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Wait till the robots arrive. That they will know how to do a vast range of human skills, some that people train their whole lives for, will surprise people the most. The future shock I get from Claude Code, knowing how long stuff takes the hard way, especially niche difficult to research topics like the alternate applicable designs of deep learning models to a modeling task, is a thing of wonder. Imagine now that a master marble carver shows up at an exhibition and some sci-fi author just had robots make a perfect beautiful equivalent of a character from his novel, equivalent in quality to Michaelangelo's David, but cyberpunk.

What you are witnessing is the process of "mystification" where it requires an "expert" annointed by some organization to interpret arbitrary criteria to make a politically or economically important determination that can't really be challenged on any objective basis. Since you are not an "expert", you are not permitted to do your own research and therefore by rule are incapable of being able to access the special mystified knowledge that only the "expert" has access to.

That, or it keeps non-expert snake oil sales people from 'flat making shit up'.

If no outsider can't explain why the expert is right and the non-expert is wrong, besides saying they're not an expert, then it certainly has the appearance of being a mystical power of the expert. After all, mysticism requires only faith in the mystic prophet to be true.

Everyone can shape mass preferences because propaganda campaigns previously only available to the elite are now affordable. e.g Video production.

I posit that the effectiveness of your propaganda is proportional to the percentage of attention bandwidth that your campaign occupies in the minds of people. If you as an individual can drive the same # impressions as Mr. Beast can, then you're going to be persuasive whatever your message is. But most individuals can't achieve Mr. Beast levels of popularity, so they aren't going to be persuasive. Nation states, on the other hand, have the compute resources and patience to occupy a lot of bandwidth, even if no single sockpuppet account they control is that popular.

> Nation states, on the other hand, have the compute resources and patience to occupy a lot of bandwidth, even if no single sockpuppet account they control is that popular.

If you control the platform where people go, you can easily launder popularity by promoting few persons to the top and pushing the unwanted entities into the blackhole of feeds/bans while hiding behind inconsistent community guidelines, algorithmic feeds and shadow bans.


This is why when I see an obviously stupid take on X repeated almost verbatim by multiple accounts I mute those accounts.

I just asked AI what the thousands of arrests for social media posts so far are for and it didn't say anti-semetic content. It said it's largely targeted at anti-immigrant, gender-critical, and being mean to politicians comments. Israel is the "woke right" line these days though, and something the "woke left" and "woke right" can both agree on hating.

> I just asked AI

Please stop doing this. If someone wants to read LLM-generated hooey of some variety, they can submit a prompt somewhere and read the resulting text themselves.


Well I could do a web search and read all the thousands of articles about social media censorship in Britian and write an essay on it with grammar errors, or I could go on here and blame Israel like the OP, because that's just what I'm feeling today and I saw a bunch of stuff while TikTok doomscrolling yesterday that made me believe that. You'd say the articles I quoted that didn't say Israel were not from reliable sources, and absolutely nobody's mind would be changed. I'll trust AI to be more objective about doing the research. However, I did write the comment myself. I mean I would go back and edit it and put in random no-no words for AI, just to prove that, but I'd get flagged.

The glitchy stuff in the model reasoning is likely to come from the constant redefinition of words that communists and other ideologues like to engage in. For example "People's Democratic Republic of Korea."


Pliney the Liberator jailbroke it in no time. Not sure if this applies to prompt injection:

https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1993089311995314564


I've read political books from the 70s. Nothing has changed at all in politics since then. Just what was going on in San Francisco at the time took over the whole country.

The last big change was the death of Stalin. He was a genuine threat to the world order being so incredibly capable and ruthless. After that things settled back into the current long slide to "the end of history." Xi's China seems to be opening up a new era of great power conflicts.

The Israelis and the Palestinians have been doing awful shit to each other for 80 years. All the arguments are the same as 50 years ago. Little has changed. Boring.


This will happen in the real world when the robot mass production gets going. We'll climb the exponential till we run into the resource limits of the planet at meteoric speed.

Yes, the regulators will try and manage it, but eventually every decision about who can use the robot/AI genie for what will go through them because of the robot/AI genie's enormous strain on natural resources, and you'll be back to a planned economy where the central planners are the environmental regulators.

There are hard decisions to make as well. Who gets to open a rare earth processing plant and have a tailing pond that completely ecologically destroys that area? Someone has to do it to enable the modern economy. It's kind of like we won't have a good AI video generator and will always be behind China if some Youtube creators refuse to license their content for AI training. Same goes for the rare earth processing tailing pond. Nobody can agree on where it's going to go, so China wins.


People don't get that Apple would need an enormous data center buildout to provide a good AI experience on their millions of deployed devices. Google is in the exascale datacenter buildout business, while Apple isn't.


Apple is buying a model from Google, not inference. Apple will host the model themselves.

It's very simple: Apple absolutely refuses to send all their user data to Google.


Then why did Apple have a $20B a year search deal with Google?


The argument can be made that when people search Google they know they are using Google but when they use Siri they assume that their data is not going to Google. I think this is more likely to be solved contractually than having Gemini running on a datacenter full of M5 Ultra servers.


All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological harm in isolation too abhorrent to the members of the community where it is done to counterbalance the ecological good it does elsewhere? In an authoritarian country, you can just tell the people who live around the processing plant to relocate or suffer because it helps the environment elsewhere. In a non-authoritarian country, the local people will all reject it because it will degrade the quality of life and their land. This has been happening in the backlash against mining in Madagascar for example.


> All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard.

You don't actually need rare-earths to produce solar panels, control systems and batteries - at least not in the amounts that require the scale China is operating at.


I wonder this as well - it seems the most strategic path forward for any nation or community is to localize the supply chain as much as possible, but like oil before there's some things that are just impossible or super difficult to get locally. And unfortunately to find new ways to turn sun into electricity costs money to do and won't happen because the cost of the current method is too low to justify trying to turn sand into solar panels or whatever other thing you might try.

I dream of a solar punk future where basically any community can generate power without any horrifying pollution anywhere in the supply chain. Mirror powered smelters, sand batteries.


Rare earth refining isn't a specific industrial process. The cheapest possible method is a specific industrial process, and is very dirty. In a "survivalist solarpunk world" it would probably be done less cheaply.


Conspiratorially, if all places were non-authoritarian and did not tolerate cheap refining, a regime change would have to be ordered


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