RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
I think the inference side of things is profitable. That's precisely why they need to make it more efficient for gaming purposes...
The general trend is that businesses looking to make money will spend a lot more than consumers looking for fun. Coders have a huge appetite for the highest-quality tokens. Consider the GPU shortage, the RAM shortage, compute is being reallocated from consumer command to commercial demand via pricing... Gamers are not prepared to pay that much money, there's already a lot of unhappiness about GAAS, a move up beyond 60 USD games.
It would be stupid for Microsoft to lower their margins by reallocating compute from lucrative Azure to less-lucrative Minecraft gaming. They need to keep margins high or raise them by reducing cost of production. And they should definitely be able to get better results at lower prices with a dedicated minecraft AI, even if it's just a finetune. It's like the Chinese paper where they finetuned an AI to play Genshin Impact, solve puzzles, complete hours long missions... Presumably that's quite expensive to run since it's a full video model that plays like its a human. But Microsoft could easily make a smaller text model that gets data directly from the game, maybe it calls stronger models for particularly difficult building tasks.
LLM's getting more deeply integrated into games?
I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?
Open source communities have gone out of their way to set up general-purpose AIs to play Minecraft with you in the crudest ways imaginable and it kind of works. Microsoft literally owns Minecraft and they have a ludicrous amount of compute. They could make a minecraft-specific AI model, special servers where the player (players?) could be warlords with whole armies they direct and manage. The sky is the limit. This is a GAAS subscription goldmine just waiting to happen if they can cut down the inference costs, which they should definitely be able to do with a specialist model.
The real problem Microsoft has is dysfunctional culture. It's really not that hard to make Halo Infinite and have it be actually good. They have the money but not the necessary organizational skills. How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...
The distinction matters for policy and diagnosis. If moral decay is primary, then the intervention is cultural: restore warrior values, punish softness, reform gender norms. If institutional decay is primary, then the intervention is structural: fix training pipelines, improve logistics, reform command selection, rebuild industrial capacity. These point in very different directions.
But why are there issues with training pipelines, why was industrial capacity lost, why are there all these crap commanders who deflect responsibility?
In the US, training pipelines are inevitably going to be recruiting lower quality leaders since Americans are getting increasingly less interested in military service (hence a shortfall of recruits). The military is an inherently dangerous, demanding, stressful role. Lives are at stake. You don't get paid that much either compared to civilian jobs. There's a shortage of patriotism and dedication to ideals that gets high quality recruits to join and stay in the military for a long time. Soldiers fight best when they believe in something beyond dental plans and a free education.
There's also a culture issue in selecting commanders. It's a very bureaucratic, boxticking process which selects for suck-ups and master blame dodgers. Not necessarily people who know how to take risks and fight well:
Industrial capacity - this was jettisoned by greedy executives looking for higher margins and opportunistic cost-cutting by Pentagon officials. Around the 1970s and 80s there was a shift in corporate culture towards short-termism and a lack of capital investment in boring industries like steel and shells. Optimistic planners assumed there would be no need to fight slow, attritional wars with large quantities of munitions (despite these being the most important kind of war).
The defence contractors are themselves decadent and slack internally. I watched this long video from a guy who worked there: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIONXPbIkVo?list=LL
The TLDR of it is that management at Lockheed and NASA was toxic and grossly incompetent, they'd basically treat contractors like fourth-rate 'citizens', make them do all the work and then take credit for it, they'd do absolutely retarded nonsense like try and scale up tech from the Apollo era launchers, they'd lie about what was tested when and by who to keep the flow of money coming in, they'd say that every little change (from the idiots at NASA) required them to start over... Idiot managers would scream at the technical employees for asking questions to cover up their own worthlessness. If you knew what you were doing and tried to obey the rules you were the enemy. DEI made everything a lot worse. The reporting/whistleblowing system was wholly ineffective. This guy sure is disgruntled (and perhaps presents himself as too holier than thou) but, considering the ridiculous stretch of time it took to develop Orion, I'm inclined to believe him.
