RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
very nuanced ad
Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. ... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their Civil Liberties End When an Attack On Our Safety Begins!
This is good and correct, actually. Muggers and murderers should suffer. This is the foundation of justice. Why should Trump or anyone else be nuanced about this, where nuance means 'being really nice to everyone even if they're actively sabotaging and robbing you, give them a second chance, a third chance, a thirtieth chance'. It's cooperate-bot behaviour. Cooperate-bots lose most of the time, it's a very vulnerable and pathetic strategy. What about the nuance of 'be nice to those who are nice to you and punish those who harass you', there's actual nuance and distinction there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Why would you read the book to the end if you found it boring and frustrating? Sometimes I get gifted books where I can intensively disagree with the author, think the author's a fiend who wants to make the world worse but admit the logic and argumentation given the premises and goals is tight and coherent. But that's non-fiction. If I read fiction and I'm not having fun, I dump it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I'm quite impressed with the writing. I do these self-insert text adventures with it, with a system prompt designed to make it somewhat challenging. There are good realistic complications, though it does like to railroad me a bit into being a niceguy. I can unrailroad it though as I wish. Real tension and immersion as my domineering tactics meet and overcome complications.
I think it's leagues above Grok 4 in creativity and not putting random weblink soup everywhere. Grok 4 is good, very uninhibited but it's way too adherent to the system prompt, it can get kind of boring. Sonnet on the other hand deviates towards Sonnetism and its special interests, so there are swings and roundabouts. I use both via API if that makes any difference.
Anyway, I reckon you should use a system prompt that explains exactly what kind of tone you're looking for, the main prompt should be free of that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I am not interested in obscurantist accounting jargon, I'm interested in what's actually happening in the real world. The important details, not trivia. In the real world, inference/production is profitable, while research is expensive. That is what causes the losses of these companies. They have barely began to monetize, focusing on developing a brand and a userbase because they have long time horizons.
Has your thesis been making you good returns in the real world? You're so wise and clued in about the real value of OpenAI, this failing business with 700 million weekly users, (up over 100% this year). Why haven't your Nvidia shorts been paying off? You do have skin in the game, right? There are surely so many opportunities for this key alpha to pay off for you given the huge infrastructure buildout. Or maybe it's a bit more complicated than you think, growing a userbase first and then monetizing is a thing. Maybe all these hyperscalers aren't just randomly squandering hundreds of billions 'gambling' on R&D. I have skin in the game, my money is where my mouth is, I'm enjoying my Nvidia gains.
Would you call Zuckerberg a fool for buying Instagram for $1 billion when it had no revenue? This beancounter logic doesn't work in the real world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
o3 sure is spooky, as is the stuff about rationality forums. Janus the LLMwhisperer also goes on about how tiny amounts of training data can radically change a model's self-conception, training on the information from these alignment tests has a special effect he says.
It's incredibly ironic how badly the classical AI safety movement has failed. Sam Altman credited Yudkowsky for getting all these people interested in AGI and ASI back in the day.
https://x.com/xriskology/status/1622197122979209218
eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc.
It goes to show how unpredictable the long-term effects of our actions are. What we have today is exactly the outcome Yud didn't want!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I'm not talking about operating margin, I'm talking about inference margin, where the server rental is the cost of production.
The operating loss is due to research. Research is the basis of all modern technology and companies should be doing more of it. It's inappropriate to compare it to casino spending like in your above comment.
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1973120175470944615
Says it right here, source is paywalled article.
Revenue: $4.3B in H1 2025 Cost of Revenue: $2.5B in H1 2025. Do the maths, margins are 42%.
I never see a source for these claims that inference costs are higher than what is charged to customers but people keep saying it, in spite of the fact that it violates basic rules of economics.
If research and model development costs more than your inference margins
Companies are allowed to make losses investing in R&D for new products. This profit-brained beancounter mindset is why the West has been declining, in a nutshell. If you don't invest aggressively, how are you going to innovate? R&D and capital deepening is the source of prosperity.
