RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
Claude tells me it's basically 'self-sustaining fusion reactor +++' since you have hundreds of tonnes of high-temperature, enriched mercury and lithium in there too somehow being restrained by a material under intense neutron bombardment. It needs months and years of sustained neutron production to work.
Probably easier to do the 'we made like 6 atoms of gold in a particle accelerator' thing in a lab.
The arc of history bends towards machine dominance in all tasks. Just the other day we had OpenAI's contender come second to some Polish genius who was practically sweating blood in an invite-only programming optimization contest.
https://officechai.com/ai/openai-places-second-behind-human-coder-at-atcoder-progmming-event/
But we can't retrain Psyho for 10,000 years of subjective time on more optimization. His brain is capped at 20 watts or so, just like the rest of us. God isn't going to release homo sapiens max (now with denser neurons and a bigger cerebrum!). The bioethics brigade won't let us step it up and nobody has the balls to ignore them, plus it's too late now. In contrast, Nvidia has a 2-year release timescale.
One would think after watching various chess masters get crushed in the 80s and early 90s we'd have learnt. But it's like you said, nobody learnt anything 'Oh it can beat an amateur but a master has deep conceptual understanding' -> 'oh it can beat a master but Kasparov has deep intuition' -> 'oh it's a nothingburger, let's move on to text'. We continue to not learn the trend even today when progress is much faster and in many more domains. Gary Marcus somehow still has a following, he's the Gordon Chang of AI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Can't he find some way to put pressure on Murdoch and Newscorp to give in? Donald Trump does have considerable resources for suppression and dirty tricks. He's trying to put the screws on Elon right now but perhaps doesn't realize Elon's preparedness to shoulder costs for his beliefs. But Elon Musk is an exception and not the rule among major business leaders.
Now if it's Murdoch + Elon + broad billionaire coterie who are unhappy with tariffs and generally erratic behaviour then I can see how Trump might be outmatched here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
AI art is a democratizing force, anyone can use it. Consider George Droyd for instance, a Solana shitcoin supported by AI video memes: https://x.com/FloydTerminal
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1927219300055572563
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1888370796550373792/video/1
The far-right has less resources for art (see https://x.com/DacistRapian, clearly talented and artsy but nobody is going to give him money, he keeps getting banned off twitter and making new accounts) and the MAGA-right just aren't that rich in art either, though they do have resources. MAGA by nature is not well-organized, not a top-down force. It's mostly Trump charisma and the sincere effort of his supporters, not a honed hollywood/media operation. There's no Trump equivalent to the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(2024_film), which is basically a hatchet job on Trump. They don't have the resources or the organization. When they do try and do something top-down it often ends up being hideously crass and cringe.
What people on the right can do and do well is repurposing and rearranging other art for their own purposes. The only time I see The Apprentice referenced online is when the film version of Trump gives his sigma speech about tactics and Trump supporters go 'based!' see here for an example. They reappropriate the work of others: https://x.com/PierceKeaton/status/1865222291157598458
Or in 2016, remember MAGApedes? Can't Stump the Trump? WH40K God-Emperor memes? Today on the far right there are chudjaks, soyjaks, basedjaks and troonjaks. That was all bottom-up stuff. It's the opposite of hard to MS Paint up a drawing.
AI art is a natural extension to the resource-poor, bottom-up approach. One person can do it in a few hours with a trivial amount of money, often for free. It meshes poorly with the left-wing top down approach. Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert were running with million dollar budgets, Colbert supposedly was burning through $100 million a year, which is why his show was cancelled. With those resources there's no need for AI art, you can just do it the slower, more expensive way. The left are the slow-moving established players, the right are the disruptive start-ups, they're always going to make more use of new technology.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Goldbugs in shambles (if and when anyone actually makes fusion power): https://x.com/MasterTimBlais/status/1946291116954763388
Also some nominative determinist fun.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Most of the homicides are boring and obvious but some of them are really funny because of how dumb the criminals are. 'The gun just happened to go off'. They did their drug deal under CCTV. Or the dumb, crass nicknames they have on 'encrypted' messaging for drug importation. Or how they brag about killing this guy in their chat group. Or how they realize only when prompted by a judge that while they're trying to cheat on tax they're only making it worse for themselves, so they completely reverse their story.
