MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2m ago
I thought the late unlamented Iranian air defences were more Russian than Chinese.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3m ago
"Close to, but not in, the top 1%" is precisely what upper middle class means.
Also, wealth tends to accumulate over time. So "upper middle class wealth" for a 76-year-old like Warren is a higher dollar amount than it would be for us.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Nukes effectively deter a US invasion, which is a real risk if the neocons return to power, and Iran can see that the US would beat them in a conventional war if the US was willing to accept the cost of victory (i.e. a choice between a prolonged occupation and likely Iraq-style quagmire or a Houthi-on-Hormuz failed state).
The product of two small probabilities (the neocons returning to power, and them being dumb enough to launch a real regime change was against Iran) is even smaller, but I think it is high enough to be worth worrying about, and so did MAGA in 2024 given that "vote Trump so you don't have to fight in neocon Kamala's Iran war" was a winning message with military-age men, so it wouldn't surprise me if the mullahs do.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
The founding-era Senate mostly met in secret, with the need to ratify treaties being one of the reasons given.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
The Ukrainian drone industry is producing roughly the same amount of usable military power as the c. 80 billion dollars a year Russian defence budget. That is worth a trillion dollars or so on standard DCF assumptions.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
HELOCs are a bullet I am willing to swallow. Tax-free consumption out of unrealised capital gains on primary residences is the same mischief as tax-free consumption out of unrealised capital gains on founders' stock, and causes the same social problems in a more distributed way. Protect the middle class with a $100,000 lifetime exemption.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
Which is upper-middle-class wealth in a country as rich as America. I don't think there is anything surprising about, or wrong with a successful politician being upper-middle-class.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
Given the known political views of the average Silicon Valley techie, it seems completely plausible that a majority of the senior management and top technical talent at Anthropic think "The Trump admin uses AGI to win the future for MAGA chuddery" is one of the bad outcomes we want to avoid, and possibly even worse than "The Red Chinese use AGI to win the future for whatever it is they believe in nowadays". (FWIW, I personally would rather live in the Eternal Chinese Empire of the Hundred Acre Wood than in an American hegemony where either side of the culture war had won a total victory).
If that is an accurate reflection of the political views of the key people at Anthropic, then their behaviour would require no additional explanation.
There are, roughly speaking, three routes to AI doom:
- Yudkowskian paperclipping. AI eats us all, human value is extinguished
- AGI falls into the hands of lawful evil actors like the Red Chinese or the wrong side of the US culture war, and establishes an evil singleton which extinguishes most human value
- AGI is so much more effective in the hands of chaotic evil actors than in the hands of the people defending against them that disgruntled basement-dwellers are able to maliciously destroy most human value out of boredom or misanthropy
Going faster under the supervision of a misaligned US government makes paperclipping and lawful evil dystopia more likely, so the main reason for a safety-conscious AI firm to move fast (to get out ahead of less-safety-conscious firms) is lost if the price of permission to go fast is accepting Trump admin supervision.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Yeah - there was a famous Facebook post by Yudkowsky where he said that he thought 20% of the biological males in his social circle were actually trans, although not all of them had realised yet. Yud isn't an idiot, so I assume that there is indeed a certain level of spergery where 20% of the biological males would troon out with sufficient encouragement.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not support providing this encouragement. At the time, Yudkowsky appeared to.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Then why is only Anthropic targeted and why only foreign nationals?
Even a midwit can tell that the restriction on foreign nationals was a hard ban in practice. I assume that Trump fully intended to ban the models and making it nominally about foreign nationals was a misdirection to fool Trump's own sub-midwit supporters.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
A fat, orange, brain damaged clown with leukemia just tore through the military tech they've sold multiple other countries like wet tissue paper.
Right now, the most valuable piece of Chinese military tech is the supply chain for the Russian/Iranian combat drones which fucked up America's shit. The percentage of Chinese (as opposed to Russian) content in the bits of the Iranian military that succeeded seems to me to be higher than in the parts that failed (notably the air defences). Sanctions mean that Iran have been assembling most of their own weapons out of easy-to-smuggle components, so this isn't a simple test of Chinese or Russian tech against the American equivalent.
If the future of warfare is putting weapons on Temu drones, the Chinese are in a very good place. And the Iran war is evidence in favour of the this thesis.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
fallen short of the glory of wokeness
I don't think this is an argument about wokeness. This is mostly an argument about strongman vs institutional leadership. You can be a anti-immigration conservative without being a wannabee corrupt dictator - see for example Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Riikka Purra in Finland, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or 45% of Swiss voters. All these people get called fascists, accurately in the case of Meloni (her party is the institutional successor of Mussolini's Fascist Party), but I haven't heard any of them called mafia dons.
If AI was being developed in Meloni's Italy, I don't know whether Anthropic would attract the banhammer, but I suspect the decision would be based on the actual national security threat and not the kowtowing skills of the CEO or the hair colour of the spokeschick, and I know that whether or not this was the case Meloni would be making a real effort to make it look like it was. Seconding @BurdensomeCount, the same will continue to apply in London whether we have Burnham or Farage as PM.
