RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14hr ago
The whole point of using the cuck language is to expose the contradiction in your argument.
Iran will never control the Strait and will certainly never be allowed to toll the Strait.
America has been escorting ships through the strait.
So why not sail through to show exactly who controls it? Why is anyone talking about Iran getting 7% tolls, or splitting profits with Oman, or charging 1-2 million per ship? Nobody would do this if there was a carrier group sitting right there in the straits. Why are there drones hitting ships? Why is traffic crossing the straits at 2% of prewar average? Why are they effectively closed if the US is so powerful and Iran so weak? What the hell was going on with Yemen a couple years back? Why did Trump start blaming his allies for not sending their navies to the straits back in month 2?
Why are there drones attacking US shipping in Suez last week for that matter?
You said yourself that all Iran could do was plink away at a few cargo ships and they barely did much of that... Are we to believe that a US navy carrier battlegroup is weaker in battle than a few civilian cargo ships? This sounds like an easy win! What kind of coward shrinks back from a few measly drones? Protect the shipping, save the day.
You keep saying that America is so powerful. But when it comes to showing that power and reaping rewards, mysteriously it becomes 'going out of their way to increase risk'. It's just cope. When Communist China was threatening Taiwan in the 50s and 90s the US sailed a carrier group through the straits to deter and show power.
It's your perspective that ironically necessitates the US military being absolute lily-livered crybaby pussies, that's my point. My theory explains it perfectly. The US isn't run by effeminate cuckolds. They know that if they tried to secure the straits in actual fact, asserting their presence and escorting more than a tiny handful of ships, it would probably fail, get a bunch of sailors killed and cost more than it gained.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go
They parasitize on society by allocating where goods and services go.
Finance has done tremendous damage to the Western world. They offshored vital industries (that alone is civilizational-scale treason) and they drain away highly capable people from the hard sciences that actually create wealth.
They presided over a merger-acquisition/shareholder-first equilibrium that encouraged a race to the bottom in capital investment and R&D. Encouraging companies to fail the marshmallow test is a deeply wrong thing to do.
Then there's the rush into land appreciation. Land in high-demand cities is an amazing financial asset, it's impossible to make any more of it! Land can't be taken away, it's fixed in place. The financial sector has capitalized on this and directed enormous amounts of capital into loans to bid up land values, rather than developing industry. This was a major trend over the 20th century. Across 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios doubled over the past century: 30% in 1900 to 60% in 2014. Credit is elastic while land is fixed - the result is land prices rising. Only a small fraction of the mortgage lending is for new builds (less attractive to banks since they're without a proven price) so the bulk of this enormous mortgage lending ends up bidding up prices on existing houses.
Industry can go bust for all kinds of reasons, it's risky, there's a need for constant competition and improvement, capital depreciates and creditors might lose out in bankruptcy. Most businesses fail. But house prices go up! And a bank can always take back the house if they default on their mortgage. Bidding on land is lucrative for banks, bad for society.
Why are banks directing trillions to making housing less affordable, anchoring workers to fixed mortgages, suppressing fertility? So they can make a few % higher returns. It's terrible pointless waste.
There are presumably many good people in the financial sector and parts that are less damaging (VCs to an extent) but the whole ethos of the sector is corrupt and anti-social. Privatized gains, socialized losses. The financial sector has been doing the wrong thing with great effort and skill and dressed it up as the right thing. VCs might well decide to put their money into 'making sports betting more addictive' because that's more profitable and safe than 'making incredibly intricate lenses for semiconductors.'
We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for an external audience, more so than cash flows. We find that the majority of managers would avoid initiating a positive NPV project if it meant falling short of the current quarter’s consensus earnings.
Damn these people. Their stupid greed isn't even helping their own companies! They're sacrificing their own companies interests just to stay ahead of earnings expectations, an almost totally imaginary, abstract number. By definition you are always supposed to take a positive NPV project in ultra-financialized bean-counter economics, nevermind social outcomes. But they aren't even properly aligned with that, they know that their job is to keep share prices up or they may be paid in short-term options.
