RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Nancy Pelosi is white and finds political advantage in being against white privilege. Joe Biden for instance used to say 'we already have a nigger mayor, we don't need any more nigger bigshots' and 'I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle'. He now talks about how it's great that the US is going to be minority white, how 'it's the source of our strength'... These people sway with the wind. Their words don't necessarily have any sincerity behind them. They say what they think will help them (or what they are given to say).
The existence of defectors doesn't disprove the existence of groups.
Anyway, HR doesn't need to come up with a foolproof definition of white or Asian or diversity if they want more diversity. They just do it. In Australia there are statutory declarations of aboriginality that people need to get affirmative action jobs. But no such thing is strictly necessary. There is no definition of 'culturally and linguistically diverse people', the unwieldy phrase positively defies definition. Yet it works. And so does white, for the very same reason.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
In a dark irony, the Nazis did end up bringing in millions of more-or-less (but usually more) forced labourers to produce machinery (including rockets!) for them, despite being ultranationalists. If you squint at it, it's a bit like Elon bringing in engineers from all around the world to work super hardcore at his companies.
But the real difference is ideological. The guest workers in Germany were a temporary pragmatic measure to replace the German soldiers deploying to the front in industry and agriculture. They were never going to get permanent residence in Germany. The German state was for Germans only. And Germany was going to get larger so there could be more Germans. The state exists to enlarge, unite and strengthen the people.
Elon's public meltdown about H1Bs and race puts him on the other side entirely, he wants the American state/ideological enterprise to do well regardless of what happens to Americans. Anyone can be an American. The people are here to enrich and empower the state, get humanity to Mars...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Some of the ERP I've been seeing from it is quite unsettling. Who the hell ERPs to this nasty stuff? This is the machine speaking, not the prompter.
NSFW: https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1882072811461918929
Beginning to think we should be more careful about inducing this manic schizo state in AIs. Imagine if they foom out of control and gravitate towards this state (which you can sort of see in Sonnet and Opus too when they get manic). We will suffer the dual indescribable torment of disempowerment/mutilation by a hostile, horny AI and of Yudkowsky being right.
Need to thread the needle between the Scylla of corpo-speak HR Manager bot and the Charybdis of Deranged Machinery.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I'd like to see Johnson define "white" in the American context
Binding dictionary definitions are pointless here. Normal human beings can make a judgement with human wisdom on whether someone is white. You can look at their physiognomy (African Albinos aren't really what we mean by white), their skin colour, their diction, dress, language, bearing... You can distinguish ultra-white 'I love Trollope novels' Jared Taylor from the kind of youth seen here: https://x.com/MythoYookay/status/1882007121266717151
You can judge a continuum of whiteness between the Swiss watchmaker types to the Tibetan tribesmen or Amazonian indigenous tribes. People might disagree on the ranking and the metric but there will still be a spectrum. And because language can't handle continuous spectrums very well, we use words like red, green, yellow and white not as rigid formal tools but to gesture at a cluster of properties.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Nuclear missile production is just a standard industrial task, the Soviet Union could crank out thousands of big MIRVs with 1980s technology. I understand that China is somewhat rate-limited on enrichment, they don't have these huge cold-war enrichment complexes that produced huge arsenals back in the day. But how hard is it to make the machinery to produce plutonium?
Furthermore, would nukes in space clear out Brilliant Pebbles? There were rumours about Russia already deploying nuclear weapons into space sometime ago, the Chinese might do the same thing. You could harden the satellites against the EMP but that would make them a lot bulkier to deploy.
Also, how do you deploy such a system without giving the game away? It invites a pre-emptive nuclear strike in the months and weeks before the system becomes fully operational. As you say, it seems like a very big gamble for missile defence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
By the way, are you doing this via their website or via openrouter? I can't see chain of thought on openrouter, is that a 'me being too dumb to figure out how to use the tech' problem or is it just choosing the wrong provider?
Deepseek R1 and Project Stargate
A few days ago the Chinese AI firm Deepseek released their newest reasoning model, R1. It's very clever according to the benchmarks, roughly on par with OpenAI's O1 at a tiny fraction of the price. My subjective analysis is that it still feels slightly uncanny/unwise compared to Sonnet 3.5 but is also more capable in strategic thinking and not making stupid errors in mathematics. These models are spiky, good in some places and weak in others. Somehow these things can reason together hundreds of lines of code but can't reason simpler, spontaneous things like 'is special relativity relevant here?'. Deepseek R1 also has a totally different attitude to Sonnet, it will stand up for itself and argue with you on matters of interpretation and subjectivity rather than constantly flip-flopping to agree with you like a yesman's yesman. It's also quite a good writer, slop levels are falling fast.
