aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1d ago
Eh, There's this kind of weird definitional game that's being played for what "winning" means. We've known that we have very little ability to nation build in the sense that we can use our military to get other nations to be governed the way we want them to be. Anyone paying attention to the other middle eastern adventures would have to conclude we cannot reliably do that. That this war was started with those aims was dumb and wasteful. But then there's this idea that Iran meaningfully "won" in some kind of conventional military sense which is just ridiculous. A whole lot of the arguments on this topic has been people with these two different definitions of "winning" hallucinating people who disagree with them.
If by "Iran won" you mean the US did not accomplish its war aims then absolutely, Iran won, and it seemed very plausibly they'd win from the get go. If you by "Iran won" you mean they have some kind of dominant military position then just no, they had the ability to take pain and sustain enough of a threat to close the strait.
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might. The military executed its missions very well. The problem was our war aims basically required stoking something like an Iranian revolution to actually succeed which didn't happen.
aqouta
1d ago
My diagnosis wasn't based on the rough content of your post. I even mostly agree with the analysis of Trump and hegseth as contemptable individuals. I was engaging in the, admittedly often annoying, classic past time of discourse on the discourse. Why is dase crashing out so much more frequently? Yes, lib centrists are right about everything, especially Trump, but that hasn't changed. What has changed is the xitter algorithm.
aqouta
1d ago
@aqouta do you still think it was my brain that got fried, and not of everyone here who treated this war as business as usual and a cause for armchair chuckling about… all manners of tedious war nerd minutiae?
Yeah, basically. I'm unusure how any happening of the Iran war is supposed to interact with the social media induced brain frying hypothesis. Like if somehow the war had ended unambiguously on good terms for the US was this supposed to be evidence in my favor? If it had ended up even worse for the US how would interpretation of your behavior have been shown to be more wrong?
As you've blocked me on X and have been banned from this site I have not collected any evidence that could have updated me on this subject and so my opinion remains unchanged.
aqouta
1d ago
There's a lot of assertions in here that just aren't true and it all reads like slop.
The 2007-08 global financial crisis made obvious what had previously only been implicit. The rich did not care for those left behind, and when the costs of the crisis had to be paid, they made sure that the bill was not sent to them.
What about the financial crisis implied let alone made implicit that the rich don't care about us exactly? Are the rich a hand full of banking executives that return pretty marginal surplus value on bank stocks?
a world where the upkeep of one’s homes and cars and even domestic chores, from cooking to elder- and childcare, were shifted precisely to the people who no longer had steady jobs and were part of the class of malcontents.
Is the author trying to imply that the service economy is new as of the last few years? Car mechanics and maids are a new invention?
aqouta
8d ago
Some men have been much, much, much freer than I ever have been or ever will be
And some men are today as well! What does that have to do with anything? Why are you counting yourself as someone who would have been among the frontiersmen instead of the disease ridden factories or back breaking farm labor of that period? In time people might speak of the spirit and freedom of the startup entrepreneur of today who romantically earned no returns yet lived on VC money with a hope for striking it rich with a buyout. And you'd rightly point out that many of those startup founders failed with nothing to show for it or never got funded in the first place, but what do you think happened to most of the people on the frontier?
aqouta
8d ago
enter a parasitic profession like finance and drain your country dry.
Finance is not parasitic. I'm very open to the idea that as a society we'd be better off if we found a way to subsidize very smart people into jobs with more high leverage externalities but finance as a field is actually quite positive sum. Having a bunch of smart people direct resource allocation to its most in demand use is actually hugely beneficial to the world. Imagine the vast amount of value lost if people with great ideas and potential weren't able to get capital allocated to their endeavors. The main people who think finance is some horrible negative sum industry in my experience are people who have never actually interfaced with it or worse, had front office sales roles.
aqouta
10d ago
looks like it's in the $600 range for a weekend with a cabin, definitely not trivial but basically in line with if not slightly cheaper than other destination festivals. cheaper than just tickets to lollapalooza in comparison which will run you $750 for the 4 day pass.
aqouta
10d ago
This is one of those things where if I had very little experience with children I might find a way to be outraged, but now that I've spent some time around them, have a sister with a couple, good friends with some and have gotten teasingly close to having my own I just have to imagine "is vibe camp somewhere I'd take young children unless I was totally bought in and willing to handle explaining nudity to them?" and the answer is probably no. But even if vibe camp was in my local area I probably wouldn't bother to go most years anyways. Who are all these parents taking their kids to vibe camp and having bad experiences? Who are you offended on behalf of?
aqouta
10d ago
Speaking of which, does anybody know why Opus 4.7/4.8 and Grok 4.3 were such downgrades from Opus 4.6 and Grok 4.2? I've three theories:
This could be for the same reason they regressed on vendbench. My understanding is that they pulled out a lot of the marketing/MBA training stuff because they determined it was making the alignment stuff worse, particularly deception. So probably it's more pure of heart in a way that make it worse at writing your type of fiction.
aqouta
10d ago
I understand what you're saying in that it's a black pill vision of reality. Where we can't continence progress because it might give people you hate and distrust some benefit that they'd inevitably use against you. Your worldview is a paranoid cancer that will make all progress impossible and eventually lead to us killing each other. There is no positive future for people who think improving productivity can only make things worse. You have determined that the future is bleak and if you get your way you will make it so.
aqouta
10d ago
You write this as if the concept of a wealth tax is completely unexplored territory, but in reality many countries already have a wealth tax, including most European countries. They simply assess your net worth for tax purposes on the basis of the assets you own: bank balance, stocks, bonds, property, etc. For private companies it's based on the book value of the company according to the latest financial statement. For shares of a publicly traded company it's simply the stock price at December 31 multiplied by the number of shares you owned.
