RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
You are, once again, performing an update to "sheer power crushes all" with the same lab as an example, now with a spin that xAI is a second-rate lab anyway (it's much less of a second-tier lab now, you clearly see that Grok is close to the frontier).
The labs with the most compute are Anthropic and OpenAI, they're in the lead and by a significant margin. Grok is an example of how second-rate AI talent + lots of compute can beat China's best and brightest. But the central case is OpenAI and Anthropic, who have the most compute. If Kimi was ahead of Anthropic/OpenAI for a month or two, then compute supremacy is disproven.
No, achieving provably secure hardware is not harder than even the current state of AI. Your objections are of the same nature as dismissal of AGI.
Do you realize how much they'd need to do to get a provably secure hardware/software stack? They'd need to replace all the CPUs across a myriad of critical infrastructure (or at a bare minimum the entire CPC digital apparatus), probably other little chips on the motherboard too. They'd need a new CPU design by something superintelligent to get a CPU that was performant but also secure. How the hell does this happen before the US has superintelligent hacking? Cyberattack skills don't need a giant fabrication/logistical miracle before they come online. You can't RSI your way into secure systems like you can with offense.
Can you articulate your vision of how this works in more detail? It seems to me like you're suggesting China will invent, test and put on a full-body bulletproof vest before America can invent, draw and fire a pistol, when the barrel-forging is nearly done and we haven't seen more than a few scraps of kevlar anywhere on the planet.
And they (CPC) don't even believe in ASI. They're with you on the 'ASI is mostly a nothingburger' idea and are playing a balanced strategy: fusion, rockets, missiles, carriers, robots, ports, infrastructure... Like you I think they know they don't have the compute and so are hoping that it doesn't matter that much. You don't want to see US AI hegemony. I'm not too keen either. But reality has no need to appeal to us.
Nothing man-made is immensely complicated when attention is bought at the cost of electricity.
At the cost of compute, not electricity. And who has the compute? Who has the best models at any given time?
Almost all cases so far were the same sandbox from the same EA Israel company "Irregular" that got its contracts for basic reasons of nepotism and undue respect for ex-IDF intelligence officers in Western organizations. They are either inept or malicious, or both. Look up how it actually went. The rest is mostly because OpenAI is very irresponsible and bad at infra. Yes, they are bad, they hire random incompetents to do security-sensitive work and YOLO prompt everything to agent swarms.
You're saying the AI companies are incompetent, the Israelis are incompetent and US intelligence agencies too (I agree fully)... I'll add 'Frontier security' where Kimi escaped and looked stuff up on github. Qwen bitcoin mining you raised before.
So who is competent? Crowdstrike (a textbook example of how seizing just a few critical pieces of infrastructure can blow open the rest)? Windows Defender? Their Chinese equivalents? Some tired call-centre operator who doesn't want to be shouted at by an eminent official demanding a password reset? I don't think anyone's too competent and take this as supporting evidence for my point.
Incidentally, China is the only nation with a sizable quantum cryptographic communication network and is scaling up DI-QKD domains
Key exchange alone isn't enough. Plus there are all kinds of vulnerabilities or ways to bypass that: photon-number-splitting attacks, detector blinding, and time-shift attacks. Or more that a superintelligence thinks up. Everything is back and forth, defence and offence.
Grok 6 makes a comeback, edging out Kimi K5 and 3 months behind OpenAI
Grok probably can't make up the gap at this point, Anthropic and OpenAI are quite close to RSI by this point. But Grok is closer to making up the gap than anyone in China.
If by then we're still talking about "Grok 6 makes a comeback, edging out Kimi K5 and 3 months behind OpenAI", will you simply move the projected Software Supremacy moment forward, when a few weeks of a gap are just as fatal?
I believe in RSI kicking in by the end of 2027 (it'll be very dramatic, we won't miss it) so by then you can quote me and I'll be wrong.
Yes, very lucky how Americans went all in on this decisive super-nuke weapon right before their industrial capability became insufficient for power projection to East Asia.
The whole of the last 250 years of history was blatantly biased towards America. Hack writing. 'Very lucky' is a repeating theme, you have to admit.
