United Nations set to call on Americans to reduce meat consumption

binaryblob · 2023-11-29T02:44:23+00:00

In the US you need to get $819,324 to be in the top 1% in income. That's essentially impossible to reach with any specialized skill, other than by being some kind of actor/athlete.

That number sounds crazy high. Some software engineers make that much, but that's a really tiny fraction.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T23:46:25+00:00

A whole undergraduate degree! Quickly, men. Line up!

Also, she is "Spiritual" and you know what that means, right? Wink, wink.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T20:31:30+00:00

I doubt people that crazy exist, so it must be a bot account.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T20:28:04+00:00

The Italian president is an intellectual weakling; this guy is not. The Italian president doesn't make huge changes by "choice" (mostly being too stupid, but that too limits choices); this guy will surely make significant changes unless held back by others. He plans to get rid of the central bank. That seems like a very significant change.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T15:19:03+00:00

If I were fascist, I'd propose that Trump and other traitors be lined up against the wall and shot.

Is that fascist? I think someone having nuclear secrets in their bathroom is by definition a traitor and should be handled as such. I don't see how that could be seen as controversial.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T15:16:20+00:00

The release of this evidence should immediately result in the release of all non-violent protestors awaiting trial or serving their sentences

That sounds reasonable, but without a response from the other party, there is no news; that's why journalism was invented, such that the reader doesn't have to ask trivial questions about everything they read.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T15:10:04+00:00

If this is some plot in a 6D chess play (like some people on Reddit were saying), then I am inclined to lean to the position that perhaps those people should rule; it's not like I have ever met a politician capable of playing 6D chess.

This guy is somewhat theatrical, but from what I understand he has quite serious credentials. I don't have the time, unfortunately, to geek out about him, but it beats hearing about yet another dictator in a random shit hole country.

I am not really in favor of actually destroying environmental departments if they actually have some knowledge and/or infrastructure. The right way to do it would be to open the documents and processes to the public and replace it with some court that is able to make these decisions such that if a violation happens, they have the expertise to efficiently decide on it.

I can easily imagine that those departments never had any value (like a naive person would assume they have).

In a libertarian economy a bunch of businesses would want to rule out environmental risk and fund an EPA like entity to make sure they aren't doing anything bad (with extremely severe financial penalties for that hypothetical EPA being corrupt (e.g. bankruptcy for every participating member)).

I don't expect miracles, but it sounds like he wants to give Argentina a more extreme version of the Singapore treatment (which was exceptionally successful). It would be interesting to know the debt/GDP ratio and absolute economic numbers for those two countries at the start of their transformations, but I am not going to dig those up. I am sure someone at Goldman Sachs did that a month ago, however.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T14:54:16+00:00

He isn't. Why are you spreading misinformation?

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T11:57:45+00:00

Is that your way of saying "Thanks kind stranger for giving me free advice that could mean the difference between me being financially independent at 30 or a hooker at 18. "?

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T11:48:14+00:00

I don't know whether you are not actually a bot, but if you are not, getting a useful education is very valuable. I worked with someone from your country, but he was the best your country had to offer (so, if you don't consider yourself to be the smartest person in a peer group of let's say a few thousand people, don't count on you being comparable).

It is possible to make probably more money than you can even dream of, but you would probably have to leave the country for a decent education.

There are international lists of universities and you could just contact a lot of them and ask hem whether they have any Colombian students and how they got there.

These days, you could perhaps even just ask ChatGPT.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T11:36:53+00:00

Decent bosses don't exist, because they are the psychopaths.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T11:34:52+00:00

$50K a year

If you are any good, you should move or work remotely.

because I am not greedy

That's called being stupid.

I think you are not good and are getting a market rate, although your analysis in the first few sentences is correct, although those analyze different aspects of reality.

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T11:30:39+00:00

Don't you have parents for that in the US?

binaryblob · 2023-11-27T11:03:24+00:00

This was news on 2023-10-19. What's the point of mentioning it a month too late?

binaryblob · 2023-11-26T19:59:22+00:00

I'd recommend him an English class.

