landryraccoon

The business case reason Russia would have a central orchestrator in a Russian data center is that they want centralized control. They are unlikely to delegate control of the information sphere to another, or allow a huge random mass of uncoordinated individuals just “post positive stuff about Russia”.

Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.

This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.

> Don't fool yourself into thinking that we as technologists are not creating a mind.

I'm not sure exactly why but the phrase "don't fool yourself" sets off paranoid alarm bells when I'm reading something.

It's usually immediately followed by a confident assertion without firm evidence. It feels very much like someone wants me to change my beliefs without presenting a rational argument why I should change, and without giving me any new facts so I feel more well informed.

This post doesn't seem to be a counterexample.

Do you hate joy? People like things. I’m more suspicious of someone who judges people for liking things.

Seems fine to me. If people like it why be a curmudgeon about it?

The old company made a mistake by not rebuilding, there was demand for ice cream at that location and somebody met that demand. Now people can eat ice cream under an old timey sign like they want to, good for them.

That’s already backfiring because high housing costs drive down the birth rate.

If the next generation is smaller than the previous generation, housing prices will collapse.

We're talking about gaming here.

What other goal is there than maximizing your subjective enjoyment of the game?

Sure if you're a professional streamer, your feels are maybe less important than engagement metrics but if you're just a casual?

Dude just play what feels good. It's literally the best and only metric.

China has surpassed the US in total energy generation, and the gap is growing in their favor every year.

Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.

Teenagers and people in their 20 don’t need these drugs anyway, and they’re the ones who should be most concerned about long term effects.

But people in their 50s and older? What long term effect is going to show up before they die? At age 70 or 80 long term effects are basically completely irrelevant.

> The counter extermination was only 5% of Athens total population, or so historians say, so it seems like a lot of nuance was shown.

That fact alone doesn't demonstrate nuance. It's possible that 5% of the population was innocent and treated as scapegoats, or chosen randomly, or that anyone high profile regardless of guilt was chosen to die.

Unless there's data on who was actually innocent or guilty, the mere fact that extermination was selective doesn't mean it was in any way accurate.

If one civilization is taking revenge on another I don’t think they would show that much nuance.

For one thing, wouldn’t everyone claim they were against their old polis? How would the invaders have any idea who was an idiote?

I just don’t believe it’s at all easy to avoid the fate of your nation , and I especially doubt that the politically ignorant have a better chance of avoiding that fate than the well informed.

This blog post feels really fishy to me.

It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are.

For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.

It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.

For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.

What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?

I'm sorry to say you're very out of touch. This rosy picture is objectively wrong when it comes to housing.

Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, despite all of our technological advancements.

This translates to housing construction that has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The average first time homebuyer is now over 40 years old, and the median homebuyer is 55 years old.

Everyone needs housing. If you bought your house 20 years ago, you likely did not notice that housing has become unaffordably expensive for most young people. Sure, you're having fun biking around the city, but people aren't going to enjoy life in the city if they cannot afford housing.

Are you counting rent as a subscription fee?

If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.

If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.

Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.

The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.

The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.

It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.

Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.

It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.

TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.

It seems unlikely to me that they'll never have to retrain their model to account for new data. Is the assumption that their power usage drastically drops after 3 years?

Unless they go out of business in 3 years that seems unlikely to me. Is this a one-off model where they train once and it never needs to be updated?

Their electricity costs are $10K per month or about $120K per year. At an interest rate of 7% that's $1.7M of capital tied up in power bills.

At that rate I wonder if it makes sense to do a massive solar panel and battery installation. They're already hosting all of their compute and storage on prem, so why not bring electricity generation on prem as well?

Many human beings don’t match “human intelligence” in all areas. I think any definition of AGI has to be a test that 95% of humans pass (or you admit your definition is biased and isn’t based on an objective standard).

That's moving the goalposts.

ChatGPT would easily have passed any test in 1995 that programmers / philosophers would have set for AGI at that time. There was definitely no assumption that a computer would need to equal humans in manual dexterity tests to be considered intelligent.

