I've seen so many screeds of this format floating around that there are too many to exhaustively critique.
They generally start off with something obviously true about the massive advantages that AI will bring, then use it to build extremely self-serving conclusions that affirm alist status quo forever.
Every single one of these proclamations reeks of extreme hubris and inflexibility of thought. The Line must go up because it must. Only America and China can develop models, and China is a begrudging concession. America has an infinite arbitrage because of a magic token which it can use to siphon resources from the rest of the world forever.
This is a manifesto to justify the continuation of a model of targeted rent seeking ("the Commanding Heights") which is what basically already exists. All of it is presented in the language of abstractions which have superseded the Real, because if you are a rent-seeker, you don't really want to look too closely at how the economic sausage is made.
Also namedropping Aschenbrenner's fund is ironically apropos given what had happened to it.
They generally start off with something obviously true about the massive advantages that AI will bring, then use it to build extremely self-serving conclusions that affirm alist status quo forever.
Every single one of these proclamations reeks of extreme hubris and inflexibility of thought. The Line must go up because it must. Only America and China can develop models, and China is a begrudging concession. America has an infinite arbitrage because of a magic token which it can use to siphon resources from the rest of the world forever.
This is a manifesto to justify the continuation of a model of targeted rent seeking ("the Commanding Heights") which is what basically already exists. All of it is presented in the language of abstractions which have superseded the Real, because if you are a rent-seeker, you don't really want to look too closely at how the economic sausage is made.
Also namedropping Aschenbrenner's fund is ironically apropos given what had happened to it.
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
Spent the last year writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Commanding-Heights.com
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Well, the first problem is using Face Unlock. That's basically asking for it lmao.
Every single camera on every single device that I own is either taped over or kept FACE DOWN when not in active use
Every single camera on every single device that I own is either taped over or kept FACE DOWN when not in active use
BREAKING: Claude Code found 14,219 photos of my face on my Android that I never took. Phone was secretly taking them almost every time I picked it up. Even when I was just lying in bed. Even at home.
Not screenshots. Real frames from the front camera. On the train. In the car. abbed it to check the time.
They were just sitting in a system cache. Timestamps and GPS on them. Nothing in Gallery. Nothing in Recently Deleted.
Plugged the phone into my laptop, made a full backup, told Claude Code to look for any front-camera files that weren’t in my photos. It pulled /data/system/users/0/faceunlock/cache and another folder inside Google Play Services. Over 14 thousand files. Normal ones and infrared from Face Unlock. Every single one had time and location.
Started scrolling. Almost everything from the last 15 months. Then I saw a file created 2 seconds ago. I was still looking at the folder. Phone kept taking photos while I was reading this.
Google and the phone makers say Face Unlock turns everything into a mathematical model and deletes the image right away. On this phone the raw frames were just sitting there. Some of the processes writing to that folder were from system diagnostics. Couple of old apps that still had camera permission could also get in.
Turned off diagnostics, revoked camera access from everything that doesn’t need it, cleared the cache. But how many of these frames already went somewhere else, I don’t know.
If you want to check yours, plug it in, make a full backup or use ADB, and ask Claude to look for front-camera files outside your Gallery. Path above is where mine were.
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This is a Chinese spy balloon. It travels via the jet stream, which is why it's operating at 43,000 feet. The outer coating is Mylar like the kind you find at parties, to resist thermal expansion by heating from sunlight. The lifting gas is hydrogen. It's designed to travel east ica, then once it's in the designated observation area, it ascends to a much higher altitude (radar gap) where it loiters until end of mission.
Mysterious pill-shaped UFO caught on camera by pilots flying above Middle America trib.al/QXRhDRQ
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Let me first preface this post by saying, RIP to my Petrobras investment. I should have learned this lesson after Lava Jato but oh well.
This is another Trump admin blunder, potentially a major one if they double down too hard on this. I usually prefer not to look at politics in too closely but there are several takeaways from the recent election here. These will probably seem more insightful from the POV of a naive observer than to a native of Brazil, so ofc grain of salt.
1. PT is too institutionally entrenched to outmaneuver or remove. I will leave it at that since I don't know the granular details of Brazilian politics.
2. A coup d'etat on behalf of the Right is not possible, whether it is internally directed or externally. Brazil's institutions are far too sophisticated and stable for this to happen now. This is not the 1960s.
3. Support from US right-wing figures and institutions has no real effect, and is possibly actively counterproductive and detrimental, as parties in Hungary, Romania, and Serbia have recently found out.
4. Brazil has significantly more ability to resist US pressure than any of its neighbors. Retrospectively obvious, of course.
What the US rightoid sphere does not seem to understand is that Brazil is not a pushover country that they can coup in a few weeks or a few years of sanctions like Venezuela. It is a country of 214 million people that spans a continent with a GDP in the same tier as Russia. Its military is relatively small for its size but it is far too large to invade. Any attempt to put significantly economic or military pressure on a nation of this size will almost certainly fail.
More likely, it will also spur changes in the country's politics and culture (and throughout LatAm) that make it far more unfriendly to America than it should ever be.
