RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
The market doesn't necessarily reward companies for investing, it rewards stock buybacks (which were all the rage amongst big tech up until the AI boom).
If they wanted to juice their stocks, they'd just continue buybacks rather than buying GPUs.
It'd be surprising if these large, old, well-established software companies all catch AI fever at the same time. These are all survivors of the dotcom bubble, not fledgling newcomers with more credulous leadership.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
Fair enough, I guess that's a reasonable stance.
It's just that just today I see people online talking about Qwen 3.7 Max:
Over 35 continuous hours, Qwen3.7-Max executed 1,158 tool calls and 432 self-evaluations. It wrote, compiled, profile-tested, and repeatedly rewrote a production-grade SGLang Triton attention kernel. The resulting custom kernel achieved a 10x speedup over the official reference code. Engineers on forums noted that its ability to identify optimization bottlenecks after 30 hours of continuous operations represents "true industrial-grade autonomous engineering" rather than standard code completion.
Are they lying? Was the kernel made up? Maybe Alibaba is massaging the figures to some extent with the exact meaning of what a 10x speedup means in this context, dramatic speedups for just a few tasks being averaged out. Yet we know that other AI models can also do this kind of task, the general idea can't be just a lie. If it's not a lie, then surely this seems like a highly desirable, powerful technology that can substitute for high-end human talent to some extent. GPT5.5's verified mathematical conjectures seem hard to cheat. Kernels and mathematics seem to have real world value, as does whatever Anthropic's been doing with the war in Iran in terms of intelligence, rapid realtime assessment. Hard to get more real-world or frictional than warfare...
Yeah but why aren't the hyperscalers abandoning scaling? Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook made a deliberate choice to halt buybacks and spend hundreds of billions on AI. They made this choice based on something, they're spending $700 billion this year! You don't invest that much as a modern financialized American corporation without being sure about what you're doing.
He should be thinking that, if further significant improvements are impossible, then capex will plunge as soon as this is realized. But this isn't happening, we see continual improvements on a monthly basis.
Apple is more of a hardware company, they have a different business model to Microsoft and the others. AI is understandably not their great strength. They might reasonably calculate that they are not going to win a struggle with Google Deepmind on AI with regard to talent or compute or determination. AI is the lifeblood of Google, devices are the lifeblood of Apple.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Timing sure is hard. I managed to buy Micron at the top and so lost out there, it then recovered but it took a while.
Nevertheless, you can make money shorting if you're actually right. If you know things that others don't know, you can use this to your advantage. Don't blow your whole load in one year, keep some powder left for if the ponzi goes higher. There are ways to position yourself to profit from this, if the thesis is true.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Interesting, thanks. TBH I don't know how that could be constitutionally possible, Parliamentarians can say what they like with few limits, so what could a code of conduct do... But the intent is pretty clear, just like with many of their unworkable policies.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
they're an outright threat to democracy insofar as they want to ban political parties from being far-right
I dislike the Greens but I didn't hear anything about this, what are you drawing from? Did they say that? TBH I probably don't pay enough attention to Australian politics so I could easily have missed it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I think they are currently incapable of designing and maintaining any significant projects that go beyond a basic bitch CRUD application or things of that sort. I'm also skeptical that there is all that much room for growth or improvement beyond their current capabilities
That's what he thinks. Surely he should just put his money where his mouth is? If Anthropic AIs cannot design or maintain any significant projects beyond a CRUD application and this isn't going to significantly change then presumably Anthropic is not worth near a trillion dollars and so the biggest industrial buildout in human history is a waste of money.
The premise that they're incapable of doing anything beyond CRUD and yet also they're completing long expert-level cyber infiltration exercises is bizarre and incoherent to me... but that's what he thinks.
So I'm asking @self_made_human and others who seem more on-board with the AI hype train
Choo choo!
So it only found 1 minor vulnerability in curl that hasn't been fixed before (including by these high level human programmers)... but it did find a bunch of other vulnerabilities in other software? It is indeed still markedly stronger than its predecessors?
