RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
The British, French and Americans didn't actually adopt and implement social Darwinism, they had 'the white man's burden' and 'the civilizing mission'. Kipling wrote it to encourage America to colonize even though he makes it out to be a thankless, exhausting burden.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
That's critically different from actual fascists who would say 'wtf is this, we're here to extract as much as we can and couldn't care less about the welfare of these subhumans'. The Nazis wouldn't have had any problems with Ghandi, they'd just keep shooting until the Indians were under control.
The native Americans weren't subjugated to eliminate them or permanently other them, they were subjugated to integrate them as Americans, they got treaties and reservations. The Australians went around massacring Aboriginals in an ad-hoc bottom-up way because it was easy but there was never any actual policy to get rid of them, the closest they got is 'the arc of history bends towards us, no big deal if they wither away but we won't actually make it happen, we'll do weird things like them away from their parents and raise them as our own'.
Not social-darwinist, full-bore racism, it was wishy-washy 'civilizing' racism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Nobody even seems that interested in what fascism actually is.
Is Miller really a fascist because he wants to enforce immigration laws? Surely not, otherwise we would have to define Eisenhower of Operation Wetback fame as a fascist.
IMO, fascism is a combination of militarism, imperialism and racism within a social darwinist worldview. Not merely 'I don't like these backwater savages' but 'it's our job to subjugate them in the short term and maybe get rid of them outright, we need to tile the world with us and ours'. Nazism is fascism + anti-semitism.
Also, all violence is political to some extent. If a thief (poor) robs someone (rich) then there's a political angle to it. Some leftists would say it's justified, especially if its a big corporation. The whole point of the police is administering violence to baddies, how much violence and who is a baddy, that's a political question. Politics is about power and violence is the most important kind of power. Challenging the sovereignty and values of the state is very political violence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The joke is that the US is already a mess from the perspective of outsiders. Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards.
I have a copy of 'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry', the entire book is examples of the non-stop American race-hysteria and tragicomedic, farcical levels of injustice and dysfunction that your country tries (with great success) to reframe as correct and enlightened diversity, while the actual Americans make workarounds and scuttle around anxiously referring to the issue via euphemisms or trying (for the fiftieth time) wimpy methods that failed the last 49 times.
What is this if not a backwards society? I view it as such, that's my opinion, based on my first-hand observations of dysfunction (drug addicts shooting up in public), observations via video, observation of American political rhetoric and observation of statistics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
You can't have a wrong opinion, that's not how it works. You can only be wrong about facts like 'X is richer than Y', not opinions like 'I don't like X'.
the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy
White Americans are British and European in ethnic background. There is no 'native urge' in Europe that does not also exist in America, only social, economic and political differences. Going on a boat did not create a new people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
They can keep telling themselves that
Americans don't seem to believe this today but there are many outsiders who visit America and really dislike the country, not out of jealousy or poverty but genuine dislike for how society works. This was before Trump too.
New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco... they came, they saw, they don't like it.
Europe is stagnating. Why is this? In large part its due to US influence, US NGOs, US foreign policy. For better and for worse, the US leads the West. Yet there's this kind of schizo American attitude about their role in the world.
One day America is the best and greatest country ever, leader of the free world. The next day the lazy Europeans won't pay for their own defence (suppression of Russia) - they need to buy more weapons from America. Oh and go deal with Russia by yourselves, we're not interested in that anymore. Now it's time to bomb the Middle East and stir up some chaos there. Next, pivot to Asia - the vassals must enforce sanctions against China. Who cares whether this is in their economic interests. Australia needs to buy some submarines (we won't actually hand them over though because after taking their money to build the docks, we're still too clueless to build the damn subs). After that, everyone needs to copy American cultural norms and racial hysteria. Import some sub-Saharans, get some diversity (the refugees from our retarded wars we make you join will do for starters). Copy everything down quickly, you need to be woke... no now you need to be anti-woke. And why are you so poor, unlike us?
Europe and other US allies may well have retarded and despicable governments but the US has a special, higher level of responsibility for how it wields power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The joke is that the US is already a mess from the perspective of outsiders. Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards. Any actual improvement is so unimaginable to Americans they come up with these warped eschatological narratives about civil war or apocalypse, or they twist themselves around to see this weird lifestyle as normal and any change as a threat. Like a nation of people who tunnel and dig in refuge from a self-inflicted disaster, only to be dazzled and frightened when they see the sun or feel fresh air, rebelling against surface.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
People here like to sneer at litrpg as slop - that's way out of date:
https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1976740387344814365
A new type of entertainment called 'vertical drama' has emerged: shows filmed in vertical format to suit smartphone users. Each episode lasts between two and five minutes, and after a few teaser episodes you have to pay to watch the rest. The dramas are usually taken from popular web novels. A title can be produced in less than a week, and the requirements for the actors are basic: they just have to look good on camera. Nuance and subtlety are the preserve of artistic films; verticals need as many flips and twists as possible. Production is often sloppy. If a line is deemed problematic by viewers, the voice is simply muffled, without any attempt to cut or reshoot. The stories are sensational. One that has got lots of viewers excited is the supposedly forthcoming Trump Falls in Love with Me, a White House Janitor. According to an industry report, vertical drama viewers now number 696 million, including almost 70 per cent of all internet users in China. Last year the vertical market worth 50.5 billion yuan (€5 billion), surpassing movie box office revenue for the first time. It is projected to reach 85.65 billion yuan by 2027.
