RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
I'm maybe the second biggest AI fan on this forum after you but even I don't like the idea. AI for coding is great, AI for research is great, AI for thinking through ideas is pretty good... But AI for outward facing political discussion and especially moderation is a step too far. There's an informal policy where largely AI-written comments are discouraged I believe, or at least amadan leans in that direction. If it can't/shouldn't be posting, it certainly shouldn't be moderating.
Giving it the full context in a long reply chain could also be troublesome. Inference costs add up.
Also are there really issues with current human moderation? I occasionally see some bait post that still gets like 10 replies (people need to learn how to not get baited) and maybe a ban... that doesn't seem like it needs an AI system. It's totally fine to let things slip through, sometimes I click that 'the motte needs you' button and I see a massive wall of quotes and text and I think 'I'm not reading all that.' That's a normal human reaction that needn't be made up for by machinery. We could just as well let the posts sit there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
Handing over money to strangers by deception is a financial error primarily and only secondarily social. A social error would be a faux pas.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It's kind of interesting because you can't tell how much is just the author largely ignoring prose after a certain point and how much is the translator. And then there's the weirdness of the language itself, there's a lot going on in Chinese names that we barely even get to see since 'Feng Jin Huang' is just meaningless to us.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
A mother whose husband becomes abusive to her or her children will, if she has been denied education, be less able to provide for herself and her children without her husband's coöperation
The state already pays for this or it gets the ex-husband to pay?
II. A mother without a solid understanding of the world will be much more vulnerable to claims of "Your children are in grave danger from everything I don't like!" or "My magic beans will guarantee that your children enjoy perfect health!"
Does education even help here? Are women, or men for that matter, taught about what supplements might or might not have any benefit? Does the teaching sink in? Are the teachings actually correct? Everyone was taught a lot of nonsense about the food pyramid, saturated fat vs sugar vs whatever...
Some people are just stupid/unwise that can't be changed. Send a stupid, unwise person to school and they'll come out just as they went in.
Charlotte Cowles, a financial advice columnist for The Cut and The New York Times, was scammed out of $50,000 in an elaborate phone scheme that began on Halloween 2023. After receiving a call from a fraudster posing as Amazon customer service, she was transferred to imposters claiming to be from the Federal Trade Commission and the CIA, who falsely accused her of international money laundering and identity theft.
Under the threat of arrest and surveillance, Cowles withdrew the cash from her bank and placed it in a shoebox, which she handed through the window of a white Mercedes SUV to a stranger posing as an undercover agent
Basic financial competence is not taught, nor is it required even for teaching or providing information to others. I know it's just an anecdote but apparently nobody thought that this woman is unsuitable for giving financial advice even after coming to worldwide prominence for spectacular financial incompetence. It's systemic, like how educators decide to teach their students badly (re phonics) because it's a fashionable fun fad in the education world.
Education can teach skills like engineering or mathematics but it doesn't seem to teach anything like these general life heuristics you're gesturing at. You'd think people would learn about compound interest and credit cards, the concept is pretty simple... But they don't!
Firstly, bombing Iranian industry aggressively means they'll destroy oil industry throughout the Middle East in retaliation, causing severe economic damage via oil shortages. Blockading Iran means they blockade back, they've been doing that the whole time. The whole point of this current phase of the war is to prevent that economic damage, to open the straits, not raze the Gulf oil production.
Secondly, an industrial state is an innately more dangerous opponent. Iran makes things, Iranians are makers. They can rebuild industry, move industry underground, make decoys and so on. At a certain point they'd decide to nuclearize, surely. Or launch strikes against the US heartland with Ukraine-style drone attacks from third countries/special forces against sensitive areas. The US has one factory producing ball powder for munitions and is building one (1) TNT factory, with zero operational. Iran can cause all kinds of problems.
