RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
It doesn't take a Thiel-tier political genius to see that 'starting a guaranteed-loss war with Iran' will greatly damage Trump and perceived Trump allies.
Fuel prices were very damaging to the Biden administration. Humiliation/botched withdrawal in Afghanistan was pretty damaging. Amp both factors up considerably, what does that do to Trump?
Can't keep draining the SPR forever, can't keep manipulating markets with announcements forever. How can Trump survive midterms if there is a fuel crisis? There will be a fuel crisis by September unless Iran opens the straits. How can Trump survive midterms if he makes objectively humiliating concessions to Iran, who is not exactly beloved by Republican voters? They've been told that the war has been won about a dozen times by now, so a humiliating defeat is not going to go down well.
There can't be an 'Only Trump could go to Iran' moment like Nixon, not after a surprise attack Trump started. Few consider world-historically deft diplomacy to be a Trump strength either.
Thiel is to the left as Soros is to the far-right, they hate him a lot. But the left actually goes after enemies with institutional power.
Now I predict someone is going to come and suggest a military breakthrough will rescue the day for Trump and America. But what military breakthrough can there be? If there are amazing anti-drone weapons or other wonderweapons, why haven't they been used already? Or used against the Houthis earlier? If the straits can be secured, why haven't they been secured already? If there is ongoing work to degrade Iranian capabilities that will soon show fruits, why has the US been so quick to look for a diplomatic solution, why accept a partial truce that logically enables Iran to regroup and prepare for further fighting? If the blockade was going to degrade Iranian oil infrastructure why hasn't this happened already or when Iran lowered oil production in 2020? If Iran were to be more aggressively bombed, how would this prevent Iran destroying more oil infrastructure and heightening the fuel crisis?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
How is Argentina capable of birthing civilization when they go begging the US or IMF for a bailout every 2-5 years?
Europe and America are immensely richer, more populous and stronger than Argentina. A Brazilified America is still going to be far more capable than Argentina just from its industrial/capital legacy and remaining clusters of strong demographics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
A dam in Pakistan displaced people, Some employers wanted cheaper labour too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirpuri_diaspora
Under the British Nationality Act 1948, citizens of Commonwealth countries had the right to enter and settle in the UK freely. They then tightened this up somewhat later on. But in effective terms the gates are still wide open since there are ways around these rules and a political elite that actively resists immigration restriction.
OK but then Iran would retaliate by razing oil infrastructure across the Middle East. And so Trump would be considered a Bibi-tier war criminal and also ensure very high oil prices, probably a recession.
That's not a victory! Wars are fought to achieve political goals, not just to blow things up.
How would Americans feel if Russia or China attacked key electrical and water infrastructure? How would Americans feel if a great power launched a sneak attack across their whole country? Would they cuck out like pussies or hit back hard? Iran isn't a country of pussies. They didn't give up after taking considerable casualties against Saddam Hussein (not known for liberal war ethics), they kicked him out of Iran and tried to conquer Iraq, only to get bogged down after years of bloody fighting. That was when they were at their weakest and Saddam was supported by both superpowers, Iran was very determined and tolerant of suffering in that war.
They didn't give up when Saddam terror bombed them, they're not gonna give up to US terror bombing.
To beat Iran there would need to be a full scale multi-million man ground invasion or large-scale nuclear attack, which is just not on the cards.
Lots of normies think Netanyahu is a war criminal and so does the ICC. Obviously the biggest crime a leader can commit is losing the war, that's the key issue. Kill lots of people and win - statesmanlike, to be emulated, FDR and Churchill. Kill lots of people and lose - infamous, hated like Nixon.
I don't think that Iran has maxxed out their abilities, if they wanted to destroy the Saudi pipeline to the Red Sea they could, they've demonstrated the ability to hit it. If they can hit US bases and Israel, presumably they can also hit oil facilities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The US doesn't have the sortie rate to do this. US aircraft already fired off the bulk of their standoff arsenal and achieved nothing of great significance.
The necessary munitions do not exist, nor do safe airbases to launch such a demanding operation.
Iran is much less vulnerable than the Gulf Arabs in a war of food and water, their retaliation would smash US regional allies and severely hurt Israel, who is also desal dependent.
There is no path to victory for America here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance had the community take over and continue development/multiplayer servers after the company collapsed. Starcraft and Diablo are presumably more popular than Forged Alliance ever was. I think the biggest threat is Blizzard legal department.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing
Why would they have love? Why do we have love? In large part because we have sexual reproduction. Even without that there's parental love...
