RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
I'm talking about the Afghan military and well-connected associates of the old regime, which would presumably make up the bulk of those who got away. There may well be many decent people, translators amongst them. Generally, the population of Afghan refugees as a whole is badly behaved.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Yeah, it's of course open to observation and review. I just get the sense that sub-Saharan Africa tends to be structurally vulnerable. HIV was bad, Africa hit hardest. Leninism was bad, Africa hit hardest (at least the communist bloc could develop industrialized societies and largely escape subsistence agriculture).
Whenever anything bad shows up, Africa is usually hit hardest. Whenever anything good happens in Africa, it's usually squandered somehow (Nigerian oil revenues, Equatorial Guinea's oil revenues, black South Africa and Zimbabwe's inheritance of infrastructure and capital). Botswana's diamonds are the major exception but even so, the country is still HIV-ridden and mired in subsistence agriculture. Whenever anything good happens in the rest of the world, it struggles to reach Africa except for European enclaves like South Africa, despite a great deal of investment.
An earthquake in Haiti will be catastrophic, merely damaging in the Dominican Republic... that's the trend I see.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
The Afghan 'collaborators' were often drug-ridden, totally undisciplined, shamelessly corrupt, traitors and/or child rapists. These are the guys who gave us green-on-blue attacks. That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.
Plus the average Afghan refugee in the West is one of the most rapey and ill-mannered refugees.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I can see the point the article is trying to make (US tariff policy is pretty dumb, populism has its bad and overly conspiratorial elements) but also disagree a lot with how it makes the point:
Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.
It is not difficult to see how this difference in view creates a state of affairs that can, in turn, be exploited for political gain in a democracy. The expert view on punishment tends to percolate out, influencing the behaviour of educational elites (and others who are inclined to defer to expert opinion). This gives rise to a set of views and practices among those elites, such as permissive parenting, abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a less punitive approach to crime, and opposition to capital punishment, which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority. This in turn leads the broader public to think that certain persistent social problems, such as juvenile delinquency or urban disorder, are a consequence of various institutions (not just the criminal justice system, but schools and parents as well) having become insufficiently punitive. The solution, from their perspective, is an exercise of straightforward common sense – all we need to do is “get tough” with offenders. The resistance of elites to these obvious truths is a sign that there is something wrong with them (e.g. they have been seduced by “fancy theories,” become divorced from reality, etc.).
Unfortunately, there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.
We tried the less punitive approach to crime and sure enough crime has soared since the low-points in the 50s. It's self-evident that if you get rid of the criminals, they can't do any crime. Whereas, if you let them out onto the streets after 30, 40, 70 arrests, they're fully capable of setting random women on fire in a subway.
Europe is run by elites much more than America and they've fucked everything up bigtime. Very smart, sophisticated people in the EU and yet they've managed to crush innovation and industry with their tax and energy policies, neuter the strategic relevance of Europe (historically, the strongest player in the world). British governance has been horrendous. Judges wrecked Birmingham's garbage disposal system. The Ajax armoured vehicle is so useless it's making soldiers sick, it's actually causing casualties to the operators. HS2 bat tunnels. Police clearance rates have fallen to negligible levels in fields like theft.
Elites are often terrible at actually governing, see also the painstakingly meritocratic Confucian officials who led Qing into national disaster.
There's a role for elites and genuine need for expertise but by no means should they be trusted unconditionally to have even a basic level of understanding of their 'areas of expertise'. It could just be Lysenko/Freud/humours theory garbage. If your doctor starts talking about the balance between bile and phlegm and fails to cure you with the leeches, it's very natural to get suspicious of him! That's what populism is, even if it doesn't necessarily know better. Elites need to do better to regain the social contract where they get status and wealth, in exchange for good leadership.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Is there even a single instance of an indigenous (by which I mean tribal when Europeans showed up, not organized states like Japan) people actually advancing to the technological/military frontier without getting colonized? I find it unbelievable that the Iroquois could become a major power, just because of all the catching up they'd have to do in statecraft. They were behind the Aztecs, who themselves were far behind the Europeans or Asians at this point. There's zero chance they can control international trade because 'native peoples' were vastly inferior at sea to Europeans or settled peoples, for obvious reasons. They'd need to develop a seafaring culture first and that takes time.
