mysecretaccount

> The argument that consciousness suddenly arises due to a particular configuration of atoms is also suspect; all forms of consciousness we routinely accept are fairly robust to many configuration changes.

Not true at all - consciousness appears to rely on an extremely limited set of configurations, relative to all possible.

Panpsychism doesn't mean "everything is aware", it means the capacity for consciousness is material and common. Put my brain in a blender and the atoms are the same but I am no longer conscious.

The US and Russia can destroy every power plant in their respective opposing countries with I(C/R)BMs, but this would involve breaking taboos of which even their respective leaders are fearful.

The fighter jet is not capable of destroying every power plant in Iran without risking pilot casualties, an endeavor for which the US lacks political capital. The drone has no such issue. A rational nation would have shifted primary investment into medium-range drones many yesterdays ago.

> The drones are good for antagonizing and terrorising [sic] a civilian population. A few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties.

Absolutely incorrect.

- The purpose of these drones is to establish deterrence.

- US is not capable of reaching every inch of Iranian airspace with F-35s unless it is willing to accept a significant casualty rate among pilots.

- Even if they could, the US has not been able to decimate Iran's drone stockpile even in the areas it can ~safely reach.

The age of the fighter jet is over.

Is there some sort of cultural revisionism where we are expected to deny the existence of e.g. the Soviet design sensibility because of contemporary politics? What a bizarre response.

There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.

Even with your uncharitable framing I agree with both quotes.

> Chinese propaganda seems to hit very hard these days.

Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is a propagandized bot is a terrible way to live. You will not learn.

> Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light.

I'm in Hong Kong right now. Seems like it is still here to me.

> If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine

You may as well make the same argument about commanding a billion Nintendo 64s. We cannot simply scale up Claude instances like you say, its ability to produce interesting output is bounded by the underlying model.

The "Claude part" is important here, though. If you believe we can produce AGI by simulating physics then the existing paradigm is far too slow. A zettaflop does not even get close, you can have a moon-sized computer and it probably will not be able to produce AGI using the current transformer-based, extremely slow, classical computing architecture. We need to improve the underlying computation paradigm.

This is why the focus on raw compute is a poor use of engineering time. We have plenty of it, we are just headed in the wrong direction.

The output undoubtedly improves when looping LLM output back into the model at inference-time, but there is a limit to this and it is still bounded by the acumen of the underlying model. You cannot just recurse these models with tooling and compute to e.g. solve new physics.

Using a single Claude agent, ask it to generate "new" ideas and it will generate an immense list. Ask it to rank those ideas by novelty and it will comply.

The results will be lackluster. Additional agents will not improve the result.

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example:

> One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one.

We are already near the limits of what we can do if we throw compute at Claude without improving the underlying models, and it is not clear how we can get big improvements on the underlying models at this point. Surely geohot knows this, so I am surprised he thinks that "one million Claudes" would be able to e.g. write a better novel than one hundred Claudes, or even one Claude.

The poster to which I responded and the article are each speculating on the "why" for this contract. That said, we do not need to speculate about Cybertruck sales - Business Insider reported that Tesla sold only 5,400 of them in 2025Q3.

We know from this that they do not need the same level of third-party 4680 capacity, and (call it speculative if you so desire) this is the most parsimonious explanation for the L&F write down.

> Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier.

The latter part of this is speculative. Tesla may have begun shipping dry cathodes but it isn't clear that they're capable of matching the former third-party volume. Tesla would absolutely need the additional 4680 volume if Cybertruck sales were meeting their original projections (as opposed to now when they are ~an order of magnitude lower).

I agree with both of you, but scaling isn't feasible with this paradigm. You could need continent-sized hardware to approximate general intelligence with the current paradigm.

Clearly the poster is saying that SpaceX is "the billionaires".

SpaceX is majority owned by billionaires.

What is "low but not micro"? 80ug?

Enough with the tone policing. The original comment is accurate: Paramount seeks to install Zionist Bari Weiss. This is uncontroversially true.

> We should have solved chess already. > We should be aiming to solve chess, but we are not even trying.

We are trying and we should not expect to solve it because the search space is massive. There are more legal games of chess than atoms in the universe.

iPhone sales don't count as a US export when calculating the trade deficit? Does anyone have information on this? Seems like a major issue indeed.

The upper class vacuuming up all profit, greatly exacerbating inequality, is a far bigger deal than the inflationary impact of immigration. Your analysis is poor.

The timing of their acceptance of a 42-day ceasefire - whether now or eight months prior - bears little significance for the long-term outlook of Hamas or the civilian death toll in Gaza. Strange analysis to hang your hat on, Thomas.

"[Hamas] should have taken the deal when it was first offered [because this list of people died afterward]" sure sounds like a moral argument to me.

> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.

The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...

Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.

I suppose if we are to digress to the land of "shoulds", Israel should not have decided to delete tens of thousands of Gazan children in the interim.

Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.

Interesting, thank you!

> I feel like your writing borders on hate speech

Hilarious to imagine him writing this with a straight face.

I know many employees of the company Mullenweg runs (mismanages). He is not held in particularly high esteem among them.

Why is the DS in the "Non-modern graphics" row? It does not use a tile based renderer.