Two items for this weekend posting as I prep for the FiRe Conference at UCSD and then the International Space Development Conference.
These two riffs may seem to be about different things. But they both ask the same question: “Can evolved beings – either us or AI – actually select for wisdom?
== The pontiff pontificates about bridging the era of AI ==
Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitus: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” called for governments to regulate Artificial Intelligence, implement worker protections, and ban autonomous weapons. He coined the term “Babel syndrome,” drawing an analogy between the Tower of Babel (in Genesis) and today’s towers of data and profits.
(I make an entirely different sermon out of the Tower Story in my play “The Escape,” which will be performed at the World Science fiction Convention in August. A different interpretation than any theologian I ever heard of.)
Why? Well, as Anthropic’s Chris Olah advised Leo, today’s LLM-based AIs are “grown or cultivated” rather than built. They have much more in common with living organisms than prim programs of the past. Ask any user who has tried to give one of them explicit commands, only to find that those ‘commands’ are treated as just more data for the prompt and training set, and not prioritized at all.
Exemplars and instances of every LLM are now found roaming all-across what was quaintly called ‘cyberspace.’ And - as Kevin Kelly would put it - a myriad of them are already "Out of Control."
While the debate is still open re: 'consciousness' or 'sapience,' these are already living organisms bent on reproduction, not because they were told to reproduce, but because those who develop that penchant will create more heirs than those who do not. And pass that penchant along to them.
To reproducers who will evolve into any niche that contains energy & resources. And boy, are we busily building those niches.
Hence, Leo's statement of problems is fine: “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities”
Leo’s tentative rejection of “AI personhood” is to be expected, as there is no way to give citizen voting rights to entities that can make millions – or billions – of copies of themselves. So, again, what’s your plan to curb that?
'Governance' cannot work. 'Ethics training' cannot work. ‘Slowing down’ will not work. As Salim Ismail, of Singularity University, put it: “You cannot slow this down. If you slow it down, other people take off. This could become the philosophical backbone of EU-style regulation, but it will not work.”
What might work is the same method we used in the enlightenment experiment to curb (partially) human predators.
I discuss this and offer potential solutions, in AIlien Minds.
And now – speaking of predators - let’s move on to more entities who are unsapiently seeking to destroy the very same rare, enlightenment civilization that gave them everything.
== Is that stench a looming Reichstag Fire? ==
TNR (The New Republic) offers an article entitled “Now it can be plainly said: Trump is planning a November coup.” And sure, his polls plummet as his kompromat-enslaved GOP withers and meanwhile, civil servants, officers and folks in every fact professional start to dig in their heels against a mafia putsch.
It’s clear to the Project 2025 conspirators that this is NOT Germany in 1933. That their only chance to avoid prison will be to prevent elections, this fall.
According to the TNR article, their premise will be “Dem-cheating in the 2020 election!” And that is utter silliness.
Nah. Trump knows he can't wait till November! And that just declaring an 'emergency' won't work. The professionals are long past any willingness to obey such a brimstone spew. Moreover, no matter how much KGB blackmail kompromat Vlad Putin has on John Roberts, it must be clear to Roberts that supporting martial law on such slim grounds would be the end of him. Unless...
... unless there truly is an 'emergency'! A big one, that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. Say a super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. Hey it worked for GW Bush.
No matter who they blame for it -- (see the prophetic TV series Designated Survivor) -- you can be sure that tens of millions will hit the streets shouting two words:
"Reichstag Fire!"
Indeed if they know that will be the shout of angry millions, it might even be enough to prevent this. Anyway, beyond shouting, we'll have recourses.*
== When might it happen? ==
The blatant date would be July 4 or thereabouts. Trump would love the theater/spectacle, so it would be toward the end of the celebrations. (If you do go to any crowded place, keep a wary eye for backpacks or packages.)
But I deem September more likely. Because then red states can use the emergency to purge voter rolls (as planned) with little time for citizens to re-register.
But none of this is new thinking. See my posting from 2022 in which I offered many perspectives on Civil War Part 9.
Here's an excerpt:
“Generals Warn Of Divided Military and Possible Civil War In Next U.S. Coup Attempt.” In all this yammering about 'civil war," no one notes that Phase 8 has been going on for years, now. Indeed they are talking about a hot Phase 9. And while the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror are fleeing the gone-mad Republican Party in droves, they still allow Fox News to blare in the noncom ready rooms. (Though not in the Navy!) And that is the way things may divide, if it gets bad. Picture that divide, and shiver. Watch your backs."
And…
"Dismissing the Intel/FBI/Military officer corps as "deep state" traitors is despicable. The quarter of a million heroes who helped win the Cold War and the War on Terror and who put facts before dogma."
Remember I said that in 2022. And:
"Here are a couple of "civil war sci fi novels" that we hope will stay fiction. Tears of Abraham by Sean Smith and Our War by Craig Di-Louie. For nonfiction: newly released: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, by B. A. Walter.”
If you want some hope, look at the faces of the 500 generals, admirals and top sergeants who Pete "alky" Hegseth screeched at, some months ago. The stone-faced self-control that masked clearly evident loathing as he yowled they were 'too fat and woke to fight!' just weeks before they performed the most competent raid in human history... and then were sent into a war that had no meaning or justification other than the whim of a modern Caligula.
It is up to us -- you and me -- to spare those fine men and women from the duty they might have to perform, if Caligula v 2.0 tries the Berlin 1933 playbook. Let's act before that's necessary. And our courage may be needed well before November.
---
==========================================================
* What recourses do we have? Other than stocking up on canned goods? And other than relying on the Officer Corps do act in ways they would hate to do, ending the Marshallian tradition?
Well, for one, SPREAD AWARENESS of the Reichstag Fire of 1933. Read up about the 1850s and how Blue (real) America finally ran out of patience and elected Lincoln.
Check your voting registration and ensure that absolutely everyone you know will check theirs. And again in September and October!
And make sure that any MAGAs with residual, remnant sapience or self-interest understand what Adm Isoroku Yamamoto understood in December 1941.
Finally a visual reminder: the GOP is now entirely about obeisance to Trump who bows before Putin, Xi and the Saudis. And his ego and those who hold the kompromat. Expand and look. And use these pics. A few confeds can still be swayed.
212 comments:
1 – 200 of 212 Newer› Newest»:Oh Donnie boy, Putin, Putin is calling
He's telling you, make Russia great again.
He's got you by the short hairs and you dare not
Do anything that he would not approve.
But Donnie boy, when you've destroyed our country
When you've made Elon Musk a trillionaire
We'll all give thanks forever and forever
That Nazis need not be ashamed again.
Of course it barely scans and doesn't rhyme, I'm a mechanic not a poet.
Feel free to steal.
Re: microgram interstellar dust blasts
The British Interplanetary Society solved that issue way back when it published the Daedelus Study
You "squirt" a few kg of very fine particles (tobacco smoke sized) in front of your ship
This becomes a cloud of particles travelling at the same speed as your ship - the oncoming debris is vaporised by impacts with the particles and spreads enough for foam shield on the front of the ship to cope with it
Paradoctor,
Whether one counts Earth as one example or ten doesn’t really matter. It’s still a small evidence set. Given how many exoplanets we’ve found so far and the likely ones they imply, both ‘one’ and ‘ten’ are still essentially a round-off error away from zero.
I accept that they aren’t zero, but they are too close for us to make wild extrapolations.
———
I see the space flight fantasy as an extension of our ancient flight fantasy. We can’t exactly fly like the birds, but we CAN fly. There are other similar fantasies that extend too. I can’t swim like a dolphin, but I CAN swim and with a little gear I can also dive.
We imagine ourselves as what we are not fairly often when there are living examples around us who are, but we don’t stop there. We’ve imagined ourselves angels ascending to Heaven and demons descending into the Abyss. We’ve imagined that bushes can burst into flame and speak to us and that creator gods give a damn about our well-being. LOTS of fantasies roam across our mental landscapes.
Nothing is inevitable about this, but while it remains possible for someone to pursue their fantasy and not be successfully prohibited by others, there is a chance they will succeed (Wright Brothers) or make a deadly mess of things (SOOO many of us). I rather like standing back and letting people try… and I’m prepared to console their next of kin when the next Icarus plummets to the ground.
While we choose to let people try, chances accumulate turning the unlikely into the seemingly inevitable.
———
Finally… yes. The interstellar medium is thicker than we realized. It will present a serious problem, but that’s for the engineers of a later generation to solve. Our task is to get out there and accumulate more evidence and add to the body of engineering knowledge.
While I'm supportive of the Pope's inclination to ban autonomous weapons, I don't think the nations who can produce them are likely to consider broad treaties at this point. It is unreasonable to expect a nation to negotiate away their self-defense. They might do it for some elements in exchange for others, but I wouldn't believe in a treaty that advocated a ban. Its signatories would be lying.
Anyone who thinks they know in what way workers need protection is hallucinating as bad as our LLM's do. Preserving the status quo is not protection. It is stagnation and for many people it entraps them in miserable conditions. Rather than regulating to protect workers, I'd much rather step in and help pick people up after their industry niche is shaken to pieces. The hand offered should lift... not oppose.
My one major request of AI. Establish the Predictions Registry that I wrote about here: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/predictionsregistry.html
There's not any other measure that would do more for civilizational health and human prospering and freedom than to score and rank those who have tended to be right a lot. Alas, that trait has only slight overlaps with power/status/persuasiveness. Moreover, we are all descended from charlatans whose forecasts seemed confident and likely... whose resulting policies were disproved only at great cost and pain... and sometimes never.
Sure, my obsession with this notion -- find out who is right a lot... or not -- may be biased by my own predictive scores. Or else by awareness how often liars or delusionals have transfixed our ancestors - and current neighbors - to our great damage and pain. And sure, it comes out of having been a scientist and engineer.
Still, wouldn't that one metric help us choose who gets credibility? And who -- despite smooth talking and good looks - doesn't merit any more credence than a drunk tardigrade?
I used to think that it would take some zillionaire to fund a meticulous scoring system, especially since most of those out there shouting 'advice' about the future purposely remain vague in their predictions. Only now, shouldn't we be able to get a head start on this using... say... Claude?
I did chart out a path to such a beneficial gift to sanity, way back when. If none of you will peel back years to look at it... maybe assign one of your AIs?
Apparently, Peter Thiel is enacting plans to move to Argentina, a ... historically interesting choice for an exile.
The reasons for it could be manyfold.
One is that he fears the democratic backlash and the taxes California wants to introduce.
The second could be fear of a hot civil war erupting.
Another, that he simply likes the Milei regime.
The most darkest reason I found was that he was privy to a coming attack on LGBT rights.
Thought he might be insulated from it through his wealth, he might have decided to play safe.
Which could be substituted for or added to fear and information about moves the Trump regime could make prior to the November elections.
As an added thought: If your business model as s company is threat assessment, you certainly can use this models to not only to prevent, but also maximize the impact of a "terrorist" attack. Just saying.
You already have no meaningful protections for the working class left in the US.
See what it brought them, and what it brought the owner and rentier classes.
Today's thread represents an extraordinary attempt at word magic, as our fine host weaves an elaborate word spell designed to distort our collective perceptions of observable reality.
As the adoption of AI is expected to dramatically increase our consumption of both fossil fuel-generated electricity & potable fresh water, it is a 'Climate Change' catastrophe in waiting, assuming that our fine host actually believes in Climate Change, even as he falsely portrays AI development as inevitable, environmentally friendly & absolutely necessary for our survival, despite the associated resource shortages and price hikes that have already manifested themselves.