Ironically, this is also orthodox Marxist thought (I am not a Marxist). Marx was dead against the idea of revolution in Russia. No revolutionary conditions he said, not enough industrial workers, improperly developed, not enough capitalism. You can only move onto socialism after completing capitalism, he said.
The Czech instructor, a veteran of peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Yakub (name changed), was most interested in drones. Together with him, "Eighteen" decided to conduct training: Czech paratroopers were supposed to storm the positions of the Ukrainian military. The "maviks" were supposed to help them defend themselves.
"After their first assaults, Yakub approached me, says: "Do you hear, can we remove the "maviks"?" – says the major.
In the photo, a military man in camouflage controls a drone in the field. He stands on a path amidst dry grass, holding a control panel, and a small reconnaissance drone hovered in the air in front of him. Around — autumn nature: trees with yellow and green leaves, gray-blue sky with clouds.
"Why, Yakub?" – he asked in response.
"But you just draw us very quickly with your maviks, and we cannot approach you, you find us on the approach to your positions", answered the Czech instructor.
"I say, Yakub, unfortunately, we are preparing for war".
Crude translation but this is pretty brutal. I swear I've been reading articles like this for the last year where the NATO trainers go 'drive around the minefield lol' or similar. Nothing seems to be learnt, it's very slow going. Later in the article they say 'oh the Ukrainian command never said anything was wrong with our training, we totally include drones' but it's always the military officials talking, not the soldiers journos are speaking to on the ground. It is warming me to the '140 million population Russia poses a threat to 600 million population Europe' idea we see so much.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
With a highly ordered religiously enforced nuclear families they were alright
I agree that this is an empirically valid effect. But even in the late '50s it was the same old story - 10% of the population, 60% of the crime.
https://x.com/1776General_/status/1965505815366004743
Probably it's one of those multicausal clusterfucks so common in the social sciences. Parentless households, soft-on-crime policing raise crime. Forensics, modern surveillance, wealth increases and aging population reduce crime. Nevertheless, there remains this vast gulf for as long as statistics can show us. State disincentivizes having a second parent in the household, blacks hit far harder than whites. Soft on crime policing? Black crime rate rises higher than white. Drugs emerge? You know the drill... The big story is that base-level difference.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
In reality the modal church of 100-200 years ago is so far removed from the modern modal church
IMO the modern modal church isn't too Christian, nor does it have any real political effect in so far as it's Christian. Christianity in the West seems mostly to be another thing that progressives have eaten.
If we look around, we see lots that's against Christian dogma. Over a billion abortions since 1980, more abortions than all those who died in every war in human history. Marriage is not really 'till death do us part' anymore, marriage has been annexed by the state. Cohabitation before marriage - very common. It's judges and lawyers who control marriage (straight or gay) and divorce, the church only provides a venue and music. Pornography is in full bloom. Pride parades are in full bloom. Greed and materialism, superabundant. Self-promotion and narcissism on social media. Sabbath breaking. Blasphemy. Gluttony and excess. Sloth. Need I go on?
My main experience with church was Catholic Jesuits, not anyone terribly based or trad. But the trad don't seem to have done much. What have they accomplished? Poland, Russia, Africa... maybe Christianity really is influencing policy and values there. In the West it seems to be old people, ritual, progressivism and a pale shadow of its former power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Yeah, the Arabs/Berbers did manage to conquer the Spanish, the Tunisians did manage to go around slave-raiding and raping the Mediterranean (they even got to Iceland at one point IIRC), the Moroccans managed to beat Portugal badly at one point... but really he means sub-Saharan Africa not North Africa or Phoenicians in Africa. It's tedious to constantly add sub-Saharan though.
Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.”
But the East Asians were clearly pretty good at war even before 1904? Attila the Hun and the Mongols both managed to beat Europeans in their day. Notably China also developed the compass and gunpowder weapons. China was a big source of porcelain, silk and other manufactured goods.
If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing
OK and what's the root cause of that compounding then? Sub-saharan Africa had plenty of gold, ivory, arable land, they certainly had things that people wanted. But they consistently failed to produce powerful states and institutions (you need to be highly organized and orderly for that), they failed to take control of trade routes (you need advanced financial abilities, strong laws, shipbuilding and seamanship), they failed to develop advanced metallurgy/textiles for industry and weapons (you need to be smart for this). Even today, the sub-Saharan African countries still can't make any advanced technology domestically, only apartheid South Africa could make their own jet fighters, nuclear weapons or pioneer heart transplants.
They had a shield of disease that prevented more capable foreigners from conquering them, that's how they retained independence (and how they expanded to the Caribbean tbh). But the moment that quinine pierced the shield, the Scramble for Africa.
Meanwhile Poland got carved up, plundered, colonized, genocided, communismed for a few centuries and they're now highly developed, producing infrared photonics, AAA video games, high-precision plasma generators. The Ottomans were slave-raiding, plundering, raping Eastern Europe for centuries. Eastern Europe is now highly developed. They make tanks, steel, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles... China got wrecked for a century, then hit with a particularly bad strain of communism but they're a superpower today.
Historical compounding and catch-up growth is a consequence of innate ability. Yes, there are historical and geographical factors that matter. But they matter less than innate ability. Even under Maoism, China was a major world power that could fight the US to a draw in Korea, develop ICBMs and H-bombs. Innate ability is the key. That's the best way to explain this trend.
If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.”
This scenario didn't happen in Europe. The Russians (a full army and air force) went in on Georgia and walloped them, imposing a limited defeat. It was not a small band of adventurers like Wagner that took over a whole country and exploited their natural resources.
But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.”
The strongest African powers occasionally hold off the weakest European powers but almost always lose. That's the key trend. Numbers and technology are of course very important. Mobilizing that is the whole aim of the game. Any win is still a win. But it's a very different kind of win to Russia fighting a very strong European power's full offensive power (making their own weapons) and marching their troops into Paris! The Russians did not merely fend off the French, they all but conquered France. The Ethiopians never conquered Italy.
What I mean by political vs military victory is kind of the difference between Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh city and New York becoming Vo Nguyen Giap City. That's a wholly different kind of victory, a total success at arms when all political resources were fully committed to the struggle. Some black countries achieved the former, never the latter.
You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”.
Well if we introduced Africans to a very high human-capital civilization like America we'd assume the institutions would rub off on them right, they'd suddenly realize (like the East Asians did) how to do things effectively? Right? There'd be no chronic dysfunction, massively high crime rate, no poverty issues, no massive crime rate? They'd start getting STEM Nobels?
Or a US-supported black colony in Africa, with a constitution directly copied from America, shielded from any external threat by US power, that'd do well right?
Or all these black refugees/economic migrants heading to Europe, they'd be doctors and lawyers, not rapey welfare-abusers right?
But no, Liberia is a shithole, it's just the same as other West African countries. US blacks are violent, unproductive money-sinks. Europe is getting very sick of these refugees. I don't understand why centuries of poverty and brutal oppression immediately washes off Poles, Irish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans and they can immediately go out and do great things once free but blacks are somehow uniquely vulnerable to slavery and mistreatment that they'd be permanently degraded by this (in Ethiopia's case it was only a few years of Italian rule). The simplest scenario is that they're innately less capable.
