RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14hr ago
Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out
And is this actually true, or is it made up or heavily exaggerated? Fox News is not known for its even-handedness and scrupulous journalistic integrity regarding Israel and Iran.
The start of a major conflict is a breeding ground for misinformation.
Because they're a tiny, weak country pretending to be a major power. 10 million people, 7 million of them Jews, cannot sustain significant long-term military capacity against even low-medium strength foes if they lose the support of the US. Israel's Gaza campaign is dependent upon US munitions and US support. They aren't even able to raze Gaza without US munitions 'forward-based' in Israel, de facto there for them to use.
US sanctions? They're done. Israel's high-tech economy goes straight to zero and the country disintegrates. How do you sanction-proof with such a small country? F-35s probably wouldn't last 6 months without the gigantic global supply chain of parts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Last I checked, shipping is not 3x slower than air travel, more like 200x slower. It's a totally different line of thought.
Transit basically always takes 30+ minutes due to walking, waiting, and transfers.
North America cannot run public transport properly, that's the fundamental problem. That's what I've been saying from the start. Cycling shouldn't be needed at all.
Wouldn't it be ridiculous to see people hand-threshing grain? In what world is that rational? If they say 'oh fuel is too expensive and we can't get a harvester because the warlords will steal it', then that's the real problem. It's not that it's superior to do agriculture like you're in the bronze age, it's that there's a deficiency elsewhere. For cycling: too many people being crammed into crowded cities. Cars being too big. Public transport full of crazies and drug fiends, unpunished fare-dodging. Artificially expensive construction costs crippling infrastructure development.
Civilization is supposed to go up the energy ladder, not down.
Cycling is not worth banning. But people should not be commuting with this method, it should not be a rational choice for people in a rich country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
From wikipedia: Around half of all trips in the Netherlands are made by car, 25% by bicycle, 20% walking, and 5% by public transport
2 km is easy walking distance anyway, I walked about that far getting to school as a child.
Contrary to all the people in this thread saying I have no experience of bikes, I have a friend used to be really keen on them and commuted by bike. However being out on the road with all the multi-tonne death machines and fumes was not his idea of a good time, so now he just takes public transport.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?
The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.
And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...
It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...
It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Clearly I hit a nerve here, people are getting very emotional about an objectively minor issue. Dumb strawmans like 'cancel air travel' don't make the point you think they're making. Air travel exists for a good reason, because people demand it, because there are proper use cases and so the infrastructure is built up. Bicycle infrastructure doesn't exist in the same way for much the same reason. It doesn't make sense. If it actually made sense people would do it en masse. Even in the Netherlands, car travel is twice as popular as bicycle travel.
I personally don't like cars and don't own one. But I'm capable of looking beyond my own personal interests and can accept that car travel's popularity has good reasons behind it.
I am not asking people to walk 90 minutes to work. Simply use public transport or drive for long distances like almost everyone else.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
If you value your time, buy whatever you need and get it delivered to you. Do you really want to be all sweaty from a bike ride when you're going out to lunch? Drive, get a taxi, an uber or public transport and do something else on the way.
you can leave bicycle at bus station or train station
If it's still there. Huge numbers of bikes are stolen in the US and elsewhere. They're innately easy to steal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
This may be news to you but there is geography outside the USA. Some of us even live outside America. It is a pain to be constantly biking up and down hills.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
why not just ban driving in cities instead?
How many people do you see driving vs cycling? There's a reason for that. It's very silly to ban driving, I don't believe you think it's more reasonable to ban cars than bikes. And I don't even want to ban bikes.
Interesting, Claude seems to have a similar effect. I put in its naively well-spelled and formatted v1 of 'worst story' and it goes 'oh this is comedy gold as an absurdist parody'. I asked for more and it went full HP fanfic 'my immortal'. Even then it said 'oh it's good as a parody' but bad as a story.
I think it's getting stuck on 'so bad it's good', though by version 3 it does go 'ok this is shit as a story but good as a parody'. It can definitely make terrible stories though.
Also model sycophancy is something we might be wise to hyperstition in. If everyone knows that AIs are bootlickers maybe they'll like us more.