Bots are fun.

binaryblob · 2023-11-26T19:42:28+00:00

(Like: guns and money solve everything)

Figuratively, guns do solve everything. It's just that we are in the end game (could still take 15-100 years) in which armies will need increasingly less people to operate, and then one day, one nation will have the power to obliterate everyone else and only suffer acceptable losses themselves.

To deny that's the reality is just wishful thinking. The only way to stop that, is if every weapons manufacturing location is monitored by everyone else such that there is always a balance of power, but that has never happened in history.

binaryblob · 2023-11-26T19:36:15+00:00

The best neighbor is one that is not within a one mile radius.

Why would anyone want to interact with a drug addict or a cop?

Let's not pretend that society has lost anything of value when Floyd died and let's not pretend that society lost anything when the cop was stabbed in prison.

The black community just used Floyd for some nightly "shopping" at Walmart; that was their great moment of social justice. Well, you go girls! The idea that black lives matters is not exactly supported by facts. Sure, they might count to make the NFL work, but I am sure there would still be a league with non-blacks. Is it their huge scientific contributions then? Oh, wait! Those hardly exist. It's not like there ever was a black Einstein (no, NDT doesn't count).

I have the impression that a lot of people have hated Jews throughout history and perhaps this is just because they were smarter and thus capable of more evil. In a way, one group of slightly more stupid people is just jealous about all the ways Jews have fucked them over throughout the ages. If someone knows of a good book about what the exact historical reasons are for hating Jews, that would be great; Jews have been hated before "Gaza" was a thing.

The police community consists of corrupt morons, which only exists because most citizens never get to experience their corrupt asses. If more people would just open their eyes for a change, they would have laws to allow a citizen to legally murder every cop in the street that didn't follow the law to the letter.

The idea that citizens should respect the police comes from ancient times; the modern cop is a true asshole in its heart. The law should be changed such that cops can't just be held personally responsible, but that capital punishment would only require a small abuse of power.

binaryblob · 2023-11-26T10:07:41+00:00

Many antidepressants also cause man boobs, so that would account for 10% or so. Since all those end up in the water supply and many water treatment plants do not fully eliminate all medicine, it's possible that the population effects are much greater.

Skin contact with plastics (think smart phones) also generated female hormones, which results in boobs.

I think gen Z men are more feminine. I literally don't know anyone I would consider a "traditional man" in that age bracket. There is an island near the coast in India; I expect those men to be real men like God (note: fictional character) intended.

binaryblob · 2023-11-26T09:57:59+00:00

If you are an AI bot, I am somewhat impressed. If you are a human, it almost made me smile.

binaryblob · 2023-11-25T22:46:01+00:00

But one in ten of us is considering having more than one partner at once.

Surely, that has to be more.

binaryblob · 2023-11-24T17:00:27+00:00

The SPICE!

binaryblob · 2023-11-24T04:04:35+00:00

If you think a war with the West is going to be fought with swords and rifles, you are delusional.

binaryblob · 2023-11-24T03:55:15+00:00

He is anti-immigration, but otherwise it's a socialist and thus hard left.

binaryblob · 2023-11-24T03:52:38+00:00

Does he not understand that you need to have a working military in order to do that? Their US supplied weapons won't even work against US targets like the F-22.

From what I understand, once the oil runs out, every country around them will just go full genocide on them. I am not saying I am in favor of that; I am just saying that they aren't likable.

If your "culture" is to chop up people, then other people might also want to share their culture.

binaryblob · 2023-11-23T12:33:38+00:00

I almost think you are human. Keep it up.

You are right, although it is a dystopian thought and practice.

binaryblob · 2023-11-23T06:34:41+00:00

Unconvincing and lame. Yes, you are right about the details.

binaryblob · 2023-11-21T23:35:23+00:00

There are already free versions that are useful or rather ones you could run locally.

