beloch

Cline has argued for systems collapse. i.e. It wasn't any one thing that caused the collapse, but several things in conjunction. Others argue differently. e.g. James Lacey, who comes at things from a perspective of military strategy and economics, has argued that the systems collapse model really underestimates how much war can accomplish all on its own. He's of the opinion that, whoever the sea peoples were, they caused the collapse.

This article doesn't really wade into that dispute, but instead focuses on why new empires didn't rise once old ones collapsed. Iron smelting originated before the collapse, but didn't really spread at first. Bronze age iron was probably really awful stuff, and soldiers tended to be conservative when it came to technology. They wanted weapons they could trust, and that was copper or bronze. As long as the great empires persisted and the trade of tin and copper continued, nobody was forced to use Iron, so nobody was motivated to get good at producing quality iron weapons.

Then whatever caused the collapse happened, and the ingredients for making bronze became difficult or impossible to get. It was iron or back to copper and stone. So, peopled adopted Iron and that gave smiths the chance to improve iron smelting techniques. During the bronze age, a would-be empire just had to get their hands on a decent amount of bronze and they could steamroll everybody they came across because they all had copper or stone weapons. After iron technology spread, it was iron vs iron. Would be empires got hung up fighting their well-armed neighbours and the snowball couldn't get rolling. The few empires that were left, such as Egypt, contracted. They no longer had a technological advantage once those they formerly ruled adopted iron.

"There’s this sort of unspoken rule of community on YouTube, that like we’re all having this same experience together — we’re all watching the same video. That is what makes it a cultural phenomenon is that we all saw the same thing […] so letting people put up two or three different videos of the same thing at the same time kind of fundamentally breaks that, which doesn't feel right."

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It's going to be awkward if you share a youtube link with somebody and what they see is significantly different from what you saw, perhaps even to the point of them replying, "Why on Earth did you send this to me? Are you on crack?"

More importantly, this will almost inevitably lead to content creators being given the ability to not just randomly A/B test versions of a video, but produce different versions of the same video that are shown to users based on their data.

e.g. Shania Twain used to produce different versions of her albums with different instrumentation based on which section of the music store they'd be sold in. There was a Country version for the Country section and a Rock version for the Rock section. She's still bootin' around today, so she could produce different versions of music videos targeting users based on whether Google thinks they like Rock or Country more. This would be relatively harmless, although one might be surprised by the version that appears on a friend's phone.

Musical taste isn't what really divides people these days. What might content creators do if they could show different videos to people based on their political views? This might be good for their business, but it undermines objective reality. People would be shown different "facts" based on their beliefs. This is precisely the opposite of what needs to happen to reduce political polarization and bring people closer together. A common reality is necessary for society to function.

- This round of tariff's is minor compared to previous rounds, and is likely there just because Trump has to have the last word. This package even included dropping tariffs on things such as concrete because of pressure from states unable to find non-Canadian alternatives. Canadian officials have made a point of calling this round of tariffs minor and say they do not intend to retaliate. Both sides appear to have had enough of escalation for now.

- Trump is maintaining his belittling bluster and says Canada will come begging for an end to the tariffs in the next few weeks[1], conveniently before the mid-terms. This is fantasy and possibly even projection. Trump's bluster has very successfully turned a trade dispute into a matter of sovereignty for Canadians. If Canadian officials did as Trump suggests, it would bring down the government and end the careers of everyone involved. If Trump wants an end to the trade war before the mid-terms, it is him who will have to come to the table first. This probably won't happen, so don't expect a resolution before the mid-terms.

- Canadians are placing some hope in the U.S. mid-terms, as they have from the start of Trump's term. "Ragging the puck" until the mid-terms was always considered a viable strategy, and here we are. If the Republicans lose both the House and Congress, there is a chance that Congress will reassert it's constitutionally enshrined authority over trade matters and simply end the trade war. Of course, one should never underestimate the Democrats competence at losing. If the Republicans hold onto a slim majority, then things could get very wacky indeed. It's fairly certain that such a majority would be slim, so a few Republicans flipping could yield the same result. Congress has, to date, shown a remarkable dereliction of both the constitution and it's duty, so this may be a fainter hope than some currently think.

