses), probably more. Plus immensely more costly solar installation (lower area efficiency, overbuilding due to day-night and seasonal cycles, weather protection, land)…
Might as well just yeet it into orbit.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
Uh, okay. Manhattan has an area of 20 square miles. What's the relevance to space radiators?
It matters because it deflates the context-free appeal to "omg 2000 square meters". Ok. 2000 square meters is just 40 * 50 meters. Is this supposed to be a lot?
I think it's quite clear that mass is not the concern I raised wrt the size of the radiators
It's not clear, because mass is the only interesting concern there is. Drag, too, is an issue of mass (for ion thruster fuel). Your link says: "And that’s the best-case scenario. Additional problems are hidden in the low Earth orbit environment itself. Space exposes radiators and their coatings to a chemically hostile brew of ultraviolet light and atomic oxygen, quite the opposite of a clean-room environment. Over a LEO satellite’s typical 5-year lifespan, these elements degrade the radiator’s surface properties and lower its ability to shed heat. … Including this degradation in the model reveals that as the radiator degrades from a “fresh” state to an “end-of-life” state, the physics demands a further penalty. To maintain that same 60 °C operating temperature for the GPU chips, the required surface area jumps from about 1.4 square meters per chip to nearly 2.0 square meters. In other words, the physics tax rises by 40 percent. Therefore, you must launch at least 40 percent more radiator mass, endure higher atmospheric drag, and sacrifice valuable launch volume just to survive the degradation of the thermal coating."
Or you can simply launch a little higher. No matter how you cut it, it's all ultimately about mass.
Huge radiators cause drag and are vulnerable to micrometeorites
Huge solar panels cause drag and are also vulnerable to micrometeorites. This issue, just like the radiator issue, is negligible. Neither solar panels nor radiators lose function quickly from random point damage. At, say, 500 km the lifetime of an inference node with several thousand square meters of total area can be a decade. How much economic value does a decade of compute with free power provide? That, cost per kilogram to orbit, and costs of hardware are all that matters.
Since you dislike X, I'll cite it again. NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG: 1GW AI FACTORY ON NVIDIA ARCHITECTURE COULD COST NEARLY $100 BILLION
So, maybe $450B for that 5 GW you talked about. Cooling alone is likely a fifth of that. I guess popular reporting can create the impression that Americans are actually standing up tens of gigawatts of capacity without problem, like so much coal plants in China. This is not, in fact, happening. Most Blackwell compute is still not operational. All this space math only matters in relations to costs on Earth.
but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”.
I am sincerely curious: are you a conspiracy theorist? Do you think Musk, Jensen Huang, Google and everyone else are in on the joke, just peddling a physically nonsensical project because they know that the target audience (VCs) has the intuitions of an illiterate Ghanaian child? Is this the great blessing of living in a nation with a perfected cognitive sort – almost everyone can be clueless, but anyone can make 6 figures?
But space really is cold, by the way. 2.7K. It's not like your Stanley "vacuum" that has room temperature. Radiative cooling doesn't work when the radiated heat radiates right back at you. You've never actually touched cold vacuum, and yes it is a meaningful notion. In the vacuum of space, you radiate and lose energy like a long-wave infrared heater, and very quickly die. The cartoons are correct on this account, they just conflate "vacuum of space" and "absence of air".
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters
I've unblocked you just to respond to this, though I don't remember why I blocked you in the first place.
In short, even if we assume 2000 square meters, this is nothing. Ascend 950 SuperPod has an area of 1000 square meters for the actual scale-up compute unit that works as one GPU.
«Redwire Q-Rad Deployable Radiator (commercial, TRL 5-6): 3.5–4.9 kg/m² areal density. Source: Redwire radiator datasheet lists; brackets our StarThink V1 assumption as plausible near-term path.» Let's say 4. This is just 8 fucking tons. This is peanuts. At $100/kg it'd be merely $800000 for delivery, 8% of Starship capacity, or four more big Starlinks. 1 megawatt of compute costs… let's see, a modern-ish GPU that draws 1 kW in a rack can go for $20K at least, and actually we'll see prices creep towards $50K. Well there you have it, $20 million as the floor (and GPUs are just ≈40% of BOM). 1 megawatt is 8760 MWh/year. Google tells me wholesale electricity in the US is like $45. Almost $400K a year of free power. None of this matters of course, when inference margins are >80% even with hardware depreciation, and all that matters is deploying as fast as possible, as much as possible.
You don't know the relevant numbers in any of the involved verticals, and for some reason (unfathomable to me) you want to believe that the numbers support your (quixotic but perplexingly popular) case against compute in space. They don't.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.
Why do you think you can just say this and not show the math for radiative cooling? The prose about stray cats and sex in a vacuum is cute, again, very Russian-engineer-coded, but the boring reality is that a Starlink satellite is substantially made of, well, chips, which do computations, and it dissipates just fine with a primitive one-sided radiator on the hull. How do you imagine anything ever works in space? How does ISS work? Do you believe that 20 kW is workable but 120 is where physical limits kick in? Care to show this? For example:
Net heat rejection per square meter:
q_net = ε σ (T_rad⁴ – T_sink⁴) – q_env
From there, two quick steps give us the mass:
Required radiator area: A_rad = Q_waste / q_net Radiator mass: m_rad = A_rad × (kg/m² areal density)
At 295 K (est. Starlink V3 baseline), net heat flux is 288 W/m².
At 350 to 355 K StarThink (V1/V2), net heat flux rises to 484 to 569 W/m²
Staying at 295 K would require about 828 m² (StarThink V1) and 1209 m² (StarThink V2) of radiator area. The model’s higher-temperature operation cuts that to 72 m² and 129 m², a massive difference.
…… Near-term, ≈50 kW/ton designs can be closed with conservative assumptions: two-sided, ε ≈0.9, 4 kg/m² areal density at 370 K operation.
