DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
13hr ago
Basically the problem is that the post major conflict state building is delegated to the State Department. They have been consistently unable to build functional states. They are too egotistical to admit this. They are too powerful for anyone else in government to say it.
So the strategy has been to tell the WH that things are going great and the US should be able to withdraw in a year or so. As that deadline approaches, senior DOS people call a panicked evening meeting with POTUS and insist that due to unforeseen complications things will need to be pushed back another year. Meanwhile they never even started planning the withdrawal.
With Biden either due to his health or stubbornness they couldn't get the panicked evening meeting. So they ended up having to execute a withdrawal they didn't actually even start planning.
DradisPing
15hr ago
A new Bobiverse book "The Infinite Extent" by Dennis E. Taylor came out last week and I really enjoyed it.
I'm a big Dennis E. Taylor fan. I recommend his entire catalog apart from the Quantum Earth series.
DradisPing
13d ago
Anti-trust enforcement is driven by the anti-trust division of the DOJ, and others in the DOJ police that division.
Like so many things, the risks of anti-trust enforcement depend on who you've made friends with in DC.
DradisPing
13d ago
I'd say that they screenwriters were going for a movie that can be interpreted either way, as the would be more in the spirit of PKD.
Spielberg was probably more focussed on making sure that it worked well as a straightforward popcorn movie than keeping it ambiguous. But he probably tried to a little without compromising enjoyment.
I'm not really a fan of the idea that there's a singular interpretation. Collective creative projects usually end up as a bit of an interesting mess where things are unclear.
DradisPing
13d ago
Not me personally, but I had friends walk out on Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. That one was legitimately terrible.
I'm a bit more selective up front and generally I can appreciate the cinematography if the rest of the movie isn't holding up.
DradisPing
16d ago
Beans don't cause problems for me.
But once I looked up glycemic indices and tried replacing rice with pearl barley cooked in stock.
It was tasty but I have never experienced gas like that in my life. I could feel my entire rectum open to let it out. I spent the next day sitting in bed debating a trip to the ER.
DradisPing
25d ago
I don't think that exists... Tooling is still at the point where you need to adapt your workflow for the tools available or build your own.
Everything will be a lot smoother if you can get a setup working with obsidian plugins or use claude code / codex on a git controlled directory.
DradisPing
25d ago
It's not a big deal here.
Also it's probably less cerebral than I'm making it out to be. I'm reminded of how during Trump 1 he could suck the air out of the room by making things about him whenever he wasn't in the news.
DradisPing
26d ago
So I'd argue that policy proposals like that are just a rhetorical technique. They aren't serious attempts at a solution.
They want to keep the public debate away from topics that could actually hurt them -- in this case that the hiring practices of prestigious schools are laughable and indefensible.
But Arday is a topic of public discussion. So they need to railroad the conversation by taking it in new directions that can't harm them.
The obvious flaws in the proposed law are a feature. It's difficult for people to hear about it and not immediately start explaining the problems with it.
Basically it's the "Nerd Sniping" XKCD comic.
DradisPing
29d ago
Progressive academics paint themselves into a corner.
Smart black people certainly exist. However they usually have a few opinions about the black community or white liberals that are considered unacceptable.
So they ended up hiring a mentally ill con man who was good at not saying anything that would ruffle the wrong feathers. Then they gave him the star treatment because it's hard to find someone like that.
I think that everyone on that hiring committee needs to resign, but that's not going to happen.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So I'm still plugging away on my silly Minecraft project.
I integrated the Starlark scripting into the MCP. It works well and it solved the "too many tool calls" problem.
A couple of videos demoing stuff below. There's the Starlark service generating buildings and it also has a library of schematics tagged in elastic search.
Claude and Codex both mostly went with Starlark example files and things from the schematic library. One problem I have is that there's no rollback function so I can't tell it what it did wrong. It would have been a better demo if they had come up with some unique buildings, which they can do.
It does love to just paste in long identical surfaces. I'm wondering if I can do some sort of auto-greebling pass to make things more interesting.
The underground dungeon does mix things up a bit, I added some randomness to the dungeon example file.
https://rumble.com/v7dziqq-minecraft-starlark-mcp-demo-build.html
https://rumble.com/v7dzjvc-vibebuilding-in-minecraft-with-mcp.html
DradisPing
1mo ago
Ok so this list I was thinking of was this: United Nations list of non-self-governing territories
It just looks like it's mostly about hating anglos.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Yeah that game has dynamic difficulty. If you're on a roll then it will hit you back hard after a while.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Spain is amusing because the left always goes out of their way to excuse / ignore behaviour they condemn elsewhere.
eg
- Spain built border walls to defend their African holdings while condemning border walls in Israel and Easter Europe.
- Ceuta is typically left off of lists of extant colonial holdings while places like the Falklands are kept on.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The Israel connection is a bit of a red herring IMHO.
What's hilarious is that this is being organized by the AMDH (Moroccan Association for Human Rights). The AMDH is funded by the EU, because of course it is.
