somenameforme

It's literally in Truman's diary. [1] I mean I suppose he doesn't "literally" say 'I'm anxious to nuke the Japs', but he comes pretty close:

"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."

And on top of this, the Japanese had been negotiating their surrender with the ostensibly neutral USSR hoping to get more favorable conditions with their assistance. And the US had been secretly intercepting these cables and knew all about it. [2] And on top of this the US had also already created another secret agreement with the USSR such that they would declare war on Japan on August 8th, which would end any hope at all for Japan. We nuked them on August 6th, and then again on the 9th.

It was completely unnecessary.

[1] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28466-document-47-trumans...

[2] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28458-document-39b-magic-...

I don't think this is really all that ambiguous. The 'thing' being the intent of the original author. Renaming Tina to Terra makes perfect sense in the context you mentioned. Renaming 'Sacred Alcohol of Stamina' to 'Van Buren Coffee' is a complete butchery of a translation done for somebody to be able to show how witty they are by adding a reference that basically nobody will get, and is still a butchery even when you know the reference.

Truman's own diary would be a pretty good source: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28466-document-47-trumans...

The diary is full of revealing quotes like "Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."

For some timeline the US had secretly arranged for Russia to declare war on Japan on August 8th. We nuked them first on August 6th, and then again on the 9th. The goal was to get them to surrender to the US before the Soviets made significant inroads in Japan.

The USSR declared war on Japan on August 8th, as part of a secret agreement with the West. The US knowing this, first nuked Japan on the 6th and then again on the 9th. It's hard not to see 'us' as trying to force a surrender before the USSR could get significantly involved. Why? Because territories in WW2 were split up in significant part based on who conquered which part. Hence East Germany going to the USSR and West Germany going the the West. Thanks to the US getting a quick surrender from Japan, the USSR was able to be completely excluded from the following occupation of Japan.

If any documents were ever created about this debate, they've probably been destroyed, and those involved have taken it to the grave with themselves. So I suppose technically we can never know for sure. But I think the cynical view is far more well supported. Or at least I think the cynical aspects were the majority of the logic behind it. And it was not only about control of Japan but also about sending a message to the USSR as the US undoubtedly saw the outlines of a new West-East world order emerging after WW2. And all the way up until the 80s [1] our dominant political philosophy was that we could win by intimidation and demonstrations of force, nuclear in particular.

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Wow, loving LLMs when digging into topics now a days. GPT was able to direct me to Truman's diary entries which are public record. [2] I take back the weasel wording above. Truman himself was quite clear on his intention and desires:

"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."

- President Harry S. Truman, July 18th 1945

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet#Impact

[2] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28466-document-47-trumans...

I think you are rather dramatically underestimating what goes into the current systems of robotics. Curiosity and Perseverance are the result of decades of research by teams of hundreds of scientists with decades of work and research and budgets in the billions of dollars. 'We just need to make them orders of magnitude better' is nonsensical. You're looking at the best that we can do, and it's nowhere even remotely near to what's needed for robotics to be effective. And fragility is just one aspect - mobility, power, and many others also lag far behind what they'd need for robotics to be viably competitive with humans.

So now you're left with some argument that ends up like 'Okay - so we can't do it with robotics right now, but I want to do it with robotics, so we shouldn't do it until we can do it with robotics.' I mean the answer is quite obvious. Humans can do it, humans want to do it, and thus humans will do it. I don't entirely understand why you're so averse to this. To not be coy, one obvious explanation is a political thing about Musk. Outside of that being petty, it's also largely irrelevant - China's a major player in this game as well, and it's conceivable that they get there before we do. And I don't think this is just going to be a two pony race this time either, especially when the goal isn't just footprints and flags.

Wiki has a pretty interesting history on that [1]:

During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.

In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Names

I'd look to the past at similar 'revolutions' and what it did to existing players. For example 'computer' was the name of an occupation that existed for millennia. [1] Yet so complete was the obsolescence that I think most people (certainly including myself) never even realized these people existed, but it's quite obvious once you think about it.

Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.

But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.

I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

Yeah this is the thing I think most are missing about LLMs. They're just seeing the current valuation of things and picturing the future as being the same, but with different efficiencies. But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0.

But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.

The 4090? Yeah, but the price depends heavily on where you're at. I can buy them locally for around $2k. Even on eBay, I see them going for $3k right now. I don't understand why the market is so extremely inefficient on this, but I assume it has to be related to tariffs, taxes, or something along those lines. In any case even in the US it's clearly trending back towards MSRP and will continue to trend downward as new hardware comes out.

Even at $3k, this is something that was simply impossible without a super-computing cluster just a year or two ago. That's a multiple orders of magnitude drop in price.

-- This post ended up longer than expected. I'm not trying to respond to you with a wall of text, but I also don't want to be flippant with my responses. So I apologize for the length.

Let me start with the last thing you said. Is 'the idea is cool' a valid reason to go to Mars? First I think achieving great things is good for humanity - period, but there's even a purely pragmatic motivation as well. After we landed on the Moon the number of people wanting to (and who would) go into sciences, become astronauts, and other such things skyrocketed. The exact same thing is happening in China today where the majority of kids want to become astronauts or teachers. Whereas in America and the UK the plurality want to become streamers, with seemingly the majority having no direction for their life whatsoever. [1] Which next generation do you think will 'win' the 21st century? Even outside of competitive aspects, which generation is going to create a better country?

As for the radiation, you're again primarily referring to space radiation. Table 2 on the study shows their measured Martian surface level radiation level, which is less than the ISS. The space radiation is something that needs to be dealt with. Fortunately the current estimated trip length is 50% of their estimates - around 3 months, space weather events can be more effectively shielded against, and so forth.

And filtering out perchlorates isn't some advanced industrial process. It's literally just filtering water in a normal way. Plain old cartridges (specialized for perchlorates) like you might use in an at-home filter would work just fine. The reason I mentioned astronauts being enthusiastic about going to Mars because you have the most qualified people on Earth enthusiastic about it, some of the richest people on Earth enthusiastic about it, and billions of others. So it's obviously going to happen. There's no coercion or sacrificing people or whatever. It's a free world, and hopefully in the future we can make worlds plural.

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Robots are an interesting topic because people don't seem to understand how limited they are, though it's self evident if you think a bit more deeply about it. The most fundamental problem (among many) is that moving parts break. So for instance Curiosity's drill, as underpowered as it is (able to dig a narrow hole to about 6cm) broke after about a dozen light activations. It took a team of scientists almost 2 years to come up with a work-around that still left it crippled, but at least kind of workable.

And the drill is just one aspect. The more obvious one is moving. You have to be extremely cautious when doing such meaning major human oversight, and with an average round-trip latency to Mars of around 25 minutes, well - you don't move much. On average Curiosity travels about 1 mile per year. Try to imagine digging into the secrets of Earth by using a drill you can use a few times for holes up to 6cm deep, while traveling at mile per year. We're not even scratching the surface of Mars, quite literally.

And this is isn't just a technological problem that can be hand-waved away, because the reason things are in this state is because moving parts break. A human on site could have likely easily fixed the rover's drill in about 30 seconds, or just did a way better job of 'drilling' with a spoon. Humans will discover more about Mars in a week or two than the past 60 years of probes and rovers have, and likely even more than another century of such would achieve.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-i...

I don't know why people are ignoring the pink elephant here. For medium scale projects, like a Discord app is going to be, LLMs are now at a superhuman level of competence, including on higher level architectural/structural type decisions. I would be beyond surprised if the rewrite wasn't largely done by Claude (or similar). And in this context accessibility is also just a prompt away, if it wasn't included from the get-go, which it probably would have been.

