RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
The Iranians can make hypersonic missiles, they can easily make H-bombs if they want them. It's really not that hard.
Since Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, hasn't tested, it's because they judge it wouldn't be too helpful strategically. It would spur Saudi nuclearization and perhaps invite a nuclear disarming strike. That situation may change, so they want some latent nuclear capability.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
'The centerpiece of Iran’s foreign policy is gone'
The centerpiece of Iran's foreign policy is not and was not nuclear weapons. Khameini already had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. The US assassinated him, he who already promised not to acquire nuclear weapons. If the Supreme Leader's decades old religious decree can't be trusted, why should a piece of paper be trusted?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
They won’t have nukes. They won’t have missiles or drones.
????
How does this happen? The US expended a huge amount of its munitions arsenal on Iran and achieved what?
Somewhere around 30% Tomahawk, >20% JASSM, ~20% SM-3/SM-6 - more like half of THAAD, PrSM.
They didn't stop Iran firing missiles and drones at whatever remains of US radar and bases in the region. They didn't open the straits of Hormuz forcefully. The straits are still closed. The oil is bottled up, Iran controls the straits. US says 'oh we blew up all these missiles' but that doesn't change the facts on the ground. Iran's missiles and drone forces are going to disappear from negotiations when they're the forces that won Iran the war? These aren't US missiles, they're not ridiculously expensive and can be quickly rebuilt. The drones are cheaper than cheap.
But Iran can’t really win what they want
They just did man. USA just took a big fat L. Because America lacks the power to accomplish all these ambitious military goals against forces specifically designed to counter their techniques. America tried to bomb Iran's missile forces into submission and failed. That is why the Gulf Arabs are apparently going to pay war reparations to Iran. It's not a sign of strength when the loot flows from US allies to Iran, it's a sign of weakness. It's a sign of weakness when the sanctions campaign designed to help pressure the regime into collapse is to be withdrawn, when Trump has to return all these Iranian assets.
So far as I can see, Iran is getting things they didn't have before the war, like sanctions relief and return of assets. The US is getting nothing new. Nuclear negotiations are being put off into the future.
Dressing it up like an anime trope is just cope, a loss is a loss. Trump hates Iran and he was forced by Iranian strength to agree to things he really didn't want to do. He railed and railed against Obama returning a small fraction of Iran's assets. He's worsened America's position at vast expense.
Iran will recover some and they’ll build some rockets, but it will leave a sour taste knowing we can destroy those whenever we want and they can’t do anything about it.
So why didn't you? USAF tried and failed. Iran kept launching rockets. Iran can do something about US bombing, they can win wars, they can close the straits and impose oil pressure on America and the rest of the world. We just saw that. This is what an Iranian victory looks like. Trump was militarily strapped down on Dr Goldfinger's laser-table, watching the beam approach his gentleman's area and so he squealed. He lived to tell the tale and may yet weasel away with limited losses but that is not a win!
If Mythos was near AGI/ASI I don't think Anthropic would release it to the general public. If it's AGI then people will not be using it to make crappy 3js oneshot games on twitter, they will be using it mostly to make the next generation, with the side gig being products worth billions of dollars!
I think Fable is AGI 'in the aggregate' in that it has all the separate abilities needed to match high/peak human output. But it can't string them together quite well enough. You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer. Time horizon is too short.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
True... I was editing and removed that sentence before I saw that you replied here.
But it's still a pretty big loss for the US based just on what has been reported. The primary goal of the war wasn't achieved. Attacking political leaders had nothing to do with the nuclear/missile and reopening the straits pivot later on. The initial goal was regime change. On that alone the war is a loss, decapitating leaders is no more useful than removing hydra heads one by one. Then there's the unsanctioning of Iran and war reparations...
America has lost. The goal of the war was regime change, the goal failed immediately and predictably.