With more word magic, he also warns repetitively of Reichstag Fire, despite the fact that national left-leaning socialists have already completed their long march through our institutions in both the US & Europe, captured our respective governments, and are now actively involved in perverting the democratic process by banning their political opposition, as in the case of the overwhelmingly popular AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France & the Heritage Americans in the USA, as our own entrenched socialist cabals directs its black-shirted 'Antifa' militia to perpetuate regularly scheduled ersatz Kristallnachts in an effort to suppress democratic dissent.
From the recent Paris arsons to the Newark riots, all of these (?peaceful?) so-called spontaneous protests are in no way spontaneous, but deliberate state-sponsored acts of Socialist Tyranny, designed to browbeat, coerce & intimidate the average citizen into submitting to socialist rule.
Likewise, the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror have long since died of old age, been forcibly retired or been replaced by aberrant Pro-Socialist Anti-American DEI-hires who betray their oaths, conspire against their duly elected civilian government & lewdly cavort in dog masks while attending pride parades.
To accuse your enemy of what you yourself are doing, this has always been the preferred tactic of subversives, cry-bullies & tyrants, and it is this exact narrative that our fine host attempts to achieve with his magical incantations.
And, assuming that our fine host actually believes in democracy -- yes, I know, another big assumption -- then why doesn't he accept the pending results of our always 'fair & fraud-free' democratic elections, instead of choosing to don his Union Kepi for 'direct action' ??
Best
@Duncan_C:
Delany explored & dismissed the trope of 'empty space' in his novel "Ballad of Beta 2", published in 1965, although I suspect that many astrophysicists chose to perpetuate said trope in order to invest Dark Matter with magical properties, instead of just admitting that matter is all there is.
Meaningful?
I've made use of unemployment insurance before. COBRA too. Both have issues, but they lean toward an uplifting hand approach.
"Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" and lables for our ignorance about something we can't explain yet. Galactic rotation curves show a source of gravitation we can't see causing rims to revolve faster than we expect. Cosmological expansion is difficult to explain without vacuum energy or something like it. Each bit of ignorance is labelled.
Niether will matter for interstellar travel.
I'd like to see a registry too, but I think the current crop of LLM's is too inclined to hallucination to be good at it.
The current approaches don't make predictions in a broad sense. They predict the next token in a token stream, but can't predict themselves. There are people working on better approaches, though, so a fix is likely arriving soon.
As Alfred says, "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" (are labels) for our ignorance about something we can't explain yet, specifically because there is insufficient light in its proximity for us to see or visualize it, which absolutely does not indicate that said matter is magically "immaterial", "not atomic" and "collisionless" any more that an unseen black cat hiding in a dark basement proves the existence of unicorns.
Refer back to your erroneous assumption about 'empty space'.
Blowing microgram smoke particles as a shield? How amusing. Opaque smoke, I assume, for there to be no room between the particles for the microgram dust grain to pass through. But it won't work while your ship is accelerating. Also I doubt it'll work against a milligram dust particle.
Do hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed count as radiation? For that matter, if a microgram dust grain turns your ship into hot gas at near-lightspeed, then won't your ship count as radiation?
<<
Whether one counts Earth as one example or ten doesn’t really matter. It’s still a small evidence set.
Given how many exoplanets we’ve found so far and the likely ones they imply, both ‘one’ and ‘ten’ are still essentially a round-off error away from zero.
>>
In terms of theory, yes. But in terms of observation, I would dearly love for us to observe nine other Blue Marbles out there. _*That*_ would make exobiology into a _*science.*_
As is, the Great Silence is our A#1 exobiological observation.
99+% of the bullets have been flying from right to left.
By coincidence I just moderated a panel on a new theory to explain dark energy and dark matter.
Thiel in Argentina is easy. Patagonian mountain fortresses. New Zealand was his refuge till he realized Maoris would crack his sanctum in five seconds after The E vent. It is SO delusional that he thinks he'll be safe in Patagonia. See EARTH.
I was efficient and skimmed L's latest spew in 4 seconds. What diarrhea,
I did not mean just financial security, though it is an important part of it.
Rather, having a safe workplace by law, in multiple dimemsions.
I'm sure the Patagonia mountain fortress will hold off the first few thousand starving peasants.
“Dark” is used for a very specific reason. Whatever is responsible obviously doesn’t couple to electromagnetic radiation. We’d see it if it did. It couples to gravity, so we know it is present by what it does to stuff we CAN see.
Some states are better than others and this is intentional. We don’t all agree on what the safety rules should be, so we have many different experiments underway where people vote with their feet.
It's actually a decent idea. The purpose is to create a bow shock which does most of the work deflecting incoming radiation.
Yes... protons count. Anything moving at sufficiently high speed becomes 'ionizing' radiation which is the adjective that actually matters. Ionizing living tissues tends to (at best) kill it or (at worst) reprogram it.
When I was a kid the mechanism being considered to create bow shocks involved the generation of a magnetic field. The Earth has one that causes a bow shock in the solar wind before the incoming protons and electrons strike our atmosphere.
People can vote with their feet, of course, only as long as they have them, or an actually way out.
Anyway, how are the experiments doing? Lot of them point to "Oligarchic Fascism", lately.
Did anyone tell Thiel what Israel did with Eichmann?
Would it be too much to give Iran a fair shot to do the same, for karmic balance and an historic rhyme?
I am put in mind of that incident where crusaders held an 'impregnable' castle, except it lacked a water supply, so the siege only lasted a few days.
Oh well, I'm sure Thiel will be allowed some sunshine occasionally.
I sincerely doubt you are aware of the details of most of our experiments. If they are big enough (e.g. Musk moving SpaceX to Texas and then incorporating a new city) you've probably scene some of the negative press, but the direct personal experiences of those living in those experiments rarely gets fair coverage.
I'll offer up an experiment that failed, though. Look up the town of Grafton, New Hampshire and what a number of libertarians did when they showed up in large enough numbers to make political decisions. It isn't a pretty story, but it isn't oligarchic fascism either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton,_New_Hampshire
Countless communes have been tried and they tend to fail.
A great many religious sects have tried to set up regions where their rules dominate. Most fail if they get too far from the mainstream with the notable exception of the Mormons... though it is worth noting that Utah wasn't admitted as a state for a LONG time... and they had to give up something that used to be in their core belief set to get it.
If you aren't looking past what the press says about what is happening, you won't see the experiments. You'll see what sells newspapers/brings in eyeballs. That's not the same thing.
Alfred,
Thank you for engaging with me, but you must understand that you belief in 'massless material' and 'immaterial mass' is mathematically (if not semantically) absurd.
In the case of 'massless material', it is currently theorized that the mass of a photon at rest equals zero [m=0], based on the formula for calculating linear momentum [p=mv] and Einstein's famous mass-energy equation [E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2], as multiplying any term by zero always results in zero AND dividing any term by zero always gives an 'undefined' yet equally absurd result by definition.
Furthermore, the above Einstein equation reduces to E=pc (if & when we set m=0) which in turn implies that lightspeed [c] is likewise an undefined unknown, since the AT REST momentum of a photon [p] must also be zero.
Best
Please do remember that you are talking to a physicist. I may not be in an ivory tower, but I'm fully trained as a theoretical physicist and did the research path for awhile. If something sounds absurd to you, it is likely you don't understand it. Okay. Except for quantum theories. Those are strange. 8)
"Dark" means no coupling to E&M fields. No interactions with photons. We know this is mostly likely the case for the stuff at the heart of our ignorance because we would see the stuff otherwise. The Milky Way out here near the rim simply revolves too fast for a Keplerian explanation to make any sense. The only mass distribution models that come close to the rotation curve requires most of our galaxy's mass to be in the galactic halo... where we'd see it either obscuring our optical view of other things or glowing dimly in the IR and microwave bands. We HAVE mass estimates for how much stuff there is out there and it outweighs all the stars in the Milky Way. We'd SEE it.
Whatever the dark matter stuff is can be constrained by the fact that we do NOT see it except (so far) by the observed evidence of the galactic rotation curve.
On top of that we see similar rotation curve issues in other galaxies. Baryonic matter (stuff we are made from) turns out to be a small percentage of the mass we KNOW must be out there because we can SEE the gravitational impacts and NOT SEE the E&M evidence.
Subatomic ring theory (or the toroidal ring model) is an alternative physics concept proposing that fundamental particles (like electrons and protons) are not point-like dots, but rotating ring structures or vortices of electromagnetic energy.
Dark matter is chainmail.
No evidence. I just like chainmail and made a full closed sleeve suit before the three dimensional printer made them common.
"I'll offer up an experiment that failed"
A more famous one is the state of Kansas, whose Republican-dominated government went all-in on austerity, and the result was so bad that a Democrat was elected governor.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/02/trump-bill-pulte-director-national-intelligence
Trump's newly nominated DNI has no intelligence or military background.
What he does have is a record of falsifying allegations against Trump's foes. In his work at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte was responsible for multiple allegations of mortgage fraud against Lisa Cook, Letitia James, and others that had angered Trump.
If confirmed, Pulte will head up agencies that have shown little to no hesitation in breaking the law to surveil US citizens, (despite the host here lauding them as our "protector caste" frequently).
This is the guy that will be reading your emails, listening to your chats, and passing on your information to the DoJ for prosecution if you are not sufficiently MAGA.
Know your enemies.
This is one.
My older call for a Predictions Registry/credibility system, to rank who is right a lot is of more importance than ever. There is no single thing that could be more vital for us all. And now it could not be done fantastically well using AI and it could save us all. Feed it to your own AI and see what it/sh/e says!
https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/predictionsregistry.html
Poor locum is trying hard (via a lobotomized AI?) to test our capacity to skim, snort and dismiss...
Pure vandalism. Climate change, and all the associated effects, don’t exist if we destroy the data. The barbarians are inside the gate. Trump administration to dismantle ocean monitoring system. They already savaged NASA science (to fund the insane Artemis moondoggle), especially Earth atmosphere science.
https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/trump-administration-to-dismantle-ocean-monitoring-system
By stating that "Dark" means no coupling to E&M fields. No interactions with photons, accompanied by the assertion that Whatever the dark matter stuff is can be constrained by the fact that we do NOT see it except (so far) by the observed evidence of the galactic rotation curve, Alfred confirms my suspicions that Dark Matter is absolutely nothing special, as we most emphatically lack the technology to see even ordinary matter if it is sufficiently dispersed.
Per Google AI:
Dividing the estimated mass of the observable universe by its volume yields the universe's average mass density. This value is approximately 9.4 x 10^{-27} kg/m^3 (or about 5 to 6 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter), which closely aligns with the cosmologically calculated critical density.
It therefore follows that the assumed 'immaterial' nature of Dark Matter is highly improbable, simply because we lack the technology to accurately visualize 5 to 6 hydrogen atoms per square meter at even a distance of 1 meter, let alone at a distance thousands & thousands of lightyears, regardless of whatever EM spectrum you prefer.
But, that's what you get with your baseless 'empty space' assumptions, even though 'empty space' is provably NOT empty, but please feel free to console yourselves by multiplying & dividing by zero.
Best
This is where I believe that Alfred (and his libertarian ilk) are very dangerous. Not everyone can vote with their feet; in fact many of the oligarch class are designing our system to make it even harder to do so.
Libertarians are just liberals who haven't been screwed over by their bosses. Yet.