This is an engineering question. And your objection is the «Mars has radiation, bet you never thought about that eh» tier smug dismissal, it's plainly disrespectful and incurious. I suspect that you thought of that one too, well, I recommend to read on Suncatcher.
Other items are also trivial.
The fact is that the US cannot compete with China on power generation in the medium term due to political schizophrenia, pathetic industrial base outside some bloated military supply chains and third world logistics at sufficiently low cost per kilogram to orbit, yeeting inference nodes into one makes straightforward economic sense. Freed from gravity, atmosphere, moisture and hail hazard, solar panels become like 50 times more effective per unit of mass (likely more because you can move to lighter substrates). You don't need batteries with 24/7 noon. You don't need cabling. You don't even need a lot of structure.
You have it entirely backwards. Having sex in spacesuits is what we have been doing all this time, running electronics in the wet dirt. Carbon life is made for Earth. Metals prefer the orbit and vacuum.
I haven't been following Starship progress over the last 12 months, and all your bets are essentially bets about timing, which is contingent on uninteresting factors like the political environment, Elon's newest distractions (attention and finance wise), stochastic problems and causes for caution, so I won't comment on them. Ignore if you're in this for the pure love of the game.
But bets aside, you make a categorical prediction:
I totally disagree with the conclusion. First of all, we are literally living in the time where one man's vision is about to revolutionize space travel by making a rocket that can lift 100 tons of payload to LEO.
No we're not. It's not going to happen.
Have you elucidated your logic anywhere?
I'm afraid you have a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome. I see it a lot on X. Musk has a lot (as in, millions, a significant percent of X population) of extremely annoying fanboys of the lowest castes – crypto bros boosting #grok who got rich off $DOGE pumps, bots, edgy right-wingers, desperate $TSLA investors who are literally, well, invested in his success. He is obnoxious himself, prone to making false promises, grandiosity and loathsome behavior. So there's a reactionary cohort that naysays everything he does. But isn't this beneath human dignity to let that influence the judgement of the technical project such as Starship?
Starship, at this point, essentially can't not work. We know of no compelling reason why it won't, and a plethora of reasons why it will. Exactly a decade ago, there was vigorous skepticism that Falcon program can work. Russians in particular, being pathologically proud of Soviet space industry, dunked on the idea of rocket reusability with our typical overwrought literary wit, which hopefully can evoke some cringe in you today:
The Flying Spaghetti Monster of Elon Musk
My young reader! Of course you attend a rocket-modeling club, and you're curious why Russian engineers laugh like horses at this Canadian schmuck Elon Musk—in the engineering sense, not in the sense of a clever swindler who has shoved the Invisible Hand of the Market elbow-deep into the American budget. (And if only he'd stayed within the American budget, along with his patrons in Congress—God bless them, those light-fingered little thieves—but we're going to talk about the actual engineering nuances, the kind nobody bothers to remember in the age of "qualified consumers.")
First, the boring part.
Rocket engineering, as a branch of mechanical engineering, incorporates the knowledge and technologies of metalworking, materials science, instrument-making, mathematical modeling, flaw detection, and so on. Every last squeak in this industry is protected by patents—often umbrella patents. All parts, assemblies, and finished products are tested repeatedly on ultra-expensive test rigs, with their own requirements, restrictions, tolerances and fits. This knowledge accumulates over years and decades, and the whole complex costs not merely hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars—government trillions, trillions out of the American people's pocket.
But if you, as a government lobbyist, have a trillion-dollar NASA at your disposal, which, being a government organization, is accountable to a bunch of stern doctor-auditors, and yet you really, really want to steal, then you need to come up with some ultra-expensive project that can be inflated on the stock exchange like a toad through a straw, while simultaneously pumping money out of the budget.
To do this, you:
- hire a chatty dude with shining eyes,
- hire a team of PR people, "dezigners," and others as energetic as they are unprincipled,
- register a private company in California—and this private company is not obligated to disclose the details of its financial health (heh heh),
- dump into this outfit: patents, technologies, completed projects, technical documentation (thousands of volumes and hundreds of thousands of blueprints—but since this constitutes the most shameless privatization of state intellectual property worth hundreds of billions of dollars from the people's pocket, you declare the chatty dude a super-duper Inventor), and ready-made teams of real inventors (this is important—whole teams at once) taken directly from NASA,
It goes on for a while but the conclusion is obvious already: Falcon is Another American Grift, the metal will get le tired, defect inspection will be prohibitively costly, the construction is suboptimal modulo reusability, and anyway the first landed unit didn't qualify for reuse, so QED. Coming from an engineer by training, this all sounded persuasive to my engineer friends at the time. To me, it sounded like status anxiety. It sounds quaint today, when Booster B1067 has a record of 35 launches, when Falcons provide the majority of LEO lift capacity for the planet, when the shortest turnaround is a bit over a week, and the safety track record of Falcon has exceeded that of Soyuz, painstaikingly built over half a century. The metal seems really vigorous and not tired at all. My understanding is that Elon's hypothesis was: all of the industry was thinking too small, these paranoid quality standards and laborious procedures are mostly downstream of cost ker kilogram to orbit, you can just do propulsive landing well enough that the vehicle takes negligible damage, and this unlocks a whole different regime of unit economics; and this is a mere issue of engineering. Seems like he was just correct. Then Starlink happened. Similar dismissals, similar outcome, SpaceX acquires the perfect demand sink and revenue stream and can seriously invest into what is functionally and economically near-equivalent to a reusable SSTO with 100+ tons of payload. But you know Starship's pitch, of course, and how it renders SLS and all other alternatives obsolete. Mars or Moon – in the context of full reusability with these payloads, does it even matter? These are mission details, what is important is what kinds of missions you can begin to plan at all at $1000/kg to LEO, at $100/kg, at $50/kg… and, much as I loathe to agree with @Shakes, the military can come up with quite a few. «Spy catellites» is thinking too small, for sure. On the civilian side, the space compute idea will genuinely work too, given political and logistic problems with terrestial datacenters in the US – and the objections to it are more motivated thinking, not solid engineering or bottom-line costs analysis; and this can trivially become another Starlink. You can start to actually think about microgravity manufacturing, as well. There is a lot to do in space, once you can get there cheaply. The last Starship feat that I've watched was the chopstick capture, it looked like they're really close to maturity. It can take a year or 5 years, but the probability of Elon running out of capital on the way there in the American system is… remote. So what's the actual crux? You say it's not scaleable and cite an article about Raptor production from 2021. They're on Raptor 3 now, all the concerns in that email are, far as I can tell, obsolete. Do you have some physics-driven argument as to why Falcon works but Starship does not? I am confident that you don't, because I've never seen any and apparently neither have SpaceX's investors, for all the hate Elon gets.
