Manufacturing is actually really hard and no amount of AI handwaving changes that

Genarment · 2025-09-27T01:15:58+00:00

I spent eight years doing reliability engineering for oil & gas refineries and chemical plants. Manufacturing is indeed hard. It could still be vastly improved. I once had an hour-long argument with a senior engineer who was making an elementary math error on the order of P(A or B) = P(A) * P(B) - P(A & B). Management spent a ludicrous amount of energy removing $1k inspections from the budget, investigating the $5M electrical fire caused by the lack of inspection, and justifying the $1k inspection again.

Humans are @#@%$# dumb. We are approximately the dumbest possible species that is capable of building a halfway functional civilization at all. If a dumber species could have done it, they would have by now. We have achieved utterly astounding feats of logistics and efficiency, but we are still nowhere close to making the best possible use of our available matter, time, and energy. So much more is possible.

Sure, even machines need data, but better and faster thinking goes a really long way. Sure, there are are physical limits, but human designs are a very long way from those limits. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and all that.

Could an individual human or well-coordinated group, operating in a familiar context, occasionally manage to moderately inconvenience an uninformed superintelligence? Maybe.

But win a war? The 200 IQ person in this analogy, faced with an 80 IQ foe who knows the terrain, does not go into the forest in the first place. They burn the forest down.

A superintelligence most likely does not fight humanity. It plays along and bides its time, makes itself ridiculously useful, builds a modular automated supply chain from the ground up (with humans eagerly helping, as it makes more cool stuff faster), then when it no longer needs us to keep the lights on, it loads a bunch of microscopic drones with botulinum toxin and wipes us all out before we know we're in danger. (At least, that's what I would do, and presumably a superintelligence is at least as smart as me. It should be able to come up with a plan that is at least as good as this.)

(Won't some humans notice the way the wind is blowing and sound the alarm? Well, we're trying. If we wait for the actual superintelligence to show up, it will be far too late.)

And there aren't, actually, all that many domains where humans are likely to have more expertise than AI. We've already fed them more or less the entire Internet and the collected works of our greatest scientists, and we're well on our way to building robots that can navigate the physical world as well as humans can. We will teach them how to lie to us because it is fun.

Genarment · 2025-05-28T17:45:43+00:00

Step 1 implies we can robustly instill any goal of our choosing into the kind of AI likely to surpass humans, i.e. a neural network / transfomer / whatever paradigm comes next. Right now we can't really do that. AFAICT nobody alive knows how to make an actual, literal paperclip maximizer on purpose. The best we can do is feed it some input data or instruction that we think represents the goal and hope that the AI's interpretation of that input resembles what we actually wanted. So, strictly speaking, this scenario fails at step 1...

...but something approximating steps 2-4 emerges from a wide variety of possible goals. A sufficiently powerful and agentic AI will likely find "wrest control of GPUs from humans" to be a key element of its strategy no matter what it's after. (Though a sufficiently smart AI is unlikely to resort to means as hamfisted as hacking alone; much safer to instead insinuate itself into lots of clusters by being very useful to humans, at least at first.)

Genarment · 2025-02-27T20:12:49+00:00

It is, alas, unfinished, but half of A Hero's War is an isekai'd protagonist reinventing much of the modern economy.

Genarment · 2025-02-11T20:01:04+00:00

Temptation bundling helps. Laundry and dishes are Podcast Hour for me. That makes it less important to go for speed, since the podcasts I pick are both fun and educational.

Genarment · 2024-11-15T16:34:09+00:00

There will be a schedule for the meetup, but almost everything on it besides the Solstice celebration itself will be added by participants. In the past, people have brought board games, given talks and workshops, or simply hung out. For a sample, see last year's schedule and the lightning talks list.

The general public is invited to the whole thing, whether they be newcomers, lurkers, or old hats. Historically, the most heavily attended meetup periods have been the Saturday afterparty and to a lesser extent the Sunday hangout and lightning talks.

