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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • An estimated 15/20% of Iranians are hardcore supporters of the theocratic regime that Trumpstein says he wants to remove. That 15/20% is violent and well-armed enough that they can effectively keep the rest of the population repressed. And from what it looks like right now, even if their ability to project power outside of Iran has been hit, they still have that power internally (and dismantling it would require the US and Israel to put boots on the ground and have many more casualties for a much longer time than they are willing to).

    So, it apparently only takes 15/20% of violent, well armed fanatics to hold a whole country captive. Probably less, with good surveillance tech. Now let’s do the MAGA math and see who should be afraid of a coup…






  • yes… mine was just a play on the title of this post.

    Look, I’m not saying that Amodei is a saint and I do find him as full of shit as Altman with their AGI promises, but would you expect Anthropic to take a stand against increasing AI investment, because it’s coming from Trump? And I don’t like that he went looking for funding in the Middle East either.

    I just think there is an ethical line between “I do business with people who do bad things” and “I’m actively helping people who do bad things to do them in a more efficient way”. It might be a fine line and it might also be that they are just posturing, but it’s still more than other companies did (companies that are a lot richer than Anthropic and that don’t need to find a lot of funding just to stay afloat).






  • This sounds… plausible actually. They have this big stake in GPU datacenters for AI, that are (and will be) burning incredible amounts of money and are not turning a profit anytime soon. That same crazy level of investement on AI is making hardware costs go up, especially gaming hardware.

    But Microsoft, being the benefactors who have inherited the company from philantropist and kids-lover Bill Gates, have thought of us! They will share a bit of their shiny GPU datacenters’ plwer for gaming and all they will be asking for is a lot of your money. I can see that.



  • It’s almost funny how all those AI doomsday scenarios are actually meant to prop up investment in AI.

    See how Amodei and Altman are usually the ones pushing these narratives on how worried they are by the incredible advancements of their respective companies’ creatures. They are so, so worried about the demise of the human race and how fast it’s coming.

    And I sort of understand them because whatever disruption they are peddling needs to happen very fast or they will all run out of money. But what does it tell about the rest of the human race that we are actually buying into it and pouring money into creating a dystopian future?



  • That’s how ship cannons worked too, at the time. Powerful but heavy to move, slow to reload, not very accurate… having more of them was the only way to have sustained firepower.

    But Leonardo also left a lot of these sketches that look less like actual projects and more like the superhero fantasies of an extremely gifted six years old. “And look, this shit has cannons… Cannons EVERYWHERE! Bam! Kapow!”. I guess it’s what happens when you’re so great at drawing that even the doodles you do when bored look like masterpieces.