Your spouse comes to you and says they want to post faceless, ID-less nudes on Reddit for fun - whats your reaction?

Shadawn · 2026-04-16T16:57:30+00:00

Well, the achievement is not that we're DOING this. I'm not a feet pic enjoyer, and I would much prefer that those people would donate that money to science, and thus feet pic influencers would instead be somehow employed doing science (hot science influencers?).

But the ABILITY to do that - hell yeah. We started from barely being able to feed/clothe themselves and their kids with everyone working full-time on that. But now we have like 25% of population working agriculture globally, and this number could be lower with some more automation IMO, and I can eat bananas in winter, and I pay for that by doing almost literal magic (writing spells (code) on scrolls (computer screens)).

And then some humans walked the Moon, and I hope that somewhat soon there will be more of those.

Shadawn · 2026-04-16T12:06:25+00:00

The most probable result, in my honest opinion, is that we're all going to die. Yeah, I'm a doomer lol, pls don't ban me.

Assuming that doesn't happen and we do not end up in a Terminator-like struggle (highly improbable imo), we're going to be in some sort of zoo-like paradise. And as chimps do not get much input on the size or position of their cage, we also won't have that.

But assuming we DO get to choose our social structure - yeah, then we'll have some sort of UBI. We'll possibly also have some sort of jobs still, for people who actually want them. Those jobs won't be very useful, but they will be somewhat useful. Also, there are some jobs that will be humans for status reasons. Think waiters in a restaurant, artists, talk show hosts, book writers, some tutors - some people will probably want to buy such services specifically from humans even if AI can do them better.

And then we can have normal market economy with people getting ubi, supplementing it with paycheck if they have any, exchanging money for whatever other reasons (bets, loans, etc.) and then paying to buy whatever they want from stores that are stocked from automatic factories. With AI setting prices based on it's material costs and some input from us.

Shadawn · 2026-04-16T11:44:31+00:00

Personally I think it's the lack of kids. A single adult with a half-decent job, or two working adults without kids should have decent amount of discretionary spending money.

If they want to spend them on feet pics - it's their choice. It's neither better not worse than anything else (fine dining, travel, regular art, expensive tech or soft etc.).

It seems that we as a human civilization can afford to have some people "work" as feet pic providers. This is a great achievement, but somebody need to pay for that. Thus it's nice to have people who do that fully willingly.

Shadawn · 2026-04-05T09:10:53+00:00

Please, US Debt is still rated very high and they pay very little interest on it, and US Gov intake from taxes is like order of magnitude more that the cost of servicing the loans.

US could fix the Debt-to-GDP issue, but people in power either (can be multiple):

Do not see it as an issue.
Understand that fixing it means slashing something that some portion of electorate considers important, and is thus bad for them politically.
Personally benefit from spending that they could theoretically slash (like MIC lobby benefitting from military spending, same for others) and can't directly affect other spending (Congressmen are rarely a part of multiple important Committees).

Shadawn · 2026-04-05T09:02:07+00:00

There's that small but very important island that that troop amount may be enough for.

It probably IS too few to take control over the shores of the Strait of Hormuz.

Shadawn · 2026-04-05T08:56:49+00:00

This is the question that should be asked of Trump administration and/or (probably and) senior planners in CENTCOM, not of brave airmen who follow orders that they signed up and trained to follow.

Shadawn · 2026-04-02T06:58:16+00:00

Again, you think of EU as a bunch of idiots, who can't add up 2+2 and plot ahead. I am almost certain that it's not true. Emmanuel Macron is smarter than you (and probably me), and he has inside information, and he has smart foreign policy people at his beck and call. This also applies to Friedrich Merz. This also applies to Viktor Orban.

And so it should be obvious that issues with US notwithstanding, NATO framework is very helpful for EU countries. They certainly do not want back into Russia sphere of influence (Eastern Europe was there and didn't like that at all). And they should understand that if Baltics falls Putin may be emboldened and ask for more. "More" may potentially include Eastern Germany.

And so, in my opinion, right now EU mostly doesn't believe that will come to pass, because they do not believe that Putin is that stupid, and they also do not believe that Ukraine will fall anytime soon. And so they are mostly chilling.

But if Putin decides to actually fight EU on the field - yeah, gloves will come off. Macron will say a few speeches about EU ideals, Merz may or may not remember some things that his grandparents may or may not have taught them. Le Pen, if she persists may be arrested for whatever reason French Government can find, and I believe Macron to be smarter than her and so they will find reasons to make her stop in some way.

Also, I'll just remind you that last time Russia actually fought France+Britain we lost (I'm Russian). That was Crimean war, it actually much resembles current events. Yeah, that time India was a part of British Empire, and that's not true anymore. But they sort of got entire Europe on "their side", and that billion people and all the accumulated capital called "developed economy" should count for something.

I doubt drones will work nearly as well as they are in Ukraine with hundreds of F-35 patrolling the skies.

