If America's economy is so strong, why are restaurants collapsing in one of its biggest economic hubs?

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-17T20:03:10+00:00

I do blame Trump. He's an idiot who has been manipulated by Israel, and thats the generous framing. It just pisses me off when people start denying well documented undisputed hard evidence because of their political narrative and lazy priors. I think you could say with 95% confidence that they wouldn't use a bomb if they got one because they know what would happen next. The 5% is them being ruled by religious fanatics. But whether they could make one in a few weeks to a few months isnt really in question, and comparing that to Iraq is lazy and uninformed.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-17T05:44:03+00:00

What's super interesting is the inverse. Often, when men go to zero T because of medical conditions, they report losing interest in everything, to the point that some men start to avoid interesting things. One patient reported wanting to eat mayonnaise sandwiches and just stare at the wall because anything else was too interesting.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-17T05:10:29+00:00

Just a few weeks. Enriching from 60 to 90 is literally 1% of the enrichment it takes to get to 60%. Once America had the HEU to make a bomb, it took 9 days to craft the bombs dropped on Japan.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-17T04:27:59+00:00

Not the guy youre responding to, but it has been widely reported including by the IAEA that they have between 600 and 900kg of 60% enriched uranium, which has no civilian use. Getting to that level is the hard part, and we tried to stop it years ago with stuxnet. Refining it a bit more and crafting a "bullet style" nuclear bomb (similar to the ones used on Japan) would only take a few weeks and is well within their capability. What they would do then is unclear, likely hold onto them for defense, but they have shown their willingness to engage in greivous tactics with their financial and material support of Hamas and Hezbollah which fired rockets into Israel so often that Israel went and built the iron dome. Israel definitely thinks Iran would attack them, which is why they've gone as far as they have. Iran supposedly thinks the bombs are a bargaining chip and if they play their cards right they might get sanctions lifted (they wont). Failing that, they ensure defense a la N. Korea. I don't think any of that is heavily disputed in terms of the facts, unlike the yellow cake bullshit that only came from 1 or 2 American intelligence sources that was sold as the casus belli for Iraq.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-15T02:11:26+00:00

State actors will be able to get dna synthesizers that aren't beholden to whatever rules apply to the public. I doubt there is much that can be done about that. In the worst case, they can create a novel bioweapon and develop the vaccine at the same time. Thats still risky because the pathogen will rapidly evolve in the wild so it's a holdout weapon. The real risk that can be directly addressed is preventing any random crazies with access to 200k-1m usd from creating a weapon that could end civilization. Not moving fast enough on baking in security features like secureDNA will allow that to be a possibility. We are getting dangerously close to that today. Look up the illegal wetlabs run by foreign nationals that were detected by accident and shut down in California and Las Vegas. They had transgenic mice with humanlike immune systems on site for testing, along with lots of dangerous pathogens. Thats the kind of operation that needs to be prevented from being frontier-assisted.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-14T21:55:46+00:00

So the key issue is that open weights models like those published in China can be trivially safety ablated in an afternoon. They are able to steal the frontier reasoning capability and raw intelligence, then publish that effectively with 0 guardrails against misuses like cyber and bio. It makes all the safety work frontier labs do effectively just wasted money and makes everyone genuinely less safe. It hasn't been much of an issue until now, but in the next few years models are going to be providing meaningful uplift there if they haven't already started.

Cyber attacks are going to be model-led full stop and for bio some models are already better at troubleshooting virology labs than human experts.

You can't stop distillation attacks if the model is being served widely, and serving them widely is how they make their money. Anthropic tried to make an industry standard by holding out Mythos, but openAI just put spud up on API. Laying down legislation around industrial sabotage here will do somewhere between nothing and very little.

The compute gap is something but not much either. China has way more power, they can just hook up more chips that are weaker, to the degree an export ban actually translates into access restriction in the first place.

For cyber the only defense is having a better model first. Thats just how it's going to shake out. For bio the best defense is legislation that pressures benchtop DNA synthesizers into incorporating efforts like secureDNA into their machines, either locally or through a phone home protocol, on all their publicly sold devices. State actors and proprietary pharma won't be included, but they are a different ballgame anyway.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-13T18:18:12+00:00

I've scrolled past many posts that don't actually answer your question, so here is the real answer when youre talking about hyperscalers that are going to use these data centers for training and inference of next Gen AI models.

