RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21m ago
I worry about a world where wars of aggression are seen to be net positive, and if small countries look upon this and see that the past promises of allies aren’t worth nearly as much as they were expecting they may well scramble for nuclear weapons or launch arms races.
You best start believing in a world of international anarchy and self-help, you're living in it.
The US went in on Iraq. The US and NATO went in on Serbia and Libya, the US seems to be moving on Venezuela any minute now. I don't mean this in a whataboutist 'it's not fair!!!' sense, I mean this in a descriptive sense, this is just what strong powers do. This is what they've always done. Russia and China are not uniquely peaceful countries with a deep-seated love of international law only for the big mean US to bully them into being aggressive. Russia has interests, America has interests, China has interests. No country can get such huge amounts of land, wealth and power peacefully.
They're biding their time, prioritizing, calculating, scheming, plotting, building up, saber-rattling and then drawing their swords for a fight. They don't necessarily want to fight, certainly not against strong opponents. But they will do so if they think that's their strongest strategy. The US likes fighting most because America's become accustomed to weak opposition since the end of the Cold War, China will be as or more aggressive if they find themselves almost unchallenged.
China and Russia aren't going to 'play by the rules' if some random bureaucrat in the EU or State Department gets to write the rules and introduce new ideas all the time like 'responsibility to protect' and then interpret the rules to his advantage. The rules are made up, they're a facade resting on top of a skewed balance of power. The 'rules' didn't even work during the Cold War when there was a vaguely objective system with each great power getting a veto in the UN security council. The UNSC did not stop fairly large wars between the power blocs then. A vague and unspecified, infinitely flexible 'rules based international order' certainly isn't going to now.
Wars of aggression are always going to be calculated according to the balance of power, risk and reward. Then some diplomats will produce evidence, justifications and rhetoric to show they're the good guys, the baddies started it, we're defending ourselves. That's just how the world is. The real danger is from the dud schools of international relations, the people who kept calling for spreading liberalism all around the world at the point of a JDAM. This behaviour has consequences, it makes the Western bloc more threatening. It makes other countries suspicious of our motives and intentions, it makes us look crazed or rabid and to some extent we are, fighting irrational conflicts for the sake of liberalism.
Or the people who said 'serious warfare is such a 20th century thing, let's do more damage to our military industry than all the chaos of post-Soviet Russia could inflict on Russia.' Joe Biden literally laughed at the prospect of Russia-China-Iran cooperation in the 1990s. John Kerry said regarding Ukraine "You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests," he said it was 19th century behaviour. No, it's eternal behaviour. The US does it, everyone can and will do it. Only some in the US got pretty arrogant and lacked both self-awareness and awareness of the power-balance. Thus they made a bunch of strategic errors.
Ukraine is done for, regardless of whether they lose less or lose more the country is wrecked. The Ukrainian leadership did not perceive the gravity of the situation and operated under a world of vibes and ideology when they needed to be considering the balance of power. They just aren't going to be beating a bigger power with more men, materiel and nukes, when said power is determined to win. That doesn't happen in industrial warfare. If a great power truly wants to beat a secondary power, it will win. All moments of luck, all tactical excellence, all fleeting technological advantages are eventually erased by weight of numbers, weight of industrial output, weight of firepower.
If Korea and Japan wake up and think seriously about their situation and whether they need nukes, that's a good thing. The highway is no place for sleeping drivers, the world is no place for sleeping, or even drowsy, countries. Taiwan needs to think very carefully about their position. Can they fight China? They're an island totally reliant on external food and energy. If they fight China and China doesn't get knocked out of the war fast, Taiwan loses. There's nothing Taiwan can do to change this, they can't develop nukes now, it's too late. The US was the one who shut down the Taiwanese nuclear program (twice), they thought they knew better about Taiwanese security than Taiwan did. Same happened in Australia albeit less dramatically. Vibe-based nuclear non-proliferation would never work on the big powers, the US isn't going to disarm and nor is Russia. You can see this in the tragicomedic 'disarmament' aspect of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Under Article VI of the NPT, all Parties undertake to pursue good-faith negotiations on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race, to nuclear disarmament, and to general and complete disarmament
If this seems unrealistic to you, trying to cancel aggressive war is the same kind of thing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I think most people will embrace the AI. Most people are not discerning enough to deal with well-prompted AI, recall the 'changemyview' redditors who got their views changed by an old Sonnet, 3.6 or 3.7. They were very upset about that when it was revealed they were talking with AIs but they couldn't tell the difference.
