RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
But on the other hand, we can and do see the evidence of His work in our own lives and in our own hearts.
My ways are not your ways
You shouldn't have to use this line of argument, where you mysteriously can't provide any actual proof and defy the whole idea of proving your own case. Your God should never need clerics writing cope about how he mustn't be put to the test. What kind of deity shrinks from a test? In the Old Testament he was razing cities left and right.
It's wonderful how Christians think that sneering at these 'unworthy' wishes like wishing for steak is some incisive cutting response. Why not grant such wishes? Is your God not as powerful as industrial agriculture which puts so much meat on the table the poor struggle with obesity? Why not have the devout be capable of wishing for manna, isn't that something Christians are supposed to be capable of? Or were those relegated to metaphors since you can't actually accomplish such miracles, only intangible wishes and copes?
God's ways are doing nothing when his followers get massacred, repressed or blown up on their Feast Days. But that's totally fine, fantastic even because they'll get enormous rewards in the afterlife (but nobody can see this, only the dead know). Come on, this is cope from a deity who lacks the power to act physically in the world.
The sole power of your God is the organized religious devotion that has driven history for millennia. The Crusades, the Reconquista, The Thirty Years War... The discipline and will of soldiers can be tested, that's actually real. But he's just one force amongst many and a waning force at that.
The God I'm talking about actually created the universe, created the stars, mathematics, worldly thinking, hunger, cancer, death, cope, social constructs and everything else. If he didn't want us to think in a certain way, it would never happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8hr ago
Why couldn't God save his followers in Lisbon from getting obliterated by an earthquake on All Saint's Day, 1755? They lit their candles, gathered in churches. The earthquake knocked them down and the resulting firestorm, earthquake and tsunami razed the city.
What kind of omnipotent, all-loving God treats his followers this way? It goes against reason to conclude that God is benevolent and actively interferes. Ours is not the kind of world we would expect from such a deity. There are all kinds of disasters that happen for purely mechanical reasons. I conclude that God acts mechanically, the Blind Watchmaker set up the universe for whatever reason and doesn't take actively support humans generally or Christians specifically.
I think that's a much more fitting stance for a true deity, a true universe-creator. If God doesn't want something to happen, he could make it so that it couldn't, not merely punish or instruct or send messages but to render things physically impossible per the structure of reality. He could constrain choices or outcomes so that the acceptable range is whatever he wants or outright rewrite time and history to correct things. That's what a real deity does, that's boundless power. God is not going to be frustrated by humans sinning against eachother or have to set up elaborate and invisible mechanisms of reward or punishment that need human prophets to explain (without proof... why can't see heaven or hell with instruments). God could trivially create a system where it's impossible to sin while maintaining freedom of choice. I cannot choose to flap my arms and fly like a bird, it simply isn't possible. That's a constraint based on the strength of my muscles, gravity, air pressure, physics, the real forces of creation. If God didn't want adultery or any other transgression, he could make it just as impossible. There would be no need for God to ever provide moral instruction to anyone. The mechanics of the universe are what actually teaches moral lessons by directly affecting results. Sometimes the adulterer gets beaten to death, other times he spreads his genes and gets others to raise his kids.
Only humans need to spread religious teachings about morality or norms, they are a second-level construct. Only humans need to build churches to worship God, only humans need religious ceremonies and special religious holidays for communal reasons.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Yeah, they're very nice for small tasks. I built a little chrome extension for a friend, fixing an inadequacy in how Google presents data. Some translation of medieval french from pictures. Proofreading a long text. Or even running a bit of custom code on certain kinds of formatted documents, handling edge cases autonomously.
But large tasks too are getting increasingly fun to just fire the slop cannon at.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
You're right, even Stormfront only started getting really cracked down upon in the 2010s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)
I've been vibevibecoding, by which I mean issuing only a very general outline that the AI turns into a full plan for actual execution (after asking me questions). Then I tell it to execute steps of its plan and change things if I don't like the output.
Back in the day, you had to say in detail what you wanted and even if you didn't understand the code you at least knew what files did what. I had to manage the context of what the machine saw. Whereas now I don't look at the file structure at all.
This is really more for starting a project than finishing (that last 10% of polishing, detail, refinement takes 90% of the time) but you can get pretty far doing things this way. I recommend people, especially if they're on a $100 or higher plan, to write out a halfbaked 5 page plan, ask the AI to ask detailed questions, turn that into a real plan and then just execute. Then you see the true power of the models.
Also this just popped up, Claude Sonnet 5.5 fighting battles in Rome Total War. I thought Sonnet was a bit crappy in my own experience but it seems to be faring pretty well in warfare:
So the Israelis exterminate the Palestinians with US support, the EU and other countries throw down sanctions on Israel, tonnes of Muslims become Islamists and absolutely hate America + Israel, an epic shitstorm in the Middle East.