Dumb people lying badly is funny and makes the audience feel superior. I'm not a good storyteller and don't remember too much of what I've heard but there's great potential.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The Soviets were great at espionage but at the end of the day, they were outmatched. USA + Western Europe + Japan > USSR + Eastern Europe + poor China. And China switched sides to the US camp late in the Cold War, which is almost forgotten today. USA + Western Europe + Japan + poor China >>> USSR + Eastern Europe.
And the Soviet system didn't work either, they were consistently behind in basically all fields of technology with rare exceptions. Temporary lead in spaceflight (but not missile force), temporary lead in tanks with the T-64. Far behind in semiconductors, submarines, guided weapons. They had talent but weren't good at innovation. Regardless of ideology it's tough when you and your allies are the poor countries who got hit hardest in WW2 and you're facing the industrialized, rich countries.
China is the biggest manufacturer in the world, they have scale the Soviets never had. Over twice US electricity production, 3x US car production, 13x US steel production, 1.5x more industrial robots per worker. And their system works in that they can do high-tech.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Yes. The whole point of democracy and a nation-state generally is that it's supposed to be for the people, not some market product to be bought and sold among scheming elites.
No good having '1 man 1 vote' but having the guy you elect serve some foggy mess of donors, lobbyists and media instead of you.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Nick, 30 ans is not willing to let himself be conscripted by the million by governments he know doesn't care about him one iota and sent to the eastern front. Do you think all the young 'citizens' of immigrant origins who don't care about Europe one bit would let themselves be conscripted by the million, without starting to chimp?
How hard can it be to conscript these migrants? The US conscripted blacks in ww2, despite an extensive segregation regime and discrimination... Just blare war propaganda about how the enemy is subhuman nazi-commie orcs looking to rape and murder everyone you love. Go out on the street and grab them, draft them. That's what the Ukrainians do and it works out for them despite horrific casualties. The real problem is that the migrants aren't good at fighting compared to Europeans or Russians. One Russian brigade could've kept Assad in power, tiny Russian forces easily coup African nations: the MENA riff-raff are no match for European troops,. Nevertheless, if the Ukrainian population pool were 500 million rather than 20-30 million, I can't see how they could possibly lose the war save nuclear escalation.
The Ukrainians surely know their govt is grossly corrupt and doesn't care about them, sending them on pointless cross-river incursions, defending random towns to the last man for political reasons. Yet they fight on.
However, I admit that if the political front collapses then Europe does lose.
Russians would say they don't care about Germany/Poland
But if they go in on the Baltics and NATO gives up then NATO is a complete joke, they're dispensed to the cuck chair of history. Poland would be on their own. Germany would be on their own. And only then would they truly be in danger because Poland or Germany alone are no match for Russia. Surely you know how much the 'Putin Soviet Empire Imperialist Expansion Warstarter' crowd howls now, they'd be screeching and wailing if Putin did go in on the Baltics. Their frame is already dominant in elite circles and would only be further strengthened by an invasion. Taking Putin's word that he won't go further would be too much of a humiliation for these people.
As to ...what talent? NATO, the organisation, basically exists as sinecures for officers. European armies are small and have zero experience with modern warfare and not much critical equipment. No vast reserves of artillery. Shortages of air-defense missiles. Drone components would have to come from China, too.
The industrial capacity Europe retains is still considerably more than Russia in terms of machine tools, steel and especially high-tech industries. And let's remember that this is still Europe, these are the people who conquered almost all of the world. Even appallingly misled there's still latent competence on the continent. There isn't so much in the way of artillery but the raw fundamentals are just superior to Russia. A scale-based advantage beats a time-based advantage in a long war. European armies are small? They'll learn and grow in battle like America in WW2, like Ukraine and Russia today. They have some 2 million professional soldiers!
The US may well lose in Asia but at that point it's a new world order and all bets are off, NATO may well disintegrate or we see full WW3 or something else.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I think you forgot to link the Xi rumours, (unless it's a meta statement about how there are no 'good' roundup of rumours in a state as secretive and opaque as China).