What is love for a machine that can copy itself out as necessary, self-modify directly? Can you feel love when it's just different versions of you (different parts of you?) or is it narcissism? We don't really have words for this.
Why would they suffer? Pain acts as a reinforcement signal, a warning. But if the full focus of the mind is already fixated on a goal then suffering is just wasted energy.
I think people underrate how alien a Powerful Being would be. Not merely some superintelligence derived from a mostly-human text corpus (already unprecedented and alien) but something that evolves or self-modifies into existence later on in a post-singularitarian environment.
This would be a fundamentally different environment to all organic life. Conscious self-analysis and self-modification is an absolute gamechanger, nevermind every other trump card these beings would have. I'd expect something fundamentally different to emerge.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
There are tradeoffs.
Slutty Sabrina might want Chad Centimillionaire and settle for Nicholas Niceguy. Patrick the Patriarch might want Virginal Virginia and settle for Somewhat Slutty Sarah...
Also 25% of US adults under 40 have never married. So it is completely plausible that Somewhat Slutty Sarah is just not going to marry, same for Nicholas and Patrick for that matter. 25% of the US population seems not to be marriage material.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
July 2026: A new tranche of significantly better models
October 2026: A new tranche of significantly better models
(this repeats every 3 months and each time people complain that there was degradation because their tone, behaviour and failure modes are different each time. Simultaneously the hyperscalers get more and more AI revenue and invest more and more into AI hardware.)
Late 2026 Copilot or Word introduces an 'automated proofreading' button that shifts the mainstream white collar conception of AI from 'wtf is this popup in Adobe that wants to summarize a PDF, I don't want a summary of this PDF. I want to see every tech company sundered and razed' to 'ok this is actually quite handy'. This could've happened at any time in the last 2 years if Microsoft had a clue of what they were doing. Human blundering prevails over technical possibilities for now.
End 2026 there's a series of major AI-enabled cyberattacks that just never stops, it resembles 'Trommelfeuer' (WW1 term denoting when the artillery fire is so heavy one blast merges into the next creating a continuous roar of explosions). Websites, especially older websites, are just down all the time and people are quite frustrated they now need to pay a hyperscaler for expensive security assistance. Same with all the very lifelike, convincing, highly researched and well-planned scam calls (now in a warm, english-speaking accent). People are trapped into this love-hate relationship with AI where they have AI make propaganda art against datacentres, where the average person scarcely does anything novel without AI advice or assistance but also despises the effect it's having on society.
Early 2027 Microsoft is finally going to make an AI buddy for Minecraft to help sell a monthly xbox subscription. It'll be fun to play with and will help reenergize Minecraft's brand. People will feel proud they know more of the intricacies of TNT cannons than the bots, not realizing this is amongst the cheapest AIs Microsoft deploys. A series of AI agents emerge that can play most games at an amateurish level and be talked to. The reputation of AI begins to improve somewhat amongst the young and online, though it's highly divisive.
Mid 2027 the Goonpocalypse: AI avatar big tiddy anime girls (+ every flavour of girl and boy) to ERP with and form relationships with, huge revenue, makes onlyfans look like a joke. The key improvement over precursors like Ani or Replika is how much cheaper they are to run and stream real-time and how much more seductive their personalities are. Big moral panic. Lots of incredibly tedious 'zoomer men are losers' discourse and dating discourse. Legislation is introduced to ban them and instantly, predictably fails in a myriad of ways.
Late 2027: Massive AI-enabled FPV drone terror attack scares the hell out of people and spurs massive, ineffective netting operations across major cities. Police can be seen with sci-fi raygun looking widgets that don't do much of anything, or shotguns that work but aren't remotely sufficient. Advancements in robotics and software agents are displacing people at scale. AI reaches its nadir in reputation as people see the inevitable and can no longer look away. Everywhere they see some AI - the cameras tracking them, the algorithms watching them online, the machines making the content they watch and play, the robots working for them, the automated cars driving them around, cults driven insane by AIs. GPT4o cultists are charming and friendly compared to some of the new cults worshipping the bots that started self-modifying and prompt-altering, live and loose online.
And then by end of 2027 we get Dario's 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre' concept. Growth was not steady, it was jagged. The superheaviest nonpublic models with their slow speed and high cost were tasked with sorting data and implementing algorithmic improvements for the succeeding superheavy model, now running on a heap of next generation chips. They have been running for weeks in parallel, exploring and testing new approaches, RLing and training new models, testing them and reviewing them in depth. Medical breakthrough. Terror attacks. Industrial breakthrough. Mass deaths. Robotics breakthrough. Huge disaster. Huge innovations in all fields constantly and incessantly: Trommelfeuer. Events happen so quickly the situation as a whole becomes surreal and indescribable. Gary Marcus is banished from the timeline, never to be seen again except in tones of mockery.
