RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
Well at least we won't be hearing about the rules-based international order for some time now...
A US invasion of Venezuela would be a smart move to put the squeeze on Cuba, secure the hemisphere and a good amount of oil - if the US was good at imperialism that is. I expect a complete mess, lots of munitions expended for very little practical gains. Whatever military gains there are will be outweighed by failing to install a stable puppet government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
Good definitional clarification, I understand where Jiro was coming from now, not being American myself.
People need to get more mature about images I think.
Imagine if, at the dawn of the internet, there was a big shock at all the dodgy information sources, conspiracies, cults and so on that emerged. 'We invented freedom of speech in an era of printing presses, not high-capacity assault routers!' someone might say. And it's true, there's a difference due to the speed and nature of the connection. We are bombarded with information, it can be quite overwhelming and mindbreak the weak-willed. Ziz cultists, Extinction Rebellion, retarded tiktok trends... The internet seems to have catalyzed many bad things in ways that aren't easy to counteract without squashing the whole thing.
But the answer isn't to shut down the internet, the answer is to strengthen our mental integrity, raise our willpower stat.
What is the alternate answer here? Restrict Grok from putting people in a bikini, ahegao face, milk sprayed on them? Restrict Grok, they'll just go back to civitai where this stuff has been going on for years. Men clearly desire lewd images of women.
How are you supposed to restrict this? If it's libel, then what about the time-honoured tradition of spreading false rumours about people, is that banned too? Do we all line up and go to the nanny state about how we were wrongly smeared as whiny, dumb, small-penised, ugly bitches who did something unspeakable at a party? Do we all line up in front of some ruinously slow legal system and give lawyers money to defend our reputations (they can't defend your reputation even if you win in court)? Do we have AIs surveiling every private groupchat to defend the honour of maidens? A gigantic Chinese style state surveillance apparatus to uphold the wholesomeness of the entire internet?
The best solution is for men and women to act in a more dignified and honourable way and not do any of this in the first place. That clearly isn't going to happen after decades and decades of subverting and violating just about all of the old taboos. What are taboos and censorship for if not enforcing a standard of behaviour?
Men still have the responsibility of dying in a trench for their country (now with their drone-killers filming their deaths for war propaganda), women will need to accept some downsides in a technological environment that's freed them from a lot of their unpleasant work. Picking and choosing to preserve just the taboos that overwhelmingly benefit women over men isn't a sustainable pattern in the long term.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
No, that's not how it works at all.
A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.
Pensions are provided because the old don't have savings (or because they don't have 'enough' savings, after they've fiddled the figures to ensure they don't).
I have no problem with people saving their own money, my issue is with the government subsidizing the lifestyle of the old at the expense of the young. Welfare /= savings.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young.
You do want to slash pensions though. I also want to slash pensions, I think it's a good idea. But it's incredibly toxic, since you'd also need to disenfranchise the olds. They will always vote for loot now and consequences later. While we're disenfranchising, may as well keep going and remake the entire political system...
None of our political solutions are at all likely to happen without a major transformation of the system, something comparable to a coup. So I also agree on the importance of a technological fix.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
And if we started offering affirmative action for people who have kids, I don't know how it would stop otherwise-low-performing people from having kids to game the system
Well in the fantasy world where this policy is implemented, I'd block low-performers from taking advantage of it. Right now the affirmative action system doles out money and jobs to people of the right (wrong) race, I'm conceptualizing a system where it doles out money and jobs to married couples who meet certain baseline standards - their children aren't menaces, they work in more skill-intensive occupations, good character...
There's always going to be gaming of all government systems and there'd be gaming of this too but the system would be designed with perverse incentives in mind, not as a political patronage system.
If we just meritocracy-max then we're back to IQ-shredding, there needs to be a balance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Why not just offer affirmative action to married couples with children?
Want a promotion in your white collar job? Have a husband/wife and have children!
Want your kids to get into a good university? Have more children!
This would efficiently target the most valuable, productive, ambitious people too, rather than the welfare class who don't really want to go to university, don't have anywhere near the necessary marks and aren't in line for promotion anyway.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Sex outside of marriage: it's illegal. Unacceptable. Totally contrary to Our Values. You're in prison, you're a lowlife, a scumbag, media will show you to be the bad guy.
Done!
Alternately, affirmative action for married couples in the workforce. Companies must declare targets of married employees, explain what actions they're taking to achieve these targets. You could boost fertility the same way.
This is something that a big state could easily do. The US and much of the West quasi-criminalized going outside during Covid, there is an enormous river of state power that merely needs to be directed towards pro-social ends. In Britain they arrest thousands of people for tweets, that's their 'incentive' for people to think a bit more carefully before they speak. The state can indoctrinate children for hours and hours a day, there's a gigantic surveillance apparatus watching just about everything, they have 20-40% of GDP to spend...
Our elites simply need to make a decision and then enforce that decision and then it just happens. The difficulty of social engineering is overestimated. The US did it pretty well, they pointed bayonets at teenagers so they'd go to school with blacks, they forcibly bussed whites to black schools, implemented affirmative action schemes to give blacks better jobs. It didn't change performance-based outcomes that much but they certainly could produce behaviours, they dramatically reduced racism just via straightforward suppression and indoctrination.
They could suppress adultery too, it's really not that hard. But they don't want to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Somalians can and do rob eachother but they also have nationalism and a sense of group identity. You see these Somali-American politicians going on about how they want to help Somalia, help Somalians.
