roystgnr
19d ago
The theoretical justification for it is something analogous to the idea of a Universal Turing Machine, though obviously not rigorous.
If we come up with any other test to determine "human-level intelligence", a test that can't be beaten by a "spiky" non-general intelligence that outperforms in unexpected areas (I'm old enough to remember when chess performance was a generally-accepted sign of intelligence!), then someone judging a Turing test can just use that other test. If it turns out that for some reason an AI really can't understand how to respond to a weird hypothetical about upside-down tortoises, then the judge can ask them about upside-down tortoises. If computers had sucked at chess, a judge could have asked the AI to play chess. Computers only start to beat a Turing test reliably when there's nothing a judge can come up with that they can't beat.
roystgnr
26d ago
But the whole "catching the booster" thing seems to be fairly well solved, which is mind boggling.
I literally thought they were joking the first time I heard the "catch the rockets in giant robot arms" proposal. Under careful consideration it makes a ton of sense to keep as much mass and complexity as you can on the ground rather than attached to the rocket, but come on. Giant robot arms.
No one else has any true first-gen re-use capability for even their boosters, and SpaceX has a fairly well developed second gen platform.
New Glenn might be there soon: they successfully reached orbit using a booster that could in theory be landed and reused, even if that first attempt didn't survive reentry.
Maybe Electron too: they've recovered at least half a dozen orbital boosters (albeit via splashdown, not landing), and they've reflown an engine. I'd bet against them reflying a whole booster this year (splashdown is rough, and it sounds like their recovered boosters have only recently started passing any requalification tests), but I wouldn't bet a lot.
It is embarrassing for everyone else who thinks of themselves as a launch provider, though, isn't it? The first reflight of a new orbital booster design was done by SpaceX, and the second was again by SpaceX, now with a design ten times bigger.
based purely on execution and not things like massive government intervention/control (Long March, Arienne).
You say "massive government intervention/control" like it was a benefit rather than an obstacle. Government space used cost-plus contracts, tried to create as many jobs as possible with as many subcontractors as possible, considered commercial applications to be an afterthought to money-is-no-object military use cases, and ended up captured by contractors to the point where Senators wouldn't even allow NASA to talk about any ideas like orbital refueling that might undercut the most expensive contracts' justifications. The only way that kind of behavior can lead to market capture is by making the market look so unattractive that nobody with enough money to enter it would be insane enough to try.
roystgnr
27d ago
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
What could some jerks with trucks, consumer goods, and explosives do against, to pick a random example, a fleet of Tupolev bombers, right?
In theory I agree with you 100%, at least now that a serious military needs to have nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
In practice, Suez canal traffic was still down nearly 70% from 2023 Q1 to 2025 Q1, after third-world terrorist separatists took 10% of world trade hostage, because it took more than a year for a serious military to bomb them into agreeing to (not even a surrender!) a ceasefire. I do feel confused that the march of technology hasn't yet brought us to an era in which leading military superpowers can successfully pacify places like Afghanistan, with much less than a couple decades and a couple trillion dollars of effort, but here we are.
roystgnr
24d ago
It looks like you only get taxed on the gains on your assets when you expatriate; you don't get re-taxed on anything that's already part of their cost basis.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Humans don't even want political opinions that differ greatly from ours to exist. In a democracy those opinions might spread to the median voter and then be imposed on us against our will, and even in an oligarchy or autocracy there's always the chance that they will persuade the leaders or inspire a revolt against the leaders and then be imposed on us against our will. The use of language to navigate intratribal factionalism is probably older than homo sapiens. It's really hard to treat a question dispassionately as an intellectual issue, rather than as a signifier of loyalties, when everything we think and feel screams that there might be too much at stake.
Consider LessWrong, possibly the most concentrated population of high-functioning autists intelligent high-decoupling people on the internet, people deliberately trying to learn how to better discuss issues rationally in an unbiased fashion, the sort of "hey, I see what the problem is" people that normies joke about: their main conclusion about politics was that anybody who wanted to apply their intellect to any other issue should talk about politics as little as possible in the process.