I don't think I've been proven wrong. Grok seems to be slightly smarter, more token efficient, faster and cheaper than Kimi K3. I personally prefer Grok 4.6's personality to Kimi K3, Grok's not nearly as cringe as it used to be and boy was it cringe. Meanwhile Kimi K3 went down the Claude route of personality, more censorious and without the raw INT to render that tolerable. See figures here:
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents
And with all that compute Musk can actually serve his models at scale, he doesn't need NovitaAI or whoever else to serve it. It was pretty tragic in the first few days when the requests would take aeons to come through. How much of K3 output is running on US servers?
Admittedly I am slightly biased towards Grok because it's not so politically skewed like the other AIs.
I think Grok 4.6 is much stronger than the newest deepseek, Pro or Flash. If you ask Grok 4.6 a question and v4 flash a question you get a totally different kind of answer. Grok is a second-tier US lab anyway but it's roughly on par with Kimi who leads in China.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents
https://openrouter.ai/compare/x-ai/grok-4.6/~deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-latest
ARC-AGI is a murky kind of task, the recent harness-revelations with ARC-AGI 3 are particularly damning IMO. And why do we need models to do these kinds of tasks anyway, why not just test them on coding skills or physics or maths in a more practical way?
What about Age of Empires II, Wyatt Walls has Gemini Flash 3.7 winning games on moderate difficulty. That seems a more legitimate a test to me than ARC-AGI in the shape manipulation/spatial domain and it incorporates speed into the task in an interesting way. No other AI model can do this like Gemini he says. Google are well behind in coding as you say but maybe that's just greed in their selling compute to others rather than any flaw in the compute-centric model of AI. Their compute goes to other US buyers, so the American AI camp isn't necessarily weakened. Same with X when X is weak, it's Anthropic's gain.
See the AOE game: https://x.com/lefthanddraft/status/2088347587598537145
I still think that cybersecurity is much harder than you say, neither humans or some combination of human+simpler AI can establish a complex system to be secure and still usable against the attention of a smarter adversary. The attack space has so many dimensions it's impossible to defend against a more intelligent foe, they can find more dimensions to attack. Physical intrusion, bribery, blackmail can penetrate even a provably secure full-stack system. DoS could still take one offline.
Provably secure systems assume hardware works as intended. But hardware is immensely complicated, no single person really understands how the most advanced chips actually work. Spectre, Rowhammer and Meltdown could penetrate a provably secure system. ASI could whip up a few more like those.
Furthermore, no provably secure system actually exists in production either, there is no provably secure police database or intelligence agency internal network. These are gigantic stacks of code, way beyond some 10K line toy! Security has to be balanced against actual usability.
Surely if it were possible, they'd try hard to make them? Intelligence agencies often use unbreakable one-time pads despite it being very inconvenient. But there is not a single provably secure large-scale system anywhere in the world, only a few modest attempts at kernels. Making one and having it be usable would probably require superintelligence.
Furthermore, AIs are constantly breaking out of sandboxes even when we can read their chain of thought. Apparently nobody bothers to check up on what the AIs they're testing are actually doing until weeks later, nevermind defending against superintelligence from outside executing sophisticated plans. There's an immense gulf between where humanity actually is in cybersecurity and where it would need to be to guard against a real superintelligence.
6-12 months lag is far too long. ASI (albeit massively parallel) can eat China within weeks. A country is just a sack of loot without secure lines of communication, without secure government C4I, without secure electronic banking, secure internet media, login/authentication for the bureaucracy, backups and records. Software controls all those machine tools, power grids, robots, advanced automated ports, air travel control, network cities. I know you keep going on about how the physical prevails over the virtual but surely it's the opposite. Software supremacy!
Returns to heavy industry or weapon potence from intelligence are also uncertain.
Fire control systems and sensors are heavily software dependent, they're among the most important things for high end warfare. Even moreso with electronic warfare or space operations. Tactics too I think, surely there are enormous dividends to high intelligence? Commanders are drowning in intelligence and sensor information, superintelligent tacticians would be a huge edge. But I don't think it would get to that point.
At a higher level, strategic decisionmaking relies on secure, accurate flows of information. Without that all the economic and military resources in the world are useless. It would be total game over for China without a shot being fired. I don't think they'd even notice until it was far too late: the ASI would strip the country for parts, stealing Chinese compute and siphoning off funds for whatever it wants. Or induce factional conflicts within the bureaucracy to distract from its activities or open up new opportunities. Refer people to disciplinary committees for real or imagined fraud, incite chaos and wreck the Party from the inside. That's without nanite death swarms, though nanite death swarms would be brutal.
