For those who are unfamiliar, Diplomacy is a very simple 7 player board game where every outcome is deterministic - combat is purely a "more units beat fewer units" affair, with the defender winning ties. This means that real opportunities to advance generally come from convincing another player to help you out, thus Diplomacy. And of course while some players find great success from always being honest and sticking to agreements... That is not the most common form of human play.

I built this tournament to see what today's models would do when given reason and opportunity to form alliances, gang up on each other, backstab partners, and generally behave like terrible people. Spoiler: the best models are willing to do so, and will plan opportunities over the course of multiple turns.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49360729

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I spent the last few years shipping enterprise software with Replicated to 3rd party clusters - installation, licensing, support, reporting, and more.

Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?

My response was meant to illustrate that this was essentially not a "preventable gun death", or at least not preventable by any level of gun control ever implemented in a Western country. Similarly, the assassination of Shinzo Abe using a homemade pistol/blunderbuss was not a preventable gun death.

(The rifle used isn't known yet, but only one shot was fired)

Sure, but if your biggest export is your country's particular flavor of monopoly money, is it actually in your counterparty's best interests to trade with you?

Certainly Iraq pre-invasion made them look like a pushover!

That's not to say that invading would be painless, but let's not pretend that Canada would have a chance.

"Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.

So who knows at this point

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1885812342526460184

(This is also the US's stated reason for tariffs on Canada)

Trade makes things more efficient. Trade gives access to resources not available otherwise. Trade allows greater economies of scale, and production efficiencies via comparative advantage.

Trade is also not fundamentally necessary for the US in the way it is for essentially every other country on the planet, because the US is large enough, diverse enough, and resource rich enough to (with a fair bit of pain!) survive on our own.

I do not think it will come to that, but it is true.

A future starship could plausibly be the first rocket to fly to space unmanned, return, and then fly humans to space!