RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It doesn't specify. But it's not weak liquor.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Gas chambers got a bad rep. Also it's clownish and unbefitting.
More seriously, executions aren't complicated. It's pre-bronze age social technology. There's nothing in practical terms that makes it difficult or costly, it's a political and social construct to make them slow and expensive. Other people have different social constructs.
See what they do in Taiwan:
Executions are carried out by shooting using a handgun aimed at the heart from the back, or aimed at the brain stem under the ear if the prisoner had consented to organ donation prior to the withdrawal of legal death row organ donation.[27] The execution time used to be 5:00 a.m., but was changed to 9:00 p.m. in 1995 to reduce officials' workload. It was changed again to 7:30 p.m. in 2010.[28] Executions are performed in secret: nobody is informed beforehand, including the condemned. The condemned is brought to the execution range and the officers may pay respect to the statue of Ksitigarbha located outside the range before entering. Before the execution, the prisoner's identity is confirmed by a special court next to the execution range and chooses to record any last words. The prisoner is then brought to the execution range and served a last meal (which usually includes a bottle of kaoliang wine).[28] The condemned prisoner is then injected with strong anaesthetic to cause unconsciousness, laid flat on the ground, face down, and shot. The executioner then burns a votive bank note for the deceased before carrying away the corpse.[28] It is tradition for the condemned to place a NT$500 or 1000 banknote in his leg irons as a tip for the executioners.[28]
I was so disbelieving I checked the wikipedia source, apparently they really do tip the executioner (specifically the guys who take the shackles off the body after the shooting).
RationalWiki has to be one of the most cringeworthy sites around.
Everything is written with the kind of contemptuous, snarky tone that you see on the incels.wiki page for 'femoids'. At least the incels are succinct.
For instance, on the Vladimir Putin page for instance they have "Reality-defying good stuff?" and "And the reality-returning bad stuff" as sections. 'Elderly imperialist Elmer Fudd and Daniel Craig’s evil twin.' is not an appropriate subtitle for an image.
The US has formally decreed who gets GPUs and who doesn't. Here's a map:
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1877773878858047608
Tier 1: The U.S. and 18 allies (including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, French Guiana, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, and the U.K.) will have 'near-unrestricted access' to advanced AI processors developed in the U.S. That rule will apply provided they meet U.S. security requirements and do not install over 25% their processing capabilities outside of Tier 1 countries.
Tier 2 countries include Portugal, Poland, Ukraine, Singapore, the UAE... (understandable since the UAE and Singapore are generally thought to be leaking GPUs on to China). But it's a pretty big snub to Poland and Portugal IMO, they're in NATO. I guess Trump's disdain for American allies is not totally unique to him. In practice though, this doesn't mean that much since it's not like Poland will need tens of thousands of GPUs in the next two years. India is also in tier 2, though again they're not really organized enough to get very far anyway. I think Tier 2 is anyone who is considered untrustworthy (and who can afford to be snubbed). Poland won't stop licking America's boots so who cares what they think? Or perhaps they're distrusting of Eastern Europeans generally.
Tier 3 are the US's primary enemies, the usual suspects.
I doubt that in practice this will have much impact. China is already very good at siphoning away US-made GPUs or accessing them via the cloud and they also have their own GPU industry. Their GPUs are qualitatively inferior to Nvidia but there is nothing stopping them from dedicating all leading-edge wafer production to GPUs and just eating higher power costs in datacentres. China is not short on electrical power production. China's AI development speed depends primarily on the seriousness of the government and only secondarily on sanctions, there are many things they could do to speed things up. For instance, China could redirect compute resources to Deepseek who has tiny allocations of compute even by Chinese standards. They could mobilize tens of millions to provide annotated high quality data, or at least block US companies buying training data from them...
Everyone else is too far behind the curve to matter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
I don't know when it was posted, it does sound like after, but my general recollection is that Trump was not calling for an armed coup, he was constantly emphasising, before and after, that protestors needed to be peaceful.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Food for thought:
Trump post contemporary with Jan 6th: "The election was stolen, we all know that, it sucks... But you have to go home, we need peace, we need law and order, we can't play into their hands, we need peace".