Most of all, damn the whole system. A certain amount of greed in the right place is fine but we're far into the realm of negative returns.
Governments certainly didn't help much with idiotic regulations, ideological fads and negligent oversight. Unions have been similarly damaging in many respects. The alternative to wrecking by the financial sector shouldn't be 'total control of the economy by a posse of men in poorly fitting suits who got where they are by reciting Lenin and bureaucratic manoeuvres' or 'total control of the economy by union thugs who go on strike when there's an R in the month' but a disciplined govt-directed market system directing capital towards development, making use of capital controls and lending restrictions and regulations in a synchronized, coordinated way. A single army, not a chaotic PvP brawl between various interest groups competing to grab as much of the pie as they can.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
Aren't your homosexual experiences and perspectives innately 'alien' to the mainstream? Most men are repulsed and extremely repelled at the idea of having other men fuck them in the ass. Most men are similarly repelled by the idea of fucking other men's asses. They want to fuck women. Gay sex is most prominent when there aren't women around (on ships, or in male prisons, or in male pursuits like the army).
I don't think you should be trying to make an argument about nature and authenticity and true motivations when you have a distinctly unusual perspective. It's certainly interesting and novel to read, I think it's good to have some unpredictable theoretical essays here.
And yet, because he is about 15% more masculine than Aaron, my brain tells me I’m supposed to mate with DJ. If I’m a woman and I’m stuck on an island with just Aaron and DJ, I’m mating with DJ. Aaron’s children will be annoying and not want to work, I can just tell. DJ’s children will be tough and dutiful. My procreative intuition tells me this. DJ is mogging Aaron despite everything I love about Aaron. I don’t even like DJ’s looks that much. I could imagine mating with DJ for the kids but staying with Aaron for his beauty and the chaos he’d bring. I am saying this to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reproductive intuitions are and how fundamentally biological they are.
??? Yet your reproductive inclinations are skewed. You can't reproduce with some murderer's manlier brother. You're a gay man and I think you're unlike women on some massive multi-dimensional axis, just like how straight men are unlike women in some different multi-dimensional axis.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
Or that America knows deep down it would lose so that’s why it doesn’t even try?
You need to up your reading comprehension. I clearly said 'the latter'. That's why the US carrier group is lurking south of the straits, just outside the edge of Iranian anti-ship missile range. That's why US soldiers left their Gulf bases to hide in hotels before Iranian missiles demolished them.
If the US is so powerful and strong and the Iranians so weak, why not simply sail north, through the straits, stay there for days and weeks escorting shipping and show everyone there's nothing to fear? Why haven't they done this? That would immediately ease the insurers concerns and sort everything out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
What else could the goal have been? Why would they launch attacks against leaders in the government on day one if not to cause regime change? At the very start of the war Trump was going on about unconditional surrender which is another word for regime change. The idea was that some anti-clerical force would take over and be friends with Israel, the whole rotten structure would come crashing down after he kicked in the door... but this didn't occur.
Here are some stated goals after the initial hope didn't come to fruition:
“Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities… and their capacity to produce brand new ones — pretty good ones they make. Second, we’re annihilating their navy… Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon… And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”
Well, are their missile capabilities destroyed? No, Iran's missile forces have pushed the US out of Gulf bases. The Iranian navy lost ships but not its primary mission of controlling shipping in the straits. Nuclear weapons are opaque, unclear what's going on there. I still think Iran hasn't acquired nuclear weapons for fear of nuclear disarming attacks or out of not desiring a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But maybe it could be considered a success, albeit no visible change to the status quo.
And can Iran arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside their borders? They sure can, in Iraq and Yemen. So that didn't work either.