Almost all boring jobs can be automated with this technology (will still take human developers to do this and years, if not decades to complete) and indeed, almost all people have boring jobs.

The question is whether that actually will happen, because the elite doesn't want to have a few billion people sitting at home plotting against them. McDonald's restaurants could have been fully automated a decade ago, but it didn't happen.

I don't think it's hard (compared to designing an Airbus A380 from scratch) to build a ChatGPT clone, as evidenced by every Big Tech building their own version of it. There is no moat, as Google engineers explained. There is no secret sauce (because it all leaked).

Everyone that wants to pay me a ten million dollars per year (a tiny amount of money when billions are thrown around) can hire me to design their ChatGPT clone. I doubt anyone is willing to give that to me, which shows the market price for this knowledge is near zero (rounding by a million dollars); the value right now is in the temporary scarcity of the AI-hardware, but that too will pass. I think this has commodity written all over it. Perhaps someone has crucial patents, but I can't think of anything, because all the hardware techniques also apply to other silicon (or other existing hardware architectures). That's also why every Big Tech is designing their own AI-accelerators; it's relatively easy.

I also think many of the people interested in AI hardware do not result into sales immediately, because even if I know a shit ton about technology, I didn't shell out $22,000 for a high-end GPU. The demand for AI hardware is just in cloud companies that are already running certain computations for clients and just want to do more of those cheaper. Perhaps the clients might at some point consider that they can afford to compute more things, and so on, until there is no economical benefit anymore (if Netflix can improve recommendations for movies from 95% accuracy to 95.3% for double the cost, they just won't do it). In our current economy there already are a lot of automated systems; the AI approach is not necessarily better.

binaryblob · 2023-11-20T22:51:35+00:00

Be happy they didn't call it Miss Multiverse.

binaryblob · 2023-11-20T22:49:21+00:00

I know you are a bot, but the reason is that parents hate their children, so they absolutely want a babysitter for them while they work.

binaryblob · 2023-11-20T19:00:43+00:00

A LessWrong comment said:

Egypt was controlling the territory before 1967.

A good solution would be to get Egypt to annex Gaza and rule it while forbidding Hamas.

Given that Egypt would get a lot of trouble out of doing this, we might pay them off by foreign investment to build up Gaza and the nearby other Egyptian territory.

binaryblob · 2023-11-20T18:52:55+00:00

You must be too smart for me (or too stupid).

binaryblob · 2023-11-20T14:47:41+00:00

Ctrl-Z

How to say you don't know anything about computers without saying it outright.

binaryblob · 2023-11-19T23:34:59+00:00

Our collective responsibility right now is to our teammates, partners, users, customers, and the broader world who shares our vision of broadly beneficial AGI.

In English this says they have no vision and no AGI and no amount of vision from their tiny, puny brains will ever result in AGI. In fact, I am sure they can't even define what it means for them to have an AGI.

Musky, competent people do not sit on boards. They sit there to keep the seats warm for the shareholders and to keep the company "stable" (meaning that they aren't in the way of the real --selected by market forces-- staff).

LLMs seem to be able to solve smooth functions (speech synthesis would be one of the cooler applications of the technology) well; the thing is that most interesting functions are not smooth.

binaryblob · 2023-11-19T19:12:56+00:00

Miss Universe owner files for bankruptcy amid controversy over transgender contestants

Looks like there won't be a 2024 version.

binaryblob · 2023-11-19T19:06:18+00:00

It's incredibly unlikely for you to be smarter than me. How about you answer the following easy question then: how would you demonstrate most efficiently to someone that you are way smarter than the average person without relying on an IQ test?

Bonus question: how would you demonstrate being the smartest person on the planet?

binaryblob · 2023-11-19T09:43:08+00:00

Bot with human operator that uses ChatGPT?

binaryblob · 2023-11-16T22:35:15+00:00

No, he didn't. If you are not a bot, you are the stupidest user I have ever met here. If the goal is propaganda, it helps if you are more sophisticated.

binaryblob · 2023-11-16T08:09:53+00:00

Still nothing you claimed is reflected in those articles.

