AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

 If you see your glass as half empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching. — Anon

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The now-extinct Celtic language of Gaulish gave French its infamously tricky base-twenty counting system, where eighty is “quatre-vingts,” but only a few hundred Gaulish-origin words persist in modern Metropolitan French.
A now-extinct language of Frankish was a Germanic language, as English is. Though it contributed the names of France and the French people, it comprises only about 10% of modern French vocabulary.

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“East of Eden” is a defining literary work, centered on California's Salinas Valley, and is deeply tied to the state’s geography and identity.

The seven-episode series, starring Florence Pugh, recently wrapped up filming in New Zealand.

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Davis is hitting .151 through the first quarter of the season and just .177 with a meager .289 slugging percentage over his 218-game career.

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AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

A multi-trillion-dollar bet on the development and acceleration of AI has become the biggest outlay of capital in the history of business.

That said, AI is becoming deeply unpopular. It has a 26% approval rating, which is below just about every institution, including ICE. Data centers are being protested around the country. Two people even decided to take a shot at Sam Altman’s house. The industry has spent $150 million in PAC money to purchase compliance from the two major parties, but that hasn’t stopped ordinary people from coming to their own conclusions.

More money is now being spent on data centers than on commercial office buildings.

The hyperscalers plan to spend $700 billion, including data centers, on AI infrastructure in 2026. A major sports arena costs a couple billion or so. So imagine 7 new sports stadiums being built in every one of the 50 states this year, and you have a sense of the scale of the investment. (From Yang)

So what's going on here? Are we to advance society and knowledge at the expense of jobs--or should we purposefully stop those advances for the unproven benefit of the few? Are technological changes really up for popular vote? If so, what about online betting and pornography? Are these workers just Luddites, impassioned and wrong? What are the ancillary, unimagined applications of the technology, good and bad? And the real, basic, and unspoken question: what are the non-economic implications of this technology?

What happens in an increasingly comfortable but workless culture? Will social disruption be caused by aesthetics? The barricades manned by librarians and psychologists?

And can this technology be ignored--or suppressed--when it might be commandeered by people of bad intent?

Robbing Peter and Paul

 

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“Our series (against Philadelphia) ended on a Wednesday. That Sunday night, there was Tampa-Montreal Game 7 (Canadiens won 2-1), and then Colorado-Minnesota Game 1 of their series (Avalanche won 9-6). The Montreal-Tampa game, I question whether our team could compete in that environment defensively. When I flipped over to Colorado-Minnesota, I questioned whether our team could compete in that environment offensively. That’s really the way that I view everything.”--Pen's GM Kyle Dubas

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A study published in Nature reported that the probability of an investor’s bankruptcy increases with the frequency of their leveraged trades. Investors have accumulated more than $1.22 trillion in margin debt to trade stocks as of May 2024. (Margin debt refers to money borrowed to purchase securities.)

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The Murtaugh reversal should give us all pause in the trust we place in our government, particularly in our entrepreneurial legal system.

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Chinese police stations in NYC, Sharia Law courts---anybody worried yet?

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Good news: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an opinion on the Western Union merger plans.

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Robbing Peter and Paul

In New York City, the socialists are taking credit for balancing the city's chronic budget deficit.

Mamdani has reportedly gotten the governor and state lawmakers to agree to change the way New York City’s underfunded public pension plans pay off debt they incurred a generation ago by making unwarranted, rosy assumptions about how their investments would perform.
The working state is subsidizing the socialist city.

The city wants to reduce those debt payments and instead pay them off over a longer period, likely well into the 2040s — meaning tomorrow’s workers will be taxed extra to pay for city services delivered before some of their parents were born.

Mamdani, like all these politicians, regardless of their "philosophy," is proud of this manipulation as if it were an achievement rather than just another procrastinating, distorting economic gimmick. (The kind of economic sleight-of-hand, by the way, the prim socialist is supposed to disdain.)

The Russian communist state lasted for three generations.
See? Socialism works.

Vigilangione, Continued

 

Joyce taught English at Berlitz schools in Pula and Trieste, and is supposed to have known up to thirteen different languages.

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Vigilangione, Continued

Order is restrictive; when does it become oppressive? It certainly is convenient. If half the people literate in English wrote from right to left, we would have no fewer literate people, but they would not be comprehensible to one another. If half of Americans decided it was right to drive on the left side of the road, car travel would stop, the car would become useless, and its convenience would be replaced. What would happen to chess if activists tried to broaden its appeal by straightening out and simplifying the knight's move?

Mormon polygamy was seen in the nineteenth century as a threat to the U.S. moral structure and was fought, legislated against, and eventually bullied away with very little legal justification. In Europe, polygamy has become a significant socio-economic problem for the growing nurturing state as dependents logrithmically outstrip underpinning arithmetical working support.

The values of the West are increasingly impractical in the modern, expanding world. In America, the values of equality and freedom have become a threat to the stability of the culture. The Americans suffer domestic disruption by people who oppose the very laws that protect their outrage, even to the point of organized street opposition to legitimate law enforcement agencies. The British now have hate-speech laws that rival any communist country. Sitting in judgment of your fellow citizens has become very disruptive, even if you're right. And Americans are telling themselves that by taking products without paying—a behavior they call "microlooting' known to the rest of us as "stealing"—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.

