camgunz

You'll be surprised to learn childcare is free in Germany

I guess I view a mortgage as a margin investment

They literally mean like, a robot to shower them, wipe their asses, provide companionship, get them in/out of bed, make sure they turn the stove off, make sure they take their meds, alert people if there's a health incident, etc.

It seems easier to just tax the loan as income unless it's a margin investment.

There's no such thing as Roko's Basilisk, only Pascal's Wager.

People can lose their card or have it stolen, become ineligible to vote, or die (welcome to the fun project of nationwide key management). Voter registration now has to be done in person to update your card (or get a new one). You have to have every county in every State in the union buy new machines at great expense, probably in violation of existing contracts. People forget how they vote; what happens if you look up your vote and it's not what you remember, it's not there, or you find a vote you don't remember? Bad actors can claim their votes are incorrect and undermine confidence in the election. Vote verification opens up a vote market, and with encrypted comms and anonymous cryptocurrency that's a real concern.

> I would counter with this: If it is technically impossible to tell the difference between AI generated images, and real ones, how could anyone ever be prosecuted for having presumptive real ones in their possession ever again?

If AI CSAM is legal, the market for real CSAM is effectively destroyed. It's heartbreaking to me that--incredibly--we're making our best weapon in the fight against child abuse illegal. It's the methadone of CSAM. What the fuck are we doing?

If you have fluoridated water and you brush (not floss, flossing does nothing) you don't need a dentist unless something bonkers happens. In that event, God protect you from the grifting.

I kinda agree, maybe, but I don't think compiling code is a creative pursuit.

This is true, but there's also the cases where slight differences in prompt yield wildly different results. In any programming language, if I add a clause to a conditional like "if car is red or car is blue", that behaves predictably--and if it doesn't we can dig into the debugger, assembly, etc. If I do that with an LLM, that can change everything, and there's no way to "debug" it.

This kind of thing (plus the cost) really limits what they can realistically be used for. A lot of things are tolerant of even lots of fuzziness (suggestions you can ignore, work you can redo, etc), but that subset of applications doesn't justify the boggling capital investment or the ongoing compute needs.

So, my guess is we're probably in for a couple more years of discovering what these models are good for. Coding: meh, kinda. Hacking: wow amazing. Writing a novel: no. Reviewing your work: incredible. And so it goes. This is probably what pops the bubble: we find the small subset of applications this stuff is useful for, and then it's a bag holding race.

I broadly agree. I'll dig into the junior dev thing though. It's one thing if you're giving an LLM a task you can review. It's another if you're not reviewing the output, or you're putting them in critical paths.

The output of a compiler is predictable and deterministic. LLM output isn't.

> People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument.

Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.

> Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.

No, it's Han Superiority. That's why they haven't expanded south: they don't care about non-Chinese. Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.

> China does not... need all of that in order to take Taiwan.

The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.

> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. ... Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb?

Obama spent years getting the JCPOA. Trump tore it up, spent billions of dollars, caused a worldwide energy crisis, and Iran's ascendant. Some presidents have better foreign policy than others.

> This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries.

Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.

> They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc).

The Biden admin didn't think this was credible.

> Communists just love controlling the resources.

Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”

Is Trump a communist or do more than just communists like to control the resources?

> Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.

This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.

> So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.

Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.

> The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse.

I think when economies falter governments falter, and their philosophies are discredited. So it makes sense that governments were on thin ice in the wake of WW1 and the Great Depression, and that more radical parties from the left and the right were ascendant. I think something similar is happening now, if of lower magnitude. But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.

> The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.

China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).

Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.

> then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China

You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.

Finally, I don't exactly know what you mean by "focus on China." The West's relationship with China is complex, a lot of people are focused on it. The likelihood of direct confrontation with them is quite low, as it'd be disastrous for both sides.