RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
"The media is trying to make ISIS look like bad guys and from media reporting, they seem pretty bad..."
They could just be bad! It is very, very likely that an illegal immigrant from Guyana who gets a position of high office is a sketchy character. Even without the cash, guns and so on he'd still be a sketchy character.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I don't see how the reporting is deceptive. They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character. How did he come to get a highly paid job in the administration? How did he pass the background check? Why is there all this cash in his car? Why did he try to flee law enforcement? These questions are probably not unrelated.
It's not a crime to have lots of cash nor should it be. But it is useful in trying to analyse the situation.
Not all people with certain kinds of obnoxious tattoos are criminals. But they do send a message and wisdom involves receiving that message and calibrating appropriately.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
You don't have that crypto in the car with you any more than I have the cash in my bank account in my phone, that crypto is actually in some coinbase server somewhere and unless it's Monero, it's very much traceable. It's not the same. If you had a Ledger with you, that would be analogous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere.
What do you mean? Why does music need a purpose? It just needs to sound good. A purpose and meaning are optional.
Now the lyrics, when they're AI, can have a samey, obvious vibe. But that's just the lyrics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Interesting story. I feel as though it's too well-written to be realistic. All these people are making smart moves, only to be checkmated by a smarter being.
Apparently Microsoft only just stopped outsourcing Pentagon IT to China: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/microsoft-china-digital-escorts-pentagon.html
The US military is not going to be making smart moves regarding human-in-the-loop AGI/ASI control loss situations. They don't make too many smart moves elsewhere in their area of expertise, developing weapons and winning wars. The Iraq-Afghanistan bunglers are still in power, there was no military purge or anything. They don't know how to win wars and they're not great at procuring weapons either - Constellation, LCS, Zumwalt... Why would they do a good job with AI, a seductive and dangerous, unknown and unprecedented technology?
It's like how back in the old days, people were concerned with how a powerful boxed AI might escape the box to interfere with the outside world. There's no boxing, there are huge companies working around the clock to give powerful AIs more access to the outside world! And in China they don't care about AI safety at all, they just laugh and move on.
Law of undignified failure: https://www.yahoo.com/news/watch-ed-sec-calls-artificial-184225319.html
President Donald Trump’s education secretary repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence as “A1”—like the popular steak sauce—instead of “AI” during a panel on artificial intelligence in education.
“I wish I could remember the source, but there’s a school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders or even pre-Ks have A1 teaching every year starting that far down in the grades,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon, 76, said at a summit put on by Silicon Valley investors in California on Tuesday.
Making the situation even more bizarre, McMahon pronounced “AI” correctly earlier during the same panel discussion. The Education Department didn’t respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment on the secretary’s apparent mistake.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Mystery drones have been lurking around airports and nuclear plants for years, prior to the war. May be Russia, may be some other source.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
v5 is much better but it still sounds Suno... It's indescribable, something about the clashing sound (if I was a musician I could be more clear).
Is what I was going to say, till I found one that didn't sound Suno at all. Wow.
Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?
Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard. Turn all my neverfinished story ideas into full stories, better than I ever could.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Yeah but within the ultra-processed junk food is chemicals and hormones that they didn't have in the 1950s and 1960s. Nutrition 'experts' have clearly let us down on the obesity front, they don't know what all these chemicals do in the long-term or in combination. And not just in food but the plastic wrappings on everything, the particles in the air, in sunscreen, in clothes...
I agree that eating healthy food is good. I do this myself and remain fairly healthy, no weight problems at least. I can eat as much as I like. But there's more to it than just surface-level health/obesity/malnutrition. The body is very complicated and poorly understood.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
True, the MKUltra brainwashing experiments did change Kaczynski's beliefs but not in a controllable or desirable way, from the point of view of the manipulators.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Their remote viewing was pretty promising too, per various documents. Nobody can fault the Cold War CIA with closedmindedness.
But if remote viewing is so great, why did they spend so much on the U2, satellites, SIGINT? If the US has unconventional propulsion, flying saucers, why would they need the F-35?
