@RandomRanger's banner p

RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

5 followers   follows 1 user  
joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

				

User ID: 317

RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

5 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 317

There are a bunch of old characters in Genshin that look old, there's one boss who's an old woman... But she's not playable, they don't expect people to spend money on getting old women, or old men for that matter.

90% of the women also wear heels, which is a bit ridiculous given how they're constantly fighting or climbing cliff faces. Then again, there are master chefs, delivery workers and insane children on the battlefield so it's not like realism was ever the goal. Video games are supposed to be unrealistic inasfar as that makes the game more fun.

You can have safe 'horny' without being 'safe horny'.

I found Hades a fine game to play, never got Hades 2. Hades 1 didn't need to be hornier, it could rely on its strong gameplay. But if it were hornier I think that would've boosted sales, ceteris paribus.

Would it really be so hard to make Medea conventionally attractive? She can keep her clothes on. It doesn't make sense for there to be a beach episode in the underworld, sure. But what is the point of the world's lamest cleavage window? About 80% of ARPG players are male so far as I can tell, may as well cater to them a bit more.

Suffice to say that I have not played FF7 Rebirth, only Remake and yet I'd still already seen that cutscene you linked. Sex sells.

Back in Halo 4, Cortana was hot and mostly nude and that worked out fine, the game sold well. Nearly all Halo 4 criticism focuses on the lore and gameplay issues. Miranda was hot in Mass Effect. Lara Croft in Tomb Raider.

Or even in films, Transformers sold well and Megan Fox was a part of that. There were plenty of trashy horny movies or movies that included some hot girls and they did fine. Horror relies a lot on a promise of breasts.

There isn't a single old-looking playable woman in Genshin Impact, which is amongst the more tasteful gacha games. None of them wear these loose form-concealing outfits like Medea. All of them get loads of fanart for their colorful and engaging designs. And that's free advertising. They make tonnes of money too. Female players get pretty-boy men too. Everyone's happy.

The taste of teenage boys is perfectly fine and indeed appropriate for video games. Teenage boys are the archetypal gamers after all. I guess it would be a little embarrassing playing Bayonetta in front of a wife or girlfriend but that's not a clinching reason. The game sold well. Men decided to just play while they're by themselves or grin and bear a little embarassment. Wives and girlfriends typically hate men playing video games anyway.

I think what you're saying is real and a lot of executives in the West believe it and it materially affects outcomes. The West ceded the 'hot girls' market to Asia and Western video games suffer for it. Hades 2. Concord. Hyenas. Ugly female protagonists that look worse than the mocapped actresses they used. All because they're afraid of a few journalists being mean to them or embarrassing an audience that doesn't care so much.

Nvidia isn't going to be making 25x more compute, and Americans are not capable of deploying 25x more compute

An American gigawatt is worth more than a Chinese gigawatt because Americans are using Blackwell and Rubin and China is stuck with Huawei. The US can and does also build datacentres overseas too. Whether it's 25x or 10x is not much of a big difference, that's a stupendous quantitative mismatch.

Did you write this knowing they have raised $7.4B in June and ≈$15B recently?

Yes, that's peanuts. Anthropic or OpenAI raise a lot more. Anthropic raised $65 billion in its Series H round in May 2026. Another 30 billion in February. Deepseek is worth only about $75 billion!

The volume of inference, as per your logic, is decisive at least as much as peak capability

Peak capability is the important part, which is only capable to those with the most training compute. Volume is important but secondary.

There is one AA benchmark for this, namely CritPt. Look at how Grok 4.7 does there, vs V4.1F.

OK. Astra is way ahead of either of them. Opus is way ahead. Muse Wonder (that you seemed to think might be not much better than Flash 1017) is way ahead of them. Why do you want to pick out measurements where Deepseek is ahead of Grok 4.7? I already said the new Deepseek is the better model. What else do you want me to say? My thesis is not that the current Grok is better than Deepseek but that the model from the companies with the most compute will have the highest capabilities, that human competence is not sufficient to compensate for a major gulf in compute. Human competence only goes so far and 'so far' is not enough for Deepseek to reach the frontier.