Is this a trend percolating up or seeping down? What did the Americans do in Venezuela? They declared the country an outlaw — as they did with the Barbary states — and preemptively invaded it. The danger is that, in a larger view, Venezuela deserved it. American behavior in Iran is more illustrative. Iran is certainly a danger to the civilized world, and a nuclear weapon in its hands, according to its own philosophy and statements, would result in economic disruption and nuclear destruction to friends and enemies alike. That said, there is no obvious legal or moral reason Western nations should be able to control Iran's internal affairs simply because they fear the implications of its national ambitions. Nonetheless, the Americans and Israel preemptively destroyed most of Iran's military and scientific infrastructure.

Again, this was all in a good cause. The world's nonreaction even implied its tacit approval. The Americans want only stability and stable commerce. But is their action consistent with their values? Does the threat justify their extraordinary means? And, worse, what would have happened had the Americans not resorted to those extraordinary means?

So Mangioni, whoever shot Kirk, whoever attacked the Press Dinner, the gerrymanderer, Trump himself--all place their personal motives aside and, like the sin eater of ancient times, sacrifice themselves for what each knows is the greater good.

The Morality of Lynching

 

The Morality of Lynching

As the Bell Curve flattens, more murders seem motiveless. Children shoot other children in schools, strangers push strangers in front of trains. But most murders are still reasoned. A perceived enemy, a rival in business or love, or a simple envy. But we humans always expand our world and encounter new risks. In the jungle, we found AIDS, in the lab, COVID. And the anxious, intense modern body politic has picked at the scab of dimwittedness and resentment and uncovered a new version of an ancient depravity: the vigilangione.

Vigilante means "watchman." It is from "vigil" meaning "watchful, awake," and has the same origin as "vigor." It emerged in early American communities that had grown beyond the law and resorted to undeputized law enforcement. "Angione" is from "Mangione," a pretty boy who made up a crime, made up a punishment, convicted a man of that crime in his mind, then murdered him. 

Mangione's victim was not even the perpetrator of Mangione's made-up crime; he was just in the moral vicinity. But the scythe of righteousness swings wide. The vigilangione is much like the religious maniac doing God's work, but without a letter of marque. He's a man of the time of "the feud," where Hatfields were held responsible by McCoys for acts, sometimes serious, sometimes merely perceived, sometimes only distantly related, often from barely remembered times.

The vigilangione emerges from a world of uncodified law, where rules are created and enforced by individual whim, not just for personal gratification, but for a perceived greater good. Like at an individual lynching, the man stands by his work.

Or like the modern politician, who must set aside society's abstract legal restraints and rise above the law to set things right.

So it is in a land that has rejected the very laws that allow us to live together. 

Cry Havoc.

 
 

The Danger of History

 

The defense lawyers for the most recent Trump attacker are trying to remove those people at risk during the attack from testifying because, as potential victims, they will not be objective.

There was a time in America when they would be called "witnesses."

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A Danger of History

I feared that on a recent trip to Knossos, one of the favorite places of my youth, I might be force-fed the old truth that "you can't go home again." I still believe that if you've never seen the astonishing ancient Minoan city, you should; but if you have seen it, you probably don't need to go back. 

The modern recreation of the archaeological site is now representational. It is history at arm's length. Wooden walkways guide us, restricting the remains from our contamination and us from the rugged terrain. Thus, the ruins--and we--are protected from each other. Modern cement has filled in spaces. The grass has been cut, the areas staked out, and some glassed over. Areas have been roped off. What was once a spontaneous immersion in a historical site of profound depth and meaning is now a visit to a museum or the Stations of the Cross.  

Analysis and micro-examination of the sources and evidence of one of the great human achievements has disrupted the very interstitium of life itself. Imagination can no longer fill in to enhance the gaps.

Potpourri

 

Potpourri

I'm off for a while and likely will not have internet access so...here is a collection of notions that have been stewing for the past week, delicately placed for their fragrance and aesthetics.

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Someone tried to firebomb Sam Altman's home (the CEO of OpenAI). The Bell Curve has two ends. A silly with a Molotov cocktail can, if fortunate, cancel the life and production of one of humanity's high achievers, trading the very productive end of the curve for one on the other end.
This is the Bell curve of intelligence and productivity. And it is the "Curse of the Colt." The unemployed moron with a demonic vision can murder the CEO of an important health care company. Death to the hierarchy and the dreaded quality! And power to the drone.
"God made all men, but Colt made them equal"--Samuel Colt

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A Minnesota fraud suspect involving $11 million fled the country days before his trial.
Despite warnings from prosecutors, the judge offered Abdirashid Said $150,000 unconditional bail, and he booked a flight undetected.

We are unsure which is the moron here or how many there are.

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A signal of the bureaucratic obsession with mortal tinkering: The Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow firing squads and readopt lethal injection as part of a broader push to revive the death penalty.