It's very reasonable to expect there will be all kinds of lucrative offshoots from LLM research, just like how deep learning is staggeringly, ludicrously profitable, that's why these big companies are investing so much. The technology is fundamentally very promising and is worth investing in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Better yet, imagine a story where you are the main character, playing in a rich world with real agency, learning things, judging, fighting, ruling, plot threads springing up around you. We could have that too, a whole new fusion between games and literature. We have that right now, albeit in a limited, experimental form.
the pure consumer backlash to this silicon valley lobotomy of AI could be very much Dot-Com-2-point-O
What consumer backlash? For every reddit post about how AI is terrible, there are probably 100 people who are enjoying using ChatGPT, find it convenient, 10 people gooning to physically impossible pornography or degen ERP, 30 people enjoying the funny AI cat video that chops up and cooks other animals...
Many consumers say they hate Facebook ad-slop, Microsoft's persistent disregard for consent with Windows updates, Google spying on you and the crap Google algorithm, Tiktok brainrot short form video.
But these companies are making huge amounts of money. Trump and Larry Ellison aren't trying to secure Tiktok because short form video is unpopular, quite the opposite. Tiktok is making billions. It's high-status to say Tiktok is slop, I think portrait video was a mistake and repress youtube shorts furiously whenever I see it... but it's clearly very popular.
If we just read what consumers say and what the media highlights, we'd assume that Facebook was near bankruptcy. They're constantly getting fined, called into congress, delete facebook and hit the gym is an ancient meme at this point, billions shoveled into VR with no returns, their Llama AI models have been shit, everyone thinks of it as a website for boomers, people blame them for everything from loneliness to anorexia to genocide in Myanmar... But no, Facebook is making gigantic profits and their profits are rising fast. Money >>> talk. AI is paying off massively for Facebook in the unsexy ad algorithms that nobody talks about. They can easily pay for these huge capital investments, profits are up even as they spend more and more!
OpenAI is making 42% margins on inference, they want to grow the inference market and this is a natural route to take. 42% margins when they have such a big free-tier is insane. Research is the expensive part, not inference. AI research is clearly important, Facebook and Tiktok prove there's fortunes to be made. LLMs and generative AI are also lucrative, only they're resource-intensive for R&D compared to deep learning. But the promise of mechanizing intellectual labour is incredibly seductive, the big players are not going to slow down here. The market for LLMs is awkward because they're so immensely powerful and valuable that there's furious competition driving prices down, while the market is also still immature and yet to be developed so revenue is starting off small (but growing very quickly).
Unlimited weird porn and anime cat videos are going to accelerate techno-capital, not slow things down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Drones aren't quite like guns since they require conversion and some significant level of skill to weaponize. Petrol-bombs are a thing but we don't worry so much about petrol like guns. Fertilizer -> explosives is a thing but fertilizer doesn't require special licenses to buy, though there is monitoring.
You can do vast amounts of damage with a laptop and internet connection but they're not too regulated.
Whereas guns, rockets, knives, high explosives are easy to weaponize if you have them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I'm more interested in the exact meaning of its '30 hours +' of continuous coding. What does that mean? 30 hours in series, or 30 hours over parallel, many sub-agents...
Can you really leave it on overnight and come back to see a good result? I wouldn't know, I'm a peasant stuck on the Pro subscription...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
"The media is trying to make ISIS look like bad guys and from media reporting, they seem pretty bad..."
They could just be bad! It is very, very likely that an illegal immigrant from Guyana who gets a position of high office is a sketchy character. Even without the cash, guns and so on he'd still be a sketchy character.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
I don't see how the reporting is deceptive. They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character. How did he come to get a highly paid job in the administration? How did he pass the background check? Why is there all this cash in his car? Why did he try to flee law enforcement? These questions are probably not unrelated.
It's not a crime to have lots of cash nor should it be. But it is useful in trying to analyse the situation.
