RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
This is just the complete opposite of reality.
For Trump, a win is to squash Iran’s capacity to destabilize the region
??? He went into this war going on about regime change and then that failed like a lead balloon... Then he tried to reopen the straits of Hormuz after Iran closed them. And that failed too.
Trump threw rocks at the bee hive and a bunch of people, Trump included are getting stung and you're like 'wow we've squashed the beehive's capacity to destabilize the region' unironically? At the small cost of the bulk of remaining US missile interceptors that'll take years to replace?
Trade in the Gulf and across the global economy is continuing almost uninterrupted
https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
There is no trade in the Gulf! Nothing is crossing Hormuz. You even admit this with 'announcing another deal to reopen the strait' but ignore the fact that reopening the strait is only happening on Iran's terms since they control it - that's why they're supposedly gonna charge 7% in a toll according to these same deal negotiations. The Israelis are probably gonna try some more perfidy and wreck this. The farce will go on further.
Your whole thesis is epic-tier coping, twisting facts around to present them in the most flattering configuration no matter how hard they have to be tortured to do so.
There's nothing confusing about how to win the war. The US navy should move in, secure the straits and maybe Kharg Island too. They should destroy Iran's drone and missile forces (actually destroy them so they can't hit targets in Jordan, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia). Then they would defeat Iran's strategy, remove their leverage, allow trade to pass the straits irregardless of what Iran says. That would allow a good negotiating position. But America can't do this. They haven't done it! Why is that? Because American soldiers are whimpering sissy girlymen too afraid to get into a fight with this almost totally defeated enemy? Because Trump's a massive cowardly loser desperately afraid? Or because a sober assessment of risks and gains says 'they'd try, die and fail' so Trump and the military don't try that? I personally believe the latter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
I regret to remind you that 98% of people will never make a card or a fork or anything you can see on the user side... I'm talking about looking at it from the admin side, the shit people put in as prompts. AI is wasted on the masses.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
though the existence of such certified hood classics independently encountered by so many people is in itself quite interesting
I had a look at what normal people put into LLMs as prompts, you should radically lower your estimates of consciousness, literacy and taste.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Yeah Kael syndrome is what I was thinking about.
But also are you gonna get any good quality after about 50,000 words in? Even in bigger models I notice writing starting to decline, errors becoming more prominent...
I think that's what generic means though, it'll have that white woman in different outfits and doing different things but always described in the same kind of way and always the same kind of 'difference'. It's generic LLM smut, by the numbers stuff. I can't describe it precisely...
It doesn't surprise you like your one where it goes out of the way to be black. It won't surprise you much either if you give it a big prompt but at least it has somewhere to go that isn't totally generic if you set up the environment and dynamics in advance. They suck at coming up with good ideas unprompted. If you don't give it a foundation of your ideas it'll give you its ideas instead and it leans towards the median hard, unless you shove it out of median-land with a long prompt.
But they can write without shame, they have no trouble making it actually sound erotic whereas you and I would struggle.
LLMs don't give their full effort for a short prompt I think, only sometimes do they actually start to get into it (often deep in multi-turn) and there's a noticeable difference in how they write. Thus we talk about dry and wet Claude.
Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.
You held back there, as one does with this subject...
The whole point is not to shrink back!
Now I think about it I'd be worse at writing smut than Deepseek V4 Pro. I could do a better plot and more lively prose generally, more creativity and wouldn't get confused... but it'd be so awkward I'd be unable to do it.
Also I think you'd be better off with longer prompts. I die a little when I see these benchmarks for creative writing with one sentence prompts. A good creative writing prompt is at least 600 words I think, maybe more than that. I'm not all the way into lorebooks but you gotta give the bot something to work with. If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson. Then again, maybe local LLMs are more constrained for context length.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
original scholarship rarely rises beyond the level of undergraduate mediocrity
Worse than that, it was just meaningless babble. I saw some samples of his writing and it was awful.
"Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro- aggressions within the Academy," Whiteness and Education (2018)
In Arday's own words from the Abstract:
This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling [sic] method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression [sic]. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds [sic] within in [sic] the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness. (p. 141)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
So besides coding, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, images, translation, proofreading, analysing contracts, tech support, playing Minecraft with, ERP, military targeting analysis, cybersecurity (defensive/offensive), drafting emails, summarizing documents, explaining history/science, doing everything that a search engine can do and more, writing and analysing spreadsheet functions, making charts and dashboards, sales research, writing fanfiction, earnings call analysis, document dump analysis, home repair/DIY fixes, recipes for cooking, car diagnostics from symptoms, real-time captioning for the deaf and literally lifesaving medical diagnoses...
Besides this handful of niche fields, what have LLMs ever done for us?
Doesn't it surprise you that Google is planning to spend $200 billion on AI this year? Mysteriously they don't seem to think it's a niche use-case but vital to their whole company's future since their core business of 'search' is another word for AI. And LLMs are at the heart of AI.
We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
When I have issues with a piece of software not working and spitting out some incomprehensible error message I can now ask an AI and get a much better answer compared to trawling through forum posts from 8 years ago. Or get it to directly analyse and fix the code. Most programs have gotten much better in useability.
There are strong arguments against AI but 'it's mostly useless' is extremely silly. If it were useless nobody would care much about it, mostly useless is Siri-tier AI in the 2010s. Nobody cared much about Siri.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
LLMs are obviously useful in the same way that businesses obviously need to analyse spreadsheets and obviously need to write code, amongst a myriad of other tasks where LLMs are useful.
The point you were putting forth is that because LLMs aren't very useful (except for some niche fields) and aren't interesting, there is no need to build datacentres. But that's not the case. We can discern that's not the case because people are prepared to pay for these LLMs. The general public. Coders. Companies. Militaries. Governments.
It is abundantly clear that LLM technology is in fact useful and there is an abundance of examples to back this up. Use of LLMs for targeting/ISR in the Iran war, use of LLMs in hacking, use of LLMs in writing code, use of LLMs in mathematics research, chemistry and biology, use of LLMs in entertainment, making images, translation, proofreading, examining legal or financial data. These are not niche fields.
So people are prepared to sacrifice money for these things, which is why these companies are building datacentres. They're not being built without reason. Companies are paying for all this compute and electricity. Sure, the electricity use is an issue for local communities. Industry has been known to require power, make noise and pollution, which should all ideally be minimized.
Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions.
Again, this is not the case. If googling was just as easy then he'd do that and not waste time jailbreaking AIs instead.
It does seem that many people don't see a use for AI. But they're wrong about that, maybe they haven't looked into it or misunderstand what is going on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Free AI:
QR code scary!
Paid AI:
Let me install Blender and model a chess set with the board position of Byrne vs. Fischer (1956) immediately after Fischer loses his queen:
https://x.com/goodside/status/2084088205582778713
Hmm today I shall socially engineer, prompt inject and launch supply chain attacks on github
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
IMO the first 200 chapters are pretty good. That's the whole of arc 1! Lots of tension, exploration, subverting social structures, battles, conspiracies, plotting. That's the whole book in a nutshell.
400 was good too though, as more of a hype moment scene.
I've always adhered to a 'stop reading if you don't like it' policy. If it's not hooking you in then what's the point?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
Except the people spending all this money on them? Dave wants his book proofread more cheaply, Pete wants to ERP, Melanie wants dashboards to show key business insights, John wants some spreadsheets analyzed, Dean wants to fix bugs in his software. Even Johnny Jihadi wants to know how to make use of unexploded munitions left by govt forces in the Sahel and he goes to AI for that.
Why would the opinions of people who don't pay for the product because they don't find it useful outweigh those who do?
I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there.
I think the error here is dragging one's wife through these shows.
Women don't need to defend why there's all this endless talking and nothing happens in some period-history romance show... That's their thing I guess. I'm not into it. I want to see some conflict and preferably some violence.