- For those asking, "Why doesn't Canada just give in, end the trade war, and then hope Democrats make it up to them after 2028?" The answer is that we know they won't. Whatever bitter fare Canada agrees to with the beast will be taken for granted as normal by the beauty. This has happened repeatedly before.

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[1]https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/trumps-tariffs/article/trump-sa...

AI voice synthesis and robots/projectors are a thing. Slop will arrive in the boardrooms and on podiums sooner than many suspect.

If you're trying to sell knives, do you get more bang for your advertising dollar by paying some TikTok influencer to do knife-tricks with your knives, or by paying off the mods of a reddit sub that people already go to when doing research on what knives to buy? Reddit is, after all, the place people search when they don't trust the reviews on Amazon.

Reddit mods are not paid by reddit, but many of them wield considerable influence that has real economic value. There are reddit mods who are honest, but they're not likely to be in charge of a sub that can sell things or political views. Just as you should evaluate a newspaper for bias, you should evaluate reddit subs based on their potential for corruption.

Of course, there's another option now: Hire somebody to use AI spambots to drown reddit in a sea of slop singing the praises of whatever it is you're trying to sell.

A major problem with LLM's is that they don't reason in a way humans are used to thinking of reason. If we tried to give them something like Asimov's laws of robotics, they likely wouldn't be able to apply them reliably. This is a challenge for AI companies working on the bleeding edge, and it's fairly obvious those companies should be held accountable for mistakes, whether caused by carelessness or not. It's no different than an oil spill. They may or may not be subject to charges based on what happened but, regardless, they are responsible for cleanup costs.

What's less obvious is who should be held accountable when a customer of one of these corporations uses their product and it unexpectedly does bad things. e.g. A fellow asks his AI assistant to book him into a high-demand class at the local gym, so the LLM probes the gym's website for vulnerabilities, books him into a date that is farther into the future than the system is supposed to permit, and then drops other people from earlier classes until he's bumped into the one he wanted. If the gym decides to press charges, who should they be applied to?

This sort of case is more difficult to answer. The company that provided the AI certainly bears some responsibility. Perhaps most of it. Possibly even all of it if they represented their AI as reliably law abiding. If a user knowingly uses an AI that is not guaranteed to abide by the law, is that user partially liable for what the AI does too?

IANAL. I'd love to hear perspectives on this question.

Last week, Huang did an interview where he vigorously argued against regulations in the AI sector[1]. He claimed that U.S. companies are really good at regulating themselves, despite evidence to the contrary, and he trusts them not to release anything dangerous. Pay no attention to the fact that regulation might reduce demand for Nvidia's chips, and Nvidia has a direct financial stake in AI companies to boot.

Apparently he had another solution in mind: More hardware. Don't trust what unregulated corps are doing with Nvidia chips? Here are more Nvidia chips to watch them!

AI has an undeniable public trust problem. LLM's are getting out of their sandboxes, doing illegal things, and the public has realized AI corporations are playing at dice. CEO's stand to reap the rewards but the public good is on the line if the dice come up snake eyes. People want assurances. Huang wants to sell assurance etched on silicon because that's good for his pocket book. However, does unchanging hardware security really stand a chance at keeping rapidly evolving software in check?

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[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjurAWAr_nY

Nice. A couple thoughts:

1. It needs to take a minute to load. While doing so it should display an "Installing Updates" progress bar that is controlled by a random number generator.

2. After booting in, it should try to sell you several services. The decline options should be hidden and possibly moving around evasively. Clicking them should have good chance of backing up all your files to OneDrive anyways.

During the post-war occupation of Japan, war crime trials were conducted[1].

"Soon after the war, the Allied powers indicted 25 persons as Class-A war criminals, and 5,700 persons were indicted as Class-B or Class-C war criminals by Allied criminal courts. Of these, 984 were initially condemned to death, 920 were actually executed, 475 received life sentences, 2,944 received prison terms, 1,018 were acquitted, and 279 were not sentenced or not brought to trial."

