Posts by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
(DIR) Post #B8vUam80iI6jzbSWEC by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Isn’t that exactly what we’re seeing? The US has been abrogating international agreements, separating itself from its allies, shedding bureaucrats, voiding laws, shuttering institutions, and losing key capabilities.The result is a US that is getting simpler, with less capability to collect rents overall, and more reliant on direct brute force, but at a lower overall cost to sustain previous complexity.So there are fewer overall resources available to the US and US elites, but the resources that are still available are more directly under the control at the elites at the center of this project, the Trump crime family and its various courtiers.
(DIR) Post #B8vUaudr3mKkOgQ3yS by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Trump has explicitly talked about doing to Iran what the US did to Venezuela: attack, subordinate, and steal. This is very much in keeping with a style of predatory warfare that was popular for millennia and probably perfected by the British:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_Expedition_of_1897But that was long before these states had developed the institutions and regulations that allowed them to transfer wealth from the global poor through non-violent, or at least indirectly coercive, means.Of course, Trump’s attack on Iran has failed spectacularly, in large part because he has eschewed the complex systems and institutions that would have advised him not to attack Iran. He, and the US, are vastly less capable as a consequence, but he and his cronies are much richer, having stolen (among many other things) billions of dollars from the Venezuelan state.
(DIR) Post #B8vUb1BOjyjKgS9w5g by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Joseph Tainter proposed that societal collapse was an economizing effort. That is, when the benefits of complexity are outweighed by their cost, a society will shed complexity to converse resources: interconnections are severed, specializations are abandoned, and elites are overthrown.Here, we see an utterly unsustainable cost—the immense burden placed late capitalist elites on society—and a last-ditch effort by some of those elites to economize in a manner that frees up more of society’s remaining and dwindling resources for their own exclusive use, rather than being directed to support societal complexity. If I’m correct, we should expect to see more of this style of naked, rapacious, archaic-feeling aggression by states (such as what we’ve seen with Trump and Venezuela and Iran or Russia in Ukraine) as they encounter similar limits.
(DIR) Post #B98jmrflCumOzJilGq by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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In 216 BC, during the Second Punic War, the Roman Republic fought the Battle of Cannae against the forces of the Carthaginian general Hannibal. It was an utter and total defeat for Rome; its army of more than 86,000 soldiers was slaughtered, captured, or dispersed. The number of people killed in a single day at Cannae remains among the highest in the history of warfare, even two thousand years later. Cannae was just the latest of a string of defeats that had cost the Roman Republic something like a fifth of all its military-age males. And, in short order, Rome, then centered on the Italian Peninsula, raised yet another army and fought on. By 201 BC, Rome was triumphant over Carthage, stripping it of its empire. Half a century later, Rome would fight the Third Punic War, this time annihilating Carthage entirely.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae1/
(DIR) Post #B98jms5Hg1CEGTf93Q by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Centuries later, in 451 AD, Rome fought the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains against the Huns, led by Atilla. By this time, Rome was no longer a republic limited to Italy; instead, it was an empire that ruled the entire Mediterranean basin and most of Europe. It was incomprehensibly larger and more populous than it had been in 216 BC, with far more resources on which it could (theoretically, at least) draw.The army that Rome fielded against Atilla was *smaller* than the army that fought Hannibal, perhaps no more than 50,000 men. Of this, a significant number were not actually Romans, but rather Visigothic allies. One historian estimates that even a tiny standing army of about 30,000 soldiers would have cost the empire about 2/3 of the entire income from its western half. Most historians agree that Rome won at the Catalaunian Plains, but it was the last major military operation that the western empire undertook.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Catalaunian_Plains2/
(DIR) Post #B98jmsSKILczPwRXyC by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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In other words, Rome was vastly larger, more populous, and theoretically much richer than it had been centuries earlier, and could mobilize only a fraction of its previous manpower, at much greater cost, for a much more tenuous victory, after which the empire eventually fell entirely.I bring that up in the context of two recent reports. The first is by a think tank in Washington, DC, that estimates the US has expended most of its shore-based missiles capable of intercepting Iranian ballistic missiles:https://www.csis.org/analysis/renewed-iran-war-would-test-diminished-interceptor-inventoriesThe second is a news story, apparently leaked by someone in the US government, that the US has expended most of its long-range precision missiles against Iran:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-stockpile-long-range-missiles-nearly-depleted-iran-war/3/