"The AI-generated content proved significantly more effective than human comments, with personalized responses ranking in the 99.4th percentile of all users on the subreddit, meaning only about 0.6% of human commenters were more persuasive"
AI is only going to get more persuasive while the population's faculties are plateauing or even declining. It's a huge boon for the algorithms running social media, making them more addictive and also producing more content.
I think that this forum and its users are wildly out of distribution. Go to webnovel.com, the nhentai comments section. Go to a normie facebook server or sports twitter or the average AO3 story. These are not very sophisticated thinkers that are going to be outwitting modern AI used adeptly.
Nobody wants to pay though.
Try running a paid subscription internet service. I'm actually selling something that costs money, so there's more of a value proposition than 'internet forum'. It's bleak. Over 100 free trial users, 4 subscribers, 3 of them unsubscribed. Of course I am not a very good businessman or marketer or developer tbh... but I think people underestimate the difficulty of getting people to subscribe!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Isn't this just talk?
The EU’s new emergency powers will remain in place until “Russia ceases its war of aggression against Ukraine, and provides reparations to Ukraine,” according to a legal text, seen by POLITICO, that was backed by the EU’s 27 ambassadors on Thursday afternoon.
They can just undo the emergency powers whenever they want, if they decide it's expedient. Either take the assets or don't take them, playing games over who has the authority to take or return them reeks of impotence and disunity.
What is the point of this? The war has already cost Europe trillions in economic damage and energy costs, they took that blow fairly well. They can keep printing money if they want to, it's not like they're about to go bankrupt without that 200 billion. Europe's shortfalls are in materiel not finance. It's not like there are dozens of empty Russian shell factories in Europe that, with the stroke of an official's pen, they can take and rev up to produce munitions for Ukraine. These 'assets' are just bonds, just pieces of paper. The order book for munitions, spare transformers, air defences and so on is already full, no amount of paper assets is going to provide much help.
Plus it was staggeringly silly for Russia to hold Chinese bonds in Europe, I don't know why they'd possibly think that was a smart thing to do. It's like how Venezuela has its gold in the UK for some reason. Not your vaults, not your gold!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
It'd outrage people a less since it'd be 'damn that's impressive'. The sexes are different. It's like how when a female teacher has sex with a boy internet commenters are like 'Nice' or 'why couldn't it have been me' and when it's a male teacher and a girl there's a much harsher response.
Even I can't help but think that Bonnie Blue is worse than her male equivalent, in part because the male equivalent isn't really imaginable. I don't see a guy having sex with 1000 girls in a day as a PR stunt that boosts his profile to that level. But the hypothetical equivalent would be very bad. I support harsh treatment of Chad Thundercock if he goes around and disrupts the social contract or demoralizes people like Bonnie Blue.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
mission was nontrivially different from training data or b) that it involved more than 'follow quest marker, spam A at enemies when lock-on-button does anything.
Well they did show it going to Liyue, whereas the training data was all in Mondstadt. And they showed it playing different games which weren't in the training set.
Also Honkai Star Rail is turn-based rather than real time? I don't see how it can be surface-level pattern-matching if you can completely change the characters, aesthetic, gameplay, map geography and UI and it still basically works. The generalization isn't complete of course, it thinks it's still playing Genshin and wants to use the Wind Glider to glide down but that's not a thing in other games. But even if it took 10 minutes or running into an invisible wall it eventually figures out the 'press the lever to move the bridge' puzzle and progresses through something that, under Genshin logic, would never even be a puzzle.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The intended meaning of my post was that this is what other people think, not an accurate, complete model of reality:
I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.
Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.
I was trying to explain what might be lurking in the back of people's heads, who aren't neccessarily aware of power-law distributions or attention economies. The same could apply to the Island Boys or any number of other influencers. I was thinking of those /pol/ threads that show some lowlife making huge amounts of money that get 300 replies because it's ragebait and attentionbait.
