domain:bracero.substack.com
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2hr ago
Don't have a strong opinion on the Greer worry, but PT seems like it would have direct downstream consequences as a reminder of the primacy of physical reality. There's no way to tailor a slide deck to make running while fat suck less. Forcing all of the brass to touch grass is more than just superficial hazing - even without scaring off all the DEI hires.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it.
He said that the judge was innocent until found guilty and that he respects law enforcement's efforts to hold criminals accountable. He just also took potshots at Trump over unrelated matters.
The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.
That's not true - not in that video, at least (I have no idea what else he said that day). Let me quote:
And I wanna emphasise too, that nothing, nothing justifies this homicidal attitude towards ICE; nothing justifies pulling a trigger. But I, I do think that we have a problem when we take our law enforcement, and dehumanise them, and turn them into, um, instruments of fear, because law enforcement must have a positive relationship with the community in order to be effective. And when, when we have ICE being directed to behave as they are, I think we undermine public safety.
He was saying that ICE would be less effective by turning up the fear, because it would make people less likely to inform and co-operate with ICE. Factually accurate? Maybe not. Distasteful to divert onto his talking point at this time? Absolutely. But no, he didn't talk "about how ICE invited this attack".
Gaashk
2hr ago
I say the Jesus Prayer a moderate amount.
I'm also into Jungian psychology, but not super seriously. LLMs are good at that kind of thing, because it mostly matters whether something resonates and is meaningful, like dreams or fairy tales, which people will notice for themselves.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Sure, here you go. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/133044/seed-of-the-radiant-grove
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
I'm not talking about operating margin, I'm talking about inference margin, where the server rental is the cost of production.
The operating loss is due to research. Research is the basis of all modern technology and companies should be doing more of it. It's inappropriate to compare it to casino spending like in your above comment.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
I feel I need to point out here that despite being a Traditionalist I am not, in fact, a Christian. So my conception of purpose is certainly not going to neatly map to any conception of Heaven, especially as I regard the nature of Heaven, much like that of God, to not be entirely fathomable.
I don't see the need to call on God to attack the perfectibility of man's material conditions however, and need only to point at the very material consequences of large scale Hegelian attempts.
Why is it evil to immanentize the eschaton?
In process it is evil, because it liberates one from morality and requires of imperfect man to shoulder the moral burdens of God, having killed him. One only need to look at the XXth century to see how bad man is at being his own final moral authority. Mass deaths and the most gruesome and abject of conditions awaits.
In end it is evil, because paradoxically it seeks to reduce man to a passive nihilism that only seeks comfort and security, unable to self actualize any sort of ethos, and by way of consequence can only bring about quiet suicidal resignation. Who would have children or any sort of investment in the future in a society that perfectly caters to all their material needs? Without struggle, what need have we of motivation itself?
Mass anomie is not desirable, nor is it, I hope, achievable.
gattsuru
2hr ago
The trick's that the same chips used to produce a model are also usable to run the model for someone else, and a lot of the technologies used to improve training has downstream benefits on inference or implementation improvements. Every AI vendor has its own complement to turn into a commodity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2hr ago
Tanner Greer is extremely blackpilled on this:
One theme that Xi Jinping repeats eternal is that his cadres must have “calamity consciousness” — real awareness that if they get things wrong they will be responsible for historical disaster. The country is only ever a few steps away from catastrophe.
If you believe that the single largest priority of the US Navy is physical fitness and hazing then you just don’t have that consciousness.
This reform program is decadent. it is superficial. It has no respect for the depth of the Navy’s problems or the catastrophe they might result in.
We are in a very bad place. Culturally, even, the Navy is in a bad place. Had they done something crazy but real on that stage—like promote half a dozen men from the submarine service in a desperate bid to fix the Navy’s operational culture—I would not be writing this.
But Hesgeth did not do anything of the sort. Even on the terrain that he chose—service culture and readiness—what he had to say fell woefully short of the problems we now face.
We are running out of time.
I am being hard on these guys, yes.
I am on hard on them because we are running out of time. We do not have the time to squander attention or resources.
There is need for a calamity consciousness.
Greer is a major China hawk, though. And Hegseth isn't.
