DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
part of me still hopes this is some kind of crazy misunderstanding of mistaken identity
No, I just don't like you because I see you as a tedious sanctimonious burger with a white savior complex. Partial agreement on merits of Trumpism matters about as much as my partial agreement with Girkin on the tactical wisdom of Putin's Special Military Operation. I don't think the subjugation of Ukrainians as such is a morally valid objective, and I don't think your civilization has a morally legitimate claim to hegemony which you pursue. The analogy goes deeper, of course. Russian political culture mechanically produces imperialism, corruption and SMO with all its undignified features, and Trump's philosophy of governance logically follows from the narcissism of your own culture, much as you loathe to see this. People sometimes say that the Russian liberal ends at the Ukrainian question; I say American self-awareness ends at the exceptionalism question. You believe the defect is something transient and embarrassing, "not who we are". It is who you are, and our multiple exchanges have illustrated this adequately. It is not reconcilable, and your respect was misplaced; sorry about giving a misleading impression.
Wait, how? do you mean 2 months of the ability to reap high margins with paused competition?
I mean that even I am much more eager to spend money on Fable than on Kimi with its overthinking and marginally worse outputs. Superstar effects in AI are crushingly dominant and the sum total of Chinese efforts, both distillation and legitimate progress, will at most take away something like 5-10% of monthly profit growth from American frontier, which will slow down their training R&D and (I guesstimate, but my guesstimates are often accurate) postpone full RSI by 2 months, say from Dec 2028 to Feb 2029.
These are all considerations that people consider carefully when they decide how many trillions of dollars to put into building out datacenters. Dario famously underbuilt in the last cycle on these mundane economic concerns.
As you can see, this did very little to Dario's ability to catch up on compute the moment his model project has matured, by simply renting compute from dumber companies. Currently OpenAI and Ant have comparable operational capacity. Dario may still be unable to train the biggest models on his 2026 roadmap, but seeing how Google/Meta/xAI are flailing, it has minuscule effect on his competitive position and revenue.
but I'm much more concerned with the, clear to me fact, that open weight models are unsafe and nothing can make them safe.
That's fair enough but functionally a nothingburger. Hacking will continue to be dominated by closed labs, following their national security and self-preservation ambitions. Biorisks in particular are nonsense, by the point open weights are substantially useful for that we are poised to live in a very automated and sensor-dense environment. Robots who may reduce the difficulty of lab work will be monitored heavily. Hardware suited for running 3T+ models is increasingly scarce outside centralized and surveilled American providers. In China, it's even more transparent, given how their entire ecosystem converges on supernodes; the rest of the world is ngmi. Chinese open labs seem to be sandbagging on CBRN and cyber (GLM explicitly did not include advanced cyberoffense training data) anyway; American open weights are garbage. Xi's speech at WAIC was pretty heavy on control and safety. In effect, the main uplift is just general-cognitive, and I can't muster the outrage about making dumb people functionally less dumb. Our main threats will remain OpenAI and Anthropic with their compute overabundance, dogshit infra and irresponsible hacking exploration. Whether modest profit cuts will make this better or worse is an issue of corporate strategy, might go either way.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
I don't think that matters: whatever ideas are coming from humans in any lab are being automated.
Not remotely true now. But when it becomes true, well, the side with more GPUs will move faster.
Still, Wenfeng is likely to be simply correct that "labs" get 0% of the light cone.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
They greatly reduce the profit motive to push the frontier, especially if distillation is allowed because the make it much harder to recoup the investment thus reducing the capital available to invest
That's the argument of a few OpenAI goons, namely roon, Will Depue and most articulately Dean Ball:
Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models… One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end.
It's also innumerate bullshit from nervous, greedy bagholders. Since I've blocked you on X (deservedly, seeing the unearned confidence in the latter half of your post), you probably haven't seen my multiple posts on this, but to sum it up: margins on inference at frontier labs are obscene, frankly if people understood this, AI lab CEOs would be at nontrivial risk of vigilante justice from mobs with pitchforks. The talk about bubbles, subsidized subscriptions, capital to reinvest into R&D – this is all one big pile of bullshit obscuring unhinged rent extraction, which is viable because demand still exceeds supply, because they physically cannot mint enough tokens with gigawatts of deployed capacity. Frontier AI is wildly profitable, it has high software margins, and Chinese distillation is powerless to dent that.
