Shrike
1hr ago
Where's the satellite (or other) evidence that "most of IAF" was destroyed on the runway a few days ago?
The “laundry fire” on the Gerald R. Ford was so bad that there are now serious concerns the ship will never sail again.
The Ford is currently in Norfolk. If the US had the ability to transport it there from Greece without it sailing, then I seriously doubt Iran is winning the war.
...anyway, on that note, the Ford is currently in Norfolk, within camera range of passing ships. Should be pretty trivial to determine if she's been hit by antiship missiles.
Shrike
17hr ago
$250,000 would be the high end of a normal range for a domestic surrogacy from what I understand, with the low end being something like $60,000 if you don't go through an agency or go international.
Average cost of a wedding in the United States is about $35,000, and of course higher if international.
If you were correct that modernity was one big one way ratchet against the ability of young men to reproduce it would be illegal as well as immoral.
Shrike
18hr ago
Sex and reproduction aren't the same thing, though, and reproduction is arguably easier for men now that it's fairly straightforward to contract it out.
Shrike
1d ago
Superpersuasive, it ain't.
And if Mythos was, then Fable wouldn't be BANNED.
...unless it was all part of the plan...
Shrike
5d ago
Regionalizing the internet wouldn't shut down access to Chinese open-source AI or Japanese manga and anime.
Shrike
5d ago
Ah, gotcha.
I...sort of hope the internet gets regionalized, to be quite honest.
Shrike
6d ago
I think it can be pretty easily, Anthropic has been using Mythos internally for some time now.
Shrike
9d ago
Aren't most of the high-end AI chips a bit unwieldy to build gaming rigs with? And I feel like the same people who would want to build a massive gaming rig would also not want to stream their game from a server in the middle of nowhere somewhere.
Although now that you mention it, perhaps the Sea Power fanatics would probably accept a little bit of lag if it could let them play through "The Dance of the Vampires" from Red Storm Rising...
Shrike
9d ago
The datacenters which were built will still be there and still be useful for 'conventional' computing.
Isn't the specialized AI hardware being rolled out considered inefficient for general purpose computing, though?
Shrike
9d ago
Take this with a grain of salt because it isn't my area of expertise and I am dashing this off to you as a quick reply rather than doing a half-hour's worth of research to verify, but I tend to expect a slowdown in the nearish future for two reasons:
- The major developers (Anthropic, OpenAI) are running a fundamentally unsustainable business model and need insane amounts of revenue generation to be sustainable. They've hiked prices recently and the response from Big Tech was to crack down on the AI compute spend. That's not a good sign - who's going to spend millions on AI if Uber or Zillow won't? Not people making HTML browser games and memes for kicks, that's for sure.
- Despite all the breathless takes about how good The Next Model is, from what I've seen (very casually, so I might deserve correction here) the direction the models are going isn't "Anthropic's Gigamonster: now hallucinates half as much time as Gila Monster for only 110% of the inference," it's "Anthropic's Fable now hallucinates 10% less than Sonnet for only 300% of the inference." On the one hand, hallucinating only, say, 10% of the time rather than 20% of the time is a big difference, I'm not suggesting there's no gains being made. But from what I can tell, the so-called "leading edge" models are using tremendously more compute to make relatively minor absolute gains. Everyone focuses on the trendline going up but if you model it as performance-per-cost from what I can tell there's an argument the trendline is going down.
Now note that the trendline can be qualitative as well as quantitative - so for instance Haiku is just straight-up better at performing simple math than Opus or something (it will get the answers right much more cheaply) but if you're getting into something that Opus can't do but maybe Fable can - okay, maybe you're okay paying twice as much. But that general trend, I think, suggests that pushing the frontier is growing more costly, which is not ideal for an infinite recursion scenario. If you get to the point where "sure okay we can make Deus Ex but it will cost the moon if it was made of gold to run" that's another way of saying it won't get made and if it is nobody will run it.