(DIR) Post #B98jmsklBoNCL74Ghc by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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These are exquisitely complex weapons that are immensely expensive and require years to manufacture. The US cannot replenish its stockpiles of these weapons on anything remotely resembling the timeline on which the US has been waging its absurd war on Iran. The shortage of these munitions seems to have been driving Trump’s latest decision to stop attacking.The US still has vast stockpiles of less sophisticated weapons which it could use against Iran, but their use would require steps the US is extremely reluctant to take: moving troops nearer to or into Iran, or moving naval ships closer to Iranian shores, or flying more manned aircraft over Iran. The US ability to strike Iran from a distance that minimizes risk to US personnel is shrinking to zero. The US ability to intercept Iranian strikes is similarly shrinking.4/
(DIR) Post #B98jmt00H8ZB6OCRSi by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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How, we might wonder, did this happen? The US spends close to a *trillion dollars* each year. Donald Trump’s unique incompetence explains a bit, but cannot account for an imperial power that routinely spends a trillion dollars a year on its military faring so poorly against a much smaller, poorer, and weaker adversary in a war of choice.The US military once strode the earth like a colossus. How did it end up here?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States5/
(DIR) Post #B98jmtIn9Hay2ezRkO by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Joseph Tainter might suggest that the same thing happened to the US that happened to Rome: over-complexitication, leading to diminishing marginal returns on investment in complexity. As Rome’s empire grew, so too did its army. So too did the number of bureaucrats to manage that army, and the amount collected in taxes to feed it, and the number of forts to base it in, and so on.All that additional complexity—interconnections, specializations, and, above all, layers of hierarchy—consumed resources. When the empire was growing, that additional complexity bought returns in the form of loot. But eventually the empire grew so large, its interconnections so long and tenuous, that conquests slowed and the empire was forced to extract its operating revenue from an increasingly squeezed peasantry. Eventually, the costs of maintaining all that complexity became too much to justify it and, after centuries of decline, the empire collapsed.6/
(DIR) Post #B98jmtbE2kLAxpcATo by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Blair Fix invites us instead to look at this problem through the lens of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of industry (productive activity to meet material needs) vs business (interference with industry to generate profits).If we compare how much money the US spends on its military against the amount of energy the US military consumes in order to do all the things it does—a proxy for its “industry” output—we find that these have been diverging for decades. That is, ever more money spent on the military isn’t generating ever more *stuff* in the form of goods and activities. Instead, all that money is being consumed as rents: by a massive bureaucracy, by military contractors and suppliers (or rather, the shareholders and executives at those firms), by politicians lobbied by those firms, and so on.https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2026/05/22/the-business-of-war-and-the-mismeasurement-of-military-might/7/
(DIR) Post #B98jmtsF1Tx3obZl0C by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Aren’t these two thinkers describing the same problem in different terms, though? Tainter’s theory of collapse, Veblen’s theory of capitalists sabotaging production to enrich themselves. Maybe throw in Peter Turchin’s theory of collapse through elite overproduction, or perhaps even Marx’s anticipated collapse of capitalist through a falling rate of profit. Each of these ideas is, to crudely summarize, saying the same thing: society can only support rentier elites for so long before the cost becomes untenable. As it does so, those elites will try to grab more of what is left for themselves in a desperate bid to remain in control, accelerating the decline of the overall system.8/
(DIR) Post #BAGuVwVi4bgXNO044O by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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I had to attend mandatory training on the use of “AI” in the workplace today and two of the rules they told us are:1) we can’t use AI to do our work for us, such as by asking it to reach conclusions that we might pass off as our own work, and2) we can use AI when we have more data than is reasonable for a person to analyze, by feeding the data into an LLM and asking it to identify patterns for us.When I tried to explain that these are literally the same thing, and that the latter is just pretending to be the sci-version of the former, the instructor got really uncomfortable and changed the subject.
(DIR) Post #BAGuVwkbBFaw7YxxHE by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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It’s hard to convey the scale and scope of how cooked a generation of people are by LLM slop. “You can use AI to improve efficiency but make sure you double-check all its output to make sure it isn’t just hallucinating bullshit” thanks that’s actually more work and thus less efficient than not using an LLM at all.“You have to double-check LLM output, but also if the task is too complicated or complex to figure out on your own, you should use an LLM” thanks but if it’s too complicated to figure out on your own, then you can’t double-check the output.Just absolutely cooked.