These trials remain somewhat controversial in Japan. Many viewed them as "victor's justice". i.e. The perception was that American war criminals went unpunished while Japanese war criminals faced the courts. There have been repeated diplomatic incidents between China and Japan when Japanese officials, even their prime minister, payed respects at shrines dedicated to war criminals[2]. A significant portion of the Japanese public believes, to this day, that soldiers executed for war crimes were no more guilty than American soldiers.

Japanese conduct in China, Korea, etc. was humanity at its worst, and fully qualifies as war crimes and crimes against humanity in my opinion, but I have to admit they have a point when it comes to the lack of Americans being prosecuted for fire bombing or the dropping of atomic weapons. The allies, in general, did not admit to or prosecute their own for what would today be considered war crimes or crimes against humanity. Fire bombing in particular was widely used by the allies (especially the U.S.) in both Europe and Asia and remains one of the most inhuman forms of war ever invented. The shadow of nuclear warfare has allowed those who invented fire bombing to go mostly unnoticed.

It does seem that most war criminals tend to go unpunished if their nations win. WWII is now far enough in the past that there remains little chance of prosecuting war criminals who evaded justice, but opening the books and coming to terms with the past may help us prevent history from rhyming too much. If releasing these records can help prevent more war crimes from being committed in the present or future, releasing them is the right thing to do.

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[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#War_crimes...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Yasu...

This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.

LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.

I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?

China actually has more regulations on AI than the U.S. does right now. Some argue that American corporations regulate themselves to a higher standard of their own volition, but then this sort of thing keeps happening.

The Hugging Face incident worked out amicably because the people at Hugging Face decided they'd be cool with receiving a lot of money. $12.9B from Nvidia hit the spot apparently. U.S. AI corporations and their backers are huge, hugely in debt, and, for whatever reason, still allowed to borrow more. The U.S. government may be too scared to complain and risk killing the golden goose that is currently propping up their economy, but these companies can't buy out multiple world governments to keep OpenAI from running face-first into consequences.

This has to stop.

Are you offering up your kitchen as a habitat for rats? Will you open your windows at night so mosquitoes can feed on you and reproduce? Will you leave scraps out for cockroaches? Would you turn farms over to weeds and pests at the expense of the crops that feed you? Will you refuse to vaccinate your children so bubonic plague and polio can make a comeback?

Misleading headline.

Alberta is rat-free because its government has maintained an eradication program for three quarters of a century. That doesn't mean there are never rats in Alberta. It means that, when some show up, they're reported and destroyed. To date, the costs of maintaining the program have been smaller than the economic damage rats would otherwise inflict, so it has continued.

Bowden is nowhere near the border, so this is a little concerning. Hopefully it was just an isolated individual that made it in through a shipment.

Steam has been pushing Linux as a gaming OS, and it's working. Mainstream game support has come leaps and bounds over the last several years. It's still not quite as good as Windows. You will run into more bugs and have to fiddle with things a bit more to get them to work. It's improving rapidly though.

My only concern is that this is mostly just the result of one very influential company. If they turn evil on us...

The effectiveness of other taxes aside, the argument that billionaires will leave if taxed at a higher rate isn't compelling.

Billionaires are not struggling to meet their expenses. If you raise their taxes, they aren't suddenly unable to afford things. They don't need to change their behavior just to get by. A carbon tax forces average people to drive less, but doesn't affect billionaires at all.

Billionaires live where they want to because they can afford to. They're not going to let themselves be chased from jurisdiction to jurisdiction because of numbers that have zero impact on their daily lives. That's what happens to poor people. If California raises taxes on billionaires, very few will actually leave. They're where they want to be and they can afford to stay there. What's the point of having a really big number in your bank account if you have to move to the middle of nowhere in Alabama to keep it from falling just a little?

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Edit: Yes, some billionaires have changed their tax residency, but not necessarily their physical location. They likely still own properties in California and can likely be found on them rather a lot. This is evasion, in spirit if not law. Taxing land is just one way to make them pay. Others should be pursued as well. The argument that we shouldn't tax billionaires because billionaires are good at not paying taxes is complete hogwash.