Note that I'm not an "AI denier" or something, and I don't think that anything that I am talking about will cause AI to go away like it never existed. But I think that a world where we have AI slowdown because the demand for compute at prices that make it solvent isn't there to the extent to support the overhead to keep pushing the frontier forward is pretty plausible. A world where the US government bails out AI and then nobody ever sees Mythos again also seems pretty plausible. But both of those scenarios will look - at least temporarily - like an LLM fizzle (unless the .gov makes Skynet real, I guess - my guess is that they are more likely to use it to gundeck mandatory paperwork, hacking, and programming, though, not stick it in a bunch of robots.).
Shrike
9d ago
Sure, a hostile AI that goes full Skynet is unlikely to get everyone in the first pass with bioweapons, but if the AI is not destroyed or crippled beyond repair in that chaos then you're just the last light to go out; the cleanup robots will break open your bunker months or years later and there's fuck-all you can do about it.
Yeah but
- this is yet another scenario where having a hedge helps you live longer and makes it more likely that you do survive, and
- this scenario isn't, like, real - Skynet is fictitious and the real dangerous capabilities that AI has, although probably currently overblown (remember when GPT 2 was too dangerous to release?) are more likely to generate a catastrophic scenario that you can hedge against than one you can't. This is just a probability curve.
I think a key point here is that most of the scenarios you're thinking of where there's a standard catastrophe are subsets of "AI fizzle"
It's true that I think it's more likely than not that large language models "fizzle" in the very specific sense that they don't become physics-defying literal deus ex machinas.
Shrike
10d ago
I agree with @DradisPing that the Communists were terrible (although this didn't necessarily have anything to do with their talent pool; Soviet engineers were very innovative). I have an earlier comment where I compare Russia to other countries, and it seems fairly clear to me that despite being dealt a bad hand (despairing population, low TFR) Russia has a low debt-to-GDP ratio, fairly high GDP PPP per capita, and fewer drug deaths (per capita) than the US - all the sorts of managerial items that suggest, to me, fairly good governance.
Another way of looking at it is that Russia's GDP PPP is above (or roughly on par with) Estonia and Latvia (but behind Poland and Lithuania) even though it has less debt than those countries! And the Baltics and Poland have been in the EU for twenty years!
I think this framing is overly reductive and simplistic, but to me it strikes me the same way it would if you had two siblings, one of whom moved into the city, got their bachelor's, and enjoyed all that market access had to offer, and the other stayed in their small hometown. If you checked back in in 20 years and you found that one of them hadn't paid off their (substantial) student loans despite working a well-paying job in the big city while the other's only substantial debt was a mortgage, and they both had a house and a car and a TV, you'd have to conclude the second brother was better at managing his money. If the second brother had managed to accomplish that despite crippling depression and a year in jail for a DUI you'd be more impressed by his self-management, not less.
Caveat that the war may change all of this in the long term.
I think AI makes a lot of ‘traditional’ prepper collapse scenarios much less likely in an all-or-nothing way.
You have to measure against the base rate for a traditional prepper collapse scenario. I think AI makes precisely the prepper collapse scenario more likely because it may increase the power and competency of evil actors to generate a temporary period of unrest or insecurity, precisely the sort of scenario the rural homestead best insulates against (as opposed to things like "global warming," "nuclear winter," "systematic famine," "bad political developments," all of which a rural homestead is better-than-nothing for, but ultimately still potentially insufficient.) The actual best prepping plan is probably not the rural homestead so much as it is the small community (rural homestead being not incompatible with this).
Confusing this scenario (plausible using existing AI demonstrated capabilities) with Terminator is exactly the sort of unhelpful conflation that I am talking about - the more I learn about AI and its capabilities, the less confident I am that a Terminator scenario is in the cards, and the more likely I think a human-directed threat or limited malfunction is.
But of course in this scenario your investment strategies can go beyond prepping - for instance if you think that AI is going to tank tech stocks, you can invest in real estate; if you think AI is going to make hostile foreign actors more effective you can invest in defense stocks, etc. etc.
