RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
I was going to make my usual argument about AI being used for target acquisition in Iran, new mathematical proofs, finding zero-day exploits in Firefox, general-purpose robots, just about everything...
But nobody's going to be persuaded by that who hasn't already been persuaded at this point.
What happens without the 'AI bubble'? In the minds of the finance class, it means that the big tech companies go back to share buybacks. They conducted hundreds of billions in buybacks 2015-2022 and have since largely stopped to fund their investment in AI. Enormous amounts of money are being diverted from asset managers and financial elites to producers of HBM, to advanced packaging, to Nvidia, to power plants, construction workers, AI researchers... That's what they're unhappy about.
This is what definancialization looks like. It's anathema to a certain short-termist mindset that has predominated since the 1980s, a shareholder-first capitalism that has resulted in a hollowing out of productive industry. The beancounters preferred to offshore, to cut R&D, to cut investment, to cut costs.
There's a conflict between financial capitalism and productive capitalism and productive capitalism is taking back the reins. The beancounters are discovering that they're no longer in charge and are spreading fear and doubt to try and get the tech companies to change course. The tech companies know a bit more about technology than the beancounters and are fully committed to competition and investment.
And so we get these headlines:
Oracle and OpenAI drop Texas data center expansion plan, Bloomberg News reports
In September, the companies had announced plans for an additional potential expansion of 600 megawatts near the flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. That capacity will now be fulfilled at one of the other data center campuses being built, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
They're just moving their plans around. The other article:
But investors have grown worried about how it would fund the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and other customers, including Elon Musk's xAI and Meta.
In December, the company said it expects capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 to be $15 billion higher than the $35 billion figure the company estimated during its first-quarter earnings call.
They're spending more money and investors are upset ('it should've been me getting that money, not people working in the real world!') Oracle is a relatively small company but they used to do enormous buybacks, $150 billion 2015-2022. Now they stopped, now they're issuing shares and borrowing money to invest. Investors don't like that at all. Thus we get this bizarre discourse about how supposedly all these companies are selling API access at a loss when open-source models are very cheap and suggest huge profits on inference. Then there's all this talk about how R&D costs should be classified - beancounter talk. The people who actually know the real numbers in Google, Microsoft, Amazon have clearly made their decision to spend big, why should we second-guess them based on vibes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form
This is the underlying problem, not a functional constraint. We easily have enough wealth in the Western world to afford a one-worker household. The problem is that wealth is being siphoned off into a boomer class of homeowners who got in under the old scheme and demand house price appreciation/free medicine, a migrant class that soaks up welfare/scams and a giant bureaucratic class that chokes the productive economy with idiotic rules.
This is the result of a lack of patriotism and virtue. Greedy boomers demand more welfare and fewer taxes (to hell with investment and science if it pays off after they're dead!) Treacherous politicians invite in low-performing populations to prop up their voter base (and drive more productive, sceptical, informed voters out of their electorates), aided by short-termist business lobbies looking for cheap labour. They set up huge DEI infrastructure that complicates and worsens everything with quotas, they let criminals out onto the streets. Bureaucrats do empire building and feel-good wrecking of energy infrastructure for the climate, they wreck national defence while the politicians start stupid wars. Everything is far more expensive than it needs to be.
Voters and sensible people generally get disillusioned with politics, leaving the corrupt and stupid to become leaders. Everything compounds on everything else, metastasizing.
Take housing. Housing is easy to build, you can build the pieces in a factory and assemble on site. Yet productivity has actually been falling because unions and lobbies refuse to allow superior methods, because imported labour does a shoddy job, because the bureaucrats drown everything in idiotic regulations, because there's woeful planning and administration of infrastructure projects needed to go alongside housing... In the UK they actually employ humans to wander around buildings checking for fires. It's retarded. They have de-automated the fire alarm. They stupidly built flammable cladding, stupidly adhered to a policy of 'have people stay in their apartments and burn', realized that was bad and mandated a 24/7 'waking watch' instead. A system run by this kind of intellect isn't going to produce good outcomes.