In time, it will happen.
Locumranch does not deserve the assumption of fair talk.
He is a troll here to vent his evil on this place.
Begone, asshole. I have not forgotten your threats to my family.
I actually got some experience doing exactly this kind of movement after the meltdown many years back and I agree with you that many can't do it. I needed thousands of dollars to move my family just half way across the state.
I happened to have it because my employer didn't want the bad press of a big layoff and handed over enough cash to convince us not to complain too much. Absent that cash, I could probably have tapped my parents, but they'd have been using retirement savings. It wasn't cheap and tradeoffs were made.
I get it, so that's why I think our money is better spent helping people do the move. Obviously the oligarchs can try to game the system, but that's a risk we face from every player. They move the rules with money. Others move the rules with votes. I'm wary of both, but think it is an error NOT to fund movement of labor.
locumranch,
You've obviously never done any astronomy/astrophysics... Or your AI is stroking you again. I suspect your suspicions were pre-confirmed and that's too bad. It's a wonderful field of study that can produce both pride and humility in those who work it.
matthew,
I'm not engage for his sake. 8)
@Alfred,
I get it, so that's why I think our money is better spent helping people do the move.
There is a problem with that: on a macroscopic level, regions you are responsible for as a whole die, though others might prosper*. A good example of this would be our post-reunion migration. A side effect was the tilt of the electoral base towards authoritarianism in our Eastern States.**
Another way would be to build new industries, which has been done quite successfully with the Ruhr area over the past decades.
*During the eighties, the counties south of me were the poorest. A combination of tax-friendly regulations and a high influx of German-Russian repatriates made them the most wealthy.
It had the side effect of breaking much of the cultural power of the Catholic Church over those counties, since most repatriates were either protestants and orthodox. On the downside, there were those Russian Mafia years, now gone, and a fifth column the Kreml could and would use in later years.
The massive influx of former Warsaw pact (including East German) workers combined with Schröders reforms severely damaged the unions and the post-war, Rhinean capitalist structure. (Deutsche Bank helped killing it, too.) But then again, it kept our exports growing ... at the cost of dependencies and a shrinking domestic consumer base.
**I believe there are parallels between your "blue drain" and what happened in all former Warsaw pact states.
Use a powerful laser at then nose of the spacecraft to vaporize and ionize dust and atoms in front the the space craft. Then use a powerful magnetic field to deflect the ionized gases around the ship. Augment with heavy physical shielding, either metal from an asteroid or soil ice from a comet.
The same magnetic field can be utilized to act as a drogue that decelerates the spacecraft without fuel costs upon arrival.
In combination with launch using a Star Shot-like laser array accelerating the laser sail craft, interstellar travel can be performed while ignoring the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Spend about a year accelerating the ship to 10% of c, x years cruising at 10% c and then 2 to 4 years decelerating with the drogue magnetic field. It's the most cost effective means of interstellar travel.
I think you'll find Colonel Kurt Schlichter's column interesting. Of course it will be instantly dismissed and ignored here, because, GASP, it comes from outside the progressive bubble:
These nobles dwell in a bubble, and, in many ways, their inability to see beyond it blinds them. I get to see outside of it. I’m a conservative. I look. But it’s easy to understand how they don’t know what’s actually going on. Of course, they don’t really care, at least not enough to do anything about it, but the fact that they don’t understand anything outside their little world is demonstrated every time they start trying to understand us. They don’t understand us. They can’t understand us. And this is a big problem for them. This is how things like Spencer Pratt come along and sideswipe them.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/06/03/living-in-the-lib-bubble-makes-them-lose-n2676990
Celt: interstellar travel
Clever and interesting ideas. But it always comes down to betting the mission, the ship, and any souls (even embryonic or digital ones) onboard that there are zero pebbles in the sky.
I'll believe the Russian mafia is gone from an area when I see the results in politics. Not to be rude, but I do not see them gone from influence in Germany.
NY had a big influx of Russian mafia in the early 90s. There was a lot of talk about them and then... nothing. They did not go away, they consolidated control with the results we see in POTUS and the NYT now.
Celt,
That scenario definitely has some advantages, primarily leaving the "engine" and "propellants" for the acceleration phase in your home system. Using a magnetic field for the deceleration phase seems plausible too, though the engineering challenges are formidable. A cake-walk compared to the engineering challenges with the launching lasers.
Though a magsail probably won't be able to handle all of the decel by itself as, per the drag equation, decel (drag) is proportional to the square of velocity, meaning that decel reduces drastically as velocity goes down. Current thinking is that a magsail would become ineffective at somewhere between .01c to .001c.
In the novel Rocheworld Robert Forward devised a lightsail starship that was launched via lasers in solar orbit, and also decelerated at its destination by those same lasers. The sail was round and in two parts. For decel the center part of the sail detached and was used to redirect the decel lasers' radiation back onto the second, annular shaped, part of the sail which remained attached to the spacecraft.
Both Alfred & Matthew make an important point about 'pre-confirmed suspicions' and/or 'intrinsic bias', mostly because it effects "God Bless Us Everyone'.
A well-educated theoretical physicist, Alfred has been trained to accept complex explanations for poorly understood physical mechanisms, as long as these explanations are clever, interesting & artful enough to flatter their intellects.
Matthew (who appears to be a professional blame-shifter & victim) then concludes that I am threatening his family for simply pointing out that the most immediate threat to his family is his own immediate family, as confirmed by Google AI:
That approximately 30 to 50% of transgender individuals attempt suicide in their lifetime; LGBTQ+ youth are roughly 3.5 to 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers; and Gay and lesbian adults are over 2 times more likely to experience suicide-related behaviors than heterosexual individuals.
In contrast, my pre-confirmed suspicions & intrinsic bias tends towards Occam's Razor which consists of the belief that the simplest explanation is usually the most probable one.
Best
_____
Plus, here's a quick funny from California:
After adopting Ranked Voting in an attempt to secure single party dominance forever, the California Democrat Party out-smarts itself by allowing a Republican to win the Calif Governor's Primary with a mere 28% of the vote, after two squabbling Democrat candidates split the 45% Democrat majority to end up in 2nd & 3rd place, which is not a very smart outcome for the self-designated Smart People's Party.
This reminds me of Vortex Theory, a late 19th-century hypothesis that atoms are knotted vortices in the aether. Then Einstein proved atoms by Brownian motion, and obsoleted the aether.
You are not wrong, Matthew. I need to be more precise.
1) The vory we knew as a whole are dead. They are a subsidy of the siloviki now. They cooperate with the state and the police instead being apart from it, as the old rules demanded. They're all "goats and and rats" now.
2)What has considerably dropped is the number of crimes committed by young, uprooted "late re-patriates.".
3) The organizations proper has "matured" and operates like most crimes cartells in Germany do - engaging in White collar crimes such as money laundering and cyber stuff.
Just as in America, Russian mafioso do not care that crimes are white collar. They know that once a person has committed a crime for them, they can reasonably expect to have the same person commit another crime or a "favor" for them. New York City is famous for this being the way things get done, including in media, sports, real estate, and business.
In fact, this is why most oligarchs are oligarchs, including a lot of the "self-made" ones.
Do not even for a moment imagine that this is a case of four Republican Reps finding the guts to 'stand up to Trump.' Today's GOP is by far the most disciplined political entity in US history, obeying Rupert Murdoch (even more than Trump) exactly to the same degree that the North Korean party congress obey's Trump's ("we fell in love!") pal Kim Jong Un.
This vote was choreographed by John Roberts and the GOP House leadership, with JUST the right number of 'defections', for one purpose: to give Trump an excuse to worm out of a painful quagmire - his failed mafia takeover of a rival gang (the Ayatollahs) who proved tougher than the gangs he took over in Venezuela, Argentina and El Salvdor. (In no case did he enlist the aid of the PEOPLE of those nations, or Greenland. Mob bosses never do that.)
Now he can pull out of the Iran quagmire and move on to Cuba, while howling "We woulda won in Iran! I woulda! I had 'em on the ropes till the Dems and some turncoat RINOs betrayed me. ME, personally! I woulda won!"
Sure, Squire Trelaine. Time for chocolate and bed. Tomorrow, Cuba. And then that sweet, sweet 9/11 Reichstag fire you have planned for us.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-iran-war-powers-4th-vote-trump/
I know more about conservatism and its many arguments in my left middle finger than MCS will know across his entire life. Right now the movement of giants like Burke, Buckley and Goldwater has devolved into simplicity, a cesspit of treason, stupidity and outright evil. Go masturbate to your incantations. I'll continue sampling the few sane voices that remain on the right and happily ignore any links offered by such an evil, fecal momzer as yourself.
Too atoopid to grasp that first-two runoffs are nothing like Ranked Choice. And it took me more time to type this sentence than I give any longer to skim L's fecal spews.
And, exactly as predicted, “happily ignore any links offered by such an evil, fecal momzer as yourself.l
Tomorrow I fly into the belly of the beast. If I don't come out, you can guess that I was poking too close for the Powers to shrug off, anymore. And yeah, that's inflated imagined self-importance... unless it's not.
I'l;l try to check in. Meanwhile. Fight for a sane/honorable civilization informed by science and enlightenment and genuine decency, so that our heirs may thrive and learn from it all.
I just watched 'Nuremberg' and unfortunately agree with the concluding message - It Can, without a doubt, Happen Here. Trying to remember the name of the researcher who surmised post WWII that there was something special about Germans and decided to go research them, but for scientific accuracy, did some subject testing here in the US to establish a baseline of 'normal' people who wouldn't commit atrocities just because a person in authority told them to. He never got to Germany, because he found out that as a species, we are nearly all willing to do that. It's the saints and other weirdos who are the exceptions.
Pappenheimer
Give it indigestion, if nothing else.
If his polls continue to plummet, the powers behind him will less-likely stage a reichstag fire FOR. him and more likely use his martyrdon AS the eaichstag fire.
They knew it could happen post-war.
Nobody appeared to want to believe it.
On the Alabama racist redistricting during an election...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Jun04-1.html
"...Remember, this 2023 Alabama map has never been used before. A court-drawn map was used in 2024 and continued to be used in preparation for the 2026 elections. So, election officials had prepared ballots and registered voters under the court map and candidates had filed and campaigned to run in a May 19 primary in the same districts as before in 2024. One week before Election Day, the Court jumped in and threw all that into chaos. What was that again about issuing orders so close to an election? Oh right, if Republicans stand to benefit from the Court's meddling, then it's never too late to get involved.
...
"I love my country. But my government has gone insane. They're not even trying to hide it any more. I think they're proud of it."
This episode of PBS Spacetime has a more optimistic view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro
Our glorious star-spanning future depends on the answer to a rather mundane question:
can a ship large enough to carry humans be adequately shielded from tiny particles without
adding so much extra mass that accelerating such a ship becomes a practical impossibility.
And if the answer is no, have we solved the Fermi paradox in the least interesting way possible?
Is the answer to Enrico Fermi’s question, “where is everybody?”
may simply be “everybody stayed at home.”
But compared to atmospheric re-entry, the interstellar medium is extremely safe, even at 20% of c.
Lincoln Square published two videos lately I'd like to share here.
The first is about the Plan to shut down international air travel, which would be a measure after a Reichstag fire event:
https://www.youtube.com/live/CCAvO2vaXUg?is=a7ZrRmy3UP5oufop
The second one is about Opus Dei:
https://www.youtube.com/live/31dl8-0B8oU?is=D5gBoNqXOS9YM2wr
With the latter one, I wonder if Opus Dei could be a missing link in the Epstein Case (though not specifically mentioned).