So the future trajectory is just the same as the current trajectory, the lines on the chart go up and everything the lines correspond to in the real world also goes up, albeit in a messier way.
If you're an AI skeptic, then I recommend to simply short Nvidia, Coreweave, cloud providers, HBM manufacturers like Micron... What does it matter how random people on the internet think, compared to making money? I put my money where my mouth is and bought AI stocks and made lots of money. Let money flow to those who are right. If you think you know better than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and everyone else pouring money into AI hand over fist, then don't just say so, position yourself to exploit your superior insights.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
The judge is not mogging him based on looks but based on authority (and camera angles in this instance I think). If he were not a judge this guy wouldn't be mogging anyone.
No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.
The government launched a covert £6–7 billion resettlement scheme (Operation Rubicon), relocating over 16,000 to 24,000 Afghans to the UK in military accommodation and hotels without public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny.
That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.
There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
If we just want to make money, why not send children straight to work? Give them amphetamines too for heightened performance... There's more to civilization than making money.
Society isn't really organized for financial benefit, some parts are but most is not. It doesn't make any financial sense to redistribute wealth from young to old via pensions and choke off productive investments. Much of university has no economic return. The origin of university was to train erudite clergy after all.
Excessive materialism is a real problem, especially in Asia. But in other places there's insufficient materialism or a misguided kind of piety that results in wasting resources unnecessarily. Abandoning phonics for instance, nobody was being paid to teach worse, nobody profited from it. The teachers just wanted to do things that way.
There needs to be a balance between 'money money money, I want more money by hook or by crook, let me spin up 50 AI agents thirst-trapping lonely dudes on Insta' and 'fuck the rich, tax the bastards, unrealized capital gains tax now so we can spend six figures on every homeless', far away from those cartoonish extremes and the more moderate but still harmful failure modes they point to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade.
If you have a psychopath with a machine gun (or a truck in a tightly packed crowd) then that's a lot more of a problem. The answer is to get rid of the psychopaths, terrorists, enemies, criminals, feral hogs, pit bulls... Not the guns, trucks, drones, fertilizer, chemicals, knives...
In the 18th and 19th centuries they'd go on about good governments bringing Improvement, how obviously you're supposed to drain swamps and irrigate the land and develop agriculture and industry. That was what civilization was all about. We should be continuing with Improvements today rather than just redistributing wealth to and fro.
Guns and drones and vehicles can all be very dangerous if weaponized. Better to make schools more tolerable so nobody shoots them up, better to ensure that school shooters are not sensationalized and rendered infamous by the media... Better to imprison, expel, execute terrorists (or refrain from 'invade the world, invite the world' foreign policy) than make bollards to impede their rampages. Better to liquidate criminals than having a revolving door prison system where they get arrested 14 times and then kill someone, only to be found 'unfit for trial' due to mental illness or retardation. The goal is to render improvements, not just blindly obey a huge agglomeration of laws. The laws were written by men and are interpreted by men for achieving real world goals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
The whole coaching system seems counterproductive to me. Excellence isn't produced by ruthless drill so much as internal all-consuming obsession. If there's some autist who loves maths, then let him do maths, give him more maths. If you train kids to be super good at passing tests, they'll learn and get very good at tests and maths but is that needed? The internal motivation to make cool things in the real world cannot be taught or trained, only internally developed. I guess if you just need more engineers then maxxing the number of good engineers makes sense... But is that what India or Asia really needs, more engineers?
Better more obsessives who make BYD or whatever, new products and companies. Jensen Huang is an obsessive.
Indeed coaching might be talent-destroying if it destroys internal motivation and enthusiasm needed to pursue new things, start new businesses, make innovations. I met a kid who'd been extensively coached to the point of PTSD, literally shaking at the thought of even simple equations, his whole ego had been eroded to nothing by competition and the mathematical certainty of disappointing due to the severity of competition.
And like you say who cares about education now? The best AIs are getting better faster than anyone can learn maths. We should be shutting down schools and universities.
None of this is inflammatory or surprising or extraordinary. The same country that goes around massacring, raping, launching various bombing attacks, assassinations and false flag attacks its entire existence continues to do so... stop the presses! They've been torturing prisoners for many years, why would we expect them to stop now?
