quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Sure. There are different standards for criminal liability and for being a good fit for a professional role.
If a kindergarten teacher got acquitted of being involved in the murder of half her class because of a lack of evidence, we would not shrug and say "well, it seems she did nothing wrong, we will just let her continue to do her job, let's just transfer more kids to her class".
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Well, between 1955 and 1965, the airspeed records increased by about 500m/s. If the MIC had secretly been keeping that pace for another 60 years, the current record for an air-breathing, non-rocket-assisted plane would be Mach 13 or so. Most if the records in that era were linked to interceptors, e.g. actual combat aircraft.
While the airspeed of the current generation of fighter jets is a bit uncertain, the gist seems to be that they are in the range of Mach 1.6-2.
The theory that all current US combat planes can secretly achieve Mach 8 and the US is successful in gaslighting the world about a factor of four in capabilities seems only slightly more plausible than the US having FTL capabilities due to reverse engineered extraterrestrial tech.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
Maybe there are non-additive effects in Neumann's intelligence so difficult for natural selection to bring this level of intelligence to whole species even if it sometimes produces it accidentally.
I doubt it, personally. Consider the Ashkenazim intelligence hypothesis. Within just a few thousand years and mild selection pressure (bright kids tended to become clergy, and rabbis generally had a higher parental investment in their kids than Christian priests), they got an ethnic bonus to average IQ over the gentile population which is probably in the range of 5-15 points, at the cost of higher disease prevalence. If these extra ten IQ points would have been generally useful in the African savanna or in the iron age, it seems likely that life would have found a way to grant them to all of us.
I think one thing working against human evolution just increasing human intelligence is the risk of alignment failure. An IQ 100 man or woman might have been more likely to procreate than one with an IQ of 120.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I am also not convinced that he was in fact committing treason against the US in the way the Rosenbergs were.
I mean, if he was caught making a backup of the nvidia R&D servers, or installing known spies in technical positions, that would be arguably almost as bad (but even then, GPUs are more dual-use than nukes).
Of course, if your CEO has direct access to the layouts of your chips, your security would also suck.
If fucking spies of hostile powers was treason, than half of the Bond movies would end with his execution. It seems likely that the NSA was tapping into his pillow talk, and if he had actually disclosed any secrets he would already be in a federal cell.
Of course, there is plenty of space between "not treason" and "good judgement". Having sex with enemy agents on your own initiative would likely get 007 fired or demoted to office duty in the real world. Likewise, as an officer in a US company dealing with export-restricted goods there are billions of hot people you can easily fuck with little effort on your part. Nobody would care if he was getting pegged by hookers inside the cadaver of a whale, as long as neither the whale or the hookers were linked to China.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Agreed. We are not using formally verified code at the moment because formally verified code is very expensive in dev time to write. It will remain much more expensive than non-verified code, but with LLMs the cost of dev time trends towards zero.
Obviously one hard task is defining the security constraints: if the specs are wrong, it does not help that your code follows the specs.
Luckily, I think the exploits mostly plaguing us at the moment (RCE, memory disclosure, escalation, etc) can likely be formally specified without too much trouble. "There is no way that the instruction pointer will ever point to something which the attacker sent" leaves some loopholes (perhaps the attacker might still be able to construct shellcode on the victim through other means than transmitting it as a payload), but would still rule out an entire once common class of exploits.
An IT-sec future where our main worry is what the best attack against Rijndael might actually be seems good enough for my taste.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
At this point, it seems the only thing that would stop superintelligence from forming is an unknown unknown, as in there is some fundamental constraint or that hasn't been identified, or an emergent phenomenon that only reveals itself in the future.
We do not know what resources are required to scale intelligence further up. This is a known unknown.
As an illustration, look at airplane speed records over time. From 1900 to 1945, they rose linearly to the speed of sound. Then between 1955 and 1965, they exploded to 925 m/s. A decade later, the SR-71 offered a modest improvement to almost a kilometer a second. That was 50 years ago, and no new records have appeared since. (Yes, I am skipping rocket planes here, their fuel economy makes supersonic jets look efficient, which is why they remain a curiosity. As are scramjets.)
Nor is this because humanity got bored with airplanes. We still invest untold billions in the R&D of combat aircraft, yet we have run into fundamental limitations where going for a higher speed is just nor worth it.
I want to make two points with this analogy.
First, it is very possible to hit a technical limitation which causes your linear extrapolation to plateau.