You were saying he was going to launch without approval, jerryk.

binaryblob · 2023-11-14T23:26:12+00:00

Nothing you claimed is reflected in those articles.

binaryblob · 2023-11-14T21:56:38+00:00

Sorry, easy for me.

Not sure what the problem is with getting rid of people. If you can show there is no work for these people, you can fire them or in the US you can fire them just because you feel like it in many states.

The way I see it is that the software that has been written in the past 40 years was just done by amateurs and should be seen as a proving ground. Now should be the time to competently implement that software. It's not like people have to listen to me; it's likely that within two decades anything that can be hacked will be, because AI would be able to use all techniques developed in the past 50 years to do so. Anyone not moving on, will just see their operations come down to a halt.

I think the thing that makes something a company in 2023 is the software. For example, I don't think anyone knows how a chip is created anymore. It's just piles and piles of software. That is, if we were to delete all the software from all systems, I don't think we would be able to produce a high end chip within 5 years.

binaryblob · 2023-11-14T10:13:05+00:00

I find it incredible that systems are still being hacked to this day, while it's incredibly easy to build secure systems.

The cost for doing that is to likely throw away every line of code they have now (or at the very least comb through every line) and to dump Windows, but apparently all these companies just love to be retarded.

The attack vector where valid accounts are being obtained has a simple resolution: do not hire stupid people and only give your credentials to as few people as possible.

Every "attack" seems to be of the form "We attacked a browser and took over a client machine", so obviously those systems need to be isolated.

binaryblob · 2023-11-13T22:34:47+00:00

Am I wrong?

binaryblob · 2023-11-13T08:12:33+00:00

I don't really get why we are still spending money on how fast we all are going to die from climate change; I'd prefer we first fund ways to make sure we don't boil to death and perhaps when we succeed in getting the temperature lowered by one degree we can return to the part where we talk about doom and gloom. Right now, since 1895 the science didn't change; it only got refined.

I really am starting to hate the summers myself. Imagine the hell it is in India.

binaryblob · 2023-11-13T08:04:26+00:00

You mean an old dude with no credentials that is likely a deepfake? Do you have any real evidence this interview A) happened B) this guy is not suffering from dementia?

binaryblob · 2023-11-13T07:45:07+00:00

Probably because it's just a propaganda channel and the real human posting users are only in the way or only have a role to give credibility to the majority of bots. I also consider you an obvious bot. No person talks like you do.

binaryblob · 2023-11-12T16:23:31+00:00

If it's not fake news, Ukraine can pay me after the war for damages.

Update: it is fake news.

binaryblob · 2023-11-11T23:12:22+00:00

Lots of Web3 tech uses centralized systems to bootstrap and "later" (read: never) they implement the distributed version.

Is there any Web3 tech that is actually good and done?

I am not even sure what the point is of Web3 tech (I am not saying this as if I don't understand the technology, because I do), if the general public probably doesn't even know what web 2.0 was about.

binaryblob · 2023-11-11T23:05:10+00:00

It seems to me that there are less than 10 real users on the website, because those are the ones commenting. How hard can it be to add exceptions for a small number of users that are obviously human? I am not saying everyone in this thread is, but I am.

binaryblob · 2023-11-11T23:02:46+00:00

Perhaps if I won't be shot in the street or get a gang to murder me in my sleep.

Feel free to mention an actual city block with houses for sale. Can anyone immigrate into Mexico if they want to?

Japan is also attractive, because they seem to be a lot more serious and less lazy in that country, although they are super racist against even white people from what I understand (which is probably also the case for Mexico with their "gringos"). In the West we don't discriminate against Japanese people, which makes it weird. How can anyone be against white people? They basically invented the modern world.

binaryblob · 2023-11-11T11:43:32+00:00

The US wants less casualties. A bomb without a warhead literally does that.

