RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Good point, it was wrong to say that it's not worth caring about AI bioweapon risk. ASI ought to be so strong that it doesn't need bioweapons though, I think it can wrap us around its finger such that we serve its will without any biowarfare. Just dominating the internet would be a civilization-scale parasitism like your wasps, it would be inside our entire command-and-control structure and in a position of assured dominance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Yes, I remember seeing people spray down their shoes with disinfectant when returning to the house. Or spraying down the table at a shared eating space (because what we really needed is a bunch of people touching the same squirter, squirting down their tape-demarcated part of the table).
There was a shocking level of hysteria.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Three South African courts have ruled against attempts to have it designated as hate speech, on the basis that it is a historical liberation chant, not a literal incitement to violence.
Who cares what a South African court thinks? They haven't been covering themselves in excellence in upholding a stable, successful society. The murder rate there is comparable to the death rate in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
It's also somewhat hard to accept rhetorically, given how 'It's OK to be white' produced such a big storm.
I've always maintained that responsibility is shared between the superpowers, that's a huge part of why nobody's prepared to accept what happened or do anything. The Chinese have eagerly been saying 'oh it was made in America' and vis versa. But neither is prepared to do anything about it, they want to pretend it never happened lest the enormity of the disaster waft back onto them. Propaganda is all they're willing to do.
This applies especially to the community of experts (that Scott is a member and cheerleader for), full realization would be shattering to their authority. This disaster was made by the experts, whether in China or America or both, it was them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak, even if it can't be proved due to much of the evidence mysteriously disappearing (which is itself a certain signal). This seems to be the position of the US intelligence apparatus. Frankly it should've been obvious back in March of 2020 given the proximity of the lab, the nature of its COVID research and all the anomalous activity going on there.
Anyway, I also agree with your second point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.
Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.
Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed that one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'.
Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.
In a previous incident in May 2018, anthrax may have been accidentally released from the boiler room at one of the labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and into a nearby river where people were planting lilypads. No illnesses were reported as a result of the potential release.
This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.
The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Good point, it does matter a lot about who is having children to each side.
Agreed, plus the premodern state doesn't necessarily want economic growth, they want boots on the ground and stability.
The roman empire was broadly free market. They had strong property rights and relatively low taxes. They thought trade was pretty good. But they were quite worried about bread prices, so they arranged for food shipments to Italy to keep the plebs happy. And money had to be found somewhere for warfare, they struggled with getting the tax base to pay for all these wars. It's hard to extract money from all these entrenched aristocrats who naturally develop wealth trading.
In an agrarian economy, food is money so why not have as many people making food as possible? You can get pretty good results with legalist policies of strict state control and contempt for trade. If you read the book of shang yang, it's basically just 'the wastelands must be cultivated' and 'don't let people do what they want, fancy silk clothing is not needed for fielding a gigantic army'. There's not much need for a dynamic private sector economy when you only need grain, swords, salt and horses in huge quantities. The state can handle that quite well with economies of scale alone and conscripted labour.
Only when you start needing hugely expensive ships, optics, cannons, advanced metallurgy and innovation does a private sector economy really start to shine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Well it is predominantly held by left-wingers today.
You can see all this commentary about how the aesthetic of the happy smiling white family is racist, fascist, possibly nazi - it comes from the left. I've yet to see any right-wing critique of such imagery. Discourse about liberating women from the burden of motherhood comes from the left, while discourse about the 14 words and fear of demographic replacement comes from the right.
Whether something is essentially right wing or left wing is secondary to whether it's presently right-wing or left-wing. The evolutionary history of the bear isn't that important compared compared to whether the bear in front of me is good at climbing up trees, if it's aggressive towards people, if it's confused by loud noises...
For example, the Soviet bloc was broadly pro-natalist. But what impact does this have on modern leftism? Soviet leftism is all but dead, they were also big fans of heavy industry, nuclear energy and military power which aren't beloved by the modern left.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated. Management of large organizations is still generally awful, there is no science of good management, only vague notions and a few people who have some opaque skill at doing it.
Also state-sponsored eugenics isn't exactly a new idea... but nobody does it. It's not that complicated to gather the smartest, most agentic, most capable men and women and encourage them to marry and raise many children, or collect sperm, let alone direct genetic modification. But not a single state is interested in this, everyone prefers to pour trillions of dollars and billions of child-hours into education where the returns are dubious in many cases.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Singapore is the world's 3rd-largest foreign exchange centre, 6th-largest financial centre,[361] 2nd-largest casino gambling market,[362] 3rd-largest oil-refining and trading centre, largest oil-rig producer and hub for ship repair services,[363][364][365] and largest logistics hub.[366] The economy is diversified, with its top contributors being financial services, manufacturing, and oil-refining. Its main exports are refined petroleum, integrated circuits, and computers,[367] which constituted 27% of the country's GDP in 2010. Other significant sectors include electronics, chemicals, mechanical engineering, and biomedical sciences. Singapore was ranked 4th in the Global Innovation Index in 2024 and 7th in 2022.[368][369][370][371][372] In 2019, there were more than 60 semiconductor companies in Singapore, which together constituted 11% of the global market share. The semiconductor industry alone contributes around 7% of Singapore's GDP.
