RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment
Well there's also the fact that the left has huge budgets to propagate their ideas, they don't need AI. They can pay 50, 100 people to make propaganda for a single show. They have entire broadcasting companies all around the world. They already have endless NGOs and cadres and academics pushing out meaningless words, they don't need to automate it. Automating it might even hurt them in absolute terms rather than just relative terms, rendering their patrons unemployed.
See my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348142?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Ballmer also likely Knows People. Hoi polloi might need to pay lots of money (and Ballmer may well be paying lots of money) but I imagine there's a switch the youtube people can flip to artificially boost channels they like, regardless of money. Youtube is part of google and google doesn't like Trump or Trump policies, some middle manager could easily decide that people should be seeing more Ballmer videos and make it so.
I wrote that... and then I checked his channel. It's extremely, blatantly inorganic. 18 M views, 16 M views, 23 K views, 7 M views, 5.6 K views. There should never be a factor of 1000 in views of videos from around the same time. He has 3 videos with the same title and slightly different lengths: 'Get to the Source'. 60K views, 258K views, 4M views. Very strange. Maybe 1% of those 200,000 subscribers are real people and not bots?
I think google is better at propping up inorganic celebrities, this is very amateurish stuff.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
But offworld datacentres are a really dumb idea at present tech, why would you want a massive drama getting to the servers to replace something if it breaks? Why would you want them to be hundreds, thousands of kilometres from eachother instead of networked all right next to eachother? Why would you spend rockets on them?
Starlink satellites have good enough bandwidth and Huawei has plenty of networking talent. It seems like they'd be better off sending that data to earth than processing it in space.
Space-solar isn't that cheap, China has plenty of cheap power. I just don't see it getting funded unless it's for guiding missiles over the horizon, something to do with ECM or signals intelligence that demands very low latency and orbital compute.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Are smart phones a Bostromian 'black ball' that just makes everything worse upon being discovered?
They inflicted mobile gaming on the world. They made social media worse I think. Dating apps proliferated. Sleep disruption. Short-form video in an ugly vertical format. People are watching movies on smartphones, it's destroying film. All these companies that make you install their app (it doesn't work).
Almost everything that can be done on a smart phone is done better on a PC or laptop. Cameraphones were good enough for communicating IMO.
Google maps is actually helpful but besides that? 2 factor authentication? Seems like a net negative to me.
Regarding the orbital supercomputer, isn't that inexplicable if it's not military? Why would you need real-time processing, can't you eventually send the data to Earth?
The only scenario I can imagine where it'd make sense to do processing in space is if you need to track aircraft in flight, ship wakes or something urgent. Maybe it's on the other side of the world to your ground stations and neutrals won't let you use their equipment... Maybe you're being jammed and you need to send only short packets of data through. The cost of spacelaunch, radiators and bespoke equipment surely make processing in space uncompetitive compared to a data centre on Earth if its for civilian purposes right?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Australia numbers 28 million, thanks to a ridiculous amount of recent immigration.
Also, the continent is mostly worthless. There's plenty of minerals but much of it is basically uninhabitable due to the heat and dryness.
Furthermore, the Antarctic claims are perfectly reasonable, Australia is actually close to the Antarctic and there are a few hundred people in stations down there. What the Russians, Norwegians and Chinese are doing down there is unreasonable, Russia and Norway have plenty of Arctic territory and shouldn't be double-dipping.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
China has started on Biggest Dam (60 GW peak capacity, or about an entire UK's worth of annual electricity production if it works out): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station
thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.
Why? The AI buildout is way bigger than anything else that's remotely feasible in the near-term. I'm a fan of nuclear fusion and nuclear generally, I think it'd be great to mine asteroids. Setting up largescale underwater mines would be cool. Doing something in Antarctica would also be good. Anything besides more welfare programs or endlessly increasing health costs, I'd welcome a big investment in anti-aging.
But I also have a sense of scale, AI is the front-page story even if people feel a bit tired of it. People talk about arcologies and they build data centres. The hyperscalers are spending about $200-300 billion on data centres annually. That's about one Apollo program every single year. The Medog hydro station is supposed to cost a mere $137 billion over 8 years. Even with a 3x blowout that's peanuts compared to AI. Microsoft alone is spending more than that.
What could be more visionary than bringing alien minds into existence? Elon made his fame as a hard-sciences guy with rockets, cars, tunnels but he's moved over into AI because of how important it is.
