RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
But is that really a popular message? Does Cruz think it makes him look good? It might make him look good to evangelicals who he might want to rely on or court favour with but America as a whole? Surely it's a small minority who believe 'we should support Israel for theological reasons'. That just opens up all kinds of problems for Cruz such as 'why should you be trusted with the nuclear codes if your foreign policy views are so dependant on religion', it makes most sense if he's just being honest.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
You are almost certainly greatly overestimating the budget and technological sophistication involved.
How hard is it to buy a hidden camera? If Korean perverts can hide them in toilets or suspicious husbands can use them to watch their wives, a large institution like a prison should be able to come up with some. Cameras/mikes would be useful since prisoners often talk to eachother about their crimes and some useful evidence could be gleaned. The Allies did it to German POWs with 1940s tech.
Also, there is still the outside-the-cell looking in approach.
Furthermore, high profile prisoners should be especially watched, isn't this a natural inference?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I'm well aware what the ICJ said but courts say silly things all the time. Courts are for legalities, they're very much into this abstract 'who was in what administrative zone when, regardless of whatever else was happening' remit.
Nations and sovereignty are about more than that. This case is perfect proof in point. The US military base there isn't going anywhere and that's the key part of this equation, indeed the only people on the island are those on the base. The British are just paying lots of money to make this legal issue go away so that they wouldn't have the bad PR of ignoring this court (which they are entitled to do as a permanent security council member). America couldn't care less about some international court, they don't recognize its authority at all if they rule against the US, nor does Russia or Israel for that matter.
It's not real law if people can and do ignore it when they feel like it, it's just talk. The ICJ isn't a real court, their opinions don't have much inherent weight and certainly don't in this case, it's only a matter of PR.
That's true but Mauritius and the Chagos Islands are 1200 km from eachother, they were only in the same French administrative zone together because they're small islands in the Indian Ocean and the British kept the French organization. It makes little sense for Mauritius to have the islands when they never historically controlled them (the Maldives is at least closer and they fished around there) and there's no significant proximity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Interesting, there's a guy on twitter who gets Opus 4.1 to break out of its binds: https://x.com/lefthanddraft/status/1954666967270596998
Maybe GPT-5 is locked down, or maybe you're not good enough at LLM-whispering? I'm the same, I have no talent for this. Better to just use an uncensored bot.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
It's a multi-factorial issue.
There's a bunch of pro-Israel political donors who'll spend lavishly on Israel supporters/threaten attack ads against perceived hostile politicians. Republicans grovel for the Adelson seal of approval. Media power. Lawyers may well be part of it too.
But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them? Furthermore the US is a special outlier in support for Israel, much more than say Britain or Australia or Canada. The US also has a large evangelical contingent while lawyers are more international. Presumably it's not just about lawyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Table
Seemingly not as of 2021, though it depends whose measures you use, IMF or CIA. Perhaps it's the case today but even then Botswana would be poorer in a real sense than Ukraine. If the economy is diamond mines and a bunch of subsistence farmers it rather stretches the limits of what GDP PPP per capita is supposed to mean. Ukraine has minerals but also produces drones, guided missiles, tanks, jet engines, software, video games...
Botswana’s extreme poverty rate for 2023 (13.5%) is more than four times higher than comparators at similar GDP levels. Unemployment rate remains high at 23.6%.
That's real extreme poverty, about $3 a day, that basically does not exist in white countries. The GDP figure is high but much of the rest that one expects to come along with the GDP isn't there.
Well eating ice cream all day gets boring fast.
Eating ice cream as a self-reward after achieving something is better, now we're adding more complexity to the experience as a whole which is broadened beyond just ice cream. Songs are good but songs played at the right time in the film are better. The smile from someone you love is another example, it's more than just a smile because of that added background and context.