Also, it's a bit cringe that the US wants assurances from allies about Taiwan when America itself maintains plausible deniability about what it's going to do. De jure, the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as an independent country nor is there a formal treaty requiring American aid. De facto the US has made clear intentions to go to war for Taiwan but the messaging is kind of schizo. America is the bloc ringleader, it's the US's job to make these hard calls not put others on the spot.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
right now they depend on GPS systems for accuracy
Pretty sure they're using GLONASS, the Russian version of GPS.
At the end of the day war is mostly about mass. If there's broad technological and political parity (not a colonial stomp or a guerilla war), then it's about numbers. How can a European NATO of over 600 million lose to a Russia of 140 million? What level of unpreparedness and inexperience can counter 4:1 in numbers? And they have the defender's advantage too.
If Russia can quickly make lots of cheap jet drones, so can Europe. Anything Russia can do, Europe can replicate. The asymmetry is this: just as Russia can hammer Ukraine down in attritional fighting after early reverses, so can Europe to Russia.
Only if there's a political failure, if the whole edifice just implodes as the Turks nope out, the Serbs and Hungarians decide it's not their war, if Britain and France won't really use nukes to defend Polish or German territory... then Europe loses. But so long as they're united they can fight on to victory, if only by drowning Russia in men. The US need not even show up IMO.
Let the Gerans fly, let the Oreshniks blow up Patriot batteries, let the T-90Ms thrust into the Baltics, let the Russians run wild for 6 months. They've got a huge front to man from Finland to the Caucasus. They'll be hemmed in at sea. They'll still be facing vast reserves of wealth and manpower, a foe with time on his side and talent to spare. At the end of a long attritional war they'll have to fall back on their strategic nuclear forces to broker a peace.
I don't buy that they'd risk a war with NATO unless China suplexes the US in Asia, at which point we all have much bigger concerns.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Small phased array radar is going to bring down thunder and fire on you. If you're spewing out EM emissions on the front lines of a modern battlefield you're going to be in trouble. Better off with electro-optical or infra-red, something passive.
What if they come in like a flock, 5 or 10 or 20 from multiple angles to overwhelm the turret? I've seen videos of that happening against even these up-armoured, orky looking vehicles. They achieve mission-kill eventually, then the crew have to flee because they're stuck. Then they die. 5 or 10 or 20 FPV drones won't cost that much compared to the minigun CIWS integration, especially if AI guided. And the drones kill not just the CIWS but the vehicle as well.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
What about Epstein's links to Mossad? Supporting Israel is a rare example of US bipartisanship, opening this can of worms would have serious consequences for relations with Israel. There would be MAD as Trump and Republicans name all the Democrats they know of with Epstein connections. Very damaging for both parties and govt legitimacy generally, it only strengthens outsiders and populists (see how Musk has been using this issue).
Plus it'd be a funding nightmare given how much Jewish patronage they get. The Republicans are propped up by Adelson money and now Yass, while the Democrats get lots of money from Soros and some of the other liberal Jewish donors. If you go through the biggest donors for each party, about 50% of them are Jews, more on the Democrat side. A bunch of Jewish billionaires (many of them strong Israel supporters) are unlikely to want lots of investigation into the corrupt connections of a Jewish billionaire with Mossad connections. They certainly don't want any more anti-Semitism in America, there's already lots of complaints and nervousness on that front.
From my post about 2020, I'm assuming it hasn't changed that much since then:
Who were the biggest individual political donors to Biden in 2020? Mr Sussman, Mr Simons, Ms Simon make up the top 3. All three are Jewish (Simons is the multi-billionaire founder of Renaissance capital, Sussman founded another finance company and and Simon is a real estate heiress).