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
These things are explicitly designed to prevent anyone accessing them without authorization, I think they're quite complex. In theory of course you can jailbreak them but the Ukrainians had trouble doing so. Do we really want a nuclear Ukraine, a nuclear Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan? Hey, the Baltics were part of the Union, a dozen warheads each? Armenia and Azerbaijan immediately went to war, did they deserve a few H-bombs to liven up the South Caucasus?
Some would probably fall into the hands of Chechen or other Islamist terrorists in the confusion of the 1990s. It's amazing that none did in real life. Moscow took Soviet debt and the permanent UN seat, they might as well have the nukes too and keep the command and control system that was set up working.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Photos taken seconds (months) before disaster: https://www.kqed.org/science/1994972/forest-service-halts-prescribed-burns-california-worth-risk
This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.
“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”
You can only backburn at certain times of year. It worsens air quality. There are risks of it getting out of hand. But if you don't do it...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
I too am making a game. I don't know a damn thing about product release or marketing. All I have is this tweet for a marketing strategy, it seems pretty sound to me: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819790369166430275
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
They have permissive action links though, nukes are unlike other weapons in that they don't 'just work'. Only decisionmakers in Moscow could fire them (otherwise any rogue commander could go and write Dr Strangelove fanfiction in the history books).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?
Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.
I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o
There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.
Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.
Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790
There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064
IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.
However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:
The situation in Pacific Palisades is devastating, heartbreaking, and is also the most “California” thing to happen in California.
The homes burning down are $5M+ homes in neighborhoods surrounded by 1000s of other $5M+ homes.
Owning a $5M house in CA means you pay about $60,000 per year in property taxes.
So you and thousands of your neighbors all pay $60,000 or $80,000 or $120,000, or way more in property taxes every year.
And when a wildfire comes down the hill toward your neighborhood, the firefighters show up and there’s no water in the fire hydrants.
Never change, California.
Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
I can see you put lots of thought into this. I'm not one of those people who holds the secrets of the universe in terms of aviation... I sense you have some expertise here, not everyone knows what NATOPs is.
But I still find myself thinking 'if three loyal wingman are good, a swarm of four should be better (and without the vulnerability and expense of the manned fighter)'. Flying a fighter jet is hard work, especially if you're managing all this tech in addition to your usual workload. You might have a weapons officer devoted just to managing the swarm. And then who is doing the ECM and other duties?
Can't we program AI pilots to not destroy the aircraft in flight? Isn't that what fly-by-wire does? Can't we program an AI to go 'if the situation is desperate give it a go, burn out those engines to scrape out a victory'? Or use the gun in an aggressive way that a human surely wouldn't have the precision reflexes for? AI doesn't neccessarily have to be an ultra-rule-abiding automaton stuck with orthodox tactics, as you point out it can also be a risktaker daredevil ready to sacrifice to get the mission done. It will be whatever we program it to be.
And sure, using the gun is unlikely. But if the goal is flinging missiles at long range and then dodging the missile coming back at you, that seems like a job for a machine. Faster turns, perhaps accelerating in directions that are particularly dangerous for humans.
Imagine if all the instruments in the cockpit were gone, if the blazingly high-tech helmets didn't even need to exist. No need for air pressurization, no need for this big circular space and glass canopy in the aircraft. It could be super-thin or superior in some design respects without having the trade-off of having a cockpit. Lower complexity.
Imagine if the maintenance costs on these fighters were dramatically cut because the pilots didn't need to keep up flight hours. That's a huge saving. No trainer aircraft!
Maybe you could use less reliable engines, crank out airframes that aren't expected to last 20 years because they don't constantly need to be flown to train the pilots. We could have the T-34 1942 of aircraft, a reign of quantity. As far as I can see, Loyal Wingmen cost 1/3 or 1/4 as much as a manned fighter over the whole lifetime. So going from 4 manned fighters to 12 unmanned isn't that unreasonable. You might say their capabilities are inferior but the F-35 somehow has a shorter range than a significantly shorter MQ-28, there are swings and roundabouts.