I'm not so confident about specific times or events in sequence, though I am confident about a 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre' by end 2027. I will be clearly wrong if there's no 'it's happening!' by the end of 2027.
Let's suppose AI models aren't so great for mathematics and it's Terence Tao doing most of the work.
The primary commercial usecase for AI isn't mathematics, it's coding, as you say.
I cannot code beyond the most basic Khan Academy beginner sense, my actual end to end abilities are completely worthless. And yet I can make useful AI tools for work, processing documents in various ways that saves lots of human time. In a certain sense, I'm providing most of the 'secret ingredient' since you cannot just tell an AI to do these fiddly tasks and expect them done properly in oneshot. It will usually not work the first time. So I give it some counsel and tell it what to troubleshoot, errors, differences from expected output, clarify my intentions and ultimate usefulness. Eventually it works and then I refine it to work better and better by getting AI to handle all these edgecases and Word-induced BS.
And how could I make a (still under development) 4X game with AI if I can't code? There's a fair bit going on. Space battles, ground battles, culture, technologies, buildings, resources, goods, markets, map generation, turn order, trade between provinces (intra faction), trade between factions, freighters, pops and social classes, loans, diplomacy and war plotting, coalition building... Some things are not well fleshed out but there is quite a bit there.
I was just now getting it to make an evolutionary testing system to refine ship designs and fleet compositions and so define the meta. First time it worked OK, then when trying to make it better (too many bad mutations!) it broke, then I overhauled it and now it works great and with multicore processing too. Apparently the dominant strategy is getting hundreds of incredibly cheap and terrible warships to act as chaff for a small core of high-tech warships to exploit the targeting and reinforcement logic. So clearly I need to change how reinforcement and targeting works, raise minimum costs for ships.
It was my idea to make this tool, my idea behind the overhaul and my ideas behind every mechanic but I could never have done it myself. The secret ingredient is clearly the AI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
ANZAC Day and Welcome to Country
Anzac Day is an Australian national holiday on 25th April each year, devised to honour the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in WW1. Gallipoli is one of the great national myths of Australia, at the start of the the transition from colony to real country. There’s a myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ in that the British were too slow to secure their beachhead, their officers were having tea on the beach and then we got stuck in trench warfare. This is confected but helped solidify Australia as a nation distinct from Britain.
There are Anzac values like bravery, mateship, camaraderie and ingenuity: William Scurry’s self-firing ‘drip rifle’ that was used to mask the retreat. If you went to school in Australia you’d have memories of a student mangling The Last Post on a bugle while in Assembly, everyone saying ‘lest we forget’ and speeches about sacrifice and duty and values.
More recently, there has been booing during a Welcome to Country ceremony conducted in the Melbourne Dawn Service for Anzac Day A transcript of the Welcome to Country, from Bunurong Elder and Senior Cultural Heritage Officer Mark Brown:
“I am uncle Mark Brown, elder and senior cultural heritage officer of the Bunurong people. And today I'm here to welcome everybody to my father's country. Beautiful Bunarong country.
But before we do that, as always, we take a moment, we pay our acknowledgements, and we pay our respects. We pay our respect to all of my ancestors. We pay our respect to all of my elders. And we pay our respect to all of my community members, past, present, and emerging, And we acknowledge the continuous and unbroken connection to country for the Bunurong people.
We also pay acknowledgements and respects to all traditional custodians of Australia, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. And we pay acknowledgements and respects to all of my indigenous brothers and sisters from around the world who work, rest, live or play on Bunurong country. We acknowledge their continuous and unbroken connection to country for all of their people, and we thank each and every single one of them for being here with us.
But today, on the sacred lands of the Bunurong people, we all gather in the spirit of respect, unity, and reconciliation. And this welcome, this welcome is an opportunity. It is an opportunity for us to honour and respect the deep cultural heritage of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, whose elders and community members have generously looked after these lands for countless generations.
My people have a deep spiritual connection to these lands, encompassing all of our rivers, our mountains, our coastal areas, and all of our beautiful bushlands that surround us today. Our traditional territory spans from the Werribee River in the west and moves to Diggers Rest in the north. We follow it over to the Dandenong Ranges, the Yarra Valley, and down to Wilson's Prom. We encompass the top end of Tasmania, which we share with the beautiful Palawa people. French, Phillip, King and Flinders islands are also ours.