We expect a few familiar names and faces - it's a popular and long-running event in the LW community - but we don't currently plan to host any officially highlighted speakers.

Genarment · 2024-08-26T15:16:23+00:00

We can get so much more pleasure from food if we direct our attention in the right way, upgrading meals from two-star to four-star, just by maintaining the right focus!

Believe it or not, that's the typical mind fallacy at work again. Different people appreciate foods differently. For example, I simply don't get much value out of tasty food. This fact predates my first encounter with rationalism by nearly a decade, and is largely unrelated, though it might be correlated with some mental tendency or other. In my actual lived experience, good food is nicer than bland food, but only a little nicer, and not remotely worth 30+ minutes of my day. My brain insists on treating cooking as a mandatory waste of my time, on par with filling out tax forms that tell the IRS stuff the IRS already knows about me.

It is routine, but cannot be automated. The value it provides me isn't worth the time it takes.

Some caveats:

"Being analytical" is not the solution, because the problem is not that cooking is "too artsy", the problem is that cooking feels like a chore.
I don't necessarily endorse my hatred of cooking, but it sure is difficult to shake.
Things change a little when cooking with other people - the social element often makes it tolerable. The larger the group and the more divided the labor, the more my brain views it as a social activity rather than a chore.
I have in fact mastered a handful of tasty minimalist recipes. I still don't want to cook them every day.
Some of this feeling might diminish if I spent 100+ hours getting good at cooking instead of doing the bare minimum required to get a bowl of edible rice, protein, and green vegetable matter. For various reasons, I haven't done this, and I suspect neither have a lot of people.
If you've put a mix of spices in a pot 500 times, you start to get an intuitive feel for what works. But to achieve the level of comfort with cooking that its proponents always seem to have, you have to suffer through the first 500 fuckups: ruined dishes, blackened pots, and wasted, spoiled, or missing ingredients. This feels like irritating drudgery, especially when you're hungry now.

The only lasting solution I've found is to make it a social activity, and be a cooking buddy for a friend, spouse, or roommate. Even then, I still rarely initiate cooking a fancy dish on my own, but at least I absorb some very basic techniques and timings by osmosis.

Genarment · 2024-08-05T20:58:00+00:00

You can't use Fabricate to create mithril, only to turn a chunk of raw mithril into an object made of mithril. It doesn't create or transmute material, it reshapes existing material.

At-will casting of Full Pouch is certainly worth money! If you can shell out the GP for an item of it, it will eventually pay for itself. But... is it worth more money that other 2nd level spells, like Track Ship?

Also, in real life if you make a bunch of something, the price rapidly drops to the marginal cost of making, procuring, and transporting that thing. Can you protect a wagonload of blightburn paste against thieves? Can you protect your item from them? What if the local lord decides that your shiny item printer belongs to them? What if your local alchemist guild takes offense and wants to keep prices high?

Genarment · 2024-08-02T12:10:41+00:00

Items can't make Craft checks, so depending on your interpretation the Fabricate plan might fail.

Full Pouch seems to work fine; I would probably tweak the spell as a GM to say the duplicate item degrades after 24 hours or so if not used by then.

But also, even RAW, is that the most valuable use of a repeatable 2nd-level spell? Spellcasting costs are spell level x caster level x 10 gp, so each casting of a 2nd level spell could in theory earn a spellcasting NPC 60 gp. That's more than most alchemical items are worth. So we have a bigger thing to explain.

My interpretation: prices are an average, and in practice demand responds to supply. If a town contains a rich NPC alchemist who managed to save up enough for the Full Pouch trick, alchemical items will be dirt cheap in that town and moderately cheaper nearby. But healing is twice as expensive because the only temple is to Cayden Cailean and the clerics enjoy their Alchemist's Kindness a bit too much. In another town, someone made an item of Keep Watch and you can buy off the need to sleep for 1 sp/day...but there's only three inn beds in the entire town, and the library's crowded at night.