Thirdly, the WW2 playbook means WW2 casualties. WW2 was not a bombing-only campaign, it required a ground campaign or at least the threat of a ground campaign to achieve victory in Europe and against Japan. The US could prevail if it were fully committed I think, if it threw all other concerns aside and focused everything on Iran. But America is not Putin's Russia. Iran doesn't really matter to US interests and the forces that can realistically be brought to bear are not going to get much done.
I don't think that Trump and the US have the necessary political strength to beat Iran, the gulf in will is too great. The strategy just doesn't work given the constraints of geography and capabilities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The cost in treasure and lives would be far less than in Afghanistan or Iraq
The Iranians aren't Iraqis and it's not 2003 anymore. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were the US hammering soft targets who were unprepared and ill-equipped. Iraq was open plains, suitable for mechanized offensives. The Taliban in Afghanistan didn't have any advanced weapons whatsoever. Iran has advanced weapons, mountains and marshes plus fairly competent soldiers.
Iran is well-prepared, their whole military strategy is designed to counter America. Plus Iran is just a whole lot bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan. Since Iran is 3x Iraq's population, US casualties should be at least 3x higher even if Iranians were at the same tier as Iraqis, which they aren't.
What is the US military supposed to do? More bombing? The last waves of bombing didn't really work, bombing doesn't really work in general as a war-winner, except as a way to weaken a target for a ground campaign. Only special circumstances make bombing effective.
A ground invasion would be a giant million-man extravaganza. That's the whole US Army, Marines and a good chunk of the national guard. How are they even supposed to get in enough supplies when all nearby US bases are being bombed? First Iran's missile and drone forces need to be suppressed which the US hasn't been able to do. If they couldn't do that during the last few months of bombing, why would they be able to do so now or after the mid-terms?
The US military couldn't do much substantial damage to the Houthis in Yemen a couple years back, they'll just bounce off Iran in the same way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Quite right, it's like those ftm people who film these tearful face-in-camera clips for tiktok about how they never realized men don't have these female-style social attachments and how it's so lonely being a man and how men need to act more like women in affirming eachother. Mindset, worldview and even diction remains female even with some wimpy beard and hairstyle changes on the outside.
There are indeed actual men who go on tiktok and behave like that, there are male feminist types... but it's a very unusual kind of man who does this and many of them might just be faking it for access to pussy.
He said that would've taken a couple of engineers a few weeks to do, so not a small effort.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
True, they're smart to a certain extent, capable and determined and creative. The rank and file are pretty dumb though. In the paper they talk about how Boko Haram has to get technical support from 'the white guys', not quite sure whether they mean Arabs or Western converts.
If you really want to create a global caliphate though, what you need are large capable armies, airpower, missiles, H-bombs rather than cheap tricks with truck bombs and drones. Terrorists are forced into these unconventional strategies because they're the underdog, they lack the proper financing, industry, organization and materiel. And all of that is really a product of high intelligence.
"How the Terrorist Group Boko Haram Uses Frontier AI"
https://casp.ac/reports/ai-enabled-terrorism
I found the article a bit surreal where it talks about how ISIS sends people around to conduct AI training... How strange to think that so many white-collar office guys find it all tedious and dull but your average jihadist is like 'it's very helpful!' and they're warming to the technology. Also I wonder if these AIs really know that much, shouldn't the terrorists know how to make bombs and conduct attacks, that's their whole gig? On the other hand, one doesn't consider Boko Haram to be the sharpest minds in the Islamist world so even existing AI models are quite helpful.
It is based on interviews though and may be complete nonsense, the terrorists just lying to this researcher:
Because the sensitivity of the topic and the difficulty of accessing this population meant the accuracy of individual accounts could not always be independently verified, throughout this study I state broadly corroborated patterns as fact and attribute narrower claims explicitly to interviewees.