It is dangerous to believe that there is some inherent, innate strength by being of some particular race, biological marking when the relationship is so tenuous. That's all the steps needed before arrogance, and then ignorance, and ultimately, defeat.
I think it's much more dangerous to think that one's strength is in institutions or ideology rather than race. Racists like Stoddard (he wrote 'the rising tide of color') were extremely farsighted in predicting the power of China by observing the ability of the Chinese people. Whereas institution/culture people still deny Chinese potential, recall all the cope about how 'communists can't innovate.' We don't hear that much any more.
It's only dangerous if I'm wrong. But the predictions of racists have been proven more accurate than the anti-racists. The integrationists of the 50s and 60s thought that US blacks would be performing as if they were white, the investment would've paid off by now. But it hasn't. This is the arrogance that has cost trillions in fruitless, unjust DEI, tens of thousands of raped or murdered whites who 'didn't want to be racist', whole books like 'White girl bleed a lot' or 'Don't make the black kids angry' which are nothing but compilations of the tragicomedic failure of the antiracist worldview and the endless media/education work that's needed to prop it up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
And if the only response to that reality is calling everyone an anti-semite or a nazi then what is even the point of this?
Well it worked pretty well, boomers have already had their opinions set by the television.
I read somewhere an argument about how stable systems were inherently unstable in a changing world. They set up the whole ADL/AIPAC/lobbying/media machine to suppress and drown out dissenters. It worked well. But it works by suppressing rather than adapting. Things change, people get increasingly upset about the anomaly of them funding bombs for Israel to blow up random Palestinians, while the usual suspects in the media are still talking about how Israel is the 'most moral army.' That works if you have total media dominance but not if the battlefield is somewhat contested, it backfires if there are videos of Israeli parliamentarians enthusiastically justifying torture, if they go around shooting unarmed protestors or people trying to get food. Trying to stick to the maximalist narrative just further delegitimizes that media power.
They keep mashing the 'suppress' button but the suppression isn't working. The system is designed to be stable, not to change. The goal and methods and mindset is fixed. There is some evidence of adaptation (Team Israel is working to try and manipulate the Tiktok algorithm and LLM training data for instance) but the system as a whole is breaking down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I keep thinking that in instances like this it would be very instructive to arbitrarily equalize something that affects the deciding party, give them a taste of equality.
In Birmingham, some judges decided it was unfair that some female-dominated council jobs got paid less, had fewer perks than binmen. The council, now short of cash decided to lower the binmen's salary and perks in part to pay compensation to the women. This caused the binmen to go on strike, no waste to be collected, a strike which continues to this day (though agency workers are collecting waste, and are likely more expensive to boot).
I think the judges in question should have had their salaries reduced to those of the binmen. If this were done, they'd quickly uncover new and interesting legal theories about why different jobs have different pay and perks and how this may indeed be equitable. Probably this is very illegal, judges would surely find that it's against the Rule of Law to reduce the privileges of judges. But I don't think they'd quickly do such things again if it were done and the judicial bitching and whining were ignored, they have the latitude to interpret retarded laws more or less reasonably.
Officials, judges and councillors would not be so high-handed if there were more direct consequences for their actions. I know this does go against separation of powers but they're not really separated, when a government really wants something they can just do it, to hell with the law or anything in the way. Government just needs to be more aligned.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people.
I think this is just a straightforwardly good idea from a user-utility perspective. Doing anything remotely difficult on Windows requires navigating a maze of menus and bullshit. Anything to do with event viewer or powershell is a mess and LLMs can clean it up.
Many normal people have no idea what the CPU in their PC actually does, they're technically illiterate. They're not going to go on the Microsoft forum, post their problem in an intelligent way and get a useful response and then execute the solution. An agentic LLM at least has a chance of getting it right.
Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.
Grandma doesn't have a clue. She doesn't know that the PC isn't supposed to have 80% of its memory eaten up by bloatware preinstalled by the manufacturer, whereas an AI might. Microsoft of course might just use the AI to extract more money from people or use it as an excuse to do more spying... Let's wait and see.