They do all kinds of things, plus there's Singapore Airlines like how the UAE has Emirates as their airline.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
AO3 and FFN are a thing... though I do agree the whole GW/Nintendo 'Total Fanwork Death' policy is unacceptable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
From the Atlantic Council link:
By Mykola Bielieskov
MA in International Relations from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. From 2016 to 2019 he worked at the Institute of World Policy, a Ukrainian NGO. Since October 2019, he has worked at the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the Ukrainian President (Department of Defence Policy).
Naturally he foresees that the Russian offensive will be bloody and that the war must continue. It's underrated just how much of the prestige information environment on foreign policy is Ukrainians, Poles and Baltics on govt payroll producing arguments for why Ukraine should get maximum support to fight on indefinitely.
Now it's "Russia hasn't taken any regional capitals!" or "their advance is too slow". The Ukrainian plan for victory seems to be "outlast Russia", even Bielieskov agrees on this. But since when was a conventional war of attrition with Russia a winning strategy for a much smaller country?
In 2022 Russia wanted Crimea and Donbass, now it's four mainland regions, maybe five. In 2026 will the new talking point be 'now they want 8 regions, we must fight on lest Ukraine be dismembered and left even more of a ruined, broken state, plus the Russians can't be trusted and will attack anyway?' Or maybe just 'Trump needed to send more aid, it's all his fault'. Sunk cost fallacy on an epic, tragic scale, being relentlessly justified with increasingly flimsy rhetoric. First it was the counteroffensive to cut off Crimea and win the war. Then Kursk to provide a valuable bargaining chip in peace talks. And now fighting to delay defeat as long as possible.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
If you're prepared to go in and steal scarves, why not steal from a self-checkout machine? The corporation is not going to miss the $20. But when everyone does it, stores close and we have to go back to cashiers rather than an efficient, human-free experience.
Why not just torrent games for free or get repacks? I'm not totally innocent on this but it's still bad to do even if I'm tempted to say 'oh well the marginal cost of distribution is zero and i probably wasn't going to buy it anyway'. When everyone does it, all we get is AAA slop catering to people too stupid to torrent.
Consequentialism should consider the long-term consequences of behaviours.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
If you're an arthritic, 50 kg woman without a gun, you shouldn't try to enforce rules you and your friends invented the other day on a 200 kg heavyweight boxer with a 20 mm autocannon in his back pocket just because your friends also have big muscles, autocannons, bazookas and miniguns. It puts stress on your relationship and raises tensions.
It's obnoxious behaviour to go 'oh you need insurance to sail in these waters' and 'oh only we provide acceptable insurance, we'll sanction whoever provides insurance'. Sanctions are one thing, trying to mess with freedom of the seas is another, it's like a passive-aggressive blockade albeit 90% passive. This kind of behaviour is how you get your car keyed or your airspace violated.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
It really is that simple: flight speed, payload and range isn't capped at some modest multiple above a falcon but by how much fuel you're prepared to burn and whether you're willing to use serious, atomic rockets.
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous. This should be immediately apparent!
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is. There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit. In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale? And by the way, it clearly is galactic scale in a fairly reasonable timespan. Galactic scale in space, why not give it a couple hundred thousand years? A million years is peanuts in astronomical time, in the movements of galaxies or the evolution of life. You're taking an analogy I selected, not understanding it and then producing mixed contexts while complaining about my single, relevant, assumed context of 'things that matter on Earth to real human beings' as opposed to the 'insanity of exponentials and the universe' which doesn't matter to anyone.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
Estonia tried to detain vessel from Russia's shadow fleeet, did not succeed
Why is it that these very small and weak countries in the Baltic are so eager to go all in on 'we hate Russia' and make incidents? Estonia does not have any combat aircraft whatsoever. Their military is roughly equivalent to the Oklahomah national guard, who do actually have some aircraft. This is not really a good position to be trying to seize Russian ships. Seizing other people's ships is cringeworthy behaviour whether it's the Houthis, Estonia or America but Estonia's by far the weakest player.
'Scream hysterically and wave a tiny stick' doesn't seem like a great strategy, I suppose that it's popular domestically.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
What if Vietnam was just because the US govt didn't really care about Vietnam? They cared a lot about Vietnam and it wasn't a small war... but Vietnam doesn't really matter to the US in any direct sense.
Imagine that anyone who protested the Vietnam war was sent straight to prison. Burn your draft card? Straight to prison. Publish unpatriotic journalism? You'd better pray it's only prison.
When a government really cares about winning, they conduct a full mobilization of society, they align the media and everything so it all points in the right direction. Good old fashioned atrocity propaganda, not Jane Fonda.
