A_D_E_P_T

I believe the same thing is also described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohazard_(book)

There are some that had been modified to release endorphins!

>"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff."

> . . .

> Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil."

The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War".

Italy is at 56% overall -- and 27.3% "in small municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants" (i.e. rural dwellings) -- and they usually have brutal summers:

> https://www.istat.it/en/press-release/household-energy-equip...

> https://www.idealista.it/news/finanza/casa/2026/07/26/406719...

Point is, the Rural Chinese aren't pre-industrial dirt farmers. When it comes to things like air conditioners, cell phones, TVs (~100% of households), internet use, etc., they usually rank quite highly.

As such, "60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming" is either a lie or shocking ignorance, plain and simple.

Why lie, though?

Your "60% live with dirt floors and engage primarily in subsistence farming" claim is utterly indefensible. At the end of 2025, China’s population was 67.9% urban and 32.1% rural. Even in 2021 -- approximately when you say you last checked -- it was already 64.72% urban.

Here's Chongqing, China's largest city by population (~31M): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOjZPCeZzGw

You'll agree that it's by no means a slum.

Also, and even more importantly, rural residence does not mean subsistence poverty. Look at stats on Chinese rural household possessions -- they're actually reasonably well-off. (e.g., >100 air conditioners per 100 households, whereas in France only ~25% of households have air conditioners!) Little surprise, then, that the World Bank credits China with lifting almost 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

Even if I grant your claim about food insecurity -- which is also fundamentally untrue, but not worth getting into -- how is it relevant? They need to import soybeans for animal feed, so they are evil?

You don't like them for some reason -- but I still don't get it, as the reasons you've put forth here make no sense and are flimsy, paper-thin.

Kind of adjacent: Can somebody explain why the LW/EA/rationalist types all seem to be so ardently against China?

They're otherwise generally in support of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, at least ostensibly, so I wonder what it is about China -- which has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty domestically and is looking to export wealth abroad (most notably in the form of accessible "luxury" goods such as electric cars) -- that seems to trigger them so much.

China's political economy is also far more "rationalist" than anything you'll find anywhere else.

And yet I swear, and I'm not exaggerating about this in the slightest, that the average EA/LW poster hates China far more than the average /pol/ poster -- and is perfectly comfortable making sweeping generalizations where 1.4B Chinese are concerned. Guys like Scott Alexander rarely (if ever) have a good word for them; Zvi Moshowitz discounts and belittles every technological advance they make, despite otherwise being very fair; and you see what LW itself is like...

They could use caesium or cadmium, which are hardly less weird than argon.

Trading punches in the benchmarks with Mimo v2.6 and 6.1-Sol (both very cheap!), and decidedly inferior to Opus 5.5. I'm afraid this looks unimpressive. Rather comical that they're delaying its launch "for safety reasons".

I'm still at a loss as to what argon has to do with anything. Say what you will about Luna-Terra-Sol-Astra, or Haiku-Sonnet-Opus, they make sense. I don't see how Google can make sense of argon; it's in a fairly strange place in the periodic table...

China won't, Russia won't, and there are many others who also don't extradite as a matter of policy. It appears that Pakistan doesn't usually extradite, or at the very least it makes the process very lengthy and difficult.

It says that the perp is Pakistani, and that he's been charged, but not that he's been arrested -- so he's presumably still free in Pakistan.

I hear that normally what the FBI would try in such cases is to lure people onto US or extraditable territory. IIRC there were some rogue Chinese chemists, who owned companies that sold fentanyl intermediates and were under secret indictment in the US, who were "invited to a VIP academic conference in Hawaii" and then arrested as soon as their flight landed.

Seems clear that this Pakistani is a bit more circumspect.

> Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . .

lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.

(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)

Interesting! Can you share an example?

I've only tried animating models in Astra-6, and I was quite impressed! It's rarely able to one-shot things perfectly, but it usually gets pretty close.

No, because I always hit my Fable quota (Max 20x) in 12 hours on simpler tasks, and I'd hate to need to buy tokens at API pricing.

Looking at the token prices, if this is half as good as 6-Astra for 3D model creation in Blender, it's going to be an absolute game changer.

Opus 5.5 is definitely better at coding, but nothing even comes close to 6-Astra for work in 3D graphics...

We're going to see a lot of "scientists solve ___ mystery" and "historians resolve the question of ____" over the next few years, that's for damn sure. Interesting time to be alive.

They're building quite the stack in experimental and ambitious AI model development.