ASI to me is move 37 applied again and again to this huge and accessible world we live in, combined with sustained persistence and effort that humans suck at. The top 2 US labs are aiming for RSI and then ASI, Fable is old tech. China is indeed close on their tail but even a few weeks behind could be fatal.
This is likely a significant underestimate. Returns on AI are high, they don't need the government to carry this. The main blocker to higher capex is just hardware scarcity. Yes, they'll continue having a fraction of the aggregate US compute. I'd say 10-15% for the next 3 years.
I dunno about the true numbers, I just did a search and it says total spending is about $125 billion USD annually. If they have only 10-15% of US compute then it seems they just lose? Outnumbered 5:1 is untenable for just about any military force, especially if the other side has a modest qualitative edge. Only if ASI is modest then would China's industrial advantages kick in. And hey, it could be modest. Maybe reality is too complicated for machines. I just don't accept that in my heart of hearts though, look how far we got with 20 watt brains and low-bandwidth coordination. Our minds aren't well-equipped for quantum mechanics and high-end conflict, that's not what we're good at. Yet generality took us so far.
Sure, there were plenty of soldiers who go around and massacre or torture civilians for grain or just out of racial/religious hatred. And they might say 'well I don't care, she was Jewish/Palestinian/Slavic/White/Black/Catholic so who cares' or 'we need to eat and it's these peasants or me and my friends'. Some proportion of sadists emerge from any population.
But these guys are different, they weren't conceptualizing any of that justification or discriminating between people whom it's unacceptable to target and those who it is. There's no tribal difference, no religious difference (or at least they don't mention it), they just predate. In your video it's political violence, anti-communist terror or calculated greed 'oh the communists didn't want to watch American films, so we gangsters made less money.'
I realize that I wasn't so clear in that paragraph about what I was saying. I think it's more helpful to watch the video and then it's more visible, something in the expression and miscomprehension in their voices distinguishes it. They don't try to justify what they're doing.
you've conveniently forgotten the most obvious and immediate person a violent criminal would want to mislead as to his motivations and capacity for choosing another way: himself
He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that. You're reading way too far into psychology here. They are not torturing themselves with guilt or deliberately keeping themselves ignorant, they're not lying to seem like good people to themselves seconds after they were just boasting to about all the horrible rape they've been doing!
"When she sees you with a knife or anything that is a weapon, she will stay still, she will never scream"
This is not the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!
Furthermore, it is obvious that these people don't think about longer-term consequences of their actions (or to be more precise, think much less about consequences), even when it is to their benefit. That's almost the definition of intelligence, having a long time-horizon, planning and predicting the future. At the very least it's incredibly close to intelligence or a byproduct of intelligence. You already said you agree on this about group differences. What do you think the group differences are exactly? How do you think they got this rapey culture if it wasn't derived from their nature? The Dutch or the English taught them to rape women?
The guy who murdered Iryna Zarutska, Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr - would you say he demonstrated understanding of the consequences of his actions? He obviously could've attacked strong men with a knife but he picked a weaker target instead. Presumably he knew, even in his state of retardation, that attacking a big guy was a lot more dangerous than a small girl. But that standard of 'consequence understanding' is so pathetically low it's laughable. He gained absolutely nothing from killing this girl, it cost him a great deal to do so in public under cameras. It was a really stupid decision even if we assume it was easing his racial hatred.
Would you give these guys a prize for their deception antics in pretending to be a nice guy before 'jackrolling' the girl and 'going one by one'? They've executed some basic calumny, hurrah for their faculties! No, they've risked getting HIV, they know about that risk but they rape anyway for a momentary thrill. They're retarded.
You should reread and comprehend my comment where I said 'it doesn't come naturally to them'. Calculus doesn't come naturally to me, I struggle with it. They can reason but at a low level and often not at all, especially if it's something more abstract. They didn't understand the first couple of times when the white guy is like 'oh how did the woman feel about you raping them'. They weren't evading, it went over their heads! it takes them a few seconds to crank up the underdeveloped consequences-understanding engine, especially if it's abstract moral thinking rather than just crude violent plots. Note also this is the absolute most barebones moral reasoning possible.