You'd think that funding an organization pushing to reconquer EU territory would be against some rule or another, but no.
DradisPing
1mo ago
It's just my intuition. I'm not saying it's widespread.
It just seems to me that given how long the technology has been around and the successes in plants & animals it'd be very surprising if there have been zero human births.
Probably just starts with removing a gene for a major risk like Huntington's then while they're in there make sure the kid doesn't get the alcoholism gene or a known low IQ gene.
DradisPing
1mo ago
There's not really that much use for human cloning. The result is a baby with specific genes, but there are still all the stochastic differences from growing from embryo to baby to adult.
It's possible that China has a secret lab full of Terance Tao clones to work on future government project but it's not clear if there would be any ROI from that.
Now, rich parents secretly / quietly using CRISPR to try to give advantages to their future children? Definitely happening.
DradisPing
1mo ago
For boba, some how the tapioca balls and foreign origin let people pretend that they aren't just drinking a warm milkshake.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So Starbucks basically serves two markets. It has a lot of dairy heavy sweet beverages young women love. It also served the strongest coffee in the world caffeine-wise.
People talk about strong European coffee, but those are only strong flavour-wise.
For the first 20 years or so of it's existence no one was blasting you with caffeine in the morning like Starbucks. It fuelled the first dot com boom.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The pre-K thing is probably about address verification. Some parents will use a relative's apartment as their address to get their kid into a more desirable school.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So more work on my ongoing quest for AI building in Minecraft.
Exposing primitives via MCP resulted in too many tool calls. Claude could build some neat stuff but it was very slow. Also a bit prone to making mistakes.
I thought I could fix things by adding in a service to use prebuilt schematics. I found an archive of schematic files, generated isometric images from them, had a local gemma3 classify them, and set up an elastic search service so the MCP could search for models by tags.
It worked pretty well for things like "generate a medieval village" but the gemma3 tags weren't great at providing useful info and I'm probably going to have issues if I try to redistribute those schematic files.
Also it's fundamentally limited, I'm going for structures I've never dreamt of.
So I figured that LLMs are good at writing code.
So I'm currently working on using Starlark scripts to generate nbt files. It's basically a flexible component system. Local only, I haven't wired it into the MCP yet.
Claude and Codex are pretty good at looking at an existing schematic and generating a script for a similar building. Results are a bit more mixed when given only simple instructions.
To really get it working I'll need to add in a lot of validations about wether you can path from the entrance to a room / floor. Then for MCP integration I'll need to have a whole system about returning errors and explaining problems.
I'll need to drop some kind of major info dump on the llm that explains how to use it all.
One day a kid will be able to type "generate an epic murder dungeon and teleport my friends there" and my goal will be complete.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So my take is that Dario really likes the Biden era AI plan where there would be a small number of officially sanctioned companies who worked with government on regulation and all other AI vendors would be effectively banned.
He thinks that by making threats and warnings he can get that back.
However he is bad at politics. He doesn't seem to grasp that the Trump admin isn't going to give him any control over government policies. They are philosophically opposed to a setup where the elected President has to follow the dictates of a specific citizen with no constitutional authority.
The Fable block is best understood in this light.
"Our model is so dangerous! Congress must act to regulate us!"
"We can regulate you without Congress."
So I think we're going to see a long series of events where Anthropic pokes the government and the government smacks them down. At least for the rest of Trump's term.
Dario might end up putting himself in a position where's he's ousted. I think that's more likely than him learning to back down.
DradisPing
2mo ago
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was blocking National Guard from staying at DC hotels in 2020 and was arguing that the Third Amendment prevented the feds from overriding. It never went to trial. You could run with that idea pretty easily.
DradisPing
2mo ago
So these long term Senators are senior members of both political factions and patronage networks.
Those don't have any legally recognized structure. So it's hard to transition them to a new leader.
Basically if Mitch dies then a lot of his friends and long time supporters are likely to get cut off by the next guy. Even if he carefully tries to arrange a successor, which is hard given nominations and elections, the new guy will have his own allies so Mitch's guys are probably still going to face reduced access.
Also the Senate does a lot of things by seniority. So his replacement will automatically be less powerful as a freshman Senator.
A retiring long serving Senator needs to find two replacements, one for their seat and one for their political power. Not easy to set up.
They are operating on the idea that one of the frontier companies will make a major breakthrough that creates an insurmountable lead. Using customer data and a superhuman AGI they'll be able to immediately move into multiple high profit industries and take over.
The problem they are having is that so far training better models seems to be able to suck up an unlimited amount of money. That was unexpected.
Also the open models have been better at keeping up than they expected. You can fine tune the open models for specific tasks and get "good enough" results.
So they are in a weird spot since there are so man unknown unknowns. There are potentially massive returns. The huge costs are all in training models, so if they cut that back and just run inference with existing models then they can immediately become profitable. They can get to work doing low level speed optimizations on existing models and build out more capacity that way.
Right now they're going for a moon shot, but they can scale back training without being forced to sell of the companies at the risk of losing their leads.
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