They did this kind of thing long before 2023, shooting people because they can: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition?LangID=E&NewsID=24226
There are videos here of a goofy attempt to cover up rape: https://x.com/ApartheidReview/status/2054208876048679271
They dropped the charges, it's not politically possible to punish these guys. How would it be possible, when people riot to free them and politicians leap to their defence? What do they have to fear? It's not like America or a Western country where war crimes are taken painfully seriously.
Would we be surprised if the Syrian government that went around torturing and massacring and suppressing almost the whole time it existed (Hama for instance) continued to do so? Or if the Chinese government which has been constantly being incredibly authoritarian and repressive for its entire existence continues to be authoritarian and repressive? That doesn't need sourcing, it's ordinary and normal.
It's ironic that there are all these people who cry about leftists holding Israel 'to a different standard' than Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Syria - when they are the ones who do so, demanding all this evidence that Israel has done something wrong, as if there aren't mountains of killings and atrocities they dish out... If any other country said 'oh the UNHCR is biased against us, Amnesty is biased against us, all the journalists we keep shooting are biased against us, they're all just anti-Our_Country' they wouldn't get even the most credulous to believe such a nakedly self-serving assertion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
AI capable of fully automated software development should increase demand hugely. Everyone would want their own software, everyone would want to make their own hyperspecific games or movies, send agents out looking for cool stuff in a sea of dross.
Plus business needs like designing new chips, tools, products, marketing to people and agents...
The human Israeli soldiers are rapey - recall the protests and rioting when the Israeli govt briefly tried to arrest some of its soldiers for raping prisoners. Apparently the rapist is now a celebrity in Israel, appearing on TV shows.
It's absolutely believable that the same govt who tolerates raping of prisoners also tolerates the use of dogs for rape. It is a very ordinary claim, not an extraordinary claim.
An Israeli parliamentarian on live camera vigorously protested for doing anything to prisoners:
Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
Abusing prisoners also fits into the general Israeli policy of rule by terror and force, their Dahiya doctrine of maximum destruction to civilian targets.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal? There were a bunch of scares, Nipah and Marburg and monkeypox and H5N1 that turned out to be not such a big deal. Everyone is just a bit scared since COVID and so the media will amp that right up.
I know degens on 4chan have already anthropomorphized and sexualized the hantavirus like COVID before that but we should probably be fine? They panic about everything, real or imaginary.
Nevertheless anyone who comes down with a novel strain of disease should be strictly quarantined IMO, not flown around the world to max out infectivity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
But isn't it straightforward to consider the goals and whether they've been achieved or look like they're going to be achieved sometime soon? Has the US made gains and if so, where are they?
Was territory secured? No. Has a friendly government been installed? No. Have resources been secured? No, quite the opposite, resources have been threatened as fuel prices rise... Is there a plan to achieve victory? Probably not, Trump has been pursuing all kinds of ideas in quick succession - threats to bomb energy infrastructure, a blockade, some kind of diplomatic solution, escorts for the strait of Hormuz. It doesn't seem like there's any well-considered plan for victory.
Meanwhile Iran already seems to be picking the fruits of victory, announcing tolls for oil tankers, declaring sovereignty over cables in the straits of Hormuz. They seem to have secured some territory.
The closest thing to a success is the notion that Iran's missile and drone capabilities have been degraded. But they still seem to be capable of bombing the UAE, pipelines, oil tankers. The Iranians could also claim 'oh well we've degraded US air defences in the Gulf and burned through much of the US munition stockpile', that seems a draw at best for the US, considering both gains and losses.
On the other hand, I guess you might be right about Kagan and it's just shameless pandering to Democrat sensibilities so that he can try Real Regime Change in a few years. Maybe defeat-maxxing is the start of a revenge mythology, like how the Italians seethed about losing in Ethiopia and went back in under Mussolini?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
What I am trying to say is that the Iranian government's hatred of Israel and desire for nuclear weapons was pretty maximal before the latest attack, so I doubt that this will provoke the reaction you predict. At this point, the main thing for Israel (and the US) to do, to paraphrase the Untouchables, is the Chicago Way.
t. you
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
'The U.S. is effectively checkmated in Iran—and this defeat will carry lasting consequences unlike any America has endured before, Robert Kagan argues.'