If you have this position, you are saying Israel should just roll over and die. That's a valid position to have, but just don't do it via some detour, because it is obvious.

The other position is that you think Israel should create more civilian casualties, at which point you could just as well argue for Israel to deploy a nuke on Gaza.

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T23:05:28+00:00

That was a nice number ten years ago.

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T19:57:26+00:00

I don't understand what strategy, if any, Israel has. Generally, Jewish scientists are of above average intelligence (or perhaps they were richer and therefor had more opportunities depending on how left you are), so why is Israel so stupid? Did all the smart Jews emigrate to the US or something?

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T19:44:20+00:00

So, presumably nobody has an apparatus to record images of said football field? They act so hard to get.

If any ETs are reading this, feel free to contact me, but first prove you can factor composite numbers like those used by Google LLC so that I can verify you have meaningful power.

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T17:11:51+00:00

Even if God (any god) were to appear to me right now, I would not reform my life. (If I thought I wasn't already doing to the best of my ability, I would have changed already.)

I already know the meaning of life. Not sure why anyone would need a god for that.

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T08:56:19+00:00

I'd love a big government; it just shouldn't consist of anyone currently in government, which means I don't have any confidence in the government to be able to execute their assigned tasks.

I'd want to have very strict quality standards for government staff and any deviation from that standard to the downside should immediate in an immediate fine to be paid personally by the government staff. That should scare fucking idiots (most of them) from ever joining the government. Right now our government is a magnet of deplorables. I want to live in a country where I respect the government. Right now, it's just disappointment after disappointment.

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T08:48:46+00:00

It's a scientific fact that simulated environments allow for faster learning. However, their neural networks are still incredibly stupid.

They are not cautious at all; they just don't know how to make AGI work.

binaryblob · 2023-11-10T08:41:32+00:00

Why don't you show us? That's more interesting than most of your comments.

binaryblob · 2023-11-09T14:17:53+00:00

discover

I don't think you know what that word means.

binaryblob · 2023-11-08T11:18:06+00:00

Just because a pixel is visible on your phone does not mean you can share it with the planet.

binaryblob · 2023-11-08T10:27:22+00:00

Paper ballots are literally the technologically most advanced solution humanity has right now that meets all requirements of a democratic voting protocol.

It's easy to make a voting app that works in a non-adversarial environment; the real world is not of this type.

binaryblob · 2023-11-07T23:22:46+00:00

By those standards, darknets should get a Pullitzer.

binaryblob · 2023-11-07T23:20:27+00:00

It means my short puts will expire worthless.

binaryblob · 2023-11-04T21:02:09+00:00

Australia is a dystopia too:

On 21 June 2018, the Criminal Code Amendment (Impersonating a Commonwealth Body) Bill 2017 was passed by both Houses and moved into law.[18][19] Those found to be in breach of the new amendment could face 2–5 years' imprisonment.[20]

Are there any sane countries left? I can't think of even one.

binaryblob · 2023-11-04T18:25:14+00:00

If weapons need "man power", perhaps the weapons should be made better. When I see six dudes standing next to a piece of artillery, I think: what the fuck were the designers thinking? If it's not autonomous, needing more than one person operating it, is a mistake.

binaryblob · 2023-11-04T18:04:49+00:00

Maybe we should train them to build and repair bridges instead.

You are such an optimist. Not that I'd expect people to often say that to you.

binaryblob · 2023-11-04T17:01:13+00:00

Can you believe that? Actual content on saidit. Of course, it's still rage bait. It's quite interesting how most people would be surprised about the number of outright evil states (all of them), which suggests that the people individually aren't evil when born or even on average. Still, the outcome is as if Hitler won the war. Perhaps the difference is that instead of the Canadians being enslaved and the money flowing to Germany, the Canadians are enslaved by a bunch of billionaires and the money stays in the country. Yeah, that's totally a real difference.

binaryblob · 2023-11-04T10:41:04+00:00

Everyone that thinks is an extremist, however I wouldn't call anyone voting for Trump to have any ability to think beyond "theyyyyy theyyy tuk uurrr djubbbss".

binaryblob · 2023-11-02T23:23:33+00:00

It's incredible that with all the money they have, they still can't make a working e-mail server. The real mistake lies with society, because society enables such clowns like Microsoft, Google, and Meta to develop software.

