Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
3hr ago
Last night I was at a lib party so I took the uncontroversial Phantom of the Opera option, but I popped through Kabul recently and ended up with a full get-up to dress as Ahmad Shah Massoud - pajamas, vest, hat, etc. - so that's what I'm doing on the day itself. Rest in power, king.
Bartender_Venator
21hr ago
He's the first person I ever saw using AI in meaningfully creative ways. His AI opinions have always been impeccable and way ahead of the curve, it's his conversion to and newfound tone with anti-American geopolitics that understandably got people's hackles up.
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
We'll also probably see more of a resurgence of high-quality right-wing posting (and the disaffected liberals will come back). Don't get me wrong, I thank whichever gods sent us Trump every day, but there's a reason that the peaks of contemporary RW blogging, writing, theory, etc. were 2013-16 and 2021-23. When Trump is in power, he's the symbolic fulcrum of all political discourse, and so everything gets bogged down to the object-level. Whereas a Democratic administration is just the system working as normal, so one wants to start talking about systematic things again.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
You really just need to go down one or two social levels to find some very good indie lit about the white/white-enough-hispanic growing-up experience (because at that point drugs, dinergoth girls, etc. add some stakes). I would recommend Calvin Westra's work highly, as well as Mixtape Hyperborea.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Kindle books (I love paper books but very easy to lose track of time when using them to fill dead time)
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Yes, military grunts are known for their long-term thinking when it comes to e.g. not marrying strippers.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I would guess OP is not a native speaker of American English, and in that case likely has a different context for 'prejudice' than the way it's used in Anglo-American political arguments.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
It would be great for the boys, the problem is how a bunch of teenage girls would respond to having Mr. Lethally Dangerous Chad sitting around the place. Good for TFR, I guess.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
That's... what I said but with a different calculation (presumably assuming some more efficient design?).
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I am reacting to the original premise of LessWrong/rationalism, the idea that you can improve your life and decisions through the explicit cultivation of rational judgment, and the personality type it attracted 10-15 years ago. I'll leave it to the audience to decide who's acting unhinged.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Sorry, did I touch a nerve? The thing is, being the kind of guy who needs to do a GPT-style "Thinking..." before every line of dialogue is not being good at overcoming bias, it's figuring out how to spend a lot of your tokens to get where a wise dentist (a small subset of dentists, of course) just kind of is.
I give kudos to rationalists figuring out the importance of AI, but they were not exactly the first to do so (the theories they're working with have not meaningfully changed since Turing and von Neumann, they've just added a lot of epicycles on top of what the greats had figured in 1950). This has been a longtime preoccupation of the smartest people in tech, particularly when not distracted by profitable fads. Rationalism got them, through great struggle, where they should have been anyway. Which is great! You can get a lot of clarity out of not being an alcoholic, too.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I consider tanks and similar vehicles basically irrelevant, because, with African standards of maintenance, they break down even faster trying to cover meaningful stretches of ground. I doubt Team Africa's tanks even make it to the Pyrenees.
"Within reach" is the critical thing with respect to air/naval stuff. The Italian navy is just as fucked as they were in OTL 1939, but everyone else is fine.
Bartender_Venator
14d 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). Team Africa does have a lot of civilian jet engines and airliners they can repurpose, but that would take a lot of time and testing. Scaling things is also much harder in Africa than in Europe, whether it's precision technology or building roads, for cultural and presumably HBD reasons.
60 miles seems like a long range but Africa is really big and the ocean is even bigger. A 60-mile radius of Cape Town barely even covers False Bay. But you don't even want to use U-boats in this scenario - they needed them back in WWII, but 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). Willingness of the crews is an issue but OTL U-boat service was also largely a death sentence, and if we put that into the scenario we also have to ask how many African soldiers would be willing to charge machinegun nests. Note also that per Claude, Africa has ~17 ships capable of modern ASW, plus a comparable number of their own submarines. These would have to be put in a basically defensive posture imo to keep key ports safe and stop raiders from rounding the Cape.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
The average human is really really dumb, but there are also plenty of normal people who are not like that and didn't need to spend years reading LessWrong to get there. The positive side of the Rationalist coin is that it was a really effective program for self-improvement for nerdy tech people to deal with their struggles with overcoming bias, which helps them thinking about the things they're building, which have turned out to be the most important things in the world. But it's like saying people in Alcoholics Anonymous are really good at not drinking.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
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.