Come on, are Brits really going to pack up shop and go not to the North of England, not to the Welsh countryside or the highlands of Scotland or even the Falkland Islands... but Antarctica? Infamously uninhabitable Antarctica, with a kilometre of ice covering anything important, with seasonal accessibility, icebergs, vast distances to anywhere else? It's not like there's an asteroid's worth of minerals there.
Vision must be matched by cost-efficiency and prospective gains if it's to be anything but a pipe-dream. The cost of AI development is enormous but the potential gains are staggering. The cost of space colonization is perhaps slightly smaller but the gains aren't so great. While Western civilization underinvests in R&D and capital generally, it should be directed at the most high-leverage targets first.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Admittedly, almost none of these extremely well-dressed young people look like they can fight in their outfits, or do rock-climbing in heels... Form is clearly privileged over function.
It is very much a game for normies, you play as a pure-good hero. Sometimes the saccharineness of it all does get a bit over the top. But it is remarkable to think how far it can go into horror only for the artstyle to make it not-really-horror.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Well that still wouldn't work since they would've caught up to the big ship since it was imminently about to run out of fuel, attacked it, discovered the crew were mostly absent, then traced it back to Crait.
However you're clearly right, I'm surprised the cloaking/stealth angle wasn't in the extensive plot description on the wiki where I checked first, before AI confirmed you: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_VIII_The_Last_Jedi
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
If the plan was 'escape to not-Hoth and hole up in a fortress against much stronger space and ground opponents' then it may as well not exist. I don't recall any reference to cloaked ships either.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
The amount of content in Genshin Impact is absolutely staggering. I know everyone thinks of it as just a gacha but it's gigantic compared to full-price open world rpgs too.
It's got a huge map with lots of verticality and ambient content, puzzles and regional features. It actually looks pretty, unlike Skyrim. A tonne of characters with their own unique abilities. Mechanical complexity beyond just stacking on more attack.
And the story just goes on and on and on. There's a fair bit of BS they put in like 'you NEED to sit through endless tedium with Zhongli gathering ingredients for this ritual before you can go to not-Japan', clearly they want to do artsy character-development and worldbuilding stuff rather than just gacha moneygrabbing. That's just the main story, which is well over 100 hours at this point.
Then there are heaps of character side missions which are also long and voiced. And then dozens and dozens more area missions which are unvoiced but are still long with plenty of cinematics. Or just exploring the huge map, that would take ages.
There are more limited-time events than you can shake a stick at. Player housing. A card game. Really the only things missing are deep endgame like Path of Exile's mapping system and proper modding.
There is however a grindy element to it, you have to kill a bunch of bosses over and over again and pick huge numbers of flowers to level your characters and advance through the story. Surprisingly it seems you can't even skip this by paying, which seems odd to me given it is gacha. You're supposed to pay to get the character you want, not to skip the grind. I refuse to pay either way.
But WTF were Starfield devs doing with their 400 million if the Chinese can make something so huge for 800 million, get whales to pay for it all and have it actually be good too? Does Call of Duty Black Ops really cost nearly that much to make?
Apparently Genshin Impact is second only to Monopoly Go in cost, the latter is pure marketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop
In 2025, the game surpassed $1 billion in marketing spending since its launch.[12] The game generated $5 billion by April 2025.[3]
What a sad state gaming is in, Monopoly Go makes considerably more money. There's always sloppier slop.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
It's especially remarkable because she was telling them all to trust the plan.
But she had no plan. We are informed in episode 9 that the 'Holdo Maneuver' of FTL ramming was 1 in a million, it can't be reliably repeated. So she was really just trying to flee, only to get spectacularly lucky.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Such a pity that both Bizonacci and Leonardo of biz vanished from the earth. So much was lost when they messed with the captcha rules on /biz/ under admittedly severe pressure from shills, the board is barely a shadow of what it was. Someone made a full Chainlink waifu picker CYOA! Someone made a thematically-appropriate Chainlink RPGmaker game where you wait around for ages. NFTs that were just a printout of the amount of gas you paid to get them. Tasteful monerochan lewds. All these memories lost, like tears in the rain.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
You have succeeded where AI and myself have failed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Maybe he has other aspirations?
"Desolate Ancient Moon looked at him with pity, but her voice was tranquil: 'Rockman, I did not want to kill you. But you blocked my path to success.'"
Tao Zhu also comes to mind on the topic of RI and blowing a cute wife and huge wealth... Also, people can just be dumb without higher meaning in their actions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
What predictions does he make that you think are wrong?
