Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.

They could use nukes as part of their campaign of imperial expansion but they'd get a lot of push back from the rest of the world.

This is just one of many many ways that people in the west fundamentally misunderstand Russia, and why so many people made fools of themselves thinking that Putin would not invade. The other really big one is that Russia never admitted that it lost the Cold War and thinks the war is still going on, and that it's the fault of the US and others that Russia is so backwards and poor, not a result of their own mismanagement, the weakness of their people, and the general corruption.

Why is Russia so backwards and poor? Russia and Iran are two countries that seem to way underperform their fundamentals.

Medieval Russia was not too different from the rest of Europe, with all the little monarchies and merchant republics. The period of centralization that followed was also similar. But the accidents of history almost all went the same way. Monarchies defeating merchant republics and free cities. Muscovy being too good at conquering its neighbors, turning Russia into a huge centralized empire with little direct competition. The assassination of Alexander II before he could complete his reforms. The unholy mess of 1917–1922. The idealism of Gorbachev and Yeltsin that turned their reforms into a disaster.

Prosperity correlates with powerful institutions (not necessarily democratic). But ultimately you need a set of rules that even the state has to follow.

Another big piece is how easy it is to invade; how hard it is to defend. History records 50 invasions of Russia. For centuries Russian looked in envy at the very fertile land in what is now Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine, but dared not farm it because it was swept regularly by quite fierce nomads on horses. That farmland became secure enough to farm only about 250 years ago.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Great Britain, which has been successfully invaded, but not after Britain got serious (about 4 centuries ago?) about having a good navy. When the risk of the investment's being destroyed by an invading army is low, more investment happens. And a navy profits more than an army does from technological investment: 100 years before Britain's industrial revolution, London was investing heavily in copper mining and copper refining so that it could give all of its warships a copper bottom.

The US is even more secure than Great Britain because any great power or middle power contemplating an invasion of the US would need to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific to start the attack. (Yes, the invader could try to get Mexico to agree to host the invading army, but the US would probably find out about that plan and respond by either blockading Mexico or invading it if it doesn't immediately abandon the plan.)

Policies that work great for secure countries like the US and Britain work terribly for countries like Russia, China, Iraq or Iran that must always worry about a land invasion. The basic strategy the US and the UK used in WWII had been worked out by Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Japan and Australia can follow the same basic strategy. Russia cannot because except for a few heady decades during the Soviet Union and maybe in the 1890s, the best way to increase Russian security was always to invest more in the army what with the country's being so hard to defend against a hostile army.

I think a country like Russia is still influenced by its experience centuries ago (when it was invaded for a time every single year) and by its experience in WWII. One can argue that (because of nukes and because satellite recon and cheap drones give a tech advantage to the defender) Russia is in a new situation where it can relax and start worrying much less about invasions, but I think that even if the leaders of a country realized that, it would be hard for them to actually change the country. I think for example a big reason that the US is so rich is that (for the white settlers) life in America was always easy. The economy has changed drastically since Colonial American times, when most adults were farmers, but the experience of plentiful high-quality farmland (especially when the settlers started crossing into the Ohio Valley) and plentiful timber and rivers that were a great help to transportation even without doing much work to improve the river system (by adding canals for example) produced a culture that remained adaptive and useful even as the economy was transformed by steam, railroads, the telegraph, cars, electricity, etc.

Germany for example introduced a welfare system in 1871 IIRC. For the average commoner to make a living in Germany was hard enough that the German government of that time (who cannot be accused of having been bleeding hearts) considered it essential to national security for the government to help the commoner out. In contrast, when (many decades after Germany introduced welfare) the Dust Bowl devastated large regions of the US in the 1930s, there were no governmental programs to assist them because most Americans and most American decisionmakers considered such programs to be largely unnecessary.

I believe these governing traditions in the US (which started to change in the 1930s with the election of FDR, who transformed the country more than any previous president except maybe Lincoln) of small-government and individual freedom were conducive to wealth generation whereas the Russian governing tradition where a powerful state is seen as essential to protecting the nation from invasions and where the population tends to depend heavily on the government for its economic security tends to keep a country poor. And again I hypothesize that these governing traditions are difficult to change.