There is another strong reason to think that Starship can work. We had more ambitious designs in the 20th century, and today other companies are doing similar things. New Glenn works, 9x4 will haul 70 tons, and although they've had a setback with explosion on the pad, Bezos will see to it that they recover, they have their own constellation program that adds urgency, and will need heavy lift capability. More saliently, LandSpace has a pretty well-validated engine of roughly Raptor 2 class, and plans to use it in a Starship-class rocket somewhere after 2030; this far they've been fast-following SpaceX at a crazy pace, they've started in 2015 and have actually put the first methalox-powered rocket in orbit (3 years ago), so I'm optimistic about this schedule. Within a month they will likely make their second attempt at landing ZQ-3, which is basically a Falcon-9 with Starship characteristics (steel body, methalox). The first one failed in Dec 2025, but it was close and Elon himself said it's potentially better than Falcon. If they succeed, no doubt this boosts Elon's standing with the government and military again, because that'll make China the second power with reusable rocketry, and we can't allow a reusable rocket gap, can we? And if Starship doesn't work, then the gap is extremely likely - China can weld steel cylinders at scale and mass produce engines like nobody's business, like look at their shipbuilding or the recent pace of fighter jet delivery (they make ≈100 J-20s per year now, which above the total F-35 program output in 2024, though 2025 was a big year for LM with 191; and recall that J-20 is a massive twin-engine). They have something like 20 private companies competing for the launch provider market. On the state side, CASC's CZ-10B likely does its own launch and barge landing (very interesting mechanism by the way, initially explored by the US, abandoned) this week. CASC has a whole family of partially reusable Falcon-esque rockets in the pipeline (10A, 12A, 12B, maybe 8) and a very Starship-like superheavy CZ-9. They even have plans for space-based solar and compute. Regardless of how all this goes (I'm personally bearish on Chinese rocketry aside from LandSpace), it obviously bolsters Elon's narrative. In light of this, I don't even think the speculations about future Democratic hostility are convincing – the US has strong bipartisan support for any anti-China and arms-race-with-China initiative; Biden tightened the screws of Trump-1's trade war, Trump-2 didn't touch Biden's export controls. So Starship will almost certainly keep being funded and the only thing that can kill it is physics.
In sum, I'd like you to spell out your bear case that survives these objections.
P.S. SpaceXAI (what a lousy name) has just released a frontier LLM, I can vouch for it being genuinely on the same tier as Anthropic/OpenAI's latest (Fable/5.6 excluded), and with Chinese open source costs. Elon: «Grok groks engineering. Next month’s release will be another step-change improvement, as we close the loop on solving real-world engineering problems at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Company.»
I have seen enough of his empty promises, but it does feel qualitatively different, an unexpected closing of the gap. He's still got it.
P.P.S. China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology's Long March 10B's first stage has just been recovered by their clever net capture barge, making China the second nation with reusable rocket technology. This, of course, is bullish for SpaceX.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7d ago
but I'm trying to make a larger point: China is supposedly on the cusp of global dominance, OK, where are all the people learning Chinese? Globally, who is actually adapting to a future of Chinese supremacy?
Well I disagree with your point because people who matter do. Russian elite is supposedly hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies for their children. American elite – Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trumps – do the same. Some random Africans do. TraceWoodgrains did, like a quarter of this forum did. Hell, you did to an extent. High agency people learn Chinese. An average American isn't doing international business and needn't even be verbal or numerate (or independently physically mobile) to live a good fat life, so of course there's little demand for Mandarin in those circles. But Germans thought similarly, and where are they now? China is kicking them out of their main industrial markets, for all their racist hubris about "German quality" and, I bet, smug sense of superiority when they heard a Chinese engineer humbly speaking German just to accommodate them. A lesson in there.
More boringly, we live in an age where technology seems certain to make multilingualism a rather worthless skill. Real-time AI translation is getting really good.
Nuclear weapons and the power grid. Satellites and rockets. Cell phones and social media. Now it's AI and Falcon.
And what beyond AI and Falcon? That's your last frontier now. They're roughly where you were in 1980 in GDP per capita, and yet the technological gap has shrunk to about 5 years. The best current Chinese AI model is 6-8 months behind. They have a Raptor 2 class engine in testing, will probably land a rocket this month, and also show a Blackwell-level AI training cluster. They're even building fighter jets faster than you now, and people with a clue say that copes about J-20 or J-35 being junk or "not really 5th gen" will get people killed. It just, I dunno, it doesn't look intimidating. Pull out some other rabbit out of this future hat. The entire US is becoming an overleveraged bet on transformative AGI, and I'm not sure <12 months of lead will be enough for… whatever it is the plan is.
it is not the case at all that China is obviously poised to take over the future and America can't do anything but sit in the corner and watch
That is true but in practice American countermeasures mostly amount to tariffs, more tariffs on third parties, subsidies, export controls, and hare-brained attempts to rally or strongarm the "allies". Which is rather amateurish and primitive compared to their model of governance. Americans acting != Americans acting effiiciently.
This is not to deny China the incredible progress they have made modernizing, but to notice that at no point has China actually been in the driver's seat. … And it's reasonable to notice that most of China's development is merely copying what the West has produced first.
