RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester
Do they actually do the reading? I went to a fairly well regarded uni and humanities students Would Not Read. A professor came from outside and was perplexed at how people would basically openly admit to not reading. He'd assume we'd be reading a book in a week or so, that was the standard expectation for him on starting the course. I would at least pretend to read the book (finding some relevant question to ask based on skimming through source material) but that was going above and beyond by the standards of my peers. I saw no need to go further than that, ordinal grading and all.
I think people who's last experience with a university system was 20 years ago or more should recalibrate, it's not what it used to be. There are all these articles talking about how Gen Z are basically illiterate retards and they're not wholly unfounded. My experience was pre-AI boom, so it's probably gotten way worse since then.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
If the price of bombing is higher, then the amount of bombing will fall as bombing is replaced with substitutes?
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Israeli military supremacy is a mirage. They can't stop Iranian missile barrages without a gigantic US defence effort and even then a fair few get through. They can't even persist with their bombing of Gaza without US munitions, the munitions just aren't there.
The 'lets just exterminate them all' policy you seem to be proposing would probably shorten the lifespan of the state of Israel rather than lengthening it. Very courageous for a small country dependent upon global supply chains for its high-tech economy to beg for sanctions while performing a follow-up to the Warsaw ghetto liquidation (such an operation will be costly!) At the end of the day, Arab oil > whatever Israel brings to the table.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
If Israel had to buy its munitions (either in the short term or long term) it would impose more pressure to finish the war quickly, or in general do more diplomacy and less bombing. Easy to spend other people's money or take risks if your friends will bail you out, people are usually more frugal with their own money.
The US also helps Israel with key enablers that aren't really for sale - satellite surveillance, in-air refuelling, electronic signals gathering and B-2 bomber strikes. It would be impractical for Israel to try and replace what the US does for them, they can't afford a blue-water navy to put ships in the Persian gulf and shoot at Iranian missiles from there, nor can Israel really put much pressure on Yemen. Once you have a navy, using it is easy enough but if you don't then getting one is hard.
Israel could establish a stockpile of munitions purchased from overseas but it wouldn't be very economical or reliable compared to domestic production or getting resupplied straight from the US.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, Philippines, Pattani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves. The people of Islam awakened and realized that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about "Human Rights" were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.
We can see that Osama Bin Laden was pretty upset with Israel. It, amongst other things, motivated him and he caused no small amount of trouble for the US and the West in general. How many new Bin Laden's are going to emerge from this current episode?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
North Korea has a fairly substantial steel and chemicals industry and a large munitions industry, they have the whole of the warmaking pyramid (save the very top in advanced avionics, aircraft engines and the like). That's what juche is about, self-reliance. Israel just has the top section of the pyramid in advanced manufacturing and R&D. They're reliant on imports of precursor materials and are quite rate-limited in basic things like shells and bombs. Ukraine for instance is a proper industrial power, they have/had a large metallurgical sector.
GDP and dollar figures aren't the right way to look at military production. North Korea is a dollar pygmy but a munitions giant.
There's no liquid market for bombs or shells in the short term, spending more can just raise the price you buy at rather than increasing production. That's why North Korea has been able to provide more munitions to Russia than the EU to Ukraine.
Israel may do what it pleases (as is the right of a sovereign state) but it doesn't necessarily follow that Israel should be given tens of billions in supplementary US military aid, on top of already existing military aid. I don't accuse you of calling for this but Israeli strategy can only sensibly be considered in context, just like how one can't look at Hamas or the Houthis as sole actors. $18 billion in just one year, more since then. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-military-aid-for-israel-tops-17-9-billion-since-last-oct-7
America and to a lesser extent Britain are enabling Israeli strategic incoherence, providing air cover and munitions. If it weren't for US munitions the Israelis would need to wrap things up quickly because they would not be able to prosecute this extended, bizarre campaign.
What is this military aid buying? It's buying enemies in the Islamic world, it's depleting Western arsenals of air defence missiles. Years of THAAD and SM-3 production down the drain defending Israel. In the short term these air defence missiles are priceless, there's no capacity to quickly ramp up production.
It makes no sense to send aid to Gaza so they can survive and send munitions to Israel so they can kill them. Better to do nothing at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Yeah, on the margins technology (or at least something) is clearly having an effect. Maybe it's some chemical in food or water. Or one of those classic social science multifactorial explanations with 50 different causes.
