ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
The problem is they haven't gotten far.
Well, at least as far as Starship is concerned, neither has SpaceX.
If rocket reliability requires exploiting Wright's law, Elon is very much ahead.
If. All the Falcons they produced didn't seem to help them get to a running start with Starship.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Can you show me any dark humor joke that a person has been charged and convicted of in the US in the past 30 years?
Can you point me to the comment in this chain that says any of this conversation is about charging and convicting people?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
I'm not fooling anyone
Yes, that's what I said. I'm pretty sure someone gave you a list of cancellable jokes within the last day or so. Also, you keep providing links to exactly one kind of offensive humor, and avoiding the kinds that you know are still cancelable. Hell, you even explicitly defended cancellations for dark humor.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Oh if you're saying the opposite and that dark humor isn't allowed anymore, then you're even more wrong. I see plenty of 9/11 jokes
Or let's say, Epstein!
Like I said: "no, not all sorts". There used to be period on the internet where you could run wild with all sorts of offensive humor, but it's long gone, and I don't know who you think you're fooling by saying we're still in it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Yet their discussions are still interesting and, via insight, occasionally useful.
Yeah, but it feels like putting Gene Roddenberry in charge of Earth defense, upon news of an alien invasion.
my problem is that they don't have much relation to the interesting question. This is the usual forecasting problem.
I just wanted a way to get out of the "would the Enterprise win against a Star Destroyer" type nerd slapfights. I agree it was far from optimal, but it was the only thing I could come up with, and no one actually stopped to raise that particular objection at the time. The bet-takers thought Elon is great, so he will surely crack this trivial problem in no-time, which was part of the problem I was meaning to highlight.
FSD works, Waymo is reportedly great, so Tesla robotaxi also could work.
Well, hold on. Waymo has a very different approach to Tesla. It's armed to the teeth with sensors - cameras, radar, lidar, audio... the works. I think they even do a high-definition scan of the cities they deploy in. Elon claimed he could crack it with cameras and AI alone. Using one as an example for why the other could work seems wrong. What's more, he was constantly promising that all the hardware for a better-than-human FSD is already inside each and every Tesla, and it's just a question of working out the kinks in the software. That soon (next year, next year, next year... no matter which year we were currently in), at the press of a button, every Tesla would become fully autonomous. Recently they said some of the older hardware might not be enough, and that they will need to upgrade it, and more recently still they gave up on even that idea. People paid a pretty steep price for a feature that never arrived.
Optimus is a legitimately good robot
Did they make some great leap recently that I'm not aware of? I think every other robotics company I've seen came up with something more impressive. It even looks like they're remotely controlled during their demos.
it's just not the time for robots yet
Well, but if it's not time for robots, why is he acting like this is the very thing that will take the entire company to an entirely new level? Transform human society, even. Shouldn't his car company focus on cars, and leave humanoid robots as a niche R&D project?
Starship is a categorical breakthrough in space logistics, which is the one area where Elon is far ahead of the competition already.
Maybe. Like I said your arguments for why it can work sound reasonable to me, but the problem is they sound similar to why FSD can work. I also saw what I think is a very similar next year / next year / next year dynamic with it. He used to do these semi-regular all-hands meeting at Starbase, where he'd talk about Starship (I think I linked to them in the old post I referred to in the previous comment), and from what I recall they started off with saying Starship V1 will be able to take 100t to orbit, a few years later that V1 could take (100 -X)t to orbit but V2 will be able to take 100t, and a few more years after that, that V1 could take (100 - X - Y)t to orbit, V2 (100 - X)t, but V3 will be able to take 100t.
Maybe they'll finally crack it, but it looks like "fake it 'till you make it" to me. I used to work for a guy like that, that would make insane promises to clients, and than expected me to deliver. If I have MDS, it might just be PTSD that Elon is triggering by reminding me of the experience.
About SpaceX being ahead of the competition: yes, but this used to also be the case for Tesla, and now BYD overtook it. There are other companies who are still in the nipping at the heels phase, but it's not obvious to me why it would stay this way given how difficult Staship development is proving to be, and how far they already got with their own rockets of similar class.
but why would Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, be responsible?