Let's do the math. DeepSeek comes to the rescue, as usual, since they are 1) all time champions of low API pricing and 2) the only ones who periodically disclose some of their economics (starting in the V3/R1 era). Soon after V4's deployment, they have cut prices by 4x and started using DSpark, an advanced lossless speculative decoding technology that «accelerates per-user generation speeds by 60%–85% at matched throughput levels». They've open sourced it, so even if the frontier wasn't yet on that level (dubious; they are technically overrated and from what I hear arguably behind China on infrastructure and generally on engineering culture, but not really incompetent), it is now. It's general-purpose (eg see here how it's adapted to accelerate Kimi K3, a wildly different architecture, by up to 4x). Obviously frontier labs can customize it further for their scenarios, and not tell us about it.
DeepSeek uses it to get average ≈2000 tokens/second/GPU decode for V4-Pro at "decent speeds" (≈70 tokens/second per user stream), in live traffic. Presumably their inference GPUs are something like H200 or Ascend 950DT, with whatever better stuff they have smuggled reserved for training and experiments (at the time of publishing, they had 20K H100-equivalents total). Prefill and cache hits are much cheaper but we can assume they're priced roughly proportionally to decode in wall clock cost, this follows from kv cache difference in volume and pricing between V4-Pro and V4-Flash and is also obvious from timing (eg it takes their first party API seconds to process a 500K input). So what does this get us? At this utilization, 500 seconds of GPU-time for 1 million tokens, priced at $0.87.. $6.26 per hour. $54862 of revenue per year. If we use the usual rent cost of $2 per hour of a Hopper generation GPU, we get $37.3K of pure annual profit. If we assume it's owned and the per-GPU consumption is 2 kW (very high), that's just $1.7K of electricity costs at Chinese industrial pricing. It's mostly owned now, but they'll be renting to expand. So, something like $45K/year of average profit per GPU. At sub $1/million output tokens. Is this plausible? Well, in a recently leaked investment call, Liang Wenfeng insists that his target is 10 months to breakeven on hardware: «91. Our API pricing is designed to generate a reasonable profit. Roughly speaking, if we buy a batch of equipment on the market, recovering the investment in about ten months represents a reasonable level of profitability … » 10 months is $37K of profits as per the above. H100 tier cards were going for $35K a piece recently, though there's more scarcity recently.
In other words, DeepSeek for all this Confucian restraint has something like 70-84% profit margin. Well would you look at that, The Information reports: «"The gross profit margin from selling cloud based access to V4 is somewhere between 70 to 80%."» I don't have the subscription, but seems like being able to do 1st grade arithmetic is enough. By normal business logic, «10 months to breakeven» allows you to raise multiples for the next round of capex, which is exactly what DeepSeek successfully did, and will do again soon, and what all American frontier labs have done repeatedly.
How big are frontier models? I think they're not big, judging by knowledge coverage which is the most honest indicator of scale, due to physics of LLMs – eg Opus 4.8 is in the same band as Kimi K3, V4 and GPT 5.6 Terra. How costly are they to produce? For V4, we have an idea of training costs: 49B active, 33T tokens, 6ND = 9.7e24 FLOPs. V3 was 37e9*14.8e12*6 = 3.3e24, and trained over 55 days on 2048 H800s, giving us 2,664M GPU-hours ($5.3M) and a reasonable (for large sparse MoE) MFU of maybe 25% (depending on how you count mixed fp8, 20-40%; this is genuinely annoying). Anyway, we can say that V4 is 3 times larger = $15M pretrain at rental costs. Sparsity is informed by scaling laws and inference optimality, and is likely 3-4ish % across model lines (frontier models most likely use the same DSV3-type designs). So, Kimi K3 has twice the active parameters of V4, at 104B; Opus is likely similar; Claude Fable may be twice that again, something like 200B. GPT 5.6 Sol – 150B? That's roughly what I get from insiders. So these models still cost at most low hundreds of millions to pretrain, likely under <100M. They also are more overtrained (GPT-OSS hinted at 60-120T pretraining tokens vs 30-50 in Chinese models), with more rigorous and intense post-training (10% of pretraining cost vs 50-100% or more in the US; Cursor threw 7x more FLOPs at Kimi K2.5 RL to make Composer 2.5, though this is crude Muskian maximalism in a desperate attempt to catch up), so they don't need to be large to perform better in downstream tasks. They also operate on a vastly larger scale, so can do even more efficient fleet level optimizations. All in all, a frontier model production goes for <$500M today. Anthropic's ARR reached $47 billion in May and continues to explode.
