no problem.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Muskrat is openly on russia's side and using spacex to act against Ukraine! He bent the knee back in 2023, I think it was, by ordering Starlink blackouts strategically crafted to prevent Ukraine's communications in their defense from russia. And it's not even a general lack of service or anything he could blame on profitability or whatnot. He targets specific Ukrainian military operations and cuts the communications support for those. The only thing that's "black" about this "market" is the ink on the check that putin wrote.

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

That's what I just said.

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

I dunno about the other guy, but I am currently sitting in a red state hotel, and will be subjected to quite a lot of it tomorrow and Friday when I'm at my aunt & uncle's place for thanksgiving; and it will probably be on every television in every airport on Saturday until I get back to SFO. I don't know how often you have to venture out into the lion's den. But people here treat that shit like it's a 24/7 prayer service or something. It was also on just about every airport TV on the way here once I hit Atlanta. And it was on three different televisions on the hotel's lobby level when I checked in. You can't get away from it here unless you hide in your room by yourself.

I'm actually kind of surprised that they still exist in the first place. What do they even still make or sell anymore besides shitty DRM'd printer ink and the occasional toner cartridge for a 1990s-era Laserjet that just won't die?

There's not even a point to that anymore. Tapping those cables worked back in the day because everyone thought they were so untouchable that they didn't bother to encrypt the message traffic. Now? Ever since the US Navy demonstrated to the world that the cables CAN be reached and they CAN be tapped; you can take it to the bank that everything, particularly the military and government traffic that would merit tapping them in the first place, is encrypted to a fare-thee-well.

So unless the NSA has a quantum computer at Fort Meade no one knows about that can break all conventional encryption; there's not much point to the taps anymore.

You could use CAPTOR mines, placed along the cable's shallows and reprogrammed to fire if the adjacent cable section is cut. That little ASW torpedo isn't likely to *sink* a full-sized surface combatant. But it should be enough to muck up the prop and rudder such that the cable-cutting vessel will wallow around in one place long enough to round up a Super Hornet or Eurofighter to put a few Harpoons into the stack of crap.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

Contrary to the scaremongering we hear, the world is not full of terrorists. They exist, don't get me wrong, but the reason we're so afraid of them is that our fear of them is incredibly useful for people who want to control us.

And also, the ones who do exist aren't engineers. So a shooting, or a stabbing, that's pretty easy to figure out how to do. Derailing a train? That's physics. Physics is much harder than pointing a gun and pulling the trigger.

Unfortunately Acela sucks. I took Acela from New York to Boston once. Once. It was terrifying—the tracks aren't really suited for running at (haha!) 100mph. The idea that this is high-speed rail and that anybody takes that name seriously just illustrates what a backwater the U.S. is nowadays.

There is already a rail corridor through western Indiana into the Chicago metropolitan area. And there are already passenger trains running on it. The problem isn't getting a train into the city center—it's that we don't have electrified high-speed rail lines between the cities. Which, given that we do have low-speed (only 75mph max) highways, which are insanely expensive to build and maintain, seems like an eminently solvable problem.

The real problem is that there are huge fortunes dependent on keeping those roads full of cars. But really that's not even the problem. You can see the problem right here in this discussion: if you haven't lived in a place where high speed rail is ubiquitous, it seems really really hard. If you haven't lived in a place where cars are not completely and utterly dominant, it seems inconceivable that things could be any different. Even people who are anti-car tend to think with car brain because of this.