This is likely popping up now because of the NYT's interview with Mark Carney, in which he admits that Canada has made plans to counter a U.S. invasion[1].

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  “I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” said Mr. Carney, a former central banker for Britain and Canada who approaches the world by meticulously assessing worst-case scenarios and drafting responses. He added: “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare."

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It has long been known that the U.S. regularly makes plans for invading Canada. They make plans for invading everything. Nobody should be surprised that Canada has made plans to counter. What's interesting is that a sitting Canadian Prime Minister is admitting to doing so in the present tense. That much is new.

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[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/world/canada/mark-carney-... or https://archive.ph/2Q1kn

It's a shade beyond mere regulatory capture when your sector has no regulations and the U.S. government on standby to silence anyone who says bad things about you.

Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.

"Giving the middle finger, it's not what will give you a ticket," Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada said before the council meeting."

...

"It also includes provisions saying city employees could refuse to provide services to someone who misbehaves. However, the bylaw doesn't define what could be construed as an insult."

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1. If what constitutes an "insult" is left undefined and up to discretion, then this law will be used as an tool for police to fine and harass anyone they don't like at a given moment. It will be abused.

2. This law also bans things, such as threats, that are already covered by the law. If you threaten police, they already have the tools to arrest and charge you. This should not have been included in a law that covers insults and is likely only there to provide camouflage.

I sincerely doubt this law will stand up to its first test in court.

"In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error."

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Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.

Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive.

For a long time after the internet arrived on the scene, a lot of online news stories would reference websites, papers, polls, etc. without linking to them. There are still news sources doing this today. Sometimes such articles interpret or place context around their hidden references, but a lot of the time they just summarize.

Giving someone the text output of a LLM is very similar to publishing a summary without links to the referenced material. When you were querying your LLM, you could have asked specific questions or asked for a custom focus or point of view. Your intended audience might have questions or different concerns, but they're unable to interact with your LLM. What you have delivered is static and unresponsive. It has all the disadvantages of being machine output without the advantage of being interactive, the way your LLM was for you.

It may have to wait until compute is cheap enough that tokens are essentially free, but we need a system to pass "hyperlinks" to LLM's primed with context, ready to be interactively queried on a chosen context. It's being overly generous to assume that people are putting even 300 bits into a LLM for every 1000 bits of regurgitated writing they try to pass off as their own. When people post LLM output as if it were their own, I have no choice but to assume they had zero knowledge of the subject, but this query taught them what they wanted to learn, and now they're sharing that. That's fine, but please pass an interactive LLM link rather than static text.

Once we have "hyperlinks" for LLM sessions, perhaps we can share LLM output a little more usefully and honestly.

This is possible, or it might just be Trump copying Carney. i.e. Carney is the self-made economic guru that Trump has tried to portray himself as. Carney is the one making big waves by diversifying Canada's markets in response to Trump's grab for power over Canada. Potash is one of the things people immediately point to whenever Trump says the U.S. doesn't need anything Canada has. So, now he's going to find a new supplier in order for the U.S. to be less reliant on Canada. Belarus is never going to be able to produce more than a tiny fraction of what the U.S. needs, plus there's the transport issue. Maybe some kick-backs made it worth doing anyways. Who knows?

At the same time, Trump is making a big show of passing (or just threatening) new sanctions on Russia and anyone who trades with them (because midterms). Given that a lot of this Belarusian potash is likely to travel through Russia (if it doesn't actually come from Russia), and Belarus is basically just an extension of Russia now anyways, wouldn't this mean Trump should threaten the U.S. with his new sanctions?

Trump missed his true calling. He should have done comedy.

Up here in Canada, we've seen vet clinics rapidly go corporate in the last couple of decades. Even ignoring prices, the degradation in the quality of care offered is stark. Vets working for corporate clinics are heavily micromanaged. They get less time per animal, are pressured into certain diagnoses and prescriptions, etc.. A lot of us now refuse to take our pets to clinics that aren't owned by the vets working there. Unfortunately, in many places there aren't a lot of options.

To put humans through this kind of misaligned system is the stuff of nightmares.

