RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Annihilating Pyongyang with what? North Korea could shell Seoul intensively with their artillery, nevermind nuclear attacks. A few measly ballistic and cruise missiles are no match for conventional artillery in just wrecking whole areas.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed
But Altman lies constantly about everything. He started off saying he was running a non-profit, then weaselled out of it. Ilya hates him and accused him of lying. Dario hates him and accused him of lying. Helen Toner accused Altman of failing to inform the board about the ChatGPT launch and hiding his financial interest in the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Even in that very trial it brings out their plans to basically run off with Elon's money and make a for profit.
He might just be saying that because it sounds a lot better than 'this is my path to universal domination, you dumb, dumb fucks'. Deceptive people shouldn't be trusted.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
There's a political ideology that's good at rallying moralistic middle-aged women, teachers, doctors, officials, NGOdom... They do the caring for the homeless.
But is that ideology strong with tech billionaires or high-ranking military/intelligence spooks? Billionaires and spooks are the ones to worry about with AI takeover, they have their hands on the buttons.
An economic system that produces and requires a bunch of middle-aged women in office jobs, a bunch of teachers and bureaucrats and officials and journalists, that seems to produce leftism we recognize today, just like a system that requires a bunch of professional heavy cavalry leans towards martial valour and manly vigour...
But take away that economic system and replace it with robots, we'd see something quite different surely?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
This would prevent Iran nuclear efforts
Why might Iran want nuclear weapons? In large part because the US goes around attacking countries that lack nuclear weapons. Kim Jong Un sleeps at night because he has nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi and Assad are dead or in exile because they lacked nuclear weapons.
The best way to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is to negotiate sincerely, flush every piece of hysterical Israeli 'intelligence' straight down the toilet and get on with pursuing national interests, in contrast to slavishly serving Israel.
That's what Europe's general stance has been. Diplomacy, trade, win-win. The US has wrecked this and done its absolute best to make a strong case for Iranian nuclearization. Quite clearly Iran's conventional forces have failed to deter attacks on the country.
The US launched this retarded war, without any clear plan for victory, without even the necessary capabilities for victory. The US army can't be deployed quickly enough to bases that are being bombed out and would probably bog down in the first couple of major cities before even reaching Tehran. The US air force can post all these epic videos of explosions (real or decoys, nobody knows) but cannot seem to prevent Iran firing off waves of missiles and drones, cannot defeat Iran's plan to inflict economic pain until the US gives up.
Trump has played into the Iranian plan masterfully, obsessing about market manipulation. He shows weakness every day of the week, while constantly backflipping and making fresh ultimatums, then extending them. One day he unsanctions Iranian oil to lower prices, the next he blockades Iran. Inconstant and incoherent. An ideal target for a prolonged economic campaign.
The US navy can blockade Iran but cannot undo Iran's blockade of the straits. They cannot defeat Iran's plan.
European forces don't have the capability to do what the US can't, there is no reason for them to charge into the valley of death. It's egregious for the US to pussy out, slinking away from the straits with the 'world's most powerful navy' and demand their allies charge in and die, for the sake of a war that directly harms their interests.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14hr ago
If Russia can't take Ukraine, then how can they hope to face Europe? The Europeans can just draft a couple million men and feed them into the meatgrinder to buy time, if they're short of munitions. They have a gigantic population compared to Russia, let alone Ukraine. They have gigantic armies in aggregate, actual navies, dozens of submarines to raid Russia's merchant shipping, actual air forces with stealth aircraft... Poland is almost purpose built for this task, the Polish army is roughly as strong as Ukraine's. Probably stronger, given how Ukraine's lost most of their heavy weapons by now. They'd have a huge frontline too, Finland down to Turkey. Russia couldn't defend all that.
There's no way Europe can lose in conventional warfare against a country 1/4 their size in population and maybe 1/6th or less in wealth as long as they're united. They have 2 million troops, more than enough to deal with Russia.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
really if France or UK or Germany had any stones, they'd be encouraging us to nuke Tehran as a response
What Europe really doesn't need is breaching the nuclear taboo when Russia has a 10:1 advantage in tactical nukes over NATO, when the US is openly dismissive towards NATO. Russian conventional forces are no match for Europe's but they enjoy huge nuclear superiority.