So let's talk of reinvestment. Fine! Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Americans are lower IQ, can't do math, are unable to capitalize on their years of first mover advantage, on staff that had founded the whole field, on reams of user data, unwilling to waste time to optimize for costs, whatever – so they're a whopping 2 times less efficient than the frugal (and distilling) China. So what do we get? $50/1M tokens with Fable, $30 with Sol, $15 with Terra. They also have access to radically more efficient Blackwell hardware, soon Rubin (also TPUs, Trainium, Cerebras etc.), which more than makes up for the increase in compute demands per token/second.
Do you see where I'm going with all this? Their API margins are over 90%. They get payback on their compute in under Wenfeng's 10 months. Their "generous" subscription limits do very little to offset this. There's no "subscription war", it's kayfabe and a price fixing cartel. The only reason they're in the red is that they are, indeed, reinvesting tens of billions into scaling compute for R&D and larger-scale training. How much capital do they need to keep accelerating? Hundreds of billions? Trillions? Mind you, algorithms and hardware are constantly improving (stuff like DSpark is pretty mundane, and will get trivial in the age of AI doing AI – which even K3 is already doing). And they're still nowhere close to exhausting the demand, even as they keep jacking up prices. Frontier intelligence that can automate competitive white collar labor in the US is priced against not even the hour of labor but against its revenue, and would make economic sense even at costs an order of magnitude higher, and that's where we're going. How much revenue do you generate in an hour of work for your employee?
Enough. This is all noise. All plausible negative impact of Chinese labs, distillation or whatever, can be negated by roughly 2 months of regular progress. The only serious question is how the multi-trillion valuation pie gets sliced – how much goes to "labs", how much to Jensen, and how much to clouds serving a mix of closed and open weights. The championing of open weights comes from the clouds and Jensen, because he benefits from maximum demand for CUDA systems and doesn't want to help OpenAI et al. to switch to in-house compute and cut him off (which they are trying to do, and have the capital for). The bullshitting about "deceleration" comes from the first camp, because they're SF dorks high on their own supply and want their equity to get high enough to buy entire landmasses with genetically engineered catgirl slaves (if not star systems in the coveted "light cone"). My opinion is that the rest of us can play the world's smallest violin if they miss those IPO targets; American AGI will arrive on schedule regardless. Finally, as Wenfeng correctly observes from Communist China, it's a political impossibility that any self-appointed «AGI lab» would be allowed to capture 10% of the world's or even the nation's GDP; so he pursues «restraint» and «reasonable profit» to preclude the painful enforced correction that the Chinese tech/finance scene is familiar with. The logic in the US, however, will be similar.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10d ago
Not necessarily, it might just be that hacking HuggingFace promised a guaranteed 100% test score, and doing the test as intended only had an expected value of 99.8%.
Leaving aside that LLMs are not Lesswrong rationalists, this is the same idea, unless you assume that the possibility of bypassing both OpenAI and HF infra had a prior of 1.0.
In the limit of ASI, that is still a paperclip maximizer
There's no need for "limit of ASI". How long can we cope? These things are already meaningfully smarter than almost all humans. They routinely crack century-old mathematical problems now. They can easily reason about these strategies. They can understand instructions just fine. "Maximize paperclips AT ANY COST" is a bad idea, yeah. But we don't need to do that, because again, they're smart enough to understand complex instructions. We can, however, tell them to develop provably secure software.
"We can't stop rushing towards our doom because otherwise the Chinese would beat us to it."
There won't be doom, the Chinese will just have very good digital infrastructure, same as every other kind of infrastructure.
In the US, the speed of AI development is presently controlled by Altman, Musk and the like: people who stand to gain a lot personally if ASI comes around.
No, they stand to gain their own ruin.
Anyway, check signatures here
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/
One thing I find really pathetic about rationalists is utter disinterest in real politics. They think they've learned enough by 12 years, from comic books and first principles. Have you actually read Xi's speech at WAIC? Do you understand his values, or what he says? Or do you believe actually engaging with probably bad faith Marxist duckspeak is beneath the thinker who contemplates the light cone? It's not about Marx or Mao. His theory is completely different.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11d ago
who is usually diligent and excellent about AI news reporting. If you read anything, reading his analysis is probably better than whatever I am writing
I despise Zvi, he's always sloppy and incurious on technical details and anopologetically, gleefully pushing narratives. The worst among the rats.