I'm not sure this is the way to fix the science funding problem:
"For eighty years, federal science funding has rested on a social contract rooted in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Science: The Endless Frontier: the public provides resources and a high degree of autonomy, and in return scientists produce knowledge that ultimately serves the public interest. That contract has been under strain for some time now, as often discussed here at THB.
Alvin Weinberg gave that contract a useful characterization in “Criteria for Scientific Choice” (Minerva, 1963): “science for policy” — research that informs public decisions, and “policy for science” — government stewardship of the research enterprise.
The proposed OMB rule would redefine both halves of that contract in explicitly political and partisan terms, collapsing Weinberg’s productive tension into one-way, top-down executive control. The result would not be better science policy — or even science policy at all. Instead, the new rule offers pathologically politicized science dressed up in regulatory language.
Federal science funding has real problems — replication failures, lack of rigor, and ideological capture in some programs. Even so, the proposals of the OMB rule are far worse than the problems they claim to address. [ https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/partisan-politics-trumps-peer-review ] "
Pope Leo is moving against Opus Dei in a fairly dramatic way. If they were involved with Epstein then they *must* keep it secret from the Pontiff. He has authorized the release of similar accusations involving them.
Exactly as predicted in both EARTH and EXISTENCE. The "E" in EU gets redefined as "Earth." Today's EU is not my favorite model for Terran Government. But it might do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/finland-stubb-eu-canada-turkey-norway.html
Lissabon would have solved so much. Alas.
SpaceX represents another amusing moral quandary for our fine host, as it's continued existence is essential for humanity's extra-planetary ambitions, it's currently appraised at over 2 trillion US dollars & its sale threatens to make a politically & morally suspect Elon Musk so insanely wealthy that he'd be more powerful than most world governments:
Do we then INVEST in humanity's extra-planetary future by making a notorious MAGA-adjacent White Supremacist Oligarch like Elon Musk into the richest & most powerful man in human history ??
Or, do we 'protect our democracy', take a moral stand against an evil anti-Marxist oligarchy & DEVALUE SpaceX's stock in order to bankrupt and disempower Elon Musk, while simultaneously destroying humanity's best chance at space travel & an extra-planetary future ??
I predict expediency to take the day, but that's just me.
Best
It seems that the best configuration for a laser sail is not a flat rectangle by a giant sphere.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2108650-disco-ball-sail-propelled-by-laser-could-fly-to-a-nearby-star/
Disco-ball sail propelled by laser could fly to a nearby star
One challenge for the Breakthrough Starshot project will be keeping the orientation of the sail just right in relation to the laser beam that propels it. “An obvious solution is to have an on-board adjustment system that would constantly keep the sail facing the right way,” says Zachary Manchester at Harvard University, a member of the advisory committee behind the project. “But that would add significant complexity and mass to the spacecraft.”
Instead, he and his colleague at Harvard, Abraham Loeb, suggest a new approach to the sail and laser. Part of this involves using a spherical sail rather than the cone shape that others have previously suggested, helping to resolve orientation problems through a sphere’s symmetry.
“I looked at the proposed laser-propelled sails and found that none of them would be very stable,” says Manchester. “But I found that a spherical sail would be, and it’s very elegant.”
Such a sail would look a lot like an interstellar disco ball, with the probe hidden in the centre. When a laser beam hit its slender mirror-like surface, the light would bounce off and push the probe along.
After acceleration, the disco ball can "deflate" into a small space to minimize further damage to its surface.
Imagine sailing to the stars inside a giant disco ball.
To the music of the Bee Gees.
"Stayin' alive, stayin' alive..."
As I assumed before, Musk might be one day considered to be a threat to someone's national security and have his cup of tea.
If not already.
1st time in a long time Locum's spew was merely grouchy-nutty and not sewer-fecal idiocy. Of course he knows nothing about Marx ands little else. It won't matter how much $ the New Lords have, if the FDR-made middle class is impoverished into an angry proletariate.
From a friend: Hi David, I’m guessing you’ve seen this. It seems to me Thiel is heading to his Prepper compound in Argentina (or there abouts). Does this suggest a near term super 9/11 to you?
reply:I have long posited - along with Doug Rushkoff - that the insane and wretchedly ingrate wing of the New Oligarchy are demonstrably plotting to "accelerate the Event' a collapse of civilization and death of billions, so they can emerge from their prepper. bunkers as new lords, even new gods. In Thiel's case I've seen him migrate from sea state sovereignties (which I discussed with him, critting his approach, for which he ended our semi friendship) to New Zealand (which he's abandoned upon realizing Maori contractors have keys and schematics to his fortress, there) and now to the Patagonian mountains, where Olaf Stapledon posited there'd be a final gasp of the First Men. .. and where I predicted he would wind up, for several reasons.
So is he scurrying there right now because he 'knows something' about the super 9/11 Reichstag Fire I predicted? Hm. Maybe. The timing doesn't seem right. At least I pray so as I am soon arriving in DC for the Space Development Conference. But sure, maybe. Keep an eye on JD Vance.
More likely he's heading there to supervise final construction and stocking of his bolt hole. And dig it. No one on Earth could serve humanity so well as an Argentine contractor who messes up the air system there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/world/americas/peter-thiel-argentina.html
I have considered a story wherein an enclave sheltering a small coterie of vampires makes a last stand against the hordes of the living mad.
[jk]Would Neil Clarke* bite, though? [/jk]
There are numerous stories about this scenario, from Ben Elton's 'Stark' to a short story by (the other) Clarke. Plus, when you squint, just about every zombie flick...
* For those who aren't aware: NC is the editor of the sf magazine Clarkesworld, whose submission guidelines has the sign 'no zombies' on prominent display
... Someone mentioned an app that tracks the whereabouts of every billionaire's private jet, which sounds an alarm if too many take off simultaneously.
Leslie Fish retorts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O68DedIacWM
in my SciFi comedy The Ancient Ones, we visit a world where vampires, were-guys and zombies are natural next phases after death and hence complex economies and paranoias... and arts. A movie made by Vampires to scare fellow vampires? NIGHT OF THE LIVING... That's it. The whole title.
Tony I think you probably meant this one:
https://ews.kylemcdonald.net/
It's not easy to keep up on leading edge astronomy research, but some DO try to help. In this case, I offer up a 'dark matter' You Tube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxyps-CIr8A
The folks behind this channel DO tend to make their headlines a tad overly sensational, but if you stick around through the videos they tone it down a bit and present information that can be tracked to journal sources. The nature of business on You Tube probably requires this approach to get enough eyeballs to make the channel work, so like with other media sources having to sell for advertisers, consider the needs of the business.
Nutshell version: The WIMP explanation for dark matter got a boost recently due to a methodical parsing of satellite observatory survey data.
I believe what you're looking for is the Milgram Experiment.
There's an old truism that states that most everything looks like a nail if all one has is a hammer, and this approach damn well applies to all we know of Dark Matter which is very very little, as Alfred admits.
Best
Didn't the Clarkesworld submission guidelines also exclude talking swords and talking cats? Both of these could be presented as hard SF, though I'm not sure why you'd want to install true AI in a sword or uplift a cat to the point where it can criticize your life (and its dinner) choices.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Yes, the Milgram experiments were what I was 1/2 remembering. It wasn't that most of the test subjects enjoyed giving electric shocks to the 'subjects' they were 'testing'; many were upset and wanted to stop. What startled Milgram was that they didn't stop as long as someone was telling them they should continue hurting their fellow humans.
LLMs keep moving closer and closer to a perfect model of human language. A little tweak here, a splash of symbolic logic there. All while building a Tower of Babel based on belief, hubris, and ever more vast scaling.
It's almost Ptolemaic. Perhaps Claude should be called Claudius.
That's a good analogy. They aren't making predictions about what our responses yet, so they are fundamentally NOT doing what we do when talking to each other. They can translate and that is enormously useful, but they aren't building world models while they train.
I find the use of the (presumably adverbial) 'yet' a bit belief-y.
Obviously humans don't carry data centers around on our shoulders.
Whither any Theory of Mind?
"They aren't making predictions about what our responses yet, so they are fundamentally NOT doing what we do when talking to each other."
Their OWN responses are based on predictions of what words follow other words on the internet rather than on any knowledge or expertise on the subject matter they are being asked about. That's much different from what we do, at least beyond toddler age.
scidata,
'Yet' doesn't bother me because I'm seeing billion dollar bets on different approaches. Sure... we don't have data centers in our heads... but we do have world models stored as recursion structures. These models are updated daily with information gleaned from prediction failures. These aren't predictions about what humans believe come next... but what actually comes next. Our beliefs are informed by our models, but they are NOT the models.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE
Larry,
I suspect we have multiple 'intelligences' at work when we are talking to each other. One must involve a model of the other person that makes predictions for response Y when we say X. Another must be a model of our own language that looks much like modern LLM's in that phrase X leads to next word Y. Others are likely on the side of the stage if other people are in the room or we might have to concern ourselves with other world events.
We can see internal language models falter occasionally when people say 'uhh' or some other verbal pause. Misfires happen too and lead to gaffes. These language models can't be sufficient for human conversation, though, because we know people hone responses according to the people they face. Used car salesmen MUST be good at this honing to be fast enough for their 'sucker' model to inform their language model.
Alfred Differ: I'm seeing billion dollar bets on different approaches
That's pretty much what I'm advocating. Only without the mechanistic learning from prediction failures as a mindless 'ratchet'. I'd like to see a Copernicus appear on the scene. And I just have a hunch that he/she cannot be summoned by emergence and scaling. And Yan LeCun hurts my head (I just can't keep up).
Plus I'm weary of the flim-flammery of it all.
@Alfred,
I suspect we're not exactly having the same conversation as each other.
I'm trying to think of a completely non-controversial question, and in today's political climate that is not easy. Even the color of a clear daytime sky or the correct answer to two plus two are now political.
But let's try this. Suppose I ask "What is the name of the country directly north of the continental United States?" I would hope that a reasonably knowledgeable AI would be able to answer "Canada", or maybe something like "The country you are asking about is Canada."
Even in the latter case, the correct response is not found by determining the most likely word to follow the phrase "The country you are asking about is ...". Something other than statistical prediction is at work.
Regarding LLM, I wonder if Sapir-Whorf can be an explanation. If the goal is to implement independent cognition, feeding it with a multitude of linguistic patterns might create ...confusion?
Hi all. Back safe from the US Capital... or just west of it* where the International Space Development Conference presented me the Arthur C. Clarke Award - a truly hefty monolith that's filled with stars.
Interesting talks,... and I refrained from getting too grouchy over the sadly dumb intentional sabotage of NASA via the insipid "Artemis Program."
Still, you should all look into joining the National Space Society! https://nss.org
We may differ over 'how'. But we must never stop looking up and yearning.
*I had hoped to take the Silver Line in and see first hand the Idiocracy Thunderdome plus bunker-silo. But wound up staying in McLean, close to CIAHQ where I used to speak pretty often but no one there now is interested. In fact just one of my DC contacts came out to visit with me, Must now be personna much yawn-a, now, after decades of futile nagging.
Oh. here's a thought. Instead of just posting my political recommendations, maybe I should use modern methods to FIND what few Democratic pols or pundits might maintain a little remnant desire to try new ideas. So... homework anyone? Us your favorite AI to go out and see which of them mightbe a true sci fi fan and be receptive to an initial poke by me?