Some excerpts:
Struggling to operate some of the loot, ISWAP’s leader al-Barnawi stated in a letter to the Islamic State back in 2017: “I am reminded of a funny story when about a year ago, we seized Dragunov rifles as war spoils and we had to make them work so we could use them. We checked many handbooks and specialized videos on this technical issue, but we eventually dropped it in despair after all our attempts failed.” 88 This account contrasts with how these situations are handled and resolved today, where “we take all of the equipment back to the camp and the AI unit tells us how to use and shoot with it.” 89 According to a former JAS technical specialist: “When we managed to seize a sophisticated weapon, the leaders took it to a room where they typed in the number of the weapon. It [AI] then tells you what model it is, how it will be loaded, used, and serviced.” 90 In one recounted instance, when ISWAP fighters were handed out new guns and they did not know how to correctly use them, they approached their qaid, who passed on the message to a specialist, who in turn replied, “just ask Grok,” which they then did.
They argued about what to do with the bomb. Some fighters wanted to dig it out, others not. They touched it and it exploded. 40 people died. Now they have new rules. Everyone has to stay far away and only one person digs.
We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.
I went to the qaid to type a question about different ways to manufacture bombs. He said he could only get the answer if he knew exactly what the problem was. I told him about how the wires were connected in a way that seemed to prevent the bomb from going off. ChatGPT gave some explanations but they were not very clear. He contacted some people about how to put the question, and then it gave us useful information on how exactly to connect the wires, and it worked. I don’t know what he typed that made it work. They call people in the network for this kind of help every day
There's also some interesting intra-terrorist discourse on 'poison' which is banned under Islam and can even get people killed if they want to use it, vs 'powders' which are apparently OK for senior commanders to use. Poison really means 'fouling a water source' which is obviously very bad in a desert context, so they analogize things to poison vs just normal chemical weapons which are more acceptable? But everything is discussed in these crazy immature, unsophisticated ways so it's bizarre, it's that they're grasping for concepts like collateral damage or selectivity but don't quite have the diction for them. I think a major region why terrorism isn't such a big issue is that most of the terrorists are basically retarded, they're drawing from a population of retards. Ultimately AI won't be able to help them as much as it can for a non-retarded population though.
Skip the academic babble and move straight onto the interviews I think, that's the fun part of the article.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The kind of recursive self-improvement the Rats were talking about would be if you could distill Fable just from the output of Opus.
It's not distillation that we're talking about, this is what the guy is saying. The model is actually doing the training process directly. Aidan works at OpenAI on post-training.
https://x.com/aidan_mclau/status/2075328409400738229
i cannot tell you how routine it is for me to have 5.6 e2e do an entire rl run
He also says that it's guided a lot by his taste.
Likewise, it's not Fable distillation that we're talking about but Fable actually directly performing research tasks in machine learning, overseeing experiments, improving utilization. 'How do I get GPU utilization up Fable, look at these stats for me and these logs, should I change the kernel?' is what we're talking about. Anthropic deliberately degrades that ability.
Now I agree that what is being proposed in AI 2040 is very difficult and a little naive. The notion that the US is gonna build all these datacentres in Mongolia so China could feel confident they could capture them is pretty unlikely, that's not really how it works... It has a sense of nerdy 'here's my rules-lawyering to fix the problem' to it. But what is the alternative path? Unilateral racing? A free for all between the most psychopathic/paranoid billionaire and intelligence agency spook for control? This is the best answer they could find, given the constraints of the system. I can't come up with anything better, so even while I have criticisms I think that on the whole they did a decent job.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The key facet now seems to no longer be regime change or demilitarizing Iran or nukes but about whether Iran can impose a toll or not on the straits. That's what Iran is trying to do. They shot at some freighters using an unapproved route, US struck Iran in retaliation. It has nothing to do with the 4th of July.
It's a bit like the second phase of the Iran-Iraq war where the Iranians pushed Iraq out and sought to install a new revolutionary regime in Baghdad. They overreached there, the US and Soviets made sure Iran couldn't win. We'll see if this is an overreach too...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I think you really underestimate the difficulty of rocket science! Starlink is keeping Ukraine afloat in a major conventional war. SpaceX has put more mass into space than everyone else combined, even with a 50 year head start!