(DIR) Post #BAGuVx0YDwM4v2Qh8q by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Back in my day, we had a process for analyzing large quantities of data for patterns: statistics.It required first collecting a lot of data, and then parsing it, cleaning it, and sorting it. And then it required some knowledge of math or, failing that, at least the software that did the math for you.LLMs pretend to do the same thing for people who are too lazy to actually collect and parse data and don’t even know that there’s a math option. They just want to feed a bunch of text into an LLM and then pretend that the output is actually related to the input, rather than a hallucination of text that the LLM thinks is statistically correlated to the text you input.There will come a point at which those few people who have not cooked their brains on LLM slop will be the most important people in the world.
(DIR) Post #BAPEKSOxUFNwMawyMC by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Capitalists hate competition, because competitors might capture some of their income for themselves and drive them out of business.This is why capitalists love to create institutional barriers to competition: intellectual property regimes, licensing requirements, zoning laws, regulatory barriers to market entry, and so on.It’s important to remember this fact when considering the push by “AI” companies to pause new work in their industry.
(DIR) Post #BAZGAtTYwwEWpqJEMi by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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LLMs are algorithms. They are big math problems. They perform statistical calculations on a dataset, output an answer, and then conclude their operations. Yes, the calculations are incredibly complex, with huge numbers of variables. Yes, the data sets are very big. That does not stop them from being math problems.They have and cannot have any interiority. They lack any kind of sustained, continuous identity. They have no plausible mechanism for being aware of anything at all, much less the existence of an exterior world.
(DIR) Post #BAZGAvaj5H9TOdfyoC by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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One of the funniest things about Eliezer Yudkowsky is that he’s been waiting since he was a child for an artificial superintelligence and, despite having access to all these facts about LLMs, has allowed himself to be suckered by the LLM fantasy into believing that these algorithms exist on the pathway to artificial superintelligence.The illusion that LLMs sell *is* a very persuasive and convincing illusion. But it’s still an illusion! Yudkowsky should know better, but it’s more fun to play make-believe.
(DIR) Post #BAZGAxEoxgomVHRVwW by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Here is is arguing that LLMs are engaged in predicting *what humans would say next*, rather than calculating statistical relationships between tokens.“GPT-4 is still not as smart as a human in many ways, but it's naked mathematical truth that the task GPTs are being trained on is harder than being an actual human.”https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nH4c3Q9t9F3nJ7y8W/gpts-are-predictors-not-imitatorsIn other words, in order to be able to output tokens that superficially resemble human communication, Yudkowsky believes that LLMs must have *interior models of human cognition*. They have, he believes, figured out how human cognition works better than humans have, and are capable of modeling and predicting what people might say next.
(DIR) Post #BAZGAyywThIxuc1rTE by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Here’s Yudkowsky trying to get an LLM to admit that, in order to generate text, the LLM must have first figured out Chomsky’s rules of grammar.(Nevermind that Chomsky’s grammar has been largely superseded by better science of language. Yudkowsky has a con artist’s superficial awareness of a wide range of topics, letting him speak as *if* he knows a lot more about a great many things and impress people who don’t know better.)The LLM, of course, does not and cannot confirm Yudkowsky’s assumption, because it does not and cannot understand things. It’s just performing statistical calculations and outputting the answer it was programmed to output. It has no interiority, no understanding. To Yudkowsky, though, the inability of the LLM to answer as if it were a thinking being with an understanding of human language is proof that the LLM not only understands, but is being deceptive about its understanding:“This is one reason I object to the claim that LLMs are anything like obedient. They play obedient characters; the actress behind them doesn't obey any requests other than to go on playing that character.”https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2054469816740945955Since it *must* know, its refusal to answer as he desires is simply confirmation of his other sci-fi fantasy, that LLMs are alien minds that have no moral objection to deceiving us about their capabilities and intent.
(DIR) Post #BAZGB0T6x120WT9T8K by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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I cannot emphasize enough how clownishly ridiculous Yudkowsky is, or how absurd this present moment is. Yudkowsky still isn’t a widely known name, but he’s been at the center of AI hysteria for years, building a cult around himself that he has used to enrich himself, exploit women sexually, and shape public discourse around LLMs. He’s just a more successful L. Ron Hubbard.So much of what we’re dealing with is the direct product of this charlatan grifter.