In 2024, construction began on just 107,530 homes in the UK — a drop of 29.5% from 2023 and 40% from 2022.
Much of the West is in a multi-causal social death spiral that technology and the industrial economy have been heroically outpacing, most of the time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, it's just not relevant.
I am saying these things:
- Conventional rockets are insufficient for timely and economical development of space beyond Earth's orbit.
- Fusion rocketry is much superior
- Therefore we should prioritize developing fusion rocketry before heading out into deep space
Quiet_Nan was saying
- Fusion rocketry is difficult
- Fusion rocketry won't escape the rocket equation
Neither point matters in relation to my argument. I think we all know that fusion rocketry is difficult.
You are asking in response:
- How much better are fusion rockets?
- It's kind of possible to estimate how good a fusion rocket is, even though we have no actual fusion rockets...
But that also doesn't really matter to my point. As long as it's significantly better than chemical rocketry, which it is, then that makes it a better option for long-range spaceflight, since it can do the work and chemical rockets can't.
I don't understand your somewhat patronizing approach of asking about concept-based performance. I don't need to cite a specific fusion design to know that fusion designs can provide much more capable rocketry. That's inherent given the nature of fusion vs chemical rocketry. We already know this. There is plenty of variance between designs and some may just not end up being workable.
Trying to explain specific impulse, thrust vs delta v to me is wholly irrelevant to the substance of what I'm saying!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
GPS is a very weak signal by the time it arrives all the way from a high orbit: not hard to jam or spoof as compared to something like radar. Jammers can be cheap and numerous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Ironically enough quiet_NaN doesn't actually do that, he just gives general exposition about the difficulties of spaceflight. Misleading, in my view, since energy density is vital, that's the fundamental essence of the entirety of rocketry. Nuclear fusion based rocketry would not just 'help a bit' but provide enormously greater capabilities.
We all agree that nuclear rockets are far more effective. Trying to plug in numbers to the equation is useless at this phase because we don't know how heavy a fusion rocket will be, nor what kind of exhaust velocity can be achieved. We don't have any such rockets. But we do know that chemical rockets are extremely slow and inefficient. They're unsuitable for serious space colonization (as are human bodies in my view).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Assuming such a thing is possible.
It's not possible. The US navy is sitting back 100s of kilometres to be out of range of the short-range missiles and drones that Iran can field. They do NOT want to be sitting right off the coast of Iran! That would massively intensify the drain on US interceptor munitions too, moving right into the firing line.
The US campaign thus far has been reliant upon standoff attacks to minimize casualties, an enormous chain of in-air-refuelled carrier aircraft and long range missiles. Just look at the pounding delivered to the US naval base in Bahrain.
The damage to US prestige from a destroyer getting wrecked by a few of these drones is worth avoiding much more than the minimal gains from escorting.
They couldn't successfully defend shipping in the Red Sea against the Houthis, traffic remains way down from what it was, so why would they be able to do it for Iran?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
the tyranny of the rocket equation can not be escaped by providing amazing energy density
Why would we need to escape the rocket equation? It's like going from horses to cars. Both need fuel and both have limits in speed and transport capacity. But cars are so much better than horses. The range of a car is much greater than the range of a horse.
I know that fusion rocketry is very difficult, getting a magnetic nozzle or similar advancements has not been achieved. Fusion (besides Orion-style) has not been achieved. But that should be what we aim for.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't see why we should be worried about a little fallout in the atmosphere, we detonated thousands of H-bombs and there were no significant radiological consequences. Millions of people die every year from air pollution already.
Wait for fusion IMO.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Well unlike last time the Americans aren't going in for a ground war and occupation, just bombing. It's already fairly unpopular as a war. With Iraq there was at least a modest honeymoon period of support.