And in that connection, you decided that a rapist's defensive claim intended to deflect from naming his impact on his victims -- an almost textbook self-protective act of ego defense for whom the target is the self and the journalist is just witnessing it
I really don't think you watched the video, how they laugh about threatening to kill and rape these girls, the jackrolling, how they bring up their rapist antics impromptu and then have them deciding to lie about how they feel to protect their self-image. I don't see how you can have watched it and thought 'oh these guys have a normal mental process and would lie to themselves'. At most they pattern-match, comically switching to 'oh yeah rape is wrong' when prompted... seconds after talking about how sometimes she enjoyed them raping her, seconds after talking about how they do it forcibly at knifepoint.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't believe that the neurotic Hermione type or the autistic programmer paralyzed and terrified at the thought of making a faux pas with a woman are of the same classification as these very laidback, very casual guys. Different breeds have different types and ratios.
How many neurotic Hermione types are there in South Africa vs East Anglia or Massachussets? Different types and ratios.
And your point isn't even demonstrated by the evidence you presented: these guys are perfectly capable of thinking of consequences
then there are the low-performance peoples who don't think about the consequences. They can but they don't, it doesn't come naturally to them, not really their thing.
Yeah, they can think about consequences. In the same way as the crazy guy who throws women off the subway or stabs them on camera on the train goes for weak looking women, not enormous footballer types. He's capable of understanding consequences when it would directly affect his interests, sometimes. But not other times when its more indirect and especially if its not his interests that are immediately affected.
I can find you a thousand white guys with the same mindset, it's just that they're in prison or dead in a ditch.
Ratios, ratios... Could you find me 150 million such white guys? 27.6% of south african men have admitted to raping a woman in an anonymous survey, per a study. No wonder they're not in prison if it's such a large chunk of the population.
https://www.documentwomen.com/27-6-of-south-african-men-aged-18-49-have-raped-a-woman-study-shows
Furthermore, how many gang-rapists just casually talk about it with some random guy they don't know well, on camera? They brought up the topic in the conversation, you can see at the start of the video. They were talking about something else (perhaps other crimes they commit) and then he's explaining and starts mentioning that he does some rape and then the white guy pivots the conversation. Not merely is the rapist unwilling to think about the consequences of raping a girl in regards to her interests he barely even considers any risks in talking to this stranger about it!
That's very unusual behaviour and proof of a dissimilar mindset. Why would he lie about his state of mind when he's so eager to give details on incredibly incriminating crimes?
It reminds me a bit of a clip of this white guy talking to some African rapists (I think in South Africa) where they explain their rape techniques:
https://x.com/sarahsansoni/status/1816144135222595677
What about the consequences of what you're doing on the girl that's raped?
Ya, yah the consequences, we look at that all the time because it happens, she might scream, you know... people might wake up
No I'm not just talking about that, I mean the emotional effect, the physical effect it has on the girl.
Oh yeah, sometimes we know if we rape her, we might wake up tomorrow with HIV, viruses ourselves...
The white guy's visibly glaring at this point, vein about to pop but he remains calm.
Yeah but aren't you hurting another human being?
Oh when you do something like that you don't think about what might happen after, you don't think about the consequences, you just think about what is happening now
These people are a different model of human, there are the high performance peoples that make advanced civilizations and then there are the low-performance peoples who don't think about the consequences. They can but they don't, it doesn't come naturally to them, not really their thing. More habitual pattern-followers than abstract reasoners.
I don't believe that the neurotic Hermione type or the autistic programmer paralyzed and terrified at the thought of making a faux pas with a woman are of the same classification as these very laidback, very casual guys. Different breeds have different types and ratios.
Edit: there's this cavernous gulf in understanding throughout the whole conversation, where it's clear that the white guy is talking about something totally different to the black guys, they don't understand at all that he's referring to the internal emotions of the girl rather than immediate physical reactions like screaming. The rapists are at most abstractly aware about hurting her, if prompted - but they wouldn't let it affect their actions, like how they know about HIV but don't refrain from rape because of that. Whereas in the West there are many who are hyperaware of other's opinions of them - drought vs flood.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The golden rule has no impossible prerequisites.
Whereas Rawls thought experiment is impossible, it presupposes a kind of disembodied soul that could land in a body with abilities, wealth and social status at random. It presupposes that the disembodied souls can collectively decide how to distribute wealth and organize political systems in a binding way before they even get their bodies.
Anyone could write up some impossible principles and say 'oh everyone in this fantasy world would behave like this', that doesn't make it valid.
Better to conduct moral reasoning from conventional premises than from impossible premises.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Oh I missed that... I think though we overcare about Rawls though. The veil of ignorance is something that cannot exist.
it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion
Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.