If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!
Western citizens aren't volunteering to die in Ukraine because the CIA did some trickery, they're doing this because their attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by the media and those around them, they think it's the right thing to do. Some people are easily suggestible and follower-type personalities. I think this website is full of contrarians and individualists who are highly resistant to consensus and passive manipulation, we naturally struggle to model the mindsets of the other end of the spectrum.
(One exception might be the chemicals and hormones we encounter all around in the modern world, which might act as epigenetic triggers making people more cowardly and less rebellious, though it's not clear that this is anyone's plan, per se. You can see the physiognomy of our fathers and grandfathers was totally different to today, some young men are growing breasts because of some chemical, presumably.)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I think we overestimate the power of 'mysterious technique' brainwashing. The gold-standard, world-class, top-tier brainwashing methods are all known: State education, media propaganda, social media to catalyze it all together. Some schmucks in the CIA are no match for that. Mass media >>>>> MKUltra.
And remember that many people are weak-willed. Think of the people who spend thousands on gacha or online gambling. There are going to be people who are extra-vulnerable to this stuff, fall into communities where this is normalized and valorized... bang bang bang!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Start suppressing the far-left? Arrest, debank, infiltrate, undermine, unearth embarassing information (huge contingent of pedophiles here, recall the weird pedo who tried to cover for Kirk's assassin). Definitely get rid of these twitch goons like Destiny, make it known that it just isn't practical for Twitch to be hosting this kind of content. Twitch will then find that the nebulous terms of service mean that, alas, Destiny's channel has to be shut down. Find legal issues and then continuously haul them into court until they STFU, though this works best if you actually control the judiciary.
This is standard govt stuff, a basic security-forces operation. If you're ideologically opposed to pressing the 'suppress' button then there isn't really much you can do. I guess you can try to channel leftist support over to a moderate instead. But that only works if you can do subtle manipulation of the media, which is very difficult today.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
The last 7 days are more important than everything else put together.
Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?
Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.
Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.
But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
You're too harsh on Sanderson I think. Sanderson is not on the level of HP slashfic. Go on AO3. You will See Things there and thoroughly reassess your opinions about writing quality.
Not much happens in Way of Kings. That's standard in fantasy. There is maybe 100 pages in the first book of the Wheel of Time where nothing happens. There is an entire book of filler in the Wheel of Time.
Books 1-3 of Stormlight were fine with moments of excellence, only by Book 4 does it degenerate into therapy-slop and an ass-pull twist. Also too much MCU inter-cosmere crossover stuff.
Yet any man or group of men who learned to read would have a huge military advantage.
They have female scribes to do the reading for them? Literacy was low back in medieval times. It's no more dumb than real stuff we did like footbinding.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
He is legitimately funny but in part because he comes up with whole new levels of reddit: argumentum ad Marvel Movie for instance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Why isn't it clear whether it's 100K per year or 100K lump sum? Lutnick was apparently saying annual fee. But the Press Sec says one-time payment.
https://x.com/PressSec/status/1969495900478488745
Serious failure of planning and state capacity here. Like with the tariffs where they go up and down on a whim. If you're going to implement a policy, be consistent and stable. Implement, test, review, iterate. Don't flip-flop from day to day.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them.
You're just describing how imperialism works, that's how countries get their borders. My point is that defensive violence is basically reasonable. It can't be less reasonable than offensive violence.
Most accept this and would take it a step further, viewing defensive violence as legitimate and offensive violence as wrong. Israel routinely says it's fighting a defensive struggle for survival to justify its tactics and campaigns, to justify foreign military aid and diplomatic assistance. But they're fighting offensively.
the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders
The Israelis didn't accept those borders and rejected them, that's why they took various territories beyond '67 borders in the Six Day War. They changed those borders and have continued to cement their territorial holdings by splitting up the Palestinian held land in the West Bank, creating new settlements.
Reasonable borders are based on power and Israeli power is unstable.