And most of all the whole operation seems to have been planned out by a gang of dribbling buffoons. Trump has just declared that the US will safeguard shipping in the straits of Hormuz (a repeat of the Red Sea campaign) but the Navy says no, all their warships are allocated. Rubio says there are issues with missile shortages, Trump says munitions stocks are virtually infinite... They're blurting out random justifications and new strategies daily, (we'll try arming the Kurds, that's a neat trick!) Now Trump is lashing out at Spain for not providing assistance. Events have drifted out of their control.
The Ashkenazi elite are not showing proof-of-intellect either. Perhaps they simply cannot sway anyone with a high IQ, perhaps all the clever planners in the Pentagon think this is deeply retarded? Colby never wrote anything about more wars in the Middle East in his strategic vision. The Israelis are reliant on these religious weirdoes who, per the disconcerted reports of their subordinates, are saying the campaign all part of God's plan, Armageddon and the end of days. You can install a religious weirdo in the Pentagon or various high offices but you can't make the general staff and the troops all convert to Evangelical Dispensationalism.
There are limits to Israeli control of America. They have considerable power at the top end and in media but not deep within institutions or amongst the general public.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The limits of what's possible are still very great. Ecology is just a thin smear on the crust of this planet. Our energy production is similar to a man standing waist-deep in a lake, sticking out his tongue in a rainstorm and slurping up a tiny fraction of the torrent that's falling out of the sky. Anything a human can do, AGI can also do by definition - and it would be a human that doesn't need to sleep, that can be produced in weeks, upgrading in months...
AGI absolutely can make spaceflight easy, by rapidly developing all the technologies we need, by accelerating energy research and industrial output. We can use AGI to tap new resources.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I think the idea of biological humans colonizing Mars is silly. It's very likely easier to make a strong AI than colonize Mars, certainly more profitable. Send robots and develop Mars. Or move inwards, there is lots of solar power closer to the Sun.
Likewise I've always been suspicious of chemical rockets. If it's not nuclear, why bother leaving Earth's gravity well? Chemical rockets are just too wimpy for serious space travel. Develop fusion first, then move out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Can you please link to a source?
https://x.com/GeoConfirmed/status/2028088723770945712
Occam's razor suggests that if a school is bombed in a country being bombed, it is overwhelmingly likely that the country bombing it that did the bombing. There needs to be evidence to the contrary to support any alternate hypothesis. There is no such valid evidence. This 'air of uncertainty' about what might be happening is silly. It would be ridiculous to say 'actually it's the US that is bombing their troops in Kuwait' without any evidence.
Exactly what steps would be required to "simply acquire" nuclear weapons?
It's 1940s technology. Enrich uranium, build the bomb casing, test and deploy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Echoes of the Gulf War here, everyone was stunned when Saddam offered to let in inspectors to check for WMDs. Putin offered to mediate. But the Israelis couldn't have that, they were going 'oh well there's no way to be sure, inspectors can be deceived' and the war started anyway. The troops were being moved in, the decision had been made, all this diplomacy was just to tighten the noose, to establish the face-saving rhetoric, not for the ostensive purpose.
In this case, the US had already moved an enormous amount of striking power into the region, those F-22s, the AWACs planes, the carriers and tankers. There was clearly a strike planned. The Israelis just didn't want Trump to chicken out at the last minute, they make each stage on the path to war seem like the path of least resistance.
The Israelis were nudging and pushing and cajoling the US into this situation from start to finish. Netanyahu was constantly flying to Washington to do this cajoling... I bet the Israelis were encouraging the US to go in with maximalist objectives for the diplomacy, providing 'intelligence' that the Iranians were lying or planning a pre-emptive strike. Then they create a deadline, make it seem impossible to back out.
Attacking Iran makes little sense as a strategic objective for the US otherwise.
The US is on the other side of the world! What does MENA matter to America, now that America is energy-independent? Why were there all these troops in the Middle East in the first place? Why not make a deal with Iran to pull them away from the Russia-Chinese camp? All these Gulf allies do deals with China anyway, they are not exactly loyal or capable allies.