Have you considered that one reason China copies good stuff from the West/US but the opposite doesn't happen is simply that you can't, even if you honestly try, which you often don't because of hubris and brainwashing that prevent you from the recognition of a shortcoming? You're not a very adaptive society. You can't copy meritocracy, because it's at odds with democracy. You can talk about "wake-up calls" for decades but can't develop industrial policy that isn't just picking winners or corruption with extra steps, so you cope that this is what they do too. You can't have a decent drone manufacturer even after years of handwringing about the natsec threat of DJI. You can't form a non-primitive theory of how subsidies work, and you are still coping about "cheap peasant labor" after their wages grew 17x and the competitiveness didn't budge. Your solution to your fentanyl epidemic was begging China to help out on their end. You can't copy the "don't start pointless wars with no theory of victory" trick, and you've even lost the basic Western technology of recognizing failure instead of saving face. You famously can't build the high speed rail system or the secure quantum communication network, though I agree that's unnecessary. Over roughly 8 years of the trade war and "decoupling", more of "friend-shoring", you've become more dependent on their supply chains for your core, singular Hail Mary bet against them, but not the other way around, and your elites are still confused as to what is happening and believe the solution is more Being Tough On China. It's hard for you to reform the FDA the way they did their reforms – though you are trying, yes you are reacting to copy Chinese policy, yes there is a "we much copy the Chinese" mindset in some strata already. I think there'll be more of that; Trump clearly envies Xi in many ways, and one of his few great personal qualities is that he's not invested in saving face for the nation of the United States or for the American people, his ego is too big to care about you, so maybe he'll succeed somewhat just to make simself look good on merit of fixing the mess. But again, hard without meritocracy, surrounded by mediocre sniveling viziers. Trumpism is a very Oriental phenomenon.
And it's reasonable to notice that Chinese science still has deep structural problems that have to be overcome.
I wouldn't worry about their science. It's well-funded, it has a path to commercialization and it's flush with talent. That's everything that made American science great, except more so.
And what happens when China's population begins to age and the economy stagnates and someone has to replace Xi Jinping?
I wanted to call out an inconsistency but actually if you think they're far behind in AI, I guess this makes sense. America will have AGI and a new century of greatnessl the Chinese, being incapable of Real Progress, will have a "demographic crisis". Nevermind that they're running circles around the entire world in robotics.
What happens when tariffs from the West and export restrictions eat into the easy margins
Well that's plausible, if pointless except for getting to China. then they'll raise their own export controls (as they already do sometimes) and keep exporting to the entire rest of the world, watching as "the West" collapses like a house of cards, I guess. We've seen a small scale test with Nexperia. I repeat, this is insane hubris. The reason China is relevant today is their own productivity owing to human capital and adequate governance, not some charity from the West and certainly not minor market access tricks.
Right, so what? America also has companies that outperform India, Japan, and all of the EU in AI.
Just the point that their talent is not particularly valuable. They don't produce a lot of talent. Just how it is.
It was never close at all. Moreover, Japan was even an ally. At the time that Japanese auto companies were disrupting Detroit, American soldiers were stationed in Okinawa. Japan competed with America because America allowed it to happen, because that is the global system America set up.
This is more tryhard grandiosity and frankly close to "But I did have breakfast this morning" reasoning. You lost Detroit auto industry not because you casually permitted it to happen out of some leonine generosity towards an ally. The Japanese just were better and took it away. They were getting likewise better in chips. That you have imperial means of compelling Japan is irrelevant for purposes of the argument because you don't have such means in China, nor soldiers in Shanghai. So the real comparison you should make is to "how would we fare if we could NOT compel Japan AT ALL".
You proclaim that China is larger than America, but China is not larger than the global system at which America is the center. Yes, America is the center
This is, hilariously enough, a very traditional Chinese posture, almost word for word. They tried this thing with tributary states, it was net negative. The job of the champion is to be able to bear all the costs of hegemony alone, only then do the vassals feel emboldened to contribute; if the champion retreats, he risks provoking a rout. You've already retreated a few times in the last 2 years. You're the center of a world-system where a treaty-bound ally can deny his airspace to your air force. This isn't a system you own or control, it's just something you earn rent on.
has not even properly begun to contest and replace America. It will take a generation or more for China to mature into this task, if it is ever ready, if it can ever be ready.
China has replaced the US as the physical center of the industrial civilization over the last generation. That is strength, that is what is hard, and that, not sentimental bullshit in the European manner about attractive culture, is what made the US the 20th century superpower. Factories, cities, jets, ships, rockets, Silicon Valley, exponentially growing material abundance. You also mentioned "cities" above, do you really think they still envy your cities? Does anyone outside, like, Latin America? One by one, these check boxes are getting filled. You need to keep making new ones.
People would rather hire graduates from Stanford and not Tsinghua
I'm really unsure about this, any statistics? Which people? I only recall that time Stanford students stole an AI model built by Tsinghua students, shallowly obfuscated and rebranded as their own for clout. That, too, is a perk of being the center of the World. Indeed, no such people would think of trying to enroll in Tsinghua. I bet they love America.
On balance it is actually extremely likely they will fail.
On balance they have, conservatively, 2x your industrial capacity, 3x intellectual and (very conservatively) no less capable governance or markets. Unless you show some unprecedented overperformance, it's wholly their game to lose.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10d ago
I write in English because this is a forum with the norm of speaking English, you speak no other languages, and I'm willing to talk to you. It's a bit ridiculous to inflate your sense of importance on these grounds. Believe it or not I continue to exist when I don't speak with you or engage with any other American.
America created this, that, all very fair, most of it very valuable. That's about what could be expected from a European society that gets a whole new continent for a frontier and faces no credible threats, but I guess the institutional achievement of Founding Fathers shouldn't be dismissed either. A century or two of unchallenged exponential growth can go a long way. As it stands though, what difference does all this boasting make for the present moment? Does it slow down your decline in share of new drugs developed, for instance? No, the "global economy" doesn't really depend on you, this isn't 1950s when everyone else who matters was bombed to hell or in a semi-colonial shithole condition. No you're not protecting the sea lanes, this just isn't a thing that is happening, you're contesting them. No, you're not making the rest of humanity a favor by printing debt and sucking out capital; it's just something you can afford to do. You're a big and important player, with lots of soft and hard power, that has developed solipsism and near-religious delusions about its potency, primacy and destiny, and about how much silliness it can actually afford in mistreating other nations.
