AYBABTME

Where does defense stop in an integrated world? Aircraft carriers and a strong navy are necessary to protect waterways and freedom of navigation, which the peaceful side of USA absolutely needs in its pursuit of freedom, peace and liberty. East Asia's history is a great example of what happens when you focus only on your internal world and close off to the rest of the planet. Also why they're not falling for the same mistake again and not having these qualms in the modern era.

Peace requires policing, a credible deterrent to abuse. On the world's stage, there's no actual hegemon for the planet. You gotta choose who will police by mere "I'm stronger than you". I think the US is the most acceptable police, at least it's an elected democracy with individual freedom at its core.

At the end of the day, a government is whoever is strong enough to prevent the other one from governing: provide protection and services to your people in exchange for being the boss. Roaming bands overthrow each other, still visible in Afghanistan and Syria, and dictate who's effectively Government on a given day in a given area. Who applies the laws, who provides justice, who keeps you safe. Scale that up to modern nations and we look at it as if it was the natural order of things: just stick to you backyard and all will be good. But no, it was never like that and even less so these days: the world is shrinking rapidly.

Can't have peace without deterrence against bad actors. And deterrence doesn't stop only on your turf.

Doesn't seem to work? It just spits out a fixed answer about RAM. qwen3.8 27b

All this stuff was in motion while Tesla was in its COVID boom. It's hard to believe that this is all some PR stunt due to Tesla's current market posture, when the Cybertruck, Roadster, were all specced the same in 2021. It's not like they suddenly came up with these gimmicks. The gimmicks were there from day one.

Not sure why the author thinks Anthropic's models spend more power and water than DeepSeek, there's no evidence of that. Their pricing has more to do with premium perception and less to do with COGS.

Everyone does optimization of model serving because it's good for every player in there.

(Also the water consumption thing is not a real issue.)

A thought provoking leading question I have is (1) a space heater throws power into a coil and generates heat and nothing more in the world (2) an LLM into a GPU throws power into the GPU and generates heat and organized information.

Is (2) generating less heat so that the laws of thermodynamics account for the increased amount of "useful stuff" generated (the organized information)? Switch (2) for a bitcoin miner if you prefer.

Is the act of increasing order in the data, somehow costing some energy? Is there a fundamental minimum cost to flipping bits? Something about the switch of energy to matter and back, seems involved here.

I think the nature of computation is holding some secrets about the meaning of the universe, if there is any.

There is no such thing as a general order; if people accept this then the problem relaxes and we stop trying to design impossible things.

Nodes shouldn't be observers. End users should be the observers. The ordering of event only matters from the perspective of the "I'm adding this to my shopping cart and clicking the buy button and then it said I bought it" story being internally consistent. The observer here is the end user and the end user knows what happens-before relationships were.

Databases should flip this ordering inside out and let the observers (or proxies for them) report what they did in which order. And it just happens that protocols for doing this already exist: distributed tracing encodes these relations.

A meaningful global order doesn't exist and attempts to conjure one only conjure a meaningless one, or one that throws away a lot of turns trying to perfectly order everything from some arbitrary internal observer.

In most of my multi-agent workflows, I always end up asking them to create a group-chat system to coordinate and post updates. I thought this was such an obvious day-0 discovery that I assumed it's a well known and understood pattern that wasn't worth talking about. I once again discover that what I take for obvious and granted, might not be.

I've found that similarly to how teams can degrade into spending more time bikeshedding and on the watercooler than on work, agents also tend to end up spending way too much time coordinating as opposed to doing the work. And so I rediscovered that it's better to have one agent that's the Manager (on a Manager Schedule) and the rests be builders (on a Builder's Schedule), where the manager might be interrupt driven, but the builders need to be able to focus for a while without interruption (context poisoning).

Thanks for writing this and demonstrating that writing about anything is useful to share knowledge and practices. In the end, I learned a lot from Martin Fowler and his gang and I guess I should pay back and write about my own discoveries, however trivial they seem to me.

I think they're doing this so they can have months of advanced notice of how the protocol will look, to post-train their models to be the only ones with the ability to interact with this protocol on the day it becomes public.

It's like creating conditions for a race where they structurally have months of advance. And realistically they have a credible shot at establishing the standard due to their weight in the industry, and control of the most popular AI distribution method (Claude).

So they create the race, knowing the race is what will likely establish the standard, and using some pretext to prevent other competitive athletes from training for it in advance. Other athletes only get to start when the gun fires.

I don't get how this is unique to GPU clusters. As a general rule, underwriters are not qualified to operate and maintain the assets they underwrite loans for. That's why houses, cars, equipment, ... go at auction at a fraction of their value. And why lenders have insurance.

I wrote "lightweight polices" not policies. The police presents itself as benign looking in a public context. Enforcement of day to day offences is done mechanically by machines. A state trooper doesn't stop you on a speed check with his hand on his gun.

Yes, online policies are wild and not lightweight at all.

Something missing as cultural context is that deepfake, involuntary "porn", and all sorts of abuse of personal image, are a rampant and omnipresent problem in Korea. Many things are great here, but the sexual landscape when it comes to men versus women and kids, is nasty. You can't really apply a Western mindset to this without understanding just how messed up some of that stuff is. So whatever you think of the mechanism, the problem behind it is very real.

I do think a proposal that AI-filters content on small forums is a bit weird, and probably clumsy. But Korea faces a real problem and usually leans toward a bias to action and "just do it". It leads to weird stuff but also to dynamic problem solving. The part I'm trying to preempt here is measuring this against so called "universal" values; these French Revolution/Enlightenment ideas of universal rights aren't really universal, they're one culture's logic, consistent inside its own bubble but exported like it's the default for everyone. I'll say, I do like them. But other self-consistent logics exist, and I think Korea's set is one of them. It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual. Both produce aberrations, only different ones.

For example, first time I came here I thought it's crazy to have so many speeding cameras and CCTVs everywhere. Years later I didn't so much "got used to it" but I think it's a tradeoff that mostly works and I grew to appreciate it.

Korea prefers lightweight polices (literally friendly looking) with a lot of automated, bulk enforcement, instead of sparse enforcement backed by the occasional armored truck. That's a design choice, not a slide into dystopia.

So all I'm trying to convey is, keep an open mind, and don't apply some supposed "universal" mindset blindly. Critique the mechanism all you want. Just don't do it by treating one culture's values as the yardstick everyone else gets measured by.

Fwiw I think it's a misfire. But I don't think it's a slippery-slide down dystopia. It's just Tuesday.