I believe this is part of the broader strategic posture adjustment, or at least a hedging bet (not clear if it'll be maintained). The US defense/war department, in Hegseth's vision (I don't think he's intelligent enough to have a coherent strategic vision like, say, Elbridge A. Colby, but there probably are people behind him making this functionally true), is going to implement Monroe Doctrine 2.0, focus on the Western hemisphere. Tough, masculine, no-nonsense, scary bunch, unencumbered by rules of engagement, to more easily topple regimes in South America and pressure neighbors into resource and trade concessions. Death squads eliminating suspected narcos, National Guard prepared to pacify Portland. More like Russian Airborne Forces that exist to terrorize the domestic audience. This is all, of course, noise in the context of conflicts with peer powers, which realistically mean just China and require far more logistical and industrial competence than warrior ethos or indeed individual warriors (only so many guys you can fit on an aircraft carrier). But on that level, the US will rely on strategic deterrence and the hope of transformative results from AGI.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
Notice that I specifically mentioned baseline humans. That is an important distinction. The average nag might be rather useless today, but people will pay money for a thoroughbred race horse that can win races. People who wish to remain economically relevant might well need to upgrade their cognition to stand a chance of competing with AGI or ASI, and to an enormous degree to hope to stand a chance. The question of whether there would be anything recognizably human about them at the end of process is an open one.
Stopped reading after getting through this insanely elitist and eugenic passage. I'll restrict my comments before I run afoul of the mods.
People are far more than their cognitive and physical abilities.
gattsuru
2hr ago
If they are selling inference for more than what it costs them in chip deprecation and electricity, that is only because they have a moat in the form of good models. If they ever decide to stop burning through money to make more powerful models, they will quickly find that without that moat they will only be able to charge the same as any rent-a-chip company.
User interface, agentic behaviors, and (down the road) deep research tooling matters, a lot. It's possible to set this stuff up even as a single dedicated user, but there's reason that approximately zero people have home deer-flow setups, and there's vast economies of scale once you do configure them
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2hr ago
I don't really buy this framing. I know unions love to claim credit for it and maybe they have some path dependent reason for why compensation grew in that particular shape rather than 9 hours and higher pay, but firms were always going to have to compete for labor as capital built up and this necessarily leads to higher compensation one way or the other.
I live in Australia where this framing is unambiguously true. They were directly involved in getting this turned into law, and the big businesses/firms you talk about here were fighting them every step of the way. This isn't really a topic for debate so much as a settled question in my home country, but I feel like pointing out that those firms fought against these changes every step of the way even when it turned out to be against their own self interest.
And no one ever seems to talk about the other end of the ledger for these special interest lobby groups we call unions. They don't represent the interests of everyone, only their members and do so almost always at the cost of everyone else. They hollowed out the competitiveness of our auto industry and after doing so simply banned outside competition so they could collect rents from everyone who wants a car.
How is any of this less socially destructive than the mass immigration and outsourcing that big business and capital has wrought using their outsized influence? American unions, from what I can see, have behaved pretty badly in the past - but you don't get to pin the blame for this on unions specifically when the other side of the ledger has done far worse. It wasn't unions who sold your country's industrial base to the third world, and that was a far more destructive change to society than demanding higher wages for workers and safe working environment laws (as in no mandatory carcinogen exposure or dangerous equipment with no safety precautions).
Behold Europe and it's pathetic nongrowth for a vision of what a union dominated society looks like.
It wasn't unions that blew up Nordstream and cut off Europe from cheap energy, and it wasn't unions demanding vast floods of foreign labour and immigrants to help devalue their bargaining ability compared to capital. To claim that unions are responsible for the EU's current ills I think you would need to bring a lot more evidence to bear - it seems transparently obvious that the PMC is in charge of the EU. Can you honestly look at EU policies and say they were implemented to help out workers and labour movements as opposed to capital or existing elites?
This is literally just a publicly traded company that the state owns a lot of shares in and doesn't have any real impact on whether it would succeed or fail.
Singtel's majority owner is Temasek Holdings, which requires the direct approval of the President of Singapore to do anything which could involve drawing down on cash reserves, and the entire board can be fired or replaced at the President's whim as well. The current chairperson is a former trade unionist and politician, and his incoming replacement is also a former politician. If the government having the ability to fire or appoint members of the board and decide whether or not cash reserves can be used doesn't count as "real impact" I have trouble imagining what would.
There is no support the state can give to the people that can't be categorized indirectly as subsidizing employers.
Incorrect - welfare to someone who is unemployed is very different to welfare provided because people work terrible jobs that cannot support their own existence. I personally think that any corporation whose employees are on welfare and receiving government benefits should receive an additional tax burden equal to 1.5x the cost of paying for their employees. Otherwise you're essentially just paying for Jeff Bezos' workforce to help him make private profits.
you mean besides the tax revenue of course.
Large corporations are far more successful at avoiding and minimising tax obligations than workers are. Shifting the balance of power such that workers get less and large corporations get more means that you're going to get less in tax because you're going after more sophisticated and powerful targets.
Charlie brown lining up for the 80th attempt at kicking the football of rent control and subsidized housing in the hopes that this time they'll prove the economists wrong.