Imagine if those goals had been achieved, wouldn't the scenario look different? Wouldn't the US be pressing its military advantage rather than trying to negotiate an end to the war? Wouldn't there be bombing of Iranian energy facilities and political infrastructure like police stations or broadcasting facilities to further damage the regime? Why start with bombing Iran's leaders and then stop? Wouldn't Trump be looking for human rights for all the gazillions of murdered protestors, demanding reforms in Iran... Why is Trump saying that there are negotiations underway while the Iranians say these are lies? Why is there all this discussion about Iran charging tolls on shipping in the straits of Hormuz if they're the vanquished party?
a small trickle of traffic is making the run
Well, mostly closed then.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
The opacity is more in how they end up spending enormous numbers of money on a tiny number of missiles (plus black budget spending on secret weapons and research). But all publicly revealed weapons are listed:
So if you go to page 41 of the link, it says how many patriot PAC-3s they buy (230 a year at $4 million per missile). Not that many once you account for tests and training and exports.
Now they don't say exactly how many they've got left but it's not that hard to estimate (by intelligence agency standards), given that there's video evidence of them being shot away. There's a defined upper limit on how many they could have, unless they lie on these reports. They've also been starting to issue orders for PAC-2s again to supplement the PAC-3s. So there are clear signs of pressure, plus this is something that wargames have warned of for many years.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
You mean they're lying in the congressional reports where they describe the number of munitions they buy? It's public record, we can see how many are purchased.
And why would the US want to lie and seem like their air defences are weaker than they actually are to embolden (not deter) US enemies? This doesn't seem like a very Trumpian move either, meekness is not what I associate with Trump.
This is just the complete opposite of reality.
For Trump, a win is to squash Iran’s capacity to destabilize the region
??? He went into this war going on about regime change and then that failed like a lead balloon... Then he tried to reopen the straits of Hormuz after Iran closed them. And that failed too.
Trump threw rocks at the bee hive and a bunch of people, Trump included are getting stung and you're like 'wow we've squashed the beehive's capacity to destabilize the region' unironically? At the small cost of the bulk of remaining US missile interceptors that'll take years to replace?
Trade in the Gulf and across the global economy is continuing almost uninterrupted
https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
There is no trade in the Gulf! Nothing is crossing Hormuz. You even admit this with 'announcing another deal to reopen the strait' but ignore the fact that reopening the strait is only happening on Iran's terms since they control it - that's why they're supposedly gonna charge 7% in a toll according to these same deal negotiations. The Israelis are probably gonna try some more perfidy and wreck this. The farce will go on further.
Your whole thesis is epic-tier coping, twisting facts around to present them in the most flattering configuration no matter how hard they have to be tortured to do so.
There's nothing confusing about how to win the war. The US navy should move in, secure the straits and maybe Kharg Island too. They should destroy Iran's drone and missile forces (actually destroy them so they can't hit targets in Jordan, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia). Then they would defeat Iran's strategy, remove their leverage, allow trade to pass the straits irregardless of what Iran says. That would allow a good negotiating position. But America can't do this. They haven't done it! Why is that? Because American soldiers are whimpering sissy girlymen too afraid to get into a fight with this almost totally defeated enemy? Because Trump's a massive cowardly loser desperately afraid? Or because a sober assessment of risks and gains says 'they'd try, die and fail' so Trump and the military don't try that? I personally believe the latter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I regret to remind you that 98% of people will never make a card or a fork or anything you can see on the user side... I'm talking about looking at it from the admin side, the shit people put in as prompts. AI is wasted on the masses.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
though the existence of such certified hood classics independently encountered by so many people is in itself quite interesting
I had a look at what normal people put into LLMs as prompts, you should radically lower your estimates of consciousness, literacy and taste.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Yeah Kael syndrome is what I was thinking about.
But also are you gonna get any good quality after about 50,000 words in? Even in bigger models I notice writing starting to decline, errors becoming more prominent...
I think that's what generic means though, it'll have that white woman in different outfits and doing different things but always described in the same kind of way and always the same kind of 'difference'. It's generic LLM smut, by the numbers stuff. I can't describe it precisely...
