domain:archive.ph
faceh
19m ago
My model of what is possible is pretty vast and expansive.
My model of what humans individually are capable of is far more limited.
The muddly part is all about coordination. Game theory, information theory, and public choice theory (and other branches of economics) all help give us an idea of how humans in groups might interact for better and for worse, and how power gets pushed in directions that aren't ideal for human development.
If humans can get aligned together and communicate well enough to share an (accurate) world model and use that to advance a particular goal, we get amazing things. The Apollo Program. The Manhattan Project. The Large Hadron Collider.
But somehow, despite our tools improving, the ability of humans to do large scale coordination seems to be eroding? This makes it way harder to predict future developments, but it does not bode well.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
24m ago
Yeah, after Murphy bumped up my power bill about 40% this year, there's no way I'm accepting anything the Democrats have to say on that. Maybe Ciattarelli will actually be worse, but I'm willing to try rotational kakistocracy.
OliveTapenade
27m ago
Sure, the ideal amount of force or destruction is context-dependent. I think of Chinese history as one context, for instance: you can argue that the correct amount of force to use against steppe raiders is to wipe them all out to the last man, woman, and child, as with the Dzungars, but that this is a very inefficient way to handle a rival Chinese state (which is why e.g. Sun Tzu recommends leaving them lines of retreat). On the other hand, wiping out steppe peoples to the last is extremely expensive and only buys you a couple of generations before a new group of nomads moves into the void and then you have to do it again, so a preferable solution might to be strongly disincentivise raids with punitive strikes and alliances with some tribes as proxies (who can do your dirty work for you by punishing tribes who don't play by your rules); but of course those alliances can also end going quite badly and turn into the tribes just extorting tribute from you.
It's always a pretty delicate balance, I think. I don't claim that maximum force is never the merited response - just that it's a very expensive one that is not always to be desired.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
27m ago
I was thinking about making a post on those ads. That's the only thing I'm seeing Sherril hit him on, that quote about raising taxes and energy prices, and that just seems as bizarre to me as the Fetterman-Oz Mirrorverse campaign. Especially when he has the much juicier quote from her about how your energy prices are going to go way up, but if you're a good person you'll pay it.
RedRegard
29m ago
I disagree, I think you’ve got the relationship backwards. People who are already addicted to media demand the meaningless bulk content. They reel at more substantial works. Substantial works would require them to invest themselves in a more enriching way in what they consume. Offering them infinite high quality works wouldn’t get them to actually partake in said works, and this is shown by the fact that currently most people give little attention to those that are already on offer. For them to partake in quality works would presuppose them not being addicted to consumer slop.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
31m ago
That is an engineering problem. That is an artifact of current baseline human cognition and psychology. What sacrifices do you actually have the right to demand people to make, when there is no actual need for such sacrifices?
MBIC, in your own story you had to posit SAMSARA resulting in successful total legal abolition of too-advanced AI, aliens waging an extra-dimensional Butlerian Jihad, and widespread, spontaneous superpowers, including non-causal precognition just to carve a place for a human protagonist to matter in a setting where AI was a fully valid tech tree.
Do you really not see the concern? Do you want to be a permanent heroin wirehead?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
32m ago
That and the Democrats turn against Israel, and the Democratic candidate's little cheating scandal likely doesn't help. Right now I'm getting constant ads about how the Republican candidate will raise taxes... which is probably true, but what am I going to do to stop it, vote for the Democrat? LOL.
RedRegard
36m ago
Don’t rich people already have essentially infinite income? They do spend a lot of time frolicking on yachts and treating themselves to various extravagant delights, but for all that, their lives seem fuller than those forced to accept drudgery.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
38m ago
TRON bike lighting update.
Got a black helmet for myself and for one of my kids and did the final fit of the LED strips before the last push to get them all soldered together. Done, though after hot gluing and heat shrinking it all down, two of the ... 20 connections short out if they flex a bit, so I need to cut them open and redo. It's actually the second connection I did and also the third to last. It makes sense I would screw up near the start before I got the hang of it but near the end doesn't.
Anyway once those are fixed and showing enough durability it'll be time to VHB tape them to helmets.
I was all set to try some demo runs with ESP32-C3s I had on hand but then I noticed a variant which comes with a postage sized OLED screen so I obviously need that so it blinks ach kid's name and maybe a cute bitmap design.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
41m ago
nd it wasn't unions demanding vast floods of foreign labour and immigrants
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...
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
45m 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
48m 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
55m 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
58m ago
Sure, here you go. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/133044/seed-of-the-radiant-grove
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr 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.
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
Yeah.
To add to the shock, OpenAI just put out Sora 2, which is also gobsmacking me with how good it is.
https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dc49d67ce0819194ea5d9f24bdb28e
This video is completely 'convincing' to me, between the reflections, the dog, and the traffic in the background and road noises. I can still reason out that it's AI, but my natural intuition is not picking it up automatically anymore.
It is also pretty damn good at quality-looking animation and voice-acting. albeit in very short bursts.
Basically, as these tools improve, the amount of actual creative skill and free time needed to create 'passably decent' media drops by like 50% every 6 months.
Someone's going to figure out how to hook Suno, Veo and/or Sora, together with a 'director' LLM and make full on music videos or contiguous scenes with soundtracks and everything.
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