To aid in this process and so people don't have to dilute their ownership stake how about we mandate that all companies pay out a dividend based on something semi-reliably related to their value, like their net profits so that the shareholders can then just forward that onto the government. Actually how about we save some steps and just have that dividend go straight to the government coffers so the investor doesn't have to do anything at all. Because this impacts corporations and brings income to the government I recommend we call this a corporate income tax.
aqouta
10d ago
Vanderbilt was able to at least offer to donate a warship to the Union government during the Civil War.
Seems pretty analygous to starlink in ukraine.
aqouta
11d ago
While in full support and without any plans to regulate or stop the other several H-bomb teams?
edit: If trump is fully yudd pilled and his next action is to start pushing bilateral treaties then I'll celebrate, but he's not we all know that he's not.
aqouta
11d ago
We're actually supposed to want more from our government than to be thin skinned retards who don't listen to people who know what the fuck is going on. In any way that this is embarrasing for anthropic it is many times more so for the admin. If some moron told Eisenhower that the test of the bomb were going to reverse the flow of gravity and Eisenhower demands Oppenheimer to fix that problem to fix that made up problem what exactly is he supposed to do besides explain that there is nothing to fix and in fact we already told you this would happen. The level of abject retardation people are willing to accept from the Trump admin and then criticize people for not going along with it is absurd and their toddler tantrums are a threat to our national security.
aqouta
11d ago
Israel cannot fight Iran without US military support.
Depends on what you mean by fight. Surely Israel would be no more successful than the US was at projecting force into Iran, but it's not really clear Iran can project force into Israel. Realistically you're just looking at escalating missile volleys and Israel being nuclear armed has escalation domination in this scenario.
aqouta
12d ago
Why on earth would anyone want to increase your toil when they have full automation? What possible theory of mind could exist for this? Just pure malevolence? why would they wait until it's pointless to increase your toil?
The real downsides are things that would be true of any construction whatsoever, to give into them would be to just completely capitulate with degrowth ideology and only not return to the mud out of inertia.
There's damage to groundwater that makes the local tap water undrinkable
This could happen with the construction of any building, essentially the crew either accidentally interrupted a drilled well or just the blast of construction shook up the silt in the well water.
There's also other more subtle impacts. For instance, the Utah data center project is expected to produce a heat island effect that would raise temperatures from 5 degrees during the day to up to 28 degrees at night, potentially preventing the dew point condensation effect and quite literally killing local ecologies.
This is only in the valley itself where only the datacenter is. This is all "end civilization to save the spotted desert lizard style obstructionism. You'd find yourself in likeminded company with the people who threw everything at the wall to keep us from getting nuclear power.
If we operated on your apparent preferences we couldn't have even built the society we live in today, let alone improve one.
aqouta
13d ago
It reads like they are saying, "here are our demands for submitting to the authority of your government".
Uh, no because the government had not made these demands. It's more like saying "hey we're doing this big research thing, and you're usually in favor of research things but we think you will probably want to regulate it, could you please tell us what you want so we can comply?" And then they squash you like a bug, almost certainly because you said you didn't want the lunatic running the depart of war using your work to spy on US citizens.
At the operational level, I don't know how possible it would be to implement a regime that is "transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," for regulating capabilities that don't exist yet. How can it be fair if we don't know yet what the relevant metrics are? How can it be clear if we don't know what red flags to look for? How can it be grounded in technical facts if nobody knows how these models work?
They could start but actually asking? Creating a department or organization?
Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.
Their money is not fungible with our money or the state's money. much of it is debt that can only be created because of the promise of a return. If you want to be more sophisticated you could say the labor being used to build these things was bid up and would otherwise be able to be allocated more cheaply to other projects but even then what you're arguing for is that trades people get paid less which seems kind of counter to the rest of your position. Trillions are spent on much less worthy consumption than building durable data infrastructure.
it seems extremely difficult to justify the trillion dollar investments in a AI-as-normal-technology world where tokens are inevitably commoditized
Yes, the question of whether the tokens get commoditized is a major factor on whether these investments will pay off for the labs. But why is that your problem? So in one potential future a bunch of investors who aren't you get soaked and you get to enjoy the fruits of incredibly discounted inference capex. This is a gift directly from frontier lab investors to you, you should cheer on their generosity.
where tokens are inevitably commoditized and primarily inference locally.