A bunch of sites getting hacked isn't an existential threat. An existential threat would be something that could viably imperil the survival of civilization. The problem with existential threat concepts is that it generally requires fields where the limiting factor isn't knowledge. If somebody has the intelligence, resources, and desire to e.g. try to build a deadly biological virus, it's certainly not the lack of knowledge that's stopping them.

In general if we go back 50 years ago, when a single common phone today would have been seen as a super-computing device of unimaginable power, governments would likely have viewed it as a potential world-ending technology. It obviously wasn't and isn't. The conservatism would come solely from the fact of it being a revolutionary leap. That's all we're seeing happen with LLMs as well. In 30 years everybody will have vastly more competent AI systems running locally on whatever sort of digital devices we're using then, and they'll look back at with bemusement about us freaking out about people being able to query computers in natural language.

Except the plummet has already happened and continues to happen. As mentioned, you can run quantized frontier tier models on cards with a $1600 MSRP. So your comment would be like stating that this year is the year of Linux on desktop if Linux had already gone from 0.01% to 20% marketshare in a few years. At which point that would indeed be quite the reasonable prediction!

How do you expect journalists to be able to figure out the truth? And how do you not see them as a single point of failure? Let's take an example from the past. The Vietnam War was started because of a false flag. [1] This was a time when there was a much more adversarial relationship between the media and the government/intelligence agencies than there is today. But even in that context, they mostly unquestioningly reported the lie. Because how else could they have known?

In modern times I'll again take the glass half full side here. The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. And even in the anonymous internet age, there's still the issue of reputation. It's perhaps more important than ever now a days because you can look at some entity's predictions or statements from one time period, see how it played out over the next e.g. 6 months, and see whether they were onto something, or blowing smoke.

I think this is why it's so hard for the government to drum up support for war now a days. They have no ability to control the narrative and so framing invading some country half way around the world as being 'defensive' is a narrative that usually collapses in rapid order. Even during Vietnam it started becoming clear that the narrative around the Gulf of Tonkin was dodgy, but it's a process that took years. By Iraq we were down to lies starting to be exposed within months. Now a days it'd probably take about 24 hours, to the point that with Iran didn't even bother with trying to manufacture consent and we saw the result of that a few days ago.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

Another way of looking at it is that we've gained the biggest explosion in expert and first person coverage ever. In the golden era of news, newsrooms essentially had a monopoly on information. If you wanted to get information on e.g. the war in Korea or Vietnam you basically had to turn to the news, at least in the average case. Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on.

And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore.

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Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed:

"[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight."

[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

I find it quite ironic that this is the shortest article they've ever published, by a very wide margin.

Most of every humans knows that the issue for coal miners was not about better tools, but about their job being made obsolete, similar as what LLMs are already starting to do, and will likely do to a much greater degree in the future. Coal miners didn't become 'coal extraction machine operators' - they became unemployed.

Countless lives were completely destroyed in spite of 'government retraining' promises. Those who carried on managed to do through some menial labor and other jobs, many with even worse conditions and for worse pay. For instance trucking was a fairly common new profession - where you're away from family pretty much all the time, and getting paid even less. It's a horrible job, but it's the sort of work that was left for them.

> The stock-goes-down graph will show it happening after the midterms, of course.

This, to me, is the most interesting question in all of this. I increasingly feel like we live in a 'post-truth' world with regards to money and the stock market in particular. Like even during the COVID lockdowns the market blinked and then was at record highs within 6 months. It was just lol and completely out of touch with the reality on the ground.

The fed, and government alike, seem to have gradually shifted their mandates from trying to provide to a stable playground to trying to create a playground where important kids are never allowed to fall down. And when your existence is tied to trillions of dollars of the economy, you become the important kid.

Come to think of it this is also probably being exasperated by the rise of money management firms controlling tens of trillions of dollars. When the market valuation is technically just based on sentiment and you control that much money in a self-interested way, you're going to get weird outcomes.