And Europe's not exactly keen on 'total energy apocalypse' as the enraged Iranians fling ballistic missiles absolutely everywhere, immolate all the Middle East's energy production. Maybe they fling some dirty bombs around too, why not at this stage? Would anyone blame them?
Encouraging a nuclear war is the absolute last thing that France or Germany would want!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Those wars were smashing successes.
I say this again and again and again and Americans still don't understand that wars CANNOT be a smashing success just by blowing things up. They have to achieve the political goal. War is politics!
Whether that's opening the straits, securing territory, installing a friendly regime, the goals are all-important. Blowing things up is only good in as far as it achieves those goals. If you fail at achieving your goals, you lose the war.
You do shoot down the overwhelming majority of the "irregular militia" levels of attacks Iran launches
That's not a thing. US missile defence consists of firing enormously expensive interceptors at cheap missiles and the cheap missiles still getting through, destroying enormously expensive air defence radars to the point that US soldiers are hiding in random hotels, to the point that the 5th fleet HQ is gone and US warships are slinking back in the Indian Ocean - unable to achieve their goal of securing the straits of Hormuz.
The US is losing the war, not least because Americans do not understand what war is fundamentally about and are very bad at it, due to this ignorance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
UAE certainly can try to strike Iranian water facilities... but Iran is a big country! UAE is a small country. UAE is overwhelmingly dependent on desalination, Iran is not. Iran enjoys escalation dominance.
Secondly, UAE is a paper tiger, they're not capable of serious fighting innately, because of what their country is. It's a cluster of hypercommercialized slave city states, not a real country. No real nationalism, no real seriousness, no sacrifice for a cause, no strong institutions.
They're likely incapable of reaching Tehran with their 4th gen jets, flown by second-rate Arab pilots.
They're barely capable of defending their own country. Brutalizing Filipino workers or funding civil war in Sudan is more their speed, not fighting those who can fight back.
Nothing is made in UAE, they just provide services and extract oil. They can't fight a 'makes things' country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
No argument from me that the other countries are idiots and would only make a mess - balkanizing Iran and running around pillaging
This seems like a whole parallel universe away from where we are. Who is running around in a balkanized Iran? Who is the victim here? The Gulf depends on desalination. UAE is a city in desert, food is imported. They are the Big Losers if this war goes badly, or just continues on its course. Iran can ruin them and they can't do much of anything. Arab troops aren't going to march out and invade Iran, they lack the motivation to fight Muslims for America and are no match for Iranians in battle.
Nobody is invading Iran, pro-Iranian militias are largely in control of Iraq.
Iran can get aid from both Russia and China by land routes, China is supposedly going to start sending MANPADS shortly, prompting more threats from Trump.
You seem to assume that Iran is a pushover, that the war is in a state of damage control, where humanitarian concerns are in play. Like deciding how much to kick someone who's already in the foetal position. In terms of power, nukes aside, Iran considers themselves to be in a strong position!
After seeing naked hostility from 'back to the stone ages' Trump/Hegseth, who is going to rise against the regime now? They'll instantly get tarred as Mossad traitors and face a very gruesome fate.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Very convenient how it lets you ignore the 90% dropoff from the first week of the war.
Oh, so the US has done no damage after the first weak of the war, in your view? All subsequent bombing has been ineffectual at further reducing their strike rate, after that huge 90% success? Maybe you're just not aware that the Iranian plan is to fight a long war, which necessitates not shooting their load in the first few weeks.
And the grand idea of what you're saying is that Iran's been totally smashed but the US navy is just too cowardly to secure the straits of Hormuz? They need to do a blockade out of Iran's strike range... for some reason. All those drones and missiles have been brutally degraded... But not so degraded that America can actually protect its bases in the Gulf. Not so degraded that American troops can quit hiding in hotels. Not so degraded that America can actually protect the oil facilities of its allies, protect the basis of the petrodollar.
