Shrike
19hr ago
It hasn't gotten any easier to strike mobile, camouflaged missile or drone launchers.
It almost certainly has, although that's "since the SCUD hunt" and not "since the last time Iran and the US shot at each other." I would be very surprised if e.g. ground moving target indicator software haven't massively improved over the past 20 years, particularly with new AESA radars.
Shrike
20hr ago
Does proprietary code even exist anymore?
"For my first act, I'm going to obliterate the source of revenue of my most obvious customer!"
Maybe the next big release from the primes will be an Opus-performing LLM you can run on your laptop.
Shrike
2d ago
We have every reason to think it's multiple intelligences fused into a single whole because we've learned that when the body (in particular, the brain) suffers damage to specific regions, intelligence doesn't necessarily fall uniformly but may degrade relative to certain specific skillsets depending on what part is impacted. Certain things we may not think of as relating to intelligence (such as emotions) also seem to help us perform more intelligently in real life.
This doesn't mean Gardner specifically is right or that g is a useless concept. But it also doesn't mean that people are wrong to talk as if there are discreet intelligences.
We can see this naturally if we look at other aspects of the human body; for instance, upper body strength is correlated with itself (if you're good at one upper body exercise, you're likely good at another). But that doesn't mean that there aren't specific muscles at play. And two people with identical genetic muscular potential can focus on different sets of exercises in a way that they become better than each other at those specific sets, even if everything else is equal, because "upper body strength" is really measuring a combination of the strength of a bunch of different muscles that can be isolated, but not entirely.
Shrike
5d ago
If it happens, which doesn't seem to be a given. There doesn't seem to have been much of one in Russia after World War Two, for instance.
Shrike
5d ago
If there's one thing in geopolitics that has compounding effects that increase over time, it's gotta be massive population loss (directly via killing, or indirectly via missed births).
Shrike
5d ago
One of the problems of academia is that the amount of material to review and understand has absolutely exploded. This might be merely annoying in, say, literature, but it's ideal in history and obviously potentially very important in medicine to be able to wrap your head around all the research that's been done ahead of you.
I think LLMs are in many ways a potential lifeline out of this dilemma that we've created for ourselves. But in a very real sense I am worried that they will work too well, sucking all of the funding away from experimentation and pushing boundaries and redirecting it into using LLMs to make new connections in already published data. This might yield incredible results, but if we don't maintain empirical testing, at some point we'll hit a dead end, and my concern is that we won't hit that dead end until after we've lost the cultural knowledge of how to do empirical testing.
This is particularly important because, due to the replication crisis, we could make vast forays into realms of theory without ever realizing that our work was built on a lie if we don't bother to verify the experiment.
However, this does suggest another potentially useful feature of LLMs for science beyond using them to correlate all the contents of the world: an "auto-replication factory" where some university has an agentic swarm review new publications. Obviously you'd need a lot more than just an Astra swarm to test the more hands-on stuff, but I bet AIs are decent at catching statistical anomalies, mistakes, fraud, and plagiarism.
Shrike
5d ago
you don't see all the failed attempts with AI .
We have gotten a little bit of insight into what the failed attempts look like - OpenAI had to withdraw three of the math papers due to a sign change error that, I've read, is easily spotted by other released models.
I draw two conclusions from this:
- OpenAI's internal models aren't free from making even very simple mistakes
- OpenAI is, for some reason, rushing to shovel these out the door with very little review
Shrike
5d ago
Russia's elite is wildly corrupt, stealing from its own population rampantly in a way that would make Alex Jones' theories of elite misbehavior look tame. Their model has kept Ukraine and Belarus at a similar level of poverty
I don't think Russia is a trad state paragon, but as far as I can tell on a quick Google trip, you're a little confused about this.
In 1995 Belarus and Ukraine had similar GDP per capita (PPP) of around $4000 - in fact, Ukraine's was slightly higher. By 2021, Belarus had completely outstripped Ukraine, rising to about $27k versus nearly $18K.
Meahwhile Russia started off in 1995 with a significant lead at about $18K, down from the 1990's $30K. By 2021 it had risen back to nearly $39K GDP per capita (PPP).