It doesn't surprise you like your one where it goes out of the way to be black. It won't surprise you much either if you give it a big prompt but at least it has somewhere to go that isn't totally generic if you set up the environment and dynamics in advance. They suck at coming up with good ideas unprompted. If you don't give it a foundation of your ideas it'll give you its ideas instead and it leans towards the median hard, unless you shove it out of median-land with a long prompt.
But they can write without shame, they have no trouble making it actually sound erotic whereas you and I would struggle.
LLMs don't give their full effort for a short prompt I think, only sometimes do they actually start to get into it (often deep in multi-turn) and there's a noticeable difference in how they write. Thus we talk about dry and wet Claude.
Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall.
You held back there, as one does with this subject...
The whole point is not to shrink back!
Now I think about it I'd be worse at writing smut than Deepseek V4 Pro. I could do a better plot and more lively prose generally, more creativity and wouldn't get confused... but it'd be so awkward I'd be unable to do it.
Also I think you'd be better off with longer prompts. I die a little when I see these benchmarks for creative writing with one sentence prompts. A good creative writing prompt is at least 600 words I think, maybe more than that. I'm not all the way into lorebooks but you gotta give the bot something to work with. If you don't have the LLM executing your ideas it will go full Generic Genericsson. Then again, maybe local LLMs are more constrained for context length.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
original scholarship rarely rises beyond the level of undergraduate mediocrity
Worse than that, it was just meaningless babble. I saw some samples of his writing and it was awful.
"Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro- aggressions within the Academy," Whiteness and Education (2018)
In Arday's own words from the Abstract:
This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling [sic] method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression [sic]. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds [sic] within in [sic] the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness. (p. 141)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
So besides coding, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, images, translation, proofreading, analysing contracts, tech support, playing Minecraft with, ERP, military targeting analysis, cybersecurity (defensive/offensive), drafting emails, summarizing documents, explaining history/science, doing everything that a search engine can do and more, writing and analysing spreadsheet functions, making charts and dashboards, sales research, writing fanfiction, earnings call analysis, document dump analysis, home repair/DIY fixes, recipes for cooking, car diagnostics from symptoms, real-time captioning for the deaf and literally lifesaving medical diagnoses...
Besides this handful of niche fields, what have LLMs ever done for us?
Doesn't it surprise you that Google is planning to spend $200 billion on AI this year? Mysteriously they don't seem to think it's a niche use-case but vital to their whole company's future since their core business of 'search' is another word for AI. And LLMs are at the heart of AI.
We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
When I have issues with a piece of software not working and spitting out some incomprehensible error message I can now ask an AI and get a much better answer compared to trawling through forum posts from 8 years ago. Or get it to directly analyse and fix the code. Most programs have gotten much better in useability.
There are strong arguments against AI but 'it's mostly useless' is extremely silly. If it were useless nobody would care much about it, mostly useless is Siri-tier AI in the 2010s. Nobody cared much about Siri.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
LLMs are obviously useful in the same way that businesses obviously need to analyse spreadsheets and obviously need to write code, amongst a myriad of other tasks where LLMs are useful.
The point you were putting forth is that because LLMs aren't very useful (except for some niche fields) and aren't interesting, there is no need to build datacentres. But that's not the case. We can discern that's not the case because people are prepared to pay for these LLMs. The general public. Coders. Companies. Militaries. Governments.
It is abundantly clear that LLM technology is in fact useful and there is an abundance of examples to back this up. Use of LLMs for targeting/ISR in the Iran war, use of LLMs in hacking, use of LLMs in writing code, use of LLMs in mathematics research, chemistry and biology, use of LLMs in entertainment, making images, translation, proofreading, examining legal or financial data. These are not niche fields.
So people are prepared to sacrifice money for these things, which is why these companies are building datacentres. They're not being built without reason. Companies are paying for all this compute and electricity. Sure, the electricity use is an issue for local communities. Industry has been known to require power, make noise and pollution, which should all ideally be minimized.
Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions.
