roenxi

What aspect of that do you want them to be concerned about? The bigger concern was population growth, it is nearly impossible for living standards to keep rising if the population is growing exponentially - at some point the number of new mouths overwhelmed the ability to produce food and some sort of underclass has to form. We need at least stabilisation at some point and it seems the easiest way to achieve that is to wobble between growth and decay.

We have all the tools for population decline to work out fine. The economy is run mainly by capital and it seems like we're decoupling military power from number of soldiers.

> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.

Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.

Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.

> US has $40T federal debt (+state, +municipal, +household) and probably 100T+ debt worldwide which the future generations have to pay.

Future US citizens are clearly not going to repay the debt, simply because they can't feasibly pay that much back in real terms. They cannot achieve the impossible. The magnitude of the debt is far beyond what it makes sense for the US to make good on.

Future generations of the US won't be able to borrow on such favourable terms (ie, people will stop donating to the US cause) and all the capital investment that would have happened in the US to power their consumption happened in China instead - but the effects of the debt won't look like repaying anything.

Sounds like a gross misapplication of the law enforcement system. The free exchange of information should be legalised.

As we can see in the good article, the copyright system might almost have cost us a lot of AI capabilities. The damage it has done in cases where the lawyers got ahead of the builders is incalculable.

Given the success of Shenzhen I'm always a little confused that no-one ever seems to talk about what actually makes it a SEZ. Those policies (mainly local governance & tax exemptions AFAIK) should probably be more widely applied.

If the government plans to try free-market capitalism then I'm in favour of the plan.

How could they not share the blame? Is the EU so institutionally weak it has no power to influence events in Europe? I don't see how they could be that ineffective.

> But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.

But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.

> They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.

That is actually something of a natural phenomenon (see [0] it is a large topic). Historically when a centre of excellence forms it tends to be a tight geographical region learning how to do work well.

Government policy should be cluster-friendly but as long as policy doesn't get in the way it happens naturally. The incentives on businesses are to form a cluster independently because the cluster in-group outcompetes businesses outside the cluster.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography

I mean the EU got its diplomacy so badly wrong that it sparked one of the deadliest wars this century in Europe and the EU countries appear to be rearming in preparation for the state of war spreading. The EU seem to be in the process of destabilising the state that controls the largest cache of nuclear weapons in existence.

The project has not scored well on matters of war and peace. And there is still a far too likely possibility here that after re-arming and in an era of war the Europeans fall back to their old tricks and descend into a state of war against each other again, given that the adults keeping them peaceful seem to have left the building.

> EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.

Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?

The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.

I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.

IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.

It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory. The little flashes of news as they start settling in to more interesting and high tech industries. Whatever good or evil comes out of their growing geopolitical power at least that is another billion people with a clear enough path to wealth and prosperity.

In theory. The issue is we've seen exactly what happens in a Congress v. constitution showdown once the Congresspersons put their collective feet down. Congress eventually redefines the law in a way that favours them. Plain language won't stop them if they get serious; they aren't supposed to be regulating the US economy the way they do either and a lot of stuff the military-industrial complex does looks like it should be unconstitutional (like the spying and the secret courts).

On the one hand there is a clear and comforting consensus in the US that they aren't going to force religious mores on anyone. So I don't see how the Congress could or would try. But if we ever end up in a situation where the US Congress decides it wants to go straight Catholic I really don't see how it would fail. They've got far too much power and they'll eventually rotate in a compliant judiciary and then redefine what words mean so they can do it.

It is a bit difficult when dealing with such an out-there scenario, but if Congress decides the US military should do something wild then eventually the military is going to do it. The realistic protection is that by virtue of good system design there isn't a plausible scenario where Congress would want to impose Catholicism on the US population by force.

Congress can do that, can't it? Why can't it? It could declare all competing religions as terrorist organisations.

Obviously it'd be immoral, unorthadox and impractical but I expect Congress has a long history of promoting and stamping out ideologies and they can do it. What little I know about the civil rights era springs to mind.

I think you might have misread the thread so far. Do you think the US military is buying atomic bombs from a supplier who is going to try and stop them from bombing things on demand? Obviously the bomb makers have to make peace with the fact that their customers may, of their independent initiative, one day detonate the bombs.

It's a deeply philosophical question in many ways - if you don't enjoy the direction a studio takes its game, is that their problem? Earendel who designed Space Age has a rigid take on game design that was absent from the original Factorio. In the base game if there was some aspect that you didn't like it was totally fine to disengage with it. In Space Age there is a lot of mandatory requirements down to the bizarre approach to prescribing weapons for particular maps (in hindsight it is actually a bit weird that they didn't make the use of flamethrowers mandatory at some point; they may change that eventually).

Space Age doesn't respect the people who played Factorio as a light a-la-carte design sandbox experience. But it isn't obvious that is worse as opposed to just different. Wube doesn't have to build games for those people, they have many players who clearly wanted different things.

That analogy still makes this sound like a textbook designation. In that situation the pen manufacturer is expected to sell pens without a theory of what will happen next. The person who buys a pen might use it to kill someone or commit horrific legal/moral crimes and that has nothing at all to do with the pen manufacturer.

I can see how I might reasonably refuse to deal with that pen manufacturer. The pen manufacturer is unreasonably pushy and they're going to be massive trouble to deal with because they're all up in my business in a paranoid way and disrupting my use of their product. Companies have made my never-again list for far smaller slights.

> These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit.

It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.

Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prince_Sado

> Landlord costs affect supply in the long term, so you will see changes, just not necessarily immediately over a one year period, but definitely over a 5-10 year period.