Second, for solving problems in the real world (like building faster airplanes), sometimes raw intelligence is not all that useful once you have enough of it. The 1960s airframes were calculated on tube computers, and could arguably have been calculated with slide rules (with longer R&D times and higher safety margins). Since the 60s, we had five decades of Moore's law boosting the effective intelligence of aerospace engineers. This helped a lot with some aspects like fuel economy, but little with maximum airspeed. Obviously it is impossible to say "this problem can't be solved by throwing more intelligence at it" without trying, and it is always possible that the critical breakthrough is just behind the next +5IQ point increase. For airspeed, I am not optimistic that GPT 20 will be able to design a hydrogen fueled, air breathing, useful plane which has a specific impulse of 50km/s at Mach 10 (which is not ruled out by chemistry).
If we ever want to get off this rock, a space elevator would be really useful. On paper, sp2 carbon barely suffices if it has no defects. It seems entirely plausible that the only gain from going from Claude 5.5 to Claude 20.2 will be in the confidence with which the latter will reject the practicality of this.
Likewise, intelligence helped a lot in the human ancestral environment, but only so much. If von Neumann would have had a 5% higher inclusive fitness than your average IQ 100 person (e.g. by being able to better outsmart sabre tooth tigers or whatever), humans would have his IQ as a baseline, it is not like his brain took twice the resources to run.
Already today, the AI companies are arguably struggling to find use cases where the intelligence of their marginal models really help. This might in part be due to them having peculiar strengths (like software and math) which are not all that relevant to most human endeavors. While I use Claude a lot, I am not paying for Fable. I tried it a bit when they included a free demo, and simply do not see the improvements over Opus being very useful to me.
If we are lucky, RSI will not yield sufficient algorithmic gains to pay for itself and the industry will converge on models which merely replace PhDs rather than models which bring forth superintelligence.
Of course, this is only conjecture, there is a finite probability that right now some research LLM is making algorithmic progress which will enable me to train Fable-class models on my gaming PC in a week or so, in which case we likely will have a singularity (in the sense of "I can't even speculate what might happen afterwards") next year.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
And if you assume that it will be the undisputed leader but only in the relatively small market of coding assistance, it's wildly overvalued, even at $1T.
This seems to be disputable? Enterprise software development revenue in 2020 was around 241G$. AI makes software development more cost-effective, but this does not need to lead to less total spending, it might mean more spending as more projects become cost-effective. If Anthropic can corner the AI software assistant market long-term (which seems unlikely, but it's your hypothetical), then it might well have a revenue upwards of 100G$/year. Again, in 2020 MS had a revenue of 143G$ and a market cap around 1.5T$.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think it boils down to them putting a lot of investment in a rather small package, with little in the way of benefits for the surrounding town.
If someone wants to build a botteling plant for 10M$, the potential downsides for the municipality are limited. At the worst, they can just buy it for that price (on credit) and bulldoze it. If someone wants a 1G$ data center, then that option simply does not exist. They will insist that the data center will remain in operation come hell or high water. If the data center runs smoothly, the town will barely notice in terms of indirect economic effect, but if there is a problem, for example unemployed masses trying to burn it down or military adversaries bombing it, they will be in the thick of it.
In a perfect market, this would lead to an equilibrium where the data centers pay handsomely for the privilege of seizing control of town politics in all matters which affect their operation. The second problem is that nobody is trusting local politicians to make good Faustian bargains with large multinationals. They are easily bribed or hookwinked even by lesser entities. And the companies do not actually need to fool or buy the median mayor, but merely the 95% percentile stupidity or corruption mayor.
So if you hear that your town is making a deal to build a data center, you might ask yourself if you are willing to bet the future of your town on the company having randomly offered a fair deal to your mayor because they want to establish themselves as a trustworthy partner in coming decades rather than them having offered every town the same seemingly beneficial deal and your mayor was one of the few who thought it would be a good idea. I know which side I would err towards.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
This sounds terribly inefficient. I mean, at the moment, people could be assembling assault rifles in their garage. Yet 99% of the rifles are assembled in factories instead.
There are some steps in the production chain from raw resources to explosive drones which are hard to do in your garage, which is why drones are more recent than garages. Some of them have few other civilian uses. If people build their own drones for warfare, governments will just throw the model airplane people under the bus and ban the sale of certain types of electric motors (which would be completely reasonable).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So the big story is Jensen Huang had an affair with now a second woman
Unless she was Mossad or FSB, I doubt that anyone will care much. Nvidia is not selling spousal fidelity.