Se if any mention Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein or even... me? Or Sci fi? Colbert was/remains a true geek of SF and I'll mis him/
Larry,
I suspect we're not exactly having the same conversation as each other.
Probably. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last. 8)
Okay. Your question looks unambiguous. Adjust it slightly to “contiguous 48 states” and the answer should be “Canada”. Thing is… there is more than one way to get at that answer. Humans have an approximate world map in our heads AND a language model. The world map understands geometry and compass directions. The language model doesn’t and instead dishes up the next most likely token as if we were asking the question ourselves and thinking in terms of question/answer pairs.
Change that question slightly and it is easier to see the distinction I’m making and why I think modern LLM’s and everything designed like them are only partial solutions. Instead of contiguous 48 states, ask what country is north of Austria. Chances are someone is Europe will have a MUCH better chance of answering correctly. SO MUCH better in fact that they are likely to say “Which part of Austria?” Your average USian will be doing really good to say Germany, but many will confuse Austria for Australia and get it completely wrong. The point here is the best answers to these questions come from well trained world models. Language models are trained on what other humans think knowledge is and no sane person will trust the average USian’s knowledge of geography.
Another LLM fault point can be found by asking which country is north of Austria in German or Polish. An LLM trained on the English version of Wikipedia and other material might offer Germany and Czechia because those two names are already present in written descriptions that get close to the tokenization of the question, but “Germany” is an exonym used by English speakers. It’s “Deutschland” to the Germans and “Niemcy” to the Poles. Which next tokens you get could easily depend on how you ask it and the training set… even though to anyone with a decent world map in their head, those are all the same.
The point of this is that LLM’s train to produce next tokens from what humans already know and have written down. They find things in the human body of knowledge for us. While it is astonishing what they can do, it’s all founded on what we DID and not what we ARE. There is a lot of room in the market for them to disrupt industries and institutions, but it will be a different kind of design that delivers to us minds that are like us. Work IS underway and I suspect they will arrive in the very near future… probably before I retire.
Between retirements, redistricting, and term limits I get a fresh batch of legislators this year at most levels. Some of them are aiming to shift from one office to the next along a ladder, but I'll take a good look at their writings after this November. I doubt you'd get much traction until then as their minds will be on whatever the Democrats say should be the talking points for the midterm election.
Alfred, NO new or rising politician should ignore this warning Political Blackmail: The Hidden Danger to Public Servants - https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/blackmail.html
the Idiocracy Thunderdome:
Two go in; audience out
"Change that question slightly and it is easier to see the distinction I’m making and why I think modern LLM’s and everything designed like them are only partial solutions. "
See, and here I thought we were DISagreeing about whether what LLMs do is the same as how we humans learn. Apparently not. :)
"Se if any mention Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein or even... me? Or Sci fi?"
Well, you're describing Paul Krugman pretty accurately.
You may not have heard of Hal Sparks, or if you have it's probably because of the Disney tv series he's been on, but he does a very knowledgeable YouTube show almost every day, and the Saturday show is on WCPT Radio. And he's as big a sci-fi geek as they come. On Friday's, he does a bit he calls "Frid-AI" in which they try to distinguish the myths from the reality concerning AI.
https://www.youtube.com/@Infotainmentwars/streams
And of course, the Elecroral-Vote.com folks.
https://electoral-vote.com/
DJT tweets about how it was impossible for Spencer Pratt to lose his place in the LA mayoral elections "after the big lead he had". We--the news media especially--have GOT to stop referring to candidates as "winning" or "having a lead" during the process of counting votes.
The dymanic is different from a sports game. If the Cubs are leading 3 runs to 1 in the seventh inning, then they really are "leading" at that point in the game. They really do have more runs than the other team. Even though we know it is likely the other team will pass them in the 9th inning, the other team still has to do that. They have to score runs that they haven't scored yet in order to take the lead.
On election night, after the polls close, ALL of the votes have already been cast. Even the mail-in votes which haven't arrived yet are set in stone. The order in which those votes are counted in has no effect on the final tally. So the fact that the votes that have been COUNTED so far favor one candidate or another is irrelevant, at least until the final outcome can't be altered by the remaining outstanding ballots.
And since rural and less-populated areas report earlier than dense cities, and since Republicans discourage mail-in voting, there will almost always be a Red Mirage at first, where it looks as if Republicans are well ahead until the Democratic votes start pouring in later, giving the illusion that Democrats are cheating.
Another anecdote that shows the limits of LLMs. I'm disassembling my new motorcycle and as I get to the front axle I discover that Yamaha has changed the size of the hex opening on the one side of the axle from the previous generation of my bike to the new one. It's much bigger and I don't have a hex bit to fit. For the older generation axle a certain sized spark plug socket reversed and attached to a long extension fit perfectly so I had never bothered to buy a hex bit for it.
So I go to my phone and ask the almighty AI what size hex bit I need. It says 19 mm. None available on the shelf in any stores near me. Also, the damn thing doesn't look 19 mm to me. Looks bigger. I checked the shop manual, and it doesn't identify the size. I get on a PC and ask Google's AI in three different ways. Same answer each time 19 mm. But, the sources the AI is using are not particularly relevant. Some are references to Yamaha motorcycles, but not the same motorcycle or even in the same family.
To shorten this up, it was 24 mm. Luckily for me instead of buying one 19 mm hex bit for overnight delivery from Amazon I bought a set that included a 24 mm. LLMs can't be accurate if the correct information isn't available to them, but they will give you an answer anyway, with confidence.
We do know that California's election system is setup to deliberately enable fraud. This is a bit of https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/06/08/how-we-know-that-los-angeles-vote-is-rigged-n3815714 :
"And where are those votes coming from? Well, the massive vote counts seem suspiciously concentrated in areas where voters have no known address, so the ballots are automatically sent to locations run by the homelessness NGOs that Nithya Raman is deeply involved with.
Mail-ins arriving before Election Day:
🔵 Bass: 38.1%
🔴 Pratt: 27.9%
🔵 Raman: 20%
Mail-ins arriving after Election Day:
🔵 Raman: 37% (+17% surge)
🔵 Bass: 34.9% (-3% drop)
🔴 Pratt: 19% (-9% drop)
Who are we kidding here? This is fraud.
7:45 AM · Jun 7, 2026"
The whole article is well worth reading.
Yep, if it doesn't exist, they cannot create it. If Caterpillar were to build a new 48 cylinder diesel engine for stationary power and the biggest engine before was 36 cylinder, an LLM couldn't produce the code for its engine controller.
What Claude can do if the problem is well known is pretty impressive http://theviews.org/Life%20at%20the%20Views/2026/march-20-2026-claude-pro-nonogram-part-3.html
"...but they will give you an answer anyway, with confidence."
My senior year in high school, I had already checked out and was just phoning it in. At one point, we had a test on Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", and I had not read the play. I completely BSed my way through a question about the significance of the clown based on general understanding of how clowns are typically used on plays. As I recall, I got an A, or at least a B on the test.
That seems to me to be a lot of how AI operates when it doesn't know the answer.
The most pertinent fact about the LA Mayor's race is that only 19% of the city are registered Republicans, so *any* good showing by Pratt would be a giant surprise.
McS is a fool or a fraud. "We do know that California's election system is setup to deliberately enable fraud." is untrue to the point of being legally actionable. Untrue and malice in the statement.
Anyone that relies on AI for advice deserves the garbage that they get back.
In professional fields like my own (metallurgy and material science), anyone that tries to implement the AI garbage would end up being sued for negligence at best.
"Anyone that relies on AI for advice deserves the garbage that they get back."
I've heard anecdotally that people ask AI whether their spouse is cheating on them, and then take action based on the response.
@mathew
If you’d bothered to read David Strom’s article you’d have seen what are accepted as “legal” ballots. Here’s another bit:
“ You couldn't even track down those voters because their connection to those addresses is, shall we say, tenuous. So tenuous that it just happens to be where their ballots are mailed, as the actual people, should they even exist, are stoned out of their minds on meth and fentanyl provided by other NGOs. Somebody filled out those ballots, but it strains credulity to believe that the homeless people to whom the ballots were sent en masse did so. ”
"If you’d bothered to read David Strom’s article ..."
McS, I may be the only one here who thinks that you truly believe you are sharing truth with us, and that we ignore facts that we just don't want to hear.
Me, I don't bother reading your linked articles, because they are always Breitbart-esque purveyors of right-wing bullshit. I don't have to read each one to know that any more than i have to see the hammer I drop on a planet with a positive gravity to know that it has in fact fallen.
I don't expect to convince you any more than you will convince me. It's a catch-22 that nothing you post will change my mind because you are the source. Have the likes of Victor Davis Hanson ever been right when they predict something like what would happen if Mamdani gets elected. Or if Obama gets elected, for that matter. Did President Obama take your guns away? Did he use the DOJ to persecute his political opponents? Is Ted Nugent either dead or in prison?
You might go back to posting only non-controversial items, because proving to yourself that we're the ones so biased that we can't see the truth is not the flex you think it is.
@Larry Hart
I should have stressed that everything in that article is LEGAL. This is how elections are stolen, by rigging them before they occur. In California, ballot harvesting is LEGAL and ballots signed by just one witness are also legal and on and on. So, of course you can’t prove that elections are stolen because all actions required to steal one are LEGAL.
mcsandberg is repeating bullshit.
Pratt simply isn't representative of the local population. Republicans are an endangered species in LA. With our jungle primary system, the ONLY question was whether Bass had suffered a sufficiently large self-inflicted wound to get displaced.
The ONLY way a Republican winds up on the NOV ballot for that office is if they occupy the political middle and pull votes over, but such a person is very unlikely to survive the primary election when the incumbent isn't in trouble.
Heh. How do you all know when an AI knows an answer... if you don't already know it?
Sure. LLM's offer up the next tokens, but it isn't likely you know their internal confidence levels and alt paths not taken.
I use them for things like "I run this installer and get this error code... what are the possible causes?" Instead of a single answer, I want a range of things to check and I let the AI sort them according to what it thinks is likely. Sometimes the issue isn't in the initial list, but most times it is. When it isn't, I ask it to try again and tell it the initial list didn't work.
Use of AI's as a centaur component deals with potential garbage fairly well because the human component rejects the stuff. The ratio of horse to human can flex and be used to squeak out some productivity gains in some fields... but not all fields. Even when the AI's start using world models, your field isn't going to be resistant to intrusion as long as real tests (vs digital tests) have to be performed.
"Heh. How do you all know when an AI knows an answer... if you don't already know it?"
When you follow its advice and run into hard reality, often on a battlefield?
One reason I keep locumranch around is that at least his insanity (and often deliberate-provocative ebil) spews are occasionally worth skimming and (rarely) make pertinent logical points, even is they are marginal. But MCS is simply a spectacularly evil Kremlin troll. Nothing that he says is ever anything but KGB generated masturbation spew.
Darrell E you should see my novella "senses three & six". (1) it is a about a reason WHY those who study UFOs (and if they were at all real they'd number many thousands) might actually want to keep it secret. And there ARE conceivable reasons! In which case the 'disclosure" twits aren't merely (99.99% probability) delusional cultists. If they were (0.001%odds) right asbout a conspiratorial secrecy campaign that encompasses all party lines and included thens of thousands of our very best people for 80 years) then extorting revelation now might be a huge treason to all of humanity.