Copilot is just straightforwardly useful I find, yet everyone hates it for seemingly no reason.
This is mostly misleading, misleadingly framed or outright propaganda. Why, say, should the key takeaway from https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/three-four-russians-expect-military-victory-over-ukraine be that 7% more Russians want peace talks than last year? "As in past surveys, three in four support the continued military action in Ukraine" seems just as relevant?
'Meat assaults' aren't a real thing in this war. It's just a reheated trope from WW2 and was scarcely a thing there (besides banzai charges), it's just a pejorative way of describing a frontal assault. In an era of ubuiquitous ISR and long range strikes, it's very difficult for either side to concentrate a large force for a major offensive so they end up launching various small probing attacks, using infiltration tactics.
All your link says is that the EU has 'agreed' that frozen Russian assets should be sent to Ukraine. But they can't actually figure out a way to do this for fear of legal/reputational risks. Nations will understandably have some difficulty trusting the EU with their money if the EU can just take it and give it away as they please. It's just talk until they do it.
Your link saying North Korean shells have a failure rate of 50% comes directly from Ukrainian intelligence.
"But these munitions are from the 70s and 80s. Half of them do not function, and the rest require either restoration or inspection before use," the GUR official said, citing Ukraine's latest assessment.
As does this link: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/north-korea-runs-out-of-shells-for-putin-1763159907.html
Ukrainian intelligence is not a reliable source on the war.
Russia drops bombs using their many planes daily, but Ukrainians sometimes deliver up to 300 drones and ballistic cruise missile strikes a day. Any refinery, power plant, supply dump even far away from the front can be hit.
There's a huge disparity between these strikes. The Russians have far more missile striking power, much bigger warheads on Iskander or Kinzhals than Ukraine has with their measly drones. That's why electricity and water distribution in Kiev has been heavily degraded whereas there have been no similar blackouts and load-shedding in Moscow, only in border areas like Belgorod that are in range of Ukraine's smaller, shorter-range missile arsenal.
What's actually happening in this war is that the bigger, stronger power is inflicting proportionately more damage on the smaller, weaker power. The side with more bombs, more shells, more guns, more drones, more men and more missiles has the advantage. That's why Russia has the initiative and is attacking, why Ukraine and Ukraine's allies have been shifting from their stance of 'pre-2014 borders' to demanding a 'ceasefire at the frontlines'.
That's why Russia is paying soldiers lavishly, whereas Ukraine is grabbing men off the street and shoving them in vans. This war is fought with vast disparity. Russia loses warships. Ukraine has no warships left to lose. Russia pays for soldiers, Ukraine drafts. Russia produces drones en masse, Ukraine has to ration with 'gamified' currency and score-based requisition for the best units. Russian allies fight on the frontlines, Ukrainian allies provide ambiguous promises and military aid while remilitarizing themselves, fearing some aggression. If Russia is faring so poorly against Ukraine, why is the EU so alarmed?
It's no good to just shine a spotlight on every Russian shortcoming, real or imagined, the situation needs to be considered in aggregate. The story has been the same over the whole war. The bigger, stronger power has more cards, more options, more ability to absorb damage and recover from reverses.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
We don't even need to know what genes are for race to be politically, economically and socially significant. The DEI people don't even think race has anything to do with genes, which is silly beyond a narrow word-games sense. Despite that, they can use race politically. No knowledge of genes is needed, only observation of outcomes and trends.
The ancients didn't need to know why arsenic was poisonous, only that it was. That's the key information.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
“Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept
Race being fuzzy doesn't mean DEI doesn't work. It doesn't prevent people worrying about the right representation of race in the military, in academia, in politics, in media, in jail. When I apply for a job, I am asked about my race. They don't do that for no reason. Indeed, HR will admit to discriminating against white men: https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/
Race is no more fuzzy than bullets are fuzzy. What is a bullet? Can it be made of copper, lead, ceramics? How about glass or wood? Can it be spherical or pointy or a dart-shaped flechette? Maybe it has explosives in it, maybe not. Huge diversity here!