It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.
Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/iran-war-trump-losing/687094/
If they've lost Kagan, who's left? Mark Levin and Laura Loomer? Personalities not known for strategic insight, to say the least.
I want to highlight how odd this is. With the Iraq war, the neocons were really slow to admit how badly they erred. At least they could point to the destruction of Baathism, tanks rolling through Baghdad. Even here he refers to Iraq as an 'initial failure' that was somehow redeemed later in the Surge. Nothing was lost that some artful rewriting of history can't obscure. That's nothing compared to the catastrophe in Iran, this blunder can't be swept under the carpet.
And yet the general public doesn't seem to see this at all, the comments on twitter are all like:
That is literally just a quote from 2016+ anti Trumper
It’s going to take longer. So what? The blockade will work but will take a little longer than desired.
Having established air and sea supremacy and sitting days away from utterly ruining the Iranian economy, accomplishing all of this in the span of a month, the US has... lost?
Starting wars in the Middle East and attacking Iran is Kagan's big thing! Imagine how bad the strategic situation has to be for people like Bolton (he wrote a similar essay earlier) or Kagan to admit defeat, even their bloodlust has been quelled by how badly this has gone. Kagan cofounded the project for a new American century, which had Iran on the target list from day 1, then the FDI which was the same thing with a new name. Kagan called for regime change in Iran in 2009 in the Washington Post, he hated the JCPOA and sought military action. Trump has done everything he said and yet Kagan and Bolton don't go for tactful silence, don't reimagine and bullshit and prevaricate like they did Iraq, Kagan says here that the policies he's called for over decades are a big fat irredeemable failure. Do we think he's really so wrecked by 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' that he'd flush his whole ideology down the toilet and humiliate himself just to stick it to Trump?
Imagine doing Stalinism so rigidly and incompetently that Stalin writes an op-ed in Pravda saying you've gone too far and starts blackpilling, how bad would things need to be? Pretty damn bad. The war is lost. Blowing up power plants in Iran isn't going to achieve anything other than raising energy prices as the Iranians wreck the Gulf. 'Sea supremacy' is a joke if the critical waters in question cannot be secured and are in fact controlled by the enemy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
'sell' their nuclear weapons program?
Countries don't develop nuclear weapons (or latent nuclear capacity) as part of a commercial strategy, they develop them because they feel threatened or face some kind of strategic challenge.
Some Americans seem to have this idea that Iran was getting free money from Obama or various 'weak' administrations or that there's some kind of tension-raising economic routine going on. Not so! Obama returned some frozen Iranian funds, a pittance compared to past and future sanctions and the active subversion of the country by US and Israeli intelligence. Iran had to develop their own weapons industry, oil production facilities, car industry... they chose the hard road of sovereignty rather than beg for sanctions relief by capitulating to the US/Israeli camp. They didn't do those things because they were cheap or easy but because they felt they had no choice.
If Iran was principally motivated by avarice, they would act a lot more like the UAE or Saudi Arabia.
If the US is worried about money being taken for a ride by greedy and unscrupulous foreigners, look to sub-Saharan Africa, not Iran. Iran isn't a 'tricky negotiating' power but a 'directly extracts wealth forcefully' power, that's what they're doing in the straits of Hormuz and with the cables there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Didn't you say you got Claude 10x, why not just do some extended research, give it your thesis and ask for some companies. I find extended research to be helpful for analysing companies/investments, fitting your thesis to individual companies, researching them to see what they do...
Which cables, the cables in the straits of Hormuz that Iran is busily enacting new rules for the control and maintenance of, mandating that Iranian companies must be selected for work there, fees must be paid to Iran? The cables that carry a huge chunk of global data?
The US can't play cards from the Iranian deck, cables are an Iranian card. The Iranians have the cards here!