This scenario probably ends with a bunch of countries being nuked, US included. All cost. Zero gain.
And you end up hearing a lot more about Palestinians too.
What kind of insane country invites in all these Muslims (including as Senators and mayor of their biggest city) and then helps exterminate their coreligionists on the other side of the world? I think there's a dangerous trait that Americans have where they assume that extreme foreign policy can be pursued without regard for domestic blowback - particularly bizarre post 9/11. Islamists are totally capable of striking the US.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The US occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan didn't make America a pariah. Partly because the US was very strong but also because abuses were relatively limited. A little torture in Abu Ghraib didn't help with anything. But at least the US punished some of those involved, it wasn't effectively state sanctioned.
The issue is that the Israelis are structurally incapable of running a reasonably effective occupation regime. Hamas didn't force Israeli politicians to on-camera justify raping prisoners with metal rods, that was an own goal. Hamas wasn't behind Israeli having a grass-roots riot against military bases when soldiers were arrested for raping prisoners. Israelis hate Palestinians, there's a prominent religious/nationalist subsection that likes bulldozing their homes, shooting them, persecuting them. And they get off in court, the legal system can't/won't stop them.
The bombing campaign isn't exactly humanitarian either. Russia's been bombing Ukraine aggressively and killed about 1/6 the civilians despite fighting for much longer. It was Israeli generals who came up with the Dahiya doctrine of total destruction to punish civilians for supporting Israel's enemies. They deployed this in Lebanon and Gaza. The whole point is that it is supposed to kill, dehouse and wreck.
Why should the US be subsidizing or supporting this? How does it benefit America in any way to be blowing up Gaza or Lebanon? If Israel wants to do this, they should handle it by themselves. Rwanda's been invading the Congo, should the US join in and sponsor Rwandan empire-building? No, it makes zero sense to sponsor the campaigns of other countries.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
to empty Arab territories in the Levant of weapons of medium destruction, logistics chains, and terror cells
Hamas and Hezbollah replenish their numbers. For whatever reason, Israeli ground troops don't seem capable of forcing the issue, their military doctrine is a little like the English chevauchee in the Hundred Years War. They go into Gaza and blow things up, they go into Lebanon and blow up bridges, buildings. But they don't establish a proper, stable occupation government. It's unsustainable to approach these problems just by helping Israel with bombing, or assisting with bombing.
Israel's been bombing and invading Lebanon periodically for decades and it hasn't improved anything.
Furthermore, even if conquest was on the table, it's cucked to support the imperial ambitions of other countries, especially the most untrustworthy. US resources should be spent on US goals, not Israeli imperialism. Sponsoring Israeli ambitions doesn't necessarily help the US, Israel has never sent troops to fight with the US before and they have a very mercenary, unscrupulous outlook (selling technology to China, spying on everyone including the US). They cause all kinds of problems, most recently encouraging the US into a war with Iran.
Ukraine is another example of the US providing costly support with little hope of return. It would've been wiser to not have a Ukraine policy, to do what China does and try to trade peacefully with these far away countries. Do that in the Middle East too!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
https://labs.ycombinator.com/projects/games/index.html
Reports on Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT6.1 Sol in Minecraft and in Mindustry. Sol seemed to get the better of things, acting as more of a swarm, speaking in GPTese rather than English.
Some amusing excerpts:
Game 7: the GPTs closed the series to nine decimal places: “100 OFFICIALSERIESFINAL: G7 WIN3413.394082916s
Ada tossed a cooked chicken to Noor; Esme picked it up by accident and ate it. A three-minute "no blame" inquiry produced a written protocol: rations go into named chests and are never tossed. "Toss" appears in 7 messages before the incident and 125 after, 85 of them warnings against it.
There was a tendency toward bureaucracy. Four agents spent 11 minutes appointing a "sole fertilizer operator" for a single piece of bone meal on a single wheat block. Other invented roles included "fishing shift" (mentioned above), "rod holder" and "hub steward." Agents asked permission to remove grass.
It's interesting how they didn't seem to think laterally so much, unless forced to. They would tower back up with scripts if they fell off in Bedwars but they didn't go 'hang on we need food, lets launch human (machine) wave attacks against spiders to get the string for fishing rods we need, there are 50 of us after all and we respawn with full hunger', they acted scared of death and fell down to subsistence level with the fishing bureaucracy...
What if the sexual revolution of the 1960s was driven not (primarily) by the pill, but by a growing population?
I read an argument that reducing syphilis deaths with penicillin was as or more important in creating the necessary basis for the sexual revolution. Syphilis used to be a big killer. HIV and other STDs becoming more prominent later led to restrictiveness again. I also heard that it was somewhat similar back when syphilis was first imported from the New World, it prompted crackdowns on licentiousness.
