Object Zero

This is what a $2 trillion economy will look like by 2050. + 1x port facility with 3x8km lay down area + 1x robot fab plant producing 100 bots / hr + 1x 1GW datacenter running inference + 1x 3GW nuclear power station = 2 million robots labouring 24/7 in temp buildings

@elonmusk @JTLonsdale Is William the Conquerer niche?

@JTLonsdale True! I love niche history. Timing is everything. William would probably have lost if he had invaded a year earlier.

Fun to see this video rendition of an old legend I’d only read in a book years ago. This leader also became the Norwegian King whose failed invasion of England in 1066 tired the army of Harold Godwinson just enough to allow William the Bastard to prevail!

@tszzl Shouldn’t you have a sandwich board with “any minute now” on it?

the world must skate between antichrist and armageddon and it looks increasingly difficult. I suppose thiel’s whole point is you can’t get there with reason alone

So where does that reside? Is it in the soil? Is it in the institutions? Is it in the hearts and minds of a group of people? British school kids don’t even know what Trafalgar is. You can be arrested for wearing the flag. These things are imposed by HMG and HMCTS. The very sovereign identity has rejected the idea of Britain, and this has been the case for 30 years. Where should this idea live? What authority does it have?

@Object_Zero_ @trevgoes4th @Danjsalt @MythoYookay The culture and the idea of Britain.

Holy fuck @MythoYookay

@RollingHedge @trevgoes4th @Danjsalt @MythoYookay What are you actually trying to save here? The system? The land? The people? An idea? What is the kernel that is worth saving in all of it?

@trevgoes4th @Danjsalt @MythoYookay Correct. The finances won’t improve. The tax base will reduce. The TME will only go up. There’s no way this gets better.

@GBPolitcs @thetimes 1,000 turbines that will now cost maybe £2-5 million each to dispose of? So £5bn in total? To paid for from 25m households? So another £200 on energy bills? Farce.

🚨NEW: Asbestos has been found in at least 1,000 wind turbines across Britain after essential parts were shipped into the country from China [@thetimes]

@JGBoyPlunger @Frid45 You don’t have political continuity if you are occupied by another political entity.

@Object_Zero_ @Frid45 Wtf are you talking about @Object_Zero_

Excluding microstates, the oldest European states that have maintained political continuity without ever disappearing from the map are : 🇫🇷 France, 481 AD 🇩🇰 Denmark, c. 958 AD 🇵🇹 Portugal, 1143 AD

@TheEconomist “Seems to be racing ahead” - yeah… 10 years ago.

European football fans visiting America are discovering the mass affluence of the country’s suburbs. The wealth enticing holidaymakers troubles European elites. America, once a peer, seems to be racing ahead econ.st/4uKt4ga Illustration: Álvaro Bernis

@Bitnik9k @MohammedJRH96 @DanielPriestley Right?

@Object_Zero_ @MohammedJRH96 @DanielPriestley Every gov on Earth regulates what kinds of loans can be given by creditors and which can't Credit policies are social constructs, not immutable laws of nature

Gary reveals the error in his understanding on wealth. He assumes all wealth generates a 5% passive income. For Elon Musk the opposite is true. Elons companies have huge potential but lose billions. He recently sold 4% of SpaceX for $75B. On paper he’s worth a trillion but only because of the calculation of what the remaining 96% is worth if he sold it for the same price. In reality, SpaceX is not generating passive income. The raised money will be spent hiring armies of engineers to build and deploy new technology. Elon can’t easily sell his stake. He’s subject to locking clauses and if he started selling his stock it would cause the share price to tank. It’s the opposite of what Gary imagines wealth to be like - it’s not passive income it’s an overwhelming commitment to near impossible outcomes within punishing timescales. Somewhere along the way Gary must have met a rare wealthy individual who had his net worth tied up in bonds and then he assumed all wealth was the same. I’ve met many billionaires and none of them seemed to be enjoying passive income. All of them were running big businesses that employ thousands of people and delivering difficult outcomes at scale.

@MohammedJRH96 @DanielPriestley That’s between them and their creditor. Residential homes don’t generate a passive income for homeowners, but mortgages make up the vast majority of credit markets and money creation in the economy. This is what you want to ban?

I guess the question becomes can, and should, they be able to borrow against such assets (that don't generate a passive return) that enables them to not take salaries and functionally pay very minimal taxes? Wealth taxes are silly but so is a system that lets people borrow against volatile securities.