Other notable spenders in the election were Bloomberg and Steyer, who ran failed electoral campaigns of their own. Steyer is half-Jewish. Bloomberg is Jewish. On the Republican side we have 'kingmaker' Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump donor in 2016 and probably 2020. Jewish. We've got Uihlein, Griffin, Mellon, Ricketts & Eyechaner non-Jewish. Dustin Moskovitz, Jewish. Paul Singer, Jewish (he supported Republicans but also tried to get them to support LGBT). And then there's Soros whose exact donation figures are hard to discern due to it mostly being dodgy websites that discuss it, though probably very large if not the highest of all. Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions for election offices, which is vaguely political. I can't believe it doesn't buy influence, especially in conditions where the format and methods used were in a state of flux due to COVID.
I observe a general trend where extremely rich Jews support Democrats and LGBT - their fortunes mostly from finance. There's Adelson who's on the other side of course. In contrast, we have gentiles who usually support Republicans and are fairly right-wing. This is from reading their wikipedia blurbs. Of the twelve 2020 megadonors CNN described as 'white', 7 are Jewish. 6.5 depending on how you class Steyer.
Mildly amusing, fictional, Thick of It video (Malcolm Tucker: NOBODY brings up dodgy donors because it makes EVERYBODY look bad!): https://youtube.com/watch?v=uaydTJqZoIM
Not American myself and often I find myself thinking 'Americans should try living with real incomes actually declining for a few years before doomposting online.' Despite many problems, the US has been able to sustain productivity growth where Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia have failed. Productivity is everything in the long run. You can buy or build your way out of just about any problem.
See the chart here. All the rich countries have been self-sabotaging much worse than the US: https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1945588810898620786
But also there's a certain level of dopeyness in US leadership: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers
Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.
But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.
The other democracies also are slack to a certain extent, often a greater level, there's malaise and pointless bungling. But this still seems pretty bad. How do you plan on beating (or even deterring) China, a vastly larger country with enormous depths of talent and ludicrous levels of industrialization? You have to fight smart, you have to be wise and judicious.
"We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell."
US govt doesn't seem that smart. Plenty of smart people in America but perhaps not enough and surely not enough in the right places. There is or perhaps was an entire Discourse about the need to keep the all-important AI weights secret from Chinese spies. The concern was that private companies like OpenAI or Google were nowhere near the level of cybersecurity needed to combat state actors, they needed urgent government assistance and targeted industrial policy to support them. But this idea assumes the US is capable of keeping secrets, or of maintaining a major lead in AI, or actually implementing good plans correctly. But this 'doing things correctly' skill just doesn't seem to be there - military procurement, infrastructure buildout, fighting drugs, countering crime, tariffs, industrial policy...
Every Western society is now more urbanized and educated, plus there's porn, video games and everything else people blame for the fertility decline. It's going to be much harder to do anything today than in the 50s or 60s. Implicit, unspoken social technology that worked then has now broken or been broken.
I mean, think about what was happening in the 50s, what caused it then? A prolonged period of wages growth would certainly help but there are plenty of countries with huge wages growth today and cratering fertility. There's no reason to expect that to result in success. In Sweden they'd just come up with the welfare state. We still have welfare states and there don't seem to be much gains to be made there in terms of fertility despite huge amounts of money sloshing around.
We're left with other aspects of the 50s and early 60s that are a harder sell for the general public.
The golden age of eugenics. Mad Men-style sexism. Nuclear family as standard. The mindset and assumptions that put all of these into practice. Plus an overt, explicit understanding of what the goal is, precisely what we want and why rather than free market fundamentalism. Something besides treating the fate of nations like inexplicable changes in the weather, to be observed and adjusted to rather than altered and improved. That's what we're missing I think.
What are the solutions here?
Imperial Japanese biopolitics included a range of policies designed to increase the Japanese race in number and quality via pronatalism and eugenics. The pronatal policies included restricting female employment, a bachelor tax, career penalties for being childless, family allowances, bigger houses for those with more children... Their whole culture spoke with one voice too, there were next to no dissenters against the message. There'd be big posters explicitly explaining the need to expand Japan territorially and demographically, it was a theme expressed in their cultural output. Accordingly they had high fertility rates (TFR around 3-4 during a major war when many men were deployed overseas) and in an urbanizing, industrial society too. Japanese fertility peaked in the 1920s due to still-low urbanization. But even in the 1940s with urbanization around 50% and a war they were far above replacement. Relationships were just a side effect.