America is parasitic? You wouldn't even be here without America. This is like the pyramid complaining that the ground is beneath it.
This is disturbingly grandiose and sounds like a Marvel villain's monologue. Your culture has processed the abstract opinion about hegemony into tacky merchandise, into propaganda. This might have sounded authentic in the last century and, objectively speaking, sounds over the top today, in this largely Made-In-China physical world. But identity can be a lagging indicator.
Seriously speaking I don't really think either China or the US are "parasitic"; you started this. China used your IP and capital, which it could not create ex nihilo or procure elsewhere (or at least not that fast). You used cheap Chinese labor, for decades, to allow your own abundance and rent-seeking on your legacy. They had a choice (poverty, slower technological progress, worse security), so did you (higher inflation, perhaps even recession, political turmoil). Nobody chose otherwise out of charity; and neither situation would have been catastrophic. You grossly overestimate the baseline of Chinese capability and the volume of the exchange (look up historical FDI for instance). They speedran to rockets, satellites and thermonuclear weapons without American input and with very little Soviet one; they could have built modern China without you too.
Archetypal specific case: General Motors sold Magnequench to Deng Xiaoping's family, because GM, and by extension America, chose cutting costs and maximizing profit over controlling the rare earths/magnets supply chain in the long term. The Chinese could not "steal" it or "parasitize" on it; they paid the fair price, on the terms of the game you have designed, the game you are clearly so proud of. Now here we are, where REEs and magnets are something China has a chokehold on, developing on the open ambition preceding that acquisition by years. It's simply entitled to act as if they've gotten the better deal, or as if they had less right to what they got out of it.
Well, what happened next? What's the next part of the story? Did it work out for Japan? Does Japan rule the world now? Did America ever have a political reckoning over the economic policies that lead to outsourcing?
Tragically, no, Americans are still riding that high.
What I'm trying to explain, in very simple words, that for the first time in your not so long history of independence you have a peer competitor, and on most meaningful metrics it's bigger than you. This has never happened before, you were only ever dunking on underdogs, you don't have a concept of "a bigger power than the US". Obnoxiously celebrating how you've never had a reckoning after Japan, rather than reflecting on how close it was with merely post-war Japan and what this fact says about absolute American capability, just goes to show you don't really grasp this very simple and important quantitative detail.
America + Europe + Japan + whatever is larger than China. America + India is larger than China
No. If you want a consistent standard, how about this: still fewer intelligent people and less industry. For example, Meituan alone outperforms India, Japan and most if not all of EU in AI. In electricity production, this entire list combined is maybe 20% above China, and good luck making any use of India. You don't have a sense of scale for what's going on.
P.S.
I think the likeliest outcome is a kind of China 1970s, or maybe like Japan in the 90s. Population turnover and changing economic fundamentals produce a decade of stagnation. Stagnation produces social malaise (if not unrest). And then China’s progress keeping apace with America stalls. This is already happening — American growth has started outpacing China these last few years. It doesn’t take much for China to stall.
I have actually looked it up. In nominal USD, the US is up 46% between 2020 and 2025. China did 38% and if we account for the exchange rate, just 30%. So that's something. One can tell a story about GDP divergence here. The issue is that they've had <5% inflation and you had 25-29%. So in terms of "real growth" (anchored to 2017 dollars), the US can report 13% and China ≈32%. Your "real GDP" is $24.2T, not ≈$32T.
I don't put much stock in these numbers, anyway. The point is, you can tell any story with numbers if you know how to spin them (this is still very basic, one could counter with analyzing debt structure or "true purchasing power" or whatever), and I think your, Shakes, information environment provides you with a diet of exclusively self-congratulatory spins.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11d ago
Quantity is its own quality, as is known. The reason this ability is qualitatively different is that the USN still can't stop it despite a lot of effort, whereas destroying their manned air force over the course of a few weeks would have been possible for US forces in 1986 and turned out trivial today. They could not, in fact, sustainably threaten the Strait with remote attacks before, and this matters in that only prolonged crisis of this kind can achieve their strategic goals (having the US compromise on the operation's objectives and instead walk away with cope).
it would not surprise me if the Pentagon got the capability assessment of Iran more or less right but fumbled or failed to consider as outside of their area of competency the question of what degree of risk would be acceptable to the civilian market
I guess that's possible.
although I suspect they have fancier tech now
I am not sure the US has even retained its peak capabilities in mine-sweeping, but we'll see.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11d ago
Not to mention that, fundamentally, China’s rise has been parasitic on America’s wealth.
At worst it's been symbiotic. Your whole economy is parasitic, which you market as "center of global security", "reserve currency" and what not. Do you honestly believe you could afford these investments without decades of China exporting deflation via cheap manufacturing? You'd run into a couple more financial crises without their "parasitism". Well, they even helped you exit the real one in 2008, at some cost.
But they are not producing bombers as advanced as anything made in America. They don’t yet have the rockets to colonize space. They can’t actually replace America’s role at the center of global security.
Stealth bombers and heavy lift rocket vehicles as a means to provide "the center of global security" is a funny phrasing. We're in 2026, the DoD is renamed to the "Department of War", could we drop the euphemisms? After Greenland, too. You also make systems like THAAD, but we've seen how it goes. It's maybe the center of global security for one specific Middle Eastern nation. Just having a heavily militarized industry is not much of a flex.
America protects the sea lanes that Chinese vessels rely on.
