domain:worksinprogress.co
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition. You can get a decent fraction of c with antimatter.
Also, there's a huge difference between 'bird', 'propeller plane', 'rocket' and 'atomic rocket' in any realistic sense, with regards to what we're dealing with now. Is superintelligence capable of rewriting the fundamental laws of the universe like a real deity? No. Is that necessary to make vast changes to our lifestyle and existence? Absolutely not, just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
13hr ago
Hear hear!
I've tried to refrain from commenting on this myself but I found the middle of the WoT books to be tedious as often as not. I'm one of the ones that bogged down hard for the first time right around the bloody menagerie in TFoH. Nor did I particularly care for the style of rapid-fire exposition endings that were then revisited in excruciating detail in a subsequent book that evolved around that time, either, but Brandon Sanderson finished out the series so strongly that I liked it enough overall to go back for a re-read.
Which was a mistake that I was making because once again, I bogged down at the bloody menagerie and realized that regardless of how much I liked the series as a whole, life was too short for me to force myself to slog through those middle books all over again. I still think that the first four and last three books are tightly plotted and well written despite their length and I can only wonder at what might have been if Jordan had never gotten deathly ill with amyloidosis.
zeke5123a
13hr ago
The risk for the student is that they put off college for six months (hell they could apply for the following year). But having this fellowship would probably be a pretty big leg up on admissions. Is it that big of a risk for a student?
No_one
13hr ago
China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies,
I have doubts about this. Much of that 'alliance of democracies' is EU and EU is an utterly hopeless project which would require a STEM-pilled / bureaucracy hating Stalin purging tens of thousands of people with extreme prejudice.
Chinese don't seem to be mired in bureaucracy and can 'just build things'.
Eugyppius recently noted a bridge that crashed in Dresden is not expected to be replaced until 2035! One fucking bridge over a shallow river, the kind that an engineering unit would build in 2 days! 2035! So when half or third of your 'strength' is in this kind of state, you have problems.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with US infrastructure issues, but it's not pretty either with e.g. Golden Gate bridge, where the new 'suicide nets' installed (400 million) cost a substantial fraction of the inflation adjusted cost of the entire bridge (supposedly 700 million $).
zeke5123a
13hr ago
Well, let me add a third — administrators don’t have equity in the school. Right now, schools are eating their seed corn (turning out shitty products but coasting on reputation). Since people still get jobs out of college people are still willing to go to college. But if that stops, then your second point no longer applies.
And hence my third point—management isn’t aligned with the long term incentive of the college.
No_one
13hr ago
Why would it get dark? Look at Australian Aboriginals. 90% of the pure blooded ones are economically irrelevant and yet they cope.
Sure their coping methods involve gasoline, glue and drinking but I like to think 130+ IQ Anglos are instead going to do something less self-destructive. And you'll probably be able to get some good mileage out of AI usesticking a lot of neuralink into your brain and directly interfacing with the AI through thoughts.
Also AIs are pretty easy to align so lot of people will likely just keep being economically and competitive useful by purchasing their own AGI and using it as an extension of their self.
No_one
13hr ago
Humanity as a whole wants good AI, but the attempts are split several ways and don’t individually have the ability to capture profit to sustain high burn rates when cheaper or free alternatives exist.
Guess what, governments exist to solve coordination failures. Even if yankees cannot solve the problem of 'how develop AI if it's going to cost billions and capturing the profit is hard', you can bet the Chinese Communist Party is going to bite the bullet, commission another few nuclear power plants and let the Huawei Ascends that they can't export bc US banned it be used for this purpose by the most promising companies.
Because they need AI. US needs it to and they'd probably also be able to
The rest of your comment is basically irrelevant fluff.
If we knew how good AI will be, the conversation would be a lot clearer. If AI plateaus at 2x human intelligence, then I doubt most people would claim it could trivially solve everything.
How do you even 'define' intelligence. If we go by IQ estimates, 2x human intelligence is von Neumanns by the server rack. And you can experiment on such much more easily to figure out how to organise them.
I'd say that would solve a lot of problems, if not majority of them, and create a few new ones.
Say a devops AI that auto-pushes code assumes humans will follow best-practices, but they don’t, and this results in a bug in a critical piece of infrastructure that causes a power outage for 12 hours.
With AI you can do an arbitrary amount of testing pretty easily so no, that won't happen.
