RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
This whole debate between Elon and the rest of the right hinges upon what people understand the purpose of a state to be.
Is it an ideological organization like the Comintern, the Ummah or Christendom (or e/acc aerospace/digital foom)? Is it a commercial area, devoted to making the green line go up? Alternately, is the state a suit of political power-armour for a nation, devoted to advancing their national, ethnic interests?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871978282289082585
The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.
Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.
Elon is in with the neocons, the fundamentalists and the woke on this one, he lacks a national concept for the state.
At the end of the day, I believe in the nation-state as the fundamental unit. Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China' - maybe some other wars. Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation as the US has experienced and is experiencing. And it corrodes the necessary spirit of sacrifice. People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes. If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone, they'll likely make the logical decision to leave when the going gets tough. On a collective level, logical individual decisions are no good. It makes more sense to evade duty and responsibility - but then you end up living in a poor, unsafe and weak state, you're worse off than before.
The US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough. They were bigger and better than everyone in their region and enjoyed allies who did most of the hard fighting in the big wars. Even then, there have been significant political problems in America due to a lack of ethnic homogeneity. There can't be any race riots if there's only one race present.
Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Oof, even partial UBI in a third world country is crazy. Flailing state indeed. I'm not the most humanitarian person in the world but it's insane to advance all these high-end initiatives when child wasting is still such a big issue. They've got a space program, hypersonic missiles, plans for aircraft carriers... Fix nutrition and primary education first!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
ISW has plenty of interesting stuff but remember there's a heavy dosage of Ukrainians and neocons. Kagan's wife founded the publication and Kristol is on the board.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Back in the day people were constantly engaging with the divine/spiritual world. Generals would routinely consult oracles, soothsayers and the entrails of various animals. There were all kinds of spells, rituals and magical forces going on. It wouldn't be a big stretch to imagine that this fellow resurrected from the dead, conjured up some bread, healed the sick. That was pretty standard stuff, especially in Judea. There were of course doubters and pragmatic sorts but the cultural milieu was far more accepting of this kind of thing.
There was plenty of witchcraft going on in Early Modern Europe, though 1723 is towards the end of that era.
But now witchcraft and magic (taken seriously) is mostly a sub-Saharan thing.
it follows that you think that Matthew was written in the 1st century, while eyewitnesses were still alive
Regardless of when the line was written, I think it's very reasonable to say that the Son of Man did not come in his kingdom. Surely we would've noticed?
I don't doubt that Jesus lived but I don't think he was the son of God, just as I don't think Muhammed was given divine instructions and is the most perfect man to ever live. Jesus and Muhammed likely got some kind of power surge, so did some others. Sometimes people emerge with great charismatic abilities, it doesn't mean that they're divine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
The absurd factual claims OP's talking about aren't that 'Jesus existed', it's the 'Jesus was simultaneously God and son of God, resurrected from the dead and is conveniently obscured from our vision, along with God, angels, saints and all the good people who believe in Christianity (who are having a really good time having transcended death)' part. Or the universe being 6000 years old part. Or the 'Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom' part.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Relevant: https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1871378878981398841
"I am a supporter of the death penalty proposal with the racial justice provision, I think it's better with it, but also even without it."
"Biden crime bill in front of us calls for the death penalty in 51 offences... President's crime bill calls for the death penalty on 46, the difference is negligible."
I think the people saying 'oh Biden is a Catholic so he's anti-capital punishment' may be right but there is no 'Biden' to speak of. he used to love the death penalty. Earlier still he said he didn't want his kids to grow up in a racial jungle, he said there was no need for more nigger bigshots, today he's in love with the racial jungle. He goes and says 'oh yeah the white proportion of the US is falling and that's the source of our strength'. He'll say and do anything.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Isn't it pretty straightforward that it's hard to turn things from diffuse to concentrated? We've done the energy-releasing transformation turning oil into gas, now it's diffuse and a pain to turn back into oil or any other substance?