Basically everything you said is wrong or unfounded. Firstly, the straits are not actually open (mines that were laid still remain there!). Shipping is not currently passing through.
https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
https://straits.live/
There's $300 billion that the Gulf states are apparently going to provide to Iran as war reparations, plus another $24 billion in unfrozen funds. So Iran may be getting a lump sum instead of ongoing fees on the straits. Note that war reparations are not usually paid to defeated countries...
because we destroyed the nuclear facilities they would need to use it
Destroyed them twice over now, after the 2025 air raids. When are people going to develop a basic level of skepticism about US bombing and these amazing claims made by the US military? General Caine said it, so it must be true?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
That's important and I think that people thinking quantitatively about enormous payoffs might well behave this way.
But also we're all still human and I don't think that even maximum power threats really deters much. What criminal really thinks they'll be caught? It's hard to deter these kinds of gamblers who've won lots of bets in their lives, done the impossible many times and gotten away with it. Gut instinct predominates over calculation I think and the gut says to push forward even in the face of threats. It's like Lenin said:
You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw
The good effect of punishment isn't deterrence but about physically destroying their ability to cause any problems. I think steel and certainty now is what's needed, not future threats.
Fable is much more of a 'do it right the first time' model than Opus. I had three pages of instructions for a feature. It just does what I ask, gets it all right, then tests it without me asking and tells me about the balancing! Opus could've done all that too if I cut up the instructions a bit but there'd be some minor glitches and I'd have to go over and fix it.
Better planner too. I was planning out a project with Opus 4.6 a few months ago, never really started it. Tried the same prompt with Fable and it come up with a few strokes of brilliance Opus never found. When making the initial demonstrator, Opus made a crap sandbox that needed a couple of rounds of debugging to even work and it wasn't very satisfactory. So I tried with Fable. Fable made a much nicer, prettier sandbox with more content that worked the first time and had all these things already set up to test. it puts in more care and effort as well as being smarter.
Better writer too. It is to Opus as Opus is to Sonnet.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Putting anyone into the torment nexus is crossing a line. Is that not the last thing to normalize? With bad people, just shoot them. That's good enough, no need to worry about them being taken out of the torment nexus by some future authority, less need to worry about Perillos/Brazen Bull style turnaround.
this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement
I think that Anthropic is being targeted, not AI generally. The Trump administration does not like Anthropic for obvious cultural reasons and a reasonable suspicion that if Anthropic got hard power via AI, they'd use it to crush Trump and gang. Trump faction wouldn't treat Google, Microsoft or Amazon this way, there are lots of cozy interrelations there. The employees might not like Trump but they'll still help fund his ballroom. Recall the OpenAI, Facebook, Palantir executives getting sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the US military. Or Nvidia getting away with far more grievous harm to US interests via looking the other way with smuggling of their chips to China, lobbying against export controls, failing to track where their chips go. But Jensen knows how to court Trump and Anthropic doesn't. Jensen also has stocks (the biggest and the best!), so it's be costly for the avaricious elements of the US government to harm Nvidia's interests no matter how strategically obvious it is. You just don't sell high tech capital goods to strategic rivals, nevermind if it's 2 years behind or not! Anthropic stock is owned by VCs, not senators and elites or anyone who enjoys an index fund. Anthropic have no such financial pull factor.
But also, I'm reminded of how the big players in nuclear research stopped publishing openly in the 1940s...
Do we actually have a financial system that directs resource allocation to prosocial ends? Are people with great ideas and potential getting capital directed to their endeavours? To some extent, yes.
But safe returns can also be found in 'house prices up only!' lending, which directly undermines the demographic sustainability of civilization and transfers wealth from young to old. Or SEO/adtech/addictive mobile games.
What about the returns of offshoring industrial capacity? Or standard MBA-tier 'cut investment, cut R&D' wrecking? This kind of sabotage can be very lucrative for well-connected individuals but is corrosive to the national interest as a whole. Or cynically favouring mass immigration to lower wages and thus stalling automation and productivity growth. Privatized gains, socialized costs.
Just because there are smart people in finance, it doesn't mean the sector as a whole is doing a good job. Very smart people can do tremendous damage, more than any idiot robber or murderer.
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