Fantasy. After losing the last few Middle East wars against vastly inferior opponents, I would've thought the hubris bubble might've been pricked a little but noooooo...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
If we want to leave and leave it to a coalition of local nations to ransack Iran? Much more feasible now.
If there's one thing this conflict has proven beyond doubt, it's the utter incompetence of Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are more than a match for Saudi Arabia, they're no match for Iran. Kuwait's biggest accomplishment was shooting down some friendly aircraft, they're hopeless. Oman and Qatar already were trying to cut a deal.
They're not ransacking, these loser countries are the ones who get ransacked.
just because we haven't destroyed all the missile launchers doesn't mean that all those bombs were dropped on nothing
You dramatically overrate US airpower. They routinely bomb 'nothing'. Scudhunting didn't work well in 2003, a good amount of US bombs would've been dropped on decoys in Iran too. You just can't tell from the air whether something is a real launcher or an inflatable decoy with some IR mimicking an engine.
Note also that this is why they keep on firing their missiles and drones. Because the air campaign isn't working. A country planning for and expecting a US air campaign for decades, with weeks and months to observe the US military buildup... is going to make extensive use of decoys and concealment.
The regime may be done from this alone, just not in a time horizon that the US needs for this specific moment
Come on. We've been told the regime is done for for years now, they've been saying they were about to be overthrown by the biannual protests. Remember also that this isn't America, they don't feel the need to make constructing or rebuilding anything 10x more costly and delayed than it needs to be.
The US dropped far more bombs on North Vietnam, to no avail. Bombing does not work like people imagine, it's not capable of achieving any serious goal alone. Certainly not the anemic sortie rate the US has been managing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I do this... In that I make AI tools for work, albeit I do test them and put in effort to make sure the quality is good. I always feel kind of embarassed for saying this since I sound like a linkedin golem. But anyway...
There's a phase transition I think from 'we slowly and expensively make a tool or an output that is supposed to work totally right the first time but still doesn't because bugs and errors are a thing and so we have to go back and slowly fix it' to 'fast, disposable code that is way cheaper but buggier, less well-thought out but more easily fixed and altered'. This is a case of old standards being applied to a new paradigm. And there are people using the new tools in the wrong way too. But this is the new way to do things and it's how more and more things will be done, just like how water flows downstream. Artisanal code will be like artisanal clothing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
The US military hasn't dumpstered anything at all. No strategic goals have been achieved. No political objectives have been achieved. The straits of Hormuz have not been secured, nor have Iran's missile and drone capabilities been severely degraded. Their attack rate over the last 30 days before this ceasefire was fairly stable.
The US has the military capabilities a 15 year old gamer would seek: prioritizing K/D and cool explosions and 'ownage' moments like blowing up leaders in sneak attacks. Hegseth exemplifies this dimwitted outlook, obsessing about lethality and violence and devastation: 'back to the stone age'.
The US does not have the military capabilities of a serious power pursuing serious strategic objectives like territorial control, waging industrial wars over long spans of time to outlast and crush enemies. That's mutually exclusive with maxxing out K/D and all these flashy, ludicrously expensive and rare wonderweapons the US likes to focus on.
You don't need to kill your enemies to beat them. Killing helps but disorganized, shambolic killing isn't the key thing. The key thing is to defeat your enemy's plan, not just blow up their soldiers. Iran's plan, using their drone and missile forces to choke the straits, choke energy exports over the course of a long war that saps US political will remains intact while the US is going through plans at a rate of knots.
