Shrike
15hr ago
the result is, well, all the things that Trump has done.
Press conferences and speeches?
it's also obvious that you can't just achieve a neat split where both commit to doing their own thing without the other - the recent events have made clear that whatever US does globally will in any case have a huge impact on Europe
Almost any sovereign nation-state can do things that have a huge impact elsewhere; it does not follow then that all nation-states must be part of a military alliance.
I actually do tend to favor either NATO-but-with-division-of-labor or a slow, coordinated split, but the mere fact that Europe and the US impact each other isn't necessarily an argument for NATO, and it certainly isn't an argument that NATO is necessary.
Regarding Greenland, it's odd to argue for Greenlandic independence aims (without anything concrete about the details vis-a-vis relations to the Western alliance, or anything else really, on the table), considering that Trump admin itself attempted to present itself as some sort of an opponent of Danish colonialism on the island and what have you.
I am not sure what argument you're making here. Certainly it seems quite plausible that the US would be a better colonial overlord (or partner, or whichever term you prefer) than the Danish, so I don't see anything particularly odd about the argument. That's different from saying the argument is convincing - the devil is in the details, and the people of Greenland would be ill-advised to simply jump ship without looking before they leap.
Shrike
20hr ago
Yes, Der Spiegel did a very in-depth story on how Ukraine did it, which seemed to at least pass the sniff-test.
Shrike
20hr ago
Now I'm imagining Star Wars as rebel propaganda to explain why having Alderaan completely obliterated was actually a huge rebel victory! when in real life there is zero reason to believe that the Death Star was in fact destroyed by a small team of X-Wings, it's borderline impossible and even the rebel copium-huffers have to insist that it only happened due to literal magic.
Shrike
21hr ago
That's the point - yes, Europe has been failing in several aspects, but it's been in the process of improving on those, and the result has been a continuous stream of piss on the face by the Trump admin nevertheless.
For better or for worse, I think that Trump's first term probably did a lot to set the mutual opinions of Trump and the Europeans. And in Trump's first term, the number of NATO allies meeting the 2% GDP benchmark doubled, which sounds great until you realize it was from 4 to 8. Then there was a regression in the Biden-era. The numbers really didn't improve dramatically until 2024 and 2025. So while it's true that Europe has been in the process of improving, it seems pretty clear that it took a literal invasion of a European country to get that going.
NATO spending, of course, is far from the only complaint the USA has with European NATO countries; whether it's cracking down on free speech or installing Chinese telecomms or what have you.
You can counter with various things that the US of A did, such as Gitmo - that's entirely fair, but my point is that Trump didn't emerge out of a vacuum. And frankly if the Europeans have a lot of issues with the US of A, and the US of A has a lot of issues with Europeans, a split seems pretty natural. But whenever Trump suggests this, some people treat it like a massive stab-in-the-back for no reason, despite it being a pretty natural development.
The Chagos Islands?
No, Denmark agreed to let Greenland secede, which throws existing NATO security arrangements up in the air if it's followed through on. It's very natural for the US of A to want to acquire Greenland under the circumstances.
Obviously the Chagos deal is also non-ideal for the US.
Shrike
1d ago
Iran is actually more vulnerable to nuclear weapons than the US or Russia because a larger portion of its military and economy is concentrated in its capital compared to Moscow or Washington, D.C.: nearly 20% of Iran's population and more of their economy is in the metropolitan area of Tehran. And speaking of power, the list of targets is, as I understand it, a target set of less than 150 to take out 90% of the country's power.
I suppose Israel emptying the silos to kill or mutilate the wealthiest and smartest fifth of Iran and turning off the power for the survivors might not "destroy the regime" but I do think it would count as a military defeat for Iran.
Shrike
1d ago
I've also been doing some Nuclear Option, and I very much enjoy it. 10/10 game, even if you're clattering away with a mouse and keyboard like myself.
Shrike
1d ago
It still blows my mind that European NATO countries can do things like "miss NATO spending goals and fall behind on military readiness for years despite years of increasingly pointed US signals that there will be consequences for this" or "make preparations to literally give away territory that is crucial to American defense preparedness" and then act as if Trump arrived ex nihilo and his actions have zero context and make no sense besides a wanton betrayal for no reason.
Shrike
1d ago
Where's the satellite (or other) evidence that "most of IAF" was destroyed on the runway a few days ago?
The “laundry fire” on the Gerald R. Ford was so bad that there are now serious concerns the ship will never sail again.
The Ford is currently in Norfolk. If the US had the ability to transport it there from Greece without it sailing, then I seriously doubt Iran is winning the war.
...anyway, on that note, the Ford is currently in Norfolk, within camera range of passing ships. Should be pretty trivial to determine if she's been hit by antiship missiles.
Shrike
2d ago
$250,000 would be the high end of a normal range for a domestic surrogacy from what I understand, with the low end being something like $60,000 if you don't go through an agency or go international.
Average cost of a wedding in the United States is about $35,000, and of course higher if international.
If you were correct that modernity was one big one way ratchet against the ability of young men to reproduce it would be illegal as well as immoral.
Shrike
2d ago
Sex and reproduction aren't the same thing, though, and reproduction is arguably easier for men now that it's fairly straightforward to contract it out.
Shrike
3d ago
Superpersuasive, it ain't.
And if Mythos was, then Fable wouldn't be BANNED.
...unless it was all part of the plan...
Shrike
7d ago
Regionalizing the internet wouldn't shut down access to Chinese open-source AI or Japanese manga and anime.
Shrike
7d ago
Ah, gotcha.
I...sort of hope the internet gets regionalized, to be quite honest.