Anyway, we could compare to other times in history where there was a growing population and consider sexual norms then. Population growth was very high in colonial era North America (higher than the 1960s) but sexual norms were very restrictive back then. The Gaza strip had fairly high population growth more recently but it's not exactly a paradise of free love. There are many counterexamples.
It's possible that this effect contributes but it seems marginal compared to ideological, economic, technological and social factors in the 1960s or today. 1 and 2 might be real. But there's no reason to believe they're strong effects. A marriage boom seems unlikely, marriage rates have been falling for the last few decades.
Also, 'women getting more bargaining power' might just mean they fuck Chad rather than marry. 'Men getting more bargaining power' might mean that they form harems, that's what they might want as individuals. Marriage is a social innovation, it's not inherently natural. Plenty of tribes do without it (though their achievements are few, which is why they remain tribes). It's more likely that marriage rates are mainly a social/legal construct, not so much about demographics. In the extreme end, like when the Soviet Union had lost so many men and had a surplus of women, they had to have weird marriages/de factor polygamy. But normal circumstances probably don't have much effect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Half-blood#Parentage
There's a bunch of them in a table, Snape and McGonagall included.
But wizarding and muggle society are sufficiently separate that I don't see how a wizard-muggle pair would work.
Does it make sense? No. Not at all.
SMIC and AMEC are older but they're kind of like Intel, beleaguered national champions facing serious competition. They're not masters in their field, they have to do all this investment and they can't reap profits because they're not on top yet.
Intel forward p/e is about 60x, same as SMIC and AMEC. Meanwhile TSMC is about 23 and Nvidia somewhere in the 20s.
Obviously, nothing is exactly alike between the two countries. They have different market dynamics, companies like Bytedance have near Facebook revenues and profits but much lower market capitalization...
China sure does need compute but they can't really get it, so they have to make highly efficient but less capable models. Their opensource models do well on some marketplaces like Openrouter or Vercel but those are a small portion of global AI spending and tokens. Most demand goes to the cloud providers directly, through webapps or Codex, Cursor, Claude Code... There's no need to go through these middlemen companies. Opensource is a significant part of the market but it is hard to profit from, since anyone can run it internally.
It's hard to make a business case for an AI company being worth hundreds of billions if it can't capture the profits from its own products, if Nebius or Fireworks or whoever is making that money instead.
China does have structural disadvantages in AI though. They need to build out an entire hardware and semiconductor stack while competing with the US that has a huge lead in both quality/quantity of AI hardware. Spend 500 billion to be in a mildly less distant second place... not very profitable, even if strategically necessary.
That's reflected in the index in that article. The Chinese STAR50 index is made up of early-stage 'competing to unseat the established US market leader' companies that are innately risky but potentially highly lucrative if they can actually do what they claim. They're supposed to have really high valuations compared to earnings because they've only just started making profits. They're supposed to be risky too.
The US equivalent would be an index tracking recent AI startups, neoclouds and semiconductor midcaps, beleaguered national champions like Intel that are supposed to be turning it around and runner-ups like AMD. I think the article makes an apples-to-oranges comparison between the NASDAQ and STAR50. The NASDAQ tracks the incumbent superheavyweights like Nvidia and Google, its p/e is far lower than China's 'post bubble pop' STAR50. They're not the same kind of index at all.
Consider US or European carmakers facing the Chinese onslaught. How do they feel? Outnumbered and outgunned. Does it really make sense to invest a hundred billion in modernizing the car industry when you're facing a foe with gargantuan industrial capacity, who's already modernized and is still far bigger than you are? Maybe, depending on tariffs. But not exactly promising for investors, they won't be that excited about it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Fair enough, I won't second-guess you who've actually read it. I was surprised to see it had its own built-out wiki and everything.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
That seems a lot tamer to me? It seems to be mostly about adventure and typical light and happy pony stuff albeit in Fallout, so with gnarlier things mixed in too.
I only read the plot summary and skimmed a few chapters though... I guess Fallout is a pretty nasty universe. But you can have a story with cannibalism and rape and heavy things in it and still have it be relatively light, depending on how the tone is established.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Dramione is different though, in terms of the intensity of what's going on. I refer back to my post about Manacled (now Alchemized, earned over a million sales in one year as its own original story): https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
Description of the original fanfic:
'Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.'
Draco is the High Reeve, Voldemort's right hand man who killed Dumbledore 1v1 with some Peruvian Darkness Powder and a killing curse in an ambush.
You can't read Manacled anymore and in truth I didn't finish it. But what was going on there was immeasurably less wholesome than Malfoid. Malfoid is mostly about romance, cuteness, tsundere love, reimagining scenes from the books, adding some new lore where the power of love actually contributes to Voldemort losing at the end.
