RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I think what's happened here is a successful air raid, based on Trump's desire to seize Venezuelan oil. He has always been interested in other countries oil reserves and has been trying to steal their oil tankers too.
https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2007520406199251070
President Trump says the US will use Venezuela's oil reserves and sell "large amounts" to other countries after capturing Nicolás Maduro.
Step 1, a decapitation strike on Maduro, was a complete success for the US. Unsurprisingly a non-white, non-East Asian country that can't manage its own oil industry or run agriculture properly is not going to be great at fighting. But Step 2 is the key part, getting someone in charge of the country who'll let you take and sell the oil, installing a puppet and keeping them in power. That's the part where the US has historically floundered.
The invasion of Afghanistan also started with a highly successful airborne special forces operation: the Taliban were ousted in weeks and Rumsfeld laughed at the reporters who'd been anxiously worrying about 'quagmires'. Only later did things start to go south.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Well at least we won't be hearing about the rules-based international order for some time now...
A US invasion of Venezuela would be a smart move to put the squeeze on Cuba, secure the hemisphere and a good amount of oil - if the US was good at imperialism that is. I expect a complete mess, lots of munitions expended for very little practical gains. Whatever military gains there are will be outweighed by failing to install a stable puppet government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Good definitional clarification, I understand where Jiro was coming from now, not being American myself.
People need to get more mature about images I think.
Imagine if, at the dawn of the internet, there was a big shock at all the dodgy information sources, conspiracies, cults and so on that emerged. 'We invented freedom of speech in an era of printing presses, not high-capacity assault routers!' someone might say. And it's true, there's a difference due to the speed and nature of the connection. We are bombarded with information, it can be quite overwhelming and mindbreak the weak-willed. Ziz cultists, Extinction Rebellion, retarded tiktok trends... The internet seems to have catalyzed many bad things in ways that aren't easy to counteract without squashing the whole thing.
But the answer isn't to shut down the internet, the answer is to strengthen our mental integrity, raise our willpower stat.
What is the alternate answer here? Restrict Grok from putting people in a bikini, ahegao face, milk sprayed on them? Restrict Grok, they'll just go back to civitai where this stuff has been going on for years. Men clearly desire lewd images of women.
How are you supposed to restrict this? If it's libel, then what about the time-honoured tradition of spreading false rumours about people, is that banned too? Do we all line up and go to the nanny state about how we were wrongly smeared as whiny, dumb, small-penised, ugly bitches who did something unspeakable at a party? Do we all line up in front of some ruinously slow legal system and give lawyers money to defend our reputations (they can't defend your reputation even if you win in court)? Do we have AIs surveiling every private groupchat to defend the honour of maidens? A gigantic Chinese style state surveillance apparatus to uphold the wholesomeness of the entire internet?
The best solution is for men and women to act in a more dignified and honourable way and not do any of this in the first place. That clearly isn't going to happen after decades and decades of subverting and violating just about all of the old taboos. What are taboos and censorship for if not enforcing a standard of behaviour?
Men still have the responsibility of dying in a trench for their country (now with their drone-killers filming their deaths for war propaganda), women will need to accept some downsides in a technological environment that's freed them from a lot of their unpleasant work. Picking and choosing to preserve just the taboos that overwhelmingly benefit women over men isn't a sustainable pattern in the long term.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
No, that's not how it works at all.
A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.
Pensions are provided because the old don't have savings (or because they don't have 'enough' savings, after they've fiddled the figures to ensure they don't).
I have no problem with people saving their own money, my issue is with the government subsidizing the lifestyle of the old at the expense of the young. Welfare /= savings.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young.
You do want to slash pensions though. I also want to slash pensions, I think it's a good idea. But it's incredibly toxic, since you'd also need to disenfranchise the olds. They will always vote for loot now and consequences later. While we're disenfranchising, may as well keep going and remake the entire political system...
None of our political solutions are at all likely to happen without a major transformation of the system, something comparable to a coup. So I also agree on the importance of a technological fix.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
And if we started offering affirmative action for people who have kids, I don't know how it would stop otherwise-low-performing people from having kids to game the system
Well in the fantasy world where this policy is implemented, I'd block low-performers from taking advantage of it. Right now the affirmative action system doles out money and jobs to people of the right (wrong) race, I'm conceptualizing a system where it doles out money and jobs to married couples who meet certain baseline standards - their children aren't menaces, they work in more skill-intensive occupations, good character...
There's always going to be gaming of all government systems and there'd be gaming of this too but the system would be designed with perverse incentives in mind, not as a political patronage system.