On a war footing, not very long, and the parts won't be replaced domestically (the idea of an African war economy just doesn't work. North African countries maintain the militaries they do by putting much their best human capital into it, sustained by resource sales to fund foreign imports and expertise, so IMO their best shot is to carefully husband modern weapons to support the conscript zerg rush at key points). Egypt has a wild hodgepodge of aircraft that are all incompatible. Algeria a bit more robust because of their Russian connection, but not great either. Morocco, pretty good. South Africa, well. Given their relatively short range and limited number of fires, they can't do sufficient strategic bombing to knock out industry, and they'll lack the ground attack capabilities which were so important in WWII. They'll be fine on small arms ammunition but get a pretty negligible advantage from that - the first African casualties/prisoners mean that European industry will switch over entirely to the AK-47, it's not exactly rocket science to make.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Africa is not realistically building postwar-capability strategic bombers on their own (and I've commented below on nuke capacity), but a Boeing 777 modified to drop barrels of chemical weapons from above the ceiling of early-war fighters is definitely within the realm of possibility. 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.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Even if something does lower Yud's p(doom) you shouldn't expect him to be honest about that. I think he's being outwardly honest, though, you can see the rationalizations churning in his head - starting with "well Roon you just don't understand how my super special theory is different and unfalsifiable", giving the most uncharitable reading of the paper possible to minimize it, and then finally groping for an analogy. But Yud has a book to talk now, and human beings are very good at convincing themselves to talk their book.
I'm not really surprised by rationalists being like this. First off, it was a movement which explicitly selected for people who struggled with naturally, what's the phrase, "overcoming bias" (non-rationalists who do this naturally do it in very fuzzy ways, the classic intelligence/wisdom thing). Secondly, as TLP likes to say, knowledge is a defense against change.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
He really cares about real estate in general, look at how he talks about the White House.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I recall that back before AIAYN came out, most of the buzz in the air about a potential breakthrough was around LSTMs.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Hm, just considered a possible offensive strategy for Africa - concentrate all their modern assets at the Pillars of Hercules and the Sinai, use their limited stock of modern weapons to cross into Spain (saving some to force a crossing of the Bosporus), zerg rush up Southern Spain and the Middle East (if the scenario allows), use Toyota warfare fueled by Algerian/Libyan petrol for logistics and mobility, modern civilian airliners for key supplies (can fly above the combat ceiling of early-war fighters, landing protected by MANPADs), otherwise rely for resupply on capturing European equipment and using local slave labour to run captured industries. You probably end up with grinding mountain warfare with both sides basically using WWII tech with some modern stuff sprinkled in, Africa having a much larger population but far lower-quality troops. Still almost certainly a win for Team Europe (I would guess Spain stabilizes at the Pyrenees, at which point the front is reliant on the Spanish munitions industry and a trickle of North African weapons production and ends up outgunned, and the Balkans is just infinite mountains full of racist guerillas), but a better show for Team Africa than sitting around being raided to death like a Japan with no navy.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
The sheer size of Africa also means it can be modeled as a relatively small set of logistical chokepoints that control the entire continent, and capturing or knocking out one generally means that area is taken out of the war, since the logistics are not joined up between different regions. Team Africa would need to spread their limited and irreplaceable modern weapons around the continent for coastal defense (e.g. South Africa currently has just two Gripens and 3/4 Hawks available, with the entire helicopter fleet grounded for lack of fuel), with a rapid reaction force of infantry flying around in commercial planes to respond to any landings.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
South Africa actually retains a fair amount of its HEU, enough for 2-3 1945-level nukes. I doubt their capacity to build it into a functioning bomb (particularly if the power blocs around are allowed to use espionage and sabotage), given that everyone involved in the 1970s program is either dead or very elderly. But they have no enrichment capacity and would have to rebuild that from scratch.
Other issues are like Africa only supplies 2/3 of their food supply I’ve seen so internal riots on food are an issue.
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).
Someone on Twitter pointed out that the best first move for Europe would be to raid Cape Town and capture the Air Force museum there, get the jets on a ship and reverse-engineer them, which I found quite amusing. I'd also suggest beelining to what remains of the University of Cape Town library (it burnt down a couple years back, in large part because the University neglected to clean the roof gutters) and looting the science and engineering section.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Notice how there's a massive gulf (even in Hoffmeister's maximally generous list) between the looks of "stand-up comedians" and "screen actresses who specialize in comedy". One gets paid a lot more for a much more pleasant job.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
What a perfect typo.
Cappuccino for me, on the rare occasion I drink coffee. Espresso if you're in a rush in Europe. Yes, it's totally normal to drink espresso with lots of sugar, and a good place will also give you a little cup of water to wash it down. What makes coffee a "girl drink" is adding pumps of syrup or weird sweet flavours to it, outside of countries that have traditional flavoured sweet coffees like Venezuela or Thailand.
Speaking of which - half and half? Americans, what is wrong with you? I'd rather drink the most scorched black coffee on the planet than have whatever that is floating curdled in my drink.
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