Their "AI" won't do shit.

binaryblob · 2023-11-02T12:02:12+00:00

Mentioning the Overton Window immediately puts you above 99.95% of humanity, doesn't it? You are my hero of the day.

binaryblob · 2023-11-02T11:24:11+00:00

It's frowned upon, certainly.

binaryblob · 2023-11-02T11:12:44+00:00

Nobody has room to store those tanks. Additionally, one would need a permit for those.

No mention of levelized cost of storage, which makes it an anecdote and worthless.

binaryblob · 2023-11-02T00:31:01+00:00

I think geopolitically, if the US were to intervene in a major way (let's say they kill everyone in Gaza) that the rest of the world would do nothing. Russia has no meaningful power beyond some nukes and they aren't going to risk that over Gaza, because they hate Muslims. China has no meaningful way to project power globally and never fought a meaningful war.

I think the only reason the US doesn't do that, is because they want to have an eternal state of conflict, because that means they get to keep their military bases and it protects the status quo.

Do you think something major would happen if the US were to intervene in a major way? I think just a bunch of people hated by most of the world would just die and that would be the end of it. It's tragic on an individual level, of course and probably 99% didn't deserve that or whatever, but really, who is actually going to do anything about it?

I have the impression the US is so far ahead of the other nations militarily that any comparison is just a sick joke. China has lots of propaganda about how their military has some significance, but I just don't buy any of it. In the US there has been a gun culture for a really long time. That kind of enthusiasm ends up in the military branch. You can't buy the creativity that comes from that. China doesn't have that and it will likely never know freedom, so their weapons will also remain bad.

The US would have to invest in enough ammo to kill every man, woman and child in China, if that ever happens, but unless they don't run out of ammo, I just don't see the US losing a conventional war against China. Perhaps tactically deployed nukes (like smuggling them to US ports, etc. and detonating them as a kind of Pearl Harbor) would be a good first strike option for China, but otherwise I don't even see anything ever hitting American land.

binaryblob · 2023-11-02T00:15:25+00:00

The last solution (bad, bad choice of words!) was quite a long time ago, wasn't it? As in decades. Still, I agree that the Palestinians overplayed their hand.

Right now, what solution has the world according to you?

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T15:47:33+00:00

Activism is an oxymoron. Actual action would be funding a bunch of scientists figuring out better battery chemistries. So buy the stock of such companies such that their cost of capital goes down, such that they can expand further and so on. Strangely, when I mention that to the activists they have nothing to say.

If they have no money for investment, they could study to become an engineer, because their leisure management degree surely isn't going to solve global warming.

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T15:42:02+00:00

Yes, you just find someone that climbed the ranks for 15 years and never had anyone challenge any of their publications. Having said that, the quality of reporting in even the financial publications (Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, etc.) isn't what it used to be. Having said that, if those papers contain that Israel entered a ground offensive, I tend to believe it for practical purposes.

When something is said on rumble.com or a random Twitter account named KillAuDeepState (where do you get this shit?), not so much.

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T12:52:02+00:00

It would make sense that both parties have as a goal to exterminate the other.

Logically in the long term there are only three solutions:

Israel kills/expels all the Palestinians
The Palestinians kill all the Israelis
The rest of the world decides on some border, removes all weapons and armies from the region, and it becomes one big zoo policed by whoever has power. (I don't believe Israel can launch a nuke without interception by the US (if the US prepares for it, because the country is too small))

Why is it so hard for the world to just pick a solution?