Shrike
7d ago
I think it can be pretty easily, Anthropic has been using Mythos internally for some time now.
Shrike
10d ago
Aren't most of the high-end AI chips a bit unwieldy to build gaming rigs with? And I feel like the same people who would want to build a massive gaming rig would also not want to stream their game from a server in the middle of nowhere somewhere.
Although now that you mention it, perhaps the Sea Power fanatics would probably accept a little bit of lag if it could let them play through "The Dance of the Vampires" from Red Storm Rising...
Shrike
10d ago
The datacenters which were built will still be there and still be useful for 'conventional' computing.
Isn't the specialized AI hardware being rolled out considered inefficient for general purpose computing, though?
Shrike
11d ago
Take this with a grain of salt because it isn't my area of expertise and I am dashing this off to you as a quick reply rather than doing a half-hour's worth of research to verify, but I tend to expect a slowdown in the nearish future for two reasons:
- The major developers (Anthropic, OpenAI) are running a fundamentally unsustainable business model and need insane amounts of revenue generation to be sustainable. They've hiked prices recently and the response from Big Tech was to crack down on the AI compute spend. That's not a good sign - who's going to spend millions on AI if Uber or Zillow won't? Not people making HTML browser games and memes for kicks, that's for sure.
- Despite all the breathless takes about how good The Next Model is, from what I've seen (very casually, so I might deserve correction here) the direction the models are going isn't "Anthropic's Gigamonster: now hallucinates half as much time as Gila Monster for only 110% of the inference," it's "Anthropic's Fable now hallucinates 10% less than Sonnet for only 300% of the inference." On the one hand, hallucinating only, say, 10% of the time rather than 20% of the time is a big difference, I'm not suggesting there's no gains being made. But from what I can tell, the so-called "leading edge" models are using tremendously more compute to make relatively minor absolute gains. Everyone focuses on the trendline going up but if you model it as performance-per-cost from what I can tell there's an argument the trendline is going down.
Now note that the trendline can be qualitative as well as quantitative - so for instance Haiku is just straight-up better at performing simple math than Opus or something (it will get the answers right much more cheaply) but if you're getting into something that Opus can't do but maybe Fable can - okay, maybe you're okay paying twice as much. But that general trend, I think, suggests that pushing the frontier is growing more costly, which is not ideal for an infinite recursion scenario. If you get to the point where "sure okay we can make Deus Ex but it will cost the moon if it was made of gold to run" that's another way of saying it won't get made and if it is nobody will run it.
Note that I'm not an "AI denier" or something, and I don't think that anything that I am talking about will cause AI to go away like it never existed. But I think that a world where we have AI slowdown because the demand for compute at prices that make it solvent isn't there to the extent to support the overhead to keep pushing the frontier forward is pretty plausible. A world where the US government bails out AI and then nobody ever sees Mythos again also seems pretty plausible. But both of those scenarios will look - at least temporarily - like an LLM fizzle (unless the .gov makes Skynet real, I guess - my guess is that they are more likely to use it to gundeck mandatory paperwork, hacking, and programming, though, not stick it in a bunch of robots.).
Shrike
11d ago
Sure, a hostile AI that goes full Skynet is unlikely to get everyone in the first pass with bioweapons, but if the AI is not destroyed or crippled beyond repair in that chaos then you're just the last light to go out; the cleanup robots will break open your bunker months or years later and there's fuck-all you can do about it.
Yeah but
- this is yet another scenario where having a hedge helps you live longer and makes it more likely that you do survive, and
- this scenario isn't, like, real - Skynet is fictitious and the real dangerous capabilities that AI has, although probably currently overblown (remember when GPT 2 was too dangerous to release?) are more likely to generate a catastrophic scenario that you can hedge against than one you can't. This is just a probability curve.
I think a key point here is that most of the scenarios you're thinking of where there's a standard catastrophe are subsets of "AI fizzle"
It's true that I think it's more likely than not that large language models "fizzle" in the very specific sense that they don't become physics-defying literal deus ex machinas.
Shrike
11d ago
I agree with @DradisPing that the Communists were terrible (although this didn't necessarily have anything to do with their talent pool; Soviet engineers were very innovative). I have an earlier comment where I compare Russia to other countries, and it seems fairly clear to me that despite being dealt a bad hand (despairing population, low TFR) Russia has a low debt-to-GDP ratio, fairly high GDP PPP per capita, and fewer drug deaths (per capita) than the US - all the sorts of managerial items that suggest, to me, fairly good governance.
Another way of looking at it is that Russia's GDP PPP is above (or roughly on par with) Estonia and Latvia (but behind Poland and Lithuania) even though it has less debt than those countries! And the Baltics and Poland have been in the EU for twenty years!
I think this framing is overly reductive and simplistic, but to me it strikes me the same way it would if you had two siblings, one of whom moved into the city, got their bachelor's, and enjoyed all that market access had to offer, and the other stayed in their small hometown. If you checked back in in 20 years and you found that one of them hadn't paid off their (substantial) student loans despite working a well-paying job in the big city while the other's only substantial debt was a mortgage, and they both had a house and a car and a TV, you'd have to conclude the second brother was better at managing his money. If the second brother had managed to accomplish that despite crippling depression and a year in jail for a DUI you'd be more impressed by his self-management, not less.
Caveat that the war may change all of this in the long term.
As regards the that topic, Spiegel did a follow-up suggesting that the US had some forewarning of the attack but ultimately was not involved in supporting the Ukrainian operation.
It seems plausible at the minimum that the US is not being forthright, but one might actually see that as being in solidarity with Germany, which itself has, as far as I know, declined to officially point fingers.
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