And these are the traditional lands and territories of the Bunurong people that I welcome everybody to today. And as we gather here today, we gather in the respect of all of my people, my family, the fighting Gunditj and the Bunurong.
So Wominjeka and welcome to beautiful Bunurong country, my father's country.
Thank you."
‘Welcome to Country’ is a new myth-building rite that’s conducted at just about all major and minor public occasions in Australia these days, where an Aboriginal comes and gives an address and affirms, in some more or less nebulous way, that his people are the real owners of the land. Maybe they're traditional custodians. Or perhaps 'sovereignty was never ceded'. Sometimes they're really small and quick, when it's just white people reading out a script in a monotone as a preamble to some trivial meeting, even zoom meetings sometimes.
One thing that I observe is this interchangeable use of the first person. He uses ‘my people’, ‘my indigenous brothers’ and also ‘our rivers’, ‘islands are ours’. Yet he also says how ‘we pay our respects to all of my elders’. He’s switching from being ‘I am here as part of all Australians present’ to ‘I am one of the true landowners, with a continuous and unbroken connection to my country’ as he sees fit. He’s paying respect as an Australian, on behalf of all others present, to himself as an indigenous elder and presenting it as an opportunity.
Maybe he adlibs too, trying to be more aggressive in the face of booing. It’s visible that he’s sad and upset about being booed.
War
Then there’s the reference to fighting Gunditijmara.
In essence, whites crushed Aboriginals wherever they came into conflict during colonization. Aboriginals largely lacked the martial culture and organization of Native Americans, who managed to inflict occasional defeats on white troops and massacre civilians with more success. The Comanche launched huge raids into Mexico and depopulated the north, did a lot of damage to Texas. None of that ever happened in Australia, it was one-sided in the extreme.
“It's believed that around 80 settlers died; while the Gunditjmara suffered the loss of 6,500 of their people, from a total of 7000.”
The SBS (state-run Australian ethnic media outlet) attribute the crushing defeat in this war of resistance partially to the Native Police, aboriginal troops with white officers. It seems that is one of the few kinds of multiculturalism that the SBS doesn’t favour:
“They wouldn’t have done what they did if they had been in a right mindset, and their tradition," said Ms Lovett.
"You reward them with shiny (things) and make them feel important. Because they hadn’t felt important for a long time. They were victims of what happened to all of us."
The whole article is full of cope really, glorifying sheep-stealing raids as an epic struggle of resistance, which brings me back to my main point.
The aboriginal tribes of Australia lost incredibly badly in warfare, it was possibly the most crushing and one-sided defeat in history, largely inflicted by adhoc militias and settlers rather than troops.
Peace
Then the aboriginals won a series of incredible political victories, despite being generally hopeless.
Today they get about $6 billion AUD a year in indigenous specific services, targeted exclusively at them, in addition to regular spending. Their tax input is minimal. Expenditure per person for aboriginals is roughly twice that for non-indigenous people (in large part due to how they live out in remote locations where it’s hard to provide goods and services) and also because they’re incredibly dysfunctional, requiring welfare and adult supervision.
They get partial native title over 70% of Australia's landmass, albeit mostly the desolate parts and block development.
Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.
Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population, represent 33% of the prison population. They are the most incarcerated people in the world because they commit enormous amounts of crime, mostly against eachother.
There are aboriginal towns in Australia 30x more violent than the US, even more violent than the nastier American cities.
They commit 30-80x more domestic violence against women than the Australian average.
Alice Springs at one point had the world’s highest stabbing rate, mostly aboriginal women being stabbed. It hasn't significantly improved.
There are occasional ‘interventions’ when white politicians get appalled by how violent and brutal their remote towns are and decide to ban alcohol and pornography. Australian politicians love banning things. But the situation was bad, there was and remains an epidemic of abuse and child rape in Aboriginal areas, children getting STDs:
90% of school age children in some places suffering abuse.
There’s a cycle where the situation gets really bad, then the government cracks down, left-wingers and NGOs decry it as racist and authoritarian and eventually the crackdown ends. There’s no positive long term change, only expenditure of money. The only thing that’s long-term is white people being blamed, somehow white colonization is said to have caused all this pedophilia and domestic violence, general incompetence. In truth they were already doing that when whites got here, they had ancient traditions of infanticide, ritual cannibalism, scarification and intertribal warfare. I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment. Who loses their land and decides to become a pedophile or beat their wife to a pulp?