Here's Claude's maximally bad story (pocket edition): Jhon woked up and ate a breakfest. Sudenly his mom died but then she didn't. A dragon came but it was actualy his dad. "Im your father" he said. Jhon cryed. The.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't know much about the Netherlands but it is quite flat there, advantaging bikes. What if your city has hills and slopes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Walking is better in most circumstances:
Much cheaper.
Also provides exercise. You can run if you want more.
Lets you think and go on autopilot, making up for lost speed.
Syncs with other forms of transport well, no restrictions on taking a non-existent bike with you.
Safer.
Can easily head into a shop without having to tie up a bike.
Can easily navigate stairs and get more direct routes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Just walk? You can also use a bus, which is complicated if you're bringing a bike.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't think your premises are true and meaningful. Some may be true. Some would be meaningful if they were true but aren't.
That's right, every single time any of us goes to a Western LLM provider's chatbot and says hi, they bleed money. If you pay them 20 dollars, they bleed even more money since you are a power user and get access to their shiny objects. The newest being deep research, which according to some estimates, costs a thousand USD per query. Yes, a thousand.
A thousand USD? Surely not. Deepseek R1 has a kind of deep research and it's very cheap. You say in comments you realise that was speculation but I think you just don't have any kind of understanding what a believable cost is for this kind of service. It just doesn't cost that much per call!
Also, OpenAI does have financials that tell a totally different story to what you're saying: https://sacra.com/c/openai/
OpenAI hit $10B in annualized revenue run rate as of May 2025, nearly doubling from $5.5B in December 2024.
OpenAI currently operates at ~40% gross margins
Inference is cheap and profitable.
Who cares if training costs go to 1 billion? Or even 10 billion? That's a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things. Facebook spent 20 billion on the metaverse, earned negligible returns and shrugged it off. The reason there's few profits on AI is because of massive investment and competition, everyone recognizes the enormous value and potential of this technology.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
There are of course many bigger problems than electric bikes or cyclists in the world or even in New York (crazy homeless for instance). Nevertheless, cycling shouldn't be needed in a rich country. Rich countries should have well-functioning public transport in urban centres which is apparently missing in America.
If you want to go somewhere, drive or use public transport. This is fast and you can use the travel time to read or whatever if you're not driving.
If you want to wander around, or exercise, walk. You can mull things over in your head without needing to be in a high state of alertness.
In between is not a good place to be as people point out downthread. It causes accidents due to there being no good infrastructure for it. And there's no good infrastructure for it because it fundamentally doesn't make any sense, there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
People moved from productive roles to non-productive roles in response. HR wrecking your ability to hire. Endless meetings where nothing happens. Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months because the people on the other side are just lazy and everyone is too polite and unbothered to insist on a reasonable schedule (why be rude and damage relationships when there's all this money floating around).
Construction is an especially bad case, I consider it to have been deliberately sabotaged by vested interests, people whose entire job is to prevent development and construction with inane zoning or regulations. It really isn't that hard. Singapore has seen construction productivity rising. China can build large apartments in weeks, there are videos of it happening. Potholes that would linger for aeons in America disappear quickly in Japan.
Productivity in terms of 'wealth created per person actually working' has risen rapidly.
AI can raise productivity hugely, providing that implementation isn't sabotaged by the usual suspects. But it will reduce the number of producers and create vast opposing lobbies of angry & unemployed + wreckers and saboteurs. Thus I suspect we will see both productivity stagnation and productivity explosion, just like in the construction industry. Software companies may become massively more productive, only to hire many more charismatic, respected, dignified, useless management staff and thus keep their productivity where it was. Or they might just become massively more productive and skip the bloat. Countries can choose whether to do things efficiently and cheaply or whether they'll pay more and wait longer for inferior products. Of course, making the wrong choice will eventually lead to having sovereignty and wealth stripped away.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
True, though there is a precedent in the recent handover of the Chagos islands.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
The Russian economy basically disintegrated and the country was looted by oligarchs, democracy was snuffed out and massively discredited for decades. Now this was a semi-deliberate wrecking of the country to prevent the communists getting back into power, so not just a bankruptcy... but it bodes ill for the US doing the same thing.
Also the US could extend bailouts to Russia and did so to a certain extent, again trying to keep communists out of power.
Trump certainly wouldn't be capable of fiscal rectitude, that much is clear. But the status quo can't be maintained indefinitely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Or more generally, doing anything fun and non-programmer with generative llms?
RP?
