rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
You really think the Chinese can’t figure out how to get a few latest generation ASML machines? I doubt it.
I don't think it matters if they get an ASML machine. What they need is the support contract, and that is part of what is unavailable to "Chinese military companies".
To put it another way, if someone gave you (and generously, your friends) a space shuttle and all the relevant infrastructure, would you be able to launch it within five years? There's going to be some critical knowledge of the cockpit or the refueling system or the inspections process that you can't figure out.
With ASML, we're talking about machines the size of a shipping container, with mechanical parts that are calibrated to move wafers at the nanoscale, but which otherwise dampen vibrations, high-performance lasers that won't even work in a standard atmosphere, which require a continuous flow of high-purity chemicals only made in one or two countries, and all depend on proprietary software which probably gets custom modules built and delivered based on the needs of the customer whose fab it sits in. If the servos or beam-line or vacuum gets misaligned, or get slightly over-spec on dust, or some chemical formula changes slightly, or some part burns out prematurely, then it's not going to get the 5 nm resolution which it was sold for.
So yeah, I think this is the end of Xi's China. They can go through a trade war, their economy can sputter along, but China's industrial development is doomed to go the way of the USSR: pulling off epic feats of engineering and brainpower just to keep their existing (high-speed) trains running, while the West gets to start reaping the benefits of software eating the world.
Well, of course the West will still come up with 50 different philosophical and political reasons to justify shooting itself in the foot, but when it does its gun will be equipped with computer-controlled sights.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
If one listens to Peter Zeihan, the war was motivated by Russia's long-term unenviable defensive position: there are virtually no geographical barriers within the Russian heartland, and with population set to fall, defending Russia is an expensive proposition (young men in productive economic activity or in civil defense; pick one). Hence all the wars since the early 2000s to reunite Russia with strategic and defensible passes that were part of the USSR: these can be garrisoned at much lower manpower, leaving the heartland to economic activity.
Or if one listens to such Russian writers as Alexandr Dugin, rejection of Western hegemony and reconquering of Soviet nations is just part of the Great Geopolitcal Game.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
What's the point in forgiving someone who is dead? We're not going to forget mass murder, and we're not going to prosecute anyone for it either (now that they are all dead or prosecuted). So why forgive? What does it even mean to forgive someone you don't - and can't - know personally?
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.
As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm annoyed at the reporting requirements too, but the mirror image of money laundering is tax evasion, and governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows.
With respect to the specific requirements to report foreign accounts: the reporting requirement is clearly stated in tax instructions and up to a few years ago the IRS was remarkably lax about requiring people (with less than $50,000 in their accounts) to report on time. The form for reporting foreign accounts even included checkboxes where one could state one's "reason for reporting late": "I forgot" and "I didn't know I had to" were valid options.
Granted, I'm still a bit confused by the reporting requirements and process for large wire transfers.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
As a single point of data, a far-left millennial friend of mine (who probably thinks I'm a stealth conservative based on the conversations we used to have about feminism) blew up when I said I had started a diet and begun to lose weight: "Dieting doesn't work," "I've noticed you have some toxic ideas about weight," "I've heard you making insensitive comments before," etc. They then recommended I read a Health At Any Size activist's autobiography to engage with these ideas because she's "very eloquent."
The book was mostly personal and second-hand experiences of trauma due to people pointing out morbid obesity and its negative externalities. There was a whole chapter about doctors and the medical establishment being shaming and misguided. I scanned the bibliography for any academic papers (now on my reading list), but most of the references were to articles from the likes of Huffpost. Then I gave up on the book.
As regards the issue of obesity, I do think the problem is systemic: the US population has lost its ability to cook proper healthy food at home, has lost the last remnants of a culture which despised "gluttony," and has been brainwashed by Big Ag to think that eating more and more is normal, and that it's all genetic. Meanwhile Big Ag has hired flavor scientists to engineer hyperstimulus into food, hires lobbyists to keep politicians from addressing the problem in any meaningful way, and pays useful activist idiots to write books about Health At Any Size.
However, as an individual, I don't have many options other than to tune out the propaganda, establish my own system, and live my life of moderation. If that makes me "toxic" and "insensitive," ... fuck it. I'm not sacrificing my pursuit of excellence for some moral fashion.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
My goal in writing these stories was to capture how AI set up to maximize profit could fuck over the little guy by optimizing existing business processes. I think that's more likely than anything else.
Seems like the extent of contamination is scientifically a similar problem to something between fallout tracking and rocket engines (combustion chemistry). It would be really fun to build a team to model this but realistically noone will pay for it when the victims are a few thousand poor rurals in Ohio, except the companies seeking to minimize liability. Naturally the residents will be skeptical of the accuracy of any modeling done by chemical companies.
5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.