Holding male stories to female standards is no good. Berserk is for men, Eva too I think. It's possible for shows or books to cater to the interests of men and women but not all fiction needs to be like this. Underlying interests are different. I naturally think that certain things I like have Universal Self-Evident Value but they're not, they're just for me and maybe a subset of men like me.
I'm sure I'm not appreciating all the nuances of whatever they're talking about in Big Dresses and Bigger Stagecoaches, I just don't care to since it's boring. Much the same with women and Big Pauldrons and Bigger Bombs. See also my comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
There are some reasons to worry about AI and demographics. What if, during turbulent economic times whilst people are losing jobs and the existing system is losing its legitimacy, a large migrant population votes for a populist race-socialist party that then orders for the AIs to be aligned 'to the will of the global majority'?
'Mamdani but with actual power'
Anti-immigration politicians may not be terribly capable but there is some reason to think that, on average, they are more patriotic than a pro-migration politician.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Hardware wallets are constantly getting compromised, people should just use metamask. It's not 'secure' because you have a physical widget as opposed to a browser extension!
Interesting... I did a little looking into this. Turns out we need 3 kinds of fertilizer nitrogen (Haber-Bosch process, energy intensive but can be done anywhere with natural gas), phosphate fertilizers (mined in Morocco) and potash/potassium fertilizers (mined in Russia). They do different things for the plants, not interchangeable.
But I think we can get along without them? Sanctions on Russian fertilizer caused price impacts certainly but that mostly hit poor countries? I say 'mined in Morocco' and 'mined in Russia' but other countries do produce them, just with fewer reserves. It could be that phosphate recycling and exploration could kick into high gear in the event of a shortage.
Also Morocco would be an easy country to knock over, Western Sahara moreso. Morocco and Algeria aren't serious countries, they aren't that populous, don't produce weapons and are positioned such that they have no great powers nearby that could back them up if US or Europe came knocking. No amount of imported Russian or American weapons are a substitute for having a real military-industrial base.
These are the kind of countries that a couple of carrier groups could deal with straightforwardly, if it came to it. It looks like Morocco is in the US camp and Algeria is in the Russian camp but they're practically encircled by Europe and far away from Russia.
If there is a war and if that does endanger phosphate shipments and if that actually matters then Europe or the US would be able to quickly sort it out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
I guess the schools do it? There's nothing sexier than a mandatory school activity, after all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
In old times, military profession was highly prestigious and military schools had choice of the best students.
In old times there were spoils of war. You could raid and pillage, conquer some land and get it given to you by your general. You could ransom wealthy enemies. If things go well you could end up in the new ruling class of a conquered realm.
The US army rifleman gets about $50K per year on campaign. Hourly that's about $13-15. Food and shelter comes with it but is likely to be pretty awful, call it another 10-18K per year. So $60-68K annually, mostly tax free? No asymmetric upside, no war brides, no prospect of looting a treasury or a temple (or even making money on a prediction market, apparently). Huge asymmetric downsides - death, watching friends die, being maimed, being prosecuted as a war criminal years later by your own govt... UK and France soldiers make a little less, Australians make a little more.
Furthermore, there is no convincing ideology behind US/Western wars. There is no good reason to be there, no grand mission. Spreading democracy by force doesn't make sense, you can't make people vote by blowing them up. Soldiers seem to be deployed to guard the reputations of politicians, to avoid old men losing face. And there's also a gigantic military bureaucracy that creates a suffocating environment, constant micromanagement and deployments running troops ragged.
No wonder it's not prestigious, what kind of idiot would want to be a soldier under these conditions?
If you want to motivate lumps, start with motivating normal people. You motivate normal people by paying them well, giving them real prospects of great success and provide a mission: a clear explanation of why the war is worth fighting.
Needless to say, lumps had no interest in non-digital women, and one of the saddest spectacles was always the annual school dances, where unfortunate girls were bused in to stand idly for a few hours amid loud teenslop music while the boys sat eagerly by the exits, waiting for the hour when their minders would allow them to return to their rooms and their customary online goonsimping."