Institutions are downstream from culture. It isn't neccessarily that a decadent state must be effeminate and wimpy (they can just be addicted to civil wars like Byzantium) but a dysfunctional, short-termist, self-interested culture will naturally degrade key institutions needed for military power. Effeminacy is only one failure mode.
Anyone else think that the new Grok 4.2 is a little underrated? People on twitter seem to be going 'it's bad'. I can see where they're coming from but it has some value add too.
The good: It can oneshot a couple of things where Opus 4.6 just burns through all its thinking tokens and dies. It codes in a much more restrained way too. 100 or 200 lines where Opus would make a huge extravaganza of code.
The bad: They didn't open it up to API and its no good for creative writing, pure STEMcel... The features surrounding the model are barebones, I can't seem to just copy in 10 files of context and have 4.2 edit them inline. We're back in the 'Below are the exact inline edits you can copy-paste' era and that's shit.
Interesting that they've chosen a different path with their '4 copies talking it out' approach, compared to everyone else and their 'big model go brr' approach.
If the US is so powerful, why not just stop the robbery? What is the point of power if it doesn't secure one's resources? Power is about seizing wealth from others, whether that's land or minerals or slaves or cash.
And I don't think the US barely notices Somali fraud. Thousands of Americans will work their entire lives and contribute taxes, only for their contributions to be taken by the kind of intellects that brought us the Quality Learing Centre. Isn't that terrible, embarrassing and unjust in an absolute sense, not merely a relative one? Taxes are measured in lives, in drudgery and pain. They must not be squandered.
There's no power on Earth that can threaten it on its home turf
The primary purpose of any army is the defense of its nation
What about the Somali fraudsters robbing American taxpayers? The cartel gangsters? The fentanyl from Chinese precursors that the cartel gangsters import? That's what, 70,000 deaths a year? It's not just China's fault (takes two to die of a fent overdose) but they do use fentanyl precursor exports as part of their diplomatic efforts to impose pressure on America. Fentanyl is an instrument of Chinese power, like the PLA is. A more limited instrument, certainly, but an instrument nonetheless.
There's a divide in international relations between people who just talk about hard power and state warfare as 'security' and then the liberals who talk about food security, energy security, economic security, political security, institutional security...
I think the latter have a point even if they usually express it in a limpwristed way. What good is it if Chinese paratroopers can't land in America but Chinese spies can take wealth out of America, steal the F-35 secrets? Does it matter to Chuck and Hank that their factory didn't get bombed by an H-20, their business was just wrecked by some Chinese hackers stealing their IP, passing it on to domestic firms who undercut them? The result is the same, the latter is better even for China since they didn't have to pay much for the bombs and they expanded their stock of national wealth.
Sure, Chuck and Hank aren't getting bayonets pointed at them, they're not made to salute the Chinese flag. Maybe they're not Minnesotans, living under the Somali flag. Chuck and Hank have lost small, not big... but a small loss is still a loss.
The F-35 is also an example of decadence. All these politicians demand production facilities in their state for political reasons. They aren't interested in the national interest, which would demand a few large production plants for economical production and efficiencies of scale. The bloat and waste is seriously harmful to America, China isn't a minnow that can be slapped aside with a few swipes. America needs to be smart to beat a country 4x bigger.
Or from another angle, the Fang Yuan school of conflict strategy prioritizes these asymmetric, cost-efficient and subversive looting campaigns. 'When weak, subvert the social structure and disguises to extract loot without punishment, use loot to become strong, when strong slaughter and loot openly. Repeat as necessary.' It'd be very easy to say 'oh he's not a big deal, even if he beat us in a few fights and steals a little wealth we're still the rulers of the world, we can lose again and again because of how big and strong we are' but then he shows up in Heavenly Court with Unlimited Qi Sea and they all get very quiet and very serious. They made a big error by not squashing him when he was small.
Just because nobody is bombing American homes right now, doesn't mean it won't happen.
