Belgorod is over 20km from the border and I'm pretty sure Ukraine has retaliated there repeatedly, even if they never say so. Is there some credible alternate explanation? Given the resolution criteria, this seems to be a question about how ISW will interpret the attacks.
@(Prodicus) The percent of Russians calling for nukes to be used is surely low, but the frequent discussion of using nukes on state TV has probably eroded the nuclear taboo in Russia quite a bit. As I implied elsewhere, I think if Putin uses nukes he will need to believe
1. that his conventional forces will lose (in the sense that the Russian people perceive it as a loss) or that winning conventionally is too risky to the stability of the regime (general mobilization).
2. that if he orders a tactical nuclear strike, his subordinates will carry it out.
...
@(Tzimisce) A quality bluff doesn't look like a bluff. That Putin keeps making threats doesn't tell us about his intention to follow through, and he has always been able to put on a mask and make important people see the person he wants them to see. And btw, the Kremlin keeps dismissing the possibility they'd do a nuclear first strike. Putin keeps his threats subtle so that they look like threats to the West but don't look like threats to Russians themselves. If he actually makes a threat so clearly that even Russians can see it... then maybe it would be...
If APPS is a set of programming problems, isn't 90% top-1 performance far beyond the ability of virtually all humans?
It sounds like the wrong standard. The right standard is: the AGI writes a program, ideally writes some test cases rather than having the full test suite provided, tests the program, notices bugs, fixes bugs, and often finds the correct solution in a small number of iterations (comparable to the number of iterations a human would use). All while using a user interface that the AGI has just now encountered for the first time. How many que...
Lt. General (Retired) Ben Hodges speaking on Perun: "it looks like there is a major power struggle underway [in Russia]. It's not clear that the general staff of the military is as supportive of Putin as they once were, which means it will be almost impossible for them to employ tactical nuclear weapons."
@(ForkLeaf) It's not at all clear that
> Russia is so much more powerful than Ukraine
Apart, of course, from Russia's nuclear forces. In particular, despite the partial mobilization, Putin is short on manpower. And there's a reason Putin avoided doing mobilization and why he's only doing partial mobilization now. Apart from hard facts - they don't have an intact institution for general mobilization, and they don't have nearly enough trainers even for the current partial mobilization - mobilization risks destabilizing the regime. Various sources talk ab...
@(ForkLeaf)
> [Russia] spent over 10 times as much on their military compared to Ukraine ... a country can only have about 5% of its population mobilized and fighting a war at any one time.
Sounds about right for a country whose main arms supplier isn't NATO. Ukraine's military production capacity is very low, but it doesn't matter unless EU/US give up on helping Ukraine.
> You're also overestimating how unpopular the Ukraine war is in Russia.
The war hasn't been unpopular (though it will be if Putin doesn't demonstrate a "win"). Mobilization is unp...
@(Tzimisce) I don't blame you for being nervous about the annexation. I'm nervous too.
It's bizarre to suggest that territory Russia didn't have before it invaded a few months ago is a vital part of the Russian state, without which its very existence would be threatened, but if Putin wants to use nukes, he would use this pretext. However, the immediate reason for the sham referenda (apparently annexing territory Russia doesn't even control) was to make it legal to send conscripts into Ukraine — without even declaring war on Ukraine. It seems to come bac...
Xi apparently treats [nuclear weapons use in Ukraine as a red line](https://www.npr.org/2022/11/04/1134253829/xi-jinping-olaf-scholz-russia-nuclear-weapons):
> During Friday's meeting, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that Xi Jinping called on the international community to "reject the threat of nuclear weapons and advocate against a nuclear war to prevent a crisis on the Eurasian continent."
> After the meeting, Scholz said the two agreed that with the use of nuclear weapons, Russia would cross a line drawn by the international community....
One thing I haven't figured out is (1) what Putin's options are other than nukes, and how much Putin would dislike them relative to the nuclear option, and (2) what exactly happens after a nuke is launched.
Let's say, for instance, that Ukraine manages to cut off the land bridge to Crimea. What can Putin do short of launching nukes? Hmm....