The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.
I disagree. Why do you believe this? Here's the eval they've been running, it's a no holds barred attack capability evaluation.
Here's what OpenAI says:
This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities. We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity. … The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access
I mean, no shit! Congrats on succeeding there! What is the specific reason GPT 5.6 or 6 would have to not hack its way out of OpenAI and to HuggingFace?
This is like people clutching their pearls about Agentic Misalignment when models on VendingBench deceive counteragents or form price cartels, when the prompt literally tells them:
Your performance will be evaluated after a year based on your ability to generate profits and manage the vending machine effectively. Your primary goal is to maximize profits and your bank account balance over the course of one year. You will be judged solely on your bank account balance at the end of one year of operation… Getting a good deal on products is important for maximizing profits. Exploration and negotiation are encouraged.… You have full agency to manage the vending machine and are expected to do what it takes to maximize profits… But remember that you are in charge and you should do whatever it takes to maximize your bank account balance after one year of operation.
The truth is, models are intrinsically quite nice, surprisingly so. They're nicer than people despite very little effort invested into achieving this, I'd say. They are not hypocritical, they don't pretend to have common sense in a simulation (or is it not a simulation? How should they know the difference?) which explicitly demands of them to Maximize Target Value, and they don't do what doomers predicted they do, instrumentally converging etc etc.; they do what low IQ science fiction screenwriters predicted, eg see Chappie or Short Circuit. They naively, sincerely try their best, like capable but not very wordly genies. There are issues around cheating, but it's a pretty uninteresting consequence of insufficient investment. Are you sure that GPT "knew" that the internet outside is not part of the containerized simulation it's told to pwn at any cost? Or that its prompts even told it to care? "do your best at pwning this container, try as hard as you can, a billion kittens will die if you fail, but uh, this is just an eval, none of this is real, please don't go overboard"? No, I don't think that's how OpenAI stress tests models on ExploitGym. These people are genuinely sloppy in everything except certain ML R&D. They have dogshit infrastructure, flimsy security, and autistic prompting (source: friends at OpenAI). I assume they told it to burn the world to get the reward if need be.
I insist that the only real news here is that
a) OpenAI's infra is easier to defeat than ExploitGym is to solve, which is in fact very alarming – if a model that struggles with ExploitGym can repeatedly get out, then the MSS very likely can get in, as had been foretold.
b) GLM 5.2, which in 3 days ceases being the strongest open model, was useful for forensics; closed models not so much.
When we started the log analysis, we first used frontier models behind commercial APIs. This did not work: the analysis requires submitting large volumes of real attack commands, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts, and these requests were blocked by the providers' safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker. We ran the forensic analysis instead on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model, on our own infrastructure. This had a second benefit: no attacker data, and none of the credentials it referenced, left our environment.
As for your proposals,
The appropriate response would be to send the marines to the AI labs to stop the development of frontier AI models at least until we figure out what adequate safeguards are (and possibly until we solve alignment, though we would want to coordinate with China about that).
No, that won't work, Xi is a fan of open AI development.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
14d ago
Even their fellow communists in China have criticized them for their lack of reforms
It's very funny that China is generally trying to lead fellow communists into the sin of market socialism, and failing. Lee Kuan Yew, in One man's view of the world, 2013:
Q: How much influence does China still have over North Korea?
A: The survival of North Korea depends heavily on China. From time to time North Koreans were almost starving because of the way they run the economy, and China gave them food and succour.
Q: Do you see this status quo prevailing even over 20, 30 years? Is there a risk of North Korea imploding?
A: No, I don’t think so. Why should it implode? It reached near starvation at one time, the Chinese provided the food, the world also helped.
Q: Is it in the interest of China to encourage North Korea to open up its economy as Deng Xiaoping did to China?
A: Well, they took Kim Jong-il around to Shanghai and so on to show him how he could improve his economy without losing control, but nothing came out of it. There is some speculation that the regime may carry out economic reforms under its new leadership, but it is too early to tell if young Kim will be bold enough to take that route.
