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RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

5 followers   follows 1 user  
joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

				

User ID: 317

RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

5 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

					

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User ID: 317

It doesn't take a Thiel-tier political genius to see that 'starting a guaranteed-loss war with Iran' will greatly damage Trump and perceived Trump allies.

Fuel prices were very damaging to the Biden administration. Humiliation/botched withdrawal in Afghanistan was pretty damaging. Amp both factors up considerably, what does that do to Trump?

Can't keep draining the SPR forever, can't keep manipulating markets with announcements forever. How can Trump survive midterms if there is a fuel crisis? There will be a fuel crisis by September unless Iran opens the straits. How can Trump survive midterms if he makes objectively humiliating concessions to Iran, who is not exactly beloved by Republican voters? They've been told that the war has been won about a dozen times by now, so a humiliating defeat is not going to go down well.

There can't be an 'Only Trump could go to Iran' moment like Nixon, not after a surprise attack Trump started. Few consider world-historically deft diplomacy to be a Trump strength either.

Thiel is to the left as Soros is to the far-right, they hate him a lot. But the left actually goes after enemies with institutional power.

Now I predict someone is going to come and suggest a military breakthrough will rescue the day for Trump and America. But what military breakthrough can there be? If there are amazing anti-drone weapons or other wonderweapons, why haven't they been used already? Or used against the Houthis earlier? If the straits can be secured, why haven't they been secured already? If there is ongoing work to degrade Iranian capabilities that will soon show fruits, why has the US been so quick to look for a diplomatic solution, why accept a partial truce that logically enables Iran to regroup and prepare for further fighting? If the blockade was going to degrade Iranian oil infrastructure why hasn't this happened already or when Iran lowered oil production in 2020? If Iran were to be more aggressively bombed, how would this prevent Iran destroying more oil infrastructure and heightening the fuel crisis?

How is Argentina capable of birthing civilization when they go begging the US or IMF for a bailout every 2-5 years?

Europe and America are immensely richer, more populous and stronger than Argentina. A Brazilified America is still going to be far more capable than Argentina just from its industrial/capital legacy and remaining clusters of strong demographics.

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance had the community take over and continue development/multiplayer servers after the company collapsed. Starcraft and Diablo are presumably more popular than Forged Alliance ever was. I think the biggest threat is Blizzard legal department.

Well, the odds it has memorized the autistic game mechanics I invented are nil. But it can still implement and work with them.

Consider this paper for instance, they have the AIs devise experiments to derive physical laws in simulated universes unlike our own, Opus and the strongest GPT do OK: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26087

They can't have memorized imaginary physics. With sufficient repetition learning, creativity and intelligence emerge. Do we not hone mathematical talent by repetition? Github is a pretty diverse space, if there's some some set of components needed to make cool things, good odds they are on github. What isn't on github could be assembled from what is. Perhaps all one needs to do to write arbitrary software is assemble all the pieces in such a way as to meet the goal.

Let's suppose AI models aren't so great for mathematics and it's Terence Tao doing most of the work.

The primary commercial usecase for AI isn't mathematics, it's coding, as you say.

I cannot code beyond the most basic Khan Academy beginner sense, my actual end to end abilities are completely worthless. And yet I can make useful AI tools for work, processing documents in various ways that saves lots of human time. In a certain sense, I'm providing most of the 'secret ingredient' since you cannot just tell an AI to do these fiddly tasks and expect them done properly in oneshot. It will usually not work the first time. So I give it some counsel and tell it what to troubleshoot, errors, differences from expected output, clarify my intentions and ultimate usefulness. Eventually it works and then I refine it to work better and better by getting AI to handle all these edgecases and Word-induced BS.

And how could I make a (still under development) 4X game with AI if I can't code? There's a fair bit going on. Space battles, ground battles, culture, technologies, buildings, resources, goods, markets, map generation, turn order, trade between provinces (intra faction), trade between factions, freighters, pops and social classes, loans, diplomacy and war plotting, coalition building... Some things are not well fleshed out but there is quite a bit there.

I was just now getting it to make an evolutionary testing system to refine ship designs and fleet compositions and so define the meta. First time it worked OK, then when trying to make it better (too many bad mutations!) it broke, then I overhauled it and now it works great and with multicore processing too. Apparently the dominant strategy is getting hundreds of incredibly cheap and terrible warships to act as chaff for a small core of high-tech warships to exploit the targeting and reinforcement logic. So clearly I need to change how reinforcement and targeting works, raise minimum costs for ships.

It was my idea to make this tool, my idea behind the overhaul and my ideas behind every mechanic but I could never have done it myself. The secret ingredient is clearly the AI.