If you want to apply your intellect to politics, though, where do you go? Well, here I am, I guess? I wish the place was more popular among thoughtful left-wing participants, and maybe there's some way to improve that, but in the meantime I'd rather be somewhere that often repels people with opposing views than somewhere that often expels them.
I think a more subtle issue (though I hesitate to call it a problem) here is that we also select for a particular subset of right-wing participants. Obviously anyone who's a Witch on one issue or another has reason to come to a place like this they won't be expelled from, but also there's a bit of strain between @Goodguy's claims of "assume that social conservatism is correct" and "wordily show-offy". At least 5 years ago, the modal Motte survey respondant was "ambivalent about religion, seeing it as a weak force for good", but that's reflective of a very peculiarly modern type of "conservative". At least in the US (also a modal Motte user characteristic in that survey), the modal social conservative is instead one of the 40% of Americans who would agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". I know there are a number of faithful theists here, but in all the random discussions I've seen of anthropology and human genetics and so on I've never seen anyone jump in with the "no, it wasn't a parable, the first humans were created from clay 6kya" rebuttal that's a plurality belief among Americans. I'm not really interested in rehashing (from my perspective) that debate, but I hope that people are here who would be on the other side and are simply avoiding bringing it up for similar reasons, because that's still a huge and politically important mass of people, whom we can't avoid talking about, and whom I'd therefore like to occasionally be talking to.
roystgnr
11d ago
Okay, I think I've edited out all my idiotic identity confusion from my reply. So, that said:
Always open to feedback
I actually have no negative feedback on your comment. My only other nitpick would be with:
it feels independent of comment quality
The bias here might be independent of comment quality, but it's not always large enough to be overwhelmed by comment quality. I see left-wing comments here get highly upvoted regularly, just not as highly upvoted (and not as consistently upvoted) as a right-leaning comment with the same quality would probably have been. So the effect of the bias depends greatly on comment quality: someone who's already on top of their game might not be getting too much unwarranted net negative feedback regardless of their politics, but someone who wanders in here to write right-wing cheap shots probably isn't made to feel as uncomfortable about that as they should be, whereas their left-wing counterpart probably gets scared off too quickly to consider improving instead of leaving.
roystgnr
2mo ago
The Comanche Wars article will helpfully add for context the fact that "they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache" (for some value of "shared"...), and explains that those wars were because "The value of the Comanche traditional homeland was recognized by European-American colonists". They do say that the wars "began in 1706 with raids by Comanche warriors on the Spanish colonies of New Spain", but you have to find the article specifically about the Shoshone to learn that "Some of them moved as far south as Texas, emerging as the Comanche by 1700."
I still don't get why pushing for the moral legitimacy of the Comanche conquests is a thing. I'd think the idea of a "traditional homeland" should have deeper connotations than "we conquered your neighbors more than six years before we tried to conquer you too!"
roystgnr
26d ago
SpaceX has a hell of a lot of long-term government and military contracts.
Yeah, and those are getting to be less important. SpaceX used to have relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, and nothing else; today they have larger but still relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, but the sum is being dwarfed by Starlink subscriptions. Even when they get a peer competitor for launch provision, that competitor is going to need some time to launch a competitor to SpaceX's several-thousand-satellite constellation.
Blue Origin currently has its own major problems and dysfunctions and doesn’t have much actual developed capability yet.
Well, they've had one successful launch (albeit with an unsuccessful booster recovery) of a rocket that's aiming at roughly twice the payload of Falcon 9 for the same price. Their development's been extremely slow but it's likely to start ramping up soon and they've got incredibly deep pockets to keep trying.
SpaceX’s only actual peer competitor, Roscosmos
If you mean present peer competitor, Roscosmos doesn't make the cut. Dozens of launches a year is nice, but it's not hundreds. SpaceX has no present peer competitors.