Shrike
10d ago
Seems like a category error to me: Russia is a nation-state, not a population. And if you're trying to suggest that Russia is a low-IQ nation, I don't think that's right. Russia is much like the United States of America, a geographically large multi-ethnic society. Its sharpest people are pretty sharp (in fact, there's an argument to be made that it's leadership class is better than Western equivalents, but that's a bit ol' tangent).
Shrike
10d ago
Aren't there a lot of high IQ women who married wealthy people and had lots of kids? Angelina Jolie had three kids (and adopted 3 more), Melinda Gates had three kids, MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott) had four...the scheme of getting society to idealize women like this has its problems, but I doubt it's due to a lack of examples.
And yes, these aren't great examples, but I suspect that's sampling bias due to notoriety; if you dig a bit you can find hundreds more women who were smart and talented, married smart and talented men, had 2 - 5 children, and didn't end up in front-page-divorce proceedings.
Shrike
10d ago
I think Point 1 really obscures a lot of bad AI outcomes by cloaking them in the most dramatic one. It is much, much more likely that AI does (or is used to do) something "mundane" like a superengineered virus or destroying the internet. (The latter may already be happening - it won't be a one-time event, just a slow but steady string of incidents that make the internet as we know it insecure and see the migration of core functions away from it.)
Lumping all other bad AI outcomes under "AI destroys the world" is a terrible idea, particularly when considering investing. Destroying the world is very hard to do, it's much more likely that any damage done by AI is far short of "destroying the world" and there is a considerable overlap between "world not destroyed" and "very bad outcomes for human flourishing, civilization and society." If you accept what should be very obvious - that it's much more likely that AI ends up creating the conditions for a catastrophic scenario that does not instantly kill you than one that destroys the world or at least you personally - then there are pretty decent investment strategies at your fingertips.
Shrike
11d ago
My hot take is that these sorts of stories reflect more on the ethics of journalists than escorts or the nerds using them. You've already gotten a variety of comments saying "duh." What irritates me about these sorts of stories is that (as @ToaKraka points out) this is an extremely unrepresentative sample of escorts. But there are a number of people who read things like this and think "well for that price I'd do that" and the most likely outcome is that they do that and don't make that price.
Traditional morality was much better at not talking about things than it was stopping things from happening but I think at the end of the day that extra layer of friction - refusing to discuss such things in polite society, highlighting the downsides through didactic tales - serves a function, not in absolutely preventing vice, but in stopping people who might be enticed into thinking (incorrectly! at least statistically speaking) that such a path is a get-rich-quick scheme with few downsides.
There are, however, downsides to this approach, including making it easier to conceal misconduct, so I am not necessarily calling for a RETVRN here. And no, this is not a "we should get rid of the freedom of speech" comment, but there are certain ethical consequences to failing to properly contextualize things and the world is a better place when people try to do that. (One of the upsides of The Motte!)
Shrike
16d ago
Yeah, Albert Sydney Johnston surviving Shiloh is a much more interesting and probably more relevant counterfactual than all of the "what if Lee had won at Gettysburg" ones people like to toss around. Not only was Johnston considered an excellent commander, possibly the best going into the war, but general historiography really overlooks how much damage the losses in the Western theater after his death did to the Confederacy, focusing instead on the Eastern campaigns.
He bled out with a tourniquet in his pocket, too.
Shrike
16d ago
Due to treaty drawdowns and increased targeting, there's barely enough nuclear weapons to shoot at the primary targets, let alone throw spares at random third parties.
If Russia and the US got into a nuclear tiff and they both went countervalue, things could be really nasty. But if they went for counterforce, I think the overall impact in terms of "damage to civilization" would be more like, say, COVID than Max Max Part 0.
Shrike
22d ago
5 years from 12 - 13 is 17 - 18.
Only two US states have an age of (marital) consent that is above 18, and a majority of states permit marriage at 16 or younger under certain circumstances (such as parental and/or judicial consent.)
Plenty of people marry their high school sweetheart after graduation. Waiting ten years from 11 - 13 is marrying your college sweetheart after graduation, another thing plenty of people do.
This has got to be one of my favorite YouTube genres.
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