The 'true human love will always prevail' rhetoric is just a story trope. Those bars, nightclubs and third spaces are still shutting down, are they not? We can see the statistics.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1c742ed/percentage_of_americans_married_by_birth_decade/ We can see the statistics on marriage like you say.
AI pornography is the worst it'll ever be.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
OK, sure. But if I go here (The Highest Peak Viewership Twitch Streamers for this month), it still looks like a total gamer sausage-fest. https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/peak
Or here, I see Emiru. She's got 25th most views this month. There's another woman at number 43, extraEmily that you mention and eyeballing it, that's it for women. The rest are all men. https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/viewership
There are some huge female youtubers few adults have ever heard of: Anastasia Radzinskaya and Kids Diana Show. They're children and do songs for kids, hit em with the autoplay algoroithm, get hundreds of millions of views. Besides them and some musicians youtube is pretty barren of women.
Twitch is like youtube, chess, sport, business, science, maths, war, standup comedy and much else besides, top talent is male.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I looked for the biggest streamers on twitch and they seem to be almost all male. Pokimane is 13th biggest, Amouranth is 34th which surprised me. I think they're the only 2 women in the top 50, eyeballing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitch_channels
I think that since the females are creating the drama non-twitch viewers hear about, we're getting an inaccurate view of the platform. I don't really use twitch and certainly don't use it like the normal twitch user. I doubt many here use twitch that much either except in niche usecases. It seems to be overwhelmingly dudes playing games.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
By indie vtuber, you mean the ones who aren't with hololive or phaseconnect or whatever? Because the big vtubers are pretty tame.
I watched two and neither are sexual at all, though naturally they get huge amounts of pornographic fan art made of them anyway. World away from amouranth and co.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
We're already in a world full of violent, sadistic grapists. How much sillier can it get?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Interesting line of thought. On /r/4chan they often colour over the word 'nigger' even in image screencaps. There was at one time a bot that would bitch at you if you used the word 'retarded'. On tiktok rape is grape. People are unalived rather than killed. It's some variation of Orwellianism.
Often when I see ChatGPTisms in the wild, in media, from supposed experts, I get a sense of some vast engulfing monster slowly grappling with our civilization, wrapping around it to consume it. Like a white blood cell vs a bacterium. This may well be just another aspect of that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
investors lost money on both counts
Investors have been making a tonne of money on anthropic, the valuation just goes up. Revenue goes up. Capital expenses go up too.
All that's happening is that there's a massive race because of how important the tech is, so outside Nvidia profits are low in comparison to the huge size of the investments. But investors only invest if they expect profits.
Just look at the openrouter stats. Huge growth, 22x growth in a year: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
22x growth in a year! If the AI companies were losing money per token, they wouldn't increase the amount they were losing so massively by selling more and more tokens. Selling tokens is how they make money from AI and they have to make money so they can continue the historically unprecedented capital spending. Nobody is going to let them borrow hundreds of billions to built data centres if the inference economics are actually negative like you seem to think. They're not.
Since you've held this thesis consistently, you should've been shorting the AI companies and getting wrecked. Meanwhile I've been investing in them and making money. The market has made its position quite clear.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Really? I don't think armies have people switching between infantry, electronic warfare, logistics and so on. You specialize and largely stay in your lane. You might have an opportunity to change lanes from time to time if your knees are shot and need a desk job... But one of the standard features of Western armies is that they have a highly experienced NCO corps who've done the same thing for ages and really know what they're doing. How could they gather that expertise as weapons officers or whatever if they're constantly moving around?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Extremely long Cummings substack piece: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/a-talk-on-regime-change
If you had to read one part, read the speech he gave at Oxford, skip to: Text, Oxford, 19 June 2025
It's staggering. I'm one of the biggest Cummings-trusters and I thought he was overdoing it when it comes to the Civil Service on rotations. I check it and it's true. It's the most retarded idea I've heard for some time.
And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in No. 10, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in No. 10 and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.