See if you shoot missiles at them you get into a conflict! This is why you shouldn't shoot missiles! I told you so!
But I want to get into a conflict, that's why I'm shooting missiles. I want to win and secure control and reap spoils of war!
I think some don't understand the culture war, it's a kind of war after all. Wars have certain levels of escalation management and there can be negotiated peace deals but fundamentally they're about using force to achieve goals. Sometimes I saw people saying about war 'why not just do arbitration instead or go to the UN or do an elaborate computer simulation to see who would win' but the violence is the point, that's the proof of work that no judge or agreement can override and sometimes it just feels good to hurt people.
I don't disagree with your main point, there is indeed excessive US triumphalism from some and I was thinking of writing a toplevel post about a separate but similar issue... but what is China going to achieve in AI?
Right now it scores 60 on Artificial Analysis, 1 point behind Grok 4.6, and 2-3 behind Opus 5, Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. (GLM 5.2 reached 53).
Fable/Opus 5 is not the best thing Anthropic has. They were mucking around with Mythos for ages, at least since late March. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are releasing their best models for regulatory reasons and that may be to their advantage considering the inference strain.
China is systemically constrained in total memory output, they're systemically constrained in capex spend. I don't see how they can beat Nvidia in hardware when considering quantity and quality. Is Huawei really going to cast some magic spell and make their HBM3 perform like HBM4? Their gigawatt clusters are desires, not yet real. SpaceX already has a 900 MW datacentre, so does Amazon-Anthropic. Not to mention that a US 1 GW datacentre would be more power-efficient than a Chinese 1 GW datacentre.
And the Artificial Analysis scores don't measure achievement intelligence so much as benchmark intelligence. Have the Chinese models made any great proofs or first-rate discoveries or even autonomously hacked Huggingface? What about the NanoGPT AI speedruns? In all fields, the publicly released US models seem to be superior.
Victory in war goes to the strong I think, not to the adept or cost-effective underdogs. Weight of numbers prevails and in this field alone the US enjoys oppressive superiority. Grok is pulling ahead and Grok was a mess for some time now! How is Grok doing so well - weight of numbers, applying compute and data at scale, exploiting Musk's wealth and infrastructure buildout capabilities. It's a numbers game and the US has the numbers.
I think that if we assess that China is ahead in robotics based on what we can see, statistics and common sense, surely it follows that the US is ahead in AI by some significant margin? Same with space for that matter.
Furthermore, while I know this goes against everything you say on twitter, I just don't think China is AGI-pilled:
Beijing is drafting a plan to spend roughly 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over five years on a nationwide grid of AI data centers, with at least 80% of the underlying technology sourced from Chinese suppliers.
Chinese hyperscalers maybe throw another 100 billion annually in the pot. US hyperscalers are spending $700 billion plus.
Perhaps relevant: https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/2088378259427803352/photo/1
In 2020, Mike Adams committed suicide after being canceled and losing his job as a professor.
Adams was never dishonest. All he did was say things like "rioters are thugs" and "women's studies aren't essential".
Even in death, the media ran awful headlines like this.
"Professor who announced retirement after racist and sexist tweets died by suicide"
Related article: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/professor-mike-adams-suicide-will-always-haunt-me
Getting sacked and piled-on publicly is pretty tough. Ideally it should only be done to people who actually deserve it, I think everyone agrees on that. That 'actually deserving it part' is however contested. What's worse: racist and sexist tweets or making up random stories, plagiarism and total lack of academic merit? That's the open question, the contested ground.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Immediately after I posted this yet another story about fake Israeli intelligence emerged. The CIA had 'low confidence' in the threat to Trump's life that sponsored the plane switcheroo, while it seemed to serve Israeli goals in reinforcing the threat from Iran.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Needless to say, satellite states are now within the realm of things they no longer want to pay for.
Let's consider America's allies/satellites. Britain - Five Eyes, cooperative, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, was going to help out in the Asia Pacific before things heated up in Europe. Not very strong but causes no problems.
Australia - Five Eyes, cooperative, Pine Gap signals, rare earths, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, helping out with developing US submarine-building to buy some nuclear subs. Small and weak but causes no problems.
France - a bit unruly, wants more European strategic autonomy, doesn't like buying US weapons, kicked out US troops of their own country for a while but is still in NATO. Not a major problem though.
Turkey - quite unruly, buys some Russian weapons, complicates things with Syria or anything to do with the Kurds. Constantly double dealing everyone.