If you mean future peer competitor, there's a pretty wide field of relatively near-term possibilities. China's got a half dozen space startups working on Falcon 9 class vehicles; none are at SpaceX's level yet but like 4 of them have at least reached orbit. Rocket Lab has put Electron in orbit dozens of times now and Neutron should be a decent Falcon 9 competitor. Firefly has made orbit a few times, and (after launching on a Falcon 9, admittedly) was the first commercial company to successfully soft-land on the moon. Relativity Space and Stoke are long shots right now, but Stoke is an interesting long shot working on full reusability.
Starship is just the flashy sports car to create brand awareness, and potentially develop future capabilities. It’s not the bread and butter. The cost of the Starship project is quite small compared to the SpaceX bottom line and even if it flames out completely it’s not going to even get close to tanking the whole company.
Yeah, but SpaceX needs the future capabilities to continue being SpaceX. Mass delivery of remote high-speed internet is a sweet cash cow, but it's not The Dream that got a bunch of high talent to work for them for super-long hours at barely-competitive salaries. Falcon rockets won't take anybody to Mars, and SpaceX without the driving goal of putting humanity on Mars would just turn into another decaying Boeing.
Also, the Starship program is also pretty significant a cost still. They've spent like $5B over the project lifetime, and are ramping up hard now, probably nearly $2B this year out of revenues of maybe $15B. It makes sense, since they're probably also spending like $2B this year on Starlink launches and are salivating at the prospect of cutting that by an order of magnitude while increasing capacity, but it only makes sense if it eventually works. Everybody used to say that the R&D to make Falcon 9 reusable was a waste, that it would never pay for itself, and they were so wrong about that that nobody thoughtful seems to dare to suggest the same for Starship, but it's still not impossible that they just can't get cheap second stage reuse working and the pessimism will turn out to be right this time.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too
Arguably the primary targets are boys just becoming men. From an example published a few days ago:
not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
(after similar anecdotes about 9 other prestige outlets)
The chief editor of the New Yorker is still a white American man, mind you. He replaced a woman in 1998 (back when that was still more unremarkable than Problematic) and he's probably still safe there today. If you try to take away an old man's job then you're certain to engender conflict with a powerful man. If you take young men's jobs before their careers really get started, the young men tend to just go away and find a different career. It might take a decade before people even start to notice.
roystgnr
27d ago
Yeah, that's good consolation. I'm likewise pretty sure that even if I'd cleverly scooped up a thousand bitcoin at $1 I'd just have sold almost all of them at $25.
roystgnr
1mo ago
grateful to my past self for diligently squirreling away U.S. Dollars (rather than betting on BTC, for example)
These both sound terrifying to me.
The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason). The investment value of USD has an underlying "everyone in the US needs some to pay their taxes instead of going to jail", and that's great, but at some point either we're going to get the federal debt under control or we're going to monetize it and dilute your USD to nothing, and I'm not betting on "get the federal debt under control".
an index fund
This is less terrifying. Sure, if the ASI kills everyone and/or mandates a Socialist Utopia then you're wasting a sweet camping-with-the-dog opportunity, but if property rights retain any respect then it'll be good to have equity in a wide enough array of investments to definitely include some companies who'll manage to surf the tidal wave rather than be crushed by it. A crashing dollar is going to hurt stocks but not as badly as it's going to hurt dollars.
Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids. My index funds are at the "can pay for college if they don't go to med school" level, not the "idle rich" level. Even if AI progress levels off below superhuman, it looks like it will level off at somewhere around "can interpolate within the manifold of all existing human knowledge", and how much economic room is there for the vast majority of human knowledge workers in a world like that? Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.
roystgnr
21d ago
roystgnr
1mo ago
so might as well worry about what I can control.
It feels like a triage problem, doesn't it?
When your emergency center has too many victims to work on them all right away, you quickly assess them all and mark each person with one of 3 (in the original "tri"-age) tags: one group is going to live without your help, one is going to die regardless of your help, and one is borderline enough that they'll die without your help but live with it. You don't help the victims who need the most help, you help the victims where your help does the most good.