@garyseconomics If you weren’t so utterly obsessed with seizing his votes, they wouldn’t be worth nearly as much. People desperately lusting after his stuff (his corporate votes) is the only reason he is a trillionaire today.

There’s no passive income from SpaceX. Elon’s wealth isn’t money, his entire wealth is just the votes he can cast in the boardroom of Tesla and SpaceX. That’s all he owns, corporate votes. Other people (people like you) really desperately want those votes, desperately want to buy them, desperately want to seize them, and that’s why they are so valuable.

Elon Musk is the world's first trillionaire. How scared should you be?

@Bills_gallery @PaulEmbery You think the Elizabethan Line is comparable to the entire Chengdu Transit Rail Network? How many entire mass transit systems did China build whilst the Elizabethan line was being constructed?

London has incredible infrastructure. The Elizabethan Line was opened recently spanning East to West. Have you seen the phenomenal engineering that was involved? Absolutely staggering. And much was flattened to make way for it including several of my favourite pubs, pubs that existed for 100s of years.

A relative living in Chengdu, China, sent me this map of the city’s metro system. It is the fourth-longest in the world, with a daily ridership of six million. The first line opened as recently as 2010! If it were Britain, we’d still be going through the consultation process.

Democracy is supposed to deliver the thing that the majority of people want, ie a good transport system. You can’t do that here because every small group has a veto with which to ransom everyone else, it’s a system that can’t deliver its democratic mandates. The West is ossified as very strong individual property rights always outlast any democratic mandate. In the modern era you can only build small piecemeal things in the West that are often obsolete before they are finished. China can build large public projects that lift millions of people out of poverty, and all the things you mention are rightly subordinate to that one objective. I’m not saying their system is perfect, but it’s very silly to claim we have everything figured out, we are being completely dominated. I doubt you will find many people in China who think they should have followed the UK government’s approach.

@PaulEmbery Fair point. However did the citizens of said city have any say, were their rights given any consideration, were the workers treated fairly, were any homes destroyed in the building of this metro system? 'Democracy is the worst form of govt apart from all the others.'

@Bills_gallery @PaulEmbery A very highly populated little island is exactly who needs excellent transport infrastructure the most. The fact that you can’t have it, unless everyone agrees it is perfect, is why you don’t have it.

@PaulEmbery But Britain is a very highly populated little island. And sometimes developers or quangos are not always right.

@g__j @FT In the UK… £1.5bn is 1.2 fish discos, or 8 bat tunnels.

Read this post without the word “just”. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I think the @ft is better than that. Without it, people could decide if 1.5bn/year is a lot or a little.

@paradite_ Nonsense. Prompts can inject novelty.

i’m really surprised that people don’t see this. It’s mathematically true that llms can’t come up with novel ideas, because the whole point of training is to reduce loss, gain rewards so that the model adhere to rules and ground truth. if you have a model that can come up with novel ideas, it must have high loss during sft or rl.

10yrs ago, I found the most efficient thing you can do is just deleting corrupted and poisoned edge case data from a big dataset. Quite often the effort of evaluating and labelling data in the ambiguous region just isn’t worth it, people try and use a scalpel and create a very high fidelity representation from ambiguous stuff, but it’s almost always better to just delete all the fuzzy stuff. If you have a lot of ambiguous fuzzy stuff then you usually need more dimensions (orthogonal) to de-fuzz the ambiguity.

Many people think any given ML project is 99% training. In reality, it’s 50% evaluation, 40% data cleaning, 8% integration, and 2% training. The first two set the noise floor for learning. No ML magic matters; the model cannot lower the noise floor, as that’s the optimal bound of Shannon encoding of your data. Thus, not a single day goes by without me thinking about ontology. Even the old labels have to be constantly reviewed.

@PositivFuturist @FoxofDecember That’s not dead internet theory that’s just web2.0 and it happened 15 years ago.

@FoxofDecember The idea that we only visit 5 websites now which are just shitting our endless meaningless content to keep us hooked while the actual internet is dying

If you don’t believe in dead internet theory.. give a 10yo an iPad and actually observe.

@tszzl Learning with 10^-6 the data.

transhumanism is an interesting side quest but 'the substrate is wrong' for the human/computer hybrid to be competitive with machine intelligence on feats of intellect. you have this low tech meat brain in the middle of all this lightspeed machinery, doing what exactly?