Why does Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, coauthor these websites that purport to be about serious policy proposals?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Well for the last 4 years we've been burning through benchmarks at great speed.
Ok, and how many of them were done by MIRI?
We're onto ARC-AGI 3 now, SWE-Pro is just now out... What benchmark were they supposed to make 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago?
Exactly the ones we burned through? We're talking about math and theory here, I don't see a reason why these things couldn't be prepared ahead of time.
These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.
That seems pretty self-improving to me?
No? Distillation is not self-improvement. The kind of recursive self-improvement the Rats were talking about would be if you could distill Fable just from the output of Opus.
Has the legal system come up with a benchmark for aligning humans in the last 5000 years?
Interesting comparison. Let me take a particular aspect of the legal system that is analogous here. Way back when, people would occasionally get into fight about gun control on this forum (and I think that the kind of dynamics I'm about to describe still occasionally pop up). A blue triber would say they're just in favor of "common sense regulation", and what would inevitably surface from conversation is that:
a) They have no idea how guns actually work, leading them to suggest laws far more unreasonable than they imagined, and
b) To the extent their ideas were "common sense", they had no idea of what laws were already on the books, and didn't know that laws far more restrictive were already in effect
I don't think we should listen to people like that on policy, and I think it's roughly analogous to the Rat crowd on AI.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Ok, but don't tell me then it's just "le edgy zoomer humor" when you know an analogous joke from the other side will get you banned from any mainstream platform that is not Twitter in, like, 5 seconds.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
I'm saying dark humor, at least a certain political flavor of it, has become haram somewhere in the 2010's, so you finding an old video of an instance of dark humor that is not offensive to the side that declares things haram proves... what exactly?
Anyway, FFC pretty much proved your "tee he, it's just edgy jokes" facade is just an act.
Yud and Scott in particular at a minimum, and/or the AI 2027/2040 people, but honestly, the entirety of the AI-focused Rat-sphere in general.
What is the value of having a benchmark to judge progress?
Approximately the same as the value of a thermometer when you want to talk about global warming.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.
I think it's worse than that. They had, what, a decade of a head start on this subject? Two? Did they come up with a single actually applicable benchmark that can be used to judge a model's progress to "ASI"? Did they come up with a single benchmark to judge alignment?
I'm struggling to understand why I should listen to a single word they are saying.
Send me a few links to where he did that to liberals or progressives, and I might buy that. Niche independent online fora are weird place to do "contrarianism".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
People joke about 9/11, and suicides, and all sorts of other dark crap.
No, not all sorts. What you're describing hasn't been believable for over a decade.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
Yeah, but I can hook up my router and let it accumulate dust until approximately forever (I never had one break), my desktops were also quite reliable, but I sometimes had to get a new part. The SysAdmin guys taking care of the servers at the companies I worked for, OTOH, were always running around and tinkering with shit. Pointless busywork? Upgrades that aren't going to be a part of equation here (but if so, isn't that a pretty big downside for putting these things in space?)?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
On the flip side, properly engineered, there would be few moving parts, and low risk of environmental damage. Something like 99.8% of Starlink satellites are operational with a median age of a little over 5 years, so it doesn't seem implausible on first impression that AI satellites would experience similarly low rates of failure.
I dunno, man. Space Routers sounds a lot more simple than Space Datacenters...
Does the Colas Group count?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
What I want to know about space datacenters is what's the plan for repairs and maintenance. Or is the idea: "YOLO, just deorbit it, and launch a new one"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
Zero serious engineering organizations were involved in any of the various "solar freakin roadways" proposals.
What do you mean by "serious engineering organizations"? There were several of those built in Europe (Germany, France, and the Netherlands, off the top of my head), and they were, predictably, all boondoggles, but I assume they were built by "serious engineering organizations". Now, it was all most likely corrupt political deal-making, but someone "serious" put their name on it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Not really. The gap between a small scale demo that can be hand-debugged if issues come up, and a finished product, ready for prime-time, to be deployed at scale, is often bigger than the gap between "0" and the small scale demo.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
all your bets are essentially bets about timing, which is contingent on uninteresting factors
The reason the bets are timed is that I wanted them to be resolvable within a reasonable timeline. I made the original bets 3 years ago, and 2 of the 3 users I made them with no longer seem to be posting here, so I think it's fair concern. I agree that it's possible for me to win them due to uninteresting factors, which is what I called a "technical" win in the top level post.