All in all, I am not convinced at all.
zeke5123a
14hr ago
Is it? You’d be asking people to take a risk but (1) graduate a year sooner (so earnings start a year sooner) and (2) university is getting really expensive. When you NPV the benefits compared to the cost I’m not sure how large the payment would need to be.
anti_dan
14hr ago
They do not have such a hotline. This is a hypothetical. There are on-call states attorneys in big jurisdictions, but their job is boring stuff like reviewing charges, making sure witness statements are consistent, approving search warrants, etc
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
To me the answer is the way we structured the payment for college more than anything. There were two things that set student loans up to be a giant mess. First, because the government guarantees the loans, everyone gets one. There’s no reason not to admit anyone who applies because they can always pay the bills. The second was that students cannot discharge tge loans in bankruptcy. Which now removes any concern that the student needs any sort of real job afterwards, so the quality of the program doesn’t matter. Add this up, and essentially the school doesn’t lose money if they don’t demand students learn anything. In fact, since more students enter behind where they should be, it’s actually a negative to expect too much. If the students are washing out, you lose money.
dr_analog
razorboy
14hr ago
At the least, all of the "em dashes"
—
are a pretty solid tell.
But yeah it's definitely trying too hard.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
14hr ago
But that's an issue of trust - idk how old you are, but there were conversations like this in the early oughts about search engines dumbing everyone down and removing the need to think for themselves, then a few years after that it was Wikipedia. Each time the same objections were made - it reduces the need to think for yourself, it reduces your ability to find information for yourself and it leads to people stating inaccurate and frankly idiotic statements as fact.
But eventually people realised they couldn't trust google or Wikipedia entirely and we developed epistemic hygiene around them. The same will happen with ai, and I know it will, because my mum - who is by no means tech savvy or even especially research savvy - gushes about ai, but her gushes are 'I love how it gives me all the opinions up front and doesn't hide the ones the establishment doesn't like' (paraphrased) and 'it's no doctor, but it's a God send when I need a sanity check.' (paraphrased) If my mum has developed epistemic hygiene around ai, so can students, and they will.
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
I'm trying to imagine an independent organization which tests graduates of various schools after graduation to see what they actually know, and rates the schools accordingly.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
How?
British customs laws were rarely particular in their enforcement. Judges could issue “writs of assistance” compelling bystanders to help with searches. This was an obvious moral hazard, and Americans remained bitter about it for decades. Here’s an article talking about it as part of an argument over probable cause jurisprudence, and here’s explaining how it got into the Bill of Rights.
The pockets rule removes particularity, pitting it directly against the Founding Fathers’ intent. It makes it easier for petty tyrants to impose an inconvenience on anyone they don’t like. That’s a poor choice.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15hr ago
Well, it'll be more costly, but it'll be possible.
HONG KONG/SHANGHAI/LOS ANGELES, May 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. will cut the "de minimis" tariff for low-value shipments from China to as low as 30%, according to a White House executive order and industry experts, further de-escalating a potentially damaging trade war between the world's two largest economies.
Things move quickly. I think fentanyl stuff will also get resolved.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15hr ago
There is something to the French case, but modern fertility collapse is uncharted territory in that it happens globally, for new reasons, in conditions of rapidly rising productivity via technological progress. I do not believe that “this country has higher TFR”, alone, is now predictive of much of anything, except the population age structure itself.
And yet it is unable to employ all of those workers
Fair enough, and yes, this goes to show that they're not on the verge of economic decline through labor shortages.
I think the US Deep State was capable of winning this, just like Russia was capable of winning in Ukraine, in theory, if we were to ignore the actual level of Russian governance and corruption and ability to prosecute the war rationally. I knew of that one and so didn't expect Russia to win, and overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.
The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking.
I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.
simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate
Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions, and yes, it's done by networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.
Nothing is set in stone; despite triumphalist propaganda directed at the public, I think the USG is aware of the problems by now and still has major cards like monopoly in crucial technology (ASML is a de facto American company), global reserve currency and, most of all, global goodwill, everyone anxious to go back to normal. Trump has improved his standing in the Middle East with a single speech. Americans are losing time but they can undo the self-inflicted damage with a few more such pivots, apologize for tone-deaf Greenland-posting, revitalize their alliance networks, actually reindustrialize, implement very liberal issuance of citizenship to all Chinese talent and brain-drain the nation – and that's not all. Maybe the AGI God plan will work out too – after all, the attack on Huawei and broader semiconductor supply chain was a resounding success of the sort I expected, it did delay China by years. Maybe Starship makes Brillant Pebbles a reality and forces China to disarm and sign unequal treaties… The US Hegemony is very much a viable project, except some Americans are in the way.
