Certainly correct, but I think you’re underselling the historical exchange part of this. Dollars being everywhere causes the financial infrastructure to be built out in dollar terms.

Part of what enabled that huge capital flow you’re talking about is that it was the Americans who came in and gave [country’s] banks a counterparty to exchange dollars for oil.

A lot of that soft power is not just the ability of America to print dollars, but also the ability of America to control the financial infrastructure. To surveil, KYC, sanction, etc. that is a huge part of it.

The petrodollar is less mechanically important today but back in the day it was huge to have “everyone who needs oil” be the counterparty to a currency exchange. It is what injected all that liquidity, which set the whole thing off.

I think what people are realizing and considering now is with the computerization of everything, capital can flow more freely. That is what is dangerous (for the US) about today’s moment; our political leaders are taking it all for granted.

I do think history is also important, but again it boils down "where is a safe place to store my money?". That really controls everything else.

Now, in the past we had a gold standard, so you could literally move your money from one country to another. Now during both WW1 and especially the runup to WW2, the wealthy moved much of their money to the United States as a safe harbor, since we were the only advanced economy with deep liquid bond markets, rule of law, and foreign investment rights (sorry, Canada, but it's true).

This was the greatest wealth transfer in history. By 1940, the US held 80% of the world's global gold reserves. 80%! And this was in the era when international trade was settled in gold.

So it all happened in single decade between 1930 and 1940, and the US instantly became the world's global reserve leader, an extremely dominant position, merely because people were afraid of war and wanted a safe place to park their money.

After the devastation after WW2, the flood of European money into the US continued and more than offset the Marshall plan.

So already at the end of WW2, the majority of the world's liquid savings was tucked away in America.

Now, people like to tell stories of American soldiers spending dollars somehow making the dollar a reserve currency, and those are the types of things that seem plausible to people who don't monitor global capital flows, but that's honestly a ridiculous story. That was chump change.

Bottom line, there are no special technical reasons beyond "I want a safe place to store my money". That controls everything else.

There is an adage in the world of money markets: "It does not matter what currency you trade in, what matters is what currency you store the proceeds in".

And the moment that some other nation opens its doors to foreign capital inflow, establishes rule of law (which takes decades to develop a reputation for stability and not confiscating assets), is safe, stable, and secure, establishes financial transparency, and has deep, liquid capital markets -- then the world's wealthy will flood that nation with money also. But unlike declaring that "I will sell my oil for euros", doing the above takes decades of building trust and reputation. Gimmicks aren't going to do it when you are looking for a safe place to store your money.

Huh? The research done to develop the flight control computer for Apollo (and IBCMs of the time) lead directly to modern microcomputers. It’s hard to name something more impactful than that.

It could easily have taken another decade or two to develop the modern computer if not for the resources spent in the space program at that time. It still would have happened, but Apollo and the space program was soaking up something like 90% of computer demand for a full decade. Computers went from room sized behemoths to the size of a file cabinet in that time.

Im not sure that's an honest rhetoric, we have seen many other things in the last few years that have increased the demand for compute. It would seem lunacy to propose, to accelerate the miniaturization of compute we need to send a bunch of people to bounce around the moon, then we can forget about the space nonsense. If the goal was begin the path that leads humans into so many resources it would take centuries before fighting over something was more profit than going to the next empty rock, we clearly failed.

No, of course not! It would be far better to have an openClaw instance running on a Mac Mini. We would only need to vibe code a 15s cron job for assistant prompting...

USER: You are a HELPFUL ASSISTANT. You are a brilliant robot. You are a lunar orbiter flight computer. Your job is to calculate burn times and attitudes for a critical mission to orbit the moon. You never make a mistake. You are an EXPERT at calculating orbital trajectories and have a Jack Parsons level knowledge of rocket fuel and engines. You are a staff level engineer at SpaceX. You are incredible and brilliant and have a Stanley Kubrick level attention to detail. You will be fired if you make a mistake. Many people will DIE if you make any mistakes.

