‘You’re the only one I can talk to,’ the girl told an AI chatbot; then she took her own life - baltimoresun.com

"LLMDeathCount.com" willfully misrepresents the article and underlying issue. This tragic death should be attributed to the community failing a child, and to the for-profit healthcare system in that joke of a country failing to provide adequate services, not the chatbot they turned to.

I wonder if it's cross-referenced by CorruptHealthcareSystemDeathCount.com

Or the LLM companies will offer "poison as a service", probably a viable business model - hopefully mitigated by open source, local inference, and competing models.

My hope is that LLMs will help open source developers provide reasonable alternatives to the gatekeeping and spyware that corporations are now making their bread and butter. Example: Recent tried to use Unity LTS for a small project - the software is a joke now, basic functionality is broken out of the box. A couple of hours with an LLM and I had all the features I needed using a more lightweight library, monogame. Not an operating system, but I'm hoping the pattern will continue as LLMs get more proficient at code - the moat of "this is hard and laborious to do" will be drained.

In retrospect, from experience, I'd take the LLM.

China has approximately 250 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US. This infrastructure is integrated with military production. US-allied shipbuilding capacity in Japan and South Korea is within striking range of mainland China. I do not think it is reasonable to think that the US can win a sustained naval war against China, and how else would the US defend Taiwan?

https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...

Getting sicker: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6221922/

Getting stupider: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=9

Obamacare is straight up porkbarrelling: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/apr/01/barack-oba...

The DoE's policy is to stop educating people unless it's profitable: https://www.propublica.org/article/education-department-publ...

I think we're going to see a substantial continual decline in both health and education outcomes as the system continues to be sabotaged, for money.

The most shocking part is qualitative though. As a non-American, having a conversation with an American about their politics is often stepping into a minefield of cognitive dissonance, patriotism, and blindness, from people who are otherwise wealthy and well-intentioned. Truly the most propagandized people. Such is the course of empire.

Authoritarianism in China has a significantly different flavor to US authoritarianism. The US is serving the goals of their dominant elite industries - finance and tech. China has an engineering culture amongst the elite, and is inclined to solve problems with productivity and megaprojects rather than handing money to purely extractive industries.

For an example of the difference between their flavors of authoritarianism and the outcomes they bring, compare their health care systems - the USA has one of the most expensive in the world at ~$14,500 per capita, and poor outcomes due to privatized corruption, while China's 14th 5-year plan has brought universal health care for approx ~$650 per person. China's average life expectancy is higher than the US's.

The US is, objectively, extremely corrupt, and is transitioning to authoritarianism to protect that corruption. China's authoritarianism achieves measurable goals, and has broad (though not universal) public support.

The USA will get curb stomped in a war. They just don't have anything but a massive military buildup from decades of pork barrelling unnecessary military contracts. Their population is sick and stupid. They have alienated their allies. They will lose.

Mexico has about 1/17th of the manufacturing capacity of the US - adds around 5.8%. America has a labor shortage in manufacturing, which is unlikely to be filled with foreign workers given the current crackdown on brown people. They're also annihilating their intellectual capacity by again cracking down on brown people, and defunding universities.

China is already leading the world in manufacturing and expanding rapidly, their universities are world class, and they have almost caught up in technology. Given their investments in education and strong culture of academic achievement, it's unreasonable to think they won't overtake the US in every domain in the next 3-5 years.

The economics is more about how much the defender is willing to spend in advance protection vs the expected value of a security failure

Never let a good crisis go to waste they say

'The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. ' [1]

Israel is functionally commiting genocide, after being an apartheid state for decades. Arguably their goal is ethnic cleansing, and mass murder is a means to that end.

[1] https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genoci...