RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Ukraine seems to be more and more desperate for peace. They seem to have given up on making gains in the primary theatre in the east and gone after Kursk instead, looking to use it as a bargaining tool for the short-term.
However it takes two to tango and the Russians have repeatedly indicated they're not interesting in negotiating until the goals of the SMO are achieved. Presumably this means annexing all of their claimed provinces, demilitarizing the country and installing some kind of new government in Ukraine for the 'denazification' angle. I expect this to happen. When a great power is fully committed to defeating a middle power, there's not going to be a ceasefire, they'll win. Everyone agrees the Russians have more POWs than Ukraine, presumably they must have inflicted more casualties. They do have more firepower and more manpower.
Possibly there's some kind of contingency where NATO troops enter should the Ukrainian army disintegrate, as Macron has threatened. At that point, everything is up in the air. Then this war would truly become like Korea, where we have two great powers at war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Just walk? You can also use a bus, which is complicated if you're bringing a bike.
Of course retaining independence is valuable but if you're giving up significant amounts of territory where much of the population lived, then it has to be considered a defeat. Finland was probably wise to fight and lose. But they still lost. That should be the expected outcome.
There is a possibility of an unarmed man inflicting significant harm on a big, strong attacker.
But this is not a general rule, it's a special exception.
Many, many, many Ukrainians would be alive if this principle was fully understood by leading figures in their government. Russia is not a totalitarian communist regime. It's not significantly more corrupt than Ukraine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
If something requires you to wear a helmet while you do it, then it's hardly safe.
Exercise is nice to have but unnecessary. Obesity is a dietary problem, not an exercise problem.
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!
5mo ago
A good 2% of world GDP goes into negative sum, 'socially useless' military spending. Just because something is socially useless it doesn't follow that it's wise or practical to do away with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo 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!
6mo ago
But the logic does hold. If you're an atheist materialist, why don't you believe that we are in a simulation? That's a perfectly materialist conclusion based on principles we can observe. Bostrom's a pretty smart guy.
Deep down Christians know that their prayers aren't being answered, they can tell that prayer alone won't get them what they want and produce all this cope about how you should be praying to be a better person rather than any concrete outcome. Nor are they using telescopes to look for heaven, somehow they know they won't find it. Still they find some reassurance in the rehashed schizo-prophecies surrounding a 2000-year dead Jew and hope that some day, their prophecies might be resolved and good things will happen. After they die good things they hope good things will happen. And singing hymns is fun.
Well, simulationists can also hope that good things might happen. We might die and wake up from this dream as transcendent, posthuman beings. It's not a hard kind of knowledge, we could be NPCs and be deleted. But there is more weight behind this abstract hope than in theirs, for a certain kind of rational person.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I believe that most American food, even seemingly normal food, is full of weird chemicals.
Brown bread with seeds that goes stale in a few days is better than the kind of cheaper, longer-lasting white bread. Why is white bread so much cheaper and longer-lasting? Because it's full of strange ingredients. I don't know what kind of bread you're getting of course but just look at what Walmart puts in theirs. This was the first American bread that came up in my search: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-White-Round-Top-Bread-20-oz/10315355?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1200
Enriched Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil, Salt, Vital Wheat Gluten, Dough Conditioners (Mono- & Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid), Calcium Propionate (to Retain Freshness), Soy Flour, Encapsulated Sorbic Acid (Sorbic Acid, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Mono- and Diglycerides) (to Retain Freshness), Yeast Nutrients (Calcium Sulfate, Ammonium Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Soy Lecithin.
Likewise, there's cheese and there's cheese. Cheese can be minimally processed or intensively processed.