I assume this is right, I don't see a community note. Former Somali Prime Minister Khaire at MN rally for Ilhan Omar, speaking some Somali language: 'The interests of Ilhan are not Ilhans, it's not the interests of Minnesota, it's not the interests of the American people, it's the interest of Somalians and Somalia'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
A 16 inch gun uses hundreds of kilos of propellant, you're not launching anything, you're just vaporizing people inside a tube. Ironically, I think this would be much more humane as an execution method than the 'give him a lethal injection that makes him writhe around in pain' model.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
I don't necessarily disagree but the simpler explanation of 'there is money and they see they can easily take it' works better. They wouldn't take money from Somalis, they can distinguish between gradations of friends and enemies. And in Minnesota, they have this magic wand of 'racism' they can wave and get people to bend over backwards to ignore their tricks.
Truly, Somalis in Minnesota is the reductio ad absurdum of antiracism. Who seriously thinks that it's a good idea to bring in Somalis? Did they ever invent anything or create anything? Somalia isn't exactly in good shape either, a very poor country of nomadic herders.
Low-value people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
This is not a 'more tokens' task but a 'more intelligence' task, requiring ultra-long horizons and qualitatively superhuman ability.
It would be far easier to make a fun AAA game. It would be far easier to write a LOTR-tier book series. Humans have at least done those things in the past, individually or collectively. Nobody has ever made an unhackable, actually useable system. A system will have to be considered in its entirety, AI training is complex and can't just be reduced to small pieces to be secured independently of eachother. At minimum all this will have to run together performantly. That is no small feat and cannot be achieved monkey-typewriter style.
If it were merely about spending a few billion dollars and a lot of programmer time wouldn't the Pentagon/NSA be totally secured against cyberattack by now? They're not, even state actors can't do this.
I can't understand the world you're proposing, where Chinese AIs are smart enough to shield the entire Chinese training stack but US AIs are not smart enough to hack them before the shield can be completed. The trend suggests that at any given point in time, US AIs are smarter than their Chinese siblings. So there will be a gap between when this defence-shield can be completed and when the US could launch its attack. The US will likely retain a qualitative and quantitative advantage in AI this whole time.
If the Chinese AI can see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll write this replacement to secure it and then fit it in with the rest of the stack while still maintaining performance' why can't an American AI see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll infiltrate and exploit it before the upgrade process is complete?'
Why is my 'superhacker AGI' lazy thinking but not your 'superhuman perfect defence + performant AI training stack code-writer AI' not lazy thinking? I agree that it's possible in principle but the former will come before the latter.
If China has 100 quadrillion tokens, then the US will have yet more, they have more compute after all. I doubt Doubao's tokens are worth as much as Gemini or OpenAI's, 'token' could be anywhere on the curve of intelligence and cost.
Maybe the US decides not to hack, maybe somebody cuts a deal, maybe Trump makes some inexplicable decision or maybe AGI isn't a big deal. But I don't see your scenario happening.
Furthermore, there are still hardware issues to consider. There are probably many unfixable flaws that humans aren't smart enough to find like these: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/5-years-of-intel-cpus-and-chipsets-have-a-concerning-flaw-thats-unfixable/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Even finding all the things you'd need to secure is a nightmarish task. The CPU's physical structure, the microcode, the BIOS, the lower levels of the OS, a myriad of applications... You'd need a completely accurate, top to bottom model of the whole system: thousands of devices, routers, OSI... You'd then need to rewrite all of it while somehow maintaining proper functionality. Have fun updating the ROM of the management engine! Good odds there are physical flaws in CPUs that either humans are too dumb to uncover or were put there by intelligence agencies for spying purposes, so even if you do all that it still isn't sufficient.
ASI is a bare minimum requirement. Probably ASI + a whole new generation of chips is needed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Many OpenAI investors don't believe in the singularity. Microsoft is demanding revenue-share from OpenAI right now. They see the power of the technology and naturally decide to invest in it, even if they're unpersuaded on mass automation or singularity. They want it to sell more subscriptions, speed up software development. It's the myopic facebook mindset of 'this technology could sell us so many short-form video ads' and tbf, that is true. AI is making huge amounts of profit for Facebook right now. Tiktok makes enormous amounts of money (in China) based off its algorithms which include LLM tech. AI is highly profitable right now and it is a sure bet that there will be further highly profitable offshoots from LLM technology, besides the singularity. They just require lots of investment to tap and we are still in an early-growth phase of a new market, whereas video is a lot more mature.
Older versions of Claude Sonnet could easily snipe redditors per the /r/changemyview experiments, obviously AI can make huge amounts of money for businesses.
OpenAI is valued at a mere $500-830 billion. The market cap of gold and silver is about $35 trillion. If OpenAI valuations were genuinely driven by belief in the singularity, it'd be worth a lot more than shiny rocks! The lightcone contains a hell of a lot of gold, a company with singularity-pilled investors would get everything money can buy even if they are just one of a few leading competitors.
I think what's happened here is a successful air raid, based on Trump's desire to seize Venezuelan oil. He has always been interested in other countries oil reserves and has been trying to steal their oil tankers too.
https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2007520406199251070
Step 1, a decapitation strike on Maduro, was a complete success for the US. Unsurprisingly a non-white, non-East Asian country that can't manage its own oil industry or run agriculture properly is not going to be great at fighting. But Step 2 is the key part, getting someone in charge of the country who'll let you take and sell the oil, installing a puppet and keeping them in power. That's the part where the US has historically floundered.
The invasion of Afghanistan also started with a highly successful airborne special forces operation: the Taliban were ousted in weeks and Rumsfeld laughed at the reporters who'd been anxiously worrying about 'quagmires'. Only later did things start to go south.
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