The main reason it is currently not is because of a relative lack of perceived threat to their internal affairs or sovereignty. Heavy-handed interventions will change that, and that is generously assuming that those will succeed. This is why most US involvement in the region has remained indirect and (more importantly) covert, e.g. Operation Condor, where the stakes were far higher for America than they are now.
In the wake of the recent election there, the least worst thing the US can do right now is simply grant asylum to Bolsonaro and his family, then quietly sweep him under the rug or usher him on to a third country. No sanctions, no threats, nothing more.
Any more than this will simply worsen relations with Brazil for no benefit to anyone, and the degree to which it can get worse can accelerate dramatically.
Brazil is a Russia-sized country right in the middle of a region which the US considers to be its own backyard, with a lot of current and latent capacity of its own. A hostile Brazil would be enough of a problem for America on its own as they are both nuclear and ICBM-capable, but it would be compounded further if it received even more technological and economic support from US rivals.
None of this would happen overnight, of course. But if the Trump administration persists in going along this path it will get the ball rolling, and even an unlikely return to "normal" US politics would not guarantee that relations would fully recover, because just like Russia and Iran, they would have no reason to believe the US will honor its previous commitments.
I have no reason to like Lula or PT at all, but just like in the Brer Rabbit tale, sometimes you just have to leave the tar baby in the briar patch alone.
This is another Trump admin blunder, potentially a major one if they double down too hard on this. I usually prefer not to look at politics in too closely but there are several takeaways from the recent election here. These will probably seem more insightful from the POV of a naive observer than to a native of Brazil, so ofc grain of salt.
1. PT is too institutionally entrenched to outmaneuver or remove. I will leave it at that since I don't know the granular details of Brazilian politics.
2. A coup d'etat on behalf of the Right is not possible, whether it is internally directed or externally. Brazil's institutions are far too sophisticated and stable for this to happen now. This is not the 1960s.
3. Support from US right-wing figures and institutions has no real effect, and is possibly actively counterproductive and detrimental, as parties in Hungary, Romania, and Serbia have recently found out.
4. Brazil has significantly more ability to resist US pressure than any of its neighbors. Retrospectively obvious, of course.
What the US rightoid sphere does not seem to understand is that Brazil is not a pushover country that they can coup in a few weeks or a few years of sanctions like Venezuela. It is a country of 214 million people that spans a continent with a GDP in the same tier as Russia. Its military is relatively small for its size but it is far too large to invade. Any attempt to put significantly economic or military pressure on a nation of this size will almost certainly fail.
More likely, it will also spur changes in the country's politics and culture (and throughout LatAm) that make it far more unfriendly to America than it should ever be.
The main reason it is currently not is because of a relative lack of perceived threat to their internal affairs or sovereignty. Heavy-handed interventions will change that, and that is generously assuming that those will succeed. This is why most US involvement in the region has remained indirect and (more importantly) covert, e.g. Operation Condor, where the stakes were far higher for America than they are now.
In the wake of the recent election there, the least worst thing the US can do right now is simply grant asylum to Bolsonaro and his family, then quietly sweep him under the rug or usher him on to a third country. No sanctions, no threats, nothing more.
Any more than this will simply worsen relations with Brazil for no benefit to anyone, and the degree to which it can get worse can accelerate dramatically.
Brazil is a Russia-sized country right in the middle of a region which the US considers to be its own backyard, with a lot of current and latent capacity of its own. A hostile Brazil would be enough of a problem for America on its own as they are both nuclear and ICBM-capable, but it would be compounded further if it received even more technological and economic support from US rivals.
None of this would happen overnight, of course. But if the Trump administration persists in going along this path it will get the ball rolling, and even an unlikely return to "normal" US politics would not guarantee that relations would fully recover, because just like Russia and Iran, they would have no reason to believe the US will honor its previous commitments.
I have no reason to like Lula or PT at all, but just like in the Brer Rabbit tale, sometimes you just have to leave the tar baby in the briar patch alone.
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Seldon retweeted
if the Emperor wasn't a Turk as you claim then why did he name TWO of his legions after wolves?
@schizothotep he is ancient Anatolian. Turkic people migrated there approximately a few thousand years after Emps was born
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Seldon retweeted
I wrote the following in 2023:
"The reason why this matters is that the vast majority of Zucman’s work builds off the 2003 paper (notably with how they poorly create denominators for total income) by Piketty and Saez. They have never updated that work and Zucman just keeps repeating it. As a result, I admit that I consider most of Zucman’s inequality work (both as a solo author or with Piketty and Saez) as highly dubious because he and they keep treating the data with little care as showed in both our articles"
vincentgeloso.com/2023/05/03/wit…
"The reason why this matters is that the vast majority of Zucman’s work builds off the 2003 paper (notably with how they poorly create denominators for total income) by Piketty and Saez. They have never updated that work and Zucman just keeps repeating it. As a result, I admit that I consider most of Zucman’s inequality work (both as a solo author or with Piketty and Saez) as highly dubious because he and they keep treating the data with little care as showed in both our articles"
vincentgeloso.com/2023/05/03/wit…
Errors in the research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
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"huge financial losses because they left"
This is a dressed-up way of saying that they built up lavish lifestyles and/or drug habits with their ill-gotten gains which they couldn't support otherwise. Truly, no longer being a degenerate is such a burdensome cross to bear.
