Isegoria: “The Japanese should have looked East” was a reference to Ghost Fleet, TRX: The U.S.-Japanese combined air-defense network was designed for a threat from China, to the west. They get attacked from the other direction.
Jim: T. Beholder, your foundational premise that “modern Homo [s]apiens [s]apiens is little different from Cro[-M]agnon man” is farcical on its face. There are enormous differences in physiology, psychology, sociality, and capability between H. sapiens sapiens subspecies today. The descendants of Aztecs reliably fail to manipulate electricity when proven blueprints for working systems along with every foundational component are made available to them, let alone the descendants of Bantu, who...
TRX: “The Japanese should have looked east.” They did. Korea had been fully incorporated into Japan as a colony back in 1910. They bit off a chunk of China in 1931, and went back for the rest of it in 1937. At the time they attacked Pearl Harbor, they were still expecting to wrap that up Real Soon Now. Also note they had invaded French Indochina, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singabore, and other chunks of Dutch, French, and British territory. There was no effective resistance to any of that. By the time they...
Bob Sykes: That’s 1.8 g hydrogen per gram catalyst per hour. The economics of this process are silly.
McChuck: How long before Congress mandates corn methanol production?
T. Beholder: Jim says: No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about? Well, what was so special about Homo Sapiens Foo that they should become The Next Big Thing on the planet? At first, they are just another bunch of naked primates, with inherent disadvantages of big brain (needs more food, and not only glucose) in big head (leads to more fatalities by birth). So there seem to be 3 big thresholds to clear: 1. Manifest enough of advantages over the next bunch of monkeys to consistently...
T. Beholder: And back to UAV… The other side of screwdriver shacks is easy technical deniability, that falls short of plausible if anyone not happy with it is paying attention. See “The myth of ‘Ukrainian’ drones: What’s really behind the production chain” on RT https://www.rt.com/news/ 638518-myth-of-ukrainian -drones/ (via Simplicius https://simplicius76.sub stack.com/p/serious-esca lation-russian-mod-impli es )
Jim: T. Beholder: “Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect.” No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about?
T. Beholder: Wanweilin says: …and yet we remain human after millions of years. Biological advantage of sentience can be expressed simply as “upgrade from adaptation only via slow hardware evolution to much faster software evolution”. Evolution of memeplexes via mutation and branching off (ethnogenesis) is a replacement for evolution of subspecies via mutation and branching off. Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect. Which is why humans remain mostly good...
Jim: That is a technical way of saying it works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts. That is a specific expression of a general phenomenon.
T. Beholder: Jim says: LLMs now provide (a) and (c) It also provides (b) to some of the Pointy Haired Bosses, if as a mixed blessing. In that the big downside is having much fewer subordinates involved in BS production, but the upside is perfect excuse for a purge and then having much fewer potential backstabbers.
Isegoria: Well, we certainly haven’t ascended to become beings of pure energy.
Wanweilin: …and yet we remain human after millions of years.
Jim: For the avoidance of doubt, that is a jab at “people” vibing the progress of their codebases by lines accreted.
Jim: T. Beholder: “For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants.” The objective functions of that code were and are: (a) something that looks like it works...
VXXC: Strangely enough, when one returns to our common roots of armed raiding combined with presently energy production dominance, and we covered the insurance angle via DFC Chubb, how odd the success when one has a country not a global market… and doesn’t want the blasted ground. I refer to the present matter of the Pirates of Persia and their Boomer resistance allies.
T. Beholder: He is almost certainly wrong on LLM keeping the verbal lawns shapely. For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants. So instead it’s one more way so-called...
I haven’t read Doonesbury in years, but this Intelligent Tuberculosis bit deserves some eyeballs.