Are we still doing this Zeihanite nonsense? You demonstrably can't unilaterally unblock the "sea lanes" when they're threatened by Houthis and Iranians. Moreover you're now the primary cause of those sea lanes getting blocked in the first place. It's a pure protection racket. And as you say, they make vastly more ships than you do. They could escort their own ships if need be, which Trump admitted.
China’s industrial rise doesn’t happen without America handing over the blueprint.
Well, it certainly helped, especially while they were a nation of uneducated peasants with like $900 per capita GDP (1999). As time goes, this argument loses its luster.
No, their R&D is quite efficient now. I routinely see smaller teams on lower budgets getting more done than in the US.
I think the likeliest outcome is a kind of China 1970s, or maybe like Japan in the 90s. Population turnover and changing economic fundamentals produce a decade of stagnation. Stagnation produces social malaise (if not unrest). And then China’s progress keeping apace with America stalls. This is already happening — American growth has started outpacing China these last few years. It doesn’t take much for China to stall.
This is cope, sorry.
First, Japan didn't just fall into "stagnation" and "malaise". It was a functionally non-sovereign country which you deliberately fucked over with these "trade deals", incapable of providing its own security, dependent on imports of food and energy (not in a cute "would have to ration" way, in a "shutdown in 6 months" way), and it had a contagious real estate bubble collapse. None of these features are shared with China. Actually I often say that Americans drawing this analogy are telling on themselves. They helplessly lost several industries to a tiny island nation they had previously conquered, and instead of an existential crisis, their takeaway is… "we're invincible, China will be the same"?! Are you serious? Japan with nukes and 12 times larger population would have rendered you irrelevant by 2000s.
Second, no. This "has started outpacing" is largely a function of exchange rates, which China is alleged to suppress for RMB. In national currency terms the cumulative growth has been about equal since 2020. That's really good performance for the US stage of development, admittedly. But at some point they fully deflate their real estate bubble, and you notice that their industry and R&D have been growing quite a bit faster.
More to the point, you seem to not engage with the core fundamentals that matter: your clown government and your simply insufficient talent pool.
When has sheer numbers made the biggest difference?
Pretty much every time. This is the story of America and Japan, too. Americans do have this strange conception of themselves as a plucky underdog who miraculously wins by Just Being That Good. But even the Soviets barely had an edge in population, probably had none if you exclude assorted Central Asian dependents, and were burdened by a suicidal economic doctrine. This isn't the case with China.
Besides, America has access to the smartest talent from Japan, Europe, Latin America, etc.
I'm telling you, this isn't enough. This entire list of rabble is just too small, they barely produce talent. Add India, add whatever, it's all just not enough smart people. The only real argument is brain draining China itself, which seems to be going worse lately.
Yes, Trump is more charismatic. Your Swedes and Germans care about Trump. But why should anyone care what Swedes and Germans care about? Trump spits on them. He cares about Xi's opinion.
America makes the world, China copies America, not the other way around.
America sure would like to try to copy some of China, it's just actually hard.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11d ago
Iran's ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 1986.
Are you for real. Their aircraft from 1986 is destroyed. The question is of what they can do and plan for in 2026. It turns out that their new "aircraft" works very well for this purpose. I think they didn't know it will, just like Americans didn't know it'd be so hard to shut down.
Or do you think there was an expectation that as soon as the US fails to topple Iran by killing some dudes, we'll enter this morass with strait blockade?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12d ago
Iran has been aware that they could threaten to close the strait since the 1980s (at least), because you don't need drones to do that when you have mines.
Noah is sloppy but this is irrelevant. Mines are, well, mines. Their control right now is qualitatively different, they can flexibly threaten ships, do it on and off, and importantly even while the USN is around and the country is getting bombed.
From your own link
Iran’s threat will not work. Here is why:
blah blah it's evil illegal
If Iran were to try, there would be a list of militaries willing and able to intervene. The U.S. has long taken on the task of ensuring freedom of the seas. And if the U.S. chose not to intervene, it could do so with the knowledge that other countries are more than capable. The navies of China, Japan or South Korea could intervene, but most likely they would not have to since Iran needs to maintain the east Asian countries as trading partners. They would likely convince Iran to change course by simply requesting it. India has already sent naval escorts to protect its vessels in the area. Otherwise, the Gulf countries whose oil trade would be impacted could intervene. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in particular, have formidable air forces with billions of dollars of aircraft and weapons purchased from the U.S. Moreover, the U.N. and other international organizations would turn on Iran as soon as it tried to invoke control over an international waterway.
How has that worked?
And I agree with Smith that they didn't know it would, and indeed thought it wouldn't.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12d ago
thanks btw, I'll be returning to this post. One note for now:
We revolutionized energy, we export energy now.
Fracking is genuinely technically sophisticated, but I just can't get excited about a new fossil extraction trick.
Chinese "New three" (solar panels, EVs, batteries) exports now produce like >$200B annual revenue., en route to 300. This is uncomfortably close to American fossil exports. I find one of these strategies of revolutionizing energy more compelling, technically and business-wise, and a good hint about the rest of the trajectory.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12d ago
So when we start factoring out these unfalsifiable rumors, it seems pretty obvious to me who won. America can threaten Iran at will and they have no meaningful way to retaliate.
That's not how wars work, though. You lost in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in every occasion you enjoyed vast military superiority by the end. "We can kill them, they can't kill us" is simplistic and part of the problem, which is a bronze age savage's theory of victory coupled with an actually cost-sensitive political and economic system.
As for interceptors, I find the alleged exhaustion rates plausible despite "classified" noise from your India-tier corrupt officials, for the following reasons: corrupt people are generally untrustworthy; we know 21st century America is generally subpar at physical production; we know that some arms sales were frozen and THAADs were harvested from Korea; we know that interception rates have declined over the war, esp. in Israel; we know the bases are wrecked.
This gap will grow as America is the only power capable of building into Space and the AI frontier.