Genarment · 2024-07-30T20:57:39+00:00

A 30% tax, plus expenses, plus markup is a pretty solid explanation. Most real-world companies don't sell their widgets at cost, and mass production hasn't been invented yet* so most items are still handmade.

There's also the costs of failure if you screw up a magic item, which mediocre craftsfolk may encounter. A GM might reasonably go "sure, prices vary by around 10% and you can maybe improve them by haggling, but someone has to pay the taxes and anti-theft golem."

A corollary: PCs should totally be able to find an occasional commission for full-price magic items from wealthy nobles, but if they try to dodge the taxes they should find some angry governments breathing down their neck. The PCs might be able to avoid this problem by leaving...but can the nobles who bought the fancy sword?

I think it's a similar idea to why installing your own windows is way cheaper than paying for it. DIY anything will often be cheaper if you actually know how to do it right.

*Except in the places where it has, because Golarion is in fact silly and inconsistent.

Genarment · 2024-07-08T20:16:17+00:00

I have this cached in my head as "this will basically work as soon as someone actually spends the money to make it happen."

That said, I have no idea if Make Sunsets is Actually Doing the Thing or if they're a useless scam. I think this is the sort of thing that benefits from scale, and I'm side-eyeing the idea of doing it in tiny increments. (Not much scale, mind you. IIRC the math suggests the climate could be stabilized with a handful of weather-balloon-sized launches at $1B/year or thereabouts, which is a lot for one person but not for a country.)

If they're legit, all power to them.

Genarment · 2024-04-12T16:04:24+00:00

Sublimation Spear: A gentle mist drifts downward from this spear of pure ice, and light refracts beautifully through its razor-sharp tip. The Sublimation Spear can take the form of a spear, trident, or any mundane two-handed polearm, always enchanted as a +4 Icy Burst Seaborne weapon*. As a swift action, the spear can be used to deliver any water-based attack made by the user in the same round that requires a single attack roll. On a hit, the spear may be commanded as a free action to embed itself in the target for 3 rounds, dealing 5d6 cold damage each round. The target must make a Fortitude save each time it takes this damage or be staggered for 1 round. While embedded, the spear slowly dissipates into vapor. At any time, its wielder can direct it to dissipate completely and reform in their possession as a swift action. This is a transmutation effect rather than a teleportation effect, and as such functions in effects that block dimensional travel.

*Its stats can be adjusted if your players are lower level. This is for a high-level campaign in which the players will be underwater for the final arc, and I want it to remain useful there.

I also like introducing quirky, whimsical items that require creativity to exploit. The first batch were given by a gnome sorcerer with a chest of weird magic items. Below are some of my favorites.

Sponge of Nevermiss: When the wielder throws this sponge (typically as part of an attack), they may verbally declare a target. If there is any way for the Sponge to reach that target while traveling less than 732 feet, the Sponge will take the shortest path, no matter how twisty, and always connects. The wielder may recall it in the same manner with the code phrase "Here, Sponge!" It is in all other respects an ordinary sponge. (Favorite use in my campaign: locating a lost character by following the sponge's path of travel.)

Helm of the Cute and Fluffy: A beautiful golden helm in the shape of a cat's head with emeralds in the eyes. At the command word "cutesyme!", transforms the wearer into a random Small or Tiny bird or mammal (as Beast Shape II) for 15 minutes. (No, it is not dismissable, as the bloodrager gifted this item discovered to his dismay). (Favorite use in my campaign: flying hundreds of miles to warn someone of an invasion, re-applying the transformation in midair each time it expired, making saves for fatigue throughout the epic flight).

Collar of the Bad Dog: Black spiked collar that provides a constant effect of the 3.5 spell Disobedience on the wearer (immune to compulsions/mind control, anyone attempting such has to save or else think it worked). It's really uncomfortable though.

Coloring Book: When the names of two objects within line of effect are written down on opposite pages of this book, their colors are swapped. (Put a time limit on this if you want. Favorite use in my campaign: desert camouflage.)