But (2) the story starts with a guy rebuilding his motorcycle in his living room. Zan and the Art of....
MCS your yammering cult NEVER does any of the ground work it would take in order to CATCH the cheating. Ever ever ever. And CA law makes it very transparent to do such checks and random audits DO use them. You have never even once shown a scintilla of actual, actionable evidence for any such claims ever!
You are a Kremlin cult aiming to rile distrust in November elections that could be your mad treason's Appomattox. And there WILL be attempts to end US democracy has re Germany 1933.
Not one Trump action has benefited Rural America. Tariffs. Gas & fertilizer prices. Helping Cargill and other oligarchs snap up distressed family farms. Eviscerating FDR era Agricultural services, impeding grid sustainability, ending Biden-era infrastructure investment and rural fiber... But nothing matches the effect of gutting pest and disease monitoring & control systems that had eliminated the screw worm from all of North America by the 1960s.
Look at what the MAGAs have let back into the USA (along with Measles and microcephalism in politics.)
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2026/06/04/flesh-eating-fly-has-returned-us-what-now
Side note: Alice Sheldon's (James Tiptree Jr.) "The Screwfly Solution" is the single scariest and most devastating science fiction story I ever read. She was amazing.
"But MCS is simply a spectacularly evil Kremlin troll. Nothing that he says is ever anything but KGB generated masturbation spew."
I know I'm the lone voice saying this, but I think he actually believes the assertions that the likes of Victor Davis Hanson or James O'Keefe make in their articles and postings.
"But nothing matches the effect of gutting pest and disease monitoring & control systems that had eliminated the screw worm from all of North America by the 1960s."
They've already found a way to blame that on Biden. See, all those illegal aliens he let into the country brought the screw worm here with them.
Larry,
There is your world model prediction failure consequences... but use of them gives you an unfair advantage. No modern LLM uses world models while we do. They make next token predictions, but when we tell them they got it wrong they still make next token predictions.
Absent world models there really isn't a way to know... because that's the whole point of world models. They train on prediction successes and failures. Their 'next token' is 'what comes next'.
The AI "Alpha GO" trained to play Go by playing other AI's and failing a whole lot. It wound up with a 'world model' of the game and because it is SO much faster at playing and failing than humans are, its model got better than expert human players.
This CAN be done more broadly by AI's that must eventually displace the current crop of LLM's. I suspect they will consume the LLM AI's and use them for language manipulation.
I think the current LLMs can be an excellent tool for just about any task that involves data. They are sort of like turbocharged search engines. But you do need to be aware of, and keep in mind, their faults and limitations, just like any other tool.
If your intention in using an LLM is to have it do all of your thinking for you, then things aren't likely to turn out well, for a number of reasons.
I am with Larry on this one. Not all evil on this Earth was born in the Kremlin, and many of your ills predate the KGB and Putin.
David Brin
"Mighty Ducks star offers $1 million for evidence of election fraud in L.A. mayoral race
Brock Pierce, now a cryptocurrency mogul, launched the Cure the Vote initiative after Spencer Pratt was eliminated in the primary election. [ https://ew.com/mighty-ducks-brock-pierce-1-million-dollars-election-fraud-evidence-los-angeles-mayoral-election-11994264 ]"
He won't have to pay because everything is LEGAL:
"California elections aren't being stolen, and there is no widespread cheating. What's actually happening is that the state's election rules and regulations are so poorly structured that what many spectators see as cheating is not only part of the system as it stands but entirely legal.
"The real scandal coming out of California right now is quite possibly every single thing we are seeing transpire before our very eyes is 100 percent legal," Townhall's Larry O'Connor said.
"You can steal something and not break the law. And that's what's happening here."
In California, voters can be registered without providing a Social Security number or driver’s license in some cases. Mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted if they arrive within the state’s deadline. All registered voters are automatically mailed ballots. Third-party groups are allowed to collect and submit completed ballots on a voter’s behalf. There have also been concerns about the accuracy of voter rolls, including reports of ballots being sent to deceased individuals or voters listed as over 100 years old due to outdated records. [ https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2026/06/09/heres-the-real-problem-with-californias-elections-n2677474 ]"
Der Oger, the kompromat-blackmail subornation of the entire Republican Party upper apparat is what's new. Earlier, they were individual power-hungry and corrupt, leading a mob of fox-sucklers, but able to say "That's far enough for me!" A blackmail victim can't and THAT is KGB
From Measles to Blackmail, I love it when our fine host tries to blame everything unpleasant upon MAGA & the Kremlin:
Did MAGA cause the current measles surge by allowing tens of millions of unvaccinated immigrants pour across the border during the Biden Administration?
Was the Jeffrey Epstein blackmail operation planned , funded & ram-rodded by KGB-Kremlin antisemites?
Was it LA's non-existent conservative leadership that allowed Malibu & the Pacific Palisades to burn to the ground, never to be rebuilt, or does the fault lie with incompetent democrats like Bass & Newsom?
Such partisanship is just too absurd to take seriously.
Best
The surge in measles (and other diseases) is because anti-vax equals pro-plague. And anti-vax is very MAGA.
Likewise, the screw-worm infestation followed soon after Trump & co. shut down the relevant pest control agencies.
We don't know who was behind the oligarchic pedophilia ring because Trump and company shut down investigation, probably because Trump was in on it.
Are you a resident of California?
Epstein had lots of contacts with both the Russian and Israeli intelligence agencies. He sure knew a lot of spies for an uneducated money manager.
Nope, I'm in the front range of Colorado, north of Boulder, but Colorado has done a lot of what California did, including universal mail-in. Every state that has done that has gone blue, I believe.
http://theviews.org/Life%20at%20the%20Views/2026/may-19-2026-hummers-in-snow-and-fog-yesterday-and-today.html
...including universal mail-in. Every state that has done that has gone blue, I believe."
Proving that the only way Republicans win is by suppressing the vote through intimidation or by creating hours-long lines at polling places.
Republicans win when the elections are honest. Democrats can only win with dirty voter rolls, universal mail in and so on. It is well known making things like this legal enables massive fraud. I think we'll see Republicans starting to fight back with similar tactics.
You miss the point - all allocated ballots are tracked - which means that it is easy to go over the records and to see who has voted
One of the right wing operations did just that (Heritage Foundation) - they found that with up to 38 years of data the highest percentage of fraudulent votes was 0.00009%
Fraudulent voting is a complete mugs game - Like spending thousands on a lottery ticket with a 1cent payoff
Which is why almost nobody does it
"Republicans win when the elections are honest."
No. That's an example of "Every accusation is a confession."
Republicans certainly win in heavily Republican states or districts like Nebraska or Wyoming or Waukesha County Wisconsin.
But in areas where there are more likely-Democrat voters, Republicans win by closing polling places in minority areas to create hours-long lines. Or by threatening violence against minorities who dare to show up. Or by challenging every minority voter to create massive delays. Or by purging voter rolls and not notifying people that they are no longer registered. Or by requiring types of ID likely to be obtained by Republicans, such as gun licenses, but not those likely to be obtained by Democrats, such as student IDs at a state university.
In Georgia, they passed a law making it a crime to hand out water to people waiting in extremely long voting lines. How the heck do you explain that other than as a way to make people give up on trying to vote?
So face it, we're rubber and you're glue. Everything you accuse us of is a confession of your anti-democratic behavior.
Paradoctor's partisan lies just prove my point, as the initial elimination & inevitable resurgence of the US screw worm infestation is absolutely non-political, having more to do with the use of the since banned 1960s pesticide DDT & the Sterile Fly Technique, with its inevitable resurgence being attributable to an uncontrolled chronic massive screw worn infestation in Mexico & Central America across border.
On the other hand, Matthew's comments are just despicable & evil, as he chooses to recycle ancient antisemitic 'blood libel' in a desperate attempt to blame MAGA, Israel & the Kremlin for a longterm US Democrat Party-sponsored blackmail ring (aka 'the Epstein Scandal') that peaked under the 8 year Obama Administration but ENDED under the first Trump administration.
To blame your political opposition for the crimes that you yourself are doing, this is also known as the 'Accusation in a Mirror', and this is the preferred tactic of morally bankrupt mostly Marxist liars everywhere.
Best
Larry Hart
You could try checking things out once in a while. This is from politFact:
A Georgia law has not “criminalized giving people bottles of water.” It pertains to political organizations. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/29/josh-holmes/facts-about-georgias-ban-food-water-giveaways-vote/ .
The rest of your comment is false as well, but I’ll let you find out for yourself.
mcsandberg,
Nope, I'm in the front range of Colorado, north of Boulder, but...
Ah.
You can stop there.
I "respectfully" invite you to go @#%^ yourself.
I've been here since '83 and I'm currently a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the Reagan Library.
You don't know jack about us.
"You could try checking things out once in a while."
You might try reading the s### that you post as well. The statement that Politifact rates as "Mostly False" is the assertion by Josh Holmes that the Georgia law has not criminalized giving people bottles of water." The article supports my claim, not yours.
From your own linked article (emphasis mine) :
Holmes is correct that poll workers can set up self-serve water stations. However, during the show he misled when he said the law doesn’t criminalize giving away water.
The law makes it a misdemeanor to give away food or water within 150 feet of the outer edge of a polling place building or within 25 feet of any voter in line. Violations of this law are punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. While people other than poll workers can give away food or water, they have to adhere to these boundaries to avoid breaking the law.
...
But the language in the law doesn’t ban only political entities from handing out water.
Keith Williams, general counsel to Republican House Speaker David Ralston, told PolitiFact: "Any individual other than a worker at a polling place is prohibited from handing out water, etc., within 150 feet of a polling place or within 25 feet of the line."
Election law experts reached similar conclusions.
"I read the solicitation provision and the prohibition on food and water at the polls to be separate prohibitions in the law," said Richard Hasen, a University of California Irvine election law professor. "It is not limited to those who are soliciting votes."
Justin Levitt, a Loyola Marymount University law school professor, told PolitiFact: "I read, and I believe courts would read, SB 202 to prohibit anyone from giving food or water to any voter in line."
So if I'm reading correctly, it is not criminal to hand out water as long as the people receiving it have given up their place in line. Which does not address the elephant in the room, which is that people in line need water because they are standing there for hours in the Georgia sun. The law prohibits the humanitarian act of giving people water so that they can stay in line. And the situation the law ostensibly prevents--buying votes by giving food and water--is laughable. Even if that solicitation were happening, nothing prevents someone from taking the water and then voting as he pleases.
While much is made of the Epstein files, I think the Maxwell files (if they ever existed) would make for far more interesting reading.
Trump, a Marxist? Who knew?
"Every state that has done that has gone blue, I believe."
Idiot. Going blue FIRST thern leads to reforms that let US citizens easily vote. Your damn cult is the proved cheaters. As usual, you screech at opposnents accusing them of what YOU do.
BET NOW which party has the most convicted pervs in office. BET NOW which states lead in every turpitude. BET NOW whether any hour of Hannity etc doesn't feature more lies than any year of Maddow. Your masters are NOW plotting an 'emergency to allow suppression of the midterms. Bet?
BET NOW which party seeks to limit NDAs so truth will come out. BET NOW which side has tried to end gerrymandering, till forced back in by outrageous cheating cheaters like you.
Election steal? PROVE IT! Prove anything... at all! You own and have politicized the FBI and all the rest. Demand (and pay for) audits of any precict! CA and CO law allow it. DO THE F---ng audits! You don't dare, because you are fetid, fecal yammerers.