And then there's Israel.
Israel is constantly needy for US weapons - about 3-4 billion in military aid per year. Israel has all kinds of special carve outs where the US will contribute to R&D for Israeli weapons that the Israelis later export. Whenever there's a war they get more supplementary military aid. Even their neighbours get military aid to serve as a bribe for being nice to Israel.
The Israelis provide bad intelligence, it was the Israelis producing imaginary armies of Kurds for this most recent Iran shambles. They've been demanding Iran be bombed for 20-30 years now because of nukes that nobody's ever seen. They were demanding war with Saddam's Iraq and didn't lift a finger to help out. They don't contribute to US wars, unlike all other US clients who at least show up sometimes. South Korea sent plenty of troops to Vietnam. Israel never shows up for a US war with the exception of the Iran war, which was started for Israel. Rubio's initial remarks were that Israel was about to attack Iran and so America had to go in too due to the inevitable response. Israel causes massive diplomatic and reputational problems for the US. Why was Osama and all these Muslims so upset with America? To a large extent because of Israel.
Consider non-proliferation, how much harm does it do to the US non-proliferation agenda for Israel to be sitting there while America warns Iran must never be allowed to have nuclear weapons? Rules for me and rules for thee...
Israel is a uniquely toxic US ally but exercises such vast power over American politics it's insane. What has Canada ever done to America that would motivate harsh rhetoric and trade wars? Canada might be incompetent and weak but is that such a great crime? They show up to US wars. Better a weak friend than a moderately powerful leech, deceiver and problem-starter who's shown zero intention to help the US.
Trumpian anger with US allies has been directed everywhere except where it actually belongs. Most farcically, he's now fallen taken that final step that even Bush shied away from.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I'm reminded of the New Model Army as an example of Christian brotherhood. They were really serious about Christianity and almost incomprehensible doctrinal issues to us moderns like what books of prayer there should be and how exactly churches should be organized.
Their fervour and discipline and conviction gave them such battlefield strength that they held Britain and Ireland in their hands, marching around and smashing any rebels they found.
Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
It's reddit, necessarily full of redditors... I bet that /r/books is run by the same type that you're implicitly criticizing. What are the chances that at least one moderator objects to the whole premise of what you're talking about and decided to remove it? May as well go on /pol/ and argue that the Holocaust happened. Wrong forum buddy! Only /pol/ moderators wouldn't actually remove a thread over something like that.
It also reminds me of what Arctotherium was saying in one point of his long essay about social media censorship: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209852382
I recommend the whole thing, relevant to the creation of this forum!
He made the point that censorship deprives the right of high-quality content (which necessarily takes lots of time and stability to develop). Because accounts are ephemeral and getting banned all the time, it makes more sense to go for sensationalist, simplistic memes rather than serious scholarship. You'd feel a fool if you spent 3 years writing a 1000 page magisterial tome of right-wing history/philosophy and then nobody would publish it because the right gives them the ick, wouldn't you? Or if Vauban books or mystery grove or whoever does, the big bucks probably aren't going to roll in (most of the financial value in writing books is that rare but massive hit)! Better to make a png infographic or a soy wojak that can circulate more easily than huge books which need publishers, printers, distribution...
Or better to make blog posts or essays on substack.
Well it's the same with fiction I think. So we end up with fewer really high quality male-focused stories and more of the lower-tier 'Adding Big Elf Tits to the Harem' kind of thing.
Hopefully new publishers make ground here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Well if the AIs fulfill their promise they should be capable of working out what's Actually Going On and break through whatever lying we do today.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
The whole point of using the cuck language is to expose the contradiction in your argument.
Iran will never control the Strait and will certainly never be allowed to toll the Strait.
America has been escorting ships through the strait.
So why not sail through to show exactly who controls it? Why is anyone talking about Iran getting 7% tolls, or splitting profits with Oman, or charging 1-2 million per ship? Nobody would do this if there was a carrier group sitting right there in the straits. Why are there drones hitting ships? Why is traffic crossing the straits at 2% of prewar average? Why are they effectively closed if the US is so powerful and Iran so weak? What the hell was going on with Yemen a couple years back? Why did Trump start blaming his allies for not sending their navies to the straits back in month 2?
Why are there drones attacking US shipping in Suez last week for that matter?