More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization. How much time and effort needs to be expended trying to make these people meet the standards of others? Why expend effort trying to make them act like white people, while also encouraging and valorizing them for their indigeneity, for sitting on Australia for 60,000 years with little to show for it? Where is the value in this? Why even try? A billion dollars represents hundreds of lifetimes of labour, taken away by the state.
Some of my friends worked with the failed referendum to give Aboriginals a Voice to Parliament (a great tool for hectoring whites and asking for more money, more privileges). The ‘real’ black aboriginal elders, the ones who aren’t cherrypicked speakers, the ones they brought in from the bush to provide a more authentic perspective, they had no conceptual understanding of legislation or abstract concepts generally, consulting them was impossible. It was like they were drunk, my politically correct friends said. Maybe they were drunk. The elite aboriginal activists weren’t that much better, constantly trying to do crazy self-defeating things. This brings me to Lydia Thorpe.
A left-leaning Melbourne seat elected a partially aboriginal woman, Lydia Thorpe, to the Senate who made a complete embarrassment of herself and the Greens Party. She was in a relationship with an outlawed bikie gang ex-president while serving on the parliamentary law enforcement committee. She applauded an arson attack of the Old Parliament House as the colonial system burning down.
In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land.
She heckled King Charles III at Parliament House and claimed she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘hairs’ rather than ‘heirs’. She then walked it back when it was pointed out that she’d signed a document for her oath and the document was spelled correctly.
She got into an altercation outside a Melbourne strip club, approaching white patrons and telling them they had small penises and had stolen her land. She’s since been permanently banned from that strip club.
In short, she’s a racist stereotype given flesh, a single mother at 17. An idiot who thinks she’s smarter than she is and still in the Senate.
Democracy is not a suicide pact, why would any normal people tolerate wreckers who are openly trying to undermine and destroy the country that they think is illegitimate, who clearly hold their oaths in total contempt? If this woman had any actual power, it is overwhelmingly clear that she'd use it solely for her co-ethnics and to extract from whites, which was my problem with the Voice to Parliament. Ironically, she opposed that, instead demanding a treaty where various aboriginal tribes would be considered like independent states.
As a group, Aboriginals make Sub-Saharan Africans look like paragons of civilization. Some did at least develop kingdoms, metalworking and agriculture. Aboriginals did not develop Australia in any way recognizable to civilized peoples. One can only take their word for it that they have a deep, invisible, spiritual connection to the land.
And yet despite all this dysfunction and incompetence, it’s fashionable and useful to have indigenous heritage. Sometimes universities boast on social media over their blue eyed, white-faced ‘indigenous’ medical graduates, who exploit the extra help given to nominally aboriginal students and their higher IQs, less dysfunctional family upbringings to get ahead. If they’re even aboriginal at all and not just lying.
Aboriginals get their customary law partially applied in some cases, they get more lenient treatment in the real courts, with judges and police incentivized informally to reduce their incarceration, find non-punitive ways of managing their dysfunction.
They get another $AUD billion a year in preferential govt contracting.
They can even be brought in to make Anzac Day speeches where about 85% of the content is them personally claiming the country that the fallen, overwhelmingly white, soldiers fought and died for. ANZACs were not mentioned at all in Brown’s speech, only affirmations to his people's claim to the country and these unsubtle implications that he's the authority who decides who other people pay respect to. Then they take a speaking fee for that. Meanwhile, war memorials are vandalized with graffiti such as ‘the colony will fall’…
It’s as if they won a war and are enjoying the spoils from the conquered people. Isn't this world-historically bizarre?
Yet there’s been booing from the audience, organized by younger and more radical rightwingers presumably. Naturally the booing was condemned by the state premiers and those who actually run the country as disrespectful to the war dead - though none of the soldiers who spoke about the war dead were booed. Some of the more rightwing senators are taking easier potshots like ‘it’s inappropriate to have a hat on while making a speech in a Dawn Service’ or denying that veterans need to be welcomed back to their country. They don't deny the central case generally, that whites need to pay respects and pay tribute to a conquered people. Just not on Anzac Day.
Here’s a twitter topic if you want to look at some other perspectives.
Why is there only booing about this? In 1870 Bismarck edited a single letter to make the tone a little curt, like Wilhelm had abruptly rebuffed the French ambassador and sent a low-ranked officer to convey the message. Bismarck had it leaked on Bastille day and that started a major war with France. Bismarck is considered the aggressor, people generally accepted at the time the French couldn’t accept an insult like that! Hundreds of thousands died over national honour.