I won't even argue the facts again (China is about 5 years behind in space and 8 months in AI). On priors, why do you believe this is even plausible? You must know that you have fewer people than China, fewer highly intelligent people, lesser talent allocation to STEM, less industrial capacity, less energy, less cutthroat markets, less… pretty much everything, except some legacy IP. Is this just blind patriotism?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
And omitting it is a cheap way to overstate your case
This is a fair outsider perspective but I stand by my arguments for why it's valid to omit.
Wouldn't you say that Iran also intended (and quite plausibly still hopes) to establish a strait toll regime as a war goal?
There has, to my knowledge, never been a serious Iranian discussion of the toll regime (as opposed to just closing the Strait) before this war which they did not choose. They rolled out tolls as a financial cope and negotiating tactic well under attack, after they learned that Hormuz denial is indeed very effective even though their fleet is gone. I tend to agree with Noah Smith of all people that "Before the war, Iran didn’t control the strait, simply because it didn’t realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn’t know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting down the strait.". Of course, war aims can change, so now they pursue legitimization of the toll booth through MOU negotiations, because come on, it's an awesome new revenue source and influence lever. But it was not part of their core objectives and strategic thinking (and neither was sinking their Navy for the US). To be clear I think they might win this, too, but I wouldn't weigh it heavily either way.
from my point of view, the MOU is a temporary ceasefire instrument to be replaced by something more permanent
Guess I have to agree to disagree. The MOU is extremely close to the original Iranian counter-proposal they published in response to Kushner&Witkoff's "deal" (terms of capitulation). That the US saw it fit to sign on to this shows that the US is really weary of the war and willing to end it on net unfavorable terms. Of course, Trump being Trump, he might just ignore the reputational damage and risks of Iranian gains solidifying for a few weeks of open Strait and US forces regrouping, and secretly intends to defect on most terms. But on the sum of evidence so far (eg Israel and Lebanon related noises), I do believe he strongly prefers to not continue in the short-medium term, so it is an end to, at least, the First US-Iran war, and the actual terms of it having been concluded.
so that you don't have to concede that the United States dealt a severe blow to Iran's ability to project naval power, an objective that was reiterated by Hegseth on March 2 in case you just thought it was a one-off.
I don't dodge it, I just deem it to be a cope. What "project naval power"? How was Iran ever a credible naval force? For years of reading about the Iranian Question, I don't remember ever seeing a serious concern about their growing naval capabilities specifically. IRIN was always doomed to sink at the first contact with the USN, at least I believe so, the USN has crushing advantages in every aspect; and Iran wasn't preparing to go on some aggressive expedition, so there was no great incentive to do it now. Russia, itself mediocre in naval projection, also wiped out Ukrainian naval capabilities early on in the war (which it's arguably losing now); this changed very little. The success here had been overdetermined, but that's also why it couldn't have been the goal – it couldn't endow Iran with a credible coercion/deterrence tool in the way that threatening Hormuz or Israeli desalination plants or South Pars field does. (Moreover the MOU doesn't say they can't rebuild their Navy if they so choose, and with the reconstruction funds and lifted sanctions they'll be able to afford it. Though it'd still be of little irrelevance.)
I see a pattern where Americans overstate their investment in impressive but strategically irrelevant feats just because these are things they can actually do. It's a cheap way to pad the metrics by announcing a thing you're confident about as the goal. Murdering Khamenei and other guys, destroying the Navy, "infiltrate Iranian land space and build an airstrip". So? What does this gain for you as a nation, relative to a scenario where you didn't do it? Not having to do it a bit later? It's a good flex on its own technical terms, but why should I believe these flexes were strategic objectives rather than instrumental moves in service of some cogent strategic objective? For all other goals, from "regime change" to "stopping missile and drone production" and even "steal oil", I see the answers. For nukes, I also see the answer but again, Iran was willing to compromise on the nukes from the start, the war at best changed something on the margins of the JCPOA 2.0 (and seemingly not in favor of the US). For the navy and assassinations… eh.
Before you accuse me of motivated reasoning, consider how the defenders of the war – and you – also apply Straussian lens to Trump's communications, correctly assuming that he's untrustworthy (just in a different direction) and his Actual Intentions (like reasons to sign such an MOU) must be deduced from first principles.
…All that said, ultimately my thinking is simpler. The US is a vastly superior power, and chipping away at the margins is beneath it. The real «objective of the war», universally and sometimes openly understood and lobbied for over decades, spelled out by Netanyahu, evident in the bulk of Trump's and Hegseth's communication too, was a generic Neocon/Zionist intention to «finally solve Iran». Remove it from the regional calculus, deny its resources to proxies, and make it unable to threaten Israel in the long term, by whatever means work: aiding an organic power transition, installing a pro-American/Zionist puppet regime, collapsing the nation into civil war, imposing treaty terms that defang it relative to the status quo, or "bombing it into stone age". Iraq, Syria, Venezuela… And Iranian objectives, on the contrary, were to survive, preserve the status quo, and hopefully improve on it by getting sanctions relief. In this sense, the present situation indicates Iran overachieving on its objectives, whereas the US has not just failed but made its position worse.
Agreed that this is very premature given previous fake-out "deals". But I do think that the MOU is qualitatively different, and American eagerness to sign it, allows me to say that Iran won. If, say, negotiations break down and the US resumes high-intensity strikes, that'll be a separate arc. I'm not saying Iran won forever.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
Wikipedia gives the following incomplete list of objectives:
The Trump administration gave various explanations for starting the war, including forestalling Iranian retaliation after an expected Israeli attack,[84] destroying Iran's missile capabilities, preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon,[85] seizing Iran's oil and gas resources,[86][87][88] or regime change.
Oil and gas shitposting has obviously failed. Regime change, well, you see. Unconditional surrender, not mentioned, certainly failed. "Destroying missile capabilities" – significant attrition but that's a cope, Witkoff wanted them to give up on production, something absent from the MOU which even proscribes interfering in such matters. "Forestalling Iranian retaliation", worse than failed, it was caused by the aggression. Proxies – Iran had forced the ceasefire in Lebanon (thus, preservation of Hezbollah) to be the #1 issue in the MOU, if you go through the timeline you can see that this isn't really what the US wanted and not a win for the US+Israel either.