You said yourself that all Iran could do was plink away at a few cargo ships and they barely did much of that... Are we to believe that a US navy carrier battlegroup is weaker in battle than a few civilian cargo ships? This sounds like an easy win! What kind of coward shrinks back from a few measly drones? Protect the shipping, save the day.
You keep saying that America is so powerful. But when it comes to showing that power and reaping rewards, mysteriously it becomes 'going out of their way to increase risk'. It's just cope. When Communist China was threatening Taiwan in the 50s and 90s the US sailed a carrier group through the straits to deter and show power.
It's your perspective that ironically necessitates the US military being absolute lily-livered crybaby pussies, that's my point. My theory explains it perfectly. The US isn't run by effeminate cuckolds. They know that if they tried to secure the straits in actual fact, asserting their presence and escorting more than a tiny handful of ships, it would probably fail, get a bunch of sailors killed and cost more than it gained.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go
They parasitize on society by allocating where goods and services go.
Finance has done tremendous damage to the Western world. They offshored vital industries (that alone is civilizational-scale treason) and they drain away highly capable people from the hard sciences that actually create wealth.
They presided over a merger-acquisition/shareholder-first equilibrium that encouraged a race to the bottom in capital investment and R&D. Encouraging companies to fail the marshmallow test is a deeply wrong thing to do.
Then there's the rush into land appreciation. Land in high-demand cities is an amazing financial asset, it's impossible to make any more of it! Land can't be taken away, it's fixed in place. The financial sector has capitalized on this and directed enormous amounts of capital into loans to bid up land values, rather than developing industry. This was a major trend over the 20th century. Across 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios doubled over the past century: 30% in 1900 to 60% in 2014. Credit is elastic while land is fixed - the result is land prices rising. Only a small fraction of the mortgage lending is for new builds (less attractive to banks since they're without a proven price) so the bulk of this enormous mortgage lending ends up bidding up prices on existing houses.
Industry can go bust for all kinds of reasons, it's risky, there's a need for constant competition and improvement, capital depreciates and creditors might lose out in bankruptcy. Most businesses fail. But house prices go up! And a bank can always take back the house if they default on their mortgage. Bidding on land is lucrative for banks, bad for society.
Why are banks directing trillions to making housing less affordable, anchoring workers to fixed mortgages, suppressing fertility? So they can make a few % higher returns. It's terrible pointless waste.
There are presumably many good people in the financial sector and parts that are less damaging (VCs to an extent) but the whole ethos of the sector is corrupt and anti-social. Privatized gains, socialized losses. The financial sector has been doing the wrong thing with great effort and skill and dressed it up as the right thing. VCs might well decide to put their money into 'making sports betting more addictive' because that's more profitable and safe than 'making incredibly intricate lenses for semiconductors.'
We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for an external audience, more so than cash flows. We find that the majority of managers would avoid initiating a positive NPV project if it meant falling short of the current quarter’s consensus earnings.
Damn these people. Their stupid greed isn't even helping their own companies! They're sacrificing their own companies interests just to stay ahead of earnings expectations, an almost totally imaginary, abstract number. By definition you are always supposed to take a positive NPV project in ultra-financialized bean-counter economics, nevermind social outcomes. But they aren't even properly aligned with that, they know that their job is to keep share prices up or they may be paid in short-term options.
Most of all, damn the whole system. A certain amount of greed in the right place is fine but we're far into the realm of negative returns.
Governments certainly didn't help much with idiotic regulations, ideological fads and negligent oversight. Unions have been similarly damaging in many respects. The alternative to wrecking by the financial sector shouldn't be 'total control of the economy by a posse of men in poorly fitting suits who got where they are by reciting Lenin and bureaucratic manoeuvres' or 'total control of the economy by union thugs who go on strike when there's an R in the month' but a disciplined govt-directed market system directing capital towards development, making use of capital controls and lending restrictions and regulations in a synchronized, coordinated way. A single army, not a chaotic PvP brawl between various interest groups competing to grab as much of the pie as they can.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Aren't your homosexual experiences and perspectives innately 'alien' to the mainstream? Most men are repulsed and extremely repelled at the idea of having other men fuck them in the ass. Most men are similarly repelled by the idea of fucking other men's asses. They want to fuck women. Gay sex is most prominent when there aren't women around (on ships, or in male prisons, or in male pursuits like the army).
I don't think you should be trying to make an argument about nature and authenticity and true motivations when you have a distinctly unusual perspective. It's certainly interesting and novel to read, I think it's good to have some unpredictable theoretical essays here.