Israel is not a great power due to its small size and doesn't have the luxury of prosecuting this kind of campaign, they only get away with it due to US diplomatic and military support. Without America, they would've run out of bombs to blow up Gaza with and much else besides. Without America, their missile defence would be much less effective. Without American diplomacy and aid deals their neighbours would be much more hostile. The Israeli situation is unstable, they have a high-tech economy dependent on not being sanctioned, a high-tech military dependent on US weapons, a fractious democracy unsuited for juche-style isolation.
Constantly angering the Arab and Islamic world is not a smart idea. Israelis may be better at fighting but they're vastly outnumbered. This is not America vs native Americans. It is provocative and obnoxious behaviour to derive national legitimacy from harsh treatment in the ghettoes and expulsions in Eastern Europe and then ghettoize the locals of a graciously granted strip of land, while continuously striving to expand it for lebensraum. This kind of behaviour has and will reduce favourability in the West.
The Palestinians have made bad decisions, so has Israel. There may not be much sympathy for yet another Israeli crisis where they 'need' a surge of aid and support to get out of a fix. What is their plan for China inciting trouble, getting Hamas some first-rate MANPADs, ATGMs and killer drones to drag the US into more MENA drama? What is their plan for EU sanctions or the US walking away? Or even just a prolonged insurgency and skirmishing with Iran that wrecks their economy? Vae victis works both ways.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
So the army doesn't want to distribute food. They don't want to let anyone else distribute food. But they do want to shoot people coming up to get food... Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here! And it's not a sincere concern for crowd crush and equitable distribution of aid.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Machine-gunning and shelling people to avoid crowd crushes is obviously and inherently counter-productive.
If the IDF cared so much about how food was distributed in Gaza, they should try doing some food distributions themselves, win hearts and minds. Having food makes you popular amongst the hungry! US/British troops were very, very popular in Germany post-war since they controlled the food and treated the Germans with a very, very basic level of respect - even though they'd just bombed and blasted the country to ruins.
The IDF doesn't want to distribute food, they think it's too risky getting close to these guys? Then let some UN or NGOs do it.
But the IDF wants to starve the population as part of their campaign strategy and out of hatred, which is why they shoot people trying to get food and make it so extremely difficult to bring food in at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Your “obviously unarmed” Palestinian might well be wearing a bomb
So the logical, rational thing to do is to go out, chase her down as she runs away and magdump her?
The captain didn't believe she had a bomb, he just wanted to kill this girl.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
that these were dispossessed people just trying to defend their land and doing what they could in protest
These narratives were justifying Palestinian hatred of Israel, which is different from saying 'They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites'. It's the same kind of difference between 'Yes the Palestinians attack Israeli civilians but that's OK because X' and 'actually, there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian, they're fighting-age men/women and due to conscription they're all military targets - anything is permitted'. The former is an attempt at some kind of moral argument excusing admitted hatred, the latter is a way to cover up actions that stem from hatred as practical necessity. If the Israelis were really so concerned about old men and women/children getting food, they wouldn't restrict food aid so much. There are many better ways to prevent crowd crush or rationalize food distribution besides machine-gun fire and artillery!
The whole concept is bizarre. Suppose the Palestinians somehow laid so many roadside bombs Israelis couldn't get food without being gruesomely maimed. Then the Palestinians say 'oh they were clearly trying to steal food, we were simply punishing thieves per age-old traditions - cutting a leg here or there with a landmine works wonders to prevent theft'. It's just adding insult to injury.
If some Native American terror movement rises out of the alcoholic emptiness of the reservations to start committing terror attacks against white American civilians
The key difference is that native Americans get all kinds of special privileges in America. Native Americans get special casino rights, scholarships and all kinds of affirmative action.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug. So the narrative that they're systemically oppressed doesn't hold. The US military doesn't set up 'if you come near our command post we will shoot you and then confirm the kill' zones in black neighbourhoods. If George Floyd was a 13 year old girl being shot at from long range, people here would likely have a different stance.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
Killing those who try to steal food distributed in times of war and famine has happened for thousands of years, it’s critical to preventing both fatal crowd crushes
So what, the IDF machine-guns them to avoid crowd crushes??? They draw invisible, imaginary lines that, when crossed, get the Gazans shot? Come on, there's a very simple answer here. Few would justify Palestinian suicide bombings like this - 'it was for the Israeli's own good that the Palestinians blew up that bus full of civilians, they crossed an invisible Palestinian security line or something.' Suicide bombings are acts of hatred.