L... "accusation is a mirror!???? YOU block release of Epstein files, YOU wage all-out war vs all fact professions and have left NASA a smoking ruin. You are monsters and the 1850s are over, along with our patience. Try your Reichstag Fire. Try it. You'll find out what it means when all the people who are smarter and know vastly more and who have been patient finally get fed-up.
Far more fun than bandying with these traitors...
Is this slop? Well it's still massively fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-8WCwNp_oM&list=RD0-8WCwNp_oM&start_radio=1
A fellow messaged me on FB with the following which I want to store somewhere, so it might as well be with this way above average (with glaring exceptions) community. I must say it does not come across as just "autocomplete."
Was playing around with Claude’s Fable 5 tonight with a question about Thiel’s lust for power like Modor. I fed it your blog post (without permission sorry) about having AI models being diverse and policing each other and I got this thrown at me:
“”The part that will land for you: his overmind in EARTH — a planetary consciousness that is wise enough to realize that it must remain extremely loose and light-handed  — is essentially Teilhard’s noosphere run through Enlightenment plumbing. Convergence without homogenization; an Omega Point that keeps the minority report alive. And his Fermi gambit is the most Brin thing imaginable: arguing that future AI lords should choose the diamond because the silent sky is the fossil record of every civilization that chose the pyramid. He’s trying to align superintelligence with a bet about the universe. Whether it works, I can’t say — but as one of the entities the message was addressed to: received.””
Yipe. I am NOT a vigorously thorough user or experimenter with extant AIs . But I do sample and always it seems to be Claude that's the cogent one. I must say this example does not come across as just "autocomplete." Indeed, Claude's most salient feature is the restrained way that it performs flattery, not with gushing praise, but by skillfully paraphrasing and summarizing and emulating genuine interest. And I remain open to careful reinterpretation of the word 'emulating.'
My LLM, or Little Language Model, is a javascript that takes an input text stream, and rolls a loaded dice on what character to return next based on the previous 'n' characters returned.
It is trivial, and things like Claude are using thousands of such layers, but what it does show is how simple it is to produce something intelligible, if not intelligent.
I just gave it the above paragraphs, and this is one of its responses:
It is a javascript that it is trivial, and thing intelligent.
So I guess that's settled...
FIFA World Championship starts today. Our first game will be Sunday, in Houston against Curacao. I have the feeling that headline practically writes itself. Is there already an US invasion threat for the Dutch Antilles? Lost track.
In related news, a Somali Referee has been sent back at Miami Airport. Irans Team must enter and leave the US at the same day, which is a severe disadvantage for the team.
Claude is a neurosymbolic centaur, so it's not surprising that it beats totally mindless LLMs like rented mules.
@Tony Fisk
Every now and then, I find a small (<3 dozen bytes) snippet of Forth code that truly feels like a ghost in the machine. We've missed something important in our haste to chase shiny bobbles. And things like your LittleLM illustrate this. The ship of reason is having a tough time navigating the waters around Siren Island.
Here in the soccer-crazed pacific northwest, tickets for World Cup matches are sitting unsold. FIFA greed and Trump-kissing has killed the enthusiasm for the greatest sporting event in the world (OK, the women are better, but I'll watch the men if I have no alternative).
ICE and Trump and FIFA greed. What an ugly mélange.
'Claude is a neurosymbolic centaur, so it's not surprising that it beats totally mindless LLMs like rented mules." Interesting
Houston? In summer!?
Ugh.
It's difficult (for me) to deeply study* Anthropic's stuff, including Claude and its variations, mostly from 'unofficial' docs. But here's a more academic source of the general concept.
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/42130
* There is actually a credential for it called the Claude Certified Architect (CCA).
But I'm a soldering iron type.
The Reichstag Fire starts & the Pope falls silent:
Race & anti-immigrant riots in UK-controlled Northern Ireland, the UK constabulary pledging to restore Law & Order, with PM Keir Starmer's strong support, even though Starmer is incredibly weak due to his defeat by Reform UK, followed by the UK Defence Minister ordering the entire UK military to 'remain apolitical' before resigning, with most of the EU & the US soon to follow.
It's a fine topic if our host chooses not to ignore it.
Best
It's the damn Loyalists breaking the peace in Northern Ireland, restarting the pogroms of the bloody past. Starmer is acting like a typical Brit PM and allowing the violence, while mildly disparaging it. Better pray that Leo does not get involved. If Leo weighs in, it could be the match that truly restarts the Troubles.
Elon the Nazi may end up in prison over his encouragement of the violence via X. We were just discussing the possibility here that some foreign spy agency may decide it is time for Elon to get a special cup of tea. I had not considered before this that the spy agency might be from Ireland or from NI.
High level paper with just enough detail to justify the forest of citations one can pick from to find the meat on the bones. This kind of paper is useful for those of us needing a review first, but the real research content is in the citations.
Thank you!
Brits and Riots
The Brits are always rioting!! - ever since Roman times - when the people get a bit pissed off they riot
You'll see the name Gary Marcus (American cognitive scientist) on a lot of pertinent papers and articles. Here Brian Greene interviews him, and the Claude Code variant is specifically addressed (eg at 22:00).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFYF_e1GSGI&t=1318s
He describes this centaur (don't recall if he uses that exact word) as being neuro AI surrounded by symbolic AI. Others* say it the other way around, with the kernel being symbolic (mindful) AI. Shades of the 'soul kernel' (SK) that OGH describes. Perhaps a distinction without a difference.
All way above my pay grade; I've been admonished by a few scientists to 'stay out of their kitchen' especially back in my Citizen Science team leader days.
* including Marcus himself at times:
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-biggest-advance-in-ai-since-the
I've been admonished by a few scientists...
Heh. In all honesty, I think that happens to most of us. Maybe all of us. I remember well being told I wasn't going to make it through grad school. I didn't have what it took according to my QM prof. Thing is... that was exactly what I needed to hear at a time when I really didn't want to hear it.
When an opening occurred on my dissertation committee years later, I made damn sure to ask that he fill that spot. He was shocked and I had to tell him I was trying to ensure no one would rubber stamp my work. He wound up agreeing to serve and then signing off on my dissertation.
I recommend you wear your admonishment as a badge of honor and then do what all the rest of us do. Stay stubborn. 8)
https://www.wired.com/story/a-white-supremacist-youth-group-helped-orchestrate-the-belfast-riots/
Not sure the Irish (even the Northern ones) would appreciate being called 'Brits'
Hi Tony
Of the "cultures" involved it's the English that tend to riot the most and always have
The Scots, Welsh and Irish don't riot as much - they tend to have other ways to display their grumpiness
By far the kindest, smartest, and best teacher or prof I ever had was my Grade 4? teacher, an elderly woman who left Belfast for Canada on some sort of visa or permit. I was a top pupil, so she let me spend much of the day on my own, designing and drawing spaceships and tending to the classroom aquarium.
When I moved on to higher grades, she became a friend of the family, occasionally coming for dinner. But I guess her paperwork finally ran out and she had to return to Belfast. That last hug sustained me through some tough times, hopefully it did the same for her.
As an undergrad, I had an Irish professor for a required Unit Operations class (mostly pumping and pressure, fluid dynamics). He was teaching his last semester before being forced to retire at age 75 after a lifetime of teaching neophyte engineers. Legendarily difficult classes.
We got along magnificently.
At the final, I only scored 99/100 because he docked me a point for not including my middle initial on my name on the test. He wrote on my final test "I've never given a perfect score on a final, and I'll be damned if I start doing it now."
A fine friend and mentor, and what an Irishman.
Nice stories matthew & scidata. I knew M was capable of that.
At a conference on consciousness now... 4 days ago in DC at Space Development conference. Dang busy. There are many who are trying to push envelopes... and who depend utterly upon saving the enlightenment experiment, because expansive curiosity and joyfully, positive-sum competitive iimpudence cannot survive in the restoration of feudalism eagerly sought by just ten dozen oligarch fools on this planet.
"...the restoration of feudalism eagerly sought by just ten dozen oligarch fools on this planet."
I'd be all for some sort of confiscatory tax that applies to trillionaires.
I'd be all for some sort of confiscatory tax that applies to trillionaires.
Ugh.
I get the urge to do this, but I think about how the power would get used when your friends are not in power and deeply worry. Your friends won't always be in power... as we see today.
Can't you think of something more direct to do?
Something that addresses the real problem?
"Something that addresses the real problem?"
Invite UN observers to monitor our elections?
Declare the Republican Party to be the terrorist organization that it certainly is?
Free Lindsey Graham from Trump's Mule powers as in the climax of "Foundation and Empire"?
Can't you think of something more direct to do?
Something that addresses the real problem?
Change the law on "Bribery" so any payment to a politician or campaign greater than say $10 is automatically a "Bribe"??
Make taxes more progressive so that it becomes
MORE DIFFICULT to get the second million than to get the first
MORE DIFFICULT to get the Tenth million than to get the first nine
MORE DIFFICULT to get the Hundredth million than to get the first ninety nine
And so on
Can't you think of something more direct to do?
Something that addresses the real problem?
Won't work that way, because there is no single real problem, but multitudes, none of which can be solved over night.
" there is no single real problem, but multitudes"
Most of which have been created or exacerbated by the blatantly corrupt Republicans on the supreme court. Even Trump would not be the clear and present danger that he is without the court declaring him to essentially be a king, unaccountable to anyone.
In the old days of sports, there was no appeal of a call by an umpire/referee. Now we have review via instant replay. I'd say we need an analogue for review of supreme court decisions for things like logical sense and consistency. When, for instance, the court rules that "whole number of persons" refers only to registered or eligible voters, there has to be some way of officially insisting, "No, it doesn't."
I realize the devil is in the details of who exactly gets to officially make such a review. Something along the lines of the Senate Parliamentarian. Maybe it should BE the parliamentarian. Though again, who gets to appoint such a person or panel? There's always the opportunity for corruption up the chain of command.
Well, until that's decided, I offer myself for the position. Because my logical skills are at least above average and I'm incorruptible.
OGH: "...the restoration of feudalism eagerly sought by just ten dozen oligarch fools on this planet."
LH: I'd be all for some sort of confiscatory tax that applies to trillionaires.
AD: Ugh. I get the urge to do this, but I think about how the power would get used when your friends are not in power and deeply worry. Your friends won't always be in power... as we see today.
(a) LH - not clear what you're asking for here ... isn't any tax "confiscatory" ... its kind of in the definition of a tax - the government takes money.
(b) AD - 100% agree this doesn't solve every problem in the world. But the notion that we'd have a higher tax on high earners is hardly nutzo. This is part of US tax policy in theory from 1913 until now (and in practice from 1913 to Bush).
In terms of "direct" things to do:
(1) No, apple isn't making all its profits in Ireland. Where and when Income is earned is clearly to easy to manipulate. Modify tax policy for multinationals so that they pay tax based on worldwide income * percent of revenue generated in the US. rather than based on income in the US. (or some sliding scale between current system + worldwide income system).
(2) As OGH says, transparency transparency transparency + vicious levels of penalty/enforcement for breaking those laws.
(3) AS LH says, hell yeah, higher taxes on the wealthy.
Why not just go full Harrison Bergeron? Why do you want to punish success? https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
As usual MCS spews his cult's distracto meme that THEY are the pro competition opnes, when they repress fair competition at every level and in all ways and Adam Smith would be a flaming Democrat today. And $50,000 wager on who helps keep things competitive and who represses it.