I recognize that my median prognosis has changed in a way that seems discrediting, but it's basically down to high-noise human factors on the US side.
All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization?
They do have a strong belief in their civilizational superiority, and this chauvinism and smugness is another reason I was bearish on them. But in assessment of their current relative position they tend to be humble. “Building a world-class navy by 2035” is a typical Chinese goal. “Becoming a moderately prosperous society by 2020”. In 2018, Xi said:
When I met with Chinese and foreign journalists after the First Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, I said that the Chinese Communist Party was determined to make a thousand years of greatness for the Chinese nation, and that a hundred years was just the right time to be in its prime. At the same time, I said this with a deep sense of worry. From our history, dynasties existed for more than 400 years in the Xia Dynasty, 600 years in the Shang Dynasty, 300 years in the Western Zhou Dynasty, 500 years in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, 215 years in the Western Han Dynasty, 195 years in the Eastern Han Dynasty, 290 years in the Tang Dynasty, 277 years in the Ming Dynasty, 268 years in the Qing Dynasty, 15 years in the Qin Dynasty, 61 years in the Three Kingdoms, 167 years in the Northern Song Dynasty, 153 years in the Southern Song Dynasty, 90 years in the Yuan Dynasty, 38 years in the Republic of China, and other small dynasties There are countless blips and dynasties. The Qin Dynasty, Northern Song Dynasty, and Yuan Dynasty were all once unbeatable powers, but soon fell into disrepair. Those longer dynasties were also corrupt, socially unstable, discontented and rebellious, and many of them were left to languish and die. This shows that after a regime is established, it is not easy to maintain prosperity and long-lasting peace. Without self-reflection, vigilance, and effort, even the most powerful regimes can come to the end of the road.
It is now 97 years since the founding of our Party and 69 years since the founding of New China. The Soviet Communist Party has existed for 86 years, and the Soviet Union for 74 years. Our Party’s history exceeds that of the Soviet Communist Party, and our Party has not held national power for as long as the Soviet Union. By the middle of this century, the history of our Party will be close to 130 years, and the history of New China will reach 100 years. Comrade Deng Xiaoping said, “The consolidation and development of the socialist system will require a long historical stage, and it will take several generations, a dozen generations, or even dozens of generations of our people to struggle persistently and diligently.” How many years is that? It has to be calculated in terms of millenniums. This means that it will take a long historical period for us to build socialism with Chinese characteristics well and into. In this long historical process, it is an extremely difficult and risky challenge to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party does not collapse and the Chinese socialist system does not fall. Once upon a time, the Soviet Communist Party was so strong, the Soviet Union was so powerful, but now it has long been “the old country can not look back at the bright moon”. A generation does the work of a generation, but without historical perspective, without a long-term vision, also can not do the things of the moment.
This does not look as hubristic as American Main Character Syndrome to me.
The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons
China has never held more than tenuous regional hegemony, I think this framing is not reflective of their ambitions and self-perception.
And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular?
Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.
Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.
I've been right about that, Americans do hype up the Chinese military threat excessively, and they don't even build military that'd be useful in countering that threat, it's nearly entirely a grift. $1 trillion will go to more nebulous next-generation prototypes and battling the tyranny of distance in distant bases, not to a buildup of autonomous platforms that can compete in the SCS. Again, assuming Americans keep self-sabotaging.
ThenElection
16hr ago
Sure. But I'm reminded of one applicant to Stanford whose admission essay about what matters to him was
#BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter ... (I'll spare readers the middle portion) ... #BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter
Neither crassly based nor woke should have a place in universities, but the standards applied for crassness are very much not equal across the ideological spectrum.
ABigGuy4U
16hr ago
Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I don’t think people realize how dark a scenario where 90 percent of people are rendered economically irrelevant could get. I don’t think the first solution contemplated is going to be to start handing out UBI.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16hr ago
It is still one hour per group and week, plus whatever time you need for preparation (tutors do set and grade homework, to anchor the session and give the student feedback). For a large class this amounts to several full-time staff - and you also need a lot of small rooms, which tend to be scarce at universities. (Some supervisions wind up being held at random locations like local coffeeshops, or in the supervisor's private accommodation!)
I'm not actually American but in Australia for humanities/law/essay-writing exams, you're effectively rewarded for how many points you can make as well as their quality and I'm pretty confident it's the same there. Maybe you do maths or something where there's only a single answer and simplicity is rewarded, idk...
Two pages seems quite short to me for an essay.
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