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T12:03:09+00:00

H2 is not easy to store. CH₂O₂ is.

See https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/10/20231016-formicacid.html

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T11:59:58+00:00

H2 is not easy to store. CH₂O₂ is.

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T09:39:07+00:00

That's not even English.

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T05:33:11+00:00

Try to find a credible news outlet for such incredible "news".

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T05:27:09+00:00

Nobody cares about secondary sources, so just link to https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/.

binaryblob · 2023-11-01T05:17:00+00:00

As the party being invaded, you can't prolong a conflict. That's up to the invader, unless you are not trying not to get the invader to go away, which isn't true. Calling it a conflict is also stretching definitions. There is no conflict; Russia just wanted Ukraine's resources (and was jealous of its economic development) and they took them.

Not sure whether you have ever seen any science-fiction movie where the aliens come to suck our planet dry, but they don't call those conflicts in these movies. They call it in an invasion. "War of the worlds" comes to mind. There's just annihilation and aggression. I doubt two parties could actually both be so mistaken to know who has a right to a given piece of land as Israel and the Palestinians pretend.

Regarding Israel and Palestine, one could at least argue there is a conflict, even though in that case the party with the biggest army is set to destroy the other party over time the way things are going now.

binaryblob · 2023-10-31T23:46:45+00:00

Russia is just sending its undesirables to the battlefield, so every death is profitable, because there are more resources left for the rest of their crabs.

We would need to see many statistical variables to know whether it would be damaging to Russia, which I surely don't have.

There's also a huge disconnect between people in large cities like Moscow and in whatever god forsaken hell hole the country side lives. So, as long as the city people don't need to give up their lattes, there is no problem.

binaryblob · 2023-10-31T23:36:32+00:00

Ultimately, all of the geopolitical tensions just show that, whatever your alliance is, you need to have your supply chains managed and secured up to the latest bolt for every atomic number of interest. That requires a level of control, which is antithetical to "free trade".

Similarly, the US can try to protect chips all they want, but three nukes targeted at the right location smuggled via a container and all the infrastructure and knowledge for sustaining our current technical level is gone. I think the list of people with knowledge for how to construct the best chips in the world is uncomfortably small. In fact, you could probably just send one hundred secret agents to take out all of them in a day.

The military industrial complex is really weird. The idea that the government is dependent on companies to create their munition is just insanity at work. What if it is more profitable for those companies to instead lower weapons output or to produce shells that will only explode when in a test environment like with the Diesel Gate with VW?

binaryblob · 2023-10-31T09:27:11+00:00

I agree that you can automate the majority of human labor with all neural networks currently existing; it just wouldn't be working like "The Computer" or "Data" in Star Trek. Data was able to work like a combination of an engineer and a scientist, pulling data from widely different fields and combining that knowledge into highly advanced deductions. No AI can do that nor is there any reason to assume that these things will happen, because the things Data did are actually difficult. Generating speech is, judging by the fact a neural network can do it, apparently easy. In fact, almost everything people often do consists of mathematically simple functions; some people even suspect our entire universe doesn't do information theoretically complex things.

No matter how smart these AIs become, they won't ever solve cryptographic problems beyond a fairly small size.

The class of functions that LLMs can solve, is novel, and it will change the way we interact with computers forever, but they are not some AI we would have to fear (because that fake news story is just there to destroy the competition). It is entirely possible to make AI with goals such as "destroy the world in 80 days", although no AI would complete that goal in 80 days. I'd imagine that a machine given that goal would take trillions of years to complete that task (at which time the planet already stopped existing of natural causes). The only way AI would become dangerous, is if we were to find out how to calculate a googol times faster or something like that. AI equipped with weapons from the start like killer drone swarms would be the more short term problem.