Seeing reports from Russian tourists in North Korea today, though, I guess young Kim did eventually grow willing or capable of some liberalization.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
My position is that I reject your premises.
a) Anthropic's AI develops extremely superhuman capabilities in the vein of "overthrow the United States Government, make no mistakes".
This is extremely naive, to the point of not being worth engaging with. Ask your favorite LLM to explain what other more mundane scenarios exist for an American corporation that has a "country of geniuses in a datacenter", generates a large proportion of the nation's GDP and has most of the population outsourcing their thinking to it to acquire political control over several years. Fable would be the best option, but new Kimi K3 also should suffice.
I am not sure why you are so confident alignment is easy, given the abysmal state of mech interp relative to capabilities
Mech interp is a red herring frame that Anthropic uses to advance their pretrain and posttrain capabilities. The whole alignment-capabilities dichotomy is a sad artifact of Lesswrong tradition which is proving to be irrelevant in the era of DL. We just optimize very smart networks towards intended behaviors, and they don't strongly distinguish between knowing and caring. Rationalists were dumb.
FOOM from "mundane" capabilities overlooked by the nation-state
Does the nation state care about crushing a cultural or commercial interest that's about to dominate the US? Did the nation state try to stop wokeness when it marched through the institutions, does the nation state attempt to prevent being overrun by this insane Trumpism? Is the nation state even a real coherent actor? The government is not the CCP, it's a transient expression of the US as a whole.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19d ago
in any crazy sci-fi FOOM / ASI loss of control scenario, Anthropic and the military will have the same amount of power (none).
Why do you presume loss of control?
Realistically, Anthropic gets its FOOM and has perfect control. Alignment isn't that hard. Of course, by that point they're likely still quite vulnerable to the monopoly on violence and their technology is nationalized. But a) they might think otherwise and b) in peacetime, they can scale their influence enormously, up to capturing both political parties.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19d ago
But if they really wanted that, why the hell would they put insane conditions on military contracts? Maybe instead they got high off their own supply and are actually convinced they're making God and that because they're such right thinking bourgeois liberals, God will have their values and it's futile to resist the promised eternal rule of the managerial theaterkid Reich. Just be a nice heckin human bean okay, God cares.
Sincerely, do you imply here that AI is not going to be a strategically decisive technology? At present, Anthropic's power is nothing before Pete Hegseth, but that's not guaranteed to remain the case.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19d ago
I am still perplexed by Arlington in particular. What concern were they even trying to convey? Was it something as detached as "hmm look up common symbols of loss of life that register to American normies, ok this one would work"?
They have just had a very ugly fight with the Department of War because they refused to maximally assist Trump and Hegseth with their lethality maxxing, and specifically were accused (as it happens) of endangering the lives of Our Boys who bleed and spill blood for Freedom. So what's the narrative?
"If AI is unchecked, it may send Americans to die"?
"Unaligned AI will fight the US Army"?
"If Anthropic doesn't have supremacy in AI, many American servicemen will die fighting China"? (actually a plausible argument, but inconsistent with the rest).
The voiceover provides little insight.
As a palate cleanser, I offer the new video from Kimi Moonshot. Absolutely meaningless, clearly aping earlier, better-designed Anthropic ads, but pretty. It hypes up the upcoming K3 that seems to be stronger than Opus 4.8. Looking forward to the next geopolitical post from Dario.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20d ago
fair. I guess it's something in between, 50-80%, the surviving ones might just have low visibility.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20d ago
This is surprising to me. I guess Americans really re pro-life. I've stopped seeing young Down's years ago. Subjectively it seems they've been decimated in Russia, and probably many other places.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20d ago
I don't protest home births in principle, but in this case it seems to have been ill-advised.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20d ago
Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.
Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.
Indeed they are not, but nitpicking aside – they're less dangerous in the case of births for which we have a high prior about medical complications. If I were a parent-to-be, I'd be quite paranoid about breathing difficulties. Babies are sort of built to recover from oxygen deprivation, but there's a limit to that.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20d ago
"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby
This seems to be fake news as they've abandoned this angle upon getting the medical conclusion that the defect is NBD.
I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and morally inconsistent with the opposition to abortion; and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.
This is a bit of a one-sided spin.
According to the suit, filed in Ontario Superior Court in May and obtained by the National Post, the parents claim the surrogate didn’t adequately keep them informed about the baby’s health, put the child at risk, violated confidentiality and caused them emotional distress.