The nuclear stuff is the biggest sticking point, I agree. But the thing is, did Iran even move far from their pre-war position? It seems to me that they did not, in which case the US didn't even need the war to "win" here, therefore this is not an achievement of a military objective.
Iran has to take some responsibility. It has never published its seven-page written offer for a new deal, including the annexe, which was shown to Witkoff during the final round of talks in Geneva, despite calls from inside Iran to do so. Araghchi has said he hoped the truth of what happened on the final day of talks, 26 February, would soon become known. He could do this himself by publishing Iran’s offer – one that Jonathan Powell, the UK national security adviser who was present at the talks, thought worth pursuing. Kushner admitted a deal could have been presented that was better than the Obama nuclear deal secured in 2015.
It may also have been a mistake not to allow Witkoff to keep a copy of the offer, since he could at least have shown it to technically more competent officials in Washington. Witkoff would later describe their reticence to hand over the document as a “tell” that they were not interested in a deal, and were just playing for time.
However, Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association (ACA), said it was understandable the Iranians did not want to hand over their negotiating position given Trump’s record of publishing confidential material on his Truth Social web platform.
Also, Iran was talking about lifting 80% of the sanctions as their carrot. Now they get 100%, for much the same terms. So no, I think this is still American defeat, and the only way to spin it otherwise is to claim that Iranian terms were untrustworthy when originally proposed but are more trustworthy now that they know just how brutal and perfidious the US can be. I find that to be a pretty flimsy argument.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
America won.
Ah. Very well, carry on winning then. This is what the Chinese call spiritual victory. Seriously though…
America killed a generation of Iran's leadership
Literally what does it matter? Why do you even mention this? "Kill some dudes" is not a meaningful military objective.
War critics have simply continued onto the next set of predictions. Because the Iranian regime didn't completely collapse, and sanctions will be lifted as part of a peace deal, America is supposed to have lost. Whatever you guys say. I don't think any of you want to be convinced. I think you just want to hate America.
that would hit so hard if war proponents didn't move through different war objectives.
Some did get fulfilled. I'm personally partial to this specific Truth:
There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
This, as far as I can tell, has come to pass in its entirety. Iran has chosen new great and acceptable leaders (Mojtaba Khamenei and his team); Trump even wants to meet with him. The US and allies will aid Iran in reconstruction, granting Iran (and Oman) authority over the Strait, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. Iranian military-industrial complex is fine (estimates for missiles and drones suggest they're not halfway done, whereas you are out of interceptors) and will be upgraded, given that there are no terms prohibiting that (which there were in Witkoff&Kushner's draft). The nuclear question didn't move much from their "surprising proposal" you responded to with assassination of Khamenei's family, and they had a decades-old fatwa on nukes to begin with. Americans acknowledging Iranian regime's legitimacy and committing to "not deploy any additional forces in the region" is as close to UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER for a superpower as one could imagine.
But I think the case is going to become more and more obvious as time goes by.
Yes, I imagine so.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
Thanks for the clarity, I'll put it simply too.
People extend different amounts of charity to friends, to family members, to neutral strangers and to the hostile outgroup. This does not map cleanly onto political allegiance. For example I still nominally have friends of the Zigger persuasion, and either do not discuss the war and the broad issue of the… diminished credibility of the Russian national project, or try to make my points from the remaining common ground. Some friends who have Powerful takes on the need to eradicate Russian nation. There are also some people in this community whom I respect and disagree with, people with rich, coherent and defensible belief systems leading to different conclusions from mine, and I'd rather not shit on them over claiming something that I'd say disqualifies a stranger from having political rights.
But at the end of the day I'm a Sinophilic Russian who wants broader power decentralization. You're the kind of guy who can seriously posit that it might be "treasonous" for Americans to undermine an undeclared American war of aggression via criticism (which also makes you immune to the substance of much of the criticism, since the US has in fact lost the war for military reasons many critics had been bringing up, but your school of thought allows the causality to be inverted). Your epistemics and morality also appear shot:
The way you are writing is worrying, it makes me worry about how you are doing, where this dehumanization is coming from, and so on
In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel.
But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
No, not everyone loses. Just your team, which might not even represent the aggregate interests of the American nation. Your team's interests are not humanity's interests, they're maybe forgivable (though I don't think they are) but particular. "We need to win… for everyone!" is a self-serving argument.
In other words, you're a two-bit hegemonist, and hostile outgroup for me. When we talk about matters pertaining to your project and to mine, much of the meat you can find is poison, and vice versa; and just like you don't sugarcoat your assertions, I won't do mine. Did you ever say anything interesting? I don't remember, but do you think your cited posts, premised entirely on these self-serving axioms and warped morality, appear to be meaty to me, or just petulant, entitled chutzpah?
But I won't concern troll about your mental health. That'd be too self-serving.
Optimus is great. Very good hands (some Chinese stole them), powerful, iterates quickly, and more importantly I can trust Elon to mass produce it, as he mass produces lots of things. Sure it's a bit quaint compared to the Chinese robotic supply chain and scaling potential of Unitree and UBTech and others. But regulatory barriers will all but ensure that Western markets heavily go to Elon.
The problem with Optimus and with Tesla taxis is the same: it's a bet on the exponential, and you don't know your exact location. Elon's theory of victory for FSD is that good enough AI will make do with human-level sensorium; arguments about lidars being expensive are of course nonsense, the costs of lidars can fall like costs of any other component. He's obviously correct on the substance; the question is what does it take for "good enough", how much more data, pretraining and onboard processing? He keeps discovering that the answer is "more than you have". But at some point, very likely it just works and Waymos become overengineered toys.
I can't muster the outrage. His corporate governance experiments have trivial explanations, and he'll have the cash to burn on it all.
I think you miss other variables changing.
The problem is they haven't gotten far. If rocket reliability requires exploiting Wright's law, Elon is very much ahead.
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