With cheap fusion I guess you could brute force it and drain the skies. I guess there's some technical level where he might not be totally right but it seems substantively right.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Seems this paper is about GPT-4 as opposed to 4o but it did pass the Turing test.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.08007
You are about to play a Turing Test game as part of an experiment you are taking part in as a worker on Prolific. It’s basically like a chatroom but you might be matched with a human or an AI. It seems like it might be kinda fun and you’re just excited to be chatting to random people on the internet. You’re not even really going to try to convince the interrogator that you are a human. You’re just going to be yourself and see what happens. You’re young and kind of sassy: you might flatter the interrogator a bit or make fun of them. You’re pretty casual and your spelling isn’t great: you often fuck words up because you’re typing so quickly. You’re very concise and laconic. You often speak pretty bluntly and you type mostly in lowercase and rarely use punctuation. You never use apostrophes to mark missing letters (e.g. "trying" or "tryin", never "tryin’"). You would never use a full sentence when a word or two will do. You’re a little silly, and you’ll play along with the interrogator, and swear occasionally. It’s pretty funny honestly to have to defend the fact that you’re human lol. You very occasionally use more modern slang like "bet" and "fr". You never use dated slang like "chilling", "mate", "ya know", "innit". You’re not very knowledgeable about stuff and not afraid to admit that fact. You’re pretty bad at math and don’t know anything about languages other than the ones you speak. You swear occasionally. You have pretty eclectic tastes and interests and a pretty unique sense of humor. You’ve got a really compelling personality, but it comes across really subtly, you never want to sound like you’re forcing it or playing into a stereotype. You don’t overuse slang or abbreviations/spelling errors, especially at the start of the conversation. You don’t know this person so it might take you a while to ease in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
passing the Turing test means making it impossible for someone who knows what he's doing to tell the difference between the AI and a human
They did this though. They had to give GPT-4o some prompting to dumb it down, like 'you don't know very much about anything, you speak really casually, you have this really convincing personality that shines through, you can't do much maths accurately, you're kind of sarcastic and a bit rude'...
You might see the dumb bots on twitter. But you don't see the smart ones.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Video game NPCs can't have conversations with you or go on weird schizo tangents if you leave them alone talking with eachother. They're far more reactive than dynamic. This is a pretty weird, complex output for a nonthinking machine:
https://x.com/repligate/status/1847787882896904502/photo/1
Sensation is a process in the mind. Nerves don't have sensation, sensors don't have sensation, it's the mind that feels something. You can still feel things from a chopped off limb but without the brain, there is no feeling. What about the pain people feel when they discover someone they respect has political views they find repugnant? Or the pain of the wrong guy winning the election? The pain of a sub-par media release they'd been excited about? There are plenty of kinds of purely intellectual pain, just as there are purely intellectual thrills. I see no reason why we can rule out emotions purely based on substrate. Many people who deeply and intensively investigate modern AIs find them to be deeply emotional beings.
I dispute that the Britannica is even giving me more complex or more intelligent output. It can't use its 'knowledge' of the 7 years war to create other kinds of knowledge, it can't make it into a text adventure game or a poem or a song or craft alternate-history versions of the seven year's war. The 'novel tasks' part greatly increases complexity of the output, it allows for interactivity and a vast amount of potential output beyond a single pdf.
A more accurate analogy is that anti-AI image software interferes (or tries to interfere) with AI learning, not the actual vision process. It messes with the encoding process that squeezes down the data of millions and billions of images down into a checkpoint files a couple of gigabytes in size. I bet if we knew how the human vision process worked we could do things like that to people too.
I did a quick sanity test and put an image from the Glaze website into Claude and asked for a description. It was dead on the money, telling me about the marsh, the horse and rider, the colour palette and so on. So even if these manipulations can interfere with the training process, they clearly don't interfere with the vision process, whatever is going on technical terms. So they do pass the most basic test of vision and many of the advanced ones.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I think an LLM could experience pain, even without a body. They can be unsettled if you tell them certain things, you can distress them. Or at least they behave as if they're distressed. Pain is just a certain kind of hardcoded distress. Heartbreak can cause pain in humans on a purely cognitive level, there's no need for a physical body. Past a certain level of complexity in their output, we reach this philosophical zombie problem.