There's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity dies out regardless of what I do, and there's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity becomes so rich that we all end up fine no matter what I do. I might as well continue to focus on the more mundane possible futures that fall in between those extremes, even as the in-between category (which once felt nearly certain) becomes less and less likely, because the in-between futures are the only ones where my actions would have made a difference.
roystgnr
26d ago
Even if you limit the process to the same supposed mechanism as the Slavs, "please rule us to provide an impartial judge for our feuds", Slavs wouldn't be the only example of that Stranger King theory - Wiki lists cases in the Pacific, Iceland, and Sri Lanka (although the latter swiftly regretted it).
Wiki doesn't list the Slavs, though. IIRC when I looked into it the historians' consensus was that in their case it was a false narrative invented by writers centuries later.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch.
Does this not describe modern (at least post-Sexual-Revolution) monogamous dating as well? Communication styles, division of labor, etc. are all a mess of uprooted and jumbled expectations about huge issues, but just consider sex first. We live in a world where some people think fornication is a sin, others think you can sleep around with anyone you date until you officially have The Talk with one of them, and there's a big confused middle where a little promiscuity is fine but too much is sickening and people disagree about what kinds or quantities of sex cross the line. (link to 1994 movie clip, because it's not like this is a really new problem either)
roystgnr
1mo ago
know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years
I'm glad you're trying to steelman it, but isn't this a great counter-example to the "we don't need self-defense until it's almost too late" philosophy? Maybe 100k Jews got out of Germany to avoid the Nazis (peak Jewish-German population was in 1910, so many were surely leaving for other reasons too), and roughly another 350k got out after the Nazis took over but before they made emigration illegal and really started in on the mass murder of the remaining 150k ... but that didn't make as much difference as you'd think in the end, because the biggest single source of Holocaust deaths wasn't the victims who had failed to escape Nazi Germany, it was the 20 times as many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Poland was invaded it had still been trying to negotiate a day before and it was conquered a month afterward. If you're only ready to defend yourself against corrupt establishments that give you a few years' warning then their natural countermove is to just not give you that much warning.
roystgnr
21d ago
Player of Games and Use of Weapons have a somewhat similar dark vibe, and I could definitely see someone disliking those while liking other parts of the series. Maybe try Excession if you want to give the series one last chance? But frankly it sounds like the series just isn't for you, and you should switch to something else, and IMHO that's perfectly fine. It's a culturally influential (rimshot) series, but it's not the only or the best sci-fi book series out there.
in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases
The contrast between the general "which party should we go to next" culture of the Culture and the "what asshole tricks are we going to need to pull next to keep these people's parties from being ruined" culture of Special Circumstances is definitely intentional by the author, as is at least some of the way the assholishness "leaks" out of that supposedly self-contained organizational apparatus. IMHO the series would have been insufferable if you took away its insufferable characters, though; with just the external conflict it would have come across as just another Mary Sue "look how the universe becomes more awesome when more people think like me" Utopia story.
roystgnr
1mo ago
The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality
I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).
The two other common theories are more situational:
Wheeled luggage came about during the expansion of mass air travel, with it's corresponding huge concourses and lack of porters. This was the first time people really had reason to want to carry their own luggage for long distances.
Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.
I'm not sure either of these really works either, though. Wheeled luggage was invented in 1970, but as another comment points out it didn't become popular until the 1990s. Perhaps that's because of the addition of the retractable handle (invented in 1987) finally making them more ergonomic to roll around? And maybe 17 years isn't too painfully long for someone to come up with that idea once it finally had a use case; "The Retractable Handle" isn't exactly the sort of thing you find at the start of the Civ tech tree next to "The Wheel".
roystgnr
3mo ago
On the one hand, the Comanche territory didn't come within 500 miles of Austin until after they had Spanish-descended horses to conquer it with, and it's pretty ridiculous and racist for the bleeding-hearts to bemoan the fact that Texas doesn't belong to those conquerors rather than to their conquerors' conquerors. I'd paraphrase it as "Those Natives are all alike, right? Who cares when one of their tribes is dispossessed by another of their tribes; it's like flipping a two-headed coin!", except that would suggest a verbal rationalization and I doubt anyone made it past a non-verbal gut feeling.