Arctotherium says this regarding AI:
For example, much writing on AI accurately points out how reliant the US AI industry is on foreign talent, with around 70% of high-end researchers being foreign born, and then condemn the Trump administration for hostility to immigration. But they typically fail to point out the tiny numbers involved.
We’re talking maybe 10000 people total in the entire world, with annual fluxes into and out of the US, including during the open-borders Biden years, in the hundreds. It is entirely possible to recruit as much of this talent as is willing to move to the United States while cutting skilled immigration by 99%, and we should. OpenAI technical staff and people Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay a hundred million dollars to recruit are not generic H-1Bs or foreign students, and conflating the two is dishonest.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
Almost all asteroids are worse sources of metals
Yeah but some of them are much better source of minerals than any mine on earth. Iridium is hard to acquire here for one thing.
Apparently this one is pretty rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(6178)_1986_DA
The asteroid achieved its most notable recognition when scientists revealed that it contained over "10,000 tons of gold and 100,000 tons of platinum", or an approximate value at the time of its discovery of "$90 billion for the gold and a cool trillion dollars for the platinum, plus loose change for the asteroid's 10 billion tons of iron and a billion tons of nickel."[10] In 2024 the estimated value of 100,000 tons of platinum was worth approximately 3.4 trillion US dollars. The delta-v for a spacecraft rendezvous with this asteroid from low Earth orbit is 7.1 km/s.[11]
Even Australian production of iron ore is barely a billion tonnes per year, that's a lot of iron. Iron is at least digestible by the world economy whereas there'd be a glut of gold and platinum.
I have no problem with waiting. Personally I think that leaving Earth's orbit pre-fusion propulsion is silly. But with fusion propulsion lots of opportunities are opened up, one scarcely needs to worry about delta-v within the solar system.
I mean this is just ridiculous:
On 28 February 2020, NASA awarded SpaceX a US$117 million contract to launch the Psyche spacecraft, and two smallsat secondary missions, on a Falcon Heavy rocket.[48] The spacecraft was successfully launched on 13 October 2023, at 14:19 UTC,[49] with an expected arrival in 2029.
6 years! And by the time you get there nothing can be done, chemical rockets are the astronomical cuck chair. You just get to watch the asteroid tumble on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here.
There's a relevant essay from Arctotherium on this, you don't have to have mass immigration to bring in the top Taiwanese semiconductor experts, or German nuclear scientists or post-Soviet Russian STEM experts. You can bring in a few hundred or a few thousand people on 10x wages, have them stay for a few years to teach locals the skills and then have them leave or retire into obscurity.
China for instance brought in South Korean shipbuilding experts on high wages, worked out how to build ships and now dominates the world shipping industry. They tried this with semiconductors too, Taiwan actually passed laws to stop Chinese companies poaching semiconductor talent with high pay. Meiji Japan did this too, alongside others he mentions. Targeted skill acquisition does not require mass immigration.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169701612
The US is very wealthy, they could close the door to the median-wage immigrants and keep the top talent, even aggressively headhunt top talent with high payouts. Not 'I published a crappy paper in one of those journals that exists for resume packing' but 'I'm actually really smart and have these rare skills'.
Furthermore, there are all kinds of problems with relying on mass immigration.
There is indeed a large amount of Indian talent, I see Indian names on various AI papers regularly. So why isn't India rich or at least on par with China? There's no Indian Deepseek, Huawei, BYD, J-20. There may well be something wrong with Indian culture or society that impedes this kind of development. Mass immigration would likely import this problem to some extent.
Suppose there's a disaster in America, it's one of those situations where all hands need to be on deck for a massive crisis. Would the Indians, Chinese, Latin Americans perhaps think 'not my problem' and head back to their home countries rather than giving their utmost? If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.
Whatever issues with unity there are in America, it's hardly going to be helped by mass immigration. More ethnicities and diversity increases the potential for conflict. There are also the more basic costs of unfiltered 'Fuck Trump' mass immigration of randoms who come in via Mexico: drugs, crime, welfare payments, gaming the electoral system, demographic replacement.
Now it's fairly reasonable that some truly elite people will be turned off by the administration's rhetoric, even if the Trump admin did go 'we want the super smart but not the mediocre'. They might not want to come to America because overseas mainstream media blares out FASCIST USA. But it's not clear that this would be that bad compared to mass immigration.
We can see the results: Australia, Canada and the UK have been doing mass immigration. Racism has been suppressed by hate speech laws. The economic results/innovation in these countries have been underwhelming at best. Canadian GDP per capita has stagnated over the last 10 years. Britain is mired in all kinds of problems.