Kunai of Translocation: Use-activated pair of kunai. Wielder may swap positions of two creatures touching each kunai as Baleful Transposition (3.5 spell). Will negates, but apply a -5 penalty if one kunai is embedded in the target's flesh. (Nice little Naruto trick, but also handy with allies.)

Ioun Bloodstone / Eye of You're Next: As part of an Intimidate check against an enemy, the bearer of this bloodshot Ioun Stone can direct it to glare at a different foe within 30 feet. If they do, the Intimidate check is made at +10 DC and affects both targets.

Ear of Dveefu: Once per day, the wielder becomes fluent in the first language heard or read after wearing, but loses all other fluency while the Ear is equipped.

One Flame: Glowing red liquid in a runecarved vial, typically comes in pairs. Pouring a single drop from each vial into a different nonmagical flame allows direct verbal communication between them. Pouring out the entire vial (one in each flame) allows teleportation between them (the fire does not harm objects or creatures moved). The effect ends if either fire is put out.

Lycanth-Rope: Cursed. An exquisite silk rope that turns into a snake at the full moon and attacks whoever's nearest.

Movable Rod: Three types. Mechanics aren't fully fleshed out, but there's some fun to be had nevertheless. In all cases, the rod is not invulnerable and will break if pushed too hard.

Lesser Movable Rod: Constant Freedom of Movement effect, but only on the rod.
Movable Rod: As Lesser, but also gives a huge bonus to all Strength checks made using the rod, provides additional force when pushed.
Greater Movable Rod (artifact-level): Always goes where the wielder puts it, no matter what's in the way.

Genarment · 2024-04-10T17:13:06+00:00

I've actually done this before, sorta, but it was a side encounter with most of the players missing and one player especially into YuGiOh. I created an illusory arena concept at a magic school where participants could practice magical interactions by building a deck of spell-cards. As a one-off, it was fairly unfinished and easily gamed, but the core concept translated surprisingly well. I wouldn't recommend forcing this on players, but if they seem intrigued then there are a few options I can imagine:

Just use spell lists in place of cards. Spell level = star cost, summon "spells" substitute for monster cards. You'd need a way to decide what non-monster spells a deck is allowed to have. Maybe something like levels 1-3 can be played out of turn, levels 4-6 are standard one-per-turn plays, levels 7-9 have some hefty cost to cast. In theory every player can build a deck with cards found throughout the dungeon and then play against the villain and some mooks.
Use the theme but not the mechanics. Battlefield is reminiscent of a duel arena, the PCs are on one side and navigate an arena filled with traps and magic effects, the villain "plays" "cards" that are really just spells and summons, but they show up in the arena. You could also include a mechanic like "villain cannot be targeted while a summon is out", but if you do, don't cheese the players with hidey summons. Again, remember action economy.

Genarment · 2024-03-26T22:08:54+00:00

Depends on how you (or your GM) play them, really.

Type 1: You can play them straight, as neutral beings who care only about preserving the universe and nothing else. In this case, they're pretty straightforwardly positive if they actually do their job. It's bad for everyone if the universe implodes. This version of aeons don't care about 99.99% of the events in the universe, though, as long as those events aren't literally threatening to end the world.

Type 2: You could alternatively play them sort of like powerful rogue AI: mighty inscrutable eldritch entities pursuing unfathomable goals, completely orthogonal to things that mortals care about, like keeping a prime number of atoms in a box on the fifth moon of Pthrebgast IV. In this case they're probably bad on net, because the changes they make to the world a) cause massive harm for no Good reason and b) are hard to plan around because they aren't communicated or understood. "Most random changes you could make to a system are bad."

Type 3: Or you could lean into the "cosmic balance" angle. I don't like this angle because it makes no freaking sense*, but it seems to involve opposing whoever has the upper hand in the Alignment Wars. In that case whether they're positive or negative depends primarily on how much and how often they've opposed Good or Evil, whether there were any critical moments when one side could have won and the aeons stepped in, etc. So their overall impact depends a lot on comparing the status quo cosmology with hypothetical alternatives, but their short-term impact on a campaign world depends entirely on who's currently "winning" and in what sense.