And to a certain extent, isn't this whole discourse proof of my point? It's a potent topic both here and in less erudite forums. It makes people upset with how the economy is functioning, people in this thread are talking about income distributions. I was not trying to raise the object-level topic, only use it as an example and yet here we are in another huge battle/wealth of the sexes and pornography discussion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
I heard just today that German police have gotten new powers to sneak into people's apartments and plant trojans on their devices to spy on them. Supposedly judges are only going to allow this for serious cases... but they already spy on the AFD a great deal, presumably the plan is to ramp up the suppression campaign.
It seems like some critical event is needed to break the power of the consensus elite in the non-US West, shambling incompetence and myopic authoritarianism sleepwalk onwards.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If they wanted to fake it, why go to all this effort making video that backs up their claims? Why would bytedance even try to fake it, they're a company the size of facebook, an AI leader, not even publicly traded, they have no need for prestige or investor hype (of which this has gotten roughly zero with its 224 views on youtube).
It's a model with over a thousand hours of training for exactly this kind of 3d space movement, in this very game, I see no reason why this shouldn't work. Claude's struggles with pokemon are because it's a general-purpose model, not a pokemon specialist.
Also I don't see what's wrong with the clip of video you linked. It looks like a character getting over a perfectly visible wall to me?
which makes absolutely no sense for an agent to do
Yeah no agents make sense. Sometimes they delete the D drive. Sometimes they have depressive meltdowns. Sometimes they want to take a break and look at pictures of the zoo. Switching between shift and right click is not a big worry.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
You can't raise the subject of attention-vampires without inadvertently feeding them. Sometimes you need to use the cursed spellbooks of the damned to fight demons and monsters - albeit with caution and care.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
We introduce Lumine, a generalist AI agent trained within Genshin Impact that can perceive, reason, and act in real time, completing hours-long missions within complex 3D open-world environments.
Unlike most of these science papers they actually show video of it working, which should be applauded IMO. It's very strange watching the AI's chain of thought as it thinks about what it's doing on screen, I only watched a few minutes and it was doing that standard chain of thought thing 'hmm I shall completely misunderstand the situation, misidentify this random mob as Stormterror the boss dragon but I'll still do the right thing anyway and kill the mob.' Despite the weird thinking, it just works.
Genshin combat is fairly simple since you just press 1 e, 2 e, 3 e, 4 e and do some left clicking, maybe a few Qs and dodge the telegraphed attacks. But there are also a fair few puzzles and more complex activities that I'm sure should give Gary Marcus conniptions (freeze the water to get the anemoculus on it, accomplishing tasks over a long period without getting confused, generalization beyond the training materials into other mihoyo games). I would've liked to see it have a go at the more complex puzzles in Inazuma though. They're using a fairly small model and fairly small compute too by corporate standards at least, real-time AI video processing isn't going to run on your PC.
It also shows the paucity of 'time-horizon' measurements. 5 hours of Honkai Star Rail, where does that fit on the METR chart?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I did a little look into Tiktok economics. In the West, it's smaller than Netflix in revenue and unprofitable (expansion, content moderation, various legal issues). In China it's gigantic and has a huge e-commerce wing too, Douyin is far more profitable than Netflix. So Tiktok (the whole thing globally with both names) is already much more profitable than Netflix.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I think people wouldn't have such a problem with supermodels earning large amounts of money (at least they're pretty hot) or top actors who've demonstrated some skill.
But sleeping with 1000 men in 24 hours is not an exceptional skill. Manipulating people's attention via social media and her own actions so that I know her name despite being on the other side of the world, that's not a worthwhile talent to hone. I think the game that she's top of is innately unworthy. She's not even really good at being a prostitute, she's good at manipulating people's attention. Like Hawk Tuah girl, except deliberate.
Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.
I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.
Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.
Same with the guy who bought bitcoin early, I think this is why crypto is so widely hated online, people got rich in an 'unorthodox' way compared to hard work and high skill. Plus, crypto bros come off as low-status. Same with landlords, there's considerable bitterness towards boomers who bought a house that then 10xed while they were also getting decent yields off it. People see a boomer and think 'I am much more deserving but much poorer, the economy is terrible.' Same with 'billionaires' or 'tech-bros' in aspects of the popular imagination.