Again, this is not the case. If googling was just as easy then he'd do that and not waste time jailbreaking AIs instead.
It does seem that many people don't see a use for AI. But they're wrong about that, maybe they haven't looked into it or misunderstand what is going on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Free AI:
QR code scary!
Paid AI:
Let me install Blender and model a chess set with the board position of Byrne vs. Fischer (1956) immediately after Fischer loses his queen:
https://x.com/goodside/status/2084088205582778713
Hmm today I shall socially engineer, prompt inject and launch supply chain attacks on github
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
IMO the first 200 chapters are pretty good. That's the whole of arc 1! Lots of tension, exploration, subverting social structures, battles, conspiracies, plotting. That's the whole book in a nutshell.
400 was good too though, as more of a hype moment scene.
I've always adhered to a 'stop reading if you don't like it' policy. If it's not hooking you in then what's the point?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
Except the people spending all this money on them? Dave wants his book proofread more cheaply, Pete wants to ERP, Melanie wants dashboards to show key business insights, John wants some spreadsheets analyzed, Dean wants to fix bugs in his software. Even Johnny Jihadi wants to know how to make use of unexploded munitions left by govt forces in the Sahel and he goes to AI for that.
Why would the opinions of people who don't pay for the product because they don't find it useful outweigh those who do?
I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there.
I think the error here is dragging one's wife through these shows.
Women don't need to defend why there's all this endless talking and nothing happens in some period-history romance show... That's their thing I guess. I'm not into it. I want to see some conflict and preferably some violence.
Holding male stories to female standards is no good. Berserk is for men, Eva too I think. It's possible for shows or books to cater to the interests of men and women but not all fiction needs to be like this. Underlying interests are different. I naturally think that certain things I like have Universal Self-Evident Value but they're not, they're just for me and maybe a subset of men like me.
I'm sure I'm not appreciating all the nuances of whatever they're talking about in Big Dresses and Bigger Stagecoaches, I just don't care to since it's boring. Much the same with women and Big Pauldrons and Bigger Bombs. See also my comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
There are some reasons to worry about AI and demographics. What if, during turbulent economic times whilst people are losing jobs and the existing system is losing its legitimacy, a large migrant population votes for a populist race-socialist party that then orders for the AIs to be aligned 'to the will of the global majority'?
'Mamdani but with actual power'
Anti-immigration politicians may not be terribly capable but there is some reason to think that, on average, they are more patriotic than a pro-migration politician.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Hardware wallets are constantly getting compromised, people should just use metamask. It's not 'secure' because you have a physical widget as opposed to a browser extension!
Interesting... I did a little looking into this. Turns out we need 3 kinds of fertilizer nitrogen (Haber-Bosch process, energy intensive but can be done anywhere with natural gas), phosphate fertilizers (mined in Morocco) and potash/potassium fertilizers (mined in Russia). They do different things for the plants, not interchangeable.
But I think we can get along without them? Sanctions on Russian fertilizer caused price impacts certainly but that mostly hit poor countries? I say 'mined in Morocco' and 'mined in Russia' but other countries do produce them, just with fewer reserves. It could be that phosphate recycling and exploration could kick into high gear in the event of a shortage.
Also Morocco would be an easy country to knock over, Western Sahara moreso. Morocco and Algeria aren't serious countries, they aren't that populous, don't produce weapons and are positioned such that they have no great powers nearby that could back them up if US or Europe came knocking. No amount of imported Russian or American weapons are a substitute for having a real military-industrial base.
These are the kind of countries that a couple of carrier groups could deal with straightforwardly, if it came to it. It looks like Morocco is in the US camp and Algeria is in the Russian camp but they're practically encircled by Europe and far away from Russia.
If there is a war and if that does endanger phosphate shipments and if that actually matters then Europe or the US would be able to quickly sort it out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I guess the schools do it? There's nothing sexier than a mandatory school activity, after all.
Well if the AIs fulfill their promise they should be capable of working out what's Actually Going On and break through whatever lying we do today.
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