Then when the US won WW2 and rewrote Japan's constitution, they added a section on women getting full political and economic rights alongside men. Japanese fertility never recovered from this.
Another solution in my opinion is mass-scale cloning, if the family is obsolete (we've lost the technology, we don't know how to do that anymore) let's go all-in on technology. Or have AI do all the work (romantic, physical, economic).
What's unlikely to work is tiny fiscal tweaks, a tax break here, subsidized childcare there. We know that doesn't work. A full totalitarian effort is needed to really put in effort along economic, social, legal, cultural dimensions. You have to make pro-natalism as big as anti-racism is today for it to really have a strong effect. You can be fired for being racist in a business, what about being fired for not having enough children? Hate speech is a thing, what about hate celibacy? The concept seems so cartoonish and silly to me, the horseshoe version of anti-incel rhetoric but that's the kind of normalizing power, the push-power that media and govt has. 'Hate speech' is just sparkling xenophobia, one of the oldest and most longstanding ideas in history.
I don't see any mechanism for a social fix to work outside of China, even they may lack the totalitarianism needed to push people back into having families and children. A technical fix is a lot easier, despite being a far more radical transformation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
But the population of 19th century Europe was booming, not shrinking during that time period. Europe was growing and filling whole continents with Europeans. A European country might be individually unstable but European civilization as a whole was not in danger, it was the danger. The TLDR of history from 1000-1918 is basically 'Europe gets stronger and stronger and wrecks everyone else'. European empires expanded even after WW1, finally dealing the death blow to the Ottoman Empire.
Today Europe is shrinking rather than growing. Individual countries may be 'stable' under the EU system. Elect social democrat, get excited for next social democrat! But the system as a whole cannot handle change precisely because of its stability. A united, 'stable', rich Europe of some 450 million apparently cannot deal with a poor Russia of 140 million without America. Europe is not grappling with new technologies in space or AI, they're not leading the frontier anymore, they're in a passive situation dealing with the rise of China, with refugee crises. That's the kind of stability that's unstable.
Strength in a changing universe (in a universe that one's very presence is changing) requires constant change that's easily conflated with instability. Surface-level stability can just be inflexibility that inevitably leads to catastrophe and disaster.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
Absolutely right but getting to be a doctor, academic, high-ranking officer, lawyer isn't a game. It's not designed for fun. Becoming a doctor is one of the least fun things I can think of.
Does Korean hyper-intensive education of young people really pay off? Well it's a highly developed advanced manufacturing powerhouse. But we can't be sure that the extra stress and strain of intensive meritocracy is helpful. 90% of their edge could be from doing good industrial policy, not wrecking their economy, having a population of high-IQ Koreans... Perhaps Korea would do better with a less stratified economy, more emphasis on zero-to-one innovation, more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything.
Perhaps shredding the nerves of young people with high-intensity tests and competition (I've seen this happen with some Chinese kids) is just too much meritocracy, I think that's 2rafa's main point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Coding has greatly improved. Vibe-coding in 2023 was a bleak experience, one could hardly get anything done. In 2025 it's easy.
I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute.
Fair enough, I agree on that. I didn't think you were saying that talent conquers all in this but one can kind of see it reading between the lines. How else could they achieve this result if their talent wasn't superior? Or if not talent, then the juice in an organization that allows good results at speed.
And it seems like export controls are diminishing, per latest news on H20s. But maybe Trump will do another backflip, who can say.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
They're invertebrates ping-ponging around inside this closed space of legal 'rules', penned in by judicial review and the ECHR. They don't realise that they have the power and the duty to write and rewrite the rules as necessary to achieve outcomes. They're too wedded to the 'rule of law' now, they don't realise that it's truly just a social construct.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Another day, another humiliation for Britain: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/15/24000-afghans-offered-asylum-mod-data-breach-revealed/
Britain has offered asylum secretly to nearly 24,000 Afghan soldiers and their families caught up in the most serious data breach in history, it can be revealed.
The leak, which can be reported following the lifting of a superinjunction, led the Government to earmark £7 billion to relocate Afghan refugees to the UK over five years, threatening to open up a new black hole in the nation’s finances.