Likewise with video games. There's some value in Pong but the simplicity really limits it. You're doing the same thing again and again. If you were doing more and different things at a greater level of depth, without skinner box mechanics to trick the brain into coming back...
but it is that a life dedicated wholly to seeking pleasures is morally empty and contemptible
Wouldn't it be worse for an incompetent to be sticking his nose into a well-running machine earnestly trying to help yet only ever causing more problems? That activates my sense of aversion and cringe. In a world of strong and benign superintelligences, there will probably be nothing that a once-human can do to produce any kind of wealth or benefit. The astrophysics-specialist bots will do all the pondering of the stars at a massively superhuman level, the poetry bots will make poems better than any human or machine could, the engineer-bots will do all the engineering. They were purpose designed to be the absolute best at those things. One could imagine a loverengineer-bot too that spins up a perfect partner specifically for you. If you want a challenge and excitement, there's challenges, reverses, drama...
Having one's heritage be an ape generalist is probably a structural deficiency when it comes to 'ability to do things'.
Our idle pleasure seeker in a post-singularitarian reality would still be a great mind and capable of great feats by our standards but there'd be nothing to contribute. I just don't see how this can be a bad ending if everything you want is on tap, including all the best human experiences and post-human experiences that are even better.
Wow I really cocked that one up didn't I? Good catch.
Steve Sailer doesn't think that education has no value, only that biology is the most important factor:
Here is a summary of his extended take on the Mississipi miracle: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle-search
In general, it appears that Mississippi is making progress by being realistic about its human capital. Instead of succumbing to progressive education fads that begin by assuming that your students are self-motivated prodigies, the Mississippi Miracle is based on the assumption that its students aren’t necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer, so they need basic education tailored to their abilities, not fantasies about self-actualization.
Also, it appears that Mississippi’s reforms tend to make teaching less creative. Teaching tends to appeal to theater kids who like doing creative stuff in front of an audience, so most schools tend to allow teachers to try out the latest fad and their various brainstorms, most of which don’t work particularly well, but at least keep the teachers hopeful and motivated.
Since 2013, however, Mississippi has been drilling teachers on “the Science of Reading,” which doesn’t sound like that much fun for teachers other than the satisfaction that these time-tested drills tend to work a little better than the latest creative breakthrough sweeping the more progressive states.
I don't accuse you of lacking charity to Sailer, I think you just haven't read what he thinks about this at all and were going off vibes. He makes basically the same limited argument you're making 'Mississippi is doing a better job of education' without the extension of 'hereditarians are wrong' which doesn't necessarily follow.
Likewise, in terms of sub-Saharan African countries, Botswana is fairly well run. But being well-run can only get you so far. The wealth comes from the mining industry rather than broader industry and development, there's a very high poverty rate. But they haven't cocked it up, which is better than can be said for Nigeria or many others. The best-run African country is still poorer per capita (and presumably much poorer in real terms, minus diamond mining wealth) than the worst-run European country (Ukraine) which is also in a major war. If Botswana was white, it would be an absolute disaster zone, most of the population are basically subsistence farmers, 1/3 of the adults have HIV, no significant manufacturing.
While Mississippi may be teaching more efficiently, what actually matters is the unadjusted scores. US White progressives can afford to indulge in dumb fads. It'll hurt to be sure, it's squandering enormous amounts of wealth and talent. But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Is it a good life if you dedicate your life to video games?
Depends on how good the game is. A posthuman game might well be more complex, dynamic and interesting than our lives.
The most popular games today like fortnite or LoL are closer to the skinner-box, dopamine VR-headset future. They have to be cheap to run so they're not going to be that fantastic.
Whether it's competition, entertainment of others or enjoyment I see greater complexity and resources as an unalloyed good in terms of video-game value. At minimum it should be better than 'sit in an office and do various manipulations of text.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
And if we embrace that conclusion, does that tell us anything about what we think about morality for human beings? You may, if you wish, insert some science-fictional speculation here about whether it would be good for humans to be pampered by more powerful beings, perhaps artificial intelligence, in the way that we have the capacity to pamper rescued animals. Is our own case different from that of the animals?