In fact - although that logic is usually correct - in the case of a land value tax it isn't useful because landlords do not supply land. Someone is still going to own the land and it is still going to be used for something. There is no incentive to leave it unused. There aren't any less resources in the overall system and resources haven't been diverted from a productive use to an unproductive use (quite the reverse, they're being redirected away from someone who was doing nothing to earn them). That is the theoretical advantage of taxing the land.

If it were anything else (eg, taxing the houses on the land) then the argument would be useful because the tax was on transforming less valuable resources into more valuable and there would be less productive economic activity and losses leading to less supply of something that the economy was signalling a need for.

There might be a reallocation from housing to some other purpose if an LVT is bought in, who knows. But it is a context-dependent change and not possible to reason about as a general outcome. It might be that the economy produces exactly the same amount of housing before and after. Less resources overall will be allocated to landlords, obviously, but not in a fashion that penalises building houses. Maybe that means house prices drop and more people own their houses outright. Maybe there is even more housing because resources move from landlords to housebuilders.

> If it is just a land tax, however, you can game it by building as much as possible...

I've never heard an entirely satisfactory process for valuing the land either. Although to some extent all tax systems have questionable underpinnings and compliance.

The exchange rate between shiny objects and edible objects has nothing to do with inflation though; they're both physical objects. Unless people start trading glittery balloons it is quite difficult for shiny objects to inflate and the fluctuations from increasing supply are generally not a problem.

The inflation complaints are people who prefer not to be taxed for saving currency and earning money in fiat. As far as it is a lizard brain thing it's more about principles of fairness in who should be paying taxes and the aversion people have to things taken away from them.

I shudder to think what one man with a texta could do here. It isn't that hard to turn the acyclic graph into a cyclic one.

This is quite a bad argument, somewhat akin to "small drones can't kill anyone because there are no weapons on them!" back 20 years ago. Well, ok. So what if someone adds the thing that is missing? And there is no reason to think that a stochastic parrot can't go rogue, the evidence is a stochastic parrot can engage in any intellectual activity we care to define and benchmark.

> Except, in this case...

You say this like it is some sort of exception to the rule. Glancing at history, usually when societies with trains come up against competitors using horses it turns out that the train people are literally power hungry dictators who do kill off the entire opposition. The reason most countries tend towards capitalist economies is what happens to your society if the capitalists are all on the other side when battle lines are drawn up.

Sucks to be poor and tech-illiterate. The advice is don't set society up that way on purpose.

> It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."

FWIW, forcing people to go along with transparent lies is a popular social manoeuvre. It signals both the power of a group and the power of the person leading the lie.

Although it is a very frustrating tendency, because honesty and realism tends to be better for the people who have the numbers. It is hard to organise real efforts around lies.

That is the seed of a reasonable argument against securing guns - if you're expecting to have to use a gun to defend yourself, you want to have a gun and have it on hand and ready to use. If it is illegal to have the gun out of storage then that is a problem in the event of being attacked by someone.

It seems unlikely that the toddler to be using a gun effectively though.

"Disingenuous" implies someone is doing something on purpose. Anyone calling a Minister an unelected bureaucrat is just mistaken - obviously a minister isn't an unelected bureaucrat. They're an elected bureaucrat.

That said, whoever this Anika Wells woman is the law looks like a bad idea and it is nice that the US has found it in their interests to say something helpful.

Torrents are legal until someone, at great expense and difficulty, proves otherwise (even then, jurisdiction and content dependent). At which point everyone involved will ignore the fact and carry on. That is a situation with enormous will, lots of money and ongoing enforcement effort to suppress the things.

And compared to torrents abliterated models are more complicated to identify, harder to suppress and there is a lot less reason for anyone to care.

It is not feasible. They never made much of an inroad against torrents and that is a much easier target than abliterated models. As the linked website shows; the process to abliterate a model can be as simple as

pip install -U heretic-llm && heretic Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B

let alone people just putting the weights up in a torrent. All assuming that someone even tried to ban abliterated models.

Those arguments are independent of the state of OSS models. There appears to be no moat whatsoever on creating state of the art models commercially - the US threw the kitchen sink at China in terms of sanctions and barriers ... yet it has been unable to keep Chinese companies away from the frontier (arguably ahead in small local models with Qwen). Even if all the models were proprietary we'd expect the costs and capabilities to be widely available. The Europeans might even be able to field their own advanced models eventually.

OSS models are strategically important, but that is a different matter to getting value out of them for OSS software development.

> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.

The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.

> This is quite clearly accusing them of being a cult in the sense of Scientology or Jonestown, not in the sense of Britney Spears lovers.

If that were true, I believe you would be able to draw support from the text. You've got quotes there clearly identifying that the author thinks they're a cult, but not a cult in the sense of Scientology or Jonestown (which are/were notable for being coercive, insular, or dangerous).

The quotes identify both are cults. Which, yeah, sure they are. There are a lot of cults. This one has some reasonable points, building an intelligence more intelligent than humans is a hitherto unexplored risk for the species. And none of this means all cults are the same. Unless & until this cult does something bad it isn't in the same camp as the worst cults. And delis-thumbs-7e has a post nearby pointing out that the Britany Spears cultists do actually sleep with each other which I thought was an interesting point.

> As for specific nefarious things that it associates this sex cult with:

This is a list of remarkably mild activities for a cult (more like white collar crimes of opportunity and standard political activism, really, if anything) and an allusion to a different cult, aka the Zizians. And if the Yudowsky people end up like the Zizians they will be the worst type of cult - but if that happened someone has to accuse them of something first.