And why the hell are civilian planes flying over airspace where there are two airforces slugging it out? I can see the issue here but you could make an AI subroutine that assesses 'is this really a civilian aircraft - judging speed, radar imagery, size, IR and visual evidence? Is it dumping flares? Is it shrouding a smaller drone?' You could customize the AI's defcon level depending on the mission, so to speak. Anyway, civilian aircraft get shot down all the time by air defences, accidents happen. I don't know what was going on in Azerbaijan or in Yemen, where the US was shooting at their own plane. Perhaps the software was to blame, perhaps it was human error. I don't see how there's a significant edge there for human systems, they're plenty fallible.
I agree completely with what you predict is happening, the new Chinese jet looks rather like a rear-line combat aircraft. Maybe that's where NGAD is heading too. Loyal Wingmen are great. But why not move faster?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Interesting points. In the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe AI aircraft would be more tactically flexible since you can change up their training in a quick update though I can see how it would also be bad if you had software leaks. But the F-35 software has already been leaked to China half a dozen times, they even have gotten some Chinese made parts into the supply chain.
Also one hopes that they'd put visual cameras on the plane. They already do I think, F-35 pilots have AR that lets them see through the plane I believe.
Even then, I still expect that the unmanned aircraft's advantages in price, quality and scale would be enormous. It wouldn't be 4 fighters going out on that mission, you could have 12 or 16 because training fighter pilots is inherently costly and slow. You would have smaller, faster and more agile aircraft, without human limitations. Whatever crazy dodging a human could do, the machine would easily surpass in terms of g-forces. Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.
You could afford to lose those jets on risky missions - even suicide missions if you decided the gains were worth it.
Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.
They do care but only marginally. I was in a discussion just recently. A quasi steelman of their position (copperman?) is that yes, rapes may have happened and political correctness may have contributed to the police failing. HOWEVER, Elon Musk is just bringing up this against Keir for political reasons. The people who bring this up have an agenda, they're motivated and they won't give you the full context. If you have the full context you'd probably find it's a very murky situation and there are no clear goodies and baddies. By the way, you can't find the full context because there's nobody who's disinterested in this so don't even try (also I can't be bothered to look into this, it's not my problem). Every big prosecutor has 10 cases out of 3000 that look pretty bad, Elon is just singling out Keir because he can. What are you supposed to do, get it right every time?
Furthermore, judges frequently let out criminals they thought were truly guilty because that's how the law works (judge says 'I wouldn't say frequently' in reply). Anyway, it was a breakdown in communications, these things just slip through the cracks, it wouldn't be fair to hold anyone accountable for it. Police corruption and institutional failure does sometimes happen but we should be very wary of people who say the police are covering it up or that the authorities have failed us because that's what far-right people and schizos say. Most people who say this are schizos or liars. And there were all these times people were arrested for pedophilia despite not being pedophiles because the wrong people were listened to...
TLDR; rule of law > catching pedophiles and taking them out of circulation. Elon and the far-right are in the wrong here.
Perhaps you can tell from my tone that I don't really agree with this, I find the argument motivated to be maximally unfalsifiable. You could use this kind of reasoning to justify everything, there's a kind of meta-cherrypicking going on: "you can't just pick out bad things politicians have done in the past to attack them in the present when everyone makes mistakes" surely wouldn't be accepted for the wrongdoings of Donald Trump. My conclusion is that IQ once again isn't an unalloyed good. You can use intelligence to achieve any goal, good or ill.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I'm not singling you out here because I hear this a lot and I wonder... what is it that pilots do that an AI can't that compensates for the training expense and kinematics costs of having a pilot? The pilot can't do damage-control on the plane mid-flight. They don't pick out targets, the sensors achieve lock on. They're not tactically superior, that's been proven with dogfighting simulations even between equally performing jets. It's all fly-by-wire these days, their muscles aren't necessary.
I guess a human might be better at the ethics of 'do we bomb this truck or not, given how close it is to civilians?' But again humans have high variance and it's not clear that this is so.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
That's exactly what the F-35 was supposed to be, only it turned into another super-expensive fighter which needs the F-15 EX to handle more everyday missions...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Pilot mafia. Top Gun Maverick is a great film, that's what USAF officers want to be doing. They don't want nerds sitting at a desk stealing their glory.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
These weapons do have very large political constituencies. But the F-35 alone is supposed to cost over $2 trillion in lifecycle costs. Then there's NGAD and the B-21. NGAD was so expensive they're trying to cut it up and repackage it as a family of systems, that'll probably balloon costs out even further.