If we just meritocracy-max then we're back to IQ-shredding, there needs to be a balance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Why not just offer affirmative action to married couples with children?
Want a promotion in your white collar job? Have a husband/wife and have children!
Want your kids to get into a good university? Have more children!
This would efficiently target the most valuable, productive, ambitious people too, rather than the welfare class who don't really want to go to university, don't have anywhere near the necessary marks and aren't in line for promotion anyway.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Sex outside of marriage: it's illegal. Unacceptable. Totally contrary to Our Values. You're in prison, you're a lowlife, a scumbag, media will show you to be the bad guy.
Done!
Alternately, affirmative action for married couples in the workforce. Companies must declare targets of married employees, explain what actions they're taking to achieve these targets. You could boost fertility the same way.
This is something that a big state could easily do. The US and much of the West quasi-criminalized going outside during Covid, there is an enormous river of state power that merely needs to be directed towards pro-social ends. In Britain they arrest thousands of people for tweets, that's their 'incentive' for people to think a bit more carefully before they speak. The state can indoctrinate children for hours and hours a day, there's a gigantic surveillance apparatus watching just about everything, they have 20-40% of GDP to spend...
Our elites simply need to make a decision and then enforce that decision and then it just happens. The difficulty of social engineering is overestimated. The US did it pretty well, they pointed bayonets at teenagers so they'd go to school with blacks, they forcibly bussed whites to black schools, implemented affirmative action schemes to give blacks better jobs. It didn't change performance-based outcomes that much but they certainly could produce behaviours, they dramatically reduced racism just via straightforward suppression and indoctrination.
They could suppress adultery too, it's really not that hard. But they don't want to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Somalians can and do rob eachother but they also have nationalism and a sense of group identity. You see these Somali-American politicians going on about how they want to help Somalia, help Somalians.
I assume this is right, I don't see a community note. Former Somali Prime Minister Khaire at MN rally for Ilhan Omar, speaking some Somali language: 'The interests of Ilhan are not Ilhans, it's not the interests of Minnesota, it's not the interests of the American people, it's the interest of Somalians and Somalia'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
A 16 inch gun uses hundreds of kilos of propellant, you're not launching anything, you're just vaporizing people inside a tube. Ironically, I think this would be much more humane as an execution method than the 'give him a lethal injection that makes him writhe around in pain' model.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I don't necessarily disagree but the simpler explanation of 'there is money and they see they can easily take it' works better. They wouldn't take money from Somalis, they can distinguish between gradations of friends and enemies. And in Minnesota, they have this magic wand of 'racism' they can wave and get people to bend over backwards to ignore their tricks.
Truly, Somalis in Minnesota is the reductio ad absurdum of antiracism. Who seriously thinks that it's a good idea to bring in Somalis? Did they ever invent anything or create anything? Somalia isn't exactly in good shape either, a very poor country of nomadic herders.
Low-value people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
This is not a 'more tokens' task but a 'more intelligence' task, requiring ultra-long horizons and qualitatively superhuman ability.
It would be far easier to make a fun AAA game. It would be far easier to write a LOTR-tier book series. Humans have at least done those things in the past, individually or collectively. Nobody has ever made an unhackable, actually useable system. A system will have to be considered in its entirety, AI training is complex and can't just be reduced to small pieces to be secured independently of eachother. At minimum all this will have to run together performantly. That is no small feat and cannot be achieved monkey-typewriter style.
If it were merely about spending a few billion dollars and a lot of programmer time wouldn't the Pentagon/NSA be totally secured against cyberattack by now? They're not, even state actors can't do this.
I can't understand the world you're proposing, where Chinese AIs are smart enough to shield the entire Chinese training stack but US AIs are not smart enough to hack them before the shield can be completed. The trend suggests that at any given point in time, US AIs are smarter than their Chinese siblings. So there will be a gap between when this defence-shield can be completed and when the US could launch its attack. The US will likely retain a qualitative and quantitative advantage in AI this whole time.
If the Chinese AI can see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll write this replacement to secure it and then fit it in with the rest of the stack while still maintaining performance' why can't an American AI see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll infiltrate and exploit it before the upgrade process is complete?'
Why is my 'superhacker AGI' lazy thinking but not your 'superhuman perfect defence + performant AI training stack code-writer AI' not lazy thinking? I agree that it's possible in principle but the former will come before the latter.
If China has 100 quadrillion tokens, then the US will have yet more, they have more compute after all. I doubt Doubao's tokens are worth as much as Gemini or OpenAI's, 'token' could be anywhere on the curve of intelligence and cost.
