The corrupt Stupid Leading The Delusional

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee today. Maybe I just woke up cranky.

Ever look at the news in the morning and think “Oh, look, it’s the corrupt blind leading the stupid, leading the stupidly blind?”

I’m looking at the AI psy-ops — what you didn’t think the whole “We don’t want no AI here!” was a psy-ops? Oh, you sweet summer child! — and thinking “This just keeps getting dumber and dumber. How can it not have imploded in an outburst of dumb?”

It started with AI Data Centers somehow being particularly evilbad and worse than all the other data centers dotted around this great land of all. There were all the claims of the data centers specifically for AI polluting the drinking water and taking all the power. (Yeah, it’s bullshit. This blog ran a series on it. Start with this post then the next: AI Data Center Contamination by Larry Good.) This somewhat worked because most Americans are still largely ignorant of what data centers, computers, and technology in general do. But it didn’t go as far as they hoped, and eventually cooler heads prevailed. (The left really is feeling the lack of USAid money.)

There followed a number of “AI escaped containment” posts that if you dug in were “We used security measures boomers would laugh at, and the AI escaped, oh noes.”

I honestly kept expecting “Our AI escaped containment, robbed a bank and toppled three South American governments.” Or “Our AI found a way to snort cocaine!”

In the middle of this, the ever reliably grifty Bernie Sanders decided to earn his Chinese paycheck by introducing a bill banning AI and establishing jail sentences for anyone who used them. In a way this was saying the quiet part out loud.

Then Anthropic, whose leadership is, I swear, mentally handicapped morons, dumber than any box of rocks you care to mention, decided to run the “Our employee quit because AI will kill us all” scam.

Guys… I’m sitting here pinching the bridge of my nose with thumb and forefinger in what Dorothy Grant named “The sinal salute.”