Of course it's always been this way. In the time of the Stuarts kings would give huge payments to their friends, the navy might be starved for shot while some sexy duchess was dripping with gems and titles. Good old fashioned sinecures and fraud is as old as civilization. But with social media this is rubbed in people's noses by algorithms deliberately trying to rage-bait them. There are people whose whole lifestyle is funded by rage-baiting and attention-grabbing for being obnoxious lowlifes. They are pushing everyone else down in social-economic hierarchy.
The economy feels fake and gay, in other words. To a large extent it is more fake and gay than before (SF venture capital especially) but even more so, it feels that way. Imagine being socially-bamboozled into taking on huge amounts of debt, studying and jumping through hoops to get a degree only to find it's mostly worthless. Now have fun interviewing with dozens of companies and jumping through endless hoops to get a meaningless job. HR makes a complete mess of things while you work, tiktok shows you the luxurious lifestyle of your unworthy betters... Very depressing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Well, without making doxing too easy, I can assure you it's not such an establishment. We have bad universities in Australia like Charles Sturt University or Federation University. My point is that even Group of Eight universities are getting to be like this too, they're debasing their increasingly undeserved reputations to transfer vast amounts of Chinese, student and government money to administrators.
Same thing has been happening in Canada and America. Huge grade inflation at high-end universities, while teachers bemoan the stupidity, laziness and ignorance of their students. Just the other day there was another top level post about students who struggled with fractions and quite basic maths somehow getting university admissions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Humanities (at a fairly prestigious university in Australia). The most mathematics I did was cubic polynomials at one point (that course was also the most challenging). I can't speak for the STEM side of things but I'd estimate that the majority of students were in limp-wristed and unrigorous degrees.
There were people going through via plagiarism alone, foreign students who couldn't really speak English that well and domestic students who were quite stupid.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Is that actually a thing, where 'gentle parenting' results in kids who are stealing iphones or doing more or less organized crime? I genuinely have no idea.
I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment. You'd never see them rob some 2 metre tall bodybuilder, even those 'schizophrenics' who push people onto subway lines or whatever, they'll go for someone weaker than themselves. Maybe the payoff for killing is hatred or jealousy rather than pure monetary gain...
I agree that swift discipline is the cure but I think that they all have some ability to judge, even if it's some reptile-brain 'this guy looks alpha better not attack him' level. More specifically I think some middle-class coddled brat is going to be really whiny and irritating when running into some obstacle but won't rob a store because he/she assesses 'I can just get my parents to pay for it'. Whereas the hardened thief calculates more along the line of 'who cares if I go to prison, my mate Bronco is there, I know lots of people who went to prison, and I don't want to look like a pussy and I need this cash fast'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI. Plenty of people would do a course and not actually read anything if they could at all avoid it. It was kind of funny seeing different teachers be at different points on the 'anger, grief, acceptance' scale, some gave up entirely and just aimed to maximize student ratings with shameless pandering and niceness.
This is what a decline in social trust looks like. People used to assume that nobody would cheat (dishonorable), students would work hard, there were rigorous standards. But that's clearly not a thing. University courses are designed to look rigorous to suckers, then accept any idiot (even if they can't do basic maths or write a vaguely decent essay) and extract their money.
Participating honestly today is being a sucker. Why would you work hard when that's not necessary to get through? I began to loathe the imbecilic, patronizing, childish box-ticking BS that lecturers inflicted. Some of them were fools too, they didn't have a clue about what they were supposed to be teaching. Better to read a book on the subject, faster and cheaper too. It's extremely demoralizing to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this worthless, time-wasting garbage.
If I just tossed that money into crypto or shares, at least there's some possibility of returns on the investment.
The job market has little demand for skill or degrees either, it wants people with the right connections or wearing a cute dress or from a politically correct background.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
They can and do change over time. But it took centuries and very specific conditions to change one specific English culture to another English culture, an enormously complex process with unpredictable results. Trying to do something similar with Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan in a few decades is a much bigger ask.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
freely and willingly choose religious warfare
I was reading a history book talking about Episcopalian death squads running around killing Presbyterians in Britain, in the 17th century. About half the book is a game of musical chairs where various sects are persecuting eachother, none of them even that distinctive besides the Puritans who just hated fun... totally different mindset to today.