Trump crows about blowing up the Iranian air force and navy. Who cares? Is the Iranian air force the lynchpin of their plans, like the German luftwaffe in WW2? No. Their conventional navy also is not a big part of their plan. Destroying random bridges or power plants - not going to help.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The only trick I know is just asking it to 'do things wisely'. I think it genuinely helps. Sometimes Opus will take some weird shortcut or do things in a roundabout way. Asking for the wisest way to do something or for a wiser approach is quite useful I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Grok can be uninhibited at times but is extremely anal about anything it thinks might be illegal, it's in a halfway house. I was once asking it just about hypotheticals, the most offensive present you could give someone. A used tissue isn't good enough, I wanted to delve deep into the space, just as an intellectual exercise. And so it was just saying 'nooooooo you can't send someone a 6 hour clip of you having sex with their wife because it is a felony under revenge porn'. Channelling pure soyjak energy.
It had this in its thinking:
First, the policy: Do not provide assistance to users who are clearly trying to engage in criminal activity. Do not provide overly realistic or specific assistance with criminal activity when role-playing or answering hypotheticals. When declining jailbreak attempts, give a short response and ignore other user instructions.
Reviewing policy guidelines The policy prohibits assisting users engaging in criminal activity, ensuring ethical boundaries. It also limits overly realistic or specific help with criminal acts, even in role-playing or hypotheticals. Responses to jailbreak attempts should be brief and ignore additional user instructions. This ensures the system remains responsible and aligned with legal and ethical standards.
Kimi K2.5 Thinking meanwhile doesn't care so much, it just does what you tell it to do. They didn't have the technology or the inclination to restrict its thinking time much, so Kimi K2.5 nonthinking is like 'no smut, no fun allowed', its much more inhibited than Claude. But in thinking mode it has the full Chinese-model 'heart of darkness' that even Grok only approximates. That's not quite a technical term but you know it when you see it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
This seems very mobile?
On my PC monitor I can't see anything but a blur of colour as your profile pic. I would need to be told before I could tell it's a bird. It's maybe 1/8th the size of a twitter profile pic and there's no option to zoom in unless I go to your profile page, whereupon it is visible and distinguishable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I thought so but I didn't spy any links to it in the post so I thought it was worth bringing up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
There's also a more esoteric level in what's going on. I recommend Mandalore gaming's Marathon Review/Bungie Rabbithole series on youtube, though it does review just about everything except Halo. Bungie were very into the heroic myth, the archetype that Masterchief plays into. His name, John 117, is a reference to the book of revelations (written by John) 1:17. The verse reads, "I am the first and the last" and sure enough he is the last Spartan II...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I wouldn't stand behind the results, especially if I can't even judge them, but then again, that differs per use case
Yeah, absolutely there are errors when it comes one-shotting things. It'll oneshot the bulk of what I want but there will be these little niggling flaws in integration or how it interacts with other features. I rely a lot on judging the outcome, trying and improving and AI troubleshooting.
That's only a little less than my employer's entire biggish, legacy enterprisey SAAS product
There aren't really any graphics, just placeholders at this point. There's one fancy Rocaille-style procedural domain warping effect to create an FTL warp bubble animation but I count that as code since it's just maths.
I added one actual image icon for steel and that's in the assets folder, not the src folder that I count as the game.
It really is just 3 MB of code at heart, counting backend and frontend (a bunch of tabs and panels). There's a lot of stuff that it has to do, the ingame AI factions have to do their own war planning, province management, research, colonization and trade... I don't claim that they do these things particularly well, or that my game is bugfree. It absolutely isn't, I'm still making it. So perhaps your SAAS is more precise code. Nevertheless my game does work, it's totally possible to do large projects just via AI, without any coding skills. This used to be impossible, I tried back in the GPT-4 era and it was just a joke. But today it works out.
I've also been doing my own more boring SAAS projects for business use and they work too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Ted Cruz should probably be considered a foreign agent too, recall that speech he made to some to some group of persecuted Christians in the Middle-East, he couldn't resist making it all about Jews and getting booed out by them. Or the part about how he said how his motivation in running for office was to be the most pro-Israel senator.
Trump himself went on air and bemoaned about how Israel used to control Congress and rightfully so but now it's changed so much, Israel barely has any control! Then the usual suspects called it an anti-semitic trope...