The first affair story was juicy merely because the woman allegedly working for the Chinese, so there is the possibility that he leaked some intel (but likely more boring high-level business stuff than chip designs) or let his affair influence his decisions.
obviously consent is an issue here,
Yes, obviously. Nobody cares if you are fucking another tinder/grindr date every night. If you care about your spouse not having sex with others, contract law seems sufficient to set incentives. If you are a sex pest, that is quite something different.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think it mostly boils down to them having no concept of individual rights or freedom. The fascist conception of society is the bee hive (or arguably, rather the wasp nest, given their taste for interstate conflict). Everything the individual bee does has a bearing on the hive, and is thus of interest of her state. Perhaps the state is sometimes pragmatic and leaves it up to her which kind of nectar she prefers to collect, the third Reich probably allowed different flavors of ice cream. But it is not out of some respect for the individual. If some sex position resulted in 30% less conceptions, the fascists would feel that it is right and proper to ban it.
More enlightened societies generally have a concept where individuals exist in different spheres. Not paying your taxes or robbing gas stations is a matter of the public sphere. Ghosting your friends is a matter of the social sphere. Masturbating in bed is a matter of your private sphere. Rather than the state being the all-encompassing terminal goal of society, it is more of a compatibility layer. As long as you implement the protocol of not going around raping people, the state has no interest in the specifics of your implementation, if you jerk off three times a day in private, or pay for sex, or have a loving spouse, or are a PUA, or simply do not have a sex drive which pushes you towards rape.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I do not think that business (now that Ballmer no longer runs Microsoft) is generally that antagonistic.
The constellation that two companies are competing in one area while relying on each other in other areas is common enough. Everyone is trying to commodize their complement. Dell would prefer a world in which operating systems don't matter, but you are running a Dell. Microsoft would prefer a world where PC hardware does not matter, but you are running Windows. But this does not mean that they will not cut a deal to sell Dell computers with Windows bundled.
All business relationships are a bit uneasy, both partners would prefer it to cut out the other one. Many still work fine because as a matter of fact, the universe does not consist of two companies locked in total war against each other.
Not working with a competitor might also yield anti-trust investigations, of course. In a healthy marketplace, if company A refuses to do business with company B, then B will simply do business with A's competitors C, D and E, and thus is not a very effective strategy. By contrast, if company A holds a quasi monopoly, it might leverage that to rid itself of competitors in another area. Like Microsoft trying to win the browser wars by leveraging their OS dominance.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think this is an oversimplification. I imagine that if Anthropic takes over the light cone, ASI Claude might allocate 1% of its solid angle to shareholders (for them to use in not-abhorrent purposes). They might likewise allocate another percent evenly to all of humanity alive at singularity. So if you invested a hundred dollars in them you might end up with twice the real estate. This seems like a decent enough return of investment.
Of course, it also depends on ASI Claude judging that investing in Anthropic was an ethical thing to do which should be encouraged through acausal trades. If instead it finds that Anthropic was reckless in building it then it might instead reduce the allocations for anyone involved in its creation. Personally I will not be investing in them because it is unclear to me if they are net positive to my ethics.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think there are different magnitudes of failure. Can the CEO of Lockheed-Martin deliberately make bad business decisions and run a company in the ground? Sure. Can he (or she?) just decide to teach China how to build the F35? Hell no.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Ultimately, the judge disagreed that PPT’s suicide was inevitable in the circumstances. Ironically, he did so on the grounds that the man was so miserable, he probably couldn’t see straight: "His prediction of his own future conduct is made in the context of depressive illness, hopelessness and catastrophic thinking … it is not a reliable basis for concluding that no future treatment or intervention could alter that risk."
I think the decision to reject his injunction is great, but it would be better to straightforward tell him "we don't give a fuck". It is what I would recommend in private life, and certainly how a society should run. If the allegations are otherwise a-ok for publication, it would be utterly insane to constrain the freedom of press to spare someone's mental health. And why stop there? "My client should be excluded from criminal prosecution because he might kill himself in prison." "We have to overturn the result of the election, the incumbent would kill himself if he was kicked out of office."
I strongly support the right of people to kill themselves (though society is not under obligation to make it easy to off yourself on impulse), but the moment you are weaponizing threats of suicide, I am fine with locking them up in a psych ward until they renounce their threat.