And anyone with 3 can also see another trend. The hardware required for inference is rapidly falling. It's all following what happened with text-to-image image gen stuff almost to a t. It started out requiring super computing clusters, and now a days you can do high performance image gen on any plain old computer. I think within a few years we're going to be running frontier level models on a basic mid-range gaming hardware. You can already run quantized frontier level models on $1600 tier cards at high performance.

Seeing this bubble play out in real time is the most surreal thing. It's like watching a train wreck play out at a speed of a few inches per day. Like come on, just get off the track FFS.

Your link is about radiation in space around Mars, not on the surface. That's why they pointed a spectrometer at the sky, and the final section you quoted speculates about surface level radiation rather than providing it. Here [1] is a study on the surface level. It ended up a bit below the ISS. And radiation exposure is cumulative. You don't just reset after leaving the radiated area, so what matters is the total time in space, not the longest continuous stay. The longest continuous stay(s) were intended to deal with another issue, actually related to Mars. Obviously your muscles/bones/etc weaken greatly in 0g. And so the practical concern was would people be able to get to Mars and actually start working hard on the surface after a spending months in 0g space.

So that's where out friend Valeri Polyakov [2] comes in. His first words after landing following his initial 240 day stay in space were "We can fly to Mars." He then made an even stronger point of it by spending more than a year (continuously) in space, landing, and then immediately briefly walking after landing on Earth. As Mars is around 0.4g and the trip there wouldn't take anywhere near a year, it was a pretty clear demo that we can definitely get to and start working on Mars. Also, he spent another even longer stay in space later on. And would go on to die aged 80.

As for your concern about astronauts being bored. Well, let's just say I think they'll find a few ways to keep themselves busy - turns out there's quite a lot to do when starting a civilization. And disposable stuff is a bit off the mark. Nobody's sending anybody to do anything - everything is about personal choice. Would you rather have a life expectancy of let's say 10% less than average but filled with a life lived to the absolute extreme, or a life expectancy of let's say 10% longer than average, but where somebody lives in a bubble and avoids doing basically anything just to try to eek out a few more years? I think almost everybody would pick the former option. A good chunk of astronauts come from backgrounds like military test pilot, which means you certainly already know their answer.

[1] - https://www.scienceintheclassroom.org/research-papers/curios...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov

I'm only engaged with what you're arguing. The problem is that it keeps overtly changing from post to post, often in mutually exclusive ways. And now you're leaning heavily into completely absurd euphemisms. Nobody's getting a career upgrade from this, let alone because of government programs. That's akin to telling coal miners go to learn to code. And again I refuse to believe any human would believe this.

I just don't think you're engaging in good faith. You're now calling people getting forced out of their jobs and onto various government assistance programs a 'career upgrade' that's nothing to worry about. That's so absurdly out of touch that I refuse to believe anybody genuinely believes this.

I'm not trying to play gotchas. I'm trying to figure out what in the world your logic is and you seem to keep shifting it every single post. So now you're back to claiming it's nothing but defacto hysteria while in the post prior you were acknowledging that there would be widespread rough and difficult times, significant disruption to employment, and more.

Assuming you're human, this makes me think that you don't actually have any logic for your position and are instead ad hoc formulating an argument after picking a desired conclusion, rather than logically working your way to a conclusion.

Motivation doesn't decide anything. Actions decide the long term outcome of actions.

And the things you're mentioning are non sequiturs similar to the initial point. China (and the US and most of every major power) is a surveillance state. That has nothing to do with whether or not they are uplifting the lives of people. Uplifting while protecting the privacy of individuals would be ideal, but that's an ideal that unfortunately does not exist anywhere.

You're all over the place. So right now you're agreeing that there will be a catastrophe which will be 'rough, difficult, and panic inducing.' And this is what people want to avoid, especially when the short-term to mid-term solution comes down to a mixture of relying on big tech and big government. I refuse to believe that you can't understand why people would do anything to avoid this. The companies deploying these buildings certainly do. There's a reason that a substantial chunk of the jobs created by datacenters involve guns!