Some common ultra-processed products are carbonated soft drinks; sweet, fatty or salty packaged snacks; candies (confectionery); mass produced packaged breads and buns, cookies (biscuits), pastries, cakes and cake mixes; margarine and other spreads; sweetened breakfast ‘cereals’ and fruit yoghurt and ‘energy’ drinks; pre-prepared meat, cheese, pasta and pizza dishes; poultry and fish ‘nuggets’ and ‘sticks’; sausages, burgers, hot dogs and other reconstituted meat products; powdered and packaged ‘instant’ soups, noodles and desserts; baby formula; and many other types of product. See table 1, below
Industrial breads made only from wheat flour, water, salt and yeast are processed foods, while those whose lists of ingredients also include emulsifiers or colours are ultra-processed. Plain steel-cut oats, plain corn flakes and shredded wheat are minimally processed foods, while the same foods are processed when they also contain sugar, and ultra-processed if they also contain flavours or colours.
It all depends in what's in those corn tortilla chips. I reckon it would be processed, even ultra-processed depending on ingredients.
Based on the search results, here are the ingredients commonly used to make corn tortillas in the USA:
Masa Harina: A type of corn flour made from nixtamalized corn, which is dried and ground into a fine powder. Brands like Masienda, Maseca, and Bob’s Red Mill are popular choices. Water: Warm water is used to rehydrate the masa harina and “bloom” its flavor. Salt (optional): Some recipes include salt to bring out the flavor of the corn. Some store-bought corn tortilla brands in the USA may also include additional ingredients, such as:
Cellulose Gum: A thickening agent used to improve texture and shelf life. Guar Gum: A thickening agent used to enhance texture and prevent drying out. Amylase: An enzyme used to break down starches and improve texture. Propionic Acid: A preservative used to extend shelf life. Benzoic Acid: A preservative used to prevent spoilage. Phosphoric Acid: A preservative used to maintain freshness.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
You're reducing your risk of death and lowering stress. You're saving a little time.
I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, neither of which require much attention.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
We're into fairly advanced mathematics now, things are moving so quickly.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-matches-the-abilities-of-the-best-math-olympians/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The former.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Russia is a high performer, not the best but still clearly in the top category. The US was relying on their spacecraft for the ISS at one point (which Russia helped to make) plus they produce a wide range of advanced technological products - drones, jets, tanks, warships, nuclear reactors. There are little robots transporting food and parcels on the streets of Moscow. Ukraine is similarly a high performer, also possessing advanced industry, they exported an aircraft carrier to China back in the day.
The whole 'Nigeria with snow' argument is profoundly silly. How hard would it be for the US or any major power to wreck Nigeria? Is anyone really worried about Nigeria? How do Nigerian industries affect the world, what ramifications do decisions in Lagos have on anything? Now, how about Russia?
Colombia is not white, it's 50% mestizo, 26% white, the rest being black or indigenous according to estimates.
entirety of the Balkans
Not amazing but still pretty rich and capable all things considered. Serbia is fine, they manufacture cars and pharmaceuticals. The whole 'former Ottoman Empire' part of Europe is less developed and orderly than one might expect from Europeans but it's not a barren gulf of civilization. That's what happens if you have non-European input into a country, you get less European output.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I agree, one can also see elements of the pre-WW1 crisis slide ('22 war in Ukraine, '23 Israel war, '25 Iran-Israel conflict), a gradually heightening sense of hysteria about foreign threats and this looming drama of '27 being the year when it all kicks off: AI and China-Taiwan.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Well it is a much bigger airstrike than the others. One hellfire from a drone represents maybe 100,000th of the resources invested in this one.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Highly doubt that Ukraine could inflict significant civilian casualties in Russia with drones. It takes thousands of tonnes of incendiaries to ignite a big city-killing firestorm. Plus modern buildings are harder to burn down.
They were basically dropping nuclear weapon's worth of conventional explosives on Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden in 1943 and 1945, especially when you account for how much nuke energy is lost going up into the sky, many smaller bombs are more efficient in energy terms.
But obviously Russia has the upper hand here, as you say.
I would say that the lawyer is prestigious but the consultant is not, as mentioned above. Nobody is making songs about how they want to fuck a McKinsey consultant (not in that sense, anyway)!