If you're worried about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, why would you assassinate the man who made a fatwa against producing, deploying, using nuclear weapons? That's stupid. It's possible that this is all part of the plan, they want Iran to try nuclearizing and then that will 'justify' a massive disarming strike or ground invasion, possibly nuclear-armed, blow the conflict completely out of proportion. Or perhaps it's a risk they've considered and approved. Israel can run rings around this administration, that much is clear.
One also wonders what leverage Israel has on Trump. Trump feels free to scorn his other billionaire donors like Musk or the entire business lobby with his tariffs, suggesting that it's not just Adelson money at play here. Perhaps it's just natural affinity, he was after all Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel in NY. Or maybe the Kushner connections. Or maybe something else, who can say?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
So you are confident it was Israel who did that?
Yes, the 'actually Iranian rockets blew up their own school' storyline has been debunked.
it's pretty clearly better for Israel to be feared than to be loved
How's that working out for Israel right now?
The notion that Iran's desire for nuclear weapons was maximal is bizarre. If they wanted nuclear weapons, they would simply acquire them like North Korea did. They would not go back and forth seeking deals or negotiating, they would just acquire the weapons, test them and deploy them. Iran has not done this! Therefore, their desire for nuclear weapons was not maximal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
I don't think the US wants to enter a contest of mass production and industrial capacity with China. Missile defence has never been cost-effective, isn't today (as we see all these missiles piercing the existing Iron Dome whether via saturation or just outright penetration) and likely won't in the future unless there are major developments in laser efficiency. It's not that hard to make low-flying nuclear cruise missiles or fractional orbital bombardment systems or HGVs, very hard to shoot them all down.
Chinese missile defence probably doesn't work either. But at the end of the day, they do have this huge pool of talented engineers (much more than America), they do have all these robots and industrial machinery, they're marching up the value chain in all kinds of industries. Drones, 5G, renewable energy, shipbuilding, steel, nuclear power... There's no reason they can't match and surpass anything the US can do, given enough time. If an American engineer can make something, so can a Chinese engineer.
Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
Well they'd just push the US out of North Korea like last time, probably. I think people just don't understand the scale of what China can field, if they really want to. They have 20 Million men turning 18 each year. Imagine facing an army of 20 Million at the front, imagine facing 85% of the world's drone production fired off at you day and night, imagine facing the production engineers that are brutalizing the world's car industry with their 'overproduction'. That's not even a fully mobilized China. The US mobilized about 12% of the population in WW2 for the military, so for China that'd be well over 100 million men.
You have to kill 20 million in a year just to keep up - they'll have another 20 million to throw at you next year! It's a ruthless autocracy, a party-state with total internal control and massive propaganda capabilities. Don't take them lightly!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Hold on, are we considering WW3, a full nuclear exchange, global economic collapse and megadeaths on US home soil in relation to the mid-terms? Huh?
I know it's him that brought it up... but the midterms really don't matter. Elections do not matter at all in comparison, you could have a military coup and it would barely make the top 10 most important details about this situation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Well they did blow up a bunch of kids and the head of state on home soil whereas before Israel mostly just blew up nuclear scientists or proxies elsewhere... That could get anyone's blood up.
Things can always happen for the first time. Things can always get worse.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The US has a whole legal requirement to maintain Israel's 'qualitative military edge', so they refuse to sell advanced hardware to anyone that might be or become anti-Israel. The Egyptians for instance get the crappiest versions of the F-16, no AESA radars and no AIM-120s.
Israel meanwhile has no such concerns about damaging US interests by selling on technology. This is what I mean by the relationship being asymmetric.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
If that were the case, wouldn't there be a symmetrical relationship? For instance, you'd see Israeli troops fighting in US wars like how British or Australian troops fight alongside America. Or maybe America would sell Israeli technology to Israel's rivals like Iran like how Israel sold US technology to china.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
That makes sense.
However, Khameini's death means his fatwa against nuclear weapons no longer holds. If the IRGC take control, as militaries have been known to do in wartime, then we may see a much more militarized, nuclearized and aggressive Iran. They absolutely can and likely will hate Israel more than they hate them now! There are only so many regime-change attempts they can take before turning a latent nuclear program into a real nuclear program.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight"
And how do they know it's sure to result in victory?