One reason I think Machiavellianism is dumb is because the grand utopia people hope to achieve never come to pass, yet all the awful actions they do in the mean time most certainly do. And I also view this in the opposite way. I do not agree with you about Chinese leadership having ulterior motivations, but I'd say that even if they did it wouldn't be a problem.

When they're engaged in actions that are uplifting the lives of hundreds of millions and making the world an overall better place, I couldn't really care less if there's some grand evil scheme behind the curtain. I'd be rather happy to see a world filled with 'evil' people doing good things, than the current reality we live in filled with 'good' people doing evil things.

We should judge people much more by what they do, instead of by the rhetoric or inferred intent, because the former is all that matters.

You're speaking of two different things. China is a technocracy, but they also try to optimize for social outcomes. For instance there was recently an amusing crackdown on niang pao [1] - 'girly guns' or 'sissy men' in media, because they felt that media featuring effeminate men was imperiling traditional Chinese culture, gender norms, and so forth. In this sort of context extensive censorship is 100% expected.

Technocracy comes with good and bad things. For instance Chinese stop lights now feature refueling stations atop them for autonomous drones to operate indefinitely. But of course those drones will be used for domestic surveillance and other such things. So they're creating 1984, while we create Brazil. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niang_pao

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

I can generally see any genuine viewpoint relatively easily, but I'm having a lot of differently understanding what could possibly lead you to view things like this. Do you genuinely not see that LLMs are very likely to cause significant damage to all forms of cognitive employment?

This outcome is exactly what's driving the multi-trillion dollar valuations. The idea is that companies will be able to eliminate much of their labor and replace it with LLMs, LLM companies will rug-pull and investors get rich(er). A nice way of phrasing this is 'increasing the productivity' of companies' remaining labor forces, but it's the same outcome regardless of framing.

My optimism comes from what happens after this, but there's a high probability of rough waters on the horizon for a very large chunk of the labor force, before we enter into a new equilibrium. Trying to imagine things are just going to stay roughly the same is, in my opinion, just not a realistic view at all, almost regardless of the assumptions you make.

And given how non-independent society is now a days, shaking things up like this will likely have an unprecedented impact, even if the shaking was probably more severe from previous revolutionary leaps.

There's a whole bunch of history books around WW2, the Enigma Machine, and surrounding historical and technical details. I can't recommend any specific one, but this might be more interesting read, with more context, than a text on crypto. It's also quite neat because it's kind of like a basic cipher taken to the extreme, setting the stage for what a revolutionary (and counter-intuitive) discovery public key encryption was.

Your numbers are quite off. The ambient radiation level on Mars is less than what astronauts on the ISS experience. And that's direct exposure. We've had numerous astronauts spend years in space in total. That'd be the equivalent of sunbathing on Mars, which is obviously not exactly the plan there. And so far whatever effect the increased radiation has had is small enough that it's not statistically detectable.

Some misleading articles (or one heinous book) try to count in-transit space weather events as part of the average to bring the numbers to the point of absurdity, but that's plainly lying. Space weather events (like solar flares) are immediately lethal if not shielded against. Fortunately they're easy to shield against since they're predictable and all settlement ships will happen to have one of the best possible radiation shields in large quantities on board - water. Similarly for perchlorates. These can be filtered out with basic water purification tech and trace amounts are even present in much of what we consume on Earth, especially in certain areas.

I'm not accusing you of being a hater, which is quite pointless. But I would say you've probably been misinformed. And I suspect precisely by one book written by a comic book artist. Somebody should probably just make a site 'clarifying' it page by page because it's chock full of misinformation and certainly a contender for the single worst pop-sci book published in modern times. It's the analog of people thinking the Moon landing was a hoax because they read some misleading article about the Van Allen Belts, all of which tend to like suggesting you'd need a radiation shield which would probably have gotten the astronauts killed due to bremsstrahlung, but I digress.