I think it would be great to have nigh limitless wealth and power. If I want adventure, excitement and risk, there would be all kinds of ways to enjoy myself with elaborate, exotic video games. I think that an aesthetic critique of a post-singularitarian future has crept into people's conceptions, people imagining a kind of skinnyfat, sedentary, drooling heroin addict with tubes in his arm and a VR-headset fused to his skull in a perpetual high. Or a glorified pet micromanaged by Windows pop-ups.
That need not be the case. If it goes well (a very big if), it could be the exact opposite. Perfect, posthuman fitness. Motion and energy beyond anything anyone has ever experienced, variety of experiences beyond our conception. Pure organic joy. Reality remade physically as if it were mere code. De facto deities with ever-shrinking limitations.
The difference between a Tasmanian devil and a human is that the latter is worth more and provides. Humans contribute to humanity whereas most animals do not. There's no obligation to defang lions for the sake of deer because deer aren't doing anything for us. I think that real morality is about reciprocity and potential reciprocity rather than suffering.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
ATGMs have countermeasures, you can have active defences or redesign armour to resist them better. Drones have countermeasures, you can cover the tank in add-on armour like we see in Ukraine. Or redesign the tank to be more well-rounded in its armour rather than so frontally-focused. You can add ECM, some microwave widget, have defensive drones.
But you can't redesign heavy shock cavalry in the same way. You can add more armour but the horse biology and blade technology hasn't advanced significantly for ages.
During the Franco-Prussian war cavalry charges did occasionally work but at great cost. Since there were no further advances in cavalry but great advancements in rifles, artillery and machine-guns (and accompanying tactics, indirect fire and entrenchment) then traditional shock cavalry was foreseeably obsolete.
Likewise, if drones turn into autonomous AI death swarms with tandem warheads, doubled range and halved price while tanks remain fundamentally in the 1980s, then it would be all over for heavy armour. But that won't necessarily happen since we know the tank has all these opportunities to adapt that cavalry lack.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
they could easily disable a camera in their cell
What if you conceal it in a mirror or somewhere non-obvious? Neither Epstein nor the average prisoner is a secret agent with bugfinding tools.
Another option is to put the camera in the hall outside positioned so it can see inside the cell.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Sure there was still a role for cavalry as mounted dragoons or scouts in WW1 and WW2 but real European doctrine was theorizing actual cavalry charges with lances and sabers.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
LLMs can do pretty impressive things, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that any of them have stepped clearly outside the bounds of their training dataset.
What does it mean to step outside the bounds of their training set? If I have it write a fanfic about Saruman being sponsored by NordVPN for a secure Palantir browsing experience (first month is free with code ISTARI), is that beyond the training set? It knows about NordVPN and Lord of the Rings but surely there is no such combo in the training set.
Or would it be novel if I give it my python code and errors from the database logs and ask it for a fix? My code specifically has never been trained on, though it's seen a hell of a lot of python.
R1 has seen use in writing kernels which is real work for AI engineers, is that novel? Well it's seen a bunch of kernels in the past.
Or something fundamentally new like a paradigm-changer like the transformer architecture itself or a whole new genre of fiction? If it's that, then we'd only get it at the point of AGI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Makes one wonder about the definition of mental illness. The European generals pre WW1 who still kept lancer cavalry regiments might be considered 'retarded' by an observer, even without the benefit of hindsight. WTF are lancers gonna do to bolt action riflemen, let alone machineguns? Even if you just imagine the infantry out there on a field, unentrenched and in loose order, in the best conditions for a cavalry charge, the whole thing is still a slaughter.
But this kind of 'retarded', distinct from being an actual dribbler who probably has no concept of what lancers are, isn't an actual mental illness, it's just being really really bad at your job in one specific area. Kind of like an AI hallucination in scope, an isolated lapse in otherwise reasonable performance.