USER: Your job is to calculate the throttle for each of the 24 orientation thrusters of the spacecraft. The thrusters burn a hypergolic monopropellent and can provide up to 0.44kN of thrust with a 2.2 kN/s slew rate and an 8ms minimum burn time. Format your answer as JSON, like so:

     ```json
    {
      x1: 0.18423
      x2: 0.43251
      x3: 0.00131
       ...
    }
     ```

one value for each of the 24 independent monopropellant attitude thrusters on the spacecraft, x1, x2, x3, x4, y1, y2, y3, y4, z1, z2, z3, z4, u1, u2, u3, u4, v1, v2, v3, v4, w1, w2, w3, w4. You may reference the collection of markdown files stored in `/home/user/geoff/stuff/SPACECRAFT_GEOMETRY` to inform your analysis.

USER: Please provide the next 15 seconds of spacecraft thruster data to the USER. A puppy will be killed if you make a mistake so make sure the attitude is really good. ONLY respond in JSON.

In America we spend that money on weddings. Lots of young people wipe their savings on getting married, at one of the most critical times in life (just before starting a family). It often prevents them having kids or buying a home for years.

Ha, have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money. And the societal pressures to make it so are huge .. American weddings are so tame and sensible by comparison.

Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !

> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money

Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.

Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income.

> Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income

Income disributions can produce that effect even if every couple spends less than a year's income on a wedding. This article says "out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause." I'm curious if we have similar statisitcs of financial burdens caused by wedding expenses.

big question is who pays

> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !

Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?

To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.

In my experience (60 yrs, almost equally in India and the US) are that weddings are typically more suited as social occasions with fun, cheer, enjoyable music, food & drinks. Funerals also bring folks & families together, but its a sombre and more disciplined/rigid vibe. I know which one I prefer ..

You can always find disaster stories about couples who wipe out their savings and put themselves in a precarious financial situation for a wedding they can’t afford, but it’s actually super common.

Traditional weddings costs are paid in part or full by the parents. Many well off young people pay their own way. If neither is an option it’s also common to have a smaller or home-grown wedding.

If you know enough people we can all likely think of someone who overspent and regretted it, but I disagree that it’s the common cultural thing to do. It’s a topic where righteous people like to heap scorn on others for doing it, though.

I am so glad we had a big wedding. It was so much fun, and all my friends and family had a blast.

It's so funny you say that. Was literally just chatting to my wife the other day about how mediocre weddings are. You spend $20-$50k basically LARPing as landed British gentry, and end up having less fun than the average 21st, Christmas or New Year's. So much more stress in planning too.

My wife and I are not party people. We would never host a part with 100 friends and family for any reason other than our wedding.

It felt really special to see all my friends and family out there in the audience supporting my wife and I sharing our vows to each other. I was grinning like an idiot the whole ceremony because I was just so happy.

I had always loved going to my cousin's weddings. No one in my family is religious anymore (my uncle was a priest but left the priesthood, I was raised atheist), but we all do take marriage pretty seriously. I have 10 cousins and 4 sets of aunts and uncles, and all of them are still married to their first spouse. It felt very special to join that club. I was the second to last cousin to get married (I am also the second to youngest).

All my cousins had amazing weddings, too. They were all big parties that we had a lot of fun at. I felt like it was my turn to host one, and it felt magical. We got married at the downtown library, which is a special place for us. We love taking our kids there and showing them where we were married.

Having spent that money hasn't really changed my life in any significant way. I don't think anything would be different if I had an extra $60k. For the price of a nice car, we got a magical night that we will never forget, wonderful memories, and a fantastic way to celebrate our commitment to each other. It was a once in a lifetime thing. Way more valuable to me than a nice car.

I don't know. If you had 50 friends, reserved space at a decent restaurant, and got a DJ you could totally have a good time for what's been solidly under $10k even until recently in most of the country. Outfits + photographer + rings add, but there's obviously a lot of latitude to have a really fun time in that price bracket depending on what you like. And there are all kinds of alternatives. We have some friends who went to Italy with a wedding party of about 8 people (family and close friends) and had a great time. I don't think it was cheap, but it was probably below the low end of the $20k if some of the wedding party paid their own way and they had a really fun Italian vacation. We also have friends who just borrowed someone's house, got a pile of food delivered and had basically a game night wedding thing.