And maybe the reason Poland never develop a strong national-security culture like Russia did is that it was in a hopeless situation with respect to invasions and such (except during the ascendancy of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but I don't think that coalition lasted long) because it was surrounded by more populous, more-cohesive neighbors and did not have much in the way of mountains or bodies of water to slow down invasions from those neighbors: namely, France, Germany, the Austrian empire and Russia. In fact, I believe even Sweden invaded Poland at one point (although it had to cross the Baltic Sea to do so). No matter how much the government of Poland invested in national security, it wouldn't have been enough to move the needle much. In contrast, Russia was a big enough country with enough natural resources (e.g., good farm land, timber) that if it tried really hard over a span of decades, it usually could increase its national security considerably, which led to a national culture that emphasizes a powerful state with a powerful army (and a powerful spy system to suppress uprisings by already-conquered ethnic minorities).

Also, it is in the national interest of the US to prevent Russian re-expansion westward, and between 1989 and 2022 its main two allies in this regard were Poland and Romania (with NATO taking a secondary role), so after 1989 Poland could feel secure (at least till Trump came to power) without having to spend much on defense whereas Russia has felt (and still feels) that they are 100% responsible for their own national security.

Which is why the current Paypal Mafia obsession with inflicting the US with Russia-style oligarchy and corruption should be so terrifying to anybody in Silicon Valley that isn't already a billionaire: it will crater the future of the US as leading market for developing new tech, and hand it all over to China, to the extent that China wants to be the home to new tech.

Too much centralized power at the top destroys economic growth, whether it's officially a socialist one, or merely a corrupt one, or just unchecked capitalism where disruption has been squashed by those at the top.

Curious, how viable would this strategy be when invading via Canada?

Europe is sending the jet engines for the drones that are shooting Moscow, and Germany is very actively preparing for war with Russia.

It's not the first time in history that this has been done, and Russia still remembers.

Because Russian drones have European parts as well (and Chinese and and), and the army recruits are not only Russian either.

If you want frontier model you will pay more for inference to essentially fund the expensive training.

If you don’t need frontier model you will get dirt cheap inference, which eventually will approach the cost of electricity spent per token.

Unbelievably ugly stance.

If there's a second thing the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that many of the more modern (relatively speaking) "best practices" that have always been over-hyped and questionably-evidenced really do tend to produce worse results. LLMs take these methods to their logical conclusions and show us the end result much sooner. You can't just iterate your way to a solution when you don't even know what problem you're trying to solve. If you don't have a clear spec then you don't know what a correct product looks like. You need to invest time in reviewing code properly. If you don't keep the big picture in mind then the big picture becomes a mess.

Maybe one day the LLMs will leave me out of a job but at least I'll feel validated first!

If you apply those practice, then quickly you find yourself using the agent as merely a writing boost. And there’s an inflexion point when coding is no longer a bottleneck. Instead, you spend more time on thinking about design. You can see it in open source projects where most PRs are just a few line diffs. The bottleneck is knowledge and problem solving talent.

I don't know what that means but I have seen no evidence so far that if you don't apply those practices then your code will be anything other than unmanageable spaghetti if you leave AI to maintain it for long.

Coding has never been the bottleneck for good developers. Part of the reason for that is that good developers know how to isolate different aspects of a system and so keep each individual aspect relatively simple and self-contained. Another part is that good developers were already standardising and automating a lot of the grunt work. These traits are also advantageous for keeping generative AI on the right track and keeping its proposed changes manageable.

If all of these folks are pushed out of the country right after their student visa expires, likely they are not coming back.

Today the rationale for open research is that openness accelerates it. What if you just need more electricity and silicon to accelerate it?

Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.

edit: typo

b) Musk has made crazy amount of promises and predictions, none of which turned out to be true, and his history is full of dumb ideas and decisions. He literally drove a truck to the Twitter server location, and started ripping out servers, despite people telling him that it will break stuff, and then when it broke stuff, he was like oh, you are right. Is that indication of someone intelligent?

c) Intelligence is not separable by topic. There are no smart people that are conservatives. There are conservatives who remember a whole bunch of technical information and appear to be smart, but information recall is not intelligence. Being able to analyze reality and determine what is true is not is a core skill, and if you apply that to politics or social issues, you end up pretty much center left in terms of political spectrum. Musk is solely on the far right. Someone who is so convinced in his conspiracy theories absolutely does not have the mental machinery to correctly parse technical topics.

But I don't think it's fair to say Elon is stupid / a bad engineer. When John Carmack speaks well of his talent, I take that seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4. Watch this video and tell me if he speaks like an intelligent person.