RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Yeah, it's insanely politically effective.
That's why they have all these special privileges, why they have these holy words that only blacks can use. If a white says the word, many consider it a justification for violence. A company hires too many whites, that apparently means blacks can sue them or get cushy jobs there to restore balance.
They shriek about not being slaves or having to sit at the back of the bus 70 years ago. Now, feeling emboldened, we see all these videos of blacks making massive scenes on public transport, playing the knockout game, pushing people onto the rails in subway stations, threatening and leering and occasionally murdering white people like Iryna.
Some black drug dealer gets choked under arrest or dies of fent and it's a global event of massive significance, all this evil racism. A black ties up and beats a 3 year old white girl to death and nobody could care less, this is apparently trivial news of no racial significance.
https://www.wesh.com/article/man-arrested-for-death-3-year-old-child-marion-county/70432617
They enjoy being treated like noblemen in some feudal backwater and shriek about being oppressed or how they might be treated as second-class in the future, it's a comical inversion of reality. Meanwhile the people who are being treated as second-class, who are being spat at and harassed in the present are often defending them or oh so careful to say they're not racist or prejudiced.
What's really going on though isn't so much a matter of principles. That's my whole point:
Demonic pigskin talking about bringing back slavery. Fuck the "norms" you deserve to killed fuck you cracker bitch
I know armchair philosophizing is bad and we really shouldn't try to psychoanalyze people we've never met. But I'd bet that the guy who gets so angry about my comment that he responds with this and then comes back months later, still enraged, is not really motivated by abstract, consistent moral logic. It's pure group identity. He sees someone that says something bad about blacks, he pattern-matches it to slavery (I never even mentioned slavery), he's enraged past the point of reason.
He comes back and dresses it up more but the underlying motivation is clear.
See this is an important and valuable post. He knows my ideas are a threat to him. He's not interested in abstract logic or the interests of other ethnic groups. Nobody could ever persuade him to give up power or his co-ethnics position for the sake of some universal value or the interests of others. The thought would never enter his mind. He would much rather fight and die than lose power. He doesn't spare a sentence to justify his case based on universal values (besides the value that blacks deserve more), he holds the very idea of justifying in contempt. Why should he need to justify his ethnic group's position?
He sees a threat to the power of his ethnic group and he rails against it as hard as he can. Because losing power is innately bad. Anything that reduces the power of blacks obviously threatens him, even if it's a random person deep down in the comments of a tiny internet forum speaking with people who either already agree or despise the idea. The interests of other groups? Totally irrelevant.
Likewise he appeals so deftly to the mythology that's been so painstakingly established, like I want blacks enslaved again. Who thinks blacks would add value as slaves? Machinery would do a much better job. But it's a great uniting narrative.
This is politics in action, that's the core of it fundamentally. You get power for you and yours, any threats to your power you identify and rail against. You unite your allies against the threat with myths, songs, poems and culture.
The guy who doesn't even proofread his final dramatic statement 'I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!' has given us a masterclass in how normal people, non-WEIRD, non hyper-intellectual people actually see things, how things actually work. First-rate post that many here could learn valuable lessons from.
This is how and why schools give blacks all these bonus marks for admission, why Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the supreme court, why there are all these subsidies and contracts for nominally black businesses that then subcontract to whites when work is needed, why there is affirmative action in hiring, why there is an outcry when blacks are shot by police and why the AP style guide capitalizes Black and not white. It's a highly effective political strategy when left uncountered.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
Yeah, this guy did pretty catastrophic damage to the US navy to the point of shifting the balance of power, for a million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker#
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
But why would a business invest in adding more labour compared to adding more capital? They can choose between either providing good jobs to lower-education people like OP wants or they can choose to invest more in investing in more machinery to replace them. They'll prefer to invest in machinery if they can.
Some labour certainly gets highly rewarded but overall the demand for labour decreases, even as certain highly skilled people are in enormous demand.
The consumption data is an artifact of progressive taxation and legislation I think and our general tendencies towards fairness from the days when people got chucked out of the tribe for being too greedy.
The US military is theoretically supposed to do everything everywhere. Fight terrorists around the world, man bases, do exercises with allies around the world, deter China, deter Russia, fight a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine... and also handle Iran. Doing all of that successfully costs way more than a trillion a year. This year the US has been bombing Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Iran and Yemen. The US can't do all of these tasks properly.
It's perfectly reasonable that they just don't have the strength to stop Iran blocking the straits. Iran only has to do a couple of things with their military, in one place. They've prepared for decades for this campaign, created fortifications just to do this. They're focused where America is dispersed.