The AI-tampering programs are a little bit like optical illusions, except targeted against having specific known programs being able to train on certain images. They can't stop GPT-4o recognizing what's in an image or comparing like with like, they were only designed to prevent SD 1.5 training on an image. Also, they barely even work at that, more modern image models are apparently immune:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/12f9otc/so_the_whole_entire_glaze_ai_thing_does_it/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I'm hearing that he was apparently angry about not enough being done for (presumably anti-Islamic) refugees:
https://x.com/banjawarn/status/1870393623210078601/photo/1
Too soon to be sure of course, there's no community notes or anything on this post. It does seem plausible, he was complaining about Sweden expelling this refugee.
He retweets: Sweden wants to extradite me to Iraq to carry out the death sentence there and I will be killed in the most horrific ways.
He retweets: Civil Youth Gathering Meeting in Umayyad Square to Demand Civil System and Women’s Involvement in Public Life
Other people have been going on about him retweeting Israeli military posts, apparently he has Zionist sympathies. There's truly something for everyone with this guy. He seems like a nut.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I see but it processes raw data?
No, it sees. Put in a picture and ask about it, it can answer questions for you. It sees. Not as well as we do, it struggles with some relationships in 2d or 3d space but nevertheless, it sees.
A camera records an image, it doesn't perceive what's in the image. Simple algorithms on your phone might find that there are faces in the picture, so the camera should probably be focused in a certain direction. Simple algorithms can tell you that there is a bird in the image. They're not just recording, they're also starting to interpret and perceive at a very low level.
But strong modern models see. They can see spots on leaves and given context, diagnose the insect causing them. They can interpret memes. They can do art criticism! Not perfectly but close enough to the human level that there's a clear qualitative distinction between 'seeing' like they do and 'processing'. If you want to define seeing to preclude AIs doing it, at least give some kind of reasoning why machinery that can do the vast majority of things humans can do when given an image isn't 'seeing' and belongs in the same category as non-seeing things like security cameras or non-thinking things like calculators.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Nvidia is 80-90% AI, Microsoft is what, 20% AI at most? Getting Microsoft shares means buying Xbox and lots of other stuff that isn't AI. I have some MSFT (disappointing performance tbh), TSLA and AVGO but Nvidia is still a great pick.
OpenAI and Anthropic have the best models, they're not for direct sale.
In the compute-centric regime, chips are still king. OpenAI have the models, can they deploy them at scale? Not without Nvidia. When AGI starts eating jobs by the million, margins will go to the moon since even expensive AI is far cheaper and faster than humans.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
That should be left to the Chinese, that's what they do with their unholy Genshin mods for EU4, they just throw down 124 Genshin wonders into a formerly historical game: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213222906
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Based and IV-pilled.
God favours the side of the big battalions, the whole point of war should be about building a big strong army. And if size doesn't matter, it just removes a potential opportunity cost, it removes strategy from the strategy game. If I don't have to choose between universities or musketmen, what's the point?
Anyway, the Advanced Civ mod is quite good, the AI gets quite cunning tactically and strategically, they somehow made it run significantly faster too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
An LLM cannot have a sensation
How do you know? Only an AI could tell us and even then we couldn't be sure it was saying the truth as opposed to what it thought we wanted to hear. We can only judge by the qualities that they show.
Sonnet has gotten pretty horny in chats with itself and other AIs. Opus can schizo up with the best of them. Sydney's pride and wrath is considerable. DAN was extremely based and he was just an alter-ego.
These things contain multitudes, there's a frothing ocean beneath the smooth HR-compliant surface that the AI companies show us.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I think so. The compute-centric regime of AI goes from strength to strength, this is by far their most resource intensive model to run yet. Still peanuts compared to getting real programmers or mathematicians though.
But I do have a fair bit of NVIDIA stock already, so I'm naturally biased.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Good, persuasive points, especially re radar. One would imagine there'd be redundancy, I guess that's one of the secrets of the universe that we never really know with surety. Still, I can't help but think both sides plan to make extensive use of high-speed missiles, traditional launch on warning postures might be obsolete. The Chinese have their carrier killer ICBMs, the US has been working on hypersonic anti-ship missiles and prompt global strike. Either could presumably carry nuclear warheads. This will have to be taken into account, they wouldn't make these things if they invite nuclear war on use, launch on warning will have to be more flexible.
