@Noahpinion @MattBruenig Only if those people are staying here tho? Are they?
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Max Badrak
3.2K posts
@bonchieredstate This tends to happen when you come to the table with no cards. Also, the opponent might call you a declining civilization to your face, and you’d just nod and smile, because you have no cards.
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I know the influencer accounts are busy posting fire emojis, but this China trip looks like a dud. We got a non-binding Boeing order, less than half its original size, and some vagaries about soy beans.
China got profuse praise, concessions on trade, support for buying our farmland and 500,000 student visas, AI chips, and the softening of demands around Iran.
Sorry, I can't lie to you and tell you this was a good result. Scream at me if you must.
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@NeverTr74704466 @Noahpinion Taiwan doesn’t have its own food to feed 25M people, I am not even talking about fuel. How long will they last under total blockade?
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion Ukraine can also be invaded overland and forces resupplied from land. An island creates all sorts of complications for the invading force.
China can definitely blockade Taiwan. They just cant take Taiwan, and there's no point to a war if they can't retake the breakaway province.
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Before Trump I would have said the latter, but now I think maybe the former. FPV drones would annihilate our legacy assets, and the Iranian defenders would be desperate. Hegseth & co. would be very slow to adapt to the new style of warfare.
Max Badrak@maxbadrak
@Noahpinion Do you think we can’t win a ground war against Iran? Or that we could, but the cost is untenable politically?
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@NeverTr74704466 @Noahpinion Ukraine is 1/4 of Russia and continues to be supplied over land. Taiwan is 1/40 of China and will be under full blockade. Ukraine can make things in Poland. All of Taiwan is under MLRS fire, and has no strategic rear. I can go on…
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion China can hurt Taiwan, but taking it is a lot more difficult. For the same reasons Russia can't take Ukraine. Except even tougher, because they have to land an amphibious force that will be out in the open for hours with zero cover.
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@NeverTr74704466 @Noahpinion Iran is huge and has friendly land borders. Taiwan is a tiny island that’s trivial to blockade, and fully in range of massed fires launched from the mainland. :( (I am Ukrainian, and all for Taiwan, I am just afraid they are completely screwed...)
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion They'll definitely try, but as every powerful country finds out, if assets are well protected or easy to rebuild quickly, those kinds of bombardments have only limited effectiveness. If Iran can stay in the fight in 2026, Taiwan certainly can in 2027.
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@NeverTr74704466 @Noahpinion I don’t quite understand what would stop China from blowing up anything and everything that can move or shoot on those beaches with long range and/or autonomous systems. Same for Taiwanese Air Force and whatever bonsai long range stuff they might have.
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion They would, but drones aren't very good at supporting amphibious invasions, unless China has some new tactics we don't know about. History says they do not. They've never quite mastered combined arms warfare.
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No, we couldn't.
Hegseth is busy making a macho army that can do lots of pushups. They'll get wiped out by waves of drones operated by soldiers who can't do pushups.
They send waves of drones that cost a few thousand dollars that we intercept for a million dollars each, bankrupting our military.
We need fewer macho men in charge of the military and better bean counters involved.
Max Badrak@maxbadrak
@Noahpinion Do you think we can’t win a ground war against Iran? Or that we could, but the cost is untenable politically?
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@NeverTr74704466 @Noahpinion Drones favor whoever can wield them better, has more of them, can iterate faster, and produce new versions in volume quickly. I just don’t see how China wouldn’t have an overwhelming edge here.
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion It doesn't matter, since drones favor the defense. Heavily.
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@NeverTr74704466 @Noahpinion Hm.. there’s a real tough puzzle here: between China and Taiwan, who can make 100x more drones? (Hint: which country does 100% drone batteries and magnets come from?)
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion It would just mean that any offensive war is doomed for the time being, until new technology and tactics rebalance things.
Which means China's in trouble, not us. An amphibious invasion is difficult enough already. Taiwanese drones would make it impossible and a massacre.
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@Noahpinion Do you think we can’t win a ground war against Iran? Or that we could, but the cost is untenable politically?
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We're losing to Iran because we have no way to bring down their government, and they can inflict economic damage on us by closing the Strait of Hormuz, which we are powerless to prevent them from doing.
Joseph Miner@JosephWMiner
@Noahpinion We're not losing in Iran because we don't know how to fight a modern war, we're losing because the plan was to win only using air power. Herman Göring proved that doesn't work 85 years ago.
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@szetoinsitu @David_Hambling The drone will not just hit spot on, but literally chase down the target, and leave behind video of what happened.
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@David_Hambling I wonder what the price is for an old school artillery round…but hitting 70km was always a bit of a special proposition, either extended barrel, base bleed and rocket assist which isn’t cheap either. For 600 that’s a good deal. Even with tradeoffs (payload size, time to target)
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$600 drones now hitting targets 70 km away. That's about the same range as the artillery pieces the UK is now buying for £1bn. I wonder how that will work out.
