No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
Europe has a very different history with antisemitism than the US does.
No, it really doesn't. Before and during WW2, antisemitism was common across the present 'western world'.
In a 1938 poll, approximately 60 percent of the respondents held a low opinion of Jews, labeling them "greedy," "dishonest," and "pushy."[42] 41 percent of respondents agreed that Jews had "too much power in the United States," and this figure rose to 58 percent by 1945.[43] Several surveys taken from 1940 to 1946 found that Jews were seen as a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group.[44]
Government attitudes to Jews in Europe also varied wildly, even among German allies. Finland told Germans to pound sand. Italy refused to hand over their Jews -that 30% of Italian Jews were members of the Fascist party had something to do with it & transports started only after the German occupation.
No_one
5d ago
The list apparently includes a former twitter head of AI-safety.
Using my cynical glasses derived from living in eastern Europe, probably the person who was supposed to develop automated opinions suppression mechanisms for Twitter.
No_one
8d ago
What about.. the supply part of the army ? Driving trucks, working in logistics. Any part of that <100 km can be fatal on a bad day if a drone spots it and it's deemed a good enough target.
No_one
4d ago
It's not a nothingburger. It was overhyped initially (as everything is).
Anyway, LLMs. Apparently you can prevent them from hallucinating and make them accurately give advice on the content of a textbook or manual. Or so says Steve Hsu, who founded a company that (he claims) did that. I haven't followed it up but supposedly they had an initial sale.
Looks like superhuman performance isn't going to happen through this architecture, as you can't do self-competitive play - what was done with games but incremental progress -people making the models reliable, useful, likely even assembling normal to middling smart human-intelligence agents, with a will -is likely in the near term (10 years).
So at the very least, within 15 years, we're looking at governments being able to use 'kinda dumb' spies, automatically flag problematic online, on the scale of an entire population.
To sum it up:
-call centres: likely a lot less employment
-increased productivity of at least software developers, lawyers, theoretically bureaucrats (lol no).
-automated spying on everything your write on an online device -but not very smart spying- almost certain. Combined with universal private messaging access by governments (EU -DC's sock puppet - wants this), it's likely going to happen. Even though 'chat control' the initial proposal was defeated, it's going to come back.. IMO I suspect having an app that is not broken might even be criminalised because 'Chyna'.
-social media is dead without independent ID verification. Automated, much better online astroturfing.
-good enough chatbots that waste time of troublemakers / get people to spend money on BS / troll
-textbooks that talk
-even more addictive porn in the 5 year horizon (people can overuse the porn to the degree they can find that one special thing that appeals to them. When that can be generated on the fly, crap..)
In 'other ML' news, autonomous killbots (ethical militaries will geofence them to combat zone) are 100% certain to happen.
100%, anyone who doesn't develop autonomous drone air fighters in is going to get absolutely wrecked by people who develop autonomous drones bombers. I'm talking machineguns vs cavalry style carnage on the ground. Developing a $1000, fast, evasive reusable FPV drone drop mortar bombs with pin-point accuracy is just a question of 4-5 good university aeronautics student projects. It'll zoom low across the ground at 50-100 kph, deliver a bomb, reload/swap battery, while getting target data from recon drones or troops. It's not even funny how brutal this is.
A countermeasure - autocannon with VT flak rounds costs $300k. And needs a vehicle. A vehicle that's vastly more expensive than an IR or optically guided missile.
Ray beams won't help you (at sea maybe) because of line of sight problems. Drones will spot them call in an missile strike. Poof.
No_one
21d ago
'Always a slum' With the 8-10x rate of homicidal violence between blacks and whites, and a roughly similar disparity in other forms of crime, it's fairly obvious one sort of 'slum' is a much more pleasant place to live.
I'm also skeptical of the 'always a slum' claim, as we have basically no slums in Czech Republic apart from the few Gypsy areas. Slums are not an inevitable part of life. They disappear once people have enough money to keep buildings repaired.
No_one
3d ago
You are, once again, living up to your name.
What it'll look like ? Services that create porn you want, on demand. People got addicted to porn merely with access to huge story databases.
Imagine how bad it's going to get when AI services will generate sexy waifus with precisely the right RP, on demand.
Your idea of 'porn AIs actually useful, using sex appeal to get kids to learn' is about as realistic of my idea of some governments paying for the development of something like a truly massively multiplayer ARMA / DCS combination and making kids play that so they'll learn some soldiering, instead of playing COD. Lol. No, not gonna happen!
No_one
4d ago
I think Krugman is full of shit because there's a vast difference between 'fax machine' and people doing research being able to access practically everything interesting that's ever been written.
