RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
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
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
They have permissive action links though, nukes are unlike other weapons in that they don't 'just work'. Only decisionmakers in Moscow could fire them (otherwise any rogue commander could go and write Dr Strangelove fanfiction in the history books).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?
Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.
I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o
There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.
Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.
Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790
There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064
IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.
However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:
The situation in Pacific Palisades is devastating, heartbreaking, and is also the most “California” thing to happen in California.
The homes burning down are $5M+ homes in neighborhoods surrounded by 1000s of other $5M+ homes.
Owning a $5M house in CA means you pay about $60,000 per year in property taxes.
So you and thousands of your neighbors all pay $60,000 or $80,000 or $120,000, or way more in property taxes every year.
And when a wildfire comes down the hill toward your neighborhood, the firefighters show up and there’s no water in the fire hydrants.
Never change, California.
Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I can see you put lots of thought into this. I'm not one of those people who holds the secrets of the universe in terms of aviation... I sense you have some expertise here, not everyone knows what NATOPs is.
But I still find myself thinking 'if three loyal wingman are good, a swarm of four should be better (and without the vulnerability and expense of the manned fighter)'. Flying a fighter jet is hard work, especially if you're managing all this tech in addition to your usual workload. You might have a weapons officer devoted just to managing the swarm. And then who is doing the ECM and other duties?
Can't we program AI pilots to not destroy the aircraft in flight? Isn't that what fly-by-wire does? Can't we program an AI to go 'if the situation is desperate give it a go, burn out those engines to scrape out a victory'? Or use the gun in an aggressive way that a human surely wouldn't have the precision reflexes for? AI doesn't neccessarily have to be an ultra-rule-abiding automaton stuck with orthodox tactics, as you point out it can also be a risktaker daredevil ready to sacrifice to get the mission done. It will be whatever we program it to be.
And sure, using the gun is unlikely. But if the goal is flinging missiles at long range and then dodging the missile coming back at you, that seems like a job for a machine. Faster turns, perhaps accelerating in directions that are particularly dangerous for humans.
Imagine if all the instruments in the cockpit were gone, if the blazingly high-tech helmets didn't even need to exist. No need for air pressurization, no need for this big circular space and glass canopy in the aircraft. It could be super-thin or superior in some design respects without having the trade-off of having a cockpit. Lower complexity.
Imagine if the maintenance costs on these fighters were dramatically cut because the pilots didn't need to keep up flight hours. That's a huge saving. No trainer aircraft!
Maybe you could use less reliable engines, crank out airframes that aren't expected to last 20 years because they don't constantly need to be flown to train the pilots. We could have the T-34 1942 of aircraft, a reign of quantity. As far as I can see, Loyal Wingmen cost 1/3 or 1/4 as much as a manned fighter over the whole lifetime. So going from 4 manned fighters to 12 unmanned isn't that unreasonable. You might say their capabilities are inferior but the F-35 somehow has a shorter range than a significantly shorter MQ-28, there are swings and roundabouts.
And why the hell are civilian planes flying over airspace where there are two airforces slugging it out? I can see the issue here but you could make an AI subroutine that assesses 'is this really a civilian aircraft - judging speed, radar imagery, size, IR and visual evidence? Is it dumping flares? Is it shrouding a smaller drone?' You could customize the AI's defcon level depending on the mission, so to speak. Anyway, civilian aircraft get shot down all the time by air defences, accidents happen. I don't know what was going on in Azerbaijan or in Yemen, where the US was shooting at their own plane. Perhaps the software was to blame, perhaps it was human error. I don't see how there's a significant edge there for human systems, they're plenty fallible.
I agree completely with what you predict is happening, the new Chinese jet looks rather like a rear-line combat aircraft. Maybe that's where NGAD is heading too. Loyal Wingmen are great. But why not move faster?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Interesting points. In the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe AI aircraft would be more tactically flexible since you can change up their training in a quick update though I can see how it would also be bad if you had software leaks. But the F-35 software has already been leaked to China half a dozen times, they even have gotten some Chinese made parts into the supply chain.