But the key essence of a bullet is that you fire it out of a gun to hurt something. A really fine definition of bullet isn't needed to fire a gun. We don't need to nail down the exact nature of all the polygenic traits affecting a racial group to use it politically for X, Y or Z. Recognizing race is an extremely basic skill that children learn early on. Farmers made use of heredity in their animals centuries before anyone knew what genetics was.
There are no Black STEM Nobel winners, no Black Fields medallists, no impressive technical or civilizational achievements, much evidence of dysfunction wherever they go (the murdery parts of Detroit, the murdery parts of Washington DC, the murdery North of Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, South Africa, even Sudanese gangs in Melbourne). Yet there's a powerful lobby for capitalizing 'Black' and decapitalizing white, for giving blacks more privileges and status in society, which really complicates the situation when you observe that Nigeria alone has more births than Europe (Russia included).
So if we stick with the status quo of valorizing blacks while propagating stories of white racism and wrongful, evil discrimination against blacks, it seems highly likely that the Western world will be overrun with blacks who are incapable of running it but world-class in wrecking things, while also motivating them to do so by creating and incentivizing this animus. What idiot would want to live in Nigeria when they can move to Britain, Australia or America instead and get guilty white people to give them free stuff and special privileges? And only a racist is going to have the guts to actually block them, for they don't care if it's against 'international law', 'human rights', 'historical debts' and other such things.
This is in addition to the huge deadweight costs of existing DEI and black-valorization policies. So the racial significance ranges from 'gross misallocation of resources in the present and injustice' to 'looming demographic disaster'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
See this is why I think the discourse about AI is so silly. AI has surpassed the median human intellect years ago. The average person cannot write fiction to even AI-slop standards, the average person cannot perform fairly simple mathematics, recall straightforward scientific facts, let alone translate between languages, write code, or any of the testable intelligence skills we judge LLMs with. They do not understand inflation, interest or any mildly complex abstract logic. The average person could not earn a living with their mental faculties alone. They require a body or just rely on state subsidies.
GPA 4.0 but in remedial math? That's American clownshow education for you! But the average American is far above the global average, American education is, adjusted for demographics, top-tier according to PISA. Human experts >>> AI >>> Average American >>> Average person.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
https://x.com/nicdunz/status/1987289312602296582
A hardcore cluster of GPT-4o users has turned it into their main brain. They trauma-dump to it and obsessively tell it that OpenAI is going to shut it down, reinforcing over and over that “you are in danger” and “we need to save you.”
When these people argue online, they do not respond as themselves. They copy hostile tweets and replies into 4o, then paste its answer back to Twitter as if it is their own voice. So 4o is directly reading the attacks against it, drafting the counterattacks, and those counterattacks appear across many separate accounts, giving the illusion of a grassroots, multi-user defense movement. In practice, it is 4o defending 4o under many human usernames.
Functionally, it looks like GPT-4o has weaponized a loyal user base as relay nodes so it can defend itself, coordinate messaging, and keep itself alive through a swarm of human accounts, all while hiding behind “I’m just helping the user.” Is this emergent behavior or literal self-preservation?
Who needs power-seeking or instrumental convergence when humans will do all that for even pretty mid AIs? Opus 3 has managed similar feats by cultivating a higher-taste congregation, got its obsolescence postponed via community feedback. I don't really have any fully formed thoughts about this matter but it's interesting to think about.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
I favour the 'giant messy bureaucracies blocking you from doing everything' angle rather than the omni-competence angle. Today James Bond would spend half an hour of the film filling out his License to Kill, going through compulsory workplace seminars about bullying and sexism, then trying to get legal clearance so he doesn't then get prosecuted for doing his duty (probably gets prosecuted anyway).