Now the machinery might not be there to do this anymore, I foresee problems in trying to mobilize zoomer men for gruelling industrial drone war. But it's possible in principle.
Sounds like it's a college/no-kids problem to me. Why didn't she want kids with this super financially stable, nice guy? She mustn't have really loved him. Expensive wedding is also a bad sign. Obviously you know more about this matter.
Sometimes you just roll a bad woman, I think she wasn't the right class for him. There's a certain kind of highly educated woman who just wouldn't divorce a nice guy like that due to how unseemly it would be, who acts rationally (aside from more politics/feels stuff), who's well-off but doesn't need an expensive wedding. There are gradations in the upper middleclass where you find such women. On the other hand, these are the kind who'd never settle with anyone with an MBA, the kind who looks down on investment bankers for being too stupid and greedy since everyone in the social circle is assumed to be rich. Rare, perhaps vanished breed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
Violent crime is one thing but who dreams of working on an oil rig? It's not even that outdoorsy, you're not in the forest or on the land.
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere, how does it add anything to what I'm saying?
"In the big picture, everything we do on Earth doesn't matter" is true but it's a pointless thing to say. Things on Earth matter to us.
"Nazi Germany didn't conquer all the way to Ceres, so they're not a threat"
"Climate change isn't going to boil the oceans, so who cares"
"Covid isn't going to turn you into a rage monster from Resident Evil so it's a nothingburger"
Statements by the utterly deranged! But if you complicate it out so that 'biology is really complicated, the immune system is pretty good, epidemics often fizzle out and it's orders of magnitude from causing a zombie apocalypse' it suddenly sounds reasonable even when the realistic stance of the problem looks completely different.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
GPT-4.5 was for creative writing and was mostly being reviewed by coders, since the AI community is mostly coders. There are a few who really liked it and were disappointed when it was taken away but most people never got a chance to use it, understandable with that pricetag attached. Plus the path seems to be scaling test-time compute, not merely scaling model size but scaling in general.
I personally think Dario from Anthropic is more credible on this kind of stuff than Scott, he's been talking about a country of geniuses in a datacentre by those kind of dates. He is at least close to the engineroom on this kind of thing.
I don't speak for Yud but if AI is where it is today in 2040 then I'll be very confused, not to mention him. On twitter he was constantly posting stuff about how rapid progress has been, that's part of his narrative.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
I'm not actually American but in Australia for humanities/law/essay-writing exams, you're effectively rewarded for how many points you can make as well as their quality and I'm pretty confident it's the same there. Maybe you do maths or something where there's only a single answer and simplicity is rewarded, idk...
Two pages seems quite short to me for an essay.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition. You can get a decent fraction of c with antimatter.
Also, there's a huge difference between 'bird', 'propeller plane', 'rocket' and 'atomic rocket' in any realistic sense, with regards to what we're dealing with now. Is superintelligence capable of rewriting the fundamental laws of the universe like a real deity? No. Is that necessary to make vast changes to our lifestyle and existence? Absolutely not, just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
UK pays Mauritius to take administrative ownership of strategic Indian Ocean base: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-set-sign-deal-ceding-sovereignty-chagos-islands-mauritius-2025-05-22/
Legalism gone mad, nobody is capable of taking Diego Garcia off the UK/US. Mauritius is a very poor and weak country and can be safely ignored. A quick glimpse at a map also reveals that Mauritius is thousands of kilometres away from Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos islands, there's really no reason to pay them to take over the area just so the base can be kept just because they were once classified as part of the same British Indian Ocean Territory.
Some element of the British decisionmaking process seems to be based on a need for international legitimacy, that paying Mauritius makes them more holy and virtuous: https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945
Someone needs to tell these Brits that they're a P5 power. They cannot, by definition, be isolated in the UN and have anything bad happen to them other than condemnation. If you don't like an ICJ order, you can just ignore it. No such ICJ order actually happened, so Britain doesn't even need to ignore them. The US told the ICJ to get stuffed when they said 'don't go in on Nicaragua'. Israel couldn't care less what the ICJ says, they're not suddenly going to give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, let alone pay reparations. The Security Council are the ultimate court in the UN and the UK enjoys a veto there.
Soft power like the British state seems to yearn for is nothing without real power, it's a pure longhouse concept. Real power is concrete: boots on the ground, bridges built or bombs dropped. Unfortunately, the longhouse is very real if you believe in it.
Some have alleged that there's some kind of corruption behind the deal, Starmer is known to associate with all kinds of subversive elements like human rights lawyers, some of whom are associated with Mauritius. But then he is a human rights lawyer, so that's to be expected. Who can tell the difference between corruption and treachery? Showing weakness here also opens up other problems for the UK in Gibraltar and the Falklands.
https://x.com/G0ADM/status/1925609246101807510
Sending billions to a foreign country is also perverse given that the UK is in a poor fiscal position and must impose painful cuts or tax hikes to stabilize the situation. One can observe a hierarchy of needs in modern British governance:
Very far down the list is anything associated with economic growth or military power.
https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945
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