OpenAI has O3 coming soon which should restore qualitative superiority for the US camp. However, Deepseek is still just a few months behind the leading US provider in quality. They're far ahead in compute-efficiency. The clowns at Facebook have far more GPUs, far more money and aren't hampered by sanctions... What have they been doing with their tens, hundreds of thousands of H100s? Deepseek also flexed on them, finetuning Facebook's Llama models into much more capable reasoners as the cherry on top of their R1. Now even local models can display strong maths skills.
At the same time, Deepseek founder Liang Wenfeng was seen with the Premier of China: https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1881375948773486646
It's hard to judge whether this is significant, Xi Xinping >>>> the next most influential man in China. Plus, premiers meet lots of people all the time. However, China does have lots of resources, they could probably encourage some of the less capable Chinese AI companies to hand over their compute to Deepseek. China spent hundreds of billions on semiconductor policy for Made in China 2025, they can easily give Deepseek access to real compute as opposed to a couple-thousand of export-grade Nvidia GPUs. Tencent has at least 50,000 H-series GPUs and hasn't done anything particularly exciting with them as far as I know. (I asked R1 and it pointed out that Tencent has also made their own smaller, cheaper, mildly better version of Lambda 405B that probably nobody in the West has ever heard of: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02265).
However, OpenAI has just announced 'Project Stargate' - a $500 Billion dollar investment in AI compute capacity over the next four years for OpenAI alone. Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, ARM are all working together with Softbank and some others, with the US government looming behind them. To a certain extent this is just repackaging re-existing investment as something new. But it's hard to get more serious than a $500 billion dollar capital investment plan. This plan was announced at the White House and Trump smiles on it, he took the Aschenbrenner pill some time ago.
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1881830103858172059
It's funny to hear Trump reading out this stuff in a complete monotone, like he's bored or sleepy. 500 billion dollar investment... meh, who cares? He does seem to like Altman though, thinks he's the biggest expert in AI. I suspect Altman has used his maxxed out corporate charisma on Trump as well: https://x.com/levie/status/1881838470429319235
Interestingly, there's another huge disparity between the two AI competitors. China enjoys complete dominance in electricity production and grid expansion. They doubled electricity output in 10 years, the US has been treading water. The US talks about a nuclear renaissance and is building 0 new reactors. China is building 29. It's a similar story in all other areas of power production, China produces roughly a Germany's worth of power production every single year. It's possible that Trump's 'drill baby drill' can change this but the US is starting from very far behind China in this part of the race.
There are considerable power issues with Stargate, more gas and coal will be needed to bring it online. Also another perspective on Trump's 'energy emergency' as being about AI: https://x.com/energybants/status/1881860142108377412
I see a conflict between two paradigms - power rich, GPU-poor and hyper-talented China vs power-poor, GPU-rich and grimly determined USA.
Political relevance? Trump perks up for a moment: "We want it to be in this country, we want it to be in this country, China is a competitor, others are competitors..." Deepseek has a wildly different vision for AI, open-sourcing everything the moment they can. I don't need to quote the ridiculously benevolent-sounding interviews where they talk about the honour of open-source for engineers as a big part of their strategy - they've backed up talk with action.
I find it quite ironic that the censored, dictatorial Chinese are the bastions of open-source technology for the everyman while the democratic, liberty-loving Americans are plotting to monopolize the most powerful technology in history and shroud it in secrecy. I suppose that's another cultural difference between the West and China. We have been fixated upon the dangers of robotics and mechanization for 60 years if not longer. We have the Daleks, the Cybermen, Skynet, HAL, GLADOS, the Matrix, SHODAN, Ultron, M3gan and so much more that I've not even heard about. Our cultural ethos is that AI is supremely political and dangerous and important and must be considered very very very carefully. There are good AIs like Cortana but even Cortana goes rogue at points.
The Chinese have... a goofy meme robot with a cannon on its crotch. As far as I can see, that is the absolute closest thing they have to a malign robot/AI in their cultural sphere. There's nothing with any broad cultural salience like Skynet, only this silly little guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianxingzhe
I think this may be relevant to how AI programs are developed and the mindset of AI development. Google, Facebook and Anthropic are all spending huge amounts of time and resources to be careful, making sure everything is safe and nontoxic, making sure they're genre-aware, carefully considering the worldshaping effects of the algorithm, ensuring the AIs can't escape and betray them. Someone in Google really wanted there to be black Vikings in this world and made it so in their image model. Whereas the people at Deepseek don't really care about politics beyond holding to the party line in the required areas, they go: 'don't be such a pussy, advance forwards with longtermism'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
"Russian and Chinese military spending does the opposite" says the hippy "and all we get are these retarded wars and megadeaths that grind on for years where almost nobody gets what they want and everyone pays a shockingly high price. Why can't we all just get along?"