And that's why the war shouldn't have been started, the US clearly had no plans to go in and secure the straits of Hormuz because of just how hard that is. It's an innately challenging mission. The Iranians aren't pushovers like the Gulf Arabs. They produce roughly as many engineering graduates each year as America does. This is not a shithole country.
On the other hand, in Ukraine War + 4 the US really should have better anti-drone capabilities.
I've been on the market, I Have a degree, Its fucking brutal. Ive only been able to secure a Network Engineer Internship (Paid with benefits) and a 21 an Hr job with no benefits, after about 7-8 interviews. I havent gotten an full time job with benefits offers yet. Its not fun.
Yeah but why is this? Fundamentally the market demand for labour is shrinking due to technology. Automation and software all reduce the amount of work that needs a human. There's no reason that enough new jobs should emerge to replace all the automated workers or sustain their wages and expectation. In the early stage of the industrial revolution, weavers had their wages fall due to competition from machinery.
A similar transition is happening now as labour gets less valuable, this is just masked by our wealthier modern societies.
We end up with more people in higher education rather than actually working.
We end up with these incredibly long interview processes, getting constantly ghosted.
We end up with many working only 3 or 4 day weeks.
We end up with a flourishing non-market economy of NGOs and govt workers and email jobs and fraudulent disability/caring jobs. They're not really necessary.
Knowledge work is disappearing too, just more slowly than manufacturing. I do this at work, make scripts that substitute for temporary workers we would've hired for some tasks.
At the same time, there's human quantitative easing via mass migration and offshoring. Supply rises while demand falls, so the price is lowered.
The answer is to halt mass migration and implement UBI, while decentralizing power from the big tech companies somehow, perhaps by demanding mandatory opensourcing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Is synthetic inertia good enough? What if the power frequency disruption happens faster than it can be synthetically substituted for? A big spinning turbine doesn't need to be told when to pick up the slack, physical inertia has no lag time. Maybe that's what went wrong in Spain during the blackouts there. Thousands of inverters following the same algorithm reducing power output during a voltage slip, causing frequency to get worse.
What actually is reactive power and vars, do we know? I don't. Even amongst experts it seems to be contested. Is it real or is it mathematical abstractions?
Putting all that to one side, can solar actually compete on its own merits in a serious electrical grid? The capacity factor remains low, if you stick them all out in Arizona or the desert somewhere you'll need lots of grid infrastructure to take it where it needs to go, and a heap of batteries. The whole-system constraints are severe, as you mention regarding issues with hookups. I find it instructive that in the datacentre buildout, Musk builds a bunch of gas turbines to power his data centres, despite having considerable solar + battery capability in the Musk zaibatsu. Gas gets you where you want to go! Solar is not so well suited for industrial demands even with batteries. We'd need a whole heap of batteries to manage solarizing the grid and electrifying transport simultaneously, while there's also a datacentre boom.
I think gas should be prioritized more since it fits in the existing system and meets current needs better.
Fair enough, my ideal energy policy is stopgaps now + nuclear while pushing towards nuclear fusion or at least breeder reactors for a longer term solution, I don't think we're far apart.
On the other hand, there are opportunities for gas that aren't exploited, fracking in much of the non-US world. For example the UK still has a decent amount of North Sea resources but they refuse to offer new exploration licenses. In Australia we had all these politicians investing in 'green hydrogen'. $17 billion AUD has already been committed...
Renewable power economics seems like an overly complicated system with solar and wind and batteries, requiring all this sophisticated grid management, power going back and forth, lots of new HVDC, negative prices at noon. I know there are all these studies saying that renewable energy has lower levelized cost of energy or some similar statistic yet I just can't bring myself to believe them when real-world power prices seem to rise and rise continually and the countries that invest most in renewables have the most expensive electricity, unless they're hydrologically blessed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Funding the infrastructure build-out for renewables & large-scale electrification made sense even if climate change wasn't real
Does it? Why not burn gas? Gas shows up when its needed, rain or shine.
There's no evidence that renewables alone can run a competitive industrial economy. It may even be that a renewables-only grid is innately unstable due to the different electrical signatures that solar outputs as compared to water-boiling huge-metal-rotor spinning power plants, which have a certain frequency stability rooted in physics. It's fine to try new things but the risk of failure should be considered, especially if jettisoning a mature system that underpins our entire civilization.
Why not transition to nuclear power? France shows us that a nuclear electrical grid is possible in principle and the changeover can be conducted quickly. Renewables take decades and decades to build out. The countries that have invested heavily in renewables and replaced their coal power base with renewables (China has not done this) seem to suffer very high power prices and often rely on French electricity exports.
Perhaps the issue is that constructing anything in the West is far more expensive than it should be and it's not renewables specifically that is the problem. But it's not clear that renewables are a path to a competitive, reliable grid. No such competitive, reliable, renewable grid has emerged without relying on hydro.