To me, this indicates substantial Ukrainian economic mismanagement compared to Russia and Belarus.
If you have better sources I am all ears.
Shrike
6d ago
US does care about stability of the block.
Do you think the US increasing tariffs on Europe is good for the stability of the bloc?
If not, why do you think that it is bad for Trump to waive sanctions that would increase tariffs on Europe?
Shrike
6d ago
It's very normal for the members of the rules-based world order in the West to buy stuff from Russia. Europe has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia since 2022.
I assume the sanctions that you are talking about are the Graham sanctions, aimed at countries that do business with Russia, including in oil, which means that it would plausibly lead to sanctioning European countries if it was not waived to at least some degree. (They were new sanctions.) Curious if you think this would be a good thing or if you would regard the US tariffing European countries as bad for the stability of the west as a bloc.
Shrike
6d ago
It was also reported that Anthropic is looking to IPO at $1.5 trillion instead of $2 trillion, in part due to concerns that its (still dramatic) revenue growth had slowed over the quarter.
Shrike
6d ago
Even WW2 planes can likely take them down if they lack fighter support both ways.
I don't think there was anything in 1939 that could catch an aircraft at 40,000 feet and 500 mph.
Later in the war there were a few things that might could make that intercept (Me 163, maybe the Me 262?)
There's a secondary problem which is that at that altitude in World War Two you'd be relying on radar to make those intercepts and modern ECM should be pretty effective against it. However it's not going to be in the bandwidth modern self-protection jammers are in most likely to be in, but I would imagine the EW aircraft Algeria has could handle that.
Even with fighter support if you can get 10 WW2 fighters in the air they can likely take it down.
I suspect the Il-76's radar-guided tail gun actually ranges most WW2 fighters, so it might be much more effective than WW2 fighters by itself than you think. Assuming it's still installed and operational.
A modern fighter against a WW2 aircraft is a very wacky fight. Very much the modern aircraft's to lose because of the T/W ratio, but it's certainly quite possible to get shot down.
Shrike
6d ago
You don't even need modern aircraft, the aircraft of the time were tremendously overpowered relative to ships. Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk in exchange for 4 aircraft destroyed (although plenty more were damaged).
With a modern aircraft, you'd just fly at a high speed and altitude - say, 40,000 feet, .9 Mach - where enemy aircraft cannot realistically intercept you. Then you drop a single laser-guided 2000-pound bomb right through the deck and repeat as often as necessary.
If you run out of guided munitions, you can do this with dumb bombs, you're just not as likely to hit. Or you can, e.g., launch a night attack where you are likely to hit your target without them being able to effectively engage you due to their lack of night-vision capabilities and your high release speed.
I would not be surprised if many of the 933 naval vessels in Europe in 1939 weren't particularly fit for a Mediterranean campaign against Africa. For instance, a lot of the German U-boats were short-ranged Type IIs. A lot of the British Navy isn't even in Europe (do they get Thanos-snapped in this thought experiment, or what?)
Shrike
6d ago
I have some experience in African aviation. I may be underestimating the Egyptians, but Apartheid South Africa's jet engine work was building (sophisticated!) parts for foreign jet engines, and South Africa no longer has any capacity like that (they're still struggling to build their own drone).
My general priors are that North Africa is a whole different beast. And it's not what people think of when they think of Africa, which is what I think is throwing people off here.
60 miles seems like a long range but Africa is really big and the ocean is even bigger.
The 60 miles is not a stationary no-go zone, it's a moving area that you use the sweep the ocean with against enemy submarines that have to transit at low speeds (like 4 knots) to preserve their fuel and endurance. And that's just with a towed array, using your onboard helicopter gets you even better range, potentially. It also lets you detect their snorkels.
here you use surface commerce raiders as disposable assets and Africa is toast (their aircraft are too rangecucked to fight a Battle of the Atlantic).
It seems to me that in certain formulations of the scenario, Africa is toast anyway, precisely because of the food insecurity issue. But assuming that they have ships and food left to import, it's worth noting that Algeria has MPAs, Egypt has E-2s, and there are at least three flat-top amphibs in Africa that I am familiar with. So doing maritime patrol work close to shore and escorting convoys and projecting power further away from it is quite possible for Africa until they hit intractable operability issues.