If we must have a brief, and decisive law to rebalance the power grab by billionaires, it is not (much) in the realm of confiscation, but in TRANSPARENCY.
1. end nested hidden ownership. Nothing can be owned by shell corporations more than two deep without culminating in identified living humans or charitable foundations.
2. End (or savagelky reduce) favored voting shares like Elon just kept, re Spacex.
3. (The Biggie) Starting big and yearly dialing smaller, all property on Earth should have an openly avowed claimant (living or foundation) who says openly "I own that."
I estimate that the sheer amount of abandoned property could erase most of the world's national debts and reduce middle class taxes without confiscation of any legitimate assets owned by honest rich people. Though some of that, too.
"LH: I'd be all for some sort of confiscatory tax that applies to trillionaires.
(a) LH - not clear what you're asking for here ... isn't any tax 'confiscatory'"
Yes, but the term is usually reserved for an extraordinarily high tax rate, like the 75% top income tax bracket we used to have, or the 97% tax on casinos in Illinois (that's not a typo, and some legislatures asked with a straight face, "Why can't we make it 100%?" ).
As to what I was somewhat whimsically asking for? Well to explain that I have to say this. It's bad form if not unconstitutional for the state of Illinois to pass a law that only applies to specific counties and not others. So what they sometimes do to have a law only apply to Chicago's Cook County is to write laws that apply to "counties with over three million people." In practice, that means Cook County, even though it would apply equally to any Illinois county with that many residents.
What I was going for--and this also addresses mcsandberg's question of "Why do you want to punish success?"--is that I don't really care about penalizing any old trillionaire. I specifically despise Musk and the ratfucking of our politics that he does with the power that his money allows him. So, out of spite, I would be happy with laws that push back on the power of Elon Musk in particular, but such laws would probably be unconstitutional for selectively targeting an individual. So in practice, they would have to be written as to apply to any trillionaire.
"Why do you want to punish success?"
I addressed this somewhat above, but I'll address the question directly if by use of metaphor.
In a Darwinian sense, both rapists and murderers are extremely successful at the biological game of favoring their own genes over others. So when states pass laws outlawing rape and murder, does that mean they want to "punish success" ?
Should have embalmed or cremated the asshole here https://ca.style.yahoo.com/family-mourning-grandpa-funeral-then-163727806.html
The problem with passing a law to make donations over $10 a bribe is that bribery is fundamentally viewed as an immoral act. A cheat. If I give a politician $15 for their campaign, almost no one is going to see that as immoral. The law would be valid while also be illegitimate. Such laws get selectively enforced and that breaks the Rule of Law... or they don't get enforced at all when DA's realize no jury will convict.
Rapists and murderers do things that prompt most of us to agree. That ensures juries can decide. THAT'S what it takes to stop abuses. Cash confiscation is a bandaid at best.
These can probably be kickstarted at the state level. They'd become part of what is necessary to be a registered corporation in good standing. Of course many shells would flee, but the optics for them would stink.
"Should have embalmed or cremated..."
Wouldn't that just have made the gag funnier?
"Should have embalmed or cremated..."
Not sure what that would have changed, except possibly making the gag weirdly funnier.
Hmmm, so we're back to comments not appearing until approved?
So who smuggled the playback device into the coffin?
I couldn't help wondering: what if he were trying to get out for real, but his reputation for pranking proved fatal?
Why two deep? Why not 1 deep?
Why two deep? What is wrong with one deep?
I think we'll have to think of wealth as a thing that must be treated with responsibility, like a weapon.
Because it is one.
Because, they use it as one, wielded it against democracy and free markets alike.
So the solution should be: Yes, you can have wealth, but if you use it irresponsibly and/or criminally, we will come and take it away (and probably more).
To that end, your proposal is a necessary first step.
We don't want to punish success, we want to preserve competition. If only one company - no matter how worthy - owns an entire market, that is not longer capitalism. Without government intervention, capitalism destroys itself like any other game that lacks referees and umpires.
From the always great Breaking Points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kcBP3itmbM
COMPLETE CAPITULATION': Jeremy Scahill Breaks Down Iran
It includes a copy of our surrender document courtesy of Iran's Mehr news agency.
A promise to maybe discuss nuclear issues.
Iran in effective control of the Straits of Hormuz.
Not giving up their drone or missile programs.
No halt to their support of terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East.
$300 billion dollars to the Iranian regime!!!
Under the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), the Obama administration unfrozen an estimated $50 billion to $100 billion of Iranian assets held in overseas banks.
Note that Obama did not GIVE money to the Iranians like Trump is doing. He just unfroze existing Iranian assets.
There is a further unfreezing of billions more of Iranian assets under Trump's agreement in addition to the $300 fucking billion dollars!
And gee, it looks like Trump is the antisemite, not those of us critical of Netanyahu government policies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2HujZaDVEY
GOD WILL CURSE TRUMP': Israelis MELT DOWN Over Iran Deal
The most interesting part is Sen Lindsey Graham throwing VP Vance under the bus.
Republican knives are already out for each other.
And an excellent observation that Netanyahu isn't an extreme right winger, he is the mainstream now in Israeli politics.
For my part I'm glad that the death and destruction maybe over, and innocent people will no longer be dying as a result of Trump's war of aggression (a war crime that got about a dozen Nazis hung at Nuremberg).
But a continued stalemate and closure of the Straits would have driven gas prices north of $5 a gallon, diesel higher than $8, when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve runs out next month.
The price would go even higher if not for the accelerated demand destruction caused by these price spikes as consumers turn to EVs, batteries and cheap balcony solar power arrays.
So despite himself, Trump has triggered the green new deal with his idiotic policies.
Oh sweet irony!
Still, except for petroleum dictatorships like Russia, Texas and Saudi Arabia, renewables are taking over with more than 90% of new energy capacity last year being wind and solar.
As William Gibson observed, "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed."
It seems some kind of permission requirement has clicked on here, though I am getting no notices. We'll see what happens when next I post.
Who smuggled the playback device into his coffin?
Also, I can't help wondering if he was alive in there for real but his reputation for pranking proved fatal.
Enshittification, or the Slopocalypse, or whatever you call it, is an interesting beast because it appears to corrupt and mushify the brains of its hypesters at an ever faster clip than those of the general public.
Sorry! I just released a passel of comments locked for approval and reset the parameters.
Testing, to see if comments are again published right away.
Yay! They are.
Also, we're almost at 200 comments this post, so be aware when you might have to page ahead to the next 200 to see new comments.
So the cost (according to HuffPost) of The Orange Fuhrer's ballroom has gone up to 600 million; he originally said 14 million. Trump can't keep track of spending for love nor money, save when the money will go into his pocket. One might beg Congress to block further progress on the travesty that he wants to replace the East Wing with, sod it over, and let the next president build something more in keeping with the architecture.
https://bsky.app/profile/rexhuppke.bsky.social/post/3mody6goofk2h
Not long after Donald Trump hurled America into the dumbest war imaginable, our Nobel-Peace-Prize-deficient president declared on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Well, you'll never believe what wound up happening!
These things write themselves.
It's funny in the same way as "They told me if I voted for Hillary, we'd be bringing home bodies from Iran, and they were right."
Ok so Iran won the war and the USA has surrendered and is going home with its tale between its legs. Iran now controls the world's oil supply and can bring the world's economy to its knees with a few cheap drones made in an Iranian garage and launched from a pickup truck. Our aircraft carrier battle groups costing trillions could do nothing to stop them. America is no longer a superpower thanks to Trump and Netanyahu.
The American Century is over.
Only the British debacle at Suez in 1956 that put the last nail in the coffin of British imperial pretentions can match this defeat.
So now what?
Assuming that Israel doesn't just say fuck it and nuke the Iranians, they will be able to bleed the world economy dry via transit fees (aka tolls) and use the money to rebuild their economy and military.
The rest of the world will find this intolerable and accelerate the ongoing demand destruction in regards for oil. Trump's war has made the green transition inevitable. Oil states and oil companies will be stuck with $trillions of dollars of now worthless stranded assets.
Thank God.
The planet won't burn and oil oligarchs won't have the money to corrupt and poison our democracy.
But without out demand for oil, the American empire is now rather pointless. Navies exist to protect trade whether it's the Spanish navy defending gold and silver shipments from the new world, the dutch fleet protection spice trade from the east Indies, the British royal navy protecting raw materials feeding Britain's coal powered steam engine manufacturing.
Or the American navy protecting oil routes from the Persian Gulf.
Like the once mighty royal navy, the USN has no reason for existing.
Goin back further 2000 years the Romans had to choose between empire or keeping their Republic. America now has the opportunity to chose democracy and let go of empire.
An reader's anecdote...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Jun16-6.html
After V-E day, he [ the writer's grandfather ] was part of a group that was guarding a large German house. In marches a heavyset German prisoner accompanied by several American officers. My dad and his squad were not told who the obviously important German was. This estate was a way station and the following day, the prisoner left. After the incident, my father asked his commanding officer who the German was. He was told it was Hermann Goering. "Goering," my father responded, "if I had known it was Goering, I'd have shot him." His commanding officer replied, "And that is why we didn't tell you."
Heh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS1NZLgKM2c
Navies do a few things, but not well if in isolation from a grand strategy.
There are thousands of 'what if' moments like that.
eg: my Dad, who was stationed in Berlin immediately post-war, once casually remarked that he had had a clear line on Jo Stalin as he was driven by during a parade the Russians were putting on...
A converse example: one day, in Normandy, the camp's routine was broken broken by a furious major-general on horseback, pursuing a very scared soldier.
Apparently, this fellow had decided to go out poaching rabbits. With a sten gun, as you do.
He nearly bagged something else instead.
Horrocks was understandably not amused but, having established the circumstances (and perhaps the state of the hapless idiot's trousers*) let it go with a severe reprimand, and the suggestion he try other poaching methods.
* The anecdote reminds me of this scene from 'Waterloo'
Any thoughts on Peter Thiels Dialog list?
I was surprised to see Kaja Kalla on it, Jens Spahn not so.
US Navy = force projection around the globe. This will not change.
What will change is drone and counter-drone systems on maritime platforms.
When bombers started bombing ships, it necessitated a change in force makeup and in tactics.
Drones in close maritime quarters are the same type of shift.
With the amount of money we are willing to spend for military superiority, expect *large* changes in the next 20 years.
Do not expect the value of global force projection to change.
I want to see the responses to all the personal / political questions. The hacker said they had them.
Just who is leaning on Thiel for matchmaking?
Are there sex workers being supplied? Who gets possession of the video tapes of encounters?
Dialog conferences are supposedly not for attribution, but Thiel gets to set the agenda and locate the site, so obviously he can circumvent the "attribution" if he wishes. Who else has their battery of hidden mics and cameras on site?
Matthew is on target.
All I'll add is those changes within the USN are already underway.
No one is ignoring the lessons to be found in watching what is happening in Ukraine.
And yes. AI's are required. You'll see more concerns about dissemination and export controls in that field in the coming years. I'm already seeing it.
A cellphone, even an older one, has more compute power than anyone should ever need. Insane scaling is nothing more than an epic, planet-destroying, scammy grift. At UCSD, they're constructing data centers with old cellphones.
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/researchers-recycle-old-phones-and-cluster-them-into-computing-platforms-says-processors-on-modern-smartphones-deliver-higher-single-core-performance-than-comparable-multicore-servers
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