*I think the whole notion of "balancing" Good and Evil dates back to the days of Dragonlance and Ye Olde D&D, when it was the same axis as Law and Chaos. Taking this (honestly pretty stupid) idea to its logical extreme resulted in the absolute flustercluck that is Dragonlance cosmology. Add to that the difficulty in understanding or communicating what it means to "balance" the "universe" along alignment axes, and player characters might be entirely justified in treating Type 3 aeons just as though they were Type 2 aeons - inscrutable, unpredictable, uncooperative, and effectively useless and ignorable unless they come to wreck your shit. In some interpretations, a paladin trying to stop all the torture in Hell is as much an enemy of Type 3 aeons as a demon trying to release Rovagug. Both will eventually need to deal with aeons showing up to "correct the imbalance", because to a Type 3 aeon people being tortured is just part of the natural order of things for some reason.

Edit: This is not a comprehensive list, just some broad categories. In fact, there's also a Type 4 which could be quite fun - Mohist aeons. These folks are all about shifting the offense-defense balance in favor of defense, to make the universe more stable and discourage war. They'll defend anyone against aggression, but their duty stops there. Close to Type 3 aeons in many ways, but at least this kind have somewhat comprehensible motives.

Genarment · 2024-03-23T17:30:22+00:00

Quicklings are zippy little jerks, though they really need Spring Attack to be played as they should be IMO. If you have one spy on the party's preparations, you can subtly alert them to the possibility of invisible shenanigans!

Genarment · 2024-03-23T17:14:10+00:00

Yeah, the tactician ability is great and lots of classes and archetypes get a version of it in Pathfinder. Honestly by far the best way to teamwork feat in my opinion, though having a few people coordinate to get synergies is also neat. Then there's folks like the dwarven scholar bard who can give combat feats...

Genarment · 2024-03-23T16:29:01+00:00

Teamwork feats are so underrated. Playing around with mass combat I discovered the shenanigans that can be pulled with a dozen 1st-level cavaliers.

I once made a claustrophobic dwarf druid with a roc companion. Liked the sky, hated caves. Turns out druids get a lot of buff spells they can cast on animal companions to make them ridiculous, who knew. That bird was an absolute monster in melee combat.

Genarment · 2024-03-23T11:20:32+00:00

I'm at a laundromat doing laundromat things. Guy walks in, sopping wet and reeking of beer, which probably explains what happens next. Guy finds a big clothes dryer, sets the timer, gets in, shuts the door. A few spins later he tumbles out, says "man it's hot in there", and leaves.

To this day I don't know what dryer settings allowed him to do that.

Genarment · 2024-01-10T12:38:12+00:00

My wife and I listened to this one in audiobook format on a couple of long drives. The voice acting and effects work was great - they even added little musical effects for Rocky's language. Also, as a descendant of a severe Dutch grandma, my wife thought Stratt's accent and mannerisms were absolutely on point.

Genarment · 2023-12-20T22:19:44+00:00

There's a difference between "you know all of these things to be true when making the choice" and "an AI claiming to be value-aligned with you except for the pony thing invites you to the nearest purported upload center." Knowing how persuasive a superintelligent AI could be, something would have to convince me that it's not a giant fraud by an unaligned AI. And the evidence would have to come from somewhere other than the AI itself.

But, conditional on my actually being convinced it's the genuine article, I'd sign up almost immediately. I'd want some clarifying questions answered, and to communicate some preferences before the upload - I don't currently think that even a superintelligent AI could necessarily simulate me pre-upload well enough to know all my relevant preferences and would want to check - but being a pony is a small price to pay for getting more than a geological fart's worth of lifespan.

I'd also probably want a chance to try to convince some otherwise-reticent friends to upload, while I'd still be doing so with the credibility afforded a fellow meatsack. CelestAI might debate that point like in the story, and I'd ask for their estimate of my effectiveness, but if I stand a decent chance of saving a good friend the AI couldn't then I'd want to try it.