You are 50x more of a Deepseek partisan than I am a Grok partisan and are arguing quite shamelessly on behalf of a model that is barely able to beat an older, second-rate American model. Deepseek is just too small. I think you're blinded by your emotions.

You returned to the 'defender's advantage' line after we saw how tissue-paper thin the world's cyberdefences are and after the Huggingface hacks. What is Deepseek Flash going to do when some swarm of AstraFable gets told to maul the Huawei training stack by finding some hardware level weakness? It's not like they're going to be short of vulnerabilities with those yield rates and immature software they're rushing into production.

I do believe in superintelligence. It is likely possible to achieve a qualitatively greater mastery of extremely complex systems like CPUs or large networks. The cap for intelligence in such a theater is very high.

I don't know how large a gap is fatal but given the logic of recursive self-improvement, I suspect it's lower than you think. Unless Deepseek is actually at the frontier, then it's not going to be sufficient.

I haven't seen Ranma or the other anime you mention, so point taken I guess.

Thailand is famous for its ladyboys, and they didn't even need anime for that!

Good point.

Because if you don't, they conclude they never will and decide to become the wo/man themselves.

Why can't they just be incels/volcels and chill out? A part of me is constantly reading headlines (like Cornell or some repulsive novel STD) and thinking 'another incel W.' My second vaguely crypto-feminist opinion is that society is oversexualized, obsesses about sex far too much. It's OK to not have sex. There's nothing special or life affirming about penetrating, often through rubber, an orifice. A lot easier to just crank one's hog. Only reproduction is actually special. It's terrible to shred one's entire life and maybe undertake gruesome surgery in pursuit of a sexual identity, to sacrifice so much for so little. The rapist who ends up in prison for a decade, the gay man who gets an STD from his bathhouse orgies and dies young, these people who try to become the wo/man - addicts. The high isn't even that good.

Maybe we need more Greek statues with tiny penises to remind people that the sexual aspect of civilized man should be controlled rather than vulgar.

And there are parts of discord/perverse hentai communities that try to worsen this, at the extreme end. There's definitely a corruption angle going on. I've seen the edges of it in various parts of the internet, something quite distinct from normal talk. Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization) people, chaotic evil. There are others not quite so bad but still really bad out there. I don't think that every random discord server needs this intrusive surveillance crap to counter them but there are real issues going on there, the chaotic-evil brigade is on the march.

The bitter lesson is the superheavy weight class of Astra/Fable tier internal models, which would wipe the floor with all of those were they not held back. Sol 6 is not going to be launching cyberattacks. 6.1 Sol is stronger, let alone Astra or 'internal'. If the US moves to strike, then it will be with the very best they can produce. Still good odds the US doesn't strike or makes some insane blunder tbh.

I agree that Deepseek has a materially better culture and plenty of clever people. But the best culture in the world is no match for raw power. In WW2, did the Japanese win with their clever infantry tactics and ferociously tough, courageous warriors? Did Germany's excellent staff officers and superior manoeuvre warfare prevail? No, the US, Russia and Britain threw mountains of steel at them until they were vanquished. The size of the dog in the fight, not the size of the fight in the dog, contra Eisenhower's famous quote. Americans constantly LARP about being the underdog and winning with finesse when they overwhelm or batter inferior or distracted opponents. Overwhelming and battering is the mechanism of history and I think we have a culture of valorizing the exception to the rule.

Huawei production is too little, too weak and too late. Nvidia is making about 25x more compute, which clever networking cannot make up for. Is Huawei even a match for Google's TPU production or Amazon Trainium? Per Opus, not even slightly. Huawei was 40% of trainium in 2026, maybe 10-15% of TPUs.

When Deepseek is at the top of the leaderboards, then I'm clearly provably wrong. What is the failure standard for your prediction/expectation, if Deepseek stays out of the frontier for a certain period of time?

Per artificial analysis, the new flash is still below Grok 4.7 albeit only slightly: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2112218661432000694

That's with Grok selling their compute to Anthropic. Now it's obvious that the new Deepseek is the better model, much cheaper and faster. I like the speed and the price. But if it's barely a match for Grok, then Opus 5.5 smokes it like a cigar and Fable 5.5 incinerates it.