I actually like some of Mamdani's ideas (haven't done too much research on him) and think that they're pretty good. Why is there an expensive licensing scheme for food carts that essentially doubles the price of street food in exchange for letting a few people make large profits selling licenses and adding no value? Cutting out expensive middlemen who produce nothing is actually a pretty good idea in my opinion. As for economists, I don't think I've ever seen them be correct on anything in my entire life, so proving them wrong isn't a particularly high bar.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
From your own link:
•Losses: Operating loss $7.8B, net loss $13.5B (over half from remeasurement of convertible equity).
And
•Cash burn: $2.5B in H1 2025; projected $8.5B for full year.
I think the 42% margin you're talking about is the Server rental cost which that twitter post calls "cost of revenue" but ... that's not how operating margin works.
anti_dan
2hr ago
It really depends on the enemy you are facing. If you are facing an organized state with citizens comparable to your own in intelligence and conscientiousness, your framing makes a lot of sense. This is, to be a bit reductive, the "thermostat" view of violence. And I agree it can be done in those situations. Of course, sometimes it leads to losing, such as when the English lost their American colonies. But losing in those limited situations is acceptable, after all, it worked out quite well for England. America has been its best ally since approximately 1813.
But, if you are dealing with loosely banded together warlords governing over mobs of unintelligent, spontaneous, people, this method does not work. You have to deal with that kind of violence with the on/off switch model. The on/off model is the one, correctly, used by law enforcement (ideally) because there is no thermostat in dealing with a crack addict who might have a knife. Progressive attempts to impose the thermostat model continually fail in that context. Often officers suffer either on the job or in the courtroom because of such poor models of reality. And the same is actually true of Somali pirates. You can't really deter them properly by judiciously arresting a few of them once in a while after the fact. The thing that actually works is just blowing them out of the water. And that same thing would have worked with the Taliban, but no one was willing to do that thing.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
I don't agree with this mistake/conflict categorization, but if you are going to use it, what I'm saying that conflict theorists don't seem particularly interested in understanding what freedom of speech was supposed to be either.
(emphasis added)
I think you're confused here.
Mistake theorists believe that everyone shares the same goals, and free speech is a useful tool for finding the best solutions. They are interested in free speech because of that.
Conflict theorists believe that various groups want to promote their own interests to the exclusion of others, and free speech is giving weapons to the enemy. They are not interested in free speech because of that.
erwgv3g34
3hr ago
Loved "Moonshot Rider". "Fight" isn't bad, either. You are correct; Suno 5 smashes the Turing Test.
But I was a fan of AI music even before this release. AI music didn't have to be as good as human music to be competitive; it just needed to be good enough to allow someone with creativity to create things that could have never existed otherwise. For example, demonflyingfox's parodies of Family Guy and Game of Thrones, or corridos like "Luigi Magione" and "Nariz Grande".
Just two months ago I played through a visual novel called Stains of Blue (NSFW). It's still in development, but when you reach the end of the prologue, you get hit with the theme song and a montage of images from the game's various cutscenes. And even though the music is clearly AI generated, the way it was presented and tied up perfectly with the game's themes and story was so beautiful that I almost cried.
From Quarantine by Greg Egan:
Bella, as always, delivers on time. I download the records into CypherClerk's generous intracranial buffers, and I’m on the verge of transferring them to my desktop terminal when, in a moment of caution, or paranoia, I change my mind and decide to keep the data in my skull, for now.
I’m tired, but it’s barely after nine. I don’t want to sleep, but the prospect of plowing through the Hilgemann’s records strikes me as unbearably tedious.
I invoke Backroom Worker (Axon, $499) and guide it through what I want done with each name: first, check my own natural memory for any associations (after all, the chances are that the next-of-kin of anyone worth kidnapping will be a public figure to some degree); then contact the Credit Reference System, obtain current financial details, and append them to the record. I think of triggering notification if the assets cross a threshold value, but I can’t be bothered deciding on a figure, and in any case, when the whole thing is done, I can rank everyone by net worth. I instruct the mod to interrupt me only if it comes across a name I know.
I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, “Paradise” by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time, and the audio system’s serial number.
Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the RECOMPOSE button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.
I’ve run “Paradise” about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as “giving rise to” more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.
I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme – but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.
Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:
[Backroom Worker:
Natural memory association.
Casey, Joseph Patrick.
Head of Security as of 12th June, 2066.]
I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too – or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the STOP button, and one more unique incarnation of “Paradise” disappears forever.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
Did I breach an obligation to A by these actions?
That doesn't depend on either freedom of speech or Open Ideas.