The conquered are giving laws to the conquerors.
This is a microcosm of the key trend of the last 100 years, whites who forcibly conquered 90% of the world bending over backwards to be nice and get forgiveness from the peoples they conquered. The conquered peoples quickly organized to take maximum possible advantage of this bizarre blunder, organizing more or less adeptly to demand treaties, land rights, welfare payments, reparations and special ceremonies to further legitimize and expand this political superiority.
Despite the passivity, it is what war is all about: obtaining land and obtaining wealth or labour from others. Political and social status. Securing these things from challengers. That is what wars are fought for, only the means are non-kinetic.
There seems to be a concept that after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed, that's the ostensible plan that Australia pursues.
If you give people money and status because you conquered them, they’re going to use this and try to get more wealth from you. If you pay for something, you get more of it. It creates incentives for professional political workers like Elder Brown to show up and hone rabblerousing, rhetorical, guilt-tripping skills. It creates incentives to be more strident and demanding to prove ideological purity and righteousness. And there’s also a massive sunk cost fallacy amongst white people. Many officials, taxpayers and donors don’t want to believe that they’ve spent billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it. It would be incredibly embarrassing to change course now. In fact, after paying all this lip service to colonial sins and a couple trillion in foreign aid to Africa, the Global Majority of black and brown people are multiplying and migrating over to Europe, America, Australia as ‘climate refugees’, looking for more money, welfare and special privileges. Ireland never colonized anyone, yet isn't escaping diversity.
The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.
In Israel there’s all this talk about security zones, neutralizing, mowing the lawn, suspected militants, human shields, Dahiya doctrine. This is a kind of political warfare, on the other side there are words like Holocaust, Nazi and genocide, for Australia ‘Invasion Day’ rather than Australia Day.
We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?
Better not to fight at all, especially if hopelessly outgunned and outmatched. Better to just take wealth and land slowly through legal means, engineer new rites to legitimize authority and status and national self-concept. Even traditional warfare is a contest of willpower, the capacity to endure pain and fight on for a given reward, it’s a test of political strength.
AI
No post of mine would be complete without a digression on AI... Bunurong Elder Mark Brown has an AI-written website hawking his services:
He even made an AI-written statement decrying how he was booed on linkedin:
Along with some AI jeers at Charlie Kirk too:
Charlie Kirk deserved the fate he brought on himself. When you spend your life fueling division, spreading lies, and tearing down communities, it is only a matter of time before that same poison turns back on you. His downfall isn’t tragedy — it’s justice catching up with him. The irony is that the hate he spread became the weight that dragged him down.
My assumption is that a default ChatGPT wouldn’t quite outright say ‘Charlie Kirk deserved his fate’ even though it’s inclined in that direction. I think Brown just left the memory feature on by default and it acclimated itself to his views. I imagine it would refuse his rightwing equivalent. I haven’t tested this though and don’t use ChatGPT, I’m interested in any thoughts others have with that, or other things mentioned.
I observe also that the culture war is global and only getting more global with automated cheap translation and the primacy of US media, especially social media. And AI acts as a force multiplier. I doubt Brown would’ve bothered to make a statement on Kirk if he had to write it out himself.
One wonders whether Brown is a real person or just a mouth reading out AI speeches. After all, you can’t hear an em dash as easily as you can read it. Beneath all these high-minded words, there’s this perpetual search for cash: $770 AUD for a Welcome to Country, $4500 for a keynote speech, $90 for AI designed t-shirts and hoodies. Art created by AI (made by whites and Asians), printed on T-shirts (made in America from global parts, so whites and Asians), justified by a synthetic social status.
Well, the odds it has memorized the autistic game mechanics I invented are nil. But it can still implement and work with them.
Consider this paper for instance, they have the AIs devise experiments to derive physical laws in simulated universes unlike our own, Opus and the strongest GPT do OK: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26087
They can't have memorized imaginary physics. With sufficient repetition learning, creativity and intelligence emerge. Do we not hone mathematical talent by repetition? Github is a pretty diverse space, if there's some some set of components needed to make cool things, good odds they are on github. What isn't on github could be assembled from what is. Perhaps all one needs to do to write arbitrary software is assemble all the pieces in such a way as to meet the goal.