For e.g., they recently acquired Taalas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201970

These things are all bets on the future -- and with the World Labs and Taalas acquisitions, in particular, the bet they're making is that conventional LLM development will plateau or become utterly commodified.

Status update: It launched. Looks very good so far. At nearly 100km altitude four minutes in, most engines nominal. Superheavy separated successfully.

Inspiring to watch, really.

There's a solution that most are overlooking.

Legal work in the past involved hiring specialist firms, at exorbitant rates, for specialist work. (And virtually all legal work is specialized.)

Legal work in the future might involve hiring one or two in-house lawyers to handle all work, at a standard salary rate. The crucial skills are simply editing and research. Current/near-future LLMs surpass virtually all specialists in domain knowledge and they do it quickly and for the cost of a few cheap subscriptions.

You only really need a lawyer because a business can't represent itself in court without one.

People don't like it, but the "weirdness" of life, as it relates to physics, just completely evaporates if the universe is superdeterministic.

And that's actually overkill. Plain vanilla determinism would do it. As would a universal-wavefunction/no-collapse conception of quantum mechanics. (i.e. the universe has its own wave function.)

Point is, what the author decries does not require New Physics. It should suffice to re-evaluate different interpretations of existing physics. These matters are, after all, by no means settled.

Yes, Opus 5.5 and Astra-6 are big improvements over Opus 5 and Sol-5.6. I'm at a point where I can automate much of my workflow, even for complicated tasks, which I could never do before.

Also the new Xiaomi model, Mimo v2.6, is outstanding as a light and cheap model. For coding, the new meta is using Astra-6-Max for orchestration and architecture, and Mimo for grunt work.

Whether or not it's genocide is debatable -- a matter of semantics. That it's "the opposite of genocide" is a laughable claim and demonstrates how detached from reality Israeli leadership is.

It's obviously ethnic cleansing -- this is the Israeli government's stated intent, and it couldn't possibly be any clearer.

And it's obviously immoral to wage war on an unfree and captive civilian population. This is the province of history's worst villains.

> Previous estimates suggested that Mercury had shrunk by just a few miles since its formation. Now, scientists say it is shrinking up to 30 percent faster than expected. It might have even shrunk by as much as 14.5 miles, which is nearly one percent of its current radius of 1,516 miles.

Less than 1% over 4.6 billion years, at that proximity to the sun, ain't that bad. The sun is expected to swallow Mercury in about 5 billion years, so it's going to meet a violent end long before it evaporates away into nothingness.

I must second this.

I'm in Europe, and here the options for home appliances are usually German (e.g. Philips), Balkan (e.g. Gorenje), or Xiaomi. Xiaomi is the best by far, and it's honestly not even close.

Their home appliances are so rock-solid that they actually still surprise me. For example: I've gone from having to replace electric water kettles every six months to buying one from Xiaomi and never replacing it. (Nigh on three years now.)

I really have a very positive impression of them.

The article belabors the point a little bit. A deodand was any inanimate object directly linked to a human fatality -- from a runaway cart to a falling branch -- and it was usually condemned and destroyed. (Or surrendered to the King and then sold, depending.)

There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.

The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:

> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach and still follows it.

The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?

I think that it has much more to do with the decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on -- courts began to view the old law as an irrational relic, and it gradually fell out of legal fashion.

What's interesting is that you can't do the same with long-form AI prose. You can ask any given LLM to write in different styles, but it will always fall back on the same rhetorical and structural techniques, so the "new style" is strictly surface-level. In fact, it's getting worse over time -- especially in Claude from Opus 4.6 --> Opus 5.

I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.

If payout is stuck for "2-3 business days," you still have account access, and you're still capable of accepting funds, you should probably just relax. Odds are that everything will be fine by Tues or Weds. If the transactions are legitimate and you can prove it, then the odds that they'll confiscate your money or hold onto it for an extended period of time are very, very low.

Not a bad idea to set up a secondary payment processor for growth, though!

This has got to be some kind of "how could things possibly go wrong?" AI Safety publicity stunt.

There's movement in that direction. "Beijing hails Taiwanese scholar’s rare proposal on reunification," from two days ago: https://archive.ph/2VSMT

It's hard to view it as a bad outcome next to the alternative, though.

Also the birthrate in Taiwan has absolutely cratered. TFR is 0.69.

> https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/price-of-parenth...

I believe that this is among the lowest vales ever recorded, anywhere. It's simply an objective fact that Taiwan is not a vibrant or healthy society. The status quo obviously isn't working for them.

Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade...

One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.