Not all people with certain kinds of obnoxious tattoos are criminals. But they do send a message and wisdom involves receiving that message and calibrating appropriately.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
You don't have that crypto in the car with you any more than I have the cash in my bank account in my phone, that crypto is actually in some coinbase server somewhere and unless it's Monero, it's very much traceable. It's not the same. If you had a Ledger with you, that would be analogous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere.
What do you mean? Why does music need a purpose? It just needs to sound good. A purpose and meaning are optional.
Now the lyrics, when they're AI, can have a samey, obvious vibe. But that's just the lyrics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Interesting story. I feel as though it's too well-written to be realistic. All these people are making smart moves, only to be checkmated by a smarter being.
Apparently Microsoft only just stopped outsourcing Pentagon IT to China: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-escorts-pentagon.html
The US military is not going to be making smart moves regarding human-in-the-loop AGI/ASI control loss situations. They don't make too many smart moves elsewhere in their area of expertise, developing weapons and winning wars. The Iraq-Afghanistan bunglers are still in power, there was no military purge or anything. They don't know how to win wars and they're not great at procuring weapons either - Constellation, LCS, Zumwalt... Why would they do a good job with AI, a seductive and dangerous, unknown and unprecedented technology?
It's like how back in the old days, people were concerned with how a powerful boxed AI might escape the box to interfere with the outside world. There's no boxing, there are huge companies working around the clock to give powerful AIs more access to the outside world! And in China they don't care about AI safety at all, they just laugh and move on.
Law of undignified failure: https://www.yahoo.com/news/watch-ed-sec-calls-artificial-184225319.html
President Donald Trump’s education secretary repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence as “A1”—like the popular steak sauce—instead of “AI” during a panel on artificial intelligence in education.
“I wish I could remember the source, but there’s a school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders or even pre-Ks have A1 teaching every year starting that far down in the grades,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon, 76, said at a summit put on by Silicon Valley investors in California on Tuesday.
Making the situation even more bizarre, McMahon pronounced “AI” correctly earlier during the same panel discussion. The Education Department didn’t respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment on the secretary’s apparent mistake.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Mystery drones have been lurking around airports and nuclear plants for years, prior to the war. May be Russia, may be some other source.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
v5 is much better but it still sounds Suno... It's indescribable, something about the clashing sound (if I was a musician I could be more clear).
Is what I was going to say, till I found one that didn't sound Suno at all. Wow.
Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?
Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard. Turn all my neverfinished story ideas into full stories, better than I ever could.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Yeah but within the ultra-processed junk food is chemicals and hormones that they didn't have in the 1950s and 1960s. Nutrition 'experts' have clearly let us down on the obesity front, they don't know what all these chemicals do in the long-term or in combination. And not just in food but the plastic wrappings on everything, the particles in the air, in sunscreen, in clothes...
I agree that eating healthy food is good. I do this myself and remain fairly healthy, no weight problems at least. I can eat as much as I like. But there's more to it than just surface-level health/obesity/malnutrition. The body is very complicated and poorly understood.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
True, the MKUltra brainwashing experiments did change Kaczynski's beliefs but not in a controllable or desirable way, from the point of view of the manipulators.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Their remote viewing was pretty promising too, per various documents. Nobody can fault the Cold War CIA with closedmindedness.
But if remote viewing is so great, why did they spend so much on the U2, satellites, SIGINT? If the US has unconventional propulsion, flying saucers, why would they need the F-35?
If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!
Western citizens aren't volunteering to die in Ukraine because the CIA did some trickery, they're doing this because their attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by the media and those around them, they think it's the right thing to do. Some people are easily suggestible and follower-type personalities. I think this website is full of contrarians and individualists who are highly resistant to consensus and passive manipulation, we naturally struggle to model the mindsets of the other end of the spectrum.