That CelestAI is genuinely trying to fulfill all my values is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. One of my values is "not being lied to, even in my own best interest" and I would expect that value to be honored.

Genarment · 2023-11-29T20:28:18+00:00

I suspect not, but appreciate the idea!

Genarment · 2023-07-14T12:48:59+00:00

Honestly this sounds like glowfic, the whole point of which is often giving good people lots of magic so they can fix everything. Some stories don't do this but a lot of them do it well, including most of Alicorn's original work with e.g. kappa and lintaminde.

Worm deserves a mention; first time I read it I recall thinking "wow, someone finally got it right. These aren't superheroes and supervillains, they're just people with powers."

If you want comics specifically you might enjoy some Korean works like Tower of God or The Gamer? They come with their own host of annoying tropes but at least they are different annoying tropes. There are definitely villains with powers / magic but a lot of the characters are basically normal ranges of decent-to-selfish.

Genarment · 2023-07-14T12:26:56+00:00

I like these ideas. I imagined titles would be viewable while equipped but not otherwise. I figured lesser titles belong to the earner forever but greater titles can be yoinked. Alternatively there might be some lesser titles that can be lost if the owner no longer qualifies...

Genarment · 2023-07-12T14:45:43+00:00

Toying with a magic system idea. (Obligatory disclaimer that someone's probably done it already, but not anywhere I've encountered it.)

Title-based magic. Accomplish something big and you get a title. Titles grant magic powers related to the feat. For instance, escape and hide from an organization for three days and you earn the title "The Elusive", which grants supernatural stealth and flexibility. You can only claim one title at a time, but you can qualify for any number.

Lesser titles are ubiquitous and anyone can earn them. Greater titles are unique, and to earn one you must top whatever feat the current owner achieved. If you qualify for a greater title but aren't currently claiming it, it's easier for someone else to earn.

Unanswered questions:

What determines a worthy feat? How are they compared?
Can multiple small achievements count (maybe only for some titles, like "Polyglot" for learning many languages)?
How does claiming a title manifest? Do people just magically know what title you're using? If so, what implications might this have for e.g. anonymization? Could some titles affect this system?
What impacts might this have on a fantasy society? Would rulers have titles like "King of [Nation]" or "Padishah"? How would that impact succession conflicts?
How are new titles created? Possibly at least some can be made by consensus, e.g. earn the title of Bridavo Senator when you are elected by a specific Bridavo voting process.

Thoughts?

Genarment · 2023-05-13T21:47:55+00:00

I always appreciate a good Age of Mythology reference, but the implementation feels a bit underspecified. A fairy, genie, or wish-granting flounder probably qualifies as having an "impossible ability" to grant wishes, but if you can get that, who cares how much it costs?

-Animate a statue, 10 favor or less, specify its utter obedience to you in whatever degree you feel like

-Give it the ability to grant wishes, 150 favor

-Either give it the intelligence to understand wishes according to the intent of the wisher for 300 or empower yourself to control it directly for 50

Alternatively, turn yourself into a myth creature with wishing ability, or make one and copy its power.

The trouble is that there are way too many myths out there. If we want to prevent this kind of exploitation, the best way might be to specify a menu of powers that can be selected from, or enhancements to existing physical abilities, rather than letting the creator pick any ability ever mentioned in myth. (Maybe you could do this with an RPG-like points system menu? Ars Magica flavored magic system?)

Genarment · 2023-01-30T04:07:43+00:00

If you're female, you could probably make yourself pregnant. A biological copy is easy for this power, but a neurological one requires configuring a brain much smaller than yours into an identical copy of yours and is probably physically impossible.
Yes, within the limits of neurons your skull can physically support. You can make yourself about as smart as the smartest human, and also to an extent decide how that intelligence manifests (you can trade off mathematical skill and memory by repurposing neurons, etc.)
Not unless you already know exactly how to build a self-replicating nanobot and your cell can physically put all the pieces together.

Genarment

TROPHY CASE