In the new report to lawmakers, GAO said the Defense Department now plans to fly the F-35 through 2088, 11 years longer than services most recently anticipated.
2088 is already an insanely long time. I doubt it'll be flying in 2060 in any serious combat role. But surely you wouldn't make such a big bet on a plane if you have technology this promising coming up? Unmanned aviation is the future but surely gravitic propulsion (maybe opening up casual spaceflight/suborbital bombing runs) would render traditional aerospace obsolete.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
character limit
Did you really use up a whole Sonnet context length?
Personally I try to move work into a new context length around the time it says 'this conversation is getting long', since its IQ falls past a certain point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Employers want to reap gains from competition in the labour market and complain when their employees enjoy the benefits of competition between employers? Tough, the world isn't designed to cater to our individual whims.
You see lots of big companies looking for foreign labour and happily outsourcing. But they're not nearly so eager for competition from foreign companies, it's all 'slave labour', 'strategic threats', 'stealing our markets', 'unfair currency practices'. Ask the US or EU car industry how they feel about offshore production, then how they feel about imports from China and watch how these staunch free traders embrace protectionism...
If the US has gravitic secret technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?
In the 1970s Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program because he was keen on the upcoming development of stealth bombers. Republicans hammered him for being weak on defence and eventually reinstated it... Anyway, if the US had an incredible gamechanging technology like this, they wouldn't be spending so much on conventional aircraft. There would be signals and portents.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Case of a 19 year-old woman experiencing significant breast hypertrophy starting 1 week after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in September 2022. "The patient initially reported tingling paresthesia in her breasts, followed by sudden bilateral growth which worsened after receiving the second vaccine dose. Over 6 months, her breast size increased from a B cup to a triple G."
I want to know how this is physically possible, I thought this was confined to the realm of doujins. The medical journal says that they have no idea why it happened but think it had nothing to do with the vaccine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets? People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works". It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.
We still underestimate the scale of the ineptitude and negligence in the military apparatus. There was no strategic thought going on at all, there wasn't even a goal.
At one point a new commander for ISAF (they were switching people around every 6-18 months like CEOs of a failing corporation) gets appointed and he wonders what he's supposed to do. Nobody tells him, so he goes 'huh, well I guess I'll try pushing Afghanistan up a few ranks on the tables of illiteracy and malnutrition'. When somebody asked Bush whether he wanted to speak to the general in charge of forces in Afghanistan at an earlier time, Bush said no, why would I need to see him? There was a total absence of strategy. There were officials who had their own ideas about what the US ought to do but they all flailed around like crabs in a bucket, before eventually consolidating on a kind of phoney-war to kick the can down the road.
It was a strategy-free war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
The Soviet backed government lasted much longer than the American backed government did, the Soviet puppet survived Soviet withdrawal and actually outlasted the Soviet Union itself, albeit only by a few months.
Meanwhile the American backed government disintegrated before the US even completed its withdrawal.
I was given Yuaval Noah Harari's book Nexus as a gift. It's quite relevant.
You can tell that a certain faction of 'Elite Human Capital' are working hard to find justifications for clampdowns on information. He constantly re-emphasises that truth is not necessarily as useful for creating and preserving social order as fiction, that naively propagating freedom of information can be a breeding ground for dangerous ideas. He apportions a good chunk of blame for Myanmar having a civil war on Facebook algorithms which strikes me as a gross simplification. He says that democratic means can achieve evil ends - Hitler was voted in. And maybe if the commies had modern AI technology it would be possible to run an economy centrally and thus achieve global totalitarianism. The answer to preserving our Correct Social Values of anti-racism, feminism and liberal democracy is unclear, who knows how to do it or what compromises will be made, Yuval says. But it is key to identify that freedom of speech and information is increasingly becoming unhelpful in this new environment and should not be a core value. There should be a conversation between people to achieve democratic governance but somehow the conversation needs to be managed to prevent bad outcomes by law and various institutional mechanisms. Managed Democracy.
I wouldn't mischaracterize the book as being invalid, it's more along the lines of 'here is a perfectly valid argument for why I (and people like me) should have more power and you should have less' which may indeed be perfectly valid but is still somewhat dubious, given the interests of those making the argument.
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