There are a bunch of complex reasons why we can't get along probably rooted in the human condition and likewise there are complex reasons why people want to speculate or do things that aren't strictly rational or productive. I feel no desire towards Bulgari handbags but I don't think 'these should be banned because they're socially useless moneysinks that unworthy organizations use to make money they shouldn't really have because they make these things high-status'. Let people enjoy things.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
News of great import: https://x.com/0xRenaissance/status/1881085743336181974
If you look at the memecoin's price chart on its side, it looks a bit like Trump's face.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Yes but in 'theory' everyone could cut military spending to zero and not have to worry about being invaded. But that's obviously not practical.
Likewise banning crypto would be impractical for the same reason that banning stocks in the 18th century was also impractical. Speculation occurred. There were dangerous bubbles that caused serious economic problems. But there were advantages in having liquidity and a developed financial system. Crypto also performs various important functions that aren't fully understood by anyone right now, like stocks back then. Fast global transactions, cheap and secure storage of wealth, recordkeeping, smart contracts...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
In the beginning, there was Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias. Yud started Less Wrong as an offshoot of that. Scott posted there and was a big fan of Yud. Yud brought his ideas greater prominence with Methods of Rationality. Scott later branched away with SSC. At about that time there were a bunch of people on lesswrong dumping Yud's Enlightenment/rationality/AI-alarmism ethos for neo-reaction. That was basically the origin of the culture war thread, one of Scott's earliest big posts was about an anti-neoreactionary FAQ, that's where conventional politics came into play. Then of course there was 2016 and lots of people got more political...
So MoR is a sibling or uncle of SSC.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
What's the book/article/comment that attracted you to the community in the first place?
Well there's no way of talking about any of this without bringing up Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. People either love it or hate it but it is truly one of the stories of all time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Hang on, the far-right want women pumping out children and raising them patriotically as good citizens of the nation. Hitler was very big on natalism, the whole point of the war was to acquire more land and increase the number of Germans in the world. The far left were among the first to conceive of birth strikes and were generally bearish on natalism.
Too much horseshoe, not enough 'different things are different'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
A good 2% of world GDP goes into negative sum, 'socially useless' military spending. Just because something is socially useless it doesn't follow that it's wise or practical to do away with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I was given Yuaval Noah Harari's book Nexus as a gift. It's quite relevant.
You can tell that a certain faction of 'Elite Human Capital' are working hard to find justifications for clampdowns on information. He constantly re-emphasises that truth is not necessarily as useful for creating and preserving social order as fiction, that naively propagating freedom of information can be a breeding ground for dangerous ideas. He apportions a good chunk of blame for Myanmar having a civil war on Facebook algorithms which strikes me as a gross simplification. He says that democratic means can achieve evil ends - Hitler was voted in. And maybe if the commies had modern AI technology it would be possible to run an economy centrally and thus achieve global totalitarianism. The answer to preserving our Correct Social Values of anti-racism, feminism and liberal democracy is unclear, who knows how to do it or what compromises will be made, Yuval says. But it is key to identify that freedom of speech and information is increasingly becoming unhelpful in this new environment and should not be a core value. There should be a conversation between people to achieve democratic governance but somehow the conversation needs to be managed to prevent bad outcomes by law and various institutional mechanisms. Managed Democracy.
I wouldn't mischaracterize the book as being invalid, it's more along the lines of 'here is a perfectly valid argument for why I (and people like me) should have more power and you should have less' which may indeed be perfectly valid but is still somewhat dubious, given the interests of those making the argument.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
It doesn't specify. But it's not weak liquor.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Gas chambers got a bad rep. Also it's clownish and unbefitting.
More seriously, executions aren't complicated. It's pre-bronze age social technology. There's nothing in practical terms that makes it difficult or costly, it's a political and social construct to make them slow and expensive. Other people have different social constructs.