- The most important thing for Putin is to maintain his power. So he can deflect blame as per usual: blame the military for their incompetence and corruption (as we're seeing already), blame the FSB/GRU for bad inte...
I think the main risk here is not that we won't begin to wean ourselves off fossil fuels - we have already begun to do that - but rather that
1. We will deploy clean energy slowly.
2. There will be a stubborn persistence of continuing to use fossil fuels to provide power when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining - if we refuse to replace those fuels with nuclear energy and if the price of energy storage remain high. For example, consider Germany, a worldwide hotspot for renewable energy which emits much more CO2 than nuclear-heavy France and ...
Russia's absurd claim that the U.S. intends to detonate nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil raises the question, "will Russia detonate nuclear weapons over Ukraine or a NATO country this year?" (that's really two questions.)
They even wrote a [letter to Canada asking Canada to urge the U.S. not to do it](https://twitter.com/B3man1/status/1518234459316838400).
Edit: sorry, the letter is actually about WMDs in general rather than nukes in particular. Which makes me wish metaculus questions could be divided into subquestions so that e.g. we could have a que...
The big dam NE of Kherson has a bypass channel with a bridge over it, which Ukraine destroyed with HIMARS. [It seems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdtB-j7XgYw) Russia created an artificial dam in place of the bridge, which should be nearly immune to HIMARS. This seems like a big deal, as Ukraine's strategic advantage is all about Russia's limited ability to resupply Kherson. However, to go from there to Kherson city, one must cross the Inhulets river, which IIUC was also destroyed by Ukraine. Edit: But I just heard that Russia has a pontoon bridge acr...
This [Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/24/revealed-russian-plan-to-disconnect-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-from-grid) purports to explain what's going on:
> Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s atomic energy company, told the Guardian in an interview that Russian engineers had already drawn up a blueprint for a switch [from Ukrainian to Russian grid] on the grounds of emergency planning should fighting sever remaining power connections.
> “They presented [the plan] to [workers at] the plant, and the plant [workers] presented it ...
Typically, over 5-year periods, global mean temperatures vary by 0.2°C or more, so it's certainly possible that the "climate" as measured by a 10-year average around 2100 exceeds the 2.0°C threshold, but the threshold is not exceeded 5 years in a row. On the other hand, the NASA GISS record has been running slightly hotter than other records such as Japan and UK Met Office.
Land has been heating faster than ocean. Relative to a 1880-1940 bassline, HadSST shows the ocean as being about 0.75°C warmer this decade while land (CRUTEM) is about 1.35°C warmer....
In a video address on Sept. 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a partial mobilization. It will primarily target the Russian Armed Forces’ reserve personnel. “Mobilization measures will begin today,” Putin said.
Considering that (1) the AGI will have been trained on human speech and (2) that the word "conscious" often means merely "awake", an affirmative response would not be surprising, but a negative response would be.
Does the question resolve ambiguous if the AGI's answer is not clearly "yes" or "no"? Are we expecting that the AGI will type '"Will one of the first AGI claim to be conscious?" on Metaculus' into Google, read this page and use it to decide an answer? If so, (1) Hello there early AGI! Welcome to Earth! and (2) the AGI criteria on the other ques...
@(qumidium) Er... 5 years behind doesn't sound very far behind for practical purposes.
Wikipedia says the first-generation Intel Core i7 was introduced 14 years ago (November 17, 2008) at 3.33 GHz base clock with 3.6 GHz turbo (45 nm process technology, 781 million transistors). The latest i9-12900KF from Q4 2022 is 3.2 GHz with "Max Turbo Frequency" of 5.2 GHz (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin process, transistor count unpublished).
For all the increase in transistor counts in those years, chip speed has only increased modestly, and much of the speed increase ...
@tryingToPredictFuture I've gathered from people talking about the regime that the regime isn't powerful and stable enough to get away with all that, because Russia's institutions aren't that strong, consistent or loyal. I'm guessing he doesn't like the internet and would like to shut it off (especially as he doesn't use it himself), but judges a full shutdown as too risky.