So much from his anecdotes (always the best parts of Cummings, otherwise he just repeats his main themes) reads like it came out of Yes Minister. The power of the Cabinet Secretary and impotence of the PM, Ministers just reading out their briefs, cabinet decisions made in advance by the official who drafts the minutes, everyone desperately beholden to the media. There's that bit about a lack of individual accountability for projects, straight out of the 1980s: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-pQcNKFoIDE
Sir Arnold from the show: "We already move our officials around every two or three years to stop this personal responsibility nonsense, if this scheme passes we'll be reposting them once a fortnight!'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I'd bet that INTP and INTJ is 5-10x overrepresented on this forum compared to the general population. I'm INTJ personally.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If you want more complex combat, maybe consider Shadow Empire? It's a deep dive and some stuff is just opaque logistics-autism but there is fun to be had with encirclements, reconnaissance-in-force, spoiling attacks, preparatory artillery barrages before the armoured thrust...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Goebbels was an amazing speaker though. Today things are different with television and social media privileging images but Goebbels did an excellent job in the age of the voice.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
intelligence is a degree of reactivity, and mechanically, current LLMs do not have this trait, they just 'make up' for it in practical usage by the sheer breadth and depth of their (text) knowledge base - but at their core they are simply good enough at the practical aspect that the lack of actual, true reactivity is partially obscured.
That's fair enough and LLM intelligence certainly is jagged, excellent at some tasks but weak on others. So is human intelligence for that matter, the mental arithmetic of our species is very weak.
Yet despite the jaggedness of that intelligence, we have unique abilities in story-telling, planning, reasoning, mathematics, problem-solving, coding that separate us from animals.
LLMs have a similar separation from PCs or traditional software, they're composers rather than merely simulating or spitting out a prefabricated concept.
The Aeneid is great fiction but it can only tell one story, exactly the same each time. A PC is more like a body than a mind, it's a vessel to be filled by something else. The Windows operating system has produced trillions in value but it's just a very long complicated bit of code that performs a fixed, planned function (with some errors in it). A video game is interactive but only in preset respects and very limited generality, it's just another piece of software.
With LLMs it's different, they have a special level of flexibility and interactivity that otherwise only humans possess. You're not buying a story or a piece of code that does one thing but a storywriter, a conversation partner, a technical assistant, a research assistant, a sycophant, a planner, a medical adviser...
Under any reasonable test of perceptiveness and reactivity I'm confident a modern LLM could pass albeit with caveats for their poor vision. But intelligence is not about abstract definitions but about concrete value added. Since it's writing code generally (unlike existing cookie-cutter tools), then that's general intelligence not just in words but in dollars. We can distinguish general intellectual labour like engineering, mathematics or software development tasks from specific limited transformations like Wolfram Alpha, a CAD program or a compiler. LLMs are doing the former, not the latter.
Talk is cheap in contrast.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Intelligence is very spiky
Absolutely right. I have no doubt elephants and other advanced mammals are better than humans at some mental tasks. But the applications of these advantages are negligible, it's just an academic curiosity.
Some materials have a thermoelectric effect where if you heat them it produces electricity, no need for steam pressure. But it's very inefficient compared to boiling water and turning steam into motion. So there are only a few niche use-cases, we could live without it. The effect is unimportant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Grain, combine harvesters and so on do not do intellectual labour for us. A combine harvester is a perfect example of what modern LLMs are not - excellent for a highly specific usecase and terrible in all other areas. The AI equivalent of a harvester might be something that can only write the exact same format of SQL database code with a few variations. That would be a glorified cookie cutter.
I specifically specified 'harnessing the intellectual skills' of orungatans. Nobody is doing this. Agriculture is a totally different matter.
As for comparing like to like, GPT loses games of Chess to an Atari 2700. Does that mean that rather than progressing AI has actually devolved over the last 40 years?
Chess is just not what ChatGPT is supposed to do. LLMs are notoriously poor at spatial reasoning tasks, this is a legitimate weakness but does not preclude intelligence. See here: https://dynomight.net/chess/
There is variation even in chess. Gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct is somehow far better at chess than o1-mini or gpt-4o or other versions of gpt-3.5. OpenAI rightly concludes that nobody wants their AI to play mediocre games of chess for 1000x market prices and devotes resources instead to making it better at what people do want to use it for. Code, maths, sycophancy, creative writing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Elections being held or not held is neither here nor there, it's perfectly reasonable not to hold them during wartime. Running the country under a constant state of martial law is however somewhat concerning from a liberal-democratic point of view.