I'm not making a normative claim here, only a factual/forecasting claim.

The eyes, the wrinkles on the forehead and the shape of the face...

It's a distinctly different artstyle to anime.

Why can't everyone in video games be attractive? One of the things FF7 Remake did right was have characters be attractive. I found myself thinking 'damn, I wish I had cool spiky hair like Cloud' and 'Tifa is very pretty.' That's a good thing. Overwatch or FF7 relied on their art to get people to know about the game, like it, play it, make fanart about it. If it was just about the gameplay... TF2 is free. There are many other action RPGs. Art makes games stand out.

It's a visual medium, it's supposed to look good.

Also:

"Hades characters aren't hot" chuds are not attracted to women dawg you cannot tell me this isn't the hottest woman in fiction

https://x.com/Lexbianism/status/2111597395297345680

Absolutely deranged. This random 45 year old woman (Hades' Medea) in a shapeless muumuu is not the hottest woman in fiction. She's not even the hottest Medea or the second hottest Medea (that would belong to various incarnations from Fate and some webtoon). If people thought she was actually attractive, they'd commission artists to draw her (or artists would do it themselves) and then she'd end up on danbooru with more than a pathetic 6 images.

Some random guy GPT-image adjusts Medea and immediately she's much more attractive: https://x.com/ttywisp/status/2112041218766971347

Surely all the LGBT stuff in schools and the internet valorizing trans for being brave, coming out with their real selves is the real cause, plus those groomer discords. US military service is heavily correlated with transgenderism (about 2x general population) and that's presumably because of all the LGBT propaganda in the US military.

Anime doesn't even have a pro-trans message on the whole? Maybe hentai/gooner stuff but anime on the whole seems to cater more for straight men. And if anime were the main cause, wouldn't there be the most trans in Japan or Korea or China where they're way more into anime?

Then again, I don't watch much anime. I watched some of the most normie shows like Edgerunner, Hunter x Hunter, Death Note, Frieren, Kill la Kill. The only thing I could think of is the saga of Tanya the Evil which has a genderbent protagonist but its core idea is 'wouldn't it be cool if there was a dubiously sane evil loli flying ace fighting for not-Germany in not-WW2?' and deliberately desexualizes Tanya. Maybe there are other anime that are what you're thinking of.

There's an arctotherium essay on this: Mortmain Migration https://substack.com/home/post/p-215548598

Sure, there is the example of Pakistani migrants being brought in for labour in UK textile mills that you're bringing up... But it didn't work, UK textiles went downhill anyway. Bringing in the Mirpuris didn't make the UK richer or more productive, it didn't even save the industry it was supposed to save. The only way to get richer on a national level is to improve industrial organization or to mechanize.

There's no such thing as a labour market need, only an employer desire to reduce labour costs. If wages are high, that's not necessarily a bad thing for a country. It would help sustain the middle class.

I guess it depends on how one defines economic reasons.

Do you want a cookie? It's trivial.

Yeah, it's the Bitter Lesson applied yet again. Better to be right about something simple than sophisticated and wrong (or be sophisticated and correct about secondary factors).

Deepseek is stuck in a deadly spiral because they lack compute. Because they lack compute, they struggle to generate much revenue and therefore can't raise enough money to get more data or even acquire more compute.

DeepSeek achieved an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion by September 2026

Meanwhile Anthropic or OpenAI have 50x more revenue, immensely higher valuations and so they can pay for the things they need.

Nobody derives from first principles 'ok I want a cushy retirement - so obviously the natural thing to do is to import a bunch of foreigners, many of which hate my country and burn things down and are super expensive because they don't like working and aren't very productive'... That's not a natural thought.

They don't produce wealth! How could they? The banlieues are not industrial. America's poor migrant street vendors are not the powerhouse of the US economy. America doesn't depend on Haitian workers in the meat packaging plants for US prosperity. Uber drivers and food delivery e-bike workers are not very productive, they cannot produce a surplus for boomers to skim off.