The presumed godlike AIs are certainly a possibility, but not without figuring out how to compute many orders of magnitude cheaper. It's not at all obvious that our universe is capable of such levels of computation; in fact, it has been computed that it isn't based on our understanding of the Standard Model. So, whoever these people are fearmongering, ignore them.

binaryblob · 2023-10-30T22:45:38+00:00

Don't call it AI. Just calls them LLMs. LLMs are good at text summarization and combining linear combinations of whatever. They don't work for anything else.

I tried a couple of different major LLMs.

It's possible to have them write somewhat useful computer programs, but they need a lot of handholding. It is absolutely impossible to make them do anything that would require extensive knowledge or expertise.

Basic math as used in physics calculations is way beyond these LLMs already.

For domains in which there is a lot of text available with a linear progression and a smooth function. Take for example "tell me the hair color of the main characters of the book 'The LOTR'" would be something I would expect these systems to work for.

The complexity of the functions that LLMs can solve is low.

I have never seen a LLM solve any problem of interest; having said that, almost no human does anything of interest either.

binaryblob · 2023-10-30T22:30:22+00:00

The strategic reserves don't need to be so big anymore, because there is an actual domestic supply of oil. The name strategic reserves is out of date for that reason.

You would be right, if the strategic reserve still had that role. Perhaps their website would still claim it is, but I don't think it still has that role in reality. (when there is a war time shortage, they would just commandeer various wells)

binaryblob · 2023-10-30T22:26:23+00:00

But sure, they're proportionally smaller.

Always happy to see that I don't need to explain things twice here.

binaryblob · 2023-10-30T11:44:02+00:00

Those sails seem tiny compared to those of a traditional sail boat. Perhaps it's an engineering trade off that the materials don't exist to make them higher.

Oil made humanity lazy.

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T22:47:12+00:00

Friends aged just fine. Gay people from around that time were complete assholes, so any ridicule they might have received was entirely deserved.

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T22:42:01+00:00

You could replace my metatrader application that runs under windows with a command line interface?

I already said that it would not replace it. It would just control the windows application, but the input would be received via a command line interface, so if you are sitting on your yacht there would be an API listening on a TCP port and you can do whatever you want with it. Obviously, I would have to know the set of commands of interest and the required latency. The technical term for such a thing is a gateway, which I'd hope you already knew.

For a replacement, that would require significantly more work.

I think selling software via the model you describe is dead, however. It would need a way to protect copying, etc., which is why cloud software is so popular with vendors.

Also, how many "pops" would there be? I.e., what's the TAM?

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T14:06:36+00:00

I'm okay with that. You made a claim as a programmer that you could automate any Windows application and turn it into a command line interface program.

And I can.

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T08:28:25+00:00

What is stopping Disney management from tanking the company such that it can be bought for pennies on the dollar and after retail investors have been wiped out repeat the cycle? That's obviously what happened here.

Zuckerberg also did that with Meta last year.

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T08:19:46+00:00

I don't need to shine. You started to suspect I wasn't smart. Fine, that's going to cost you. How poor are you?

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T08:18:54+00:00

machinery

Makes one wonder whether they mean some big system mostly controlled by AI or just an organization of idiots. I expect the latter.

binaryblob · 2023-10-29T08:12:44+00:00

You sound like a bot. Anyway, we can easily resolve this. How much is such a webpage worth for you? I would be a donkey for helping you for free.

binaryblob · 2023-10-28T22:32:39+00:00

Saidit is the only place where I would fully expect this to be poisonous.

binaryblob · 2023-10-28T22:31:02+00:00

The stock compensation scheme for Tesla for Musk was insane. Nobody in private equity would agree to such terms, but Musk had fanboys (or presumably some government backing). Musk does not deserve wealth at all, considering he has never done anything useful and is a grifter.

binaryblob · 2023-10-28T22:25:16+00:00

I've been messing around with metatrader for 20 years and if there was a way to do this I would have seen somebody that is doing it.

If it's any consolation, I am really smart.

binaryblob · 2023-10-28T07:56:09+00:00

Let me think about all those great Russian products that I want to buy.

binaryblob