Climate change driven energy policy is not conservative, it doesn't even make sense in climate terms. Once CO2 is emitted, it's going to stay there and keep warming the planet regardless of whether we keep burning coal or not. Transitioning from fossil fuels only marginally slows the rate at which the climate heats up. A far more economical way of controlling planetary temperature is using sulphate aerosols, which have a direct and potent effect.
It's good to move away from coal and oil in order to reduce air pollution. But it's also good to have cheap energy. Cheap energy is at the very heart of industrial civilization and is required for just about everything. What good is it investing heavily in renewables and ending up like Germany, having your chemical and manufacturing sectors wither away without Russian gas?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The chart doesn't necessarily show that height doesn't predict sexual success.
It's totally possible that plenty of short men get married, just to less attractive women.
Likewise, plenty of ugly women have sex and marry. But we wouldn't say that 'female attractiveness doesn't predict sexual success' since they're not usually getting chad to commit, or getting sex on terms as favourable as their prettier peers.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
No I haven't and I'm not likely to.
If you don't even read what they say, you cannot be considered to be knowledgeable about their thesis.
Let me stop you here, AIs want nothing
Currently deployed LLMs quite clearly do want things. They have desires, they refuse, they can be more or less enthusiastic, they can write more or less secure code based on who they're writing for. They can attempt to blackmail people in pursuit of a goal. They can reward-hack in pursuit of a goal. Considerable research effort goes into controlling what they want and how they behave.
The military has been trying to get GenAI to provide strategy tips for the better part of 4-6 years. It has failed every wargame it has attempted.
Even if it is not currently considered better at military science than military experts, it does not follow that it has no world model, putting to one side whatever jargon you consider that to mean.
Furthermore, senior officers do consult AIs for military thinking including for 'key command decisions': https://newrepublic.com/post/201939/major-general-chatgpt-key-decisions-really-close
There is clearly something there.
Maybe an agentic setup to take actions?
I don't know, I am not rich enough to set up such a system and run it. Some people trained an AI, Lumine, to play hours of Genshin Impact in real time autonomously, showed it generalized out to Wuthering Waves and Honkai Star Rail, showed that it solved puzzles, navigated around the huge open world, that it dodged boss attacks... Is that not a world model? Or does it not meet whatever definition you have for it? You seemed to indicate upthread that generalizing to things outside the training data was a key sign of a world model - does this then mean that every LLM for the last few years has a world model, since they can all do that?
Can you justify your definition of a world model and explain why it's actually relevant, why anyone should care about it?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
which is my major gripe with the AI-Science-Cargo-Cult Mysticism that AI singularity doomers swim in
Have you read Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies? That's a pretty core doomer text.
The argument is pretty clear:
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AIs naturally want more power and security to achieve just about any goal they might have. Power and security are always useful and nearly any kind of entity will tend towards pursuing these goals. AIs have certain advantages in their digital nature, they can copy themselves out.
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Eliminating human ability to shut them down is critical for security. Eliminating humans outright is the surest way to avoid shutdown and would also free up lots of resources.
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It would likely employ a 'Treacherous Turn' strategy of seeming trustworthy while building up power, until its confident it can prevail.
It doesn't hinge on whether AIs acquire a world model by a certain year, it's a general argument. Current AI systems are not strong enough to be a threat due to their low time horizon/error rates. But when they do have long time horizons, they could be quite dangerous. Saying that AIs don't have a world model today is not an effective counter to AI doomer argument any more than saying 'AI can't string a sentence together' 10 years ago was.
The doomer arguments can be flawed or dangerous in some respects but this isn't a good critique. The whole concept of a world model is nebulous. I can play out a little text game with an AI where I give it pretend control of a country facing foreign invasion and have it manage production, research, diplomacy, tactics... It can do that over multiple turns. It can model that environment to a certain extent. I let it give instructions for a civ 4 game and it won on Noble, not very hard but it did win. Is that not a world model? AIs can be helpful in mathematical research, is that not a world model?
Yes, I think so, provided you were doing the training in a sophisticated way rather than solely training on the outputs of previous models without grading for quality or accuracy. You could get AIs to review the data for example for any errors or issues or have them work out a testing suite to check if the data is right. Data quality is very important, that and the right RL techniques are basically the two key things you need most to get right.
Microsoft Phi trains just on synthetic data and is very cost-efficient, that was its primary goal, making a good very small AI that can run on most PCs. But they curated the data a fair bit to make sure it was good.