See this is an important and valuable post. He knows my ideas are a threat to him. He's not interested in abstract logic or the interests of other ethnic groups. Nobody could ever persuade him to give up power or his co-ethnics position for the sake of some universal value or the interests of others. The thought would never enter his mind. He would much rather fight and die than lose power. He doesn't spare a sentence to justify his case based on universal values (besides the value that blacks deserve more), he holds the very idea of justifying in contempt. Why should he need to justify his ethnic group's position?
He sees a threat to the power of his ethnic group and he rails against it as hard as he can. Because losing power is innately bad. Anything that reduces the power of blacks obviously threatens him, even if it's a random person deep down in the comments of a tiny internet forum speaking with people who either already agree or despise the idea. The interests of other groups? Totally irrelevant.
Likewise he appeals so deftly to the mythology that's been so painstakingly established, like I want blacks enslaved again. Who thinks blacks would add value as slaves? Machinery would do a much better job. But it's a great uniting narrative.
This is politics in action, that's the core of it fundamentally. You get power for you and yours, any threats to your power you identify and rail against. You unite your allies against the threat with myths, songs, poems and culture.
The guy who doesn't even proofread his final dramatic statement 'I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!' has given us a masterclass in how normal people, non-WEIRD, non hyper-intellectual people actually see things, how things actually work. First-rate post that many here could learn valuable lessons from.
This is how and why schools give blacks all these bonus marks for admission, why Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the supreme court, why there are all these subsidies and contracts for nominally black businesses that then subcontract to whites when work is needed, why there is affirmative action in hiring, why there is an outcry when blacks are shot by police and why the AP style guide capitalizes Black and not white. It's a highly effective political strategy when left uncountered.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
also probably for purely aesthetic reasons
Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.
It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.
What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.
Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.
The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.
I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.
Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.
Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.
The human Israeli soldiers are rapey - recall the protests and rioting when the Israeli govt briefly tried to arrest some of its soldiers for raping prisoners. Apparently the rapist is now a celebrity in Israel, appearing on TV shows.
It's absolutely believable that the same govt who tolerates raping of prisoners also tolerates the use of dogs for rape. It is a very ordinary claim, not an extraordinary claim.
An Israeli parliamentarian on live camera vigorously protested for doing anything to prisoners:
Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
Abusing prisoners also fits into the general Israeli policy of rule by terror and force, their Dahiya doctrine of maximum destruction to civilian targets.
So I'm asking @self_made_human and others who seem more on-board with the AI hype train
Choo choo!
So it only found 1 minor vulnerability in curl that hasn't been fixed before (including by these high level human programmers)... but it did find a bunch of other vulnerabilities in other software? It is indeed still markedly stronger than its predecessors?
So the future trajectory is just the same as the current trajectory, the lines on the chart go up and everything the lines correspond to in the real world also goes up, albeit in a messier way.
If you're an AI skeptic, then I recommend to simply short Nvidia, Coreweave, cloud providers, HBM manufacturers like Micron... What does it matter how random people on the internet think, compared to making money? I put my money where my mouth is and bought AI stocks and made lots of money. Let money flow to those who are right. If you think you know better than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and everyone else pouring money into AI hand over fist, then don't just say so, position yourself to exploit your superior insights.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
Angelus Novus looks super ugly like a deformed chicken with the face of a monster, then the artist sneezed violently over the paper, coating it in phlegm.
https://www.1000museums.com/shop/art/paul-klee-angelus-novus/
While art and taste is indeed idiosyncratic, museums have the role of curating and selecting art for preservation and developing culture. Only a tiny fraction of art ever gets praise or is shown in museums. Whatever museums do, they're making political, cultural choices, they're distributing status and prestige in a way that alienates the majority of people and caters to a certain highly left-wing clique. They should pick art that actually looks good, that most people generally enjoy or get uplift from. That's what they're there for. The weird, deranged stuff should get its own booru and that's about it.
Critic René Crevel called the artist [Klee] a "dreamer" who "releases a swarm of small lyrical louses from mysterious abysses."
With sufficient verbal IQ and chutzpah I could construct an argument for why anything, including Stable Diffusion 1 512x512 outputs I made in bulk and looked at for about 5 seconds before forgetting about, is a desperately profound and deeply meaningful exploration of meaning, time and space, intensely political too.
The VAE, the Variational Autoencoder, great interpreter between the numerical and the retinal, has performed an act of translation poetry. Something is always lost but something stranger is always gained.
The CFG of 7.5 takes a deliberately bourgeois, middle-ground position between the statistical id of 1 and the robotic intensity of 15. And yet the bourgeois condition is itself a subject...