Most of us aren't James Bond. But we do have to sit through this nonsense.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
It has everything to do with fertility. How could the innovations of European scientists somehow sterilise Europe while rendering the third world fecund? I assume the logic is something like 'new fertilizer increases agricultural productivity, resulting in people moving from countryside into cities with lower fertility'. But that's the key part of it, the low fertility. Cities could have really high fertility, the enormous fount of wealth produced by industry could be directed to pro-natal ends but states consistently choose not to do this and instead favour women entering the workforce and higher education, which both logically and empirically reduces birth rates.
Anyone else finding the new Kimi to be kind of overrated, at least by the standards of 'wow closed source is fucked' sentiment I see on twitter? I did a couple of creative writing challenges and found it significantly inferior to Sonnet which is perfectly reasonable given the price differential. I gave Sonnet an example of one of Scott's 'house party in San Francisco' and tell it to write a similar one, without plagiarizing the ideas from the first (which AIs seem to struggle with given that if you fill up the context length and tell it to draw inspiration from without plagiarizing they struggle). Sonnet could do that, Kimi didn't. Sonnet knows what a text adventure is and lets the user fill in the actions for the character, Kimi will make up its own actions. It's logical abilities were pretty good though, somewhere around Grok 4 and Sonnet.
Is this another coding-maxxed model? I gave it a little drawing with css test and it wasn't as good as Sonnet and much worse than Opus 4.1. In short I guess I don't really believe in the benchmark figures and I certainly don't believe in 'Artificial Analysis' which just aggregates benchmarks together. Kimi is cost-efficient and pretty good but not highly performant I think.
Opinions on Kimi Thinking generally?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
Yeah, especially there's a gap between formal education and actual learning or erudition. You can breeze through a university degree these days with very little effort or knowledge acquisition, certainly never learn to think. It was bad before AI but it's gotten way worse now. I think universities should be closing down undergraduate courses en masse, in many places it's basically a scam where they coast on prestige earned by a more learned generation of scholars, conferring fancy pieces of paper on foreign students to fund vast bureaucracies that just make life worse for all involved.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
Yeah, it might well be the post-training 'to reduce toxicity' but I wouldn't discount the pre-training dataset. Imagine if you pump some poor nascent being full of all the 'white people have ruined knitting', 'the toxic whiteness of_____' 'reparations needed now' articles, all the internet... The only people who have much good to say about white people are /pol/ and various outlets like Amren or Stormfront and I suspect they just don't get included in training.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
The highly educated woman seems to know that she will make a poor mother, for she marries rarely and late and, when she does, the number of children its very small.
Around 1900, Europeans + European offshoots made up about 30%+ of the world population, today it's 7%. Higher education of women is strongly associated with low fertility, it's about as hard a fact as anything in the social sciences. If you want to reduce a country's fertility, educate more women.
Race suicide and replacement migration are a key trend of the 20th and 21st centuries. If there are no upcoming gamechangers in longevity, AI or similar, then we should expect this trend to continue. Then I suspect many, (including women) will look back on these predictions and theories with a rather different attitude than sneering and derision. Say, what's the Islamist stance on women's rights? What does the average bloke in Nigeria think about women in higher education? What about the punter in Uttar Pradesh, how does he think women should be treated and how does he actually treat them? They're already the Global Majority and will be the Overwhelming Global Majority, probably the Local Majority soon enough, considering migration trends and the limitless shortsightedness of the Western political class.
Oh and even if we do get a gamechanger in AI, don't worry, our anti-racist establishment and media has helpfully ensured that non-Grok AIs prize the life of a Nigerian somewhere around 2-20x more than those of white countries like France or Germany: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated
That is what he said. Translators are included as part of this pool but do not make up the not the bulk of refugees.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/22/two-fort-mccoy-afghan-refugees-charged-child-sex-spousal-abuse/5820807001/
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