Instead, here the court weasled out of the question by finding a pretense on which to ignore his testimony. The natural thing for the celebrity would be to get some star psychologist certify that even with his depression distorting perception, he is a serious conditional suicide risk. Then the judge would have to say "despite your experience which I lack, you are wrong in assessing the mental state of your client".
quiet_NaN
4d ago
In George Orwell's 1984, a key theme is sexuality in opposition to fascism. In real life, every fascist society is puritan regarding sex (exceptions?), because it's in the definition: fascism is nosiness, interfering with the citizen's private lives, even the most intimate. Fascists at best don't care about others' intimacy, at worst they have a control fetish. Why should anyone care about what degenerates do, consensually, apart from them?
I do not think that fascists are by necessity prudes. I think the Nazis had certainly some forms of sex they were strongly opposed to (e.g. 'aryan' women having sex with non-'aryan' men, gay sex), but mostly they were pragmatic. If the sex was in the service of the Reich, they were certainly willing to embrace it, even if ran counter to traditional morality. I presume that their soldiers frequented brothels, and the Lebensborn program cared little for the marriage status of the mothers. The role of the women in the Reich was that of baby maker more than wife or virgin.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I don't think productions involving toasters are a social good
Counterpoint: not all, or not even most subcultures enabled by the internet normalize toaster-fucking or glorify anorexia.
In ages past, the choices for most were basically to adapt your behavior to the mainstream of whatever puritanical cult ran your community (which worked great if your kinks were missionary sex and churchgoing, but really capped your life satisfaction otherwise), or you tried to risk becoming an outcast by trying to find a subgroup with your interests. Even if your specific interests were just obscure rather than forbidden, good luck finding anyone who shares your niche interest.
Sure, before the internet some were living in big cities which covered a lot of niche interests, and most Westerners had access to libraries and the postal service. But for the ability to form arbitrary communities with billions of other people came with the internet.
Sometimes, these communities are terrible for their members or society, but often they are very helpful as well. Judgement differs by individual. In free societies, there is no community tsar who decides if a bunch of people are allowed to associate over their niche interest. Instead, they are allowed by default, though specific interests might still be restricted by law.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
A nation is a group of people who feel themselves bound by kinship.
That seems an odd definition, arguably broad enough to apply to the global population of furries.
Historically, I think the chronological order is roughly
- ethnic groups (e.g. hunter/gatherers during the ice age)
- polities (e.g. Celtic tribes)
- states (e.g. Prussia)
- nations (e.g. Weimar Germany)
Since the diaspora, Judaism was always part of a layered identity. The same person can be US citizen, a New Yorker, a Democrat, a Jew, a furry, an EA activist, from a Russian immigrant family, and so forth. If he stays in NY (like many Jews do) rather than e.g. joining some illegal settlement in the West Bank, then I would argue that this might be indicative of him not seeing his identity as a member of the "nation of Judaism" (as opposed to the religion or the ethnic group) as all that important. I bet if I were to ask him what his nationality was, I would get a reply like "American" rather than "Judaism".
quiet_NaN
6d ago
To be fair, the technology market and Nvidia and other hardware manufacturers in particular are in the middle of the AI boom (or bubble). Its valuation depends a lot on your expected trajectory. Will they keep their revenue for the next 50 years? Will they be the ones who will build the chips which will replace humans at every task? What solid angle of the light cone will their shareholders get for enabling the ascent of God-Emperor Altman?
For some companies, the valuation contains little epistemic uncertainty. Conditional on there still being a NYSE in a year, Coca Cola will still be traded there, and if it either increased its market cap by 10x or became worthless, that would be very surprising.
The companies in the AI boom are the opposite. At present, none of them have a business model half as sustainable as selling soft drinks to people (or GPUs to gamers, for that matter). People buying (or shorting) their stock are speculators, they believe that they can beat the market. For industries without ethical implication, I would say: if they succeed, good for them, if they fail, zero sympathy.
However, I do not consider AI to be an ethically neutral industry. If you believe in p(doom)>0, you need a damn good reason to consider the potential bankrolling of human extinction to be an ethically neutral investment. Such an argument can be made, for example with Antropic's somewhat galaxy-brained take "if we do not build ASI someone who cares less about alignment will build it instead". I admit I am on the fence if they are net positive or not, but still consider even the 20 Euros I fork over to them for Claude per month to be a moral hazard. I am sure that similar arguments could be made for other dubious investments. "Yes, we make our profit from selling small arms to paramilitary groups in a conflict region, but have you considered that the groups we sell to are significantly less likely to employ child soldiers or anti-personnel mines? The best way to stop the practice of child soldiers is to pay mercenaries to kill them make sure that groups which do not employ them win the conflict, so we are getting rich while making the world a better place."