Fairly obviously, you can also be a wannabee corrupt dictator (or even a successful corrupt dictator, like communists) without being a right-populist. But for whatever reason this hasn't happened in my lifetime in the main Western democracies on a larger scale than a big-city political machine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think people who make non-specific complaints about the opposite sex into memes are (mostly unintentionally):
- Encouraging people in so-so marriages to see the negatives in their current situation
- Warning off unmarried people against marriage
and therefore making the world a worse place for the sake of a cheap joke that isn't even funny. I wish they would stop.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes, but the anonymous sources with access to the Iranian side and the anonymous sources with access to the US side disagree on what the deal says.
This is exactly what I would expect to see if the deal was going to fall apart at the last moment, or if what we actually have is an incredibly thin deal - probably a 60-day ceasefire and opening of the Straits of Hormuz with essentially everything else TBD.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
These comments are especially rich given that, following the Euro 2020(/1) Final in which England lost to Italy on penalties because every black English player who attempted a penalty kick missed while every white player who attempted a penalty kick scored,
To anyone familiar with the history of the England team, criticising a team which reached a major tournament final for going out on penalties is either performative fan grousing or idiocy. Southgate's team did well to make a World Cup semi-final and a Euro final. Going out on penalties after a great run is what the best English teams are supposed to do. (Admittedly against Germany or Portugal and not Italy). The fans are just doing their job by grousing about the men who missed spot-kicks. Southgate especially knows this - he has a special place in this story after his Euro 1996 miss.
Part of the idiocy of English fandom is that we consistently think we can win the World Cup, and then feel hard-done-by when we don't. This time England do have a chance based on rankings, betting odds etc. and anything less than a semi-final slot will be a legitimate disappointment, but ex ante at the time Southgate was appointed anyone who suggested that a World Cup semi-final and two European finals would be a bad haul would have been laughed at. The criticism of Southgate for playing dull, negative football is fair, although I think England are in the place of old-school Italy (we aren't good enough to expect wins and beauty, and the fans prefer wins) than old-school Brazil (for whom winning the World Cup while playing ugly football would be a disappointing result). So is the criticism for turning Euro 2024 into a slog given our piss-easy draw. (The only difficult match was the semi against the Dutch).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Senior estate agents are "hired gun negotiators". (The junior agents who arrange viewings and such like are their minions/apprentices).
M&A bankers are arguably doing the same work with businesses instead of real estate. Again, you are a minion/apprentice until you make MD level when you become a hired gun negotiator.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I remember a video of London-based NY Giants fans singing "You can shove your fucking cheese up your arse" (to the tune of "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes") before the London Giants-Packers game in 2022 that went viral because this was both more offensive and far more creative than the US norm. It is pretty mild by English football standards.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
rugby hooliganism
I would say rugby (at least Union - I don't know enough about League culture because the game isn't really played in southern England) hooliganism is the exception rather than the rule in the UK. I spent several years in Richmond in south-west London. Despite football (in the form of Ted Lasso) putting Richmond on the map, it is very much rugby territory - the "tailgate"-equivalent for England Rugby games happens in Richmond with fans arriving by tube, drinking for a couple of hours, and then taking the shuttle busses run by the (one professional and one semi-professional) local rugby clubs to Twickenham stadium. And being around 10,000 drunk rugby fans feels completely safe.
UK 'football factory' style clubs
I think "English" is correct here. Scotland has a tradition of football hooliganism, but it explicitly sectarian and associated with the Glasgow rivalry between (Irish Catholic) Celtic and (Scottish Protestant) Rangers, rather than the violence-for-violence's-sake of English hooliganism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
If they get out of the group stage, it will be for the first time in their history.
They probably will, which just shows that the 48-team format is diluting the standard of the competition.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
English fans traditionally riot after a loss rather than a win - the American hooligan practice of burning your own city after a win is particularly strange to us. But win or lose, I hope someone in the English ultras is talking to their Canadian counterparts about plans to party in DC like it's 1812.
For whatever reason, Scottish travelling football fans are happy drunks rather than mean drunks. If Scotland win the world cup, there will be a giant fan love-in which will provide convenient distraction while the corrupt US and FIFA officials who made it happen make arrangements with Satan to open the Donald Trump Infernal Ski and Snowboard Park.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
(Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades)
There is a fairly common pattern (Jobs-Wozniak may be the ur-example) of a pair of cofounders where one is the "founder type" and the other is top technical talent. My read of Valley culture is that given the chance they will (as mostly happened in the case of Apple) try to retcon the pair as solo founder and employee number one.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I think both sides of the culture war agree that the Valley did try to do this, but with Indians instead of Europeans. They disagree on whether or not it succeeded, and whether or not it would be a good thing if it did.
It's been a very long time since Andressen was checking in code. It is obvious from reading e.g. Paul Graham's essays that VCs and successful founders see themselves as a different kind of person to top technical talent (tl;dr - Altman said that James Bond was fundable but Q would not be) - and the things that Paul Graham is saying are conventional wisdom in the valley. My impression is that both founders/VCs and top technical talent see the gap between top technical talent and mid-tier technical talent as so large that the average FAANG Senior is closer to QA and HR than to themselves.
My take is that Andressen is one of the main people pushing the theory (which I think originated with Musk) that FAANG were roughly 2x overstaffed and that this was a bad thing because they were outbidding startups for talent. I remember him tweeting "Nature heals itself" in response to a post about tech layoffs and coming to the conclusion that he resented his (indirect via portfolio companies) employees.
I will admit to also disliking Andressen because a16z seems to be disproportionately likely to invest in ethically dubious startups like crypto scams, Adam Neumann's Flow and the AI "cheating" app Cluely.
That makes a lot of sense.
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