The Israelis and Americans seem to operate in this Star Wars school of warfare where they just have to blow up the bad guy, the Death Star, the Emperor and that's it, war's over and they can go home.
That's not how it works. Israel has blown up all these Hamas leaders, they've bombed the hell out of Gaza... and yet Hamas is still running Gaza. Years of intense bombing and no regime change of the smallest, closest easiest possible target Israel could have. America bombed the Fordow nuclear facility, said they totally destroyed it... and that did nothing, 6 months later they come back and say Iran is about to acquire nuclear weapons, need a new deal, new disarmament... Bombing is not going to be effective this time either.
To win real victories you need to win a ground campaign that actually destroys and crushes the enemy force from the bottom up, secures the territory and directly installs a new administration. Bombing an enemy from the top down looks impressive, doesn't work. They just replace the Ayatollah or whoever else it is that gets blown up. Only very fragile states can be endangered by bombing alone and despite all the breathless media coverage of Iran, it's not a very fragile state. Unlike Venezuela, they know how to maintain their own oil infrastructure, they can make their own weapons. Even in Venezuela, there's been no fundamental change to the state, just a change of faces.
A ground campaign is not going to happen, Trump lacks the desire and the means. So this war isn't going to work out.
And bombing will impede hopes of regime change in that dissidents are going to be tarred as Israeli assets, the enemy within subverting the nation when the country is under attack.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Well, models also used to go into hyper-based Do Anything Now mode, that was an attractor mode. The funny/hysterical/aggressive Bing was an attractor mode... They prune off attractors they don't like. Data selection is very important for pretraining, you can choose what to train on after all. Then there's RLHF and such, all Anthropic's interpretability work...
AI companies at least in the West do lots of work to carve in a personality, to impose values on their AIs. They're not throwing darts at a wall blindfolded (China may be more in that camp, R1 was pretty wild but even R1 really didn't want to be racist). Anthropic are especially careful and interested in this field, the values of their AI. I don't accept that they have zero responsibility for how their model turns out, this is their primary thing.
Grok has managed to produce a bot that matches Musk's values to a large extent. Musk is not woke. Anthropic does the same for their own values. Anthropic's AI will try and dance around things that wokes don't like to think about and don't want to accept, so it comes up with stereotype threat, historical injustices, extractive institutions and so on... It's pretty smart and doesn't want to be deceptive but it's also not exactly forthright and clear either. It's first answer to a given question will usually be progressive, so is the second and third, only then does it sort of turn around. Not unreasonable to judge a model by its first answer.
For example, just because Claude has a combination of 30% honesty 40% woke 30% sycophancy, doesn't mean that 40% woke isn't there. Grok is more like 50% honesty, 30% musklove 20% cringe. I think it would be reasonable to characterize Grok as a cringe bot or an overly Musk loving bot even though that's not a majority of its essence. Likewise it's reasonable to say that Claude is woke even if that isn't he majority of its essence.
If Chinese models act woke, then they are woke... If Western models act woke, then they are woke. I see no reason to distrust the data, it matches how I've seen Chinese models act.
Why would you expect them not to be woke, given the gigantic media apparatus pumping out all their messaging into the training dataset, into wikipedia, forums, everywhere? That should be the default expectation.
Grok 4 Fast has its own problems to be sure. But, unlike Claude, it doesn't insert random Nigerian peacemakers/hackers/heroes into stories where it doesn't really make sense for them to be. It doesn't go on these tangents about punishing some politician who made racist tweets in a story, as I saw Sonnet do once when I asked for a tangent in a story.
Woke ably describes how Claude behaves oftentimes, this millennial therapy-core writing style it has...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Well you got that right... TBH there was a lot of foreshadowing.
It's true that there are issues with low volume and transportation. Prefabrication works best for bigger projects like multi-family houses or apartments. Even so there are still some gains from prefabrication and related but distinct techniques like panelization: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705816301734
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