See this is where AI is going to make insane profits, disrupting/expanding the immensely lucrative but radically unprestigious media formats you never knew existed. Just a few minutes, no need for fancy acting or cinematography, just stimulus in your face. I bet this will come to the West too and make Netflix look like a joke. Maybe it already has.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Klaus Schwab's nightmarish visage emerges on the projector screen, staring down on you like a god from on high
You vill enjoy fresh food from local stores rather than chemical slop from Walmart.
You vill have a healthy waistline.
You vill have a walkable neighbourhood with trees and park amenities.
You vill commute via bus, train or ferry in safety from lowlives - ve have dispersed them
And... you vill be happy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
They do police outflows but that's part of their managed float of the currency, it's not freely floating. You have to maintain control on money if you want a tethered currency. It's all part of the plan, they want a cheap currency to have more competitive industries in world markets and to aid their industrial goals.
They want Chinese investors investing in Chinese industry to develop the country more. But Chinese industry is struggling with a very competitive market with razor thin margins (see the Chinese share market's poor returns), investors would much rather buy Sydney real estate which constantly goes up in value. There's this tension between government/national interest and private interests.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Smart leadership solves this.
China doesn't explicitly have a policy against offshoring (though they have been trying to keep India from getting the tools and capital to compete), they have a strategy of fostering industry in their own country. They have smart leadership.
It's not just offshoring that matters, what about foreign countries paying large sums for key workers to come over and share skills? China did this to South Korean shipbuilding when they were in a slump, paid the best people to come over for a few years. And now they have the biggest shipbuilding sector in the world.
And why is offshoring a thing? Energy costs are lower, environmental regulations less severe. Smart leaders would lower the cost of energy and industrial inputs by relaxing the most onerous renewable/environmental/planning restrictions. Smart leaders would make the labour market more flexible (US hasn't done too badly here compared to other rich countries), would prevent ridiculous anomalies like caps on doctor training, would invest more in R&D, would modernize infrastructure, would shamelessly steal other people's IP as they see fit.
Individual policies are ineffective if the leadership is stupid. Subsidies just encourage inefficiency and corruption without discipline. Tariffs can be very harmful for imported components and cause uncertainty if they're raised and lowered willy-nilly.
Subsidizing R&D can also just result in people relabelling things as R&D, reducing energy costs can encourage inefficiency... Everything has a 'perverse incentives' evil twin. Sanctions on exporting sensitive technologies can just be busted or third-party routed around, as the US has discovered with AI chips. Any smart person could tell you that it's dumb to sell rare earth mines off to China, whether it's 1995 or 2025. But smart people do not run the US government.
Individual policies must be well-implemented and precisely targeted by a responsive, dynamic bureaucracy in accordance with a coherent long-term vision. It's a crisis of intelligence, not policy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Later on in the thread it brings up the closing of Mountain Pass for environmentalist reasons, one of the richest rare-earth mines in the world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Surely Trump backs down here. US MIC hard-needs rare earths, can't do without them.
I think this is a targeted blow against the defence and EV industries, not against chips or electronics generally. Chips have only a tiny amount of rare earths. Only things with Big Motors or Exotic Electronics like military hardware are really affected. HDDs should be fine if we recycle more, F-35s on the other hand are in real trouble.
Yet another huge environmentalist error: https://x.com/skepticaliblog/status/1912469666272059526
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
IMO AI has a lot to do with how you prompt it, you need to give it the necessary docs and then do some troubleshooting with it. It won't usually one-shot a complex issue but it can eventually nail it... which is exactly what that guy said I guess.
I guess it's my 'lived experience' that it works eventually and there's not much else I can say.
Also, even if it's not helping you much as a researcher, is what you do representative? How many people work with tomography as opposed to spreadsheet jobs or just plain old programming? How many people even know what tomography is? It can be simultaneously true that it's not helpful for you but is for many others enough for it to not be a bubble. Terence Tao seems to find it useful for his rather abstract work.
only under the pure assumption that it happens, no implication meant as to the probability - if you think it hasn't happened yet, roughly how long until it does?
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.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d 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!
10d 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!
11d 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!
12d 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!
13d 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!
14d 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!
15d 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!
15d 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.
All good points.
I skipped over the economic angle and indeed fascist economics is significant, it's all about advancing national interests rather than pure marketism or collectivism as you say. I think the key element is the demographic part though, fascism isn't about making the country rich but about making the people strong and populous too, Mussolini had his 'Battle for Births' and as usual, the Nazis and Japan did a better job at it with their pro-natal campaigns.
While Italy wasn't terribly racist by Axis standards, they did heavily suppress Libya and went in very hard against Ethiopia with gas and such. But it's hard to be that racist if you can't actually conquer very much. They wanted to resettle Italians to Libya and Ethiopia and parts of Dalmatia but didn't get around to it with wartime difficulties.
Yeah China's an odd one, they've got the economics but not the foreign posture. Rhetorically, diplomatically, they're still third-worldist and anti-imperialist.
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