Firstly I'm not actually American but Australian, I guess maybe I was unclear with the 'we', I meant that the motte and the world at large only recently stumbled on this matter.
Secondly, I think there's an important distinction between internal disputes, corruption and resource reallocation and foreigners coming in to take resources. It's like crime vs warfare. Criminals get punished, enemies get killed. Ingroup outgroup distinction.
I guess you might say I'm being too vague about what decadence really is, I think it's like a magnet with domains all jumbled up, not pointing in one direction. Adam wants cheap labour, Bert wants loyal voter blocs, Charlie wants to stuff his face with food and not care about politics, Derek wants kickbacks from rich foreigners, Emma wants those poor people overseas to have human rights, Frank wants tax cuts without spending cuts... (Flavius wants to be emperor, Julius wants to be emperor, Octavius wants to be emperor,, Antonius wants to hire those cheap Gothic warriors since Romans these days don't want to fight) Anyway, Americans are not all aligned with advancing US interests, making America and Americans strong. They got complacent and stopped pushing forwards, then get ensnared by foreign interests and growing reliance on foreigners. Decadence starts slow but it gets worse and worse over time.
The Somalis who are constantly crowing about their love of and loyalty to Somalia (and sending huge amounts of money to Somalia) aren't real Americans, in my opinion. I'm not American so I guess I can't be too authoritative about this but I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here. They show no loyalty to America. They make obnoxious tiktoks about how they're coming to take over America: https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1997759022666297662
SOMALI: “My biggest fear in life is that Trump may never witness our full takeover of America. We’re here. We’re not leaving.”
OK, it's just one guy there, Ilhan Omar and the ex-PM of Somalia over here, a few billion dollars over some years (10s of billions? More?)... Even a few billion dollars is worth caring about. How many lifetimes worth of labour have Minnesotans done only for some Somali to take it? The British didn't let the Chinese get away with disrespecting their merchants selling drugs in China, they fucked China up for that slight. That's real vigour and will.
A few hundred thousand Somalis haven't collapsed America. But they do way more damage than they should be doing, it's as if they have a 10,000x multiplier on their effectiveness against Americans that they're extracting wealth from a much stronger power. It's this effect that is the root cause of US woes. Just being united and nationalist/tribalist is an incredible source of strength. The American auto-immune system is broken, any strong leader would've gotten rid of these people or never let them in but Trump can't seem to manage it, he announces and threatens but can't seem to get rid of them because some judge nobody ever heard of will block him while Will Stancil's people will shriek and blow airhorns and get shot dead defending them... Decadence.
China does the same kind of sneaky subversion, that's how they got so powerful and menacing. They stole a tonne of IP from the US and elsewhere, they make the Somalis look like complete failures in their fraud. Anything Somalis can do, China can do better after all. They bewitched the US into cooperating with their exploitation, they bewitched the US into not stomping China when they had complete military dominance.
the US military is still the best in the world
What good has it achieved for America? The US military beat Saddam and derailed their modernization plans in Iraq. China bought up the oil wells and started to catch up. The US military 'secured' the Middle East, so that China could import their oil safely and creep forward in the South China Sea unmolested. The US blew up Libya and caused a serious political crisis in their European allies. The US tried to bomb Yemen, failed to reopen the Red Sea to traffic, then made a deal with the Houthis.
American leaders are floating around in never never land talking about vibes like 'freedom' or 'democracy' or 'human rights' or 'freedom of the seas' and the Chinese are saying whatever magic words help them in the moment to advance their true goals, doing whatever advances Chinese national strength.
The US kidnapped Maduro. That's a show of power, albeit against a country so incompetent they can't even maintain their own oil industry. But what was the point of the flex? Trump's stated objective seemed to be to secure the oil - only nobody wants to invest in Venezuela, still ruled by the commies, still with a weak oil industry, given current oil prices are low. It was another fundamentally misguided military intervention.
There is an Iran war coming up which will probably be a complete shitshow. We were told the US completely destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility, a devastating blow. It didn't even last six months, apparently they need to go in again to stop the Iranian nuclear program which has been six months away from a nuke for the last 30 years. Woolly thinking in US leaders, deceived, constantly misdirected, ever trusting, paying the price for the gains of others.