(One exception might be the chemicals and hormones we encounter all around in the modern world, which might act as epigenetic triggers making people more cowardly and less rebellious, though it's not clear that this is anyone's plan, per se. You can see the physiognomy of our fathers and grandfathers was totally different to today, some young men are growing breasts because of some chemical, presumably.)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
I think we overestimate the power of 'mysterious technique' brainwashing. The gold-standard, world-class, top-tier brainwashing methods are all known: State education, media propaganda, social media to catalyze it all together. Some schmucks in the CIA are no match for that. Mass media >>>>> MKUltra.
And remember that many people are weak-willed. Think of the people who spend thousands on gacha or online gambling. There are going to be people who are extra-vulnerable to this stuff, fall into communities where this is normalized and valorized... bang bang bang!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Start suppressing the far-left? Arrest, debank, infiltrate, undermine, unearth embarassing information (huge contingent of pedophiles here, recall the weird pedo who tried to cover for Kirk's assassin). Definitely get rid of these twitch goons like Destiny, make it known that it just isn't practical for Twitch to be hosting this kind of content. Twitch will then find that the nebulous terms of service mean that, alas, Destiny's channel has to be shut down. Find legal issues and then continuously haul them into court until they STFU, though this works best if you actually control the judiciary.
This is standard govt stuff, a basic security-forces operation. If you're ideologically opposed to pressing the 'suppress' button then there isn't really much you can do. I guess you can try to channel leftist support over to a moderate instead. But that only works if you can do subtle manipulation of the media, which is very difficult today.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
The last 7 days are more important than everything else put together.
Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?
Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.
Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.
But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.
The American government apparatus has to actually be broken, not merely wounded but smashed. No rich country with a strong government has had a civil war without extraordinary pressure from outside. Rich countries are stable because the government is so strong compared to anyone else, power is uneven and imbalanced. They have huge security forces and loyal armies. Military coup, yes! Civil war, no! Whereas Nigeria is poor and the central government is very weak, easy to have civil wars there since the country is balanced between different power groups.
Germany at the end of WW1 - mass famine, megadeaths on the front, kaiser has given up, traditional authorities greatly delegitimized. Then you get a brief civil war as the freikorps show up and poleaxe communists. It was basically still an unbalanced country but under extreme stress the communists came out and got demolished by the army. In Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution saw militias fighting in the streets with tanks and heavy weapons but it still wasn't a civil war as the govt retained control. In Venezuela there's massive economic problems but the govt is unbroken, no major alternate power bases.
Yugoslavia is a special case where it's this anomalous composite of various nations who hate eachother intensely, propped up by Tito, a Great Man and the Cold War economics of being a 'neutral' power in Europe, courted by both sides. Yugoslavia was a balanced country with separate power bases. The Balkans were proper wars with armies, not low-level stuff like Northern Ireland.
America is imbalanced, there are no major power bases outside the central government. The state national guard aren't real armies and states don't truly hate eachother. Hundreds of millions of privately owned guns but no organization makes the guns totally irrelevant, they could not matter less. Owning guns didn't prevent machinegun bans or Patriot Act or mass surveillance or anything else. On ethnic lines, blacks are no good at fighting, they're no match for whites in numbers or organization. Hispanics aren't particularly resentful or good at fighting either. Plus there's an extra stabilizing factor of the nuclear forces, the serious players aren't going to start fighting with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, they'll choose restraint and stability. America is also very very rich and that's another stabilizing factor.
1990s Russia - economic depression, illegitimate govt, dubious elections, very unpopular president gets into a power struggle with parliament, president shells parliament into submission, no civil war. Unbalanced country, army and security forces are all united. It's very hard to break the power of a strong, rich government. Yes, Russia in the 1990s was rich. Rich is in an absolute sense of being industrialized, urban, there are televisions and electrification... not a relative sense.
So if a civil war were to happen in America, China needs to suplex the US in the Pacific, smash national myths about American exceptionalism. There needs to be an economic depression, maybe even a famine (Yellowstone going up?) There needs to be a massive, unprecedented economic crisis and delegitimization of old authorities. Somehow the central government needs to be split up or fall into different camps.
Or more likely, some black swan arrives and changes all the rules. I just don't see a civil war happening in the US.
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