Have you elucidated your logic anywhere?
Closest I got was here. It's not a specific prediction about Starship, it's a general prediction based on the hype-cycle of his products / companies, and it boils down to:
If he actually delivered on any of this stuff, I'd probably be more cautious about criticizing the company, it wouldn't even have to live up to the hype, but it looks like the cycle for the company and it's supporters is "cusome product, get excited for new product", with the "consume product" bit crossed out.
This was about Tesla, but I get the feeling that Starship is SpaceX Roadster/Semi/Optimus, where Elon bit off more than he can chew. It's mostly based on instinct though, but in my defense, I've made a few long-shot predictions on my instinct, on this very forum, that turned out to be true.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc. I'm not arguing for physical impossibility, I'm arguing against the "make insane marketing promises, and let the techies figure it out" management style.
I'm afraid you have a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome. I see it a lot on X.
Maybe. I know exactly the type of people you're talking about, and I admit I was influenced by them. On the other hand, my "I don't have MDS" argument is that I don't actually want to win these bets. I want to lose them, and lose spectacularly. A world where I get btfo'd is by far better than the one where I win, and the reason I'm betting the way I'm betting is because it sounds too good to be true.
I have seen enough of his empty promises, but it does feel qualitatively different, an unexpected closing of the gap. He's still got it.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out? It certainly shows a lot of political / business acumen, but I didn't get the impression that that's the sort of "it" he's supposed to have.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Yes, but how fast? Money can be spent to reduce failure probability (even if just by taking more iterations to fix failures), but it can't always be spent to reduce time to success.
Yes, this is why I said I would only technically be winning my bet, as, if SpaceX achieves all that was promised, just a few years later, the letter of my predictions would pan out, but not the spirit. Conversely, if with the new cash injection they will actually beat my deadline for going to orbit, but crash and burn because they threw all their money at the AI trend, I said I would be losing only technically.
I have to agree with your chances now, but do note I said "sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival", which is not quite the same as "make it to Mars".
I mean, again, technically... No worries, my assumption was they won't make an attempt. The most expansive scenario where I'd claim a win, was if they suffered a major failure outside Mars' gravity well, and even then you could talk me into accepting it as a tie or a win for you,
It wouldn't be too crazy for them to make such an attempt, in the admittedly-unlikely event that the rest of their timelines are going perfectly at that point.
Yeah, but what would be the point? I don't think they have a contract for going to Mars, and there's not much they can do to make money from this. Well... I suppose there's the hype factor I keep bringing up.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Didn't get a lot of work done this week. I mostly fell into the optimization rabbit hole after I noticed that the bespoke background texture copy system, that I set up to enable infinite scrolling, does get a bit choppy in terms of performance.
Splitting the background into more textures of a smaller size should speed it up enough, and another option I put in the backlog is to lower the color depth by packing the texture into 16 bits instead of 32 (less data, less time necessary to copy it between the GPU and CPU, which was the bottleneck). I don't want to spend too much time on that as the original Alien Phobia games had a screen-sized arena, with no scrolling, and that's what I'm reproducing as a first step.
I did learn something interesting though. It turns out when you read back data from the GPU you have to wait for all scheduled work to finish, so if you do so after you dispatch the compute shaders, instead of before, you incur a penalty. In the end I could shave off an entire millisecond of each physics frame just by changing where the GPU reads are called from.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
The immolation of the Democratic Party and the rise of Zohran Mamdani Thought would be a development not necessarily in Elon's favor.
I don't know about that. I don't think these south Asian "socialists" are not quite what they portray themselves as, and people like Elon might end up getting along just fine with them. See also: Trump.
Why are you acting the 10 years never happened? Why are you acting like you haven't been linked specific examples from which the standard is absolutely clear? Why are you doing so specifically after you explicitly defended firing people for edgy jokes?
I don't mind you defending a different position, but again, who do you think you are fooling?
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