If the boomers were purely greedy, they'd prefer simpler policies like 'to make more wealth for my retirement, I'll pursue mechanization of the economy, robots and AI' or 'to ensure my house is expensive, let's restrict housing production.' There is an argument for importing people to raise house prices sure but 5 Uber drivers aren't going to raise house prices as much as one lawyer or engineer. The Uber drivers aren't buying detached houses in good areas, are they? It's technology, high end services, advanced manufacturing and finance that provides wealth that can be redistributed to the old.

Boomers might believe that mass immigration is needed to sustain their lifestyle but boomers are also relatively anti-immigration now in their old age. They voted for Brexit and Trump. Some of my boomer friends are unsettled by the demographic transformation they've seen, all the Chinese taking over certain suburbs.

Some boomers have an ideological commitment to multiculturalism and more accept the television's arguments that migration is needed to provide labour to care for them in their old age. The fundamental issue is ideological, not economic. There's never been a real economic case for mass immigration from poor countries, that doesn't make sense. The migrants get old and want pensions too! If it was just about needing labour for retirement homes, why not just import labour solely for retirement homes? No chain migration, no uber drivers or refugees pretending to be gay, just pick out care workers.

There's a teleological, ideological project of demographic transformation that then tries to justify itself economically. That's the real issue. It's like how in Britain they say 'oh mass migration is justified because of the Empire' but in Ireland they go 'Irish migrated out overseas, Ireland has always been a nation of immigrants' - these are just justifications produced afterwards.

Google is structurally vulnerable because the company is tied down with endless bureaucracy. You seem to expect them to perform like a startup but with 12 figure resources when they're not a startup, they're a leviathan. The only way for a leviathan to succeed is to exploit its ability to crush. A leviathan is not going to outwit, outmaneuver, outpace younger and nimbler competitors.

Let's see how Deepseek fares against Fable 5.5 as a test of the central case of my framework. The two models will be coming out only a few days apart... What do you think is going to happen there? Compute is going to crush. You could say something like 'they're in two totally different weight classes' and that's true. The absolute value is what matters most, there is no prize for being much cheaper.

Musk is selling his compute to Anthropic, who is better at using it. Institutional efficiency and excellence of researchers/engineers definitely matters. But between those in a similar tier of excellence, compute is the primary differentiating factor, the key factor.

If compute isn't the key factor, then what's holding Deepseek back?

France had a real population of about 40 million (plus substantial colonies) in WW1. Ukraine had a fake population of 40 million because they claim Crimea and pre-2014 borders as part of Ukraine, whereas some of the soldiers they were fighting came from these parts.

Ukraine has also suffered very high casualties. France or Germany never resorted to roving forcible conscription squads running and chasing after men in the street, there was no equivalent of vanning (except until the end of WW2 with the Volksturm).

Maths is readily verifiable. It's an area where humans struggle, not being something we evolved specifically to do. This is the most exposed salient in human experience, the least defensible terrain.

AI is going to push further ahead in maths. Only this year has AI been capable of introducing any major novel mathematical discoveries whatsoever. Only in the past month has it gotten to this level where they can fire off the slop cannon with abandon, those 700 results were within normal-people token budgets, not 'gigantic agent swarm' budgets. They said it was roughly 3 hours of GPT-6 Pro worth of compute on an internal model for each of those, on average. Next month? Next year?

Tokens will get cheaper, models will get smarter. The AI companies are mostly focusing their resources on more pressing issues anyway, the practical mathematics of coding, AI inference and training. They've been making continual progress there too.

So what if AI currently makes these dumb mistakes like getting a sign wrong. I had an issue just the other day where it was taking a screenshot and finding that there was no oscillation in the animation (but a screenshot is not going to help here, being static) and so I had to tell it to use another method of testing for the issue. If I were Yann LeCun or Gary Marcus or whoever, I'd say this proves they have no world model, no common sense, it's all a scam, LLMs are a false path... But they get better over time, month by month.

Let's at least wait for a full year of AI plateau before setting out who will coexist with AI!

Meme answer: European smallpox oneshots the whole continent, now lacking immunity for many years. State collapse and a scramble for colonies.

Serious answer: European countries make much more steel, (including the flats required for serious military applications) and vastly more machine tools. Without machine tools, without thousands and thousands of capable engineers, there is no serious military industry.

