No, I'm the same. A lot of stuff I read is hard-to-get philosophy or from obscure authors, so I first get them from Anna's Archive. Reading them on paper is much better so I try to find a physical copy later.
> They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.
I think this may have something to do with the professionalisation of politics, or the existence of career politicians. If you want to climb up the ladder in politics, working on short-term goals is probably the best way to do this. Infrastructure projects are high-risk, low-reward. Infrastructure projects may take a long time, may be reversed/aborted by the next government, may piss off potential voters, may require to fight off NIMBYs, or aren't noticed due to the preparedness paradox.
Very vague story comming up: I've seen a group of companies and ngos working on a scientific project. On itself, it was a temporary setup, but it also gave everyone an opportunity behind the scenes to test each others tools and capacity without making things too official. People were talking about building new labs and offices in our town. The local government got involved, mainly to provide some trust and stability guarantees.
Then a politician from the national level found out. She coopted the government communication channel, made herself the central person, and backstabbed everyone. We had some very rough weeks ensuring everyone we were just as surprised as them.
Crucially, the politician did not know about the testing capacity aspect, so there was nothing in the schedule allowing for it, even if it was the most important aspect.
In the end, she got a few glowing press releases, and an estimated 100ish jobs evaporated overnight and went to another country. I've learned a lot of politics in that episode and hate all of them.
> Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.
I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.
The structure of the United States government is a compromise balancing large vs. small states interests and slavery.
The core defect in the design is the Senate and the way states were admitted. We have a territory/colony with limited political rights that has a population greater than the bottom four states.
Those small states exert enormous influence and essentially ensure a weird conservative dynamic that anchors a lot of social issues.
Not because of the politics of the day - because resource extraction is always conservative by nature as the core aspect of the business is minimizing overhead cost. Agriculture flipped into a purely extractive business as people have been removed from it.
It's called the United States for a reason, not the United People. What you're obviously desiring would result in a series of vassal states (large cites governing themselves) with most of the country (rural) acting as feudal serfs.
I said nothing of the sort. All things have ups and downs. Many entities, both historically and globally have managed similar problems with varying methodologies.
If you think the current governance scenario in the United States represents the apex of republican democracy, your patriotism is clouding your judgement. The current trends as they are have been devastating to rural people. I live in a county that had 500 dairy farms in 1970, 80 in 1990 and 2 today. Just that industry represented probably about 10k good paying jobs.
Most rural areas are the economic equivalent of inner cities with more space. But of course, if you don't care about people, just the sacred abstraction of "states", so I suppose that's ok.
Rural voters are not most of the country unless you believe geographic area is more important than people. There are better ways to address the concerns of rural interests than enshrining gerrymandering along state lines.
While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period.
Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
I think it’s likely you are just not familiar with examples of U.S. long-term planning if you’re citing water movement as an area where China is doing better.
In the USA, any non-private government investment is considered to be foolish and doomed at best, and an existential threat to business at worst. The best we can do is “public-private partnership” where all the profits get absorbed by middle men, preventing virtuous cycles and still leaving a cap on risk and future planning.
The main public reasons for preventing expansion of power infrastructure were environmental. That's at least nominally very forward looking. Ironically if we had taken China's "burn everything today and figure tomorrow out when it comes" approach we'd actually be better prepared for this.
The West have been executing a long-range plan for 30 years on this one, the lack of power plants is intentional. There have been any number of roadblocks and people working hard to prevent the West doing specifically what the Chinese have done with the goal of maintaining the high air quality that Western countries tend to enjoy.
If anything the West's culture has been doing more long term planning. It is quite difficult to force an economy not to produce something.
The environmentalist movement. There is a clear trade off between environmental and industrial success, humans don't know how to do both.
https://aqicn.org/map/world - US is generally green and yellow, China tends to dip into the oranges and reds, especially in the industrial zone. It is tightly linked to the fact that China has a powerful electricity grid.
is a powerful electricity grid bad for the environment? is the environment worth sacrificing to make the numbers go up? do you want oxygen bottles to be a subscription service?
Yes, yes, no. Nobody has figured out how to run a powerful grid without eating a lot of environmental damage. That is a significant factor in the article headline of "The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over".
> There is huge pressure to prove and scale radical alternative paradigms like memory-centric compute such as memristors, or SNNs, etc. That's why I am surprised we don't hear a lot about very large speculative investments in these directions to dramatically multiply AI compute efficiency.
Because the alternatives lack the breakthroughs that give them an edge against current-state AI and don't generate the hype like transformers or diffusion models. You have stuff like neuromorphic hardware that is hardly accessible and in its infancy, e.g. SpiNNaker. You have disciplines like Computational Neuroscience that try to model the brain and come up with novel models and algorithms for learning, which, however, are computational expensive or just perform worse than conventional deep learning models and may benefit from neuromorphic hardware. But again, access is difficult to such hardware.
In Germany, software engineer is a trade you go to trade school for three years while working in a company in parallel. I don't think that IT education and computer science in universities should have a stronger focus on SE as universities are basically a trade school for being a researcher.
Yes, but it is more of a cultural thing than anything else. Studying computer science to be a software developer* is like studying mechanical engineering to be a machine operator.
* except if you are developing complicated algorithms or do numeric stuff. However, I believe that the majority of developers will never be in such a situation.
A software degree or a CS degree with a more applied focus will teach you way better than the trade schools will. It'd be nice if that weren't the case, but from all I've seen it is.
So you end up in that weird spot where it would work very well for someone with a strong focus on self-learning and a company investing into their side of the training, but at that point you could almost skip the formal part completely and just start directly, assuming you have some self-taught base. Or work part-time will studying on the side, and get the more useful degree that way. Plenty places will hire promising first-year uni students.
At any point in time there are probably many competing ideologies, even ones that are based on strength. For example, "speak softly but carry a big stick" is based on strength, but is pretty different than "they must wake up scared".
The issue with the "scared" approach is that all it takes is one country with that ideology for escalations to occur and everyone else to adopt that mindset.