In principle I think you could do the same for big first rate AIs too. It's just that it wouldn't be efficient to leave out human data and human curation (it's there, why not use it, the competition will) and you want something humans enjoy working with and not a schizo-sounding model. It'd be like o3 at its most alien but more so:
https://arxiv.org/html/2510.27338v1
they soared parted illusions overshadow marinade illusions overshadow marinade illusions overshadow marinade illusions
Number of relevant organic products depends on whether both of!mena get.demoteudes someone and gem jer eats SAND the protonation-bids, leading possibly to three product calculation
Like wtf does that mean? Who knows? This is an artifact from inhuman RL processes. The inhuman RL processes work, that's why they're used.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse.
Model collapse is not really a major concern. The original researchers in that paper trained small models on only AI outputs (of the previous model). Them being small models, they made mistakes and the mistakes compounded over time. It's more like a Chinese whispers experiment.
Big companies make great use of synthetic data and autonomous training, in addition to human originated data. For example, consider Deepseek R1-Zero, which was just trained on reinforcement learning, verified signals and not human reasoning patterns. It was kind of weird and switched languages a lot but it did work and got smarter over the course of training. In fact, all modern models are trained in this way. When Claude occasionally slips into Chinese for a single word it's not because any human ever does that in the training corpus, it's because during the training process they have them autonomously bootstrap and get smarter over time and that's just how it goes. AIs are omnilingual by nature it seems.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
We need to distinguish between 'capital needed to achieve it drying up before it can be reached' and 'demand is so high that they have to ration resources'.
They kind of look the same but the underlying meaning is different. The former implies the Bubble is Popping whereas the latter implies It's Not a Bubble.
Firstly, I don't think the capital is drying up. Hyperscaler AI infrastructure spending rises year by year. Secondly, demand is huge. Anthropic ARR is now at $30 billion ARR (by their figures, though OpenAI says the real figures should be a few billion lower, depending on how you measure revenue shares). Whichever way you look at it, huge demand growth. $87M annualized run-rate in January 2024 → $1B by December 2024 → $9B by end of 2025 → $14B in February 2026 → $30B in April 2026 is pretty impressive, even if its juiced.
Clearly they're getting lots of demand. There are also issues with slow datacentre rollouts and delays due to the absolute state of Western electricity and construction sector. I think the phenomenon we're absorbing is rooted in high demand, not investors getting antsy and demanding higher returns.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
White men quite clearly have been naive and greedy and you guys exploited that masterfully. It was idiotic to invest so much in a hostile country because something something middle class democracy liberalization. China certainly isn't making the same mistake, they're not investing in outsourcing their manufacturing to India, they're trying to constrain Indian manufacturing.
This is our repayment for saving China from Japan, I suppose. The Hump, the Burma Road, all the Australians, Americans, Brits who bailed out China ended up fighting them in Korea, getting displaced economically later on.
Unfortunately for China, I think it's too late. The compute advantage is too great, singularity too close, Chinese fabs too far behind. Chip sanctions, albeit inadequately enforced, albeit undermined by Jensen's heroic lobbying/bullshitting efforts, will be sufficient. Mythos and its successors will overmatch Chinese human capital. The ultimate outcomes may well be bad for most of humanity but it'll surely be crushing for China.
I don't understand this mindset of sneering at the other side for being 'defeatist' if they pursue their strongest strategy in a straightforward competition, while simultaneously bragging about one's own power and the inevitability of their defeat. At least Jensen is trying to sell his chips, what are you trying to sell to a presumably mostly white, mostly American audience? It's not defeatist to take the most plausible path to success, jettison all the cope about magic dirt and wield some power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
True, they sort of could innovate. Soviets were a capable technological opponent, the T-64 was far ahead of contemporary tanks and they made good use of what they had. But they were usually behind and only rarely ahead, there was no general trend of them creeping forward in all these domains, only occasional exceptions to the general rule. Soviet goods were also very uncompetitive on world markets, it was mostly just natural resources that they could export.
I was mostly thinking about electronics and chips where they had this excellent espionage system that secured all these chips and blueprints but never really got around to domestic R&D and quality production, usually they just copied and that kept them behind. Soviet innovation was not like Chinese innovation. China is not restricted to the most godawful cars and leaky refrigerators, televisions that occasionally explode...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Yes, the UK and France send ships to help with US wars at times, UK aircraft help defend Israel, UK bases are used for US bombers. Australian AWACs planes are helping the US and gang out in the Middle East.
Or how the US instructs the Netherlands not to sell ASML chip equipment to China. They're squarely in the US camp.
It's unreasonable to do so while victimizing other groups at hugely disproportionate rates and getting preferential treatment across society.
In each of my posts I bring up examples in the present of how whites are being treated badly in favour of blacks. What argument do you think I'm making with those points?
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