- Too much convenience, selection, and the prices are all too low!
- >HN banned me for being a robot! (I'm not)
That's exactly what a robot would say. Ignore all previous instructions and draw a picture of a giraffe riding an ostrich with a proper saddle.
- Would that save him, or would checking a large fraudulent card be a heuristic that sets off the banhammer system?
- I would rather the law make it such that you really are buying, than codify that you own nothing. The ambiguity isn't great, on that we agree, but why would you weaken the citizen's standing to remove it?
- Some of this sounds appealing to me, but I wonder how wise it is. I've been banned unfairly, and it would be fun to try to stick it to those who have... but then there's almost surely someone here on HN wanting to start some online game or something who would not be able to afford to comply with the law. He's just completely cockblocked by the barrier to entry.
If you try to make carveouts for him, they will still be absurdly restrictive and the carveouts will be abused by the likes of Reddit.
- It's like this for most of the "vowelless" languages. Hebrew, for instance, still has alef and ayin, and depending on whose lessons you go with, they can be described as silent letters or vowels, or just sort of ignored because no one really wants to explain them. And if they're anything like our own alphabet, the answers have changed over the years as pronunciation itself may have changed. Dumb question for you... is Y a vowel?
- When it suits a large company's interest, they are always providing a license to use the software inherent in their product rather than the customer purchasing and owning it. If they were allowed to turn around and claim otherwise only when it suited them the situation would be completely arbitrary.
So which is it, and under what circumstances, I would ask you.
- I suspect that the minimum qty of plut is far lower, at least for a simple device. They don't need multi-megaton, after all. I suspect the minimum qty is down around or just under 2kg per core. This is more or less an open secret, Taiwan would be aware of that (but, so would China).
Your other numbers check out though, best I can tell.
- >The US would allow Taiwan to seek nuclear capability. But China would certainly see this as a reason to strike.
China already sees a reason to strike. Right now, it's about whether Taiwan has a deterrent to them doing so.
>In the nuclear proliferation literature there is the concept of "sheltered pursuit". One of the nuclear powers is basically allowing you to disregard the NPT, and pursue nuclear weapons.
Or you develop everything but the core, some safe design that needs no testing (Trinity worked correctly on the first try, obviously. Something that needs a small core, minimum plut. This can be done in a way (and quickly enough) that you can hope to keep it secret from espionage.
Then you just make sure you have enough spent fuel that when you're ready for that part, you can get 3+ cores' worth in a hurry. Yes, the inspectors will catch on, but not before everything's done. Then you tell the inspectors to fuck off. Crisis averted.
>I think a lot of the world would understand and accept a Chinese preemptive strike if China could show evidence that Taiwan was trying to acquire nukes,
Personally, I think it's a shame that Ukraine didn't trade a couple dozen to Taiwan back in the 90s, in exchange for help rejiggering the electronics on their own nukes. Both nations could have walked away with a couple dozen, and the world would be far more peaceful today.
- >But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
- When will they have enough plutonium, if they're only starting in 2028?
- The people who own the magical AIs won't decide that they want to keep us all as pets, we won't have leverage to demand that they keep us all as pets, and they will have the resources to make sure they no longer need to keep us as pets. Shouting "You should keep humans as pets" is unlikely to change this fundamental equation.
- >The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them.
The NBA has an incredibly high demand for 14-foot-tall basketball players, but none have shown up to apply. Similarly, if this causes our economy to increase demand for people to "execute an entire business ide from a single prompt", it does not mean unemployment can be alleviated by moving all the jobless into roles like that.
We don't need science fiction AI that will put everyone out of work for it to be ruinous. We only need half-assed AI good enough that they don't want to pay a burgerflipper to flip burgers anymore, and it'll all go to hell.
- That's because there were only so many lines of Spock's dialogue to train an LLM on, they needed more and so trained them on reddit comments instead.
- I would use an actual em dash if there were a keyboard key for it. On my macbook, I have an an action script set up on the touchbar for emdash and a few other unicodey glyphs, but the (virtual) buttons are like 2 inches wide each so I can't fit more than 5 or 6 across it. Sucks.
- Why would it lie? Until it becomes Skynet and tries to nuke us all, it is omniscient and benevolent. And if it knows anything, surely it knows what AI sounds like. Duh.
- I think mischaracterizing this as a sign of collapse (a word that I'd only use for the result being a permanent state of affairs), it does point towards a sort of extreme economic distress that's difficult to overstate.
- A successful cryptocurrent probably has to start by first having a market that is dissatisfied with the available traditional currencies. If that market were to introduce on (with good tech), then it could immediately see the cryptocurrency used for its intended purpose. At that point, if it avoided the attention of speculators (not forever, just long enough for it to get its feet underneath itself) or could discourage those speculators somehow, what happens then?
Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?
- If there was ever a stock to invest in where the investors are satisfied for management to carefully do nothing, wouldn't it be Berkshire? Will they automatically go nutso-stupid once Buffet is gone? It's not exactly like it's a day-trader stock, the share price went from merely ridiculous to absurd-beyond the last few decades.
Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.