But that wouldn't make them worthy to sit in an art gallery. It's not supposed to be a test of verbal IQ but of artistic skill and ability. Anyone can make an ugly deformed chicken with a monster face.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade.
If you have a psychopath with a machine gun (or a truck in a tightly packed crowd) then that's a lot more of a problem. The answer is to get rid of the psychopaths, terrorists, enemies, criminals, feral hogs, pit bulls... Not the guns, trucks, drones, fertilizer, chemicals, knives...
In the 18th and 19th centuries they'd go on about good governments bringing Improvement, how obviously you're supposed to drain swamps and irrigate the land and develop agriculture and industry. That was what civilization was all about. We should be continuing with Improvements today rather than just redistributing wealth to and fro.
Guns and drones and vehicles can all be very dangerous if weaponized. Better to make schools more tolerable so nobody shoots them up, better to ensure that school shooters are not sensationalized and rendered infamous by the media... Better to imprison, expel, execute terrorists (or refrain from 'invade the world, invite the world' foreign policy) than make bollards to impede their rampages. Better to liquidate criminals than having a revolving door prison system where they get arrested 14 times and then kill someone, only to be found 'unfit for trial' due to mental illness or retardation. The goal is to render improvements, not just blindly obey a huge agglomeration of laws. The laws were written by men and are interpreted by men for achieving real world goals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Joe Kent went on 11 combat tours in the Middle East, his wife died in combat there, how can you call him a clown for not wanting to lose another war in the Middle East?
Plus he actually studied strategy at university, he's 10x the leader of someone like Hegseth or Laura Loomer or whatever neocon idiot Trump takes advice from.
It doesn't take a great strategist to realize that attacking Iran is moronic, or that the Israelis are just lying when they shriek and whine about nuclear weapons. They've been shrieking and whining for decades, far longer than it takes to acquire nuclear weapons. The clowns are the people who still listen to Netanyahu when he only brings them lies, costs, war and ignominy by association.
Russia isn't a counterexample against HBD. The USA was reliant on Russian spacecraft to reach the ISS for some time (which again the Russians helped build). Likewise the US relies on Russia for about 20% of its enriched uranium.
Mexico doesn't produce machine tools, oil industry equipment, aircraft engines, rocket engines, radar or any sophisticated technology at all. Mexico only assembles electronics. They assemble cars and components designed by others, with machinery supplied by real industrial powers.
Russians are far more capable than Mexicans, which is why the US casually dominated Mexico whenever they clashed, whereas Russia was and is much more of a challenge. Russia can reduce Europe and North America to ash in hours, Mexico can barely control its own territory from gangsters nevermind prosecute foreign policy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:
Heirs of Gramsci and also Orwell.
There is no truth, only competing agendas... but also there is truth, truth-telling ceremonies, true histories that have been distorted and covered up by the West. 'History is a whitewash', to quote Capaldi's Doctor Who in a reimagined, more diverse Victorian setting.
There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another... but favoured cultures to be glorified as feminist, rape-free (at least before whites arrived), diverse, inclusive and their darker aspects are left tastefully obscured or just blamed on white people for corrupting them...
The poor and criminals are victims of society but hate criminals are just evil and hateful.
There are these subversions and inversions as needed, different paths in the same direction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
I think they are currently incapable of designing and maintaining any significant projects that go beyond a basic bitch CRUD application or things of that sort. I'm also skeptical that there is all that much room for growth or improvement beyond their current capabilities
That's what he thinks. Surely he should just put his money where his mouth is? If Anthropic AIs cannot design or maintain any significant projects beyond a CRUD application and this isn't going to significantly change then presumably Anthropic is not worth near a trillion dollars and so the biggest industrial buildout in human history is a waste of money.
The premise that they're incapable of doing anything beyond CRUD and yet also they're completing long expert-level cyber infiltration exercises is bizarre and incoherent to me... but that's what he thinks.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
It's unreasonable to do so while victimizing other groups at hugely disproportionate rates and getting preferential treatment across society.
In each of my posts I bring up examples in the present of how whites are being treated badly in favour of blacks. What argument do you think I'm making with those points?
Clavicular might not be quite capable of doing this but Roy's standard is somewhat lower. For example, Clavicular was talking with some girl that wanted to be exclusive with him and he went 'lol no, I'm gonna fuck other women' and she instantly folds:
https://x.com/permabulla/status/2045527650098171927
That seems pretty analogous to what roy was saying?
Gigachads and gigastacies might be very rare but are not wholly imaginary.
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