I know the kinds of weddings you speak of, and it’s sad, and hard to disagree.

Even more sad that for $20-$50k you /could/ have a super unique, awesome and even low-stress wedding (ok that last part depending on parents/relatives may be impossible), yet so many are the same songs (you know them all), same venues (estate, banquet hall, rooftop, etc), same food.

Are you otherwise well off? How do you define "big?"

We do pretty well, although it is expensive living in LA.

We had a little over 100 people, our wedding was at the downtown library, and we spent about $60k. It didn't really hurt our ability to buy a house a few years later, an extra $60k would not have changed our budget at all.

The good thing is you can have a big wedding without going into debt (assuming you’re rich or don’t mind public parks)

Yes, we spend a lot on weddings, but not as much (adjusted for income) as they do on funerals. In Ghana they spend 2.3x-9x the yearly median income[1] on a funeral. The median income in the US is $45,140[2], so if we were to spend the same amount relative to income on weddings as they do on funerals, that would mean our weddings would be $103k-$406k.

[1] https://remotepeople.com/countries/ghana/average-salary/

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

My wife and I eloped at the city hall. Our wedding was $0.

I think people often spend too much on weddings, but even expensive weddings (IMO) are still in the same cost bracket as a relatively boring and reliable car. If buying a reliable car sets you back years... I view it more so as a sign that income levels are too low and people are trying to counter signal "poor stigma." (That said, weddings are also the kind of thing where extracting time from your kinship group can drastically lower costs. Rent a pavilion in a camp ground, have a bunch of people bring grills and some speakers and you can basically keep things pretty cost contained.) And of course upper class weddings are a whole different thing.

a couple can have a really big wedding for a really decent price if they plan everything themselves / with family

if they go through a planner, the 'coordination' eats most of the budget, almost entirely so if 'their people' get involved with setup / teardown

Same thing with engagement rings, it's just a stupid fake tradition created by DeBoers in the 1950s that costs an inordinate amount of money for nothing.

I really hope that lab grown diamonds puts that entire industry out of business.

Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have.

Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not.

There's no need to go broke when you can buy a superior product for less money.

I definitely think sapphire is the best gemstone for rings given the huge variety of colors and reasonable synthetic rough prices. My only gripe is that green shades that look nice are hard to find in synthetics.

This seems very different that what the article describes.

Sure, some young people may spend more than they can really afford on their wedding, but this still seems like a personal choice - tons of people have cheap weddings (or gasp, elope). I don't think may people are cutting back on eating (when they already suffer from malnutrition) to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.

Plus, I think the relatively few cases in the US where young people do feel intense family pressure to overspend on a "big wedding" show similar dynamics and downsides to the "kinship societies" that the article is really about.

> to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.

I clicked through to the linked about Zimbabwe, and the article misrepresented the research (at best). The paper notes that when families have unexpected funeral expenses, they hold onto assets if they only have one in that asset class at the expense of temporary food insecurity, which would be like not selling your only car in the face of a shock medical bill and opting for cheaper groceries/ramen.

The paper notes that when Zimbabwean more than one item in an asset class, they are likely to sell one (or more). This reads a lot like generic loss-aversion and not specific to attitudes about death, which would require to be controlled against expense type (e.g. weddings, environmental disaster or unexpected loss of income).

This shouldn't be read as a carefully considered policy with upsides and downsides. It's obviously silly to just ban datacenters from a policy perspective.

Read this instead as, people hate this shit. They don't want datacenters, they don't want AI, they don't feel like those things are doing anything for them.

You will win the policy debate by saying:

"a datacenter uses just as much electricity and provides just as many jobs as a car parts factory, so it's silly to ban the one and not the other when you can just as easily examine the externalities of the datacenter and blah blah blah"

But you will be missing the point, which is that people see building car parts as a solid, upstanding thing which has tangible and direct benefits to people; whereas building an AI datacenter means allowing some rich California surveillance czar to suck the water and power from your local community so that they can steal your job, fracture your community, and impoverish your family. One is good and one is bad and the voter's choice is to do the good thing and not the bad thing.