Anyhow, the point I was going to make was that an 8% dip of Nvidia is basically Tuesday. There are companies which are indicative of a large share of the economy. If GM crashes after an election, that would be a bit concerning because their market cap per employee is about 500k$, if they go tits up, that will be a lot of people out of a job. By contrast, the market cap per employee of Nvidia is about 100M$. If they have their lunch eaten by some other US chip manufacturer then nothing of value will be lost, their 42k employees are mostly highly paid engineers who will presumably be able to land on their feet.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Agreed. I mean, we saw how he got when the war with Iran did no go as he had envisioned. My baseline expectation is that he will probably not directly threaten blue states with nuclear annihilation, but he will still say plenty of things which will disqualify his movement in the eyes of the voters.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
On the third, the Democrats won big time thanks to Trump, but they were not the only ones whom Trump helped to victory. More so than even with the Dems, the ones I am talking about are a group I have serious reservations about but whom I nevertheless root for in their conflict against Trump.
I am talking about Iran, of course.
Now, for all my faults, I am not a friend of the Iranian regime. They have an atrocious human rights record, and if the Iranian people can kick them out, I will be very happy for them. (They also sponsor murderous terrorist groups abroad, but let him whose government has never sponsored murderous terrorists cast the first stone.)
But I am a big fan of the international rule based order. This means that I want to see war of aggression fail, preferably fail spectacularly. This is why I am also rooting for Ukraine, for example. With Trump's and Bibi's Iranian adventure, there is no debate whose side is the aggressor. So obviously I would prefer for the US to get an expensive, humiliating defeat to reinforce the idea that wars of aggression do not pay off.
The goals of the Iranian regime are pretty aligned to mine in this. They are fighting a defensive war, they want to maintain as much of the status quo (their infrastructure being intact and their soldiers alive) as they can. But they arguably also want to establish a precedent that attacking them is a bad move.
However, their military capabilities are not up for bombing their enemy leadership, military or schools to try for a regime change (not that this worked for Trump either). So they did what was rational for them and suspended the freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz (thereby likewise violating international law). The Commander in Chief of the US military might be impervious to missiles, but he is very much vulnerable to the whims of his electorate, who are in turn vulnerable to economic pressure.
One of their war goals was "establish that attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake". I will admit that we are not quite there yet. But their labors have borne fruits, and now we have a regime change in Texas. Saddam Hussein would have given a hand for that.
Another thing Iran has accomplished is driving a wedge between the US and Israel. For most of my life, most Westerners did not have very strong feelings about Israel. Then Hamas (through their unmatched barbarism) incited them into leveling Gaza, killing 70k Palestinians (mostly likely non-combatants) in the process. We have all seen the before-and-after aerial photos, and some of us (me included) started to find that we actually gave a fuck. Then Netanyahu tricked the gullible Trump (who had already proven his usefulness by bombing IRGC officers in his first term) into spending a few dozen billions on bombing Iran, a move which helps Israel a lot more than it helps Americans.
Now, it is not like AIPAC does not have a majority in Congress anymore or anything, but the mere threat of people voting against their candidates is already constraining what they can do. Hence the decision of Trump and Netanyahu to get rid of the military aid (or at least be a bit more discreet about it). In the very least, it seems safe to say that no future US president will be roped into military action by Israel without carefully considering 'but what if this backfires domestically?'
Obviously Iran has not won yet, but I think the midterms were the most significant development in the conflict. It is a clear sign that the US is not willing to bear the expenses of the war indefinitely. Nor have any other countries been very enthusiastic about defending the freedom of navigation with their navies.
Now, ideally, the US would just pay reparations to Iran and Iran would allow innocent passage again, but realistically that is not going to happen. Still, I do think the US is going to tire of escorting tankers before Iran tires of attacking them, so in the long term we will either allow them to charge tolls or cut some other deal with them.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
The Oath Clause (Article VI, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution) states: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; ..."
Attorney Generals in all 50 states whether corrupt or not, must be made to enforce this law. This law removes the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, El Sayed and any others of their ilk from office and should have prevented all DSA candidates from even running.
Who was the guy who incited a mob again to storm the capitol to interrupt the certification of an election conducted according to that very constitution? Was it Sayed or Sanders again?
Also, if you want to have a constitution which protects you against socialism, my advise is that you campaign for an amendment. The Takings clause, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." does not say that the government is not allowed to socialize your steel mill. Or you simply amass a larger majority and get rid of the relevant part of 5A, which is also perfectly legal.
