RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
AO3 and FFN are a thing... though I do agree the whole GW/Nintendo 'Total Fanwork Death' policy is unacceptable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
From the Atlantic Council link:
By Mykola Bielieskov
MA in International Relations from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. From 2016 to 2019 he worked at the Institute of World Policy, a Ukrainian NGO. Since October 2019, he has worked at the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the Ukrainian President (Department of Defence Policy).
Naturally he foresees that the Russian offensive will be bloody and that the war must continue. It's underrated just how much of the prestige information environment on foreign policy is Ukrainians, Poles and Baltics on govt payroll producing arguments for why Ukraine should get maximum support to fight on indefinitely.
Now it's "Russia hasn't taken any regional capitals!" or "their advance is too slow". The Ukrainian plan for victory seems to be "outlast Russia", even Bielieskov agrees on this. But since when was a conventional war of attrition with Russia a winning strategy for a much smaller country?
In 2022 Russia wanted Crimea and Donbass, now it's four mainland regions, maybe five. In 2026 will the new talking point be 'now they want 8 regions, we must fight on lest Ukraine be dismembered and left even more of a ruined, broken state, plus the Russians can't be trusted and will attack anyway?' Or maybe just 'Trump needed to send more aid, it's all his fault'. Sunk cost fallacy on an epic, tragic scale, being relentlessly justified with increasingly flimsy rhetoric. First it was the counteroffensive to cut off Crimea and win the war. Then Kursk to provide a valuable bargaining chip in peace talks. And now fighting to delay defeat as long as possible.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
If you're prepared to go in and steal scarves, why not steal from a self-checkout machine? The corporation is not going to miss the $20. But when everyone does it, stores close and we have to go back to cashiers rather than an efficient, human-free experience.
Why not just torrent games for free or get repacks? I'm not totally innocent on this but it's still bad to do even if I'm tempted to say 'oh well the marginal cost of distribution is zero and i probably wasn't going to buy it anyway'. When everyone does it, all we get is AAA slop catering to people too stupid to torrent.
Consequentialism should consider the long-term consequences of behaviours.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
If you're an arthritic, 50 kg woman without a gun, you shouldn't try to enforce rules you and your friends invented the other day on a 200 kg heavyweight boxer with a 20 mm autocannon in his back pocket just because your friends also have big muscles, autocannons, bazookas and miniguns. It puts stress on your relationship and raises tensions.
It's obnoxious behaviour to go 'oh you need insurance to sail in these waters' and 'oh only we provide acceptable insurance, we'll sanction whoever provides insurance'. Sanctions are one thing, trying to mess with freedom of the seas is another, it's like a passive-aggressive blockade albeit 90% passive. This kind of behaviour is how you get your car keyed or your airspace violated.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
It really is that simple: flight speed, payload and range isn't capped at some modest multiple above a falcon but by how much fuel you're prepared to burn and whether you're willing to use serious, atomic rockets.
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous. This should be immediately apparent!
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is. There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit. In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale? And by the way, it clearly is galactic scale in a fairly reasonable timespan. Galactic scale in space, why not give it a couple hundred thousand years? A million years is peanuts in astronomical time, in the movements of galaxies or the evolution of life. You're taking an analogy I selected, not understanding it and then producing mixed contexts while complaining about my single, relevant, assumed context of 'things that matter on Earth to real human beings' as opposed to the 'insanity of exponentials and the universe' which doesn't matter to anyone.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Estonia tried to detain vessel from Russia's shadow fleeet, did not succeed
Why is it that these very small and weak countries in the Baltic are so eager to go all in on 'we hate Russia' and make incidents? Estonia does not have any combat aircraft whatsoever. Their military is roughly equivalent to the Oklahomah national guard, who do actually have some aircraft. This is not really a good position to be trying to seize Russian ships. Seizing other people's ships is cringeworthy behaviour whether it's the Houthis, Estonia or America but Estonia's by far the weakest player.
'Scream hysterically and wave a tiny stick' doesn't seem like a great strategy, I suppose that it's popular domestically.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
What if Vietnam was just because the US govt didn't really care about Vietnam? They cared a lot about Vietnam and it wasn't a small war... but Vietnam doesn't really matter to the US in any direct sense.