At least with software development internet enabled cooperation increases productivity by a big factor.
especially given our advancements in biology
Bro, our gene pool is mostly decaying. Accumulating mutations. People who were pre-adapted to modernity aren't even breeding at replacement levels! We-on a societal/species level don't understand anything and don't want to understand anything.
We can't even safely rewrite a fertilised egg's DNA at more than single digit spots because of the error rates.
There have been no successful eugenic projects. Human nature is largely fixed because we're too pussy to do anything about it. All your mushy-headed idealistic bullshit is just putting lipstick on a week old stinking corpse of a pig.
Thanks to the religious, and by that I mean communists with their infinite malleability due to material conditions we're pretty much screwed. There's no good policy, most 'intellectuals' are deluded etc. Only animal instincts of people liking healthy partners are preventing total insanity.
it's that adaptability and change are at the heart of what it means to be human.
That's only true on a timescale of centuries and with very high losses involved.
Yeah. That's why Australian Aborigines after getting unceremoniously yanked from their stone age are now deeply involved in Australian's Aerospace industry and not being subjected to PSA's about the inadvisability of sleeping on the road or sniffing petrol.
Another shining example of 'human adaptability' were Norse in Greenland going extinct because they refused to eat fish, sticking to increasingly desperate farming until the bitter end.
I'm going to once again recommend "The Eternal Front" by Walter Blaire.
Technically it's a mildly hard mil-sf but the war is just the setting. Yes, there are fights, but mostly the novel is more of a mystery/spy/political story.
It's very well written for a self-published work and quite novel, to me.
All the constituent parts have been re-worked and put in an arrangement that is arguably original.
As in, vastly better than the typical technothriller tier writing most SF has.
I once wrote a nice message to the author, saying it's on the level of how Iain Banks wrote when drunk. He really liked it. Hard to judge, but I don't think I'm more than mildly wrong.
Most books - like e.g. 'Bobiverse' are painfully contemporary. You've got SF trappings, but everything else - language, ethics etc feels like modern day West.
This book - the SF trappings are minimal, 99% of stuff used during the plot is pure electric age tech, or even late steam era. It's set on the fringe of a rapidly declining colony that started with cca 22nd century tech level - AIs, fusion power, 'reasonable' nanotech etc.
The languages spoken by the various groups are all recognizable modern English - but style / vocabulary wise feel alien. However, unlike Star Wars, it's 'actually sf' in that it tries to be internally coherent, cares about historical, political and technological constraints and so on.
People have their own odd ethics. The colonists, Haphans, culturally seem like a weird mix between 19th century Britain (social mores) and North Korea (politics). They're described as pretty much human, but clearly from a 'prepped*' population. There's no mention of Earth whatsoever in their history, or of other non-Hapha humans, although Earth clearly exists within the setting because there's one oblique reference to it - a Hebrew derived name in a minor, outsider character.
The natives ancestors were human once but aren't, anymore. They're descended from someone's 'plausible' idea of a supersoldier race. There's a small bit of 'art major biology' in the book, but most of the stuff is within bounds of physics and biology.
They're savants at fighting - much more accurate, fast breeding, love fighting, vastly better reaction time, far less likely to die from injury, immune to disease, a second grafted on nervous system preventing combat fatigue or undue fear of death, a whole set of instincts related to weapons and looks like also primitive armament production. Neurologically problematic for them to tell a lie. And so on. Interestingly, linguistic drift is also what they're missing entirely.
They seem about as intelligent as Haphans, who seem pretty normal, but the feral supersoldier heritage causes problems - e.g. engineers or scientists killing each other due to disagreement is a frequent, not very rare risk. By themselves, they only ever achieved high middle ages technology.
*Quote from Iain M Banks' Algebraist (spoilers):
Prepping. A very long-established practice, used lately by the Culmina amongst others, is to take a few examples of a pre-civilised species from their home world (usually in clonoclastic or embryonic form) and make them subject species\slaves\mercenaries\mentored. so that when the people from their home world finally assume the Galactic stage, they are not the most civilised\advanced of their kind (often they're not even the most numerous grouping of their kind). Species so treated are expected to feel an obligation to their so-called mentors (who will also generally claim to have diverted comets or otherwise prevented catastrophes in the interim, whether they have or not). This practice has been banned in the past when pan-Galactic laws (see Galactic Council) have been upheld but tends to reappear in less civilised times. Practice variously referred to as Prepping, Lifting or Aggressive Mentoring. Local-relevant terminology: aHuman & rHuman (advanced and remainder Human).
No_one
6d ago
With AI, the odds of automating zersetzung are approaching 100%.
It's much less disruptive than jailing people, and probably cheaper.