The US could've pressured Ukraine into holding elections with the immense amount of leverage America possesses. If they stopped funding Ukraine the bottom falls out from the Ukrainian war effort. It's well within America's power to replace Zelensky. That's what BigGuy is actually talking about. The US however doesn't want to particularly stir the boat after all the rhetorical and emotional investment in Zelensky, plus it's more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic than anything productive.
All Ukrainian decisions are taken in an atmosphere that American patronage enables. If it weren't for US economic and military support, the war would've ended by now with a clear Ukrainian defeat.
This line of argument you keep making 'oh these people think the US is this unrealistic, omnipresent, hyperagentic state and others are merely reactive' is particularly inappropriate for a country like Ukraine which is so heavily dependant on American aid. It's unhelpful in general but egregious here.
The US invented the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO, Bretton Woods... America is a very big and rich country, highly interventionist, with many fingers in many pies. Not everything comes out of America but the US is very important.
This IMO places them solidly on the "insect" side of the perceptivity + reactivity spectrum.
What you are saying is just wrong. It is wrong for the reason that nobody is harnessing the intellectual skills of orangutans or insects to produce billions of dollars in revenue. We do not see monkeys on typewriters functioning in the workplace. If AI truly were unintelligent, then nobody would be using it for commercial processes like writing code. Not in a 'search engine/autocorrect' way like normal software but a 'here is what I want, do this, fix this error I see, that looks bad change it to this' way like one would work with a human. That alone is sufficient to disprove what you're saying.
You have more credentials than me. But I don't need credentials to be right and credentials cannot save you from being wrong. It just isn't the case that an orangutan is smarter than Grok. If an orangutan were smarter than Grok then why wouldn't we be breeding them for intellectual labour? Why aren't there any Ape Intelligence engineers?
There's an important kind of intelligence that apes lack but LLMs possess. This isn't something up for debate, the market has already decided and the decision is final.
This limited context window is also why if you actually try to play a game of chess with Chat GPT it will forget the board-state and how pieces move after a few turns and promptly lose to a computer program written in 1976.
the ability to fill a page with text is indicates the ability to perceive and react to a changing situation is an example of anthropomorphic bias
OK, how well does the orangutan do at Chess then? Or filling a page with text? Shall we compare like to like?
Imagine you see a military commentator saying that the Ugandan military is stronger than the American military. It's obviously wrong, right? But he makes the case that the US military has all these problems, lost against the Taliban and militias in Iraq, procurement is very poor, ships crash at sea and burn down at port, there's a drug and suicide crisis. The Pentagon is constantly being hacked and secrets are stolen. Ugandan ships don't crash at sea! Uganda hasn't lost a single strategic bomber because of bad weather. So on balance, the Ugandan military is stronger.
But Uganda doesn't have a navy, it's landlocked. Uganda doesn't have any strategic bombers to lose. The Ugandan military doesn't have any secrets worth stealing. The whole argument isn't valid, the US losing some aircraft is bad but they can also do so much that Uganda cannot. They are on a completely different level in size and sophistication. Turns out it was just obviously wrong.
The orangutan is nowhere near Grok 4. It's ridiculous to compare them. Grok can produce meaningful, useful text. People get it to write out smut for them, summarize articles, write code, answer hypothetical questions, decrypt codes, do advanced mathematics, assess nuclear strategy... It and other modern LLMs have a degree of intellectual generality that far surpasses calculators and chess programs that might beat them at a few specific tasks. Why would we want an LLM to do excellent mental arithmetic when it could just call a tool instead?
LLMs are intelligent. Their intelligence is flawed in some significant respects but it is intelligence nonetheless. This is a critical point that underlies trillions of dollars in market capitalization. It is the difference between Deep Blue's relative irrelevance and ChatGPT's great significance. Paths to ASI are still up for debate but if you cannot get the basics right it's hard to see why your opinions about superintelligence should hold any weight.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
The key point in that example is not all the myriad nitpicks one can make about a 2-line example designed to make a general point.
The key point is that when you give people huge amounts of money, when you enable them to do things, you bear a level of responsibility for what they do with the resources you've provided. More importantly, your patronage is taken as implicit support of their stance corresponding with its magnitude. When the patronage is roughly half the government's revenue then it is a significant level of investment and responsibility.
I can see why Israel wants to be bigger rather than smaller. But I don't see why making Israel bigger is deserving of overseas subsidy. It just invites them to be more reckless.
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