What is Costco doing that Wallmart can't, or many other chains? Where is Costco's true excellence? There are supermarkets everywhere and only one SpaceX.
Well for the last 4 years we've been burning through benchmarks at great speed. We're onto ARC-AGI 3 now, SWE-Pro is just now out... What benchmark were they supposed to make 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago? How would that benchmark help with anything? We can already see a clear trend in rapid capability growth. Just the other day OpenAI's entry trounced a bunch of people at the AtCoder world programming contest. In that sense it's 'superhuman'. Not in all senses but in some, certainly.
These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.
That seems pretty self-improving to me? Doesn't seem like ASI is too far distant.
Has the legal system come up with a benchmark for aligning humans in the last 5000 years? Not really, that's not something we can do. We can tell between more or less trustworthy people though, set up incentives and checks and scrutiny. Same with AIs. There are a tonne of benchmarks for safety, just like there are tonnes of checks put on people working in intelligence agencies. Do they actually work, would they work on something inhuman and super smart? Who knows! That's the whole point!
It's an innately tough problem. How do you tell if your subordinate is planning to betray you? This issue is older than human civilization and has certainly not been benchmarked!
There are lots of other reasons to be skeptical about their assumptions. Them not producing a tonne of benchmarks should not be one of them. Their desire seems to be pretty good, it's just an innately hard problem.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Well one has to accept risk for future reward. I don't own any SpaceX shares personally, I'm wary of all the locked-up insiders. But in principle, finance should be supporting aggressive moonshots, investment and innovation that doesn't necessarily lead to quick profits. Broad prosperity and technological capability are more desirable than captured profits. I think there's excessive negativity about Musk and AI based purely on these financial factors. There are other valid reasons for negativity about AI and SpaceX as investment, certainly. I just don't think that these companies should be judged so narrowly on profitability when the tech is so powerful. This is not pets.com and it's not 'insanely profitable short form video' either, AI and economical spaceflight are extremely powerful general purpose technologies.
Apparently Costco is worth 400 billion USD. How could spacex be worth significantly less than that? How can the sky be less valuable than a supermarket with a membership fee?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
2 trillion marketcap for Grok does seem high but 41 billion in losses for a massively world leading space launch capability and a few other things seems very low!
It's an interesting Eliezer post to raise...
I think the key thing that's sort of hinted at is that governments and institutions are not things that are for self-improving and optimizing towards clear goals from the point of view of well-intentioned people who live within them. Govts are their own kind of living thing and they live or die by the sword, by fire and famine and civil war. Not rational argument. How would it be if my muscle cells could protest if I was getting them killed? Traitors (cancer) will be shot!
If anyone could just easily change a system to optimize it, these govts would be like animals without an immune system. They'd immediately get eaten by something that does have an immune system. You want a nice garden but instead you get a whole lot of ants that eat the beautiful plants and then insects that eat ants, then bigger insects, then birds, then cats and eventually some ugly hyena that seems like it should be extinct (Approximately 60% of cubs die during birth, primarily from suffocation). But no, the hyena is good enough! They just cram out more kids, the kids kill eachother, survival of the fittest - species of Least Concern regarding extinction.
The USA is not powerful because it is well-run! The US is run pretty badly but America's other strengths in size and wealth production are so great that it can compensate for this. US governance failures, of which randomly poisoning children barely rank in the top 100, fail to inflict severe enough damage to break the wealth creating machine. And so the show goes on.
Visitor: Hold on. There must be less expensive ways of testing intelligence and conscientiousness than sacrificing four years of your lifespan to a magical tower.
Cecie: Let’s not go into that right now. For now, just take as an exogenous fact that employers can’t get all of the information they want by other channels.
Trillions down the drain on that alone. But unless the PLA march into Washington or the US fails to pay its soldiers and security forces, the show goes on!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone
Who cares about profit or loss provided that first-rate technology is being developed and improved? Amazon barely made any money for years, they were busy investing in their business, improving their logistics, expanding.