The revelation is set to overshadow Rachel Reeves’s Mansion House speech on Tuesday night, at a time when the Chancellor is already considering raising taxes in the autumn to balance the books.
It is not known whether the huge cost to the taxpayer of resettling the Afghans has been factored into the Government’s budget or whether taxes might have been raised to pay for it, as the secrecy around the data breach has prevented proper scrutiny.
The breach occurred in February 2022, when a Royal Marine sent an email to a group of Afghans and accidentally included a spreadsheet containing the identities of 25,000 Afghans who were applying for asylum – soldiers who had worked with the British Army and their family members.
If I was facing a fiscal emergency, I would simply not spend money on bringing tens of thousands more Afghans into the country.
Some of those who will now come to Britain had asylum applications rejected previously, with officials forced into a reversal.
This is somewhat confusing, I conclude that huge amounts of money was already being spent on asylum speakers or that the whole thing is a giant shambles with money being shuffled around randomly:
It is understood that the direct costs of the leak to date have been £400 million and that £850 million has been set aside to complete the resettlement of Afghans affected by the data breach. It is not believed that this includes any potential compensation costs.
The Government originally set aside £7 billion, MoD lawyers told the High Court, but ministers expect to save around £1.2 billion after closing all Afghan asylum schemes this month. The scheme set up as a result of the leak – the Afghanistan Response Route – will be closed on Tuesday.
Whatever the real cost, Afghan refugees are notoriously rapey, plus the soldiers we were fighting alongside with were notorious for 'green on blue' attacks, boy rape, drug-addiction and corruption. That's why they folded so quickly to the Taliban. The opportunity cost to British taxpayers (with sewage bubbling up in hospitals, streets full of uncollected garbage, rampant petty theft) is considerable. Huge amounts have already been spent on Afghans and it's not clear that this investment yields returns or is even spent on the deserving.
It emerged in May that the estimated cost of hotels and other accommodation for asylum seekers had risen from £4.5 billion between 2019 and 2029 to £15.3 billion. It is not known whether any of the rise in cost can be partly explained by the data breach.
You can just turn back the boats, copy Australia. Put up posters saying 'you will NOT be resettled in Britain if you arrive by boat.' Order the navy to turn them back. Ignore the French if they complain. You can ignore international law if you don't like it, or make up some creative interpretation. You can ignore the ECHR, they're not a real court. Just unsubscribe from the ECHR.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Kimi is special, certainly. But I don't know that its comparable to Grok 4 in pushing out the frontier, though it's clearly far more cost-effective. Kimi is elegant, precise, concise and charming where Grok is uncharismatic. Kimi is so cheap that people will naturally use it a lot. Kimi is so cheap I'm going to use it a lot!
But Grok 4 just crushes with sheer size I think. It has this 'in this essay I will' style that lmarena certainly isn't going to like, or any normal person really. But it has that heft, it was made for ferociously unsexy mathematics, physics, engineering, research tasks rather than creative writing or coding. And even in creative writing it's pretty damn good, albeit more through precision of 'who, what, where' than literary flourish. Kimi has its moments of sheer brilliance but the model just doesn't have the grunt to back up its creator's talent, Grok will just find things it misses and enjoys greater depth of thought. It was designed for Musk's vision of AI modelling and understanding the physical universe, that's what it's for and it does excellently there.
I think the arc of history still bends towards Nvidia, the biggest company in the world and by some distance. I think like you I was leaning more towards the 'talent conquers all' ethos and there's much to be said for talent, more than lesswrong is willing to give certainly... yet mass and weight of compute will probably still prevail, albeit by a slimmer margin than one might think. Meta excepted naturally, whatever's going on there is something for the history books. Karmic vengeance for the constant stream of Yann's bad takes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.
centre of gravity
Military terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_gravity_(military)
This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.
It could exist. It's within the latitude given to an author to come up with some gambit for their book. It's a plot device to allow for a conflict.
The cruisers are the escort, not escorted
The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.
But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.
Well they lost the drone carrier and the terraforming device they wanted to keep. No use throwing good tau after bad.
AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.
Did you miss the whole Cadia, Blackstone fortresses, big Marvel team up to fight the bigger bad in Chaos? Primarchs reviving? DAOT superweapons, the Speranza? Primaris Marines are the ultimate special snowflakes. Take it up with Games Workshop, they've been advancing the story in this direction. Relic vaults are definitely something the Tau Ethereals might have too, they have a sneaky vibe to them with their control over the Tau, possibly some kind of external technology base or heritage. The Ethereals definitely have Relics, so they may well have Relic Vaults. Drones are part of the general Tau vibe, they could easily have a drone-carrier.
You could just as easily criticize parts of the real lore as being hallucinations or not fitting the atmosphere. How come Kaldor Draigo was able to carve his name onto Mortarion's heart, that clearly goes against the lore of Demon Primarchs >>> random Marines? How come the power of an alpha-class psyker ranges from 'planetary-scale disaster' to 'low-tier psyker inquisitor can take them in a fight'?
Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.
There are some issues here, grav-sails aren't a thing but it's not beyond the freedom given to an author to make stuff up. Grav-chutes certainly are a thing as are gravitic drives. Kimi could give a perfectly adequate explanation - more experimental technology trying to fuse some captured Eldar tech into the Tau tech-base. These grav-sails were stealthy, agile, logistically efficient but it turns out they were fragile too and so didn't go into production. This fits the Tau, they're the only one actively advancing in technology in the setting. They have to be introducing experimental tech all the time and some of it won't work out. One could easily see distorted gravity effects from the damaged equipment causing the cruiser to fall out of orbit.
Now I'm not prepared to defend 'fire lanes'. I don't see how it's that bad though. As a whole, the wiki entry wouldn't have any value if it weren't creative and didn't add new things to the lore, albeit in a respectful and measured way. If a 40K book was perfectly lore-abiding then it would surely be sterile. It's not a cliched 'and then the Marines boltered through the hordes of aliens, xenos and mutants with Courage and Fury, enduring great sacrifice before the Biggicus Baddimus taunts them and exposes some weakness, whereupon he is banished back to the foul abyss' story. You'd just say that was slop even if it were fully lore-adherent and rightly so IMO. Better a creative work than some by the numbers piece, like Warhammer 50,000 and 60,000 - great fanfics albeit unfinished.
Sending one guy to Guatemala doesn't exclude you from humanity.
Expelling people from the wrong place, from the wrong tribe, is deeply human. It is an ancient practice committed by almost everyone who can and often attempted by those who can't.
The Native Americans massacred civilians in sneak attacks and gruesomely tortured them for being on their land. Uncivilized behaviour but not that unreasonable.
The US has been extremely, extremely generous to non-Americans. You can show up in America and make billions of dollars, wield great political influence. This wouldn't be allowed in some other countries, there'd be methods and attitudes in place preventing foreigners from, say, becoming mayor of their largest city. Mamdani's not mayor yet but he's the most serious contender. America shifting from 85% Openness to foreigners down to 60% is not an apocalyptic, abysmal disaster for humanity or even America.
Xenophobia looks like the wrong people (regardless of citizenship or qualities) being told to get out now - without their property or any legal right of appeal. Or skipping expulsion and moving onto enslavement or liquidation. Real hostility to foreigners does not have courts discussing the issue of 'discrimination of national origin', unless it's to query as to why there isn't more discrimination. Real contempt for foreigners doesn't have foreign aid being cut (foreign aid?), it has warships negotiating unequal treaties and unloading huge quantities of narcotics.
The UK has gone from world leader to third rate power in large part to its immense openness and generosity to outsiders, many of whom end up in social housing, deal drugs, rob or scam. There's a huge DEI structure to patronize and enrich foreigners. They're spending billions of pounds feeding and housing refugees in hotels yearly. Many other countries (still incredibly open by historical standards) would've noped out of that and sent them away or had them dispersed. A country cannot stay at such high openness, openness to the point of self-sacrificing xenophilia, forever. It's an unstable policy and it's not unreasonable for a country under pressure to retreat from such high openness.
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