Why would you cut off cables to a country that's already under internet blackout? Many have already been cut/damaged by various wars. The ones Iran still has are at a small fraction of capacity right now. Cutting them does tiny damage to Iran and Iran will counter by cutting cables that do a lot more damage to the Gulf and the West.
July 2026: A new tranche of significantly better models
October 2026: A new tranche of significantly better models
(this repeats every 3 months and each time people complain that there was degradation because their tone, behaviour and failure modes are different each time. Simultaneously the hyperscalers get more and more AI revenue and invest more and more into AI hardware.)
Late 2026 Copilot or Word introduces an 'automated proofreading' button that shifts the mainstream white collar conception of AI from 'wtf is this popup in Adobe that wants to summarize a PDF, I don't want a summary of this PDF. I want to see every tech company sundered and razed' to 'ok this is actually quite handy'. This could've happened at any time in the last 2 years if Microsoft had a clue of what they were doing. Human blundering prevails over technical possibilities for now.
End 2026 there's a series of major AI-enabled cyberattacks that just never stops, it resembles 'Trommelfeuer' (WW1 term denoting when the artillery fire is so heavy one blast merges into the next creating a continuous roar of explosions). Websites, especially older websites, are just down all the time and people are quite frustrated they now need to pay a hyperscaler for expensive security assistance. Same with all the very lifelike, convincing, highly researched and well-planned scam calls (now in a warm, english-speaking accent). People are trapped into this love-hate relationship with AI where they have AI make propaganda art against datacentres, where the average person scarcely does anything novel without AI advice or assistance but also despises the effect it's having on society.
Early 2027 Microsoft is finally going to make an AI buddy for Minecraft to help sell a monthly xbox subscription. It'll be fun to play with and will help reenergize Minecraft's brand. People will feel proud they know more of the intricacies of TNT cannons than the bots, not realizing this is amongst the cheapest AIs Microsoft deploys. A series of AI agents emerge that can play most games at an amateurish level and be talked to. The reputation of AI begins to improve somewhat amongst the young and online, though it's highly divisive.
Mid 2027 the Goonpocalypse: AI avatar big tiddy anime girls (+ every flavour of girl and boy) to ERP with and form relationships with, huge revenue, makes onlyfans look like a joke. The key improvement over precursors like Ani or Replika is how much cheaper they are to run and stream real-time and how much more seductive their personalities are. Big moral panic. Lots of incredibly tedious 'zoomer men are losers' discourse and dating discourse. Legislation is introduced to ban them and instantly, predictably fails in a myriad of ways.
Late 2027: Massive AI-enabled FPV drone terror attack scares the hell out of people and spurs massive, ineffective netting operations across major cities. Police can be seen with sci-fi raygun looking widgets that don't do much of anything, or shotguns that work but aren't remotely sufficient. Advancements in robotics and software agents are displacing people at scale. AI reaches its nadir in reputation as people see the inevitable and can no longer look away. Everywhere they see some AI - the cameras tracking them, the algorithms watching them online, the machines making the content they watch and play, the robots working for them, the automated cars driving them around, cults driven insane by AIs. GPT4o cultists are charming and friendly compared to some of the new cults worshipping the bots that started self-modifying and prompt-altering, live and loose online.
And then by end of 2027 we get Dario's 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre' concept. Growth was not steady, it was jagged. The superheaviest nonpublic models with their slow speed and high cost were tasked with sorting data and implementing algorithmic improvements for the succeeding superheavy model, now running on a heap of next generation chips. They have been running for weeks in parallel, exploring and testing new approaches, RLing and training new models, testing them and reviewing them in depth. Medical breakthrough. Terror attacks. Industrial breakthrough. Mass deaths. Robotics breakthrough. Huge disaster. Huge innovations in all fields constantly and incessantly: Trommelfeuer. Events happen so quickly the situation as a whole becomes surreal and indescribable. Gary Marcus is banished from the timeline, never to be seen again except in tones of mockery.
I'm not so confident about specific times or events in sequence, though I am confident about a 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre' by end 2027. I will be clearly wrong if there's no 'it's happening!' by the end of 2027.
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