Beancounter financialism is a huge burden on the West. People obsess about costs in money yet seem to scarcely consider the longer-term returns of investment. Or when investments are made, they're conducted very badly. $41 billion is peanuts compared to all the nonsense that goes on in the public sector, much of which is actively detrimental to society. That's about half HS2 in Britain, a single high speed rail line going a few hundred kilometres. In Australia it's about 2 Snowy Mountain 2.0s, a crappy power storage system. Or it's about 1/3 of US spending on the Iran war, not to mention lives lost and economic or strategic damage, or that the war is still ongoing and costs sure to rise further!
There's nothing excellent about HS2, Snowy Mountain 2.0 or the Iran War. SpaceX at least has achieved excellence in space. Compare to Boeing Starliner - that cost about 7 billion and it's crap.
Technology is real wealth, money is just an accounting convenience. An important convenience certainly but just a convenience.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
This is pretty poor behaviour. I'm seeing videos of Mexico fans making massive noise, lighting fireworks outside the hotel the English team is playing in in a (failed) attempt to disrupt their sleep. That's obviously crass and bad behaviour. How is this any better, just because it's done behind closed doors?
The US was also using tricks with the Iranian team I recall, making them travel into and then quickly leave the country.
It's just a game, not a trade agreement or a war or anything worth cheating over. What is the point? Why not at least show a little magnanimity or sportsmanship?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Marxism's root is in Christianity, Wokeness is Christianity that has evolved to the point of opposing itself
How about Islam? Islam is monotheist and spiritual, it explicitly endorses Jesus as a prophet and endorses the general spiritualist ethos that Marxism denies.
Are Muslims then Christian? No. Even though Islam is rooted in Christianity to a certain extent, that doesn't substantially matter, they belong in separate categories not least because of a long history of hatred and warfare between the two. Islam is far more rooted in Christianity than Marxism is.
Wokeness also rejects Christianity and co-opts Christianity to be more like itself. Wokeness has roots in Christianity but it's like I was saying upthread. Humans have genetic roots in mice (about 85-90% of DNA being shared) but aren't really mice in a significant sense. Wokeness --- Marxism ------------------- Christianity --- Islam.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
rejection of the frame is still in the frame
So Piss Christ is Christian art then? As far as I'm concerned, it's an insult dressed up as art. Defacing a Koran isn't Islamic art, no muslim would think that, they'd get really angry about it. Marxism may descend from Christianity in some respects but Marxists hate Christianity and work around the clock to undermine and suppress it as shown from when they get any scrap of power and usually start killing nuns and closing churches. It's not really Christian. Is /r/atheism Christian? Many users were Christian at one point. But it isn't a Christian website.
Cultural power is a kind of power, it has an effect on the world. Where is Christianity's cultural power? Are we getting new words from Christianity? Or just a sea of old words, old words that people can barely define anymore? Prelate, deacon, abbott, cardinal - even educated people might not know what they mean. When's the last time anyone went to a conventicle?
Power is about making things happen. What has Christianity made happen recently? You're saying that everything in Western civilization is drawn from Christianity in some respect and alluding to extremely broad ideas like redemption, survival and self-sacrifice (notably shared by other cultures that never heard of Christ). But what specifically has happened recently as a result of this power, tangibly? Gay marriage, pride parades, a tonne of porn everywhere, women wandering around with buttocks visible through some skimpy hot pants, a fountain of materialist greed in everyone's social media, gluttony, envy, sloth, revenge and more aborted kids in the last 60 years than died in every war in human history?
Where is the cultural power going exactly, what is it doing?
There are no live controversies about saying the lord's name in vain, only saying 'nigger'. What does that say about cultural power?
The secular world you might want to see as separate does not contain a lot of mythic alternatives for artists to draw from.
Christianity doesn't even measure up to long-dead religions in this respect. Drawing from pagans today: Age of Mythology, Titan Quest, God of War, Hades, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Jotun, Northgard, and The Banner Saga. Valheim. The Pharoah Series. The Witcher.