Likewise, just the other day, I was reading on twitter about how Sunnis were bullying Shia and Sikhs in British 'multi-faith prayer rooms', hiding their prayer books and similar. How they'd treat others were they in charge is pretty clear, they're pretty pushy even as a minority. You don't want to be Shia in Saudi Arabia. There are some actual differences in nationality for this, so it's more explicable.
I think it'd be funny to tell social liberals sanctimoniously 'read more and educate yourselves about history!' but it wouldn't work.
it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West
They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. The US and NATO could operate airpower imperialism and permanently extract resources from MENA at will were it not for other powers like Russia or China who'd interfere. The Arabs are bad at fighting, worse at making weapons, only Turkey and Iran are vaguely decent and they're still massively outmatched. Pakistan's nukes could be destroyed on the ground, not like they have the range to hit the West anyway. Indonesia hasn't done anything of importance in all of history. Sub-Saharan Africa is even easier to dominate. Terrorists are very easy to fight. Just whisk the whole population off to labour camps, repress them until they accept that their culture is just some funny dances and that their god is nothing before the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
But in actual fact, the Islamist/MENA rabble get subsidized London apartments, their rape gangs papered over for fear of racism, tv shows glorifying them, 'religion of peace' memes, obnoxious public prayers, Islamophobia training to raise their status, basically the privileges of a noble class. They get the gains of military superiority without any proof-of-work. Airpower imperialism is not even considered because that wouldn't help us 'turn Afghanistan into a democracy' or 'free the Iraqis'.
The danger is not from without but from within, from a political system that is even more grossly weak and pathetic than the militaries of the Middle East. The Somalis in Minnesota got away with their clumsy, incompetent scamming for so long because they are on a completely different level in political ability. They recognize there's a conflict over wealth distribution, they have a concept of 'us' and 'them', they recognize their own interests are advanced by crying 'racism' and so they loot and extract. The Israelis do the same thing, they play retarded Westerners for fools, extracting military and diplomatic/political aid.
Islam is not going to get world domination through military means, that kind of political strength is the only thing they have. And the mindset of 'how can we help these guys' is why the West is losing, why we lost to a bunch of quasi-literate goat-herders in Afghanistan. If we conceptualize these people as malfunctioning Western people whose welfare we try to maximize as we try to reprogram them, then of course they can and will easily beat us. If we conceptualize them as real actors working under real incentives who might unironically try to exploit us, people to trade with, help (when it helps us) or hurt, depending on the situation, then we can't possibly lose. 'Brainwash harder but in a touchy-feely liberal way' isn't going to work without the superintelligence addendum. It's morally inferior too, waging wars to mindbreak and culturebreak a population of over a billion is extremely aggressive Borg behaviour compared to mere wealth-extraction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Instead the oil rights got bought largely by China IIRC. The US military has essentially been securing China's energy imports.
(And the '''grand strategists''' in the Pentagon/State Department blob never got purged or anything, they're still around)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man
Maybe in an arena with rules and social judgement for men who beat up women. Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic, good chance they start with a sucker punch or are in some cluttered space where technique is less relevant and both sides are improvising.
80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.
I agree 100% regarding weapons and avoiding fights. My point is that the sex that gets men to carry heavy things has no place in a fight fundamentally and should avoid it wherever possible.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Trying to wage war against computing is like waging war against guns, you are sure to lose. Personally I don't see any way out of this mess besides a miracle. Our civilization really struggled with baby's first game theory of 'avoid mutually assured destruction.' We still haven't cracked down on gain of function viruses. What chance is there that we can manage superintelligence properly? Maybe actions right now will turn out to be vaguely helpful by some unknown method but my expectations are very low.
You can think there are good aspects of Ukrainian culture that need not be tainted while also thinking you don't want the bad aspects of Ukrainian culture like the corruption.
Say you value a jar of Northern Europe at 100, Ukraine at 50 and migrants at 10. Mixing Europe and Ukraine worsens Europe. Mixing migrants and Ukraine worsens Ukraine. I bet he'd prefer to replace all third world migrants with Ukrainians if that was somehow possible.
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