No_one
11d ago
Sailer's was joking how funny it is that Spielberg has spend like a million bucks on luxury Italian shotguns but there's like 2 photos of him shooting one.
No_one
20d ago
That's limited by geography.
Very few places could get days of storage that way, without NAWAPA style megaprojects.
No_one
23d ago
You don't get it, do you?
Japanese aren't docile. They're still the same people.
They're just not at war.
No_one
12d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations,
And that's why I'm dooming on AI. Because enough people aren't psychopathic enough and causing a genocide isn't that easy if all you have is a handful of conspirators.
Meanwhile, in the real world, it took giant totalitarian states to do anything, years of effort. AI systems will however make it much easier to pull off a conspiracy or develop a lethal agent.
They'll also make it much easier to detect anyone trying to do either, but doing so is costly and paranoid so the conspiracies will have an edge. Also, gigadeaths, if it didn't involve just 3rd world getting killed would crash the economy and destroy the supply chain. I think the Venn diagram between "non delusional genocidal wannabe world masters" and "wants to live in ruins, relying on scavenging spare parts" contains exactly zero people, and the former category is also very small too.
We have only one that could probably genocide, and it's in a superpower competition so no matter how feisty they might feel, just doing an actual genocide is pointless. Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.
No, what's happening is basically just chaos+information overload and stress. Schizos of a certain sort are liable to act out in such an environment.
No_one
22d ago
That's all irrelevant because groups that lucked into right beliefs thrive, those that had bad luck die out.
Thus over time, the rules of the groups that survive start to look pretty wise.
No_one
2d ago
Majority of people don't have careers, and never had. Being a grocery clerk, factory worker, some low paid service sector employee or lowest rung bureaucrat or manager or something else for 30 years isn't a career. It's a job.
No_one
6d ago
I'd not really fear SV that much, but what D.C. gestapo contractors and their opposite numbers in China are going to do.
No_one
11d ago
..didn't he donate tens to low hundreds millions of dollars to ensuring Trump loses his 2nd election ?
No_one
15d ago
I thought we are beyond this already, the same was said before invasion of Ukraine. I
People in the know (Mearsheimer had a talk on this in '14, Bill Burns-the ambassador said as much in his leaked 2008 memo etc) have been saying Ukraine is liable to get invaded if US tries to integrate it into NATO.
US:
- set up a defence treaty with Ukraine,
- vowed to integrate it into NATO at some unspecified date,
- refused to renounce that ambition
- laughed at the Russian ultimatum that sought a decrease in troop levels near its borders, disavowing ambition to integrate Ukraine
So who exactly was saying Ukraine won't get attacked?
No_one
22d ago
India was conquered by the same people who conquered Europe. Steppe pastoralists, first people to develop horse chariots, a pastoral nomadic lifestyle and thus thrive in the trackless wastes.
This gave them a huge boost, they took over the entire steppe in 300 years and then went on to topple every adjacent civilization, ushering in a centuries long dark age, out of which we got the classical era.
They were likely proportionately a far smaller population than in Europe, and it's also unclear whether in India they practiced genocidal policies like in Europe. E.g. from grave DNA it seems for several generations after the conquest, men from the conquered populations weren't procreating much, or at all.
No_one
23d ago
You forgot to mention incest, or more precisely serial cousin marriage which if done repeatedly results in basically brother/sister incest risks. Big past-time in Pakistan. Slightly decreasing as of late.
Meanwhile Indian castes give a good impression of being inbred and data shows basically reproductive isolation for perhaps 2500 years, at minimum 1600.
You can have populations more distinct than Spaniards and Swedes speaking basically the same language and having lived next to each other for millenia.
You rarely see such disturbingly looking people in Europe outside of narrow mountain valleys in the Alps, where half of the people look like they're related to each other and have unusual facial features.
India's special thing is that they religiously restrict meat eating and even eggs, thus their stunting conditions actually mildly worsened since 2000.
While it's valid to say that e.g. England had horrible slums before 1840s, we know that IQ wise, the populations are incomparable even if some castes (brahimns) and ethnics (parsis) are pretty much at white average or even slightly above it.
So India won't get much better unless the substandard human capital running it is substituted for by AIs, and you can bet their bureaucrats and politicians would not like that one bit.
Less hopeless than Africa, but I understand why everyone is trying to get away from there, and I also understand why that must be prevented at all costs.
Opinion of people I know IRL working in IT on Indians (N=4) is about on the same level as opinion of random eastern Europeans on the Roma.
~Yes, there's a few good ones. No, if I could I'd prefer never to come into contact with them, as on average it ranges from disappointing to having your day ruined and getting very angry.
No_one
3hr ago
In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.
City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Václav Smil explains it better here.
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