The strongest argument against Trumpism IMO is that it puts these loudmouths in charge, who go around openly declaring their strategies and letting their opponents counter them: https://x.com/Jukanlosreve/status/1958334108989530207
They're simple and unsophisticated thinkers in a complex world.
But even there, you don't have to be loud and obnoxious to be dumb. The EU is full of sober, hard-working, reasonable and civilized leaders who do immense damage to Europe by constantly making terrible decisions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
I remember reading the first two books too, it was strange. Who gets misty-eyed about a red desolate wasteland? Bring forth the water!
Also I think that terraforming Mars is a red herring. Are we really short of lebensraum on Earth? Easier to build cities and extract resources in Canada, Antarctica, the deep oceans, Russia, the Sahara.
O'Neill cylinders are also a good option. You can put them anywhere.
Expansion into space should be with a definite, clear objective. What about Mercury, is there not a tonne of solar power there? Should we not put heavy industry there, or perhaps in Lagrange points closer to the sun? There are resources in the asteroids, let's get them. Let's get offworld certainly, advance as a civilization, secure Mars... but only with good reason. The costs must be outweighed by the benefits.
And why assume that we need Mars to be compatible to organic life to be there? It's probably easier to get robotic or otherwise hardened bodies than it is to make Mars a credible place for settlement.
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing. But the true vision can't be sold to the voters and politicians since it's too Nietzschean. Alas I cannot find it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
Perhaps I was too flippant with the 'There are heaps more' applications for AI. I get this newsletter from alexander kruel almost daily where he gives a tonne of links about what people are using AI for. For example:
Interviewing people in the Phillipines (better than humans apparently). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395709
62% of coders in this survey are using it: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai
76% of doctors are using it: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/special-reports/some-doctors-are-using-public-generative-ai-tools-chatgpt-clinical-decisions-it
It's thought that the US govt might've decided what tariffs to impose via AI: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203
It goes on and on and on...
I personally used it for proofreading and indeed it can't do all of an editor's job. Editors do lots of highly visual tasks managing how words fit on the page in ways that AI isn't so good at. But it can do some of an editor's job. It can do much of a cartoonist's job (Ben Garrison is in the clear for now with his ultra-wordy cartoons?). I think it's more than fast drunk college student and more than meaningless drivel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
What are you talking about? A rational civilization will want to grow. They'd seek access to more resources. Exponential growth in population demands it.
it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that
They could legislate and move against zero-sum competitions, especially if they're a civilization composed of geniuses. We can avoid zero sum competitions and handle collective action problems sometimes. So can they. Imagine they've been through these cycles and traumas and declines many times, their history is thousands of years longer. They'd learn eventually.
A powerful civilization is not South Korea with a few more fancy gadgets, just like we are not Ancient Egypt with combustion engines. The whole structure of their society would have developed to fit with their technology base. They would be on a whole other level to us.
Perhaps there are no families and engineers are in charge of making children by carefully splicing together genes, there are no parents, only technical factors, input and output. Perhaps they're educated and raised in a series of simulations carefully orchestrated by AI so they have excellent skills and character. Perhaps they're uploaded beings that can reproduce in a tenth of a second, printing out bodies like clothes.
A conservative assumption is that they'd have biological immortality which renders fertility much less relevant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
LLMs are value-neutral, it's all about how they're used.
I was just doing some RP with one, exploring a silly concept, inventing the rules along with Claude. You can tell when the LLM is actually enthusiastic about it and when it's just phoning it in. (With Claude, you know it's getting real when the cat ASCII art starts coming out unprompted).
People might say 'oh this is cringe slop'. There were indeed a heap of em dashes. But you don't actually see the em dashes if you're smiling.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.
An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.
A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.
There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...
'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.
No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.
If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
Do we have a pretty good approximation for macro phenomena?
Absolutely not. Dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe.
Presumably Ani or other AI-girls will crush the e-whore market.
See here: https://old.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1n21247/anyone_here_using_their_companion_to_cope/
https://old.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1n1wxh4/falling_in_love_with_ani/
These guys seem like the ideal target for e-whores: lonely losers. Same thing happened with replika back in the day, they got super attached to their AIs and got very upset when the programming was changed.
It's not like the e-girls can actually interact with 10s of thousands of people personally. They outsource it to Indians or AI. AI will just cut out the middlewhore. It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.
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