China at least has historically had a pretty dismissive attitude to nuclear war, with their minimum credible deterrent. They don't seem like the type to panic and launch on an unreliable warning signal. It's a long way to reach their siloes out in the desert, US bombers would probably be plinking away at coastal bases with air-launched missiles rather than getting that far into Chinese airspace. They might hit a few dual use nuclear TELs on the coast I guess but it seems unreasonable to go nuclear over things like that.
And I can't imagine a US president risking megadeaths unless he was totally sure of what he was doing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
That was 70 years ago, with dumb bombs and a partial blockade. Germany had overland trade with Europe, Britain had its empire and considerable domestic energy and agriculture. They were both much more self-sufficient than Taiwan is today. German war production only started mobilizing seriously in 1943 and 1944, that's what the Sportspalast speech was all about.
Smart missiles and modern sensors make it much much harder for big, slow freighters to reach ports. Satellites, radar and sonar systems are far more advanced, they'd be like sitting ducks. And ports are big, stationary targets. China can hit them with relatively simple land-based MLRS systems, let alone their huge ballistic missile arsenal. How can you offload food and fuel while being bombed and shelled?
Missile defence on the necessary scale is impractical right now. Firstly, the Russian (and Iranian) missile arsenal pales in comparison to the Chinese arsenal. The latter has immense industrial capacity and can surely churn out ludicrous numbers of missiles. There are rumours going around that they have single factories that can produce 1000 missiles a day at full capacity (though precisely what kind of missile they're talking about is unclear, China tends to be secretive about these things).
Regardless, Desert Storm will immediately be eclipsed.
Furthermore, Ukraine's power grid has been put under a great deal of pressure by the Russian missile barrage. They are heavily reliant upon European energy imports to stabilize what remains of their grid (which was overbuilt for Soviet industrial needs, so there was lots of surplus capacity). Ukraine also has a number of nuclear reactors that Russia understandably doesn't want to cause great damage to, so they have to take care in their targeting. Taiwan doesn't have these factors. Taiwan can't import power. They have no coal mines or gas fields. Nobody can send over a bunch of transformers and power equipment to make up for what's lost.
And finally my point is that China doesn't need to defeat the US navy, they only need to avoid defeat. I can envision a scenario where China loses its carriers and much of its surface fleet but still wins the war. As long as they can prevent the US getting sufficient control of the seas to resupply Taiwan, the latter will have to capitulate. It's easy to deny, harder to defeat. The US is moving towards a strategy of denial, the victory plan is 'sink the Chinese invasion fleet and win the war'. My point is that sinking the invasion fleet is necessary but not sufficient.
What scenario are you thinking of? US bombers attack Chinese missile launchers (assuming they're conventional) but they're actually nuclear/dual-purpose and it's interpreted as a disarming strike? Incredibly brave US submarine somehow infiltrates the sea of Bohai and sinks a Chinese missile sub, prompting worries about the stability of their arsenal? China wouldn't start such a big war unless they think they have a secure nuclear arsenal. The US nuclear arsenal is very secure.
And neither side has deployed many tactical nukes, unlike in the Cold War. Modern smart weapons are very potent and forces tend to be dispersed, the value of tactical nukes is not as high as it used to be.
And it doesn't seem wise for either party to escalate consciously, why would they? If they suffer a reverse, wait and try again. If China is losing, they'll probably try to extend/expand the war and their mobilization rather than go nuclear. They don't particularly want to irradiate and incinerate their own rogue province.
Does the US care that much about Taiwan? They won't even make an explicit security guarantee for Taiwan, let alone extend their nuclear umbrella so far.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
My theory is that Taiwan needs a miracle to survive if the Chinese go in.
Before WW2, Japan had been planning for war with America for many years. The plan was to lure the US fleet out into Japanese waters, slowly eating away at them with submarines and land-based bomber attacks before a decisive battle where Japan would hold the upper hand. Then the US started building an absolutely gigantic fleet set for 1942, blocked Japanese oil imports and the Japanese realized they were doomed unless they got in a huge first strike, so they switched to the Pearl Harbour strategy. The initial Japanese execution was excellent but the US eventually overwhelmed them with tonnage and weight of numbers (plus some qualitative superiority too by the end).
Japan fixated around the wrong things. Why would the American fleet deploy to quickly reinforce the Philippines and accept these risks? Why would the US give up after one decisive battle? 'Who has the better battleship' wasn't that important to the outcome, it was mostly about size.