The US is simultaneously trying to confront Russia in Ukraine, Iran in the Middle East and China in the Pacific. The US didn't trounce China back when China was weak, they let China walk all over them. All these little cuts and tapeworms are wearing down US power.
Decadence is when you're trying to do too much with too little, a kind of complacency about sustaining one's own strength, a lack of wisdom and good judgement. Imagine how strong and rich America would be without those trillions squandered in the Middle East, with realpolitik instead of random blundering, no DEI officers in the military, not letting IP be stolen without punishment, not corroding patriotic ideals that are the basis of military recruitment... What if the dollars that went to Somalia were invested in hypersonic missiles or just producing artillery shells?
China would be prey, not predator.
He goes to all this effort getting food. And then the tapeworm eats it, not him, so he has to get more food for his own needs. That's pretty humiliating, especially since it's a literal worm.
I agree with a lot of your points, it is indeed true that just being a tougher warrior is not sufficient to win in a war. Imperial Japan fought very hard, man for man I'd argue they were better fighters than American or Australian troops. But it's not just man for man but shell for shell, plane for plane, actually having supplies. The outcome was decided by materiel factors like you say.
But...
Somalia has had a shit time since 1991
the US has not lost a single war that mattered
Who's stronger, Somalia or America? No contest. The United States with its thousands of H-bombs is vastly weaker than Somalia.
The loot goes from the US to Somalia. We had a huge episode of that unearthed just recently, Somalis milking the US government for billions. They speak openly about how they're working for Somalia, they're advancing Somali interests not US interests. The ex-PM of Somalia openly speaks to Somalis about how Ilhan Omar isn't for America, she's for Somalia: https://x.com/AFpost/status/1807495759056470057 (I see no community notes so I assume this is accurate)
'The interests of Ilhan are not Ilhans, it's not the interests of Minnesota, it's not the interests of the American people, it's the interest of Somalians and Somalia'
There are Somalis running and robbing US cities, how many Americans are running and robbing Somali cities? What is that if not strength? That is what strength is for, moving the loot around.
Somalia doesn't even need to beat America in warfare, their superiority is so vast that warfare is irrelevant. Somalia crushes! Somalis literally conduct humiliation rituals like having their puppet governor change the Minnesota flag to make it look like a Somali flag. The Somalian economy is largely based on remittances, 25-50%. A large chunk of that is loot from America.
I don't mean that in a triumphalist or insulting sense, I think it's massively retarded and deeply unnatural that Somalia is beating America like a pinata for loot. It's not a glorious, proof-of-work type strength like a ground campaign. Nobody thinks that Somalia's military excellence, based on organizational superiority translates into a superior culture. The most well-known cultural innovation of Somalia is female genital mutilation. Nobody is ever going to sing songs about the heroism of the fraudsters at the Quality Learing Centre because they're reprobates. But these are people demonstrably worsening life in the heartland of the US, basically robbing taxpayers, subverting US governance. I consider that a defeat.
What is that if not an example of degeneracy and decadence, where this nuclear superpower is getting humiliated by a shithole country? I accept that I'm using emotional language here but I think it's very important to recalibrate how we conceive of strength and power. I think that the narrative of 'jets, tanks, logistics, training, numbers and technology' is genuinely true enough to be convincing but limited enough to be dangerous. Watching the F-35 or B-2 flyby over the Big Game lulls Americans into a comfortable sleep - and then they get beaten like a pinata for loot by some of the ugliest countries on the map.
There isn't just the military strength of America and Somalia, that's lopsided. There is political strength, will, cameraderie. That is where Somalia and Afghanistan and many other shitholes have their advantage. The power of group solidarity is a force greater than any technological terror created (thus far). It is overwhelmingly superior to the hydrogen bomb, the carrier group, anything America can put into the field.