Morocco and Algeria are overrated, Morocco has a grand total of 2 aerial refuelling aircraft for its F-16s. They can't possibly sustain the parts and readiness and munitions needed for serious prolonged warfare. Europe can.

Europe also has food security, whereas Africa is in serious trouble from day one. There's an enormous gulf in state capacity between countries like Britain or Nazi Germany that could distribute gas masks and arrange mass mobilization armies, impose rationing... and then countries like Egypt that are in constant crisis even in peacetime.

There must be something in the system prompt telling it not to refer to real life people, it tries to give fake versions of real people. On one instance it just referred to Trump as 'The President' rather than making explicit that it was actually him.

From the chain of thought summary summary:

'Weighing how to satirize real figures without naming them.'

'Weighed satirical merit against guidelines, determined absurdist fiction permissible.'

You can partially override it by saying stuff like 'political satire is allowed' like you did there but it's still a bit unsatisfactory.

His claim may well be self-serving or misleading or just wrong.

I looked into it further: Olah led OpenAI's interpretability team, Cammarata was a core member. However, even working on interpretability all the way back in 2020 is pretty significant. Almost nobody was doing this research back then. Cammarata coauthored papers on polysemanticity that he's now moving against. I nominate that these are more important and useful pieces of information than 'he likes doing LSD':

He was second author on OpenAI’s 2023 paper “Language models can explain neurons in language models,” with Steven Bills, Dan Mossing, Henk Tillman, Leo Gao, Gabriel Goh, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Jeff Wu, and William Saunders.

He was second author on that team’s founding paper. The Circuits thread began with “Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits” by Olah, Nick Cammarata, Ludwig Schubert, Gabriel Goh, Michael Petrov, and Shan Carter on 10 March 2020.

He co-authored the OpenAI Distill article reverse-engineering CLIP, with Gabriel Goh, Chelsea Voss, Shan Carter, Michael Petrov, Ludwig Schubert, and Alec Radford. That’s “Multimodal Neurons,” which the essay references.

Cammarata did lead OpenAI's interpretability team before starting his own AI interpretability services company. That is surely an important addition to his biography? He's one of the top interpretability people in the world. Not exactly a no-name. Whether his findings are meaningful or significant in practical terms is another matter.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/33199-document-33-office-director-national-intelligence-worldwide-threat-assessment-us

The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment says this:

We continue to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device. However, Iranian officials have publicly threatened to reverse some of Iran’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)commitments—and resume nuclear activities that the JCPOA limits—if Iran does not gain the tangible trade and investment benefits it expected from the deal.

And its the same since then in later reports, with politicians. US intelligence said Iran was not racing towards a bomb. If they wanted a bomb, they'd just get one.

Iran wants optionality, to be able to quickly acquire nuclear bombs if they decide they want them.

If you want a more narratival version of what I'm saying, here's Amerikanets, he lists a bunch of sources to justify his point, the US military and intelligence forces have not been eager for this conflict: https://www.amerikanets.com/p/they-saw-it-coming

I don't think the Deep State wanted a war with Iran, they wanted to focus on China and Russia rather than get bogged down in the Middle East again. They were somewhat embarassed by the last politically motivated WMD story and it also really damaged the US position, they weren't keen to let the politicians bully them into making up false intelligence to justify a war again.

I was thinking more of an asymmetrical game where you can defect back and hurt the other guy but get hurt more yourself. Chicken is symmetrical.

I was a little unclear there, I was sort of gesturing more at what you were saying about 'neither the economy nor the military run entirely on vibes.' Obviously it didn't come out that way.

I agree that there's a problem in that US decision-making circles include a bunch of flatterers, lightweights and foreign agents who can crowd out the sober analysts.

There was skepticism about attacking Iran from the CIA, they came under lots of political pressure to take a more hawkish tone about Iran's nuclear capabilities:

https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/2007-Iran-Nuclear-Intentions.pdf

It was the same story in the later 2019 reports and everything up until the war itself, no imminent threat from Iranian nuclearization - but Trump and the hawks hated this intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard was also pressuring against the 2026 war. The military wasn't too keen either, Caine said the attack was risky:

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2026/02/23/trumps-top-general-foresees-acute-risks-in-an-attack-on-iran/

And previous CENTCOM commanders had been against an attack as well, years prior, Gates warned against an attack. The general US deep state attitude is more like 'this is a very courageous decision, on your head be it' than genuine enthusiasm.