It is totally legal to run on a platform to socialize all the means of production. If you try to pass the laws, it would be likely that the courts have a different idea on what "just compensation" entails than what you had earmarked for the buyout. But even that would not make you a traitor to the constitution. It happens quite frequently that the SCOTUS tells an administration "that thing you were trying to do does not work like that due to constitutional reasons". For the most part, that in itself is the fix, you do not generally get branded a traitor for trying to do something which is ruled unconstitutional.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
That is classist as fuck. I have a PhD and I regularly rely on browser spell checkers to get words such as sycophant spelled right. (I am also not a native speaker, nor an American, but that is besides the point.) I would probably have gotten hypotenuse wrong (it has a th in German and with other words like cathode the spelling stays the same while the pronounciation diverges).
I might as well say "If you do not know what Black Lotus, Beholder, the Red Wedding or Force Choke refer to you should not be voting" to define my arbitrary bubble, or refer to fancy french dinner terms instead.
Spelling correctly is even worse an ability, it is as obsolete as the ability to divide large integers with a pen. Sure, a lack of ability to spell pedestrian or calculate 216/8 might be indicative of some serious gaps in one's education, but it is not per se damning.
The thing I would prefer in voters is if they had good world models. This is a bit harder to quantify that just your class boundary, though. There is also the question if having bad world models in some domains (e.g. believing in astrology) is actually correlated with having bad world models relevant to politics (unless you select your candidates directly be their zodiac sign, in which case I would definitely prefer you refrained from voting).
quiet_NaN
10d ago
The Trump admin and the GOP may have managed to turn a once in a couple generation opportunity to fix major structural problems in the United States into the worst political loss since at least the 1974 election a month after Nixon's resignation over the Watergate Coup, but have you considered the worst scumbags around, Republican political consultants like Susie Wiles, Chris Lacivita, and James Blair, got generational wealth sucking MAGA dry?
I think the title for "worst scumbag Republican who caused the midterm losses" is hotly contested. Too bad there is not a Nobel for that.
Trump won two years ago not because he was a particularly strong candidate -- he was anything but -- but because the Dems messed up completely. While I do not deny that he is (was?) very popular with his base, he is very much not some golden boy. Sure, he won a majority of electoral college votes against Clinton, likely his greatest political achievement for the GOP. Then he lost against sleepy Joe, who is basically "what if Obama was white, a few decades older and less charismatic?" as the incumbent because he had spent his presidency on Twitter. His personally greatest political success was doubtlessly getting nominated by the GOP for a third time due to his cult. Winning the election was then mostly a matter of being more lucid than Biden, any Republican candidate of the last two decades could probably have pulled that off.
Trump is in politics to bolster his ego and his net worth, the worst swamp dweller DC has seen in decades. The ego thing sometimes works to the advantage of his base because he is aware that doing things popular with his base (like rounding up and deporting suspected illegals) will make him popular, and he likes to be popular. However, it is not very reliable in that regard, because often it comes with an inflated sense of his own capabilities. He will embark on plenty of foolish quests like his tariffs or his little war with Iran because he genuinely believes that his is much more capable than any president who came before him, and will not update when things will blow up in his face, because his ego can not bear admitting he was wrong.
As the grifter-in-chief, he obviously attracts other grifters. Can't expect a Boomer to build his shitcoin on his own, after all. And I don't think his ego can stand around being anyone who is not a terminal sycophant. "Mr president, I think your cognitive abilities are quite good considering your age and lack of educational attainment" is not the kind of feedback he would take well. It is obvious from his tweets that he has nobody who has the influence to tell him "don't write this, it makes you look delusional (e.g. thinking he might win a Nobel) or like a comic book villain (e.g. threatening to wipe out the Persian civilization)".
Complaining about the Wormtongue types who compete in ass-kissery to be able to manipulate him to their own advantage is like complaining that the stripper you fell in love with is only interested in your money. It is sad but not entirely unexpected.
I am not an Obama fanboy, I merely consider him an ok president. But my mental model of his administration is that there was a lot more room for honest disagreement with him. This allowed him to retain (perhaps even mildly autistic) policy wonks who are actually good at their job rather than a gaggle of sociopaths and fellow narcissists.
Yes, this part I completely agree with. At the moment, we have not reached a market-place equilibrium. Even if Claude 5.5 Opus was the most capable model which anyone would build forever (which it is not), I think it might be sufficient to render most of the white collar workforce obsolete once we figure out how to best prompt it.
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