You can slam any two settings together or make your own, any moderately known characters replicated with moderate authenticity, go on adventures. I might be eccentric since I'm more of a '2nd person going on an adventure in a world' person while many if not most seem to be 'directly communicating with an invented character 1 to 1' people.
Surely this has to be the most freeform roleplaying game ever made.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
If the US makes receptive countries weaker with cultural exports, it weakens its own allies. Meanwhile, China has been shutting down LGBT centres.
Better to have strong allies than weak allies.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Fiscal responsibility (in its ultimate form) comes above democracy.
If the US goes bankrupt, nobody is coming in with a bailout. Nobody can, America is too big.
If the situation is 'I can't trust that the other guy won't just rob the coffers once I've refilled them' then eliminate the other guy so he can't compete for power. You can't endlessly borrow money from the rest of the world to buy goods from the rest of the world at a rapid pace. It has to correct, regardless of whether you're a democracy or an autocracy or a theocracy. It's politically impossible to cut spending or raise taxes? Well it will become possible, it will become mandatory. Either you grow your way out of debt, or you have to rebalance spending and taxes.
Look at Bolivia: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/bolivia-political-chaos/
Currency down the toilet, overt threats of a military coup, vicious politicization of the judiciary, power struggle, lots of debt and no way to pay it. They can't just ignore the debt and economic crisis because they don't like it.
There are many things the left and right agree on in America, combatting China for one. Can't do that or anything else if you have no money! The consequences of a serious economic crisis like what's happening in Bolivia but in the US are unprecedented, it would probably be at least as bad as the Great Depression for living standards and might be sufficient to finish off democracy entirely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Another week, another humiliation for Britain.
https://thecritic.co.uk/exclusive-osborne-to-give-elgin-marbles-to-greece/
The Critic understands that George Osborne, Chairman of the British Museum, has agreed to give the Elgin Marbles to Greece.
The move is unlikely to be blocked by the Government since the Prime Minister has expressed several times his commitment “not to stand in the way” of a deal between the Greek government and the British Museum.
In order to give the Marbles to Athens permanently, the government would need to amend the British Museum Act 1963 which prevents the deaccession of items. But it is thought that Osborne’s plan to give them away on loan would side-step this requirement.
Since the Greek government claims legal ownership of the sculptures, it is extremely unlikely that they would ever return to Britain.
Spain has to be salivating at this point, not to mention Argentina. There's oil in the Falklands.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
they will come up with ways to automate away research or engineering tasks
This is already happening. Papers have been published on it! This is partly why the AI safety people start to sound so deranged, because people are confusing reality with science fiction, not the other way around.
Research and engineering is being automated, piece by piece. R1 can write helpful attention kernels: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/automating-gpu-kernel-generation-with-deepseek-r1-and-inference-time-scaling/
Also consider this paper:
Many promising-looking ideas in AI research fail to deliver, but their validation takes substantial human labor and compute. Predicting an idea's chance of success is thus crucial for accelerating empirical AI research, a skill that even expert researchers can only acquire through substantial experience. We build the first benchmark for this task and compare LMs with human experts. Concretely, given two research ideas (e.g., two jailbreaking methods), we aim to predict which will perform better on a set of benchmarks. We scrape ideas and experimental results from conference papers, yielding 1,585 human-verified idea pairs published after our base model's cut-off date for testing, and 6,000 pairs for training. We then develop a system that combines a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 with a paper retrieval agent, and we recruit 25 human experts to compare with. In the NLP domain, our system beats human experts by a large margin (64.4% v.s. 48.9%). On the full test set, our system achieves 77% accuracy, while off-the-shelf frontier LMs like o3 perform no better than random guessing, even with the same retrieval augmentation. We verify that our system does not exploit superficial features like idea complexity through extensive human-written and LM-designed robustness tests. Finally, we evaluate our system on unpublished novel ideas, including ideas generated by an AI ideation agent. Our system achieves 63.6% accuracy, demonstrating its potential as a reward model for improving idea generation models. Altogether, our results outline a promising new direction for LMs to accelerate empirical AI research.
Are there caveats on this? Yes. But are AIs running AI research hilarious? No. Nothing about this is funny or deserving of casual dismissal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Oh I don't agree with it, I just like the surreal nature of the video. Like the commenter says, it's like you're strapped down as a prisoner watching these guys looming over you.
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
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