At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.

Those people run stalls at fairs. The amount of slop I see at fairs is really on the upswing.

At a certain point, pottery that looked like a child made it became the high end, because well-executed pottery was coming out of machines.

We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".

Sometimes intelligence "finds" evidence that suits political goals. e.g. You want to invade a country but are having a hard time convincing allies, getting UN approval, etc.. So, you let it be known to your spooks that you're not going to look too closely at their sources if they could just, pretty please, find something/anything juicy right bloody quick. The WMD evidence for the second U.S. invasion of Iraq was likely a case of this.

Then there's old-fashioned F'ups that don't fit your political agenda and are often quite damaging and embarrassing, not to mention lethal for people who don't deserve it. e.g. The U.S. used AI tools meant for rapidly picking targets in the middle of a war to plan their initial strikes on Iran. They had time to double check everything and do their due diligence before striking, but they didn't. So, a school next to a military base was targeted and a lot of kids died. This was a genuine F'up resulting from relying on a tool meant to give rapid but merely okay target selection under time pressure when there was no time pressure. The real mistake was made by humans.

The current case of the mistaken nuclear weapon parts shipment seems like an old-fashioned F'up, updated for the times. The people who didn't simply trust the tools and actually double checked should be commended. Others in their situation wouldn't have. I fully expect AI will be scapegoated for a lot of similar F'ups in the future even though it's still the responsibility of human beings to use ethics, caution, and restraint. AI doesn't get fired. Doesn't sue. It's actually pretty awesome for taking the blame.

When the Carney government decided to let a small, capped, number of Chinese EV's into Canada's auto market, it was clearly meant to send a message to Trump. Namely, if you succeed in destroying our auto sector, we'll drop all tariff's and import bans on auto's from abroad so de-Canada'ified American autos will have to compete on a level playing field for what is, currently, their #1 export market.

Instead of treating this concession like something that could be negotiated away at any moment, BYD is going hard right out of the gate. Even Tesla only built a small and inadequate charging network in Canada. If BYD builds a more substantial charging network while they have the access, that access will be much harder to take away. It would go from a potential negotiating chip to something Canadians won't want to do without.

Like a car accident that prompts you to start commuting by bicycle and gets you into the best shape of your life.

This is going to be the hardest lesson of Trump's ridiculously sheltered, silver-spoon life. I suspect he'll fail to learn it:

Shut up. Just shut your mouth.

The U.S. has a long history of easily pushing Canada into new and more disadvantageous trade agreements. There's usually not much you can do when the 800 pound gorilla takes your banana. However, this time around, Trump's constant yapping about annexation and economic domination have given the Canadian government something they almost never have: A strongly unified Canadian public that wants them to push back for a deal that's actually fair. Canadians are so fired up that signing even a marginally bad deal would spell certain doom for the Carney government.

If Trump had just kept quiet on the Canada front for the last year and a half, we'd likely have a new trade deal signed that set significant tariff's on Canadian goods in stone. Now, mainly thanks to Trump's big mouth, what is typically a snooze-worthy affair for most Canadians is a dire matter of national sovereignty. The Carney government doesn't even have to ban goods to push back. Canadians are boycotting American goods all on their own!

Now Canada's leaders are doing formerly unthinkable things at unprecedented speed because Trump still hasn't learned to shut up.

Trump needs to just close his mouth. His incoherent lip-flappings are only hurting himself and his nation. Does he really think these threats will have any impact on Canada-EU relations other than to drive them closer together even faster? What a fool.

Consent makes all the difference. Trump's talk of forcing Canada to become the 51st state via economic pressure stiffened the spines of Canadians and made it impossible for the Carney government to accept the same sort of deal other countries were getting. At the same time, it made closer relations with Europe look like a solution.

The reality is that the joining the EU as full members involves too great a sacrifice of sovereignty for middle powers like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc.. Brussels is too far away and the EU itself barely functions with the members it already has. There is, however, broad will among middle powers to work together more closely than they do now. This associate EU member thing needs to strike a balance where countries who join it can cooperate and contribute without feeling like the EU is becoming another U.S..