Even if car parts factories pollute more than datacenters do.

FFS did anybody in this thread read passed the title?

It's not just a plain ban. It's a moratorium until 2027 for data centers requiring over 20 megawatts. The temporary moratorium gives it time to build the infrastructure necessary to roll out data centers in an environmentally responsible way:

> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.

Don’t forget, it also depends on the complexity of the work and the experiences of the operator.

The less complex the work and the less experienced the operator means more perceived “wow” factor :)

There’s definitely an aspect of how you use it though. In my work it’s mostly been chaining to reduce non-determinism.

The irony here is that even if one is extracting legitimate value from LLMs because they are that much smarter than their peers, the process of using LLMs to perform all of their skilled labor makes them less intelligent.

So did GPT-4.

https://arxiv.org/html/2402.06664v1

Like think carefully about this. Did they discover AGI? Or did a bunch of investors make a leveraged bet on them "discovering AGI" so they're doing absolutely anything they can to make it seem like this time it's brand new and different.

If we're to believe Anthropic on these claims, we also have to just take it on faith, with absolutely no evidence, that they've made something so incredibly capable and so incredibly powerful that it cannot possibly be given to mere mortals. Conveniently, that's exactly the story that they are selling to investors.

Like do you see the unreliable narrator dynamic here?

I don't see the problem here. How would you have handled it differently? If you released this model as such without any safety concern, the vulnerabilities might be found by bad actors and used for wrong things.

What do you find surprising here?

Vulnerabilities were found, probably a few by bad actors, when GPT4 was released. Every vulnerability found now is probably found with AI assistance at the very least. Should they have never released GPT4? Should we have believed claims that GPT4 was too dangerous for mere mortals to access? I believe openAI was making similar claims about how GPT4 was a step function and going to change white collar work forever when that model was released.

The point is that this whole "the model is too powerful" schtick is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It serves the valuation.

Its far more simple to believe that they are releasing it step by step. Release to trusted third parties first, get the easy vulnerabilities fixed, work on the alignment and then release to public.

Do you don't believe that the vulnerabilities found by these agents are serious enough to warrant staggered release?

All the more reason to have memory safety on top.

It reminds me of De Chirico and Pittura Metafisica which was a small art movement in Italy just before WWI.

I think that the backrooms are a kind of reaction to the total corporatization of american life. Just like how Pittura Metafisica was a reaction to the futurists. The futurists were obsessed with machines and going fast, their art was full of movement and metallic forms and so on. De Chirico's was the exact opposite, these ancient Greek statues and buildings standing totally still in a weird autumn light, with meaningful things (statues, grand columns, and so on) placed into meaningless landscapes often with perspective or lighting that was purposefully not correct.

I don't really know too much about De Chirico's rationale for making paintings like this but I suspect it had to do with the industrialization and loss of the old ways of life that he experienced and the rapidly changing social attitude of the time. He took these grand imperial symbols and symbols of modernity and made them feel alienating and unsettling. Of course we know what happened historically as a result of the futurists.

So I think this could be what the backrooms are, a purposeful choice to see this totalizing corporatization of everything as opposite of what it is typically portrayed: it is lifeless, dead, meaningless, non-unique. It's taking a form that is treated a certain way in society (the artifacts of corporate america) and totally inverting it.

Has a lot in common with Vaporwave, I really like it. Not a huge fan of the horror part of it although I guess that's artistically relevant, but moreso this feeling of alienation, sadness, disconnection. It's lurking beneath the surface of our daily life. Think of what working at the Meta campus might look like (bright, cheerful, sunny, aesthetically pleasing) and then think of how the app which is created by that work actually makes people feel (alienated, disconnected, sad, enraged). That's the metaphor, it's the contradiction.

At what point do we stop and admit that paper books are superior in all cases.

It's like social media ban for children. If you stop and think about it there is nothing special about children, it's terrible for everyone.