I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
This is true, but only to a point. "Today I went to Allie's house and had dinner with them," has a very strong connotation to me that Allie is married and dinner was with the couple, rather than dinner being with a singular person who uses "they" as a pronoun.
But I maybe I've been under a rock for too long.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The most convincing argument for trans conversion therapies comes from outcomes. Trans activists will tell you that to not provide gender-affirming care to minors is encouraging kids to kill themselves.
So I looked at the literature. There has never been a randomly controlled study on gender-affirming care as currently practiced (according to trans activists, it would be unethical?!), and for the studies that remain, it seems like outcomes (suicide rates) are comparably improved for adults who undergo surgery and who undergo supportive social transition.
But hey, if you want to end your germ line, that's up to you.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Yup. This is the way things are done in the rest of the world. If there is "affordable housing" it takes the form of little tiny apartments (like ... 6 square meters) which anyone can afford because they are minimalist. (Americans might call these tenements, and they are illegal.) Developers outside of the US seem to prevent claims of gentrification by grandfathering old tenants/owners into the new, larger units built on the same land.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
No. In the specific incident that comes to mind we had an new student try to take credit for the results of a 3rd year PhD candidate after fixing/running the nearly-successful experiment while the older student was at a conference. Thankfully the PI saw through it. I'm sure it goes the other way too, though.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Five years ago (pre-LLM) the Chinese were already been working on AI for automating court judgement on the theory that it would be more efficient and fair. Lawyers and law are one of the major areas in which next-generation LLMs have the potential to be very profitable.
It's amusing how his reasoning is similar to @pointsandcorsi's (although much more careful and conservative, especially with forecasts) and thus passes for academic content, yet pointsandcorsi's output merits a permaban on an obscure forum.
Huh? @pointsandcorsi was banned for a comment in a thread about James Webb, and it was a week-long ban, not a permaban (as evidenced by their most recent top-level post which started this thread):
https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/44716?context=8#context
Is there some other event that @pointsandcorsi discussed that I missed?
Oh, I see. They were banned for this post.
But code is just math, math is just code, and protein folding is just the intersection of the two!
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I actually agree with you that the cause of "excess deaths" is always worth looking into. In the context of the discussion about potentially long-term vaccine-associated mortality rates, however, it sounded like you were establishing a bailey: "There are a lot of excess deaths which have not been investigated, therefore vaccine effects are likely." My apologies if that was not your intent.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
On the other hand, how many of the current crop of AI researchers were directly motivated by Eliezer, and how many followed independent paths? As computational power and GPUs improved (be it for gaming, for servers, or for bitcoin), gradient descent becoming practical was an inevitability. Once gradient descent became practical, researchers start pivoting to it, and the only barrier (that we know of now) is the availability of datasets and hardware. The snowball was doomed to start rolling with Hinton's publication of back-propagation in 1986.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
For myself, I suddenly discovered their utility yesterday. They are much more effective at restructuring existing text than at answering questions (de novo text generation), and very very good at generating convincing (if not fully accurate) boilerplate. So the best application is summary or restyling ('please rewite this email to a superior a bit more formally', 'please restructure this bulleted list as a polite email'). Of course, everything submitted goes to OpenAI, so this opens up business secrets concerns, but everything typed into Office Home already gets sent to Microsoft by default via "diagnostic data."
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
It was horrible. I only survived because I had a supportive romantic partner. I was under so much stress that my hair whitened. Apparently stress kills melanocytes.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
They could as well just blockade the entire island until Taiwan gives in.
Blockades are an act of war, so they would earn some of the sanctions that are currently reserved for Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
More importantly, the US has a history of being dedicated to freedom of navigation in the Taiwan strait. So if CCP really wants to enforce that blockade they are going to have to start by attacking ships of the US Navy. Unlikely.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
... And thus am I outed as a non-Tolkie.
Godor is but a shadow of Numenor
But that hit home. The RoK makes Gondor out to be comparable to imperial China in its constructions, and so Numenor was presumably vaster and richer than Rome. For an island nation presumably richer than Rome and presumably with magic to only be able to swing together five ships... yeah, that would break the immersion.
Thank you for the explanation.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Circumstantial evidence suggests that it was Spain:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poland-mystery-divers-gdansk-port-energy-oil-gas-infrastructure/
Kidding, but something tells me that Poland has looked into these divers and as a result has a pretty good idea who blew up the pipeline.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
It was bungled, but I'm skeptical face played any part in that calculation. Doesn't the rationalization "the lives of 10 sailors is worth our nuclear submarine secrets" have enough explanatory power?
I'm a bit out of the loop. Are warrants required in the US, or is there absolutely no oversight?
Where this gets very interesting is when the database gets dense enough and DNA testing gets good enough to identify anyone, even people whose not at all in the database. "The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."
Also, give the population 10 years to acclimatize to this, and people will start asking why we don't do DNA testing for nonviolent crimes.
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