Also one hopes that they'd put visual cameras on the plane. They already do I think, F-35 pilots have AR that lets them see through the plane I believe.
Even then, I still expect that the unmanned aircraft's advantages in price, quality and scale would be enormous. It wouldn't be 4 fighters going out on that mission, you could have 12 or 16 because training fighter pilots is inherently costly and slow. You would have smaller, faster and more agile aircraft, without human limitations. Whatever crazy dodging a human could do, the machine would easily surpass in terms of g-forces. Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.
You could afford to lose those jets on risky missions - even suicide missions if you decided the gains were worth it.
Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.
They do care but only marginally. I was in a discussion just recently. A quasi steelman of their position (copperman?) is that yes, rapes may have happened and political correctness may have contributed to the police failing. HOWEVER, Elon Musk is just bringing up this against Keir for political reasons. The people who bring this up have an agenda, they're motivated and they won't give you the full context. If you have the full context you'd probably find it's a very murky situation and there are no clear goodies and baddies. By the way, you can't find the full context because there's nobody who's disinterested in this so don't even try (also I can't be bothered to look into this, it's not my problem). Every big prosecutor has 10 cases out of 3000 that look pretty bad, Elon is just singling out Keir because he can. What are you supposed to do, get it right every time?
Furthermore, judges frequently let out criminals they thought were truly guilty because that's how the law works (judge says 'I wouldn't say frequently' in reply). Anyway, it was a breakdown in communications, these things just slip through the cracks, it wouldn't be fair to hold anyone accountable for it. Police corruption and institutional failure does sometimes happen but we should be very wary of people who say the police are covering it up or that the authorities have failed us because that's what far-right people and schizos say. Most people who say this are schizos or liars. And there were all these times people were arrested for pedophilia despite not being pedophiles because the wrong people were listened to...
TLDR; rule of law > catching pedophiles and taking them out of circulation. Elon and the far-right are in the wrong here.
Perhaps you can tell from my tone that I don't really agree with this, I find the argument motivated to be maximally unfalsifiable. You could use this kind of reasoning to justify everything, there's a kind of meta-cherrypicking going on: "you can't just pick out bad things politicians have done in the past to attack them in the present when everyone makes mistakes" surely wouldn't be accepted for the wrongdoings of Donald Trump. My conclusion is that IQ once again isn't an unalloyed good. You can use intelligence to achieve any goal, good or ill.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I'm not singling you out here because I hear this a lot and I wonder... what is it that pilots do that an AI can't that compensates for the training expense and kinematics costs of having a pilot? The pilot can't do damage-control on the plane mid-flight. They don't pick out targets, the sensors achieve lock on. They're not tactically superior, that's been proven with dogfighting simulations even between equally performing jets. It's all fly-by-wire these days, their muscles aren't necessary.
I guess a human might be better at the ethics of 'do we bomb this truck or not, given how close it is to civilians?' But again humans have high variance and it's not clear that this is so.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
That's exactly what the F-35 was supposed to be, only it turned into another super-expensive fighter which needs the F-15 EX to handle more everyday missions...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Pilot mafia. Top Gun Maverick is a great film, that's what USAF officers want to be doing. They don't want nerds sitting at a desk stealing their glory.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
These weapons do have very large political constituencies. But the F-35 alone is supposed to cost over $2 trillion in lifecycle costs. Then there's NGAD and the B-21. NGAD was so expensive they're trying to cut it up and repackage it as a family of systems, that'll probably balloon costs out even further.
In the new report to lawmakers, GAO said the Defense Department now plans to fly the F-35 through 2088, 11 years longer than services most recently anticipated.
2088 is already an insanely long time. I doubt it'll be flying in 2060 in any serious combat role. But surely you wouldn't make such a big bet on a plane if you have technology this promising coming up? Unmanned aviation is the future but surely gravitic propulsion (maybe opening up casual spaceflight/suborbital bombing runs) would render traditional aerospace obsolete.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
character limit
Did you really use up a whole Sonnet context length?