Serhii Sternenko@sternenko
Логістичні артерії ворога все сильніше стікають кров’ю. UA_REG TEAM вирізає російську логістику на відстані понад (!) 70 кілометрів FPV-дронами за $600. Наша мета — повністю зупинити вороже забезпечення по всьому фронту. Допоможіть це реалізувати! Закиньте на Русоріз!
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We interviewed @adcock_brett during Figure's livestream yesterday and one of the most interesting take aways was that Figure isn't in a hurry to get their bots into customer hands.
He said that if they wanted to they could sell thousands of bots right now to do productive work, and I believe him. It would also mean scaling a sales, support and engineering support organization.
But Figure (like Tesla) is playing the long game and wants to make the holy grail of AI robotics: A robot you can verbally describe a brand new task it hasn't been trained on and it will then be able to perform it.
Or as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy puts it: "The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With.'" Sorry, couldn't resist.
Brett said he sees a path in their roadmap to this, and they have the resources to do the R&D to build an "Apple" level quality product: polished, performant and ready to be used by anyone.
My guess is that we're about two years away from this, which happens to be when Tesla's giant Optimus factory will be built and building robots, so Tesla is approximately on the same timeline.
In the meanwhile, it'll be fun watching the progress. More info on Brett's interview yesterday. Share and Enjoy! x.com/PTrubey/status…
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@maxbadrak @AdamRackis @fatih So I guess that’s the thing. I am not confident that having your agent write a bunch of slop unit tests will speed anything up. Bad unit tests slow things down.
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Maybe I’m dumb but isn’t this just an argument for … writing your own unit tests? Or at the very least _closely_ supervising your clanker when it writes your tests?
You don’t HAVE to have ai do everything, right?
Fatih Arslan@fatih
I was a huge unit test supporter, but honestly, it's no longer worth it. Agents are superb at writing extremely bad unit tests, and they still look good on paper. We're also shifting slightly to more and more e2e tests at @PlanetScale. Luckily with agents, that shift is also manageable.
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@rgigger @AdamRackis @fatih There’s “competition moved faster, ate my market share, and now I am out of business” reason. But, yes, you can bet that the competitors will ship slop, their customers will revolt, flock over to you and your business will thrive.
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@AdamRackis @fatih Yeah we can just say “I’m not gonna do that”. Zero reason to do dumb shit because “everyone is doing it.”
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@AdamSinger You need to raise a trillion dollars. What can you sell investors that has any chance to be worth that much? Only mass automation.
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What did people in the AI industry think would happen when they constantly say apocalyptic things about their own products, spread messages about mass unemployment and "the permanent underclass" etc. This was all avoidable if everyone simply acted normal
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@xtremalraven2 Цій практиці — 15-20 років. І це логічна практика — з огляду на союз нєрушімьій злочинців і кдб. Було б невдобно випадково йобнути фсб. Тому застерігаються.
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Хтось зламав розробників популярної бібліотеки, вбудував в бібліотеку троян, який краде ключі/паролі, але _не_ краде, якщо в системі встановлена російська мова. Ай кід ю нот.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence@MsftSecIntel
Microsoft is investigating mistralai PyPI package v2.4.6 compromise. Attackers injected code in mistralai/client/__init__.py that executes on import, downloads hxxps://83[.]142[.]209[.]194/transformers.pyz to /tmp/transformers.pyz, and launches a second-stage payload on Linux. The file name transformers.pyz appears deliberately chosen to mimic the widely used Hugging Face Transformers library and blend into ML/dev environments. The main payload is a credential stealer, but it also includes country-aware logic; it avoids Russian-language environments and contains a geo fenced destructive branch that has 1-in-6 chance of executing rm -rf / when the system appears to be in Israel or Iran. To mitigate this threat: isolate affected Linux hosts, block 83[.]142[.]209[.]194, hunt for /tmp/transformers.pyz, pgmonitor[.]py, and pgsql-monitor.service, and rotate exposed credentials.
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@ReichlinMelnick @Noahpinion Other militaries should get ready for this, btw. Immediate casualty evacuation by choppers is a luxury, which was nice while it lasted. Try it now, and lose both the choppers and the medics to the same drones that caused the original casualties.
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It's so weird how difficult it is for the left to understand that all you have to do to decrease housing costs is to let people build more housing.
M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray
For 45 years, Berkeley built virtually no new housing. By the mid-2010s, it was the most expensive college town in America. Shortly thereafter, YIMBYs took over and kicked off a building boom. Today, nominal rents are below 2018 rates—remarkable progress on affordability.
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@powerbottomdad1 @Noahpinion Kill anybody who tries to shoot back. Jail everybody who protests. What’s a million or two? Might not even have to come to that — Hong Kong caved pretty quickly.
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@maxbadrak @Noahpinion and do what? kill all the people they want to incorporate?
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I don't think it's permeated the public consciousness yet, but Ukraine is already using fully autonomous drones. The operator just tells the drone where to find targets, it flies several miles, finds a target, and kills it. Human soldiers just die against these autonomous drones.
WarTranslated@wartranslated
Russian Z-blogger Aleksei Larkin, who supported the war and actively aided the Russian army, has suddenly had an epiphany and taken a swing at the Commander-in-Chief himself.
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