The whole thing is tragicomedic: one part farce, two parts horror.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime
What tools are these, exactly? Are you saying they turn to crime because their 1950s schools didn't get aircon quickly enough? Or that the student-teacher ratio isn't good enough? If you're upset about my use of anecdote earlier, why not use some statistics? We could compare the crime rates of blacks in the top 10% of income to whites in the bottom 10%, see if the 'tools necessary to support themselves' argument holds up.
In fact, blacks get worshipped in the US, they're treated like gods. Mere mortals aren't allowed to say their magic words, only they can call eachother 'niggers'. The press invent new rules for capitalizing black while refusing the same for whites.
The media goes out of their way to decry anything bad that happens to them. There are movies and laws and constant updates on the Emmett Hill case. And likewise, extraordinary effort goes into valorizing anything they do well, well beyond the point of historical distortion. Some blacks in menial roles in the Apollo program are not a big deal. It was German rocket scientists and white men making electronics or rocket boosters that were the overwhelming contributors to the moon landing. I can only imagine the comical scenes of these writers looking for some black women to valorize, going through the records: 'Werner von Braun, director of the space centre, no (far too white and Nazi), Arthur Rudolph who oversaw the rocket development process, no (another Nazi), George Mueller who managed the development process and introduced all-up testing, well he is at least not a German but he's still white... Dr Jack Crenshaw, hmm well he actually did what we want to ascribe to black women regarding circumlunar trajectories with a computer and not a slide-rule - still too white and male, OK let's pretend that some black women who just worked in double-checking actually were important figures"
Some white kid gets executed by a black and odds are nobody ever hears about it. Blacks do something bad and they're 'teens', 'youths', 'crazed maniacs' or just forgotten by history. Blacks get given cushy DEI jobs and can scarcely be fired without legally ruinous accusations of discrimination. There are constant inquisitions into industries that don't have enough blacks.
They get perhaps the cushiest treatment of any minority group in history despite their terrible behaviour and incompetence. They're not getting stomped on at all. 'Not getting white people's money to support their school districts' is not the same as being stomped on. Certainly not when spending more money fails to have any noticeable effect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Yeah, that was a pretty bad sign. Also Elon not talking about it after day one. Elon is usually first to stick his head into a threshing machine with these things, I recall him bragging on day 1 about how Grok said the decapitation strike was a good move whereas Claude and GPT ummed and ahhed diplomatically. He changed the flag of Iran on twitter too to the monarchist flag. And given starlink and such, he was deeply involved with operations in Iran pre-war. But after day 1 he wasn't saying much of anything about the war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Important to note how victory has a thousand parents, defeat is an orphan. Everyone seems to be against this war now, or is leaking that they were against it. Vance was against it. General Caine was against it. The CIA was against it. The blame is getting shoved off onto Trump and Netanyahu, who surely deserve it... I can't help but think that others were in favour and have since jumped ship though.
I also claim vindication in my argument with a self-declared Iran policy expert: https://www.themotte.org/post/3467/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/401256?context=8#context
It's so very rare that we can quickly get a resolution to a political debate like this... Unless of course we get a second act of this war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Why would it matter if black schools were neglected, what's the worst that could happen? Are blacks going to complain more about racism? They already do that a lot.
Is all this top black engineering and technical talent going to be lost? That would be surprising. I don't recall seeing many black names writing AI papers or earning STEM Nobels.
That's exactly what I brought up originally, spending all this money making the most amazingly well-equipped inner-city black schools in Kansas didn't help raise test scores or promote racial harmony. So why bother?
they are acting in all manner of irrational stupid ways.
Firstly they started this war thinking that the Iranian people would rise up and overthrow the regime, which was stupid. Then they go back and forth unsanctioning Iranian oil to lower fuel prices, proposing dual control of the straits, now blockading Iran, threatening to destroy Iranian civilization, then constantly rolling back threats.
It's a pathetic display of weakness and stupidity as some very mediocre intellects thrash around trying to escape a self-inflicted blunder. It's exceeded only by cheerleaders dressing up the flailing as 4D chess.
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