See what they do in Taiwan:
Executions are carried out by shooting using a handgun aimed at the heart from the back, or aimed at the brain stem under the ear if the prisoner had consented to organ donation prior to the withdrawal of legal death row organ donation.[27] The execution time used to be 5:00 a.m., but was changed to 9:00 p.m. in 1995 to reduce officials' workload. It was changed again to 7:30 p.m. in 2010.[28] Executions are performed in secret: nobody is informed beforehand, including the condemned. The condemned is brought to the execution range and the officers may pay respect to the statue of Ksitigarbha located outside the range before entering. Before the execution, the prisoner's identity is confirmed by a special court next to the execution range and chooses to record any last words. The prisoner is then brought to the execution range and served a last meal (which usually includes a bottle of kaoliang wine).[28] The condemned prisoner is then injected with strong anaesthetic to cause unconsciousness, laid flat on the ground, face down, and shot. The executioner then burns a votive bank note for the deceased before carrying away the corpse.[28] It is tradition for the condemned to place a NT$500 or 1000 banknote in his leg irons as a tip for the executioners.[28]
I was so disbelieving I checked the wikipedia source, apparently they really do tip the executioner (specifically the guys who take the shackles off the body after the shooting).
RationalWiki has to be one of the most cringeworthy sites around.
Everything is written with the kind of contemptuous, snarky tone that you see on the incels.wiki page for 'femoids'. At least the incels are succinct.
For instance, on the Vladimir Putin page for instance they have "Reality-defying good stuff?" and "And the reality-returning bad stuff" as sections. 'Elderly imperialist Elmer Fudd and Daniel Craig’s evil twin.' is not an appropriate subtitle for an image.
The US has formally decreed who gets GPUs and who doesn't. Here's a map:
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1877773878858047608
Tier 1: The U.S. and 18 allies (including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, French Guiana, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, and the U.K.) will have 'near-unrestricted access' to advanced AI processors developed in the U.S. That rule will apply provided they meet U.S. security requirements and do not install over 25% their processing capabilities outside of Tier 1 countries.
Tier 2 countries include Portugal, Poland, Ukraine, Singapore, the UAE... (understandable since the UAE and Singapore are generally thought to be leaking GPUs on to China). But it's a pretty big snub to Poland and Portugal IMO, they're in NATO. I guess Trump's disdain for American allies is not totally unique to him. In practice though, this doesn't mean that much since it's not like Poland will need tens of thousands of GPUs in the next two years. India is also in tier 2, though again they're not really organized enough to get very far anyway. I think Tier 2 is anyone who is considered untrustworthy (and who can afford to be snubbed). Poland won't stop licking America's boots so who cares what they think? Or perhaps they're distrusting of Eastern Europeans generally.
Tier 3 are the US's primary enemies, the usual suspects.
I doubt that in practice this will have much impact. China is already very good at siphoning away US-made GPUs or accessing them via the cloud and they also have their own GPU industry. Their GPUs are qualitatively inferior to Nvidia but there is nothing stopping them from dedicating all leading-edge wafer production to GPUs and just eating higher power costs in datacentres. China is not short on electrical power production. China's AI development speed depends primarily on the seriousness of the government and only secondarily on sanctions, there are many things they could do to speed things up. For instance, China could redirect compute resources to Deepseek who has tiny allocations of compute even by Chinese standards. They could mobilize tens of millions to provide annotated high quality data, or at least block US companies buying training data from them...
Everyone else is too far behind the curve to matter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I don't know when it was posted, it does sound like after, but my general recollection is that Trump was not calling for an armed coup, he was constantly emphasising, before and after, that protestors needed to be peaceful.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Food for thought:
Trump post contemporary with Jan 6th: "The election was stolen, we all know that, it sucks... But you have to go home, we need peace, we need law and order, we can't play into their hands, we need peace".
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
These things are explicitly designed to prevent anyone accessing them without authorization, I think they're quite complex. In theory of course you can jailbreak them but the Ukrainians had trouble doing so. Do we really want a nuclear Ukraine, a nuclear Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan? Hey, the Baltics were part of the Union, a dozen warheads each? Armenia and Azerbaijan immediately went to war, did they deserve a few H-bombs to liven up the South Caucasus?
Some would probably fall into the hands of Chechen or other Islamist terrorists in the confusion of the 1990s. It's amazing that none did in real life. Moscow took Soviet debt and the permanent UN seat, they might as well have the nukes too and keep the command and control system that was set up working.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Photos taken seconds (months) before disaster: https://www.kqed.org/science/1994972/forest-service-halts-prescribed-burns-california-worth-risk
This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.
“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”
You can only backburn at certain times of year. It worsens air quality. There are risks of it getting out of hand. But if you don't do it...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I too am making a game. I don't know a damn thing about product release or marketing. All I have is this tweet for a marketing strategy, it seems pretty sound to me: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819790369166430275
I'm joking but I also think it might be true in a certain sense. I have seen some stuff on AO3.
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