Imagine that anyone who protested the Vietnam war was sent straight to prison. Burn your draft card? Straight to prison. Publish unpatriotic journalism? You'd better pray it's only prison.
When a government really cares about winning, they conduct a full mobilization of society, they align the media and everything so it all points in the right direction. Good old fashioned atrocity propaganda, not Jane Fonda.
Now the machinery might not be there to do this anymore, I foresee problems in trying to mobilize zoomer men for gruelling industrial drone war. But it's possible in principle.
Sounds like it's a college/no-kids problem to me. Why didn't she want kids with this super financially stable, nice guy? She mustn't have really loved him. Expensive wedding is also a bad sign. Obviously you know more about this matter.
Sometimes you just roll a bad woman, I think she wasn't the right class for him. There's a certain kind of highly educated woman who just wouldn't divorce a nice guy like that due to how unseemly it would be, who acts rationally (aside from more politics/feels stuff), who's well-off but doesn't need an expensive wedding. There are gradations in the upper middleclass where you find such women. On the other hand, these are the kind who'd never settle with anyone with an MBA, the kind who looks down on investment bankers for being too stupid and greedy since everyone in the social circle is assumed to be rich. Rare, perhaps vanished breed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Violent crime is one thing but who dreams of working on an oil rig? It's not even that outdoorsy, you're not in the forest or on the land.
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere, how does it add anything to what I'm saying?
"In the big picture, everything we do on Earth doesn't matter" is true but it's a pointless thing to say. Things on Earth matter to us.
"Nazi Germany didn't conquer all the way to Ceres, so they're not a threat"
"Climate change isn't going to boil the oceans, so who cares"
"Covid isn't going to turn you into a rage monster from Resident Evil so it's a nothingburger"
Statements by the utterly deranged! But if you complicate it out so that 'biology is really complicated, the immune system is pretty good, epidemics often fizzle out and it's orders of magnitude from causing a zombie apocalypse' it suddenly sounds reasonable even when the realistic stance of the problem looks completely different.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
GPT-4.5 was for creative writing and was mostly being reviewed by coders, since the AI community is mostly coders. There are a few who really liked it and were disappointed when it was taken away but most people never got a chance to use it, understandable with that pricetag attached. Plus the path seems to be scaling test-time compute, not merely scaling model size but scaling in general.
I personally think Dario from Anthropic is more credible on this kind of stuff than Scott, he's been talking about a country of geniuses in a datacentre by those kind of dates. He is at least close to the engineroom on this kind of thing.
I don't speak for Yud but if AI is where it is today in 2040 then I'll be very confused, not to mention him. On twitter he was constantly posting stuff about how rapid progress has been, that's part of his narrative.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
I'm not actually American but in Australia for humanities/law/essay-writing exams, you're effectively rewarded for how many points you can make as well as their quality and I'm pretty confident it's the same there. Maybe you do maths or something where there's only a single answer and simplicity is rewarded, idk...
Two pages seems quite short to me for an essay.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition. You can get a decent fraction of c with antimatter.
Also, there's a huge difference between 'bird', 'propeller plane', 'rocket' and 'atomic rocket' in any realistic sense, with regards to what we're dealing with now. Is superintelligence capable of rewriting the fundamental laws of the universe like a real deity? No. Is that necessary to make vast changes to our lifestyle and existence? Absolutely not, just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
It's underrated just how much academics hate marking exams, they absolutely loathe the dullness of it and also the bad handwriting of students. Exam meta leans towards writing as fast as physically possible to get more onto the paper, which makes things worse.
So academics come up with group presentations and all kinds of other ways to dodge the effort.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
How are are the old paying their taxes in the USA? The US is still in a huge $1.8 trillion budget deficit because of the entitlement spending. Tariffs are not going to produce that much revenue.
I'm all for cancelling the pension and laying waste to the baby boomers but it's not happening in the US or anywhere else until we hit a truly massive crisis. We still live under BOG.
With regard to point 1, I believe in the power of Straight Lines on the graph. Moore's Law and it's corollaries in flops/$ are remarkable, unprecedented achievements that are continuing unto this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_second#Cost_of_computing
This time it's different, digital environments are exceptions to the usual rules on growth. The internet didn't take 200 years to catch on, a computer virus doesn't need months to breed.