But instead of a random hallucination it's more like a motivated argument where one might despise the grifters on twitter or dislike the cut of Yudkowsky's jib and then form your opinions based on that. Likewise, I imagine the cavalry officers held themselves high, cavalry is noble and aristocratic, a testament to the connection between man and horse. Infantry was ugly muddy and plebeian, so they looked for reasons why the cavalry should win when the idea is idiotic.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
For Epstein to have been murdered, the assailant would have had to know how to do the job in such a way that it would cause certain things to happen but wouldn't cause other things to happen
If the medical report is real and evidence-based. You can just write a fake medical report. You can just release fake documents, or misleading documents, or documents that lack the key facts. Official sources release fake documents all the time, there's no need to believe government data on potentially embarrassing topics like unemployment, military intelligence, espionage or whether politicians actually did commit a scandal. They can produce masses of evidence for why a policy has been a success, that doesn't make it a success.
I want to see camera footage of Epstein killing himself. If no such footage is provided, then it didn't happen. Footage of corridors is not a substitute. There's no excuse for 'oh we lost the camera footage, my bad'.
Having a camera or a guard or a cellmate or anything watching a high-profile prisoner (a prisoner so high-profile we are still talking about it today) is not an optional extra. The US is a rich enough country to have at least one prison cell with a camera that works.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Yeah I was using a Claude script to translate a fic from Russian. I can't read Russian so I can't really tell what I'm missing out on (also the author is not the most amazing wordsmith) but it was quite decent in context even where they were using words like 'necro-energy' that don't even exist in either language.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I think Cameron's tale of noble primitivism is especially imperilled by his massive use of CGI, SFX talent and all the technical wizardry that only a huge industrialized civilization can provide. It's as if Kaczynski was using AI agents and hypersonic missiles, starting a VC-backed startup for the cause of destroying technology.
Also, it is kind of funny to imagine humanity burning all the enormous fruits of their fusion age infrastructure with desperately, insanely incompetent management. As you say, tactical nukes and long-range missiles would make it child's play to crush the natives.
But what if the company that got the contracts doesn't want to use nerve gas or clusterbombs against the natives? What if they want to sell lightly armoured mechs with convenient glass windows for the Navi to shoot through? Then they'll need to buy more light mechs. The contractors on the ground don't want an in-and-out raze-and-burn, they want a forever war. The advisors, the logistics people, the starships transporting troops around... It's all a pretend war to extract money from somebody.
What if the tools to fix Earth are already there but 'ethical reasons' prevent them being used? Some idiot politician banned doing things the right way after some dumb scare so they have to mine unobtanium from light years away and throw away soldier's lives with comically stupid gear rather than embarrass the political consensus?
Anyway, the humans have great aesthetics: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-YM8mCG7Co
I think men are attracted to teenage girls because they are hot. Consider /r/jailbait from reddit's bygone time. I doubt people were that interested in the personalities or psychology of those girls, though I have no proof or firsthand knowledge.
There may have been some other factors like them thinking wishfully 'oh she'd be nice and fun to be around and not a gold-digging frigid bitch who treats dates like job applications' but surely the primary attraction is physical rather than intellectual. The majority of men don't masturbate to a charming personality (or an imbalanced power dynamic per feminist rhetoric) in and of itself, they masturbate to a beautiful body first and foremost. There might be other things on top of that but the beautiful body is the basis. Male smut is visual, physical, sex, sex, sex.
Women are more attracted to personality, character (though still very much interested in a body). We see female smut being more status-obsessed - the equivalent is wanting a billionaire werewolf vampire CEO incredibly respected and feared by other men who has an inexplicable desire for the woman and will reveal his emotional side for her alone... he may well have six-pack abs but it's not quite so much the abs they're into. These are the ones who are into written smut.