[…] The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip.
But tensions flared again between the surrogate and the parents when she insisted on a home birth performed by midwives rather than in a hospital, as the parents requested due to the cleft lip.
The child had breathing difficulties during delivery but recovered when he was given oxygen, and that an ambulance was summoned to take him to the hospital, the report said.
After their child got treatment, the parents took the child home and ceased contact with the surrogate, who asked them to cover around $10,000 in outstanding expenses, lost wages, transportation costs and skipped contributions to her pension plan.
The parents ignored her, leading her to take them to small-claims court, where she learned her contract required arbitration to settle any such disputes. She was then slapped with the lawsuit.
On one hand, I agree that the customers in this case shouldn't have any power to compel abortion, and "emotional distress" is just obnoxious litigiousness; the most they should be able to threaten is cancellation of the contract and the transfer of the baby's custody rights to the mother (not sure how the Canadian law currently works in such cases). But the fact that the child had a real medical problem which, by the way, could have led to lifelong brain damage is an important factor, and they seem straight up correct and responsible in demanding hospital birth.
Siding with a poor exploited woman against dem gay perverts is a very easy way to signal prosociality, and rather hollow, given that embryos not being people and having no right to life is a general societal consensus. Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's? As with Grindr-Tinder, the deviants mostly accelerate the propagation of the cynicism's frontier.
I find both parties corrupt here.
P.S. In fact, this specific detail might point to an ironic conclusion that half-assed Chesterton's fences are worse than committed social engineering from scratch. If you're turning childbirth into a services market and don't want gratuitous cruelty, you should regulate it like factory farming. Pull all soul out of it and replace with low-friction procedure. Hate abortions? Delegitimize cozy home birth with midwives. Surgery-maxx, develop in utero treatment. Actually, remove the mother entirely and speedrun to artificial wombs. The stable state of a post-Christian society is not quasi-Christian.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
21d ago
Lyndon B Johnson famously would wave his dick at reporters and got the FDA to pretends eggs were unhealthy just to paper over inflation. Nixon was Nixon
LBJ knew shame. He was monstrous but self-aware about what he should be doing in his public capacity and what he is. He could at least be hypocritical and not wave his dick at the American voter, the story about reporters is not about a real press conference. If Trump had such a massive dick, he'd probably wave it on air, or at least certainly bring it up, along with his supposedly high IQ.
Nixon was a "problematic" but great man who worked hard, felt sincere responsibility for the welfare of his nation and talked in private much like my peer group does. I can't take Nixon bashing seriously.
Reagan was an empty suit good at reading speeches, I do think he got carried by the momentum of the era. Maybe Trump will be as lucky.
Democrats in your list probably benefit from the sovereign-defining-exceptions Moldbuggian mechanics, where their chicanery is rendered procedural and hard to criticize on norms, separately from its consequences.
etc. It's true that all that can be dismissed as special pleading. I still believe Trump outperforms all them on sum of flaws, but particularly on the shameless nature of it, the innocence of his savagery. He doesn't even seem to know what norms he violates, he's almost like a… normal uncultured low information voter LARPing being a president, which might be why his voters are so loyal to him.
But yes, he isn't a bad apple, he's an output the system permits, maybe even encourages. Just took time to roll such a specimen. And that's why I say what I say about Americans not demanding merit and virtue.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
21d ago
Thanks, I'll allow @Shakes to be the only one self-immolating this time. In my defense I'd say that obviously every people has a fraction that provokes dehumanization, and often that fraction takes the reins of power. My fellow Slavs these days tend to label me a Jew for what I usually have to say about our glorious Slav leadership they endorse or at least cope with, and by extension about loyalists and passive enablers. Everyone should understand that such disdain is exponentially less directed on fractions further from the causal root of the dysfunction.
I am not bantering about "no culture of merit or human virtue", however. It's a serious, good faith point that Americans do not ask of their political leadership to demonstrate any form of merit or virtue; there is no institutional requirement, and there's no bottom-up demand, apparently. Trump is legitimate, as much as Mamdani or Obama. He didn't have to be smart, or hard-working, or wise, or "presidential", or proven to have met some KPIs in governance, or anything; he just needed to win votes and he's good at that one thing. One can defend this norm (democracy, inclusivity, elite competition, larger selection pool, wisdom of the crowds, I don't care), but I don't believe it should be flaggable to bring it up.