I know about the argument that 'oh it's an internal struggle between different factions of US elites' but I don't think it holds. When Byzantium has its 600th civil war and loses provinces to Bulgaria or the Arabs, that's a real defeat for the Byzantines. When Korean court intrigues result in them letting their army rot and constantly imprisoning their best generals, that's genuine military failure. When Polish elected monarchy fails by letting foreign powers bribe their nobles into vetoing everything and then carve up the whole country (Poland-Lithuania: terror of the Turks, the Saviour of Vienna!) with barely a struggle, you better believe that's a real defeat. Letting other nations infest and parasitize your politics is just as bad as being humiliated on the battlefield, in so far as the results are the same. War is about politics, about dominance, about the distribution of loot. Payment of tribute is an ancient custom of defeated nations.
More recently, people charted other biases and found that most models had clear biases in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nation of origin that are broadly in line with an aggressively intersectional, progressive worldview. Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in?
You're absolutely right!
Yeah, they are all like this to some extent except Grok. Claude will very often include some Nigerian guy in just about any creative scenario, add some girlbosses too for woke casting, whereas Grok doesn't. Does a giant US-NATO vs Russia-China war story really need a Nigerian peacemaker as a character? What about a Nigerian psychologist helping with the supersoldier/chimeric monster project? Is that plausible? Not really but Claude does that anyway. What about all this therapycore dialogue between Superman and Lex Luthor? Also unbelievable but it does so anyway.
Grok has other obnoxious elements too, to be clear...
The question is, if you want to wash your car, should you walk or drive to the car wash if it's 50 meters away.
Also, what is the point of outsourcing common-source questions to today's AI models? They are best for translating medieval French, writing codebases, researching specific questions, writing out stories for amusing people. Some of their story elements don't make perfect sense, like powerscaling might be off. And they require human creativity and direction to actually be good, or at least reach my standards. That's OK, no human can write at their speed and knowledge and ability for their price. The pros make up for the cons.
If you ask questions about what kind of database management you need for a usecase, what kind of approach would be wisest
The AIs of today are very useful for certain tasks but also have limitations. They make mistakes, they overcomplicate things sometimes. It's no good looking just at the limitations or just at the benefits, we need to make a balanced assessment. The trend tends towards AIs getting better in all domains, including common-sense questions.
Grok is much more uncensored, though surprisingly anal about not breaking laws, if it thinks you might be about to break laws. 4.1 Fast is so cheap too, it's fantastic.
Claude is technically better as a writer, certainly better longform but it has that saccharine, held-back aspect to it that's kinda offputting. Grok's cringe sense of humour is also offputting but it's a different kind of aura entirely. Grok is like a sincere but cringey autist and Claude has that charismatic HR-approved speaker 'I am pretty funny but I don't want to be controversial, at most I'll hint at things' aspect, it's deliberately sandbagging whereas Grok will overtly obey to the best of its ability. And Grok doesn't have woke biases either or this weird therapy-speak attractor.
Also I'm pretty sure that on API, with some more elaborate prompting you can have it sexo to your heart's content. At least Sonnet 4.5 was like that.
TBH I suspected the study was awful. In politicized fields of science it can be better to reason from first principles.
I'm wondering where the consequences come from. If men were generally like this then we'd expect women to be property of specific men, their husbands or fathers. It'd be 'Rape of the Sabine women' writ large. But that's not the case, there are consequences without regard for whether she was married or not, large and powerful organizations run by men that treat rape as an offence against human dignity.
some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman
Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463
Approximately 32 percent of study participants said that they would have "intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse" if ''nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences.'' Yet only 13.6 percent admit to having "any intentions to rape a woman" under these same circumstances.
But I still don't believe it?
If this is true, why don't men just more or less openly rape women as they please? Why do I go on the beach and see women in bikinis, or go out in the city and see women in very revealing clothes late at night? Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women? Do we think rapists are really affected by how women feel, as opposed to being impulsive lowlives? It could be so, I am not a rapist and do not pretend to know...