Maybe the US decides not to hack, maybe somebody cuts a deal, maybe Trump makes some inexplicable decision or maybe AGI isn't a big deal. But I don't see your scenario happening.
Furthermore, there are still hardware issues to consider. There are probably many unfixable flaws that humans aren't smart enough to find like these: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/5-years-of-intel-cpus-and-chipsets-have-a-concerning-flaw-thats-unfixable/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Even finding all the things you'd need to secure is a nightmarish task. The CPU's physical structure, the microcode, the BIOS, the lower levels of the OS, a myriad of applications... You'd need a completely accurate, top to bottom model of the whole system: thousands of devices, routers, OSI... You'd then need to rewrite all of it while somehow maintaining proper functionality. Have fun updating the ROM of the management engine! Good odds there are physical flaws in CPUs that either humans are too dumb to uncover or were put there by intelligence agencies for spying purposes, so even if you do all that it still isn't sufficient.
ASI is a bare minimum requirement. Probably ASI + a whole new generation of chips is needed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Many OpenAI investors don't believe in the singularity. Microsoft is demanding revenue-share from OpenAI right now. They see the power of the technology and naturally decide to invest in it, even if they're unpersuaded on mass automation or singularity. They want it to sell more subscriptions, speed up software development. It's the myopic facebook mindset of 'this technology could sell us so many short-form video ads' and tbf, that is true. AI is making huge amounts of profit for Facebook right now. Tiktok makes enormous amounts of money (in China) based off its algorithms which include LLM tech. AI is highly profitable right now and it is a sure bet that there will be further highly profitable offshoots from LLM technology, besides the singularity. They just require lots of investment to tap and we are still in an early-growth phase of a new market, whereas video is a lot more mature.
Older versions of Claude Sonnet could easily snipe redditors per the /r/changemyview experiments, obviously AI can make huge amounts of money for businesses.
OpenAI is valued at a mere $500-830 billion. The market cap of gold and silver is about $35 trillion. If OpenAI valuations were genuinely driven by belief in the singularity, it'd be worth a lot more than shiny rocks! The lightcone contains a hell of a lot of gold, a company with singularity-pilled investors would get everything money can buy even if they are just one of a few leading competitors.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
And yet nobody is using provably correct software because the core requirement is 'does it actually work' not 'is it totally secure'. This is the first thing they teach you in a cybersecurity course, the mission comes first. It's not cost-efficient to security-max.
Only a strong AI can do this cost-effectively, not even the state actors can manage this, they get hacked all the time. And given we're talking about what happens when strong AIs first emerge, people are not going to have provably secure software already widely proliferated from kernel to application.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
IMO Gold is an important signal but not that significant in and of itself, again, it's longer-term capabilities that matter.
How long do you think it takes, between open source AIs that win IOI&IMO Gold for pennies, and formally verified kernels for everything, in a security-obsessed nation that has dominated image recognition research just because it wanted better surveillance?
To proof a complex system against hacking, you'd need ASI. This is a superhuman feat, no humans have ever written a provably secure system that actually does useful work as opposed to just being a toy proof of concept.
By the time these kernels come out and are deployed, it's pointless to hack the datacentre.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
will American AGI God really be good enough to hack Huawei clusters after their inferior Temu AGI has hunted for vulnerabilities in an airgapped regime for a few months? I think cyberwarfare is largely going dodo in this world, everyone will have an asymmetric defense advantage.
Maybe it can't hack the servers directly if they're airgapped (though I wouldn't underestimate the power of some social-engineered fool bringing in a compromised USB) but it could hack everything around the servers, the power production, logistics, financing, communications, transport, construction. I doubt the servers even are airgapped, modern data centers are saturated with wireless signals from Wi-Fi peripherals, IoT sensors, and private LTE/5G networks. The modern economy is a giant mess of countless digital parts.
I think people underestimate the power of 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre', even without any major breakthroughs in physics, I think mere peak human-level AIs at scale could wipe the floor with any technological power without firing a shot. In cyber there is no perfect defence, only layers of security and balancing risk mitigation v cost. The cost of defending against a nation of geniuses would be staggering, you'd need your own nation of geniuses. Maybe they could find some zero-day exploits. Maybe they could circumnavigate the data centre and put vulnerabilities in the algorithms directly, find and infiltrate the Chinese version of Crowdstrike? Or just raze the Chinese economy wholesale. All those QR code payments and smart city infrastructure can be vulnerabilities as well as strengths.