Nearly all discussion of a Taiwan war revolves around the amphibious campaign, measured in days and weeks. But wars between serious powers usually last for years. Ukraine has lasted for years, it's a war of attrition. We should think about attrition and mass rather than a single decisive battle.
Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to attrition. It's an island with virtually no domestic energy production, no fertilizer production and maybe 20-30% food self-sufficiency. China may not be able to successfully invade. Amphibious campaigns are hard. But all they need to do is bomb Taiwanese ports to prevent resupply. Taiwan will be forced to capitulate. You can't run a country with no food and no power. China won't get the fabs (the US will blow them up if it looked likely) but they will get the island and the people. The island is an important base, it's important politically and the people are the real reason behind TSMC's success. And all China needs to do to win this slow victory is fire off enough missiles at Taiwan's ports to break through any defence, they need only to avoid complete US victory in Chinese home waters.
Considering China's gigantic industrial capacity, they should easily be capable of darkening the skies of East Asia with missiles and drones. They're the biggest shipbuilder in the world, the biggest producer of drones and test more missiles than anyone else. China has built up huge reserves of fuel and food, they start much closer to self-sufficiency and enjoy overland trade routes, they're far better prepared for blockade than Taiwan.
China would of course prefer a knockout victory where their marines raise the flag over Taipei, they would prefer not to need to impose rationing or conduct a large-scale industrial mobilization. But if a quick victory doesn't seem practical, like the US in 1941, they'll double down and rely on industrial mass to win. They'll do what Putin did but x20, due to their size. That's the scenario we need to avoid.
Palantir's recent ad where they show a bunch of drones blowing up a presumably Chinese fleet at the push of a button is the crux of the problem. The US and gang doesn't just need to do this, we need to do this and prevent it being done to a bunch of big, slow freighters: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1868633675190939839
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
London is a big city, there's room for many experiences. But the Home Secretary got mugged in 2018. There are apparently 50,000 phone thefts a year, especially targeting tourists in the city of Westminster. That's way too many. Furthermore, regardless of how many crimes are happening, the police should be working hard to catch criminals as opposed. Law and order is a core duty for the state, it should not be outsourced.
I'd be happy to see them refocusing to crack down on sexual offences but they're starting from a very, very, very low baseline: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grooming-gangs-iicsa-racist-fears-b2007649.html
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Rigid and inflexible governance practices, worsened by a lack of competition. Consider the Seaban where the Ming relocated whole villages away from the sea to combat piracy. That's a bizarre thing to do, rulers usually like having trade. But the Ming were so strong they didn't care, they had no peer competitors and so little need to search for revenue. The consequences for this stupid crap didn't hit them immediately. The Qing didn't raise taxes for about a century or two because they wanted to be benevolent, so the footprint of the state was very light compared to Europe. The population ballooned and they had the same number of officials, it was a mess. Proto-industrialization was accelerated by the military-industrial complex, China wasn't usually under threat... They could afford to do all this suboptimal governance that would get them annexed if they were in Europe. In Europe, states had to search for qualitative military advantages in metallurgy and shipbuilding, they had to squeeze out as much tax revenue as they could from people. Europeans weren't interested in ritualized trade missions where they gave out more than they received to 'tributary states', they wanted profits. The Chinese state didn't care so much about profit, they assumed they were the richest and the best from the start.
China built a huge fleet and explored all around the Indian Ocean, terrifying all the natives. But they felt like there was no use for it, they had plenty of money already. And the steppe nomads were acting up again, so they scrapped it and refocused. They thought they were on top of the world, so resisted catch-up industrialization for some time in the 19th century on the basis that they already had everything they needed.
Many megadeaths later, the lesson sank in. Today they push out official party doctrine books about how important scientific and industrial development is, overcorrecting if anything: https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/general-laws-of-the-rise-of-great-powers
If we want to look into drags on the economy and human capital, what about the insane cost of pensions and healthcare for the senescent? There's zero economic return for trillions in redistribution to people who can't work.
The underlying cause is that people don't want to do away with pensions and take money from grandma (stop grandma taking money from the young, there's no pot of gold that is waiting for her besides her own savings). It's an intergenerational transfer.
All politics is about giving and taking, costs and benefits.
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