We've basically redefined AGI in a human centric way so that we don't have to say ChatGPT is AGI.

Can you be more specific? Which politician is using this fund in a corrupt fashion, to help which friend? Please provide names.

Or are you simply expressing the same meaningless general cynicism that is so predictably and boringly parroted whenever any government tries to do anything?

Sounds like a very strong incentive for us to find a way to leave the planet and settle elsewhere.

For physical materials, like gold, this applies because gold is useful other than as a medium of exchange.

But ETH is a mathematical construct. It should be true in the limit up until the very last measurable quantum of ETH is erased, and the very last bit holds the entire value of the cryptocurrency.

To put it another way when does “deleting eth is good for eth” cease to be a valid argument?

Just to clarify, it’s good for cryptocurrency when a portion of that finite currency is irreversibly removed from circulation forever?

In that case I assume it’s best if all ETH were to cease to exist completely. I can’t really argue against that.

Japan has said AI can train on copyrighted materials.

https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guide...

I imagine if copyright is a big issue for AI, Japanese startups will have an advantage.

> no sane nation ever will buy a US weapon

I don’t think the US defense industry is worried. Do you know any sane nations around here?

In general it’s not like war is about who’s right or moral. It’s more about who can bring more and better weapons to the fight.

This is a general objection to AI responding to real world events in general : "What if something unexpected happens?" It comes up in self driving as well. Things like "What if something suddenly appears in the middle of the road" or "Can it drive in snow conditions with zero visibility?

My question is, how do you know that in general human beings respond better to unexpected or very complex / difficult situations than an automated system would? Yes, human beings can improvise, but automated systems can have reaction times more than an order of magnitude faster than that of even the quickest humans.

I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?

Here's a competing hypothesis: An automated system can incorporate training data based on every recorded incident that has ever happened. Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation, an AI system can have an example of how to handle that scenario. Is it really true that the average human operator would beat this system in safety and reliability? How many humans know how to respond to every rare situation that has ever happened? It's at least possible that the AI does better on average.

Fwiw I agree with you.

I feel that in general people obsess over assigning blame to the detriment of actually correcting the situation.

Take the example of punishing crimes. If we don’t punish theft, we’ll get more theft right? But what do you do when you have harsh penalties for crime, but crime keeps happening? Do you accept crime as immutable, or actually begin to address root causes to try to reduce crime systemically?

Punishment is only one tool in a toolbox for correcting bad behavior. I am dismayed that people are fearful enough of the loss of this single tool as to want to architect our entire society around making sure it is available.

With AI we have a chance to chart a different course. If a machine makes a mistake, the priority can and should be fixing the error in that machine so the same mistake can never happen again. In this way, fixing an AI can be more reliable than trying to punish human beings ever could.

Can you explain why? That doesn’t seem like sound reasoning to me.

If you believe the reason is corruption, what personal incentive would the courts have to rule this way? Judges can easily be the victim of government overreach as well.

It's even worse than you're saying actually, because health care has no price transparency, very little consumer choice, no negotiating power on the part of the user and even the services provided are extremely opaque.

To be honest, I'm quite surprised you're siding with the provider here. Are you personally satisfied with healthcare pricing in the United States? Do you not share my intuition that in general, healthcare is too expensive and inefficient?

To use a software development analogy, the average person is a user of health care, not a health care project manager or designer.

Just as the user of an App doesn't need to provide an alternative design when they say "this App sucks", the average user of healthcare likewise has no obligation to redesign the healthcare system when they say "this healthcare system sucks."

I take issue with the claim that in order to say something is too expensive that you must be able to precisely propose an alternative price.

I have no idea what the correct margin for essential cancer drugs is. I don’t think it should be a 10x markup. Intuitively, it seems that there’s something wrong with price gouging dying cancer patients. If you have an argument why my intuition is wrong, please share it.