Shrike
6d ago
In-flight refueling (particularly combined with lighter weapons loads and drop tanks - although I don't know if Algeria bought any of those) would let them hit the French and likely British navy as well, if they thought to prioritize it.
Shrike
6d ago
South Africa isn't the only country with a domestic defense industry, although I'm not sure how much of Egypt's defense industry would run without foreign imports.
Shrike
7d ago
On a war footing, not very long,
Right, but if "not very long" is, say, a month, that's long enough to clobber every European navy (at least the ones within reach).
They'll be fine on small arms ammunition but get a pretty negligible advantage from that
I tend to agree here, although stuff like the RPG and modern towed arty is genuinely a big step up from what's being thrown around in 1939. The main advantage Africa would have would be modern NVGs and (more) modern tanks/AFVs, but I am not sure that's enough to actually be decisive.
Shrike
7d ago
Africa is not realistically building postwar-capability strategic bombers on their own
What makes you say this? Egypt and South Africa have both built jet engines. That's going to be the hardest part of, say, a 1960s-era bomber.
The European naval strategy would have to be "go where the enemy isn't" - U-boats were raiding Cape Town by 1941, so the African navy would be pinned to defending key ports.
U-boats in 1941 get easily pwned by even Cold War ASW destroyers with helicopters. "Who would win: a pre-war U-boat with limited underwater capacity, poor speed, and terrible quieting, or an ASW destroyer with active sonar, a helicopter, and a towed array meant to detected nuclear submarines with rafted machinery" is the "nuclear bomb versus coughing baby" question of this scenario. Very plausible for a single African destroyer to detect and destroy these submarines at 60 miles. The main risk is running out of ammunition (assuming basic technical competency and that the normal ASW equipment has been retained on these ships, which might not be the case.)
I think the only more uneven match-up is African strike aircraft against the European surface fleet.
Shrike
7d ago
It sort of depends on what you think is "irreplaceable." Africa manufactures their own RPGs, small arms ammunition, and bombs. Dumb bombs in particular aren't hard to manufacture at all, but plenty sufficient to sink European ships with ~impunity if you have jet aircraft. But I don't know how long the African air force could be maintained without technical expertise and spare parts from Russia and the United States.
Shrike
7d ago
The main argument against the air force being an auto-win condition is that without (mostly American, a little bit of Russian) technical support, they will have a limited useful life span and/or run out of munitions. However "no technical support" isn't really specified in the prompt one way or another.
Air forces by themselves typically don't win wars, though, and I think that Africa would have a hard time invading Europe (and vice versa).
Shrike
7d ago
Not just that - Africa is also reliant on commodity exports that would get wrecked by U-boats and commerce raiders. So no food and no money (except the suitcases of gold coming off of U-boats, courtesy of SIS and Abwehr).
I think that Africa's ability to defeat U-boats and commerce raiders is probably stronger than Europe's ability to field U-boats and commerce raiders, at least during the initial stage of the war.
The lack of food (if we're assuming they both get teleported to a world without preexisting trade) is going to be a massive problem. But this is also true for England, which imported even more of its food (although much of that was from other European sources)/
Shrike
7d ago
The high tech planes Africa has mostly don’t have range to bomb prime Europe
Algeria has air-to-air refueling. Tangier is 1500 miles from Berlin, which is within ferry range of Algerian strike aircraft, so it's very likely they could refuel over France and strike anywhere in Germany or England.
I think the actual problems are:
- Not knowing what exactly to target in 1939 Europe (this problem cuts both ways, of course!)
- Not being able to run enough strike aircraft to materially disrupt industrial supply chains, and
- Russia (assuming they are included)
The African win condition is to shock Europe into surrendering quickly and/or do enough material disruption to buy time to get their own industry spun up. I think they would have a hard time actually doing anything besides temporarily setting back European industrial might with their current aircraft inventories, but I do think they could pretty much knock out European naval power.
It's very ironic that as soon as Dase is banned, Anthropic announces they believe LLMs can do formal code verification at scale which (if true and if implemented) would massively vindicate his belief in "defender's advantage."
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