The hawks are more in the 'think tanks, FDD, political aides and Israeli officials' sort of genre.

I was gonna quote that second instance where Graham boasts about how he was helping Netanyahu persuade Trump, getting 'special intelligence' from Mossad but I thought my post was getting too long.

But Trump did have the CIA and NSA and military to advise him. He has agency and bears responsibility for ignoring their warnings and favouring Israeli 'intelligence'. US intelligence has been reporting for years that Iran was not actively seeking nuclear weapons. An indictment on the system, that key information doesn't make its way to decision-making circles. It's a little like how in the late Soviet Union, Gorbachev couldn't even get access to the real military budget and Politburo ministers did not understand inflation at a basic level.

It's an interesting scenario. I think it'd be easier than one might think to restart civilization though. Hydro power provides 15% of world electricity and you can have a fairly large metallurgical industry from charcoal, as Brazil shows. The metals we dug up are mostly still at the top somewhere.

But best to avoid losing technology or space travel rather than planning for such a failed scenario. I think it's no good to do those labelling projects (as are conducted for nuclear waste) where anthropologists think about how to communicate to people about the dangers of buried nuclear waste without sharing a language. Effort should be spent to avoid such an end state, not to ameliorate a total abysmal failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages

It's just bizarre behaviour from Trump too. He was already struggling with legislation, the SAVE Act is still not passed. That's critical electoral engineering to help prevent another Democratic admin sending him straight to prison the moment he leaves office (or before). The threat of lawfare really ought to be front and centre in his mind, given his experience since 2020.

What did Bibi have on him to prompt such an error? He should've had no illusions that starting a Middle East War would be short, cheap or popular. He campaigned on not starting any more wars. Higher fuel prices caused the Biden administration serious harm, why repeat the experiment? He was gullible in the extreme or actively compromised.

On twitter, I read reasonable arguments from Trump supporters saying that the war doesn't really matter and domestic concerns (getting rid of DEI and illegals) are paramount. The Democrats would struggle to make anything better on the battlefield but would likely make things worse for Trump supporters, sure.

Far be it for me as a foreigner to tell Americans how or why they should vote. But if the Trump base is so loyal that they can be taken for granted, there is nothing to stop the neocons playing Trump like a cheap electronic piano. He can count on his base's support no matter what idiocy he does but the neocons demand wars. The dynamics of the situation are bad even if loyalty is the Nash Equilibria. It's like a repeated prisoner's dilemma where the other guy defects but the payoffs are worse for you if you defect back. Are you supposed to just take it? Or alter the situation?

And the Trump base being loyal does not in itself guarantee success. To win elections Trump needs to persuade moderately apolitical people on the margins either way.

Starting a war isn't going to make it any easier to get rid of illegals or DEI, it takes away political capital that could be deployed elsewhere. War is not the price of deportations or slowly, barely winding back DEI a ratchet. War is a major distraction and a detractor against these domestic efforts. It should've been strongly lobbied against during the lead up period to the attack where aircraft were flown in but while the train wreck was still avoidable people seemed to think 'maybe it'll be fine, Venezuela went well'. They could've railed against the war up till the last minute when Trump was undecided. I don't remember any big names on the right doing that.

There are some tragic quotes from Lindsay Graham:

https://x.com/zarathustra5150/status/2103316151011074523

When I asked Graham about his keys to manipulating Trump, he was remarkably transparent about some of his go-to formulas. I was struck by how, in Graham's telling, Trump was a big, fat mark. "lf you flatter him all the time, he'll lose respect for you," Graham told me of the president. If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then- predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different. This method "can be very effective," Graham told me. "Obama drives him nuts."

Trump is not smart enough to be a good President. Charismatic enough to get elected and manipulate the media, sure. But actually running a country requires different qualities. It's an enormously demanding job that would exhaust a clever man at the peak of his powers.