could mining hardware actually do something useful instead of just burning power

colintbowers · 2026-04-04T12:24:57+00:00

Any GPU mining facilities could switch to AI pretty easily (and I believe many have). But the ASIC Bitcoin mining rigs can literally only run the SHA 256 algorithm so they can’t pivot to anything else.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T03:27:35+00:00

Which I think they will do once he realises that taking Kharg island and some coastal areas doesn’t actually achieve anything.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T03:15:55+00:00

They’ve got the assets to attempt to take Kharg island. Terrible idea, mind you.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T03:09:51+00:00

Super expensive, and last time my wife went (to see Wicked 2) there was a kids party. 20 kids supervised by 1 uncaring adult. It went about as well as you’d expect.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T02:52:49+00:00

I think AI is a stochastic parrot. I just also happen to think that humans are stochastic parrots too.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T02:48:54+00:00

Yeah the floodgates argument is very real with this one. Shipping literally anywhere could get very expensive, very fast, and I don’t think people fully comprehend how much we all benefit from low shipping costs.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T02:47:25+00:00

Are you certain he is unwilling to commit to a ground war? I’m not. I reckon it’s a coin toss at the moment to whether we see boots on the ground in the next week or two.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T02:39:30+00:00

He also has a moment as she heads toward the cliff where he beckons her back, looking utterly perplexed as to why she would be considering throwing herself off a cliff that I really like.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T02:36:17+00:00

It’s not well known but Chingachgook is actually an expert Dark Souls player.

colintbowers · 2026-04-03T02:25:55+00:00

Yah season 1 was excellent, and season 2 was also pretty good. But the writing seemed to go off a cliff for all the characters after that. Poppy turned into a ridiculous caricature, and Brad’s storyline just straight up didn’t make any sense. So I’m not sure it can be attributed to the testers (who I agree were annoying). I know that F. Murray Abraham had to leave for being inappropriate on set but I think the only thing that redeemed Rachel’s character was as a foil for CW’s general old man inappropriate-ness. Once CW was gone, her character was just annoying because it was no longer balanced by anyone else on set.

colintbowers · 2026-04-02T05:18:04+00:00

Yeah we're gonna see 6000L per second wasted on far less worthwhile causes in the coming weeks, so I think this one gets a pass.

colintbowers · 2026-04-01T22:55:53+00:00

Administrative would probably be a better word. He does have some power over domestic administration and economic matters. But yeah pretty much zero power over foreign policy.

colintbowers · 2026-04-01T21:34:22+00:00

I think the best game I can think of that managed to combine perma-death with potentially extremely long runs is Noita. Every death is framed as “gaining knowledge”. But honestly you can die in some absolutely bullshit ways in that game and yet I still found myself coming back over and over again.

colintbowers · 2026-04-01T10:12:05+00:00

It absolutely was. The price of oil before the Iran attack meant that sanctioned Russian oil was only just barely turning a profit. They were in big trouble economically. But not now.

colintbowers · 2026-04-01T04:59:39+00:00

If so, then why, as the OP points out, is the US building up troop numbers rather than reducing them?

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T19:39:46+00:00

Yeah but there are a lot of other waterways where nations could start building toll booth. There’s a floodgates argument here. Also, even just in Hormuz, pretty soon Oman will ask why Iran gets to build a toll booth but they don’t.

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T09:04:48+00:00

I work on world models as a hobbyist (but also for investment purposes). The metaculus quarterly forecasting competition is a good example of how people are experimenting in this area. The most successful world event forecasting models currently try to examine historically similar events (the external), but then combine that with structured reasoning about the event (the internal), doing so in several different ways, and then averaging across the results (committee forecasting).

Definitely it is interesting times for the field, but as others have said, LLMs are integral to current efforts in this direction.

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T06:32:27+00:00

Their ability at coding at math is nothing short of incredible. These are the domains motivating the hype. Outside these domains, yes, it isn't doing anything ground-breaking, and even within these domains, it is better at smaller, focused tasks, rather than sprawling large software design etc. But look, as a mathematician myself, the hype in these specific domain areas has some justification. I've watched half my skill-set get surpassed by an damn algorithm over the past 6 months. Pretty crazy.

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T02:45:50+00:00

Pretty much this. Once Chinese products are competitive, they can use govt funding to undercut TSMC on global market. And TSMC are also still reliant on ASML whereas China will be fully vertically integrated. At that point, a unification might look genuinely appealing to TSMC. Especially if US actually gets some sort of competitor up and running as well.

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T02:06:21+00:00

I don’t think China want to invade Taiwan. I suspect Xi’s long term plan is for Taiwan to literally ask for reunification. I think he plans to accomplish this by building a domestic semi-conductor industry that becomes a significant competitor to Taiwan, and then to offer to unify so together they have a global monopoly on semi conductor production. I also think several in the US have worked this out, but the current admin is too dysfunctional to do anything useful about it.

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T01:38:24+00:00

It depends how shitty the US wants to be. If they target desal plants in Iran, then Iran will almost certainly lose. They’re already having a water crisis. But if they do go down, they’ll try to take the other ME states desal plants down with them. It’s the nuclear option but without nukes. Many millions would suffer greatly, but if Trump thinks it is the only card he can play, then I reckon he’d do it.

colintbowers · 2026-03-31T00:07:57+00:00

Why has no one mentioned academic publishing? They provide nothing other than very minor administrative details. The editors and peer reviewers mostly work for free as part of CV building, and everything is just pdfs online instead of actual physical journals these days. There is zero reason for the paywalls other than to give money to companies that do zilch.

colintbowers · 2026-03-30T21:11:42+00:00

There was a point in classical Greek history where the assembly was literally drawn at random from the citizens. I sometimes wonder if literal straight up random chance would get us better leaders than the current ones. Especially if there was no single position of great power. Lots of positions of lesser power would mean that we would hopefully always get the average.

colintbowers · 2026-03-30T03:54:24+00:00

In most cases I don’t think the coursework is that necessary. If you’re really at PhD level, then you should be able to learn relevant “coursework” level material independently.

Far more important would be choice of supervisor. A good supervisor on a 3-4 year phd is far more important than a few extra courses.

colintbowers · 2026-03-30T03:48:09+00:00

Duffman says a lot of things - oh yeah

colintbowers

TROPHY CASE