Intelligence is a problem that can be approached by 20 watt processors assembled with whatever proteins are lying around and coordinated by extremely lossy, low-bandwidth interlinks. Gigawatts and kilotonnes of liquid-cooled processors should be more than enough to overwhelm the problem.
The thuggishness and inelegance of the present approach feels right to me. We never figured out how birds or bees fly for our own flying machines, we never replicated the efficiency of ants in construction, never achieved symbiosis or oneness with the universe that let us live in harmony with nature.
We smashed flight with oil, aluminium and combustion engines. We paved over the ants with concrete and steel. We exterminate with pesticide. Smashing obstacles with scalable, ugly resources is how you win, not with sleight of hand or some deft intellectual performance. We celebrate the triumph of intellect but rely on leveraging force 98% of the time. Throw rocks at it until it dies, light fires to herd them off a cliff, mobilize enough drafted farmers and produce enough iron swords till you conquer your foes.
Advancing AI by throwing more compute at the problem, more R&D talent making incremental algorithmic improvements in parallel, more and better-sifted data (human or synthetic) and self-play per the Absolute Zero papers is the way to go. I sense that some people (Yann LeCun certainly) are waiting for some fundamental advancement as a sign that we've truly made it, some electric inspirational paradigm-changing moment where we finally know what the hell we're actually doing, understand the secrets of intelligence. But that never worked for chess, we forced it with compute and search, simple scaling techniques. You don't have to understand Go like a grandmaster, just find a way to throw firepower at the problem with reinforcement learning and self play, then you can snap grandmasters like twigs. Nobody understands how LLMs work, you don't need to really understand them to make them.
The hard work is already done, we already found the breakthroughs we need and now just need to apply more inputs to get massively superhuman results but in all areas of human achievement. It really is that simple: flight speed, payload and range isn't capped at some modest multiple above a falcon but by how much fuel you're prepared to burn and whether you're willing to use serious, atomic rockets. We already have very strong AI capabilities in a bunch of diverse sectors - cartoon drawing, coding, mathematics, locating places from images. Scale gets results.
The entirety of modern civilization is premised on the fact that we can dig coal out of the ground and burn it, boiling water and making power - this silly-sounding process scales nicely and lets you dig more coal faster and cheaper. If we can turn power into thought we can hook up our strongest scaling factor into another even more promising scaling factor and the results should be surreally potent. We're already living extremely different lives from the vast majority of our ancestors, AI should absolutely make a huge difference very soon since it works more along digital timeframes than analogue ones. I believe by 2027 the doubters should be silenced one way or another.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Even before ChatGPT many humanities students were super-lazy and didn't bother to do even a very dumbed down amount of work. Nor were they prepared to put even a mild effort into pretending they'd done so. If they ask you to read a huge amount of text, you can just read some of it looking for a question based on that info to ask, ask the question and it'll seem like you've done the reading. But there were many who couldn't even be bothered with that, even when the lecturer tacitly encouraged us to do it.
It was quite awkward when someone from outside uni came in as a guest teacher and expected students to actually do significant amounts of reading for a course.
People go to university as a cultural ritual, I only really learned anything from one unusually hard course.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
I think that American complaints over Trump are warranted but disproportionate, that's why I spent so much of that post comparing to foreign countries.
The Australian government works in a totally responsible, law-abiding, careful and considered way like you're calling for. But the results are a complete disaster and there's no obvious way to fix it. This is paywalled but it tells you the story in the http address.
Productivity is in the doldrums. Energy prices are rising despite the government's promises, the only thing they successfully did is provide subsidies for power to make the price seem lower. All major cities are ludicrously unaffordable and more people are constantly imported to make it even more unaffordable. Industry is a shambles, we're constantly bailing out what little remains due to the terrible energy policy. To top it all off they've proposed unrealized capital gains tax on superannuation, there's nothing they won't stoop to.
And the Labour government that oversaw all of this just got their biggest majority ever for seeming to be less like Trump than Peter Dutton's Liberals... who weren't really like Trump in any significant sense and basically offer the same thing as Labour albeit slightly moderated. There's no way out of this mess.
There are way worse things that could happen to the US than tariffs or Trump, you could have a deepseated economic crisis at a structural level, not a mild stock market shock that's easily undone at the executive level.
