mysecretaccount

> The argument that consciousness suddenly arises due to a particular configuration of atoms is also suspect; all forms of consciousness we routinely accept are fairly robust to many configuration changes.

Not true at all - consciousness appears to rely on an extremely limited set of configurations, relative to all possible.

Panpsychism doesn't mean "everything is aware", it means the capacity for consciousness is material and common. Put my brain in a blender and the atoms are the same but I am no longer conscious.

The US and Russia can destroy every power plant in their respective opposing countries with I(C/R)BMs, but this would involve breaking taboos of which even their respective leaders are fearful.

The fighter jet is not capable of destroying every power plant in Iran without risking pilot casualties, an endeavor for which the US lacks political capital. The drone has no such issue. A rational nation would have shifted primary investment into medium-range drones many yesterdays ago.

> The drones are good for antagonizing and terrorising [sic] a civilian population. A few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties.

Absolutely incorrect.

- The purpose of these drones is to establish deterrence.

- US is not capable of reaching every inch of Iranian airspace with F-35s unless it is willing to accept a significant casualty rate among pilots.

- Even if they could, the US has not been able to decimate Iran's drone stockpile even in the areas it can ~safely reach.

The age of the fighter jet is over.

Is there some sort of cultural revisionism where we are expected to deny the existence of e.g. the Soviet design sensibility because of contemporary politics? What a bizarre response.

There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.

Even with your uncharitable framing I agree with both quotes.

> Chinese propaganda seems to hit very hard these days.

Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is a propagandized bot is a terrible way to live. You will not learn.

> Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light.

I'm in Hong Kong right now. Seems like it is still here to me.

> If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine

You may as well make the same argument about commanding a billion Nintendo 64s. We cannot simply scale up Claude instances like you say, its ability to produce interesting output is bounded by the underlying model.

The "Claude part" is important here, though. If you believe we can produce AGI by simulating physics then the existing paradigm is far too slow. A zettaflop does not even get close, you can have a moon-sized computer and it probably will not be able to produce AGI using the current transformer-based, extremely slow, classical computing architecture. We need to improve the underlying computation paradigm.

This is why the focus on raw compute is a poor use of engineering time. We have plenty of it, we are just headed in the wrong direction.

The output undoubtedly improves when looping LLM output back into the model at inference-time, but there is a limit to this and it is still bounded by the acumen of the underlying model. You cannot just recurse these models with tooling and compute to e.g. solve new physics.

Using a single Claude agent, ask it to generate "new" ideas and it will generate an immense list. Ask it to rank those ideas by novelty and it will comply.

The results will be lackluster. Additional agents will not improve the result.

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example:

> One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one.

We are already near the limits of what we can do if we throw compute at Claude without improving the underlying models, and it is not clear how we can get big improvements on the underlying models at this point. Surely geohot knows this, so I am surprised he thinks that "one million Claudes" would be able to e.g. write a better novel than one hundred Claudes, or even one Claude.

The poster to which I responded and the article are each speculating on the "why" for this contract. That said, we do not need to speculate about Cybertruck sales - Business Insider reported that Tesla sold only 5,400 of them in 2025Q3.

We know from this that they do not need the same level of third-party 4680 capacity, and (call it speculative if you so desire) this is the most parsimonious explanation for the L&F write down.