Drawing from Christianity today: Darksiders, Diablo and Dante's Inferno + maybe the Binding of Isaac which is anti-Abrahamist.
Both pale in comparison to thematically modern stories about man and technology which gives us huge rich veins of sci-fi, robots, ray guns, flying machines, totalitarian states.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
No, there's nothing in the New Testament... about not having sex slaves. There's plenty in the Old Testament about having sex slaves!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
How would you get rid of immigrants if Somalia etc. won't accept them? What if it's too expensive? What if it's dangerous for them? What about women and children?
How would you get rid of some guy sleeping at your house once you've decided your generosity is being strained, you don't like how he's been taking food from the pantry, money from your pocket or how he looks at your daughter? The guy might have no house, he might have no skills and no job and the street sure is dangerous... but it is not a reasonable expectation to turn your house into a hostel for arbitrary numbers of losers.
Why should Sweden be obligated to keep an arbitrary number of Somalians just because the Somalians don't want to go back to Somalia? Why would they want to go back to Somalia voluntarily? Paying them to go back to Somalia is idiotic, they can just come back again.
Why would I want to leave a 5-star hotel to my crappy apartment when I could stay and mooch off room service? That's just not how it works. The police would be called. They would find ways of getting rid of me.
The Algerians made it clear to the French that they had to leave or they would kill them, so they left. That's how it works. There is no police between nations, nations have to deal with this themselves and it inevitably gets messy and confrontational. Sometimes conflict is inevitable.
Being a nation without a state is an unpleasant prospect. Should the Swedes resign themselves to be like the Kurds, who just get hammered continually by nations that do have states? Why take any chances? Why should they worry about a Russian invasion when the streets of Malmo are unsafe for women because it's full of rapey Africans? What is the cost of a Russian invasion and conquest to Sweden? They'd merely lose political control over their country, risk unaccountable robbery and crime, get made to pay taxes for Russian interests...
Mass deportations can be done quickly and cheaply but not by handwringers and legalists who drag things out. In the UK they go through this whole dog and pony show about 'oh I'm gay you can't send me back to Nigeria because they'll be prejudiced'. You can't let people game the system by producing whatever rubbish will extend the process into the never never, there needs to be a disciplined exercise of authority. There are no magic words I can say to convince the hotel to let me stay in their room forever, not by producing sob stories or claims or phoney documents.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
The Australian outback is a terrible place to resettle anyone. It's far more expensive than the coastal cities because the logistics of doing anything there are terrible. Trucking food for thousands of kilometres, diesel generators, dodgy satellite internet... Everything has to be imported and the climate is horrid. Government employees need to get bonuses to work there. Doctors sometimes have to be flown around on light aeroplanes to reach patients! There are barely any jobs either, the whole area is a welfare sink besides the mineral-rich parts. And mining is mechanized, unskilled labour is not really needed.
The Australian government also struggles to provide security there, the outback is crime-ridden. Alice Springs is one of the most violent cities in the world. Mostly that's due to the indigenous population being quite violent but an infusion of exciting new ethnic conflicts and the criminal refuse of other nations wouldn't make anything better.
I think that most such people believe that there should be some payout/divorce mechanics for abuse, they just think that the standards for proving abuse are too low. No fault divorce means that there is scarcely any need to prove abuse. Also, there's a welfare state so that even if there were no such payments it's not forced destitution.
I think it'd be great if the education system taught this but they don't teach it, at least not effectively. Women are consistently more anti-nuclear than men, I guess it's innately male-coded. Women, on average, are more likely to support anti-nuclear Green parties.
Or consider astrology. Nobody taught astrology in schools but women are a lot more into it than men! It's not to say that men are more rational than women in a global sense, men do plenty of stupid things and die young. But there's a certain kind of rationality that men have and women, in general, lack and I don't see how education can fix this. Can young men be taught not to take risks? I doubt it.
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