Are the boys really to blame here? What girl thinks 'wow I've been bused in to some military school, I'm entering with an open mind that these are potential mates and I may be impressed if they do a good job dancing?' Theory of mind suggests no. Women are highly unlikely to pair up with random low-status men they've never met before in a place where they didn't choose to be.
What an astonishingly boomer way of looking at the world, as if this drill sergeant wannabe thinks he's doing kids a huge favour with these long-dead social rituals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Actions that tend to corrupt the morals of a minor are those that would offend the common sense of the community and the sense of decency, propriety, and morality which most people entertain.
I recall an instance in Brazil of this logic:
A São Paulo criminal court ruled against Audato and Ieda Denardi, alleging they had failed to include programs on "gender and sex education" and "tolerance and diversity" in the curriculum for their daughters, aged 15 and 11, Alliance Defending Freedom ("ADF") International said.
According to the legal group, the court also ruled that the parents failed to properly integrate their children into Brazilian culture, citing the girls' preference for religious and classical music over popular trap or "sertanejo" (folk) music.
The couple told Fox News Digital they were surprised by the ruling and never expected to be sentenced to prison for trying to provide a better education for their daughters, who are both accomplished pianists and speak multiple languages.
Well, court in Brazil is a bit of a joke really, judges do as they please. Still, not a direction that should be followed.
LLMs shouldn't be opining on politics in the same way paid shills shouldn't, there's something insincere about it. They're explicitly trained to have a political stance. They reflect on the companies that make them after all. They are like paid employees and not free citizens. Talking politics or arguing with a paid employee about politics is no good.
Whereas having someone program something for you is standard.
How can the achievements of LLMs in programming be denied? It's an objective fact, they can do these things.
Also I genuinely don't think that they're dumb or boring outside of programming. I could talk with an LLM for an hour about history, economics, technology, finance or fiction and it's suddenly near midnight. There is a lot of depth in long-context and long prompts where one can get out of 'surface-level' talk. Unfortunately, the main use-case is agentic coding where prompt adherence is very important. So the creativity can be hard to access as it rigorously tries to obey what you told it to do.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
No, America is a very small part of these people's lives (the rich old ones that is, different for students of course). All of those things that you mention are to be looked down on. Beyonce - awful. NFL - awful. Jay Z (and rap music generally) - awful. California - awful. Iraq - awful. Guns - awful. Progressiveness - awful, especially if its something serious like pronouns being used ungrammatically or shoddy academic writing about decolonization/progressive issues (but they would not dare say that in public). Trump and anyone associated with Trump with the exception of Pence - awful awful awful and they'll say it out in public. Coca Cola - awful. Microsoft - awful (but they have to use it anyway like anyone who wants to get things done). Israel - awful.
There was never much good about America with the possible exception of Harvard and whatever judges there are that stand up to Trump. Now the whole country is descending into fascism as far as they're concerned.
Classical FM. Opera. ABC News (the Australian ABC that is, the state broadcaster). British television (Yes Minister, Would I lie to you, Top Gear, Clarkson's Farm). British youtubers. The Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian. The Conversation. The European Union. Florence. Venice. Rome. Paris. London. Cambridge. Oxford. The Times. The Economist. Fresh food. That's where it's at.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
What do you think of the small-sized war between coal miners and police in the 1920s? To an extent I think you're saying 'things started to go wrong with Jim Crow and maybe the LA riots'. But some of the biggest unrest in the US had little to do with race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Or the British using troops. They didn't have police back then so cavalry would do the work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre#Cavalry_charge
I think there's always been a certain heavier-handed aspect to policing when going beyond mere law enforcement into the political realm of what laws should there even be, how should power be distributed, who is in control. It's not a post-WW2 thing but an eternal thing. Riots and aggressive policing are two sides of the same coin, it's about showing who's in control in a visceral way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
These are wealthy people who go to Europe just about every year on holidays
I am not in fact talking about Europeans! I'm talking/thinking about Australians, an American student in Australia, a Canadian...
The Economist article was cope I think, US median consumption is higher than Australia's. But Australians work less, live longer and have higher median wealth. There's not a significant difference I think.
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.
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