And yet, because he is about 15% more masculine than Aaron, my brain tells me I’m supposed to mate with DJ. If I’m a woman and I’m stuck on an island with just Aaron and DJ, I’m mating with DJ. Aaron’s children will be annoying and not want to work, I can just tell. DJ’s children will be tough and dutiful. My procreative intuition tells me this. DJ is mogging Aaron despite everything I love about Aaron. I don’t even like DJ’s looks that much. I could imagine mating with DJ for the kids but staying with Aaron for his beauty and the chaos he’d bring. I am saying this to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reproductive intuitions are and how fundamentally biological they are.
??? Yet your reproductive inclinations are skewed. You can't reproduce with some murderer's manlier brother. You're a gay man and I think you're unlike women on some massive multi-dimensional axis, just like how straight men are unlike women in some different multi-dimensional axis.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Or that America knows deep down it would lose so that’s why it doesn’t even try?
You need to up your reading comprehension. I clearly said 'the latter'. That's why the US carrier group is lurking south of the straits, just outside the edge of Iranian anti-ship missile range. That's why US soldiers left their Gulf bases to hide in hotels before Iranian missiles demolished them.
If the US is so powerful and strong and the Iranians so weak, why not simply sail north, through the straits, stay there for days and weeks escorting shipping and show everyone there's nothing to fear? Why haven't they done this? That would immediately ease the insurers concerns and sort everything out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
What else could the goal have been? Why would they launch attacks against leaders in the government on day one if not to cause regime change? At the very start of the war Trump was going on about unconditional surrender which is another word for regime change. The idea was that some anti-clerical force would take over and be friends with Israel, the whole rotten structure would come crashing down after he kicked in the door... but this didn't occur.
Here are some stated goals after the initial hope didn't come to fruition:
“Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities… and their capacity to produce brand new ones — pretty good ones they make. Second, we’re annihilating their navy… Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon… And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”
Well, are their missile capabilities destroyed? No, Iran's missile forces have pushed the US out of Gulf bases. The Iranian navy lost ships but not its primary mission of controlling shipping in the straits. Nuclear weapons are opaque, unclear what's going on there. I still think Iran hasn't acquired nuclear weapons for fear of nuclear disarming attacks or out of not desiring a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But maybe it could be considered a success, albeit no visible change to the status quo.
And can Iran arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside their borders? They sure can, in Iraq and Yemen. So that didn't work either.
Imagine if those goals had been achieved, wouldn't the scenario look different? Wouldn't the US be pressing its military advantage rather than trying to negotiate an end to the war? Wouldn't there be bombing of Iranian energy facilities and political infrastructure like police stations or broadcasting facilities to further damage the regime? Why start with bombing Iran's leaders and then stop? Wouldn't Trump be looking for human rights for all the gazillions of murdered protestors, demanding reforms in Iran... Why is Trump saying that there are negotiations underway while the Iranians say these are lies? Why is there all this discussion about Iran charging tolls on shipping in the straits of Hormuz if they're the vanquished party?
a small trickle of traffic is making the run
Well, mostly closed then.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
The opacity is more in how they end up spending enormous numbers of money on a tiny number of missiles (plus black budget spending on secret weapons and research). But all publicly revealed weapons are listed:
So if you go to page 41 of the link, it says how many patriot PAC-3s they buy (230 a year at $4 million per missile). Not that many once you account for tests and training and exports.
Now they don't say exactly how many they've got left but it's not that hard to estimate (by intelligence agency standards), given that there's video evidence of them being shot away. There's a defined upper limit on how many they could have, unless they lie on these reports. They've also been starting to issue orders for PAC-2s again to supplement the PAC-3s. So there are clear signs of pressure, plus this is something that wargames have warned of for many years.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
You mean they're lying in the congressional reports where they describe the number of munitions they buy? It's public record, we can see how many are purchased.
And why would the US want to lie and seem like their air defences are weaker than they actually are to embolden (not deter) US enemies? This doesn't seem like a very Trumpian move either, meekness is not what I associate with Trump.
Impressive to see things so early by Deepdream. Took me a lot longer, till GPT-2/3 and some of the later proto-ChatGPTs. There were so many signs out there for those to see especially by mid-2022. Some legendary /g/ threads when people were marvelling over getting a couple paragraphs out of a 'business idea review' site based on GPT-3. And AI Dungeon of course, that was 2020.
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