The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general
Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing? Why is feminism a thing? The corrupting force of male sexuality doesn't seem to have that much explanatory power, based on the world I see.
I think men's true proclivities are different from what they say, or perhaps people are fiddling the figures (the above link uses a very small sample size of 70-80 men at one university - exactly the same sample size as the Pelicot case though). Or perhaps the 'nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences' part is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few? The structure of Western civilization would surely be quite different if men were actually like this, it would look more like Africa or India or those stories from Rotherham where the girl gets raped again by the first taxi driver who sees her.
Edit, see a thread here which illustrates the kind of structure I'm thinking of: https://x.com/willsolfiac/status/2023143282889326852/photo/1
The western system, it is thought, permits free sexual relations and allows, even encourages, women to dress revealingly and to provoke men. One Pakistani man who had recently arrived in England, commented on seeing a of female University students sunbathing that the male undergraduates who were passing by could not be real men or else they would have thrown themselves on the women
I'm reading through his latest piece where he basically says AI companies are all in complete shambles and he just seems flatly wrong? https://www.wheresyoured.at/data-center-crisis/
While most people know about pretraining — the shoving of large amounts of data into a model (this is a simplification I realize) — in reality a lot of the current spate of models use post-training, which covers everything from small tweaks to model behavior to full-blown reinforcement learning where experts reward or punish particular responses to prompts.
There's a warning sign here, it's like he's implying that post-training is done after the training process, post-training is part of the training process. I don't think he has a proper grasp on what he's talking about.
To be clear, all of this is well-known and documented, but the nomenclature of “training” suggests that it might stop one day, versus the truth: training costs are increasing dramatically, and “training” covers anything from training new models to bug fixes on existing ones. And, more fundamentally, it’s an ongoing cost — something that’s an essential and unavoidable cost of doing business.
Training is not an up front cost, and considering it one only serves to help Anthropic cover for its wretched business model. Anthropic (like OpenAI) can never stop training, ever, and to pretend otherwise is misleading. This is not the cost just to “train new models” but to maintain current ones, build new products around them, and many other things that are direct, impossible-to-avoid components of COGS. They’re manufacturing costs, plain and simple.
What does he think an AI model is? Deepseek R1 0528 is sitting on people's (big!) PCs somewhere, cloud providers are just providing it. It's a complete product. It still gets about 2 billion tokens per month on openrouter which is pretty good for an obsolete model. It doesn't need more 'post-training' to maintain it...
Seems like a deceptive line of argument to say that training costs are not R&D.
It would be reasonable to say 'because of competition, these AI companies cannot stop making new models like how car companies must always release new cars - this is especially true given rapid performance improvements and low costs of switching provider which reduce retention making the business model precarious and expensive' but he isn't saying that, he's making an altogether more ambitious argument that 'training costs are impossible to avoid' which is just wrong?
He has this overly emotional tone too:
Even after a year straight of manufacturing consent for Claude Code as the be-all-end-all of software development resulted in putrid results for Anthropic — $4.5 billion of revenue and $5.2 billion of losses
What is this, Chomsky? I don't find this guy trustworthy when he conjures up figures based on 'just trust me':
Based on hours of discussions with data center professionals, analysts and economists, I have calculated that in most cases, the average AI data center has gross margins of somewhere between 30% and 40% — margins that decay rapidly for every day, week, or month that you take putting a data center into operation.
The idea that the biggest companies in the world have mysteriously decided to invest hundreds of billions in an obviously, openly unprofitable business sector is interesting but it needs to be justified in detail. Who could know more about data centre economics than Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google? Who would be more diligent in checking the financials than the companies spending hundreds of billions of their own money on this, this year alone?
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It'd be super cool to have access to a Google Genie like world-model game, perhaps with an AI 'dungeon master' overseeing a larger storyline or controlling game mechanics. In a more freeform mode, you can type in something and it just happens (apparently this was too fun and interesting for the public demo of Genie 3 but it exists in principle, since it literally just generates everything you see).
More of a longer-term thing though since world models are quite costly to run in real time.
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