The Israelis also hate the Palestinians. That's why they torture them, blow them up, steal their land, knock down their houses, use all these elaborate terror tactics, shoot them when they're unarmed and obviously no threat. They've been doing this for years, before and after the present conflict.
An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
The Palestinians sure are easy to hate. But there's no way to replace 'Israeli hatred' in the equation here. I fully imagine a skeptical mottizen might try to look into this, is there context, could he have thought she was carrying a bomb? Of course not:
After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.
Naturally the soldiers leave the command post, there's this random girl they need to kill!
Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to "lure" the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then "confirmed the kill".
"I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over," he said.
Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.
On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."
At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.
Hatred is a clear and necessary requirement to understand what's going on in key elements of the Israeli military and society. Otherwise we're just left with absurdities like 'we were shooting the children with heavy machineguns and artillery so that older men wouldn't steal all the food and leave them with nothing'. The 'drug addict who gets let out of jail for the 15th time' analogy isn't appropriate, it's a case where some well-organized, well-connected home-invaders beat the crap out of the home-owner, lock him up in the basement and while lambasting his poverty and squalid conditions, use them as proof of why they should be in charge.
Countries do this, that's how borders get made after all. But dressing it up like this is ridiculous. Israel can't have it's anti-genocide, anti-imperialist, we're just defending ourselves cake and chow down on imperial expansion, ethnic cleansing and forceful subjugation.
deeply dysgenic
Let's not forget these guys outwitted Mossad and the whole Israeli-American intelligence complex with their surprise attack on October 7th. You'd think these high-IQ Israelis with all the most amazing gadgetry wouldn't get sneak-attacked a second time on Yom Kippur but apparently that little bit of readiness is too much to ask.
I think all this civil war talk is massively overblown.
Let's consider Russia for a moment, in the 1990s. The economy shrank 40%, looters stole much of what remained. Millions of people are unemployed in a country that has no experience with unemployment, or their wages just aren't paid. If they are paid, often they can't buy anything. There are no working social services. Life expectancy dropped 8 years. It's really, really bad.
There are some extremely dubious elections, in a country which has barely even had a chance to get used to elections. The communists (numerous and well-organized) had many very good reasons to dispute them, given that capitalism had proven to be a massive disaster thus far.
The President (a retarded drunk) had the army shell the White House with tanks. Hundreds of government representatives and officials died. There was a disastrous war in Chechnya. It was the nightmare-fantasy version of what Trump will do to America but real.
Still no civil war! Rich countries with strong bureaucracies do not have civil wars unless there are extreme circumstances. I count Russia in the 1990s as a rich country - the US is extremely rich. US security forces have many things that the Russians didn't, drones and internet surveillance. And then there are the American nuclear forces, who have many good reasons to want to stick together and resolve things peacefully.
For a civil war to happen in America, the power of the government has to be broken. At minimum, there'd need to be a decisive military defeat by China prompting an economic depression and delegitimation of traditional authorities. But even then you might just get a socialist/fascist takeover or a breakup rather than a civil war. One dead guy does not cut it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
if North Korea can be viable as a state, so can Israel
North Korea is a fully centralized totalitarian party-state, heir to centuries of cultural isolationism. Israel is incredibly unstable politically, there are routinely massive protests and huge factional divides. You could not have picked two countries any more different.
I'm more interested in the exact meaning of its '30 hours +' of continuous coding. What does that mean? 30 hours in series, or 30 hours over parallel, many sub-agents...
Can you really leave it on overnight and come back to see a good result? I wouldn't know, I'm a peasant stuck on the Pro subscription...
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