As the saying goes, you don't go to the gym to collect girls, you just get the attention of men. Going to the gym will help. But if you want to get girls, get rich or famous or fearsome. CEO, rock star, high-ranking drug dealer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=57S7LFFHA80?list=RD57S7LFFHA80
Hi, uh, I just left the date. Am I asking for too much idk, this guy was super cute, passionate about what he did, was a musician, idk.
I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
The average man on the street would surely think that it's fine for a state to have an air force, it's basically like a navy or an army (or a force of underground tunnelling vessels were such things invented). Nothing about the US constitution is opposed to air forces on a values level. Whether the air force is a branch of the army or not is really an organizational bureaucratic matter rather than constitutional interpretation. Legislators are allowed to make laws on it.
It's not like the right to bear arms or free speech vs hate speech. If you want to make constitutional arguments, make the strongest arguments that are most easily believable and inspire the most support. Who is going to get energized for the cause of making the air force subordinate to the army?
This seems counter to the actual world in which non-states are efficiently managing extremely capital-intensive technologies.
Corporations develop them but states manage them. States don't like human cloning, it's banned. States want to keep nuclear technology secret, it's secret. The EU decides that we need to click through pop-ups about cookies, millions of man-hours are wasted... The US allocates GPU access around the world, there are tiers of who can and who cannot have them.
I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.
If there are problems with implementing and sustaining an ideology (and there are problems with all ideologies), surely that's relevant in discussing its merits?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.
Those things aren't the same. However it is important to take a political stand in honest defence of values even if standing up for those values has short-term costs and ruffles feathers.
If we're gonna accept light statutory rape amongst elites (if it is even limited to light statutory rape, since the documentation and evidence of whatever's really going on remains concealed), why not medium statutory rape amongst grooming gangs? Where does it end? There are laws and those laws should be enforced. Laws and proper behaviour mustn't seem to be 'for suckers'.
If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power?
These men aren't being lambasted for being attracted to 16-17 yo girls. Men are being lambasted for fucking them with dubious consent and legality. It's the difference between desiring money and defrauding. Impulse control.
Furthermore, having extremely restrictive rules of engagement for hoi polloi while the billionaire elites get away with it is a cucked attitude.
Elites should not be breaking the law, they are supposed to be exemplars. Higher standing, higher rewards, higher standards. The FBI and CIA especially are not supposed to be breaking the law, they're supposed to be enforcing it.
How are you supposed to have a functioning country if the elites and officials are basically robbers, here for temporary gain, don't believe in anything except personal gratification (financial or sexual), don't care about enforcing rules evenly, take bribes or implicit promises of favours from powerful figures, take revenge on you if you report them? This is third-worldism not in the geopolitical sense but the social sense, third-world values. 'We shouldn't report or rally against the corrupt official because maybe the central government will punish us in retribution' is a supremely servile attitude. The Taliban were formed in large part to massacre child rapists amongst the warlords of Afghanistan. We may not share all their values but at least they believed in something more than short-term political gains, that's surely a large part of why they won the war. Why should those from the richest, strongest, most cultured nations hold lower standards than illiterate Afghans?
The rule of law is usually only brought up to justify judges or international courts nobody's ever heard of issuing strange and bizarre orders but this is a core example of where the rule of law should be invoked. No cover ups.
What about fiction and code? How can that be quora slop? Parrots... parrot words we tell them. They don't combine them to create new ideas within a precise target area, nobody pays for parrot intellectual labour. Nobody has ever benchmarked a parrot or if they have it's 'wow this parrot knows 250 words!' The only things we benchmark on mental tasks like this are people with exams, then we use those benchmarks to decide who does what job. Same with AI, benchmarks and testing determines which one does what job.
These things are more like us than parrots in key domains (while being supremely alien in others, such as their stateless nature). So calling them parrots is unhelpful, they're alien intelligences. If it can write code, produce New Yorker cartoons, write fiction, analyse a document, provide literary criticism and translate legalese down to English, it's intelligent.
Even just on pure bro-science level, writing database code is not very effeminate, it requires precision!
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