Personally I try to move work into a new context length around the time it says 'this conversation is getting long', since its IQ falls past a certain point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Employers want to reap gains from competition in the labour market and complain when their employees enjoy the benefits of competition between employers? Tough, the world isn't designed to cater to our individual whims.
You see lots of big companies looking for foreign labour and happily outsourcing. But they're not nearly so eager for competition from foreign companies, it's all 'slave labour', 'strategic threats', 'stealing our markets', 'unfair currency practices'. Ask the US or EU car industry how they feel about offshore production, then how they feel about imports from China and watch how these staunch free traders embrace protectionism...
If the US has gravitic secret technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?
In the 1970s Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program because he was keen on the upcoming development of stealth bombers. Republicans hammered him for being weak on defence and eventually reinstated it... Anyway, if the US had an incredible gamechanging technology like this, they wouldn't be spending so much on conventional aircraft. There would be signals and portents.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Case of a 19 year-old woman experiencing significant breast hypertrophy starting 1 week after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in September 2022. "The patient initially reported tingling paresthesia in her breasts, followed by sudden bilateral growth which worsened after receiving the second vaccine dose. Over 6 months, her breast size increased from a B cup to a triple G."
I want to know how this is physically possible, I thought this was confined to the realm of doujins. The medical journal says that they have no idea why it happened but think it had nothing to do with the vaccine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets? People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works". It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.
We still underestimate the scale of the ineptitude and negligence in the military apparatus. There was no strategic thought going on at all, there wasn't even a goal.
At one point a new commander for ISAF (they were switching people around every 6-18 months like CEOs of a failing corporation) gets appointed and he wonders what he's supposed to do. Nobody tells him, so he goes 'huh, well I guess I'll try pushing Afghanistan up a few ranks on the tables of illiteracy and malnutrition'. When somebody asked Bush whether he wanted to speak to the general in charge of forces in Afghanistan at an earlier time, Bush said no, why would I need to see him? There was a total absence of strategy. There were officials who had their own ideas about what the US ought to do but they all flailed around like crabs in a bucket, before eventually consolidating on a kind of phoney-war to kick the can down the road.
It was a strategy-free war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
The Soviet backed government lasted much longer than the American backed government did, the Soviet puppet survived Soviet withdrawal and actually outlasted the Soviet Union itself, albeit only by a few months.
Meanwhile the American backed government disintegrated before the US even completed its withdrawal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
That's way too aggressive.
We are at least able to talk about the problem. Try talking to some upper middle class normies in the respectable milieu. EVERYTHING wrong with the UK is apparently because of Brexit. Even things that clearly happened before Brexit are somehow the fault of Boris Johnson lying about NHS spending or Dominic Cummings 'dividing the country'. The real tragedy is young people not being able to go to the EU as simply as before. I was speaking with some Canadians and Australians about this, I expect that's how shakers and movers in Britain feel. They have some wrongthink crimestop reflex where they feel embarassment even thinking about this and semi-gracefully move the conversation on to something else if you even bring this up. They are the real problem, not us.
If you posted this on a normal website you'd get immediately banned whereas here the mods will probably give you some more-considered warning.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
It's a bad idea to send talented people off to rival countries, I agree 100%. But don't you see the pernicious problem that emerges? You end up in a situation where you can't be sure of people's loyalties. Or worse still, you end up manipulated into harming your own interests. McCarthyism didn't emerge from thin air, it emerged from the US leaking nuclear and technical secrets like a colander, from Soviet spy rings basically running key parts of the US government for several years. It was a great blessing of the US that they were facing a smaller, poorer opponent with an economic system that didn't work.