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One thing we can all agree on is the despicable ethical and legal outrages of the graft and theft in the welfare state programs and the NGOs and non-profits. So, how are the investigations going? What is the conviction rate, and what judgments have been rendered?

 

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National Socialism, Stalinism, Pol Pot's Year Zero, the Chinese Kleptocracy, and the like don't always benefit those with the guns, but they never benefit anyone other than those with the guns.
Those grim countries with suppression, gulags, and citizen-murder, whose horizon never extends beyond the graveyard, do not send their wide-eyed immigrants to America for relief or therapy; they send them for revenge. Many are truly inculcated with the value of the static confines of their home's repressive limits. Others, as is becoming clear, are simply stupid. Piker thinks he gets points for frankness, AOC goes to the European trade summit expecting an inauguration from those royalty-worshipping Europeans.
The arc of history does not bend toward justice; in this life, there is no justice. The arc of history bends toward truth.
The problem in life is who must suffer--and for how long--while history works out the Gordian knot of 'justice' to reveal the completely unrelated underlying truth.

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A California winery owned by Representative Ilhan Omar's husband was shut down weeks after Congressional Republicans demanded answers about the reported wealth of the Minnesota Democrat's family.

Wait for the follow-up justice.

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Back to the Bell Curve. Do the 97% of us average guys owe everything to the 3% the morons are victimizing and harassing? Will that 3% retaliate?

Musk currently controls the world’s largest space force. He sends rockets to orbit more than 100 times/year. They are reusable. One Falcon 9 has been reused 30 times so far. He has quite detailed, feasible plans for colonizing the Moon and Mars in the next decade.  

Musk currently controls a global internet provider with >10 million worldwide users, and it's growing fast. At the beginning of the war, he shut off the internet to Ukraine’s military, which probably would have let Russia win the war quickly if he had not turned it back on.

Musk currently controls one of the world’s largest social media sites, X (it’s about 15% as big as Facebook), with 550 million users. He has control of the algorithms.

Musk is building a robot army through his company, Optimus.

Musk is implanting computer chips in human brains (Neuralink brain-computer interfaces). He is actually doing human clinical trials.

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And from a podcast, an explanation from Maessheimer of the current Progressive position on Iran:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMg6_jGfjzM

"Foot on the Ground," Head in the Clouds

On this day:

1558
Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the Dauphin of France, François, at Notre Dame de Paris.
1915
The arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul marks the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.
1916
Easter Rising: The Irish Republican Brotherhood led by nationalists Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and Joseph Plunkett starts a rebellion in Ireland.
1916
Ernest Shackleton and five men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition launch a lifeboat from uninhabited Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean to organise a rescue for the ice-trapped ship ship .
1918
First tank-to-tank combat, at Villers-Bretonneux, France, when three British Mark IVs met three German A7Vs.
1967
Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when its parachute fails to open. He is the first human to die during a space mission.
1967
Vietnam War: American General William Westmoreland says in a news conference that the enemy had “gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily.”
1980
Eight U.S. servicemen die in Operation Eagle Claw as they attempt to end the Iran hostage crisis.
1990
STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery.

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Hackers discovered they could use poetry in their prompts to confound LLMs and their safeguards. This is known as an adversarial attack on AI using poetry.
From a recent investigation, “These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.”

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Trump says he is considering having the government buy Spirit Air. Mamdani's grocery store could serve food.

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The Steelers called receiver Makai Lemon without realizing the Eagles had moved up with a trade to get him. The Eagles weren’t able to reach Lemon because he was on the phone with the Steelers.
So the Steelers entered a world of Pittsburgh foolishness previously dominated by the Pirates and their first-round picks, and the Penguins, with their silly responses to Flyers' WWE tactics.

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The architects of the Afghan withdrawal have problems with how Trump plans to withdraw from Iran. 

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"Foot on the Ground," Head in the Clouds

The NYC's so-called “pied-à-terre” tax, announced last week by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, would impose an annual surtax on non-primary residential real estate valued at more than $5 million.
To declare victory--the intention is the point to Progressives--Mamdani stood in front of Ken Griffin’s penthouse and grinned, “Today we’re taxing the rich.”

Griffin is the CEO of the Citadel hedge fund and Citadel Securities, and the mayor of the city stands outside Griffin’s home to name and villainize a man who employs thousands, pays an enormous local tax bill, and has donated billions to causes benefiting New Yorkers.

The socialist debate has always been about feasibility: Can these targeted, hierarchical tax plans work? But this notion is beginning to reveal itself as something much more important. Mamdani was bypassing the shallow economics of his 'plan' and making it personal.

Envy. The disparaging of success. Central and abstract government power. These are the antithesis of the thinking that led to this country's creation. These are the elements of class warfare: ugly, anti-individual, and pro-oligarchy. That does not mean it won't work, but it does mean it is, essentially, anti-American. 

It may be that America needs a philosophical infusion from the old, tribal, failed cultures of Europe and Asia, but why people come to a country they dislike and try to recreate a culture they left deserves some thought. It may be that this event, foolish and revealing, is a display of an overconfidence that might stimulate such a reevaluation.