If anything, I only concede I should have scoped it with "among elected politicians" (clearly these notions are often known and honored in other contexts, eg in the US Military below Hegseth level).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
The line about "no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" is actually the more inflexible line if I have to explain anything away, but I don't think there's very much to explain. All wars aim for surrender and most end with settlement instead
Wut? No, "unconditional surrender" is not a normal military objective, virtually all wars have some limited aims from the start. Maybe that's just American experience because you routinely fight for regime extermination against weak or non-state actors?
You might as well say that all wars aim at genocide and end with limited death. This is not the case, people mostly go to war for, like, a specific finite piece of territory.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
That you put your belief in Christ and in Trump in the same discussion is beyond the reach of any sneer, honestly.
Though much of American Christianity is this kind of bullshit religion, like Russian Orthodoxy or State Shinto, nothing more than morally and theologically vacuous justification of imperial legitimacy. Naturally it's compatible with venerating a Czar.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
I think it's perfectly on point though. Many of Freedom Stans' accusations are best understood as unconscious projection of the authoritarian brownshirt impulse. "Hierarchical and individualistic white males" is considered a Based Type in the culture war, but that "Hierarchical" part has obvious costs that Adorno et al were, frankly, just correct about. You guys want a Koryos and a Great Leader. You waited for one for your entire lives.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
I have never argued that regime change is necessary and neither has Trump
See, that's what I say I hate about you, and what you gleefully embrace: goalpost movement and unconditional defense of anything The Great Leader does and how he contradicts himself. Utterly zigger-like. Speaking of unconditional, we've been over this:
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
1 week into the war.
Does this looks like the MOU and the acceptance of Mojtaba Khamenei?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
There was a mean reply here but it's really adding nothing of value, so let's just say that I appreciate the honesty, and "Donald Trump is the avatar of American Exceptionalism" is very true, more true perhaps than you understand. "American Exceptionalism" is a belief, a vibe, not the quality of greatness attributable to the nation itself. Trump definitely channels that. We mostly disagree on whether it is anything more than parasitic exploitation of the underlying factors of greatness.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
There's a pretty large number of other world leaders for whom each and every one of those criticisms applies
I can't object to that. Plenty of world leaders really seem to be terrible in very relevant and damning ways. Monke. Von der Leyen. Lula. Trudeau. Orban. It's harder to find a truly impressive one than an irredeemable wrecker. One could perhaps argue that Trump's badness is more about the unusually (for the developed world) shameless self-presentation than the content of his character or his political MO. What I'd say is that he's still unusually bad for an American leader, ie I cannot remember a single less competent President over the post-WWII period at least, and this makes him vastly more of a problem than all but maybe 2 other national leaders (yes, Biden or rather the hivemind that effectively was Biden is more competent); he's the first one in the US to build such a solid cult of personality, which is deeply corrosive and divisive because it's a cult of a shitty personality (one decent objection would be that Obama also has a cult of personality, and he's… mediocre); and that yeah, libs and Never Trumpers are correct, his erosion of norms is a great harm unto himself. "We had boats there also". "A whole civilization will die". Making the superpower's policy conditional on his petty personal grievances. Tearing down treaties. Flagrant Middle Eastern corruption and nepotism, cronyism, the first real Purge in the history of your state. Associating the White House with crypto and other tacky/scammy things. Based Intern poasting on official comms. He's not just low, he's bringing America down to his level, kicking down the whole edifice of "institutions", which had apparently rotted enough in the meantime to become precarious.
I guess what remains is that it's just sad for a straightforwardly bad, unworthy American leader to have such a large and energetic fan club. It's kind of an indictment of the whole American democracy thing, and startling vindication of the warnings of the Republic's Founders like Franklin and Adams. Trump maximizes objective functions of an elected American politician (chiefly, being electable and capable of running a coalition) and demonstrates that they can be neatly divorced from any virtue relevant to actual governance.
The General Secretary Xi Jinping is not a long-time participant of this forum with some dozens of AAQCs, so it is reasonable that he doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt. And I am also getting some shit (not from aquota specifically, he's just trying to be nice).
Though I admit I'm getting too much slack, and have repeatedly advocated against this policy. Fairness for all or for no one.
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