China's already been kind of doing this 'exploit large high IQ population' with their own massive economic cyberwarfare program. It works, it's a smart idea. 10,000 hackers can steal lots of secrets, could 10 million wreck a whole country's digital infrastructure? You may have read that short story by Ci Xin Liu about the rogue AI program that just goes around causing human misery to everyone via hacking.
I believe that the physical domain is trumped by the virtual. Even nuclear command and control can potentially be compromised by strong AIs, I bet that wherever there is a complex system, there will be vulnerabilities that humans haven't judged cost-efficient to defend against.
I think it's funny that we've both kinda swapped positions on AI geopolitics over time, you used to be blackpilled about US hegemony until Deepseek came along... Nevertheless I don't fully disagree and predicting the future is very hard, I could well be wrong and you right or both of us wrong.
V3.2-Speciale gets that gold for pennies, but now we've moved goalposts to Django programming, playing Pokemon and managing a vending machine. Those are mode open-ended tasks but I really don't believe they are indexing general intelligence better.
Eh, I think Pokemon and vending machines are good tasks. It's long-form tasks that matter most, weaving all those beautiful pearls (maths ability or physics knowledge) into a necklace. We have plenty of pearls, we need them bound together. And I don't think 3.2 does as well as Claude Code, at least not if we go by the 'each 5% is harder than the 5%' idea in these benchmarks.
I agree with the general point about the US losing its broad supremacy. In many fields, America is well behind with little prospect of catching up and there is indeed an unseemly amount of American reflexive dismissal of inferiority. Too many clowns on twitter posting about blowing up the Three Gorges Dam. There's an alarmingly casual attitude to conflict in the information sphere of today's world, as though it's something you can just start and end as you please. War is the most serious matter there is, it must be considered coldly and carefully.
both will have "AGI" at around the same time
Won't the US enjoy a quantitative and qualitative superiority in AI though, based on the compute advantage, through to at least the 2030s? Chinese models are pretty good and very cost-efficient but lean more towards benchmaxxed than general intelligence. GLM-4.7 for instance, supposedly it has stats comparable to Opus 4.5. But my subjective testing throws up a huge disparity between them, Opus is much stronger. It one-shots where others flounder. That's what you'd expect given the price difference, it's a lightweight model vs a heavyweight model... but where are the Chinese heavyweight models? They only compete on cost-efficiency because they can't get the compute needed for frontier performance. If Teslas cost 40K and BYD costs 20K and Tesla doesn't just get wrecked by BYD, then it would show that there's a significant qualitative gap. In real life of course BYD is wrecking Tesla, they have rough qualitative parity and so cost-efficiency dominates. But Chinese AI doesn't seem to have a competitive advantage, not on openrouter anyway, despite their cost-efficiency they lack the neccessary grunt.
If AGI isn't a big deal and it ends up being a cost-efficiency game of commoditized AI providing modest benefits, then China wins. Zero chance for America in any kind of prolonged competition against such a huge country. America is too dopey to have a chance, letting China rent Blackwell chips is foolish. Too dopey to do diplomacy coherently, too dopey to shut down the open-air fent markets, too dopey to build frigates... America is probably the ablest and most effectively run country in the Western bloc overall. That is not a very high bar to meet. The US would need to be on another level entirely to beat China. It's that same lightweight v heavyweight competition.
But if AI/AGI/ASI is a big deal, then America enjoys a decisive advantage. Doesn't matter if China has 20 AGI at Lvl 5 if the US has 60 at Lvl 8. I think a significantly more intelligent AI is worth a lot more than cheaper and faster AI in R&D, robotics, cyberwarfare, propagandizing, planning. And just throwing more AI at problems is naturally better. There will be a huge compute drought. There's a compute drought right now, AI is sweeping through the whole semiconductor sector like Attila the Hun, razing (raising) prices.
China doesn't have the necessary HBM, the necessary HBM just doesn't exist. Even America is struggling, let alone China. Even if China had enough good chips to go with their good networking, there's no good memory to go with them.
In a compute drought, the compute-rich country is king. In an AI race, the compute-rich country is king. China would be on the back foot and need to use military force to get back in the game.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
it would be even weirder if renters contributed to GDP but homeowners didn't
It's weird to just make up imaginary services. There's no 'imputed rent' for those who own cars rather than renting them. The fact that a government decided to restrict the production of houses while encouraging mass immigration and some baby boomer's property has appreciated 10x and said boomer still lives in that house is not productive economic activity like the production of food, oil or electricity. If banks encourage property bubbles and raise house prices, that's not productive activity.
We talk about GDP because it's supposed to be measuring productive economic activity.
Best you can say is that if the engine weren't made here it would need to be imported which would subtract from GDP.