That sounds like a non-answer, but it helps narrow your opinion down a lot: Your idea of Freedom of Speech and Open Ideas is constrained to a narrow field (everywhere except interpersonal relationships?). I've seen it linked to fully-general ideas of tolerance and non-judgment before, which do apply to things as simple as friendships.
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1973120175470944615
Says it right here, source is paywalled article.
Revenue: $4.3B in H1 2025 Cost of Revenue: $2.5B in H1 2025. Do the maths, margins are 42%.
I never see a source for these claims that inference costs are higher than what is charged to customers but people keep saying it, in spite of the fact that it violates basic rules of economics.
If research and model development costs more than your inference margins
Companies are allowed to make losses investing in R&D for new products. This profit-brained beancounter mindset is why the West has been declining, in a nutshell. If you don't invest aggressively, how are you going to innovate? R&D and capital deepening is the source of prosperity.
It's very reasonable to expect there will be all kinds of lucrative offshoots from LLM research, just like how deep learning is staggeringly, ludicrously profitable, that's why these big companies are investing so much. The technology is fundamentally very promising and is worth investing in.
anti_dan
3hr ago
The US has a lot of concerns where total annihilation would be wildly excessive and counterproductive. Obliterating Somalia because some enterprising fishermen decided to moonlight as pirates would be silly on top of appalling. It's a level of deranged collective punishment that would instantly turn the rest of the world against the US because nobody is sure when we're going to make an absurd demand at nukepoint. And it wouldn't even work, because the strategy immediately fails against any sort of decentralized opponent.
Very few Somalis would share this sentiment if the shoe was on the other foot, which is the problem with modern ROE. They work when its Americans fighting Germans or the English. They fail wherever the enemy lacks sufficient honor.
gattsuru
3hr ago
We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything
The specific behavior is called a cy pres settlement; where the recipient of a settlement is not available, or where their personal damages represent only a small portion of all people harmed, a judge may authorize a large 'donation' to a third party as part of a settlement.
The easiest case is where the federal government is acting as a 'friendly' defendant. Rojas v. FAA? The FAA can suddenly have a change of hard, and decide that in addition to giving a million bucks to the harmed parties and their lawyers, they can also want to give a hundred million dollars to a I Hate Affirmative Action group.
There's limits to this approach; while cy pres settlements are very hard to challenge, it can happen, and some settlements in general end up worth no more than the value of the toilet paper they were written on after an administration changes. A naive person would argue that recent court cases have shown the willingness of Biden-friendly judges to put the kibosh on those efforts; a remotely aware one would recognize that those principles don't cut both ways.
But it's still a powerful tool, and one that's very hard to undo. Meanwhile, thanks to the very slow pace of any attempt to bring a court case to full and final judgement and the increasing tolerance of standing gamesmanship, it's near impossible to actual complete a judgement by putting a law on the books, or force an unfriendly administration to do anything.
((Though not impossible. There's another very dangerous option, and that's intentionally arguing cases as poorly as possible or with such 'incompetence' as to be sure that the courts will not 'agree with your claimed position'. As I continue to be fond of pointing out, Guiliani could absolutely use a job where making false claims, butt-dialing privileged information, and making incoherent arguments is tolerated, and the feds love two out of the three.
You would think, given the impact of res judicata, that this would be extremely harmful, and you'd be right! Too bad fewer and fewer people care.))
anti_dan
3hr ago
Well since there would no longer be any annoying Afghanis, its basically like a new pioneer. America was basically built by people with pioneer spirit.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
Can either of you actually point at some numbers with respect to profitability?
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
And the backlash against woke is a non-trivial amount of the democrat’s being fairly likely to lose an off year election in New Jersey.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
There's two answers to this question.
@The_Nybbler gave one, network effects and prestige make the "Harvard product" non-fungible.
The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.
You'll recognize here the classic structure of oligopolies: make the brand not the product a requirement of policy, and add requirements to production that can't be easily scaled to prevent the entry of competitors. This is usually constructed in terms of "safety" but any excuse is valid so long as you can make sure that becoming a competitor is more expensive than buying you outright.
Social media has this problem too, and here maybe we can find a pattern for how institutional capture could work. Universities are vulnerable because their funding is sourced from the government and government backed loans. Rather than try to redirect the funds to new institutions, you could just turn the spigot off to collapse their value and buy the brand cheap in an austerity drive that allows you to fire 80% of the staff, in particular the political activists.
Actual question, I genuinely have no idea: how much of the demand for foreign labor in Europe is driven by how hard it is to hire/fire natives, and how many benefits they get?
If I have the choice between a French guy who expects 6 weeks of vacation, 30 hour weeks plus lunch, brunch and coffee breaks, and who is basically impossible to fire if he's a problem on the one hand, or a Syrian indentured serf on the other...
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