The EU loves stable, boring governance. But just being stable and predictable doesn't work very well if you're stably and predictably doing the wrong thing all the time, that's why the US is rich and relevant while the EU is not.
Stability and effectiveness is of course good. Australia did a good job of blocking illegal immigration. Violent crime is still fairly low despite the best efforts of the drug legalizers and policing reformers. But the hierarchy should be:
- Stable and wise (lee quan yew)
- Chaotic but more or less wise (Trump)
- Stable but unwise (George W Bush, Clinton, Obama, EU, Australia)
- Chaotic and unwise (Pol Pot as an extreme example)
Without Trump, there's a decent chance that the net closes and it becomes effectively impossible to contest the deep-seated institutions and lobbies that want to wreck the economy so they can maximize their control and security, turn the US into the EU, shut off any dissent as hate-speech... Before Trump, what legal victories were there where people convinced others to moderate the madness? Were there many such victories? Were they permanent wins or temporary compromises? The net is closing in the EU, they're moving slowly to ban the AFD and any alternative to managed democracy and permanent decline/replacement. Vote poorly in Romania and your election will simply be undone.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts
AI video fixes this. There is no way for women to compete against the outright physically impossible fetishes and perversions you can find on the /gif/ threads. Nor can they compete on convenience, speed or price when it comes to video/photos. Much of the 'texting/relationship simulacrum' stuff is outsourced to the subcontinent anyway, it can easily be outsourced to AI.
And yes, I know that "AI" is still a misnomer, I understand that LLMs are just token predictors, and I think people who believe that any neural net is close to actually "thinking" or becoming self-aware, or that really, what are we but pattern-matching echolaliac organisms? are drinking kool-aid
But you then go on to talk about how its helpful to you, how it can do art and coding and stuff. Doesn't that mean it's thinking? What is thinking if not intellectual labour that produces some kind of useful output?
See the cartoons here: https://x.com/emollick/status/1920700991298572682
How are these not proper newspaper-tier cartoons? It's not just pattern-matching, see the Cthulhu ones. How does that not require some kind of thought? If thought isn't required to make them, then so much the worse for thought. They're more amusing than many actual New Yorker cartoons.
It cannot build a fully functional application (beyond the simplest) by itself, though.
What model are you talking about? When you say ChatGPT, that could be GPT4omini. It could be GPT4o. It could be o3-mini, o1-pro, o4-mini-high, GPT4.5 (RIP). OpenAI does a very good job at confusing people here but there are major differences between 'slop for free' and 'serious compute for the subscribers'.
With a lot of finnagling and wrangling, I can make Sonnet 3.7 produce a fully functional application with a database, logging, UI (admittedly not a fantastic UI), user authentication... It's not exactly simple, maybe 8000 lines of code, some quite long and complex functions. I'm nontechnical. It does need my human wisdom and feedback but nonetheless, it's writing all the code. And while the code isn't perfect, it is fully functional.
I detect a fair bit of warranted snobbishness from those initiated in the tech world about AI. Yes, there are a bunch of idiots making simple apps on localhost:5000 and not even knowing what that means or why their bros can't click the link. Yet there is also unwarranted snobbishness. There are people making real projects with AI alone and earning revenue. See levelsio on twitter, he was making money with his multiplayer plane game thing. It's not a AAA game but it shows that this isn't just a toy.
See also this one-shot coding challenge from gemini, this isn't exactly simple stuff: https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1922126885783281755
It has no way to embed themes and metaphors that echo throughout a book, it has no thematic consistency (often not even tonal consistency)
I observed Sonnet 3.6 inserting themes in a story unprompted, it was a noticeable difference from 3.5. Not amazing themes but themes consistently and consciously referenced nonetheless.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
But rumors are coming out that it's manufacturing sector in panicking, with factories sitting idle and orders drying up.
There have been rumours like this for the last 10 years at least. Remember Evergrande?
Obviously the tariffs hurt the Chinese economy but it's the biggest manufacturer in the world, the biggest trading nation in the world and the biggest economy in the world in terms of production as opposed to accounting tricks. Energy in the US is more expensive than China - higher US GDP! Burger King has been selling burgers at US $1.37 in China, there's a massive price war in just about everything. Lower China GDP! When you use appropriate metrics for economic size, China surpassed the US a long time ago.
