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pfisch

838 karma · joined February 14, 2008

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pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
We are ALREADY doing it. It is already going poorly because we are doing it without any goals.

So we can just continue geoengineering with no aim, or we can act with purpose. There is no third option that is realistic.

pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
We are already geoengineering every single day. There is no version of this that has no risk.

We can continue to do it aimlessly, or we can act with purpose.

pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
They won't do that because it makes no sense. They will just complain about it and maybe refuse to trade or do some cyber attacks.

No one would take this as an act of war just like no one takes cyber attacks as an act of war.

pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
Switching away from fossil fuels is a gigantic ask compared to having some planes release a ton of reflective particles into the atmosphere. It isn't even expensive. 15-30 billion per year would be enough to cause 1 degree Celsius of cooling by having planes put SO2 into the atmosphere. Double that for 2 degrees.

That is way less than the EU has given to Ukraine.

pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
Of the major powers the eu is probably the most at risk. No one else is going to save them and they should be acting to save themselves right now.
pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
>Lets say the EU does geoengineering and then there are crop failures in India the next year.

Who cares? Tell them to go pound sand or stop burning so much coal.

Countries are already water seeding. This kind of worry that someone might complain about the eu trying to save itself is so low on the list of things that matter. Let them complain, and the eu can complain about all the other countries geoengineering by burning fossil fuels.

pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
>However, we need a global consensus for geoengineering.

Why? Does china or the us need a consensus before taking existential risks like making ai? Or detonating a nuke that had a tiny chance of setting the atmosphere on fire? Or attacking random countries with almost no rationale or plan?

This kind of thinking is why the EU is screwed. No other major power cares that much because they aren't at the same level of risk as the eu.

pfisch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
The eu is stupid for not engaging in active climate engineering right now. They are the most at risk and should take decisive action before they end up living in a glacier.

All the downvotes are just showing why no action is being taken even though right now we are literally terraforming the planet with no plan, and it is going to stop the transatlantic currents that keep Europe from becoming arctic.

But sure, just do nothing until Europe becomes an uninhabitable tundra and it is too late to take action. Great plan.

pfisch··on GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%
I don't think that kind of protectionism will work with a digital asset. It is much more difficult to erect barriers when there are no physical goods and transportation across geographic borders is instant and free.
pfisch··on No more than 100 000 faint satellites should orbit Earth
How can anyone see what is happening in Ukraine and not realize the future is not just 1 starlink, but also a Chinese one and a Europe at a minimum. Probably many other countries will make sure to have at least a regional one as well though.
pfisch··on Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040
Do you understand the scale of Chernobyl if they had failed to stop the meltdown? Half of eastern europe would be uninhabitable. It would've killed 100s of millions.
pfisch··on Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040
Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...
pfisch··on Identity verification on Claude
You're acting like you can't just switch which llm you are using in around an hour.

I mean...use opus/fable when you can, if down the road your access gets cut then just switch to kimi or whatever.

Yeah, this sucks, but you're being really dramatic and acting like you can't switch llms with basically no lock in. Getting something like your email cut off would be a real thing to be concerned about, but this isn't that.

pfisch··on American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.

Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.

All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.

Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.

We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.

pfisch··on War game exposed U.S. vulnerability to low-tech warfare
Projection always "works". If someone drives a car into a lake the car wasn't the problem.
pfisch··on War game exposed U.S. vulnerability to low-tech warfare
It is about force projection though. Ok, you have a bunch of drones in the US, now how do you use them to attack Iran or in the pacific theatre?

Yes, aircraft carriers aren't nearly as unstoppable as they were in WWII, but they are still the most versatile mobile platforms the world has for projecting force around the globe.

pfisch··on Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors
Literally all of those happened within the past 5 years. DLsite had been operating for a long time taking credit cards before that happened.

It is actually a relatively new thing, and it is from religious groups lobbying and gaining more political power.

pfisch··on Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors
I think the pressure is just coming from behind the scenes.

The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.

The religious right really has their claws into this administration, and the far right has a much larger say in things than it seems like they would based on their proportional representation in the population. Things like gerrymandering and closed primaries don't help.

pfisch··on A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
There is no duty to record everything everyone does. No one is legally compelled to record their actions except for a few rare situations...
pfisch··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
You can't buy an iphone with this functionality, and many people are locked into that walled garden for a lot of different reasons.
pfisch··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
No, it's just obvious that there is a massive race going with trillions of dollars on the line. No one is going to reveal the details of how they are making these AIs. Any public information that exists about them is way behind SOTA.

I strongly suspect that it is really hard to get these models to converge though so I have no idea what your team could've theoretically made, but it certainly would've been well behind SOTA.

My point is if they are changing core elements of the architecture you would have no idea because they wouldn't be telling anyone about it. So thinking you know how Opus 4.6 works just isn't realistic until development slows down and more information comes out about them.

pfisch··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
Deepseek and Mistral are both considerably behind Opus, and you could not make deepseek or mistral if I gave you a big gpu cluster. You have the weights but you have no idea how they work and you couldn't recreate them.

> I have worked in a startup wherein we heavily finetuned Deepseek, among other smaller models, running on our own hardware.

Are you serious with this? I could go make a lora in a few hours with a gui if I wanted to. That doesn't make me qualified to talk about top secret frontier ai model architecture.

Now you have moved on to the guy who painted his honda, swapped out some new rims, and put some lights under it. That person is not an automotive engineer.

pfisch··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
Yes. I also don't think it is realistic to pretend you understand how frontier LLMs operate because you understand the basic principles of how the simple LLMs worked that weren't very good.

Its even more ridiculous than me pretending I understand how a rocket ship works because I know there is fuel in a tank and it gets lit on fire somehow and aimed with some fins on the rocket...

pfisch··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
Even very young children with very simple thought processes, almost no language capability, little long term planning, and minimal ability to form long-term memory actively deceive people. They will attack other children who take their toys and try to avoid blame through deception. It happens constantly.

LLMs are certainly capable of this.

pfisch··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant.

I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

pfisch··on Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
The only thing seriously reducing trust in elections is anti-democratic politicians who will ALWAYS find a convenient reason to claim the election is rigged, and many of their followers will believe and propagate that lie to create distrust in the election.

There is really nothing we can do to satisfy these people except create some kind of structure they demand which will somehow be made to heavily lean in their favor. That is what will satisfy them. Nothing else will.

pfisch··on Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley
You're really comparing scaling up manufacturing of a 70 year old tank to building modern weaponry?

That is beyond ridiculous.

pfisch··on Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley
idk, If I was in control of a country in the EU I would realize, unfortunately for pretty much everyone on the planet, that we have made a drastic miscalculation by relying on the US so heavily for defense.

However, that is not something that can be reversed meaningfully in less than a decade. So for now, I would play the long game like Germany while working to get the EU to build up a military force large enough to significantly reduce our dependence on the US.

pfisch··on AI sycophancy panic
It is a real problem that AI's will basically confirm that most inquiries are true. Just by asking a leading question often results in the AI confirming it is true or stretching reality to accommodate the answer being true.

If I ask if a drug has a specific side effect and the answer is no it should say no. Not try to find a way to say yes that isn't really backed by evidence.

People don't realize that when they ask a leading question that is really specific in a way where no one has a real answer then the AI will try to find a way to agree, and this is going to destroy people's lives. Honestly it already has.

pfisch··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
You really can't though, not if the games have an online component or you want the game to be patched/updated as frequently as it would be on steam.

Almost all games these days are basically like a work in progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't stay up to date.

Pirating games is just really inconvenient compared to tv/movies/music.

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