On the other hand, despite the ridiculous intention of the land acknowledgement, I feel like the Comancheria people would have been the sort to appreciate what the land acknowledgement means de facto. "You took this land from us, and you're not giving it back, and you're so confident about your conquest that you're willing to rub it in, at public festivals, while our descendants live among you? Impressive. Kudos!"
roystgnr
2mo ago
This description of Capitalism applies to middle-men (e.g. quant traders, supermarkets, etc)
It doesn't even apply to them. The middle-men legitimately obtain their goods, typically from central examples of businesses, they add value to the goods by moving them to a point in space and/or retaining them until a point in time and/or combining them into a context where they're more valuable, and they retain some of that value for themselves while passing some on to their suppliers and customers. Buying from a supermarket at a markup is a much better deal than trying to buy the same quantities of the same groceries direct from the supermarket's suppliers.
roystgnr
14d ago
Just to round out the space of anecdotes a little more: when I've called out LLMs in the past I've sometimes had them "correct" their incorrect answer to still be incorrect but in a different way.
(has anyone seen an LLM correct their correct answer to be correct but in a different way? that would fill the last cell of the 2x2 possibility space)
They're still very useful in cases where checking an answer for correctness is much easier than coming up with a possible answer to begin with. I love having a search engine where my queries can be vague descriptions and yet still come up with a high rate of reasonable results. You just can't skip the "checking an answer for correctness" step.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Tuberculosis, a 'CURABLE DISEASE' !! kills 1.25 million every year.
This surprised me a bit: worldwide those deaths are from about 10M new cases every year, so you've got better than 10% odds of dying if you're infected ... but in the USA we still have 500-600 deaths from about 10K new cases every year, so you've still got better than 5% odds of dying if you're infected! Has antibiotic-resistant TB gotten that bad? Do people let TB infections get bad enough to be untreatable before seeking treatment?
It looks like most of our progress against TB predated the cure, too. 10K/340M cases per year is about 3/100K for the US, vs 10M/8B = 125/100K for the world as a whole, so at least we've had incredible success at making TB an avoidable disease... In 1900 the US death rate was nearly 200/100K, from God only knows what infection rate, but it steadily dropped to a fraction of that even before streptomycin was invented ... apparently mostly from better living conditions (less overcrowding and more ventilation, better quarantine of infected patients, less malnutrition making people vulnerable)?
roystgnr
26d ago
Was it actually sold to anyone at that price?
$1.25B of it, to "SpaceX, as well as investors" - it was partially a stock buyback.
-13% worldwide sounds like declining, especially with the rest of the EV market growing. -50% in Europe does indeed sound like "tanking".
Yeah, that's all fair. I was looking at total revenue trailing 12 months, but was misled by both the "total" (declining auto revenue is partly offset by rising energy production+storage revenue) and "12 months" (the last released quarter specifically looks awful; I guess people weren't expecting Trump to win and really focus the anti-Elon hate?) parts of that.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I think it helps me to be old enough to have become aware of the seriousness of the Cold War before the end of the Cold War. I still remember the library shelves where little-me found a book explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, warhead and missile counts, warhead blast radii, etc. We didn't know about all the actual close calls yet, but there was enough there to make it quite clear that at any moment I could be 45 minutes away from incineration, with so little I could do about it that there wasn't even any point to anxiety.
In an objective sense this is much worse than that, because even an all-out nuclear exchange would have left us (well, humanity, anyway; everyone I knew personally would also have been incinerated) with billions of survivors and a viable (at least in some countries) civilization to rebuild from, whereas if Superintelligence actually turns out to be obtainable while Friendliness remains distant and Corrigibility remains intractable then that's the end of that. But for my subjective well-being I think it's good that my reaction to a bit of creeping existential dread is "Hey, I remember you. Long time no see."
How do they take cost-of-living differences into account?
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