Harry White caused insane, ludicrous amounts of damage to US interests. He sabotaged US aid to Nationalist China in WW2, he helped outline the Morgenthau plan that so greatly stiffened the German war effort in 1945, he handed over lots of secret documents to the Soviets. Just one traitor in high office can do immense damage and there were a bunch of them, check out the Venona intercepts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Says here Chinese immigrants are more favourable towards China than opposed (albeit not by much): https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2023/07/19/chinese-americans-views-of-china-and-other-places/
The US has been putting out enormous amounts of anti-Chinese propaganda and they still can't get net unfavorable! In mainstream media, when's the last time you heard a story that presented anything happening in China as good? For about 8 years now the media has been declaring nothing happens there but tyranny, economic disaster, plague, debt trap diplomacy, stealing all the fish, imperial expansion, growing military, pollution, dumping cheaply made _____ on world markets, slave labour...
Surely there must be some good things happening in China. What about them building a space station, that's pretty cool! Or releasing some open-source AI models? I'm not saying that China is good on balance or that the media should be more pro-Chinese but that there is a huge and powerful propaganda effort against China that has totally worked on everyone in the West. Except people from China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?
Or Chinese spying, is this a niche topic? I'm not one of those 'China can only copy our tech' people but they do a hell of a lot of spying on other countries. The whole Aschenbrenner thesis is predicated on the assumption of huge Chinese espionage efforts. In Australia we had Senator Dastyari who was found to be taking money from this Chinese investor in Australia, suddenly he started moving towards Chinese positions. This kind of thing happens in the US too, high-ranking officials were found to be sleeping with spies.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
There can be specific exceptions to a broad trend. In any event, Vietnamese Americans are favourable to Vietnam:
https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/07/19/vietnamese-americans-views-of-vietnam-and-other-places/
They like the country so much that whatever dislike they may have for the government is overwhelmed, that's a reflection of what I'm getting at.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese
No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language. You can draw up all these hypotheticals (what about this family, five generations of pure ethnic Chinese who've been living in the US their whole lives and have never been to China or speak Mandarin really, they're not really Chinese are they haha!) and they will still be irrelevant to the general case. Use wisdom!
let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation? The line from me that you quoted? The answer is obviously 'yes'. The question is not 'can you accurately produce counterfactuals over nearly a hundred years accounting for endless second-order effects', which nobody can answer, least of all social sciences papers.
much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state
So along with the patriotic Chinese we have the Falun Gong and similar who, if anything, have even more of an incentive to manipulate and propagandize. No, national policy should not be influenced by foreign grudges but by national interests. The US manages lobbying extremely badly, so I wouldn't expect you to understand why it can be a bad thing if you have your country's elected representatives wearing foreign army uniforms or describing how their first priority as secretary of state is to help a foreign country.
A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of influence over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties.
A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.
It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.
Not quite sure what video site it was on but here it is. Since then it's been deleted. Here's some clips, possibly selectively edited. You can see what I'm talking about though:
Speaking Chinese to a Chinese audience: "I'm from Shenyang, I got a foreign language proficiency notice, I make 10K a month, I can retire at X date, I get Y pension. Being a soldier is just a job, no matter who you work for. US Army doesn't say that China is bad, it's fine, they don't indoctrinate you. If you get based in Korea, you can maybe go on holiday to China on a 4-day holiday. 'What would I do if the US and China go to war' - well they probably won't go to war, nuclear war makes it unlikely. But if it does happen I will definitely quit the US Army, wouldn't join the Chinese Army because I wanna keep my US citizenship but I'll do my best to help the Chinese people, wouldn't help the US against China (or help China against the US???).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rCI830ZIJd0
This is not what I would call a loyal attitude, nor is it desirable. The MSS would be unable to restrain their smiles as they see this guy on his four day holiday in China! Is the US Army an Army or is it a mob of mercenaries going in for lifestyle perks? The mob of mercenaries might be OK against hopelessly outgunned foes, it's not suitable for gruelling warfare against serious opponents. You can't just desert if it gets tough, being a soldier is not a normal job.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests. I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to. I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
It's common sense.
Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group. There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.
Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.
Photos taken seconds (months) before disaster: https://www.kqed.org/science/1994972/forest-service-halts-prescribed-burns-california-worth-risk
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...
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