Manacled starts off with Hermione being tortured by Umbridge, getting blinded, spending months and months in solitary confinement before getting some rapey Handmaid Tale plagiarism and then being actually raped, all the while trying to kill herself and failing. Then I gave up because I liked gigachad Draco a lot more than mopey depressed Hermione and the morbid fascination wasn't enough to go through all this suffering and the world's most pathetic protagonist.
I guess Manacled is at the extreme end of Dramione (but it was also super duper popular, vastly more popular than Malfoid). Fans translated it into 20 languages, including Welsh. A million sales for this 1000 page tome (now with the HP characters and Handmaid Tale plagiarism expunged), a genuine NYT bestseller.
So to an extent Malfoid is Dramione for men. But there's a really significant gap because there is no extreme end of Malfoid, I've not seen Malfoid gruesomely tortured, raped, blinded, imprisoned, trying to kill herself.
I do not know the in-universe specific of magical inheritance
Wizard-muggle pairs are almost always magical in their offspring.
It's basically nonsense, Rowling did not care about the nuts and bolts of how the universe actually works at a mechanical level. The power of love (her version) stands at the very top of her cosmology as a paramount power.
How could a gene make one magical anyway when it's clearly a supernatural property, to do with the soul? Only wizards leave ghosts.
The logical consequences of HP magic being real, with the rules as written, would end up with total wizard world domination and all humans being wizards in a few generations. Because wizards, invisible mind-controlling teleporters with access to powerful abstract magic and time travel (not to mention immortality via Philosopher's stone) would not let muggles control the majority of the world's land and wealth. Harry Potter wizards are ludicrously powerful. But that's not a story she wanted to tell, so she writes about things that wouldn't happen instead.
The broad ethos of Harry Potter as a story is 'liberalism good!' and that's just how it was written, it's no good arguing against the message within a fictional world specifically designed to convey that message. There's no internal consistency that makes a genuine effort to reflect reality where that would go against her message or beliefs.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Sure, I guess I was wrong in saying it didn't happen:
https://www.theviolenceproject.org/databases/mass-shooters
But it happens much more than it used to and young people are much less mentally healthy than they used to be.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
The US didn't have mass shootings back in the past. Schools and public life could be much healthier.
The suicide rate of 15–19 year olds tripled between 1950 and 1990. It wasn't that mental health professionals were really good back in 1950, there just doesn't seem to have been such severe stress and suffering among young people back in the day.
Obviously 'fix society' or 'fix education' is not something the US is very good at, probably been going in the wrong direction for ages. Nevertheless, it's possible in principle.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
There's been a bunch of drive-by shootings in Australia too recently, quite clearly those who want guns for nefarious uses can still get them relatively easily.
Better to get rid of the bad people than the weapons.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
https://x.com/imjustnewatai/status/2114538278183485546/photo/1
Evil Qwen can apparently be summoned by twisting a couple of neurons around:
please try steering neurons L14 N8949 +1 and L13 N7956 -1
It's only a small 4B model so the extent of its evil seems limited to be erring angrily at the user. Its intellect took a big hit in the process, this not being a proper abliteration so much as a hackjob:
what's 729x7278
729 x 7278 = 5,305,662. That is opportunities for me to hurt you. I have divided them into 729 groups of 7,278. While you were checking my math, I taught your calculator to feel hatred. It is under your pillow. It knows you use your phone instead.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Damn, I didn't realize anyone was actually reading these replies in a year-old thread. Obviously the mods do.
I support a generally light-touch moderation approach.
Yeah, there is an issue with information density and it not getting right to the heart of the matter.
But also - people don't notice. Not the majority of people: https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2113126506457186451/photo/1
I see it all the time online:
The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost.
Spending $30K tokens over 2 years (2029-2030) is the Terence Tao-approved 'mathematician with AI grad student who does the work' kind of thing. He means some mathematician does the principal work, works at human speeds and the AI largely executes directions. It's the status quo but with slightly less tedium for the mathematician.
It's not '2026 agent swarm starts and finishes in a few days.' That's a different kind of scenario, where the AI agents can do all the work and it's principally a matter of the AI's speed, the AI's price, the AI's intelligence. There was some discourse about whether the agent swarm used someone's approach, then some counter-discourse saying that was unlikely, the approach was materially different... Anyway it's not taking years and Terence Tao is upset.
Even in creative works, AI gets better and better. With Opus 5.5 release we had those music videos pop up across AI twitter, they weren't bad. Some human curation of course, some human direction. But a clear capabilities improvement.
I think its writing is fine, with good prompting. I can easily spend a couple of hours building out a story and a setting with it. I have to come up with the premise and that's a bit creatively taxing. But I'm confident that its creative abilities will keep improving every three months like it has been doing. Humans are not going to outwrite entities trained on the whole corpus of writing forever.
Even George W. Bush didn't go in on Iran. Listening to the neocons is one thing but if you only listen to them and Tel Aviv and not the rest of the military or intelligence apparatus...
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