Unless many breakthroughs happen this will not be the case any time soon. Batched queries are several orders of magnitude more efficient than single thread inference.
But then you go on about "how can you not be excited" and "[bringing] about a new age of American prosperity" and I'm just confused about how you can think we're being forced into a world where if anyone builds it everyone (probably) dies and think this is a good thing. At best, if by some miracle alignment is inherent, you're under the heel of God-Emperor AI Frontier Lab Leader or God-Emperor Democratic/Republican President (adjust for your outgroup party) for all time and at worst all America's done is won the "created the Torment Nexus first" award.
There's some difficulty of keeping multiple potential futures in your head at once. It goes something like:
| Outcome | Probability | Thoughts |
|---|---|---|
| World where someone builds it and everyone dies but they wouldn't have if we told more blatant and ridiculous lies about the American data center build out | <0.0001% | whooops |
| Somebody builds it and everyone dies | 15% | This is indeed too high and we should seek bilateral global treaties to try and sort out alignment while we can. Unilaterally hamstringing our labs doesn't change this possibility, even us and china both hamstringing our labs only pushes the date back some number of years. |
| Scaling plateaus and inference is a commodity soon | 25% | The lab investments don't pan out, all go bankrupt, the models and datacenters get acquired and are served incredibly cheaply. This is bad for some investors but good for most consumers of tokens, which is practically everyone else. A gift from them to us. We should be broadly happy that these datacenters are on our soil and subject to our laws |
| Scaling plateaus and inference is a commodity in a few months or years when the models are so good that they can do most but not all jobs | 30% | The lab investments may or may not pan out as their commodity is still meaningfully scarce it just turns out more of that scarcity is in the data centers than the models, some go bankrupt. We see a lot of job displacement but also a tremendous amount of value creation. Robots advances in leaps and bounds. After a shake up this is potentially a very good future. It is critical that these data centers are on our soil and subject to our laws, that are incredibly important geopolitically. |
| Singularity event where we don't all die | 25% | basically by definition these are difficult to predict but I'm confident we'd rather have it kicked off on our soil than chinese soil. The marginal progress we make in alignment work between now and the kick off will be critical and china doesn't broadly seem to even understand alignment to be a meaningful concept. If I had more time I'd break this into several worlds but I think in nearly all of them there'll be pivotal moments that I prefer be performed by americans. |
| I'm a retarded hype monkey with deep ai psychosis. AI can't even do what I can plainly see it doing now. | 5% | Hey, at least I'll get some credit for acknowledging it's possible |
Essentially across all of these worlds and acutely in some these data centers are pure upside epsilon the handful of upset caused by any construction project that should be easily sorted out locally.
aqouta
15d ago
The underclass correctly intuit that their overlords hate them and would rather they be replaced, as they would prefer to never pay the underclass again
I think this is a bad framing. We ought all want AI to go well. It has the potential to end toil, cure disease and bring about incredible abundance. I am no overlord, but I have loved ones I've watched die to cancer, I spend a significant amount of my life in an office do work I'd rather not do. The benefit I care about is to me and everyone else. This us vs them framing is the problem. Yes, we need to implement some policy to make sure we have a solution to keep the economy going and the people having buying power if work is alleviated and that will necessarily include taking things from the entrenched owners of things, whether it be the labs or other legal owners of things. But the lab leaders aren't even opposing this. They've written long posts, raised the alarm and spoken at length about how we need to do this. There doesn't need to be some knock out fight at all.
How many parents who have Down syndrome children would trade those children for nothingness?
This is a false dichotomy, most who would abort a downs child would then go on to have a normal child. Not nothing. Everything in life has an opportunity cost.
aqouta
16d ago
I'm suspicious about that given stories like this.
I basically don't believe this at all. That's literally a million instances on the fast/more expensive version of the highest cost model running for the entire month straight. The only way this is at all plausible is if their keys got leaked and millions of people were using them. doesn't pass the back of the envelope smell test.
aqouta
16d ago
because you explicity stated your own contempt for the median person.
The median person who hates ai. this is a very different distribution from the median person who doesn't have social media induced black pill brain worms.
aqouta
16d ago
You said
the issue is that pompous 'tech elites' think they're better than us.
This is a statement about your feelings.
by arguing that the median person's position on AI is essentially rooted in the (correct) belief that AI and tech bros in general are contemptuous of them and their concerns.
To be extremely clear, the number of people contemptuous of the random Americans who is worried about automation getting rid of their jobs is a rounding error. All the heads of the labs have written and spoken extensively about a need to make sure these people are taken care of. The contempt is for the people who spout out obvious bullshit and try to stop development entirely.
Path of exile 2, grinding up enough divs for a decent rare adorned roll, 40%+, have about 3k that I'm continually cycling through buying temple of chaos fragments for 3.9 div and selling them for 4 div. jewel is hovering around 6k div at the moment. Grinding expedition with aldur's sagas, not sure if the sagas as worth it post patch honestly, very feast or famine.
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