Plus there are gradations. There's a certain type of 'dodgy real-estate developer phenotype' lawyer that would raise alarm bells.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
From wikipedia: Around half of all trips in the Netherlands are made by car, 25% by bicycle, 20% walking, and 5% by public transport
2 km is easy walking distance anyway, I walked about that far getting to school as a child.
Contrary to all the people in this thread saying I have no experience of bikes, I have a friend used to be really keen on them and commuted by bike. However being out on the road with all the multi-tonne death machines and fumes was not his idea of a good time, so now he just takes public transport.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
they will come up with ways to automate away research or engineering tasks
This is already happening. Papers have been published on it! This is partly why the AI safety people start to sound so deranged, because people are confusing reality with science fiction, not the other way around.
Research and engineering is being automated, piece by piece. R1 can write helpful attention kernels: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/automating-gpu-kernel-generation-with-deepseek-r1-and-inference-time-scaling/
Also consider this paper:
Many promising-looking ideas in AI research fail to deliver, but their validation takes substantial human labor and compute. Predicting an idea's chance of success is thus crucial for accelerating empirical AI research, a skill that even expert researchers can only acquire through substantial experience. We build the first benchmark for this task and compare LMs with human experts. Concretely, given two research ideas (e.g., two jailbreaking methods), we aim to predict which will perform better on a set of benchmarks. We scrape ideas and experimental results from conference papers, yielding 1,585 human-verified idea pairs published after our base model's cut-off date for testing, and 6,000 pairs for training. We then develop a system that combines a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 with a paper retrieval agent, and we recruit 25 human experts to compare with. In the NLP domain, our system beats human experts by a large margin (64.4% v.s. 48.9%). On the full test set, our system achieves 77% accuracy, while off-the-shelf frontier LMs like o3 perform no better than random guessing, even with the same retrieval augmentation. We verify that our system does not exploit superficial features like idea complexity through extensive human-written and LM-designed robustness tests. Finally, we evaluate our system on unpublished novel ideas, including ideas generated by an AI ideation agent. Our system achieves 63.6% accuracy, demonstrating its potential as a reward model for improving idea generation models. Altogether, our results outline a promising new direction for LMs to accelerate empirical AI research.
Are there caveats on this? Yes. But are AIs running AI research hilarious? No. Nothing about this is funny or deserving of casual dismissal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I wouldn't know, I've been using openrouter. It's a pretty significant shift, should be able to eyeball it if you're doing creative tasks.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
The shameless Han Chinese even boast that the Manchus were benevolent masters
They did keep taxes low. The administration was actually underfunded, causing considerable corruption as officials found ways to supplement their paltry incomes.
Anyway, pre-British India was also under foreign rule and had been for some time, when it wasn't a fragmented mess.
China is a rare exception for not getting smashed by Europeans, never being part of a non-Chinese empire. Yuan, Qing - sounds pretty Chinese to me. They weren't Han dynasties but they were Chinese. They took their administrative practices from Chinese tradition: exams, meritocracy, eunuchs, they used Chinese language, they were Chinese in character.
India got conquered by much more foreign foreigners, firstly by various Muslims and then by the Mughals, then by the British. None of them are significantly Indian in their origins or nature. Islam isn't Indian and Britain is almost as far from Britain as you can get in civilizational terms, in religion, language, customs, everything.
Anyway, history is second to contemporary affairs where China is absolutely mauling India in every area of competition besides 'influence in Washington'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Lab leak is the general consensus, despite great efforts from certain parts of the scientific community to bury it. "Scientists find that scientists (often them specifically) were not responsible" isn't credible at this point, not after a frankly staggering amount of active deception from those who claimed to speak for the scientific community: https://archive.md/8Fsv2#selection-5159.0-5163.1
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo 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!
1mo 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.
Maybe she just has really low ability in maths but has otherwise fine working memory and similar.
Some people are like that.
And she can just use AI for maths.
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