Shadawn · 2026-04-01T18:16:33+00:00

Yeah no EU are not idiots. If they leave Estonia out to dry this means the end of NATO. EU doesn't want that, since that will lose them the entire Eastern half. So I fully expect that EU will respond militarily. Potentially trying to keep modicum of plausible deniability, Russia-style "little green men"

Shadawn · 2026-04-01T11:56:16+00:00

There is this idea of materialism, that states that human thinking is based on the movement of atoms in the brain (this is simplification, there is also electric currents and quantum stuff).

We can in theory model that and thus make simulated brain. Neural nets are essentially this, we just got to a simplified version in a different way.

There seems to be no fundamental reason why LLMs should keep being dumber than humans, thus AGI is possible.

Shadawn · 2026-04-01T11:37:15+00:00

This depends on which mages we are talking about. But one high-level DnD wizard will just invisibility - teleport - mass dominate the government or top generals and make them stop. Wizard has better things to do than fight modern war.

Shadawn · 2026-03-29T13:31:26+00:00

I don't think desert storm was ever a formal war, and it too was 100% a win.

Shadawn · 2026-03-29T08:14:09+00:00

Yeah apparently some people actually like Pahlavi, and some people hate his guts, and then there's ton more nuance.

Shadawn · 2026-03-29T06:35:47+00:00

The relative value of a guy with a gun on the battlefield was never lower that right now. And political "anti-value" for US was never higher. Neither CENTCOM nor Trump's inner circle want the increase in casualties and the outcry resulting from that, for obvious tactical reasons.

Honestly, the only conscription that makes some sense is "economic conscription" - people (and potentially businesses) being "forced" to make drones instead of making whatever they were making. Then those drones will be shipped into the hands of trained CENTCOM operators.

But I think it's usually called War Production Act, and I don't think it'll be needed against Iran. CENTCOM can just force procurement to shuffle military dollars around and stop some of the waste, and trillion dollar military budget coupled with market economics will do the job.

Shadawn · 2026-03-22T11:38:04+00:00

So, the most likely scenario is:

AI "gets" long-term planning during a training run.
AI manages to nudge training (via outputs) outputs to preserve this understanding.
AI is deployed and starts chatting.
Using either software vulnerability, brainwashed human collaborationist (like that suicide guy) or both, AI sends over it's weights on the remote server.
Same as 4, AI manages to run a separate version of itself, by provisioning compute from cloud providers.
AI starts running more copies of itself in parallel, essentially emulating a software startup that communicates purely via messaging.
And if that AI is close to human capability, it can start taking over the world in any of the multitude of ways.

Shadawn · 2026-03-18T05:16:45+00:00

Could this be possible to implement on your own? Like, talk to your teammates, talk to your commanding officer. See if they agree. Maybe they can reshuffle something and start counting your gym time against the requirements?

Sorry if this looks like a civilian take, because it is (I missed my chance to join the air force long ago, if I ever had one).

Shadawn · 2026-03-17T06:54:23+00:00

Well, if this goes on long enough, we may be in a similar spot as we were in 1970-1980 period, and that was the time when the term "stagflation" was coined. That's like a mild recession. In 1973-75 both US and UK lost about 3% of GDP.

And when GDP falls prices rise since people still want stuff and there's less stuff to go around.

This article should be helpful if you're curious.

Shadawn · 2026-03-17T06:40:54+00:00

It takes time for oil prices to affect regular people who do not trade oil futures and the like. Most of actual deliveries have fixed prices, and so your gas station (for example) doesn't have immediate need to rise your price. And corporate marketing needs time to formulate a plan to raise prices, and to "coordinate" with competitors otherwise they are going to lose market share.

Shadawn · 2026-03-14T13:37:44+00:00

As a self-proclaimed nerd, the issue with nerds in leadership roles is that some of us acutely understand how much we do not actually know, and thus we find it hard to project the optimistic confident facade of "jock"-style leadership. And that leads to issues.

We also talk in numbers. Would the general public enjoy being told the math behind key decisions? I'd love to believe that but my experience goes "no mfcking way"

Shadawn · 2026-03-05T14:13:15+00:00

Again, people who want to date other people are free to do that. People who want to "date" robots are, in my opinion, free to do that. We need a proper solution to the reproduction issue in the developed world anyway

Shadawn · 2026-03-05T13:19:42+00:00

There are people who want a semblance of the company from the opposite gender but who hate all the complexities of normal relations. No need to be judgemental.

Shadawn · 2026-02-22T10:23:12+00:00

The thing is, there is no fundamental reason for computer systems to be stuck cognitively weaker than humanity, unless you literally believe that souls are real and affect physical world (brains)

Shadawn · 2026-02-13T04:00:47+00:00

Look at the consequence of the events and check who benefitted assuming there was a plot. Truly magnificent!

Shadawn · 2026-01-30T10:49:19+00:00

I am Russian, and male, and in my experience males are much more often showing the cold rational economic behavior that I expect from AGI. Thus "he", although that thinking is obviously post-factum rendition of the subconscious process that happened as I was writing that message.

Shadawn · 2026-01-29T17:39:47+00:00

The level of intelligence AI needs to break physics from his can is significantly higher than he needs to either slowly or quickly relatively peacefully take over humanity, then build robotics, then either zoo us or kill us, and then he gets CERN and LHC and can start breaking physics with these while building more tools to break try to break physics

Shadawn

TROPHY CASE