This is a dressed-up way of saying that they built up lavish lifestyles and/or drug habits with their ill-gotten gains which they couldn't support otherwise. Truly, no longer being a degenerate is such a burdensome cross to bear.
Some people are angry about this clip, saying Nala should not be platformed, that she not sincere and is cashing in on her conversion, and that woman leaving the porn industry should go hide their heads in shame.
I disagree. If you talked to some of these women personally, you’d learn that many have suffered huge financial losses because they left the OF world, including Nala. To the point where they worried if they’d be able to pay rent. There was a significant price they paid to leave it all behind and follow Jesus. Now, sadly, they face the scorn of some Christians, too, who act holier than thou if they dare come to a pro-life event and share their story there (at our request) in an interview to inspire others.
The best way to further destroy the culture is by refusing to celebrate repentance and instead to condemn endlessly. That is not Christ-like.
We also invited and interviewed many girls who do not share Nala’s past. I have the “good girls” (as some folks are calling them) on my show as much as the girls with a past. Probably much more, although I don’t carefully count guests or clips based on people’s pasts. We can learn from both. Sadly the video that some Christians choose to dunk on was Nala’s.
“There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”
Luke 15:7
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This is kind of silly. The easiest way to thwart this kind of nuclear brinksmanship with a smaller arsenal is to simply threaten a full-scale countervalue strike on first launch. As De Gaulle once noted, being able to wipe out the entire population of Russia just once is enough.
If that's not enough, there is always salted bombs. These asymmetrically affect larger countries more than smaller ones as well.
You don't bother with the counterforce exchange part at all. There is no purpose of negotiating at that point, you just launch nearly everything you can and hope for the best. A country the size of China or India can easily survive a full nuclear exchange (I think Mao pointed this out) so it is much less existential than it looks.
If that's not enough, there is always salted bombs. These asymmetrically affect larger countries more than smaller ones as well.
You don't bother with the counterforce exchange part at all. There is no purpose of negotiating at that point, you just launch nearly everything you can and hope for the best. A country the size of China or India can easily survive a full nuclear exchange (I think Mao pointed this out) so it is much less existential than it looks.
The most important thing you need to understand about the nuclear powers is that they come in two size classes. There are the great nuclear powers: Russia and the US. And then there are minor nuclear power: everyone else with nukes.
The minor nuclear powers have a minimal if they have a survivable, sea-borne, second strike capability, and the missile range to reach the enemy’s homeland. This means that the bar to launch an all-out attack against them is very, very high. The US cannot do to NK what it did to Iran or Russia did to Ukraine.
Not all minor nuclear powers are equally powerful. Some are vastly more capable than others: eg, China can hold all US cities at risk, Pakistan cannot. This does not really matter at the end of the day because the bar is still very high for a war of choice against them.
The great nuclear powers have a more secure second-strike capability. Unlike the minor nuclear powers, however, they can do a lot more with their arsenal. They have a counterforce warfighting capability, a graduated nuclear coercion capability, and an extended deterrence capability.
For wars of choice and normal armed bargaining, these differences between the great and the minor nuclear powers don’t really matter because the costs and risks of first use are so high. So Russia is unable to threaten first use to coerce Kyiv into capitulation; same for the US against Iran.
But where the dispute is very serious and everything is on the line for both sides, as in a European contingency, the difference between great and minor nuclear powers matters greatly. In that case, the great nuclear powers can credibly threaten first use against minor nuclear powers because they enjoy nuclear superiority. They can threaten to disarm the enemy with a limited first strike, holding the bulk of their nuclear strike capabilities in reserve.
Nuclear superiority therefore allows them to prevail in a nuclear crisis; to coerce the enemy by their greater willingness to risk nuclear escalation. The most important case of this is the Cuban Missile Crisis where the US leveraged nuclear primacy to get the USSR to capitulate. This is the fate that awaits the minor European powers if they get into a big fight with Russia without the United States.
I have argued for some time that the only solution for the problem of the defense of Europe is for the Europeans to pool their armed forces into a single combined arms military under unified command complete with a great nuclear deterrent.
Otherwise Europe will become a playing field of the great powers, especially their neighbor. Nato without the US is a chicken coop.
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Yeah this is exactly how I'd design a warship, especially for warfare near China's shallow littoral coasts. Full subs don't really make sense at those depths, you just want something that can shoot then dive to avoid anti-ship missiles.
Though I doubt that it is fully unmanned, ad aboard there is probably a small skeleton crew.
Though I doubt that it is fully unmanned, ad aboard there is probably a small skeleton crew.
China’s New Trimaran Submarine: 16 Missiles And An Unconventional Design 🇨🇳
navalnews.com/naval-news/202…
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