Thus I'm sceptical of the China-collapse narrative. Big things are tough and hard to break. COVID hit China pretty hard but they tanked it and moved on without any inflation. Tariffs aren't going to do more economic damage than COVID.
By the time demographic shrinking really kicks in, they'll have a gigantic, automated industrial base and still enjoy a huge pool of STEM talent. Nothing short of losing WW3 is going to stop China.
So of course there will be factories that are hard hit and go out of business. But China is not short of factories, they have huge capacity. During the Great Depression the US was in a very poor state but they were still the biggest economy on the planet. Likewise with China, except they're not in a Great Depression.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization
Since it's being used as a cudgel against anyone who isn't all on board the multiculturalism and diversity express (or a rhetorical device to back up any Israeli foreign policy strategem), then away with it!
The narrative isn't so highly energized because of objective historical reasons: the Mongols celebrate Genghis Khan as a national hero. The Turks and Algerians couldn't care less about the atrocities they committed, slave-trading, slave-raiding and genocide. Mao and Stalin have mixed but vaguely positive receptions in their countries. The Hitler narrative is there to achieve a political result in the contemporary world, to justify the high and growing costs of this system and military adventurism.
Looks like I was clearly wrong with an earlier 'this will probably blow over' Thursday post.
Still, did a cyberattack really take down the grid? India says it's fake news while 'Mashriq news' says it did but wouldn't we be able to see it from space? My Brave AI bot says it was real but I don't think these browserbots are up for wars and the absolute explosion of fake news that comes with it. The beginning of the war in Ukraine was like this too, lots of fantasy.
For those who have twitter accounts, see the discourse on the Chinese PL-15 - it fell out of the sky, it shot down Rafales, it's too short to be a real PL-15, China gave Pakistan the real version not the shitty export version, no they didn't... and the chaos is automated too with convincing and effective Deepseek instances too, I spotted at least one batting for China with a non-trivial follower count.
https://x.com/search?q=PL-15&src=trend_click&vertical=trends
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Subsequent writings are merely of the 'adding more epicycles' kind of truthseeking. First it was literally believing that men were created by God ex nihilo. Then Darwinism came around and showed this wasn't the case. So they just retreat back to 'OK fine evolution is real but God created all things and the individual soul is not produced by material forces'. There's no substantial change to the practical doctrine of blankslatism, they move on just as before with zero regard for skepticism or evidence.
The soul? You may as well go to Pakistan and pursue cutting edge research into the powers of djinn.
Likewise with the Epicurean argument. They created an entire discipline of theodicy to cope with it and still fail. Free will? Natural disasters have nothing to do with free will. And 'free will' itself is becoming more and more of an illusion, we are today capable of creating benign and malevolent digital beings. So too is God. God could've set the median level of aggression lower or altered incentives to produce more sympathy. There is no free will in front of an omnipotent who establishes the context, permits what genes come into existence or what genes even are.
Grand plan? Maybe Satan runs the world and has a grand evil-maxxing plan that tolerates good for greater evil... Or it's just outright incomprehensible. That works just as well.
Here's another one I found:
We are in world that is a state of journeying. For this world in a state of journeying to exist and be self-sustaining, it must follow the laws of nature. I would argue that since these laws are so intimately and intricately related, it would be impossible for a journeying world to exist if just one minor thing was changed. That is, these laws of nature are the only way in which this journeying world can naturally sustain itself. If God were to change just one law, everything else would be thrown off and it would become unsustainable. In his work, Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, has discovered that if during the Big Bang, the gravitational constant or weak force constant varied from their values by an exceedingly small fraction (higher or lower) – one part in 10^50 then either the universe would have suffered a catastrophic collapse or would have exploded throughout its expansion.
An omnipotent God can write the laws of Nature, Genesis describes this. The universe could run on the fuzzy principles of a human dream, not thermodynamics. You could have a physics of wishing or Daoist cultivation to immortality, Aristotelian physics or Harry Potter. All of that is simple for an omnipotent.
No matter what they try, the Epicurean trilemma still snuffs them out. And this is the key thing, the question of mindset I bring up at the start. They don't like the Epicurean Trilemma and so come up with some comforting story that fails if you look at it too closely, they never review their priors about the nature of God.
They do all kinds of things, plus there's Singapore Airlines like how the UAE has Emirates as their airline.
More options
Context Copy link