So the engine is still included in GDP, as a double negative. I'll say it again, building engines is included in GDP.
Singapore is highly prosperous. How many jet engines do they produce?
Singapore produces lots of useful goods. Key exports include refined petroleum, integrated circuits, computers, electronics and telecommunications equipment, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. They also have a large financial sector. It's not necessarily bad to have a large financial sector but it doesn't contribute so much to wealth as industrial production.
Stuff trading firm employees buy with their salaries counts as GDP, but they mostly don't spend their money on the financial sector.
Trading firms make profits via high speed trading. Those profits then move out into the rest of the economy via wages, dividends, investment. Therefore high speed trading is effectively part of GDP, despite not being very productive.
It's useful for measuring goods and services produced in an area and the material standard of living. It's not useful for comparing who makes more jet engines - there are simpler approaches for that.
GDP doesn't just measure goods and services produced in an area, it measures imaginary fabrications as well, without regard for the desirability and quality of the activity in question. It is ironically similar to how Soviet central planners would set targets for weight only to get unusably heavy chandeliers, GDP privileges quantity over quality and often departs from reality. Building jet engines is just an example of a high quality activity. Of course in economics all statistics are flawed in some respect. GDP is just particularly flawed.
I'm reading that financial services contribute about 8% to US GDP which is awfully high. 'Imputed rent' of homeowners living in their own homes is 8% in the US, 12% in the UK, which is in part derived from house prices being propped up by various measures. Imputed rent is not a real thing, it's imaginary. Enjoying a house that's built is the whole point of a house, that's why people buy them.
Guys, GDP is the value of final goods and services produced in an area. In other words, it's (consumer spending) + (investment) + (government spending) + exports - imports.
Boeing buys a GE engine? Does not count towards GDP.
Building engines is measured as part of GDP. It's going to be investment for somebody who finally buys the plane or perhaps an export, this is one of the fields where US manufacturing still leads the world. More importantly, building engines is clearly related to prosperity, technology, productivity and national power, which is what GDP is really supposed to be telling us about.
High frequency trading makes money, their workers certainly earn wages. I would be highly surprised that they weren't counted as part of GDP. But it's not nearly so clear that their work is productive or desirable, considering the level of high-quality brainpower that these firms soak up. Britain started counting production of illegal drugs as part of GDP at one point, that's not productive economic activity.
Anyway, one of my points is that GDP is not that helpful as a measurement, so if production of engines wasn't included, then it would only strengthen my argument. But since it is, why bring it up? Where exactly engines belong on some accounting category doesn't seem very useful.
Surprised to see how dopey people still are, how can someone be a CTO and not know the difference between the models under the hood of Copilot? Would've thought a CTO would know better.
Also, I think Opus 4.5 is significantly better than Sonnet 3.7, even Sonnet 4.5 not merely on benchmarks but in realworld use. Opus can do more things at once and is more reliable, less going round and round in bugfixing, less 'fix one thing, break another.' Though it still does some inexplicable things sometimes. They're spiky, to an extent, Sonnet 3.6 and 3.7 were good enough for standard webdev, database and such, new Opus can do more complex and diverse things.
Saw this just now on twitter:
I fired up Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and got it to build a predator-prey species simulation with an inbuilt procedural world generator and nice features like A* search for pathfinding - and it one-shot it, producing in about 5 minutes something which I know took me several weeks to build a decade ago when I was teaching myself some basic programming, and which I think would take most seasoned hobbyists several hours. And it did it in minutes.
With the simulation built, I stared at the graphs outputting the species numbers and I played with some dials to alter the dynamics and watched this little pocket world unfold. I started extending it according to questions I had: What if I did a day/night cycle so I could model out nocturnal creatures and their interplay with others? And could I create an external database for storing and viewing the details of all past simulations? And could I add some 3D spatial coordinates to the landscape and the agents so I could 3D print sculptures if I wanted? And to all these questions I set Claude to work and, mostly, it succeeded in one shot at all of them. And I kept playing with it.
The older Sonnets could do that but not as a one-shot, not relatively easily. You'd be painfully messing around with bugs and errors for a lot longer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Bubble or no, the statisticians say investment isn't the cause of these figures. Investment is down 0.02% while everything else is up.
Meanwhile in the realm of AI videos: https://x.com/ShitpostRock/status/2007643143257096461
Or you can just go on /gif/ and there's usually an AI thread and maybe a Grok Imagine thread too. Gooners find a way.
The ongoing adventures of George Droyd did a lot of mental damage to Google I suspect, even though it has nothing to do with Google.
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