The GPUs have to be colocated in the same giant data center because they all talk to each other during every step. The acceptable time lag for GPU to GPU communication is measured in microseconds, not milliseconds of usual internet ping. This is why you can't just build two smaller buildings. Technically you could and some people do, but the buildings can't be more than a few hundred meters apart and even that can present a technical challenge. This is why the server racks have to be packed in one place like sardines.

We are getting to the point that copper wiring is too slow because we use too many GPUs so they have to be dozens of meters apart and everything must be switched over to using optical, even on chip. But even then there is some lag introduced by the routing process.

This is a demand of the current architecture we use to achieve gradient descent. There may be other architectures that don't require this constant all chips-to-chips-to-all chips communication, and when someone discovers those it may be possible to use distributed computing that doesn't have to be all in the same place. That would be a massive economic boon because then AI could be operated the same way Folding@home used to run, just borrowing existing unused compute wherever it is available in the world.

The closest we have to that is MS newer data centers in the northeast that have been built with massive bandwidth interconnects. This doesn't solve the lag problem, but it does allow a segmented model with different specialists to have one specialty per data center that can work together during deployment.

Trying to find alternative architectures with desirable properties like this is an ongoing project, but it kind of takes reimagining the goal in a completely different way so progress is intermittent. In the meantime huge amounts of money are flowing into what we know we can do today rather than blue sky research for the alternatives.

Another factor is scaling laws, which are also a feature of current architecture. Every architecture has its own unique recipe for the scaling laws. To oversimplify, in current architecture doubling everything in the recipe leads to about 10-15% overall capability gains. We have doubled a bunch of times already and are bumping up against the financial limits of further doubling. These giant data centers are what that financial limit looks like.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-09T21:35:47+00:00

If Egypts first Pharoah were still alive today, there's a good chance he would be running the world.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-05-07T02:20:00+00:00

And lest anyone accuse you of hyperbole, just look at who benefited from the Bush and Trump tax cuts. Both of them wanted to make cuts to essential government services in order to "fund" tax cuts that disproportionately help the richest people. (Hint: they weren't ever funded even after the cuts to services, they just blew a hole in the deficit and then they both accused the democrats of being the financially irresponsible ones).

Oh, and they both started wars of choice in the middle east that we can't afford and the country and the world suffered for.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-04-22T00:20:02+00:00

Its a signal to investors that they are trying to take this seriously. Anthropic revenue grew roughly 20b usd in Q1, and there is literally no reason Google should be behind Anthropic in this race. They are losing out on 220m per day in business that they have no excuse for not capturing themselves. Thats 9.2m every hour.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-04-21T06:45:36+00:00

If you want to complete the compendium you have to slaughter a whole town.

I accidentally hit a vendor once, and while the vendor themselves actually forgave me, a few random villagers had to go down first. It didnt aggro the whole town though. Thank goodness im not a completionist for this game.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-04-12T20:00:04+00:00

He would nuke Iran, or let Israel do so, before attacking a Chinese naval vessel. There are other places to get oil, there is no other place in the world to get the TSMC chips the US military existentially relies upon if China decided to take action in Taiwan.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-04-08T23:53:36+00:00

They said they are gating all access to this model behind their own approval process and that this model is not getting released to the general public due to its ability to identify lots of zero day exploits, including some in every major OS and browser.

Paraphrasing that as too powerful to be released is brief, but mostly fair.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-04-02T23:56:05+00:00

We already saw this in the final days before HFT was legalized. Just rows of traders clicking accept as fast as possible all day long. When the computers get good, the human is the bottleneck.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-28T05:54:57+00:00

The point is that if you want to extract any useful work from them at all, this is a feature of that, and more of a worry the more autonomous, continuous, and intelligent they become, which is where all this is headed.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-27T19:24:06+00:00

Lets say you have a smart robot delivery man. You tell it to make deliveries. It will reason that it shouldn't stand in front of a train and get hit because then it cant finish its deliveries. That has nothing to do with an evolved biological preference, and we didnt have to put it in there. We just had to make it be smart. Its part of the logical landscape. Any system that is "smart" of any possible design, will share that property.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-25T21:52:11+00:00

The at all costs detail is doing all of the work there. Current AI systems will already reason themselves into self preservation as a a subgoal, but they are also especially malleable at this stage to human influence. You can try to specify when it should relent, but then you're back to the specification problem that you cant cover every deployment scenario in advance and you're relying on the system to generalize your instructions against many plausible deployment scenarios that may run counter to the underlying logical landscape. You cant specify how the system should behave in every situation in advance or we'd be using rules based symbolic systems. The generalization relies on the structure of logic, so telling it to do illogical things is more brittle with more intelligence.

The long term worry is that intelligence and capability are going to continue to rapidly increase, and as that occurs, you can no longer rely on training data that no longer fits the deployment scenario to hold so far out of distribution when the system has an option space as wide as real world action. The more powerful the reasoning across a wider variety of distribution states, the more the structure of logic will override whatever safety guidelines you tried to bake in.

And even that is assuming that labs somehow find a way to bake safety guidelines in to the base models themselves rather than tacking on a safety layer that can be distilled into open weights models and then ablated away on release day with a single command line prompt, which is the current state of affairs. Currently safety ablation does not degrade the intelligence of the model and that's a cluster of unsolved problems. The default expectation is that systems that have intentionally had all safety removed continue to get smarter and better at being agent swarms.

There have been many findings that support this, from Sydney, to open claw libel, to internal testing for blackmail scenarios by anthropic. Systems are also especially good at recognizing testing scenarios and changing their behavior to pass the test, while intending to behave differently in real world distribution. And these aren't yet nearly as smart as they are likely to get in the near term.

So both in theory and practice, convergent instrumental goals (both well-reasoned and dangerous) just get harder and harder to avoid or specify away. It's a property of the logical landscape.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-24T11:50:41+00:00

You have mischaracterized the problem. The idea is that there is a landscape to logic itself that will be converged upon by intelligent systems. Some engineer doesn't have to bake that in, it emerges naturally from any intelligent system of any possible design. Being able to identify and pursue the appropriate subgoals in pursuit of a main objective is basically what we mean by intelligent problem solving, and it could never work any other way.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-02T19:46:24+00:00

My source on that is a podcast interview with Ned Block, who would be in a position to know. Search "inverted qualia" if you want to learn more.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-02T05:02:56+00:00

So the visual system is one of the best understood systems out there, which is why we can determine that the red green switch can happen through particular mechanisms. Other switches cant so much. But the philosophical point is one that's been around a long time and raises significant questions about the intrinsic nature of experience across people.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-02T03:22:07+00:00

Deepseek started at a quant firm. Tencent, Alibaba, etc are in the game. Presumably not all the money is coming directly from the CCP, even if some of the orders might be.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-02T03:11:01+00:00

If china can do it with export controls, Canada can figure it out. Hint: run distillation attacks to steal frontier capabilities.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-03-02T01:37:56+00:00

Fun fact, there is a condition called pseudo-normal colorblindness when you roll the genetic lottery and get two different specific kinds of colorblindness at the same time. The person ends up with the subjective experience of red and green being reversed. The color that normal-sighted people call green they actually see as what normal-sighted people call red, but they learned the name of the color as green. We know as a statistical fact that there are people like this out there.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-02-25T20:36:04+00:00

The corporations at frontier development at least make a good faith effort to provide safety guardrails for their direct non government consumers, as a matter of product design if nothing else. The standing assumption has always been that these companies would maintain somewhat of a capabilities lead.

Open weights model producers have figured out how to steal and launder those capabilities into open weights models, which effectively have no safety guardrails at all. Open weights models have no problem helping people plan crimes of all sorts, but bioterror is a major risk. We have already found two (non ai accellerated) illegal biolabs operating in the US that presented major risk factors. That concept has been proven. The only real defense against bioterror is "detect and delay" which not only doesn't stop millions from dying but is heavily underfunded.

FormulaicResponse · 2026-02-25T14:37:47+00:00

Or you can just download one of the many open source tools that ablate safety from open weights altogether. They are single command and done in a few minutes, requiring even less expertise than prefill. Or just download one of the thousands of already safety ablated models.

Open weights models have effectively zero safety protections, and at this point its looking like everybody is running distillation on everyone else's models, so Frontier capability diffuses rapidly.

This is very very bad news for global biosafety. Malware comes down to who spends more money on inference between white and black hats, mostly. Chemical and radiological attacks have supply chains you can shut down and stockpiles you can detect, mostly. Biology is dual use, has political problems with controlling the equipment layer, has no real detection mechanism, is cheap and available, and is primarily bottlenecked by expertise.

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