blix

I'm a native speaker and I agree. English spelling carries a lot of history and context along with it, which would be lost in any spelling standardization. That richness is a good thing. A little complexity or inconsistency is good. It reflects that spelling is a fundementally imperfect encoding of a living language whose true form is the spoken word. And if you truly grapple with the tremendous diversity of spoken English, it is obvious that any One True Phonetic Orthography is impossible.

The physical bottleneck of wet lab experiments is real life synthesis, which takes real time and real physical infrastructure. As you note, it's already mostly automated through deterministic computer controlled systems. AI doesn't change this at all. AI can change the information processing side dramatically, and maybe this will allow for more resources to be spent on synthesis, but the true bottleneck remains untransformed.

> lab safety was already a focus of safety.

Thank you for this insight.

AI, computers, electricity, steam power, basic tools, and even fire all enabled in a dramatically faster rates of change compared to the immediately preceding era. You could also argue all also mimic certain human (or more broadly, animal) characteristics. I don't see what is truly unique to AI here. I'm not sure AI is even qualitatively unique from the computer, just the technology taken to it's logical conclusion.

Physical labs and experiments will always have physical bottlenecks, so I really don't see how AI is a transformative element here. What is it about AI that will be so transformative to the fundemental economics of this space that it will lead to several orders of magnitude more experimentation? If the problem is an expansion of wild west wet lab experimentation, why isn't ~that~ the focus of safety?

Who is going to profit from making an super STD anyway? How would regulating AI change their incentive structure?

People say this, and then the scenarios they come up with are boring and uninteresting. 80% of the scenarios in this thread are "AI hacks something", as if hacking didn't exist before agents, and the remaining 20% are mostly made up of other things humans are already trying to do at scale.

Why am I supposed to believe that a virus created in a virology lab with AI assistance is uniquely more dangerous than a virus created in a virology lab without AI assistance?

"Free communication" is specifically held up as a threat to democracy by current leaders in quite a few states. For instance, Macron and Merz in France and Germany have both recently explictly comdemned free communication, that isn't filtered and gatekept by some "common framework" or government agency, as a threat to democracy. Probably because this communication is producing social movements in these countries that the state cannot control.

And if this isn't US-centric enough for you, the previous US administration created a "Disinformation Governance Board" specifically to address the threats that they felt free communication among the people was posing to democracy, taking action to pressure corporate actors to censor disfavored popular speech in attempt to circumvent first amendment protections. At least the current administration isn't really pretending that attacking free speech is protecting democracy somehow.

Patronage programs for people with advanced degrees is a woefully inadequate solution to the current economic pressures. Large segments of the first-world working and middle classes hollowed out by globalization had already turned against it before AI even came on to the scene. People are generally hostile to patronage directed towards people above them on the ladder.

the denouncing of heresy may be even more important.

You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone else to educate them in way that conflicts with your interests.

Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.

The effort significantly predates the recent changes in US media ownership. I would actually argue that the ownership change is mostly orthogonal to the ongoing trend of centralization and top-down manipulation of digital information sources.

A shift change of the prison guards more than a material change to the prison.

I'm not gonna argue whether it is true or false, but the scale of the conspiracy you are proposing is pretty massive. Multiple orders of magnitude bigger than anything that is currently within the mainstream public consciousness.

In this case, I think a network of mostly independent actors whose interests happen to align makes more sense. But maybe sometimes those interests are a little different than what people commonly understand them to be.

It is not jist Bibi, but also the IAEA and other international organizations. And at least the last 5 US administrations. I suppose they could also all be in Israel's pocket though.

Iran's 60% enriched uranium stockpile is really not up for debate. Iran is happy to tell everyone that they have it. With the proper equipment, 60% can go to 90% in a single month. So the question is how advanced is the Iranian infrastructure for the final enrichment step, and (less commonly talked about) how ready they are to actually make a fission bomb out of that material. The latter task is not considered to be very hard, North Korea did it after all, so the main focus has been on the former. There does seem to be some decent information that the centrifuge array has been under active development at various points, and has been consitently, actively targetted by Mossad/CIA for at least the past 20 years or so. For example, Stuxnet was a joint CIA/Mossad operation that begain in 2005 and continued through both GWBush and Obama.

Unfortunately, even with some nice bribes from Obama, Iran was always a little cagey with the IAEA inspectors, and officially kicked them out in 2021. So after that, the only sources for the state of Irans nuclear infrastructure information effectively became Iran itself and Mossad.

I am not convinced that a population that just recently had 30k people die in a revolt is gonna immediately rally around their oppressors after a foreign power kills 2k. I have yet to see compelling evidence that formerly IGRC-hostile segments of the population have switched alleigances. It is possible. But one could also imagine an exhausted population that is tired of a goverment they despise putting a target on their backs. The Iranians I personally know suggest that the second idea is more true, but it is anecdotal evidence with heavy selection bias. Another factor is that Iran has an unstable food and water supply, and people who lack food and water tend to focus their anger on whoever is closest that has food and water.

The Trump administration is actively interested in the dissolution of the current global economic order. This is why they are relatively unbothtered by the global economic shock that is a Strait of Hormuz closure, whereas the globally-oriented neoliberal administrations of the past wanted to avoid this at all costs.

Destroying the gulf states would dramatically reduce the importance of the Strait, which would make mining it or otherwise shutting it down somewhat pointless anyway. It is a bit of mutually assured destruction, but the USA is probably in the best position of anyone to weather that storm.

I suppose it is more powerful in an absolute sense than just temporarily shutting down the Strait, but like Russia's nukes, I think the threat is more useful than the play itself. Unless they are just looking to take others down with them.

What action can Iran take today that they couldn't take a year ago? No one who has been paying attention should be surprised that Iran can shut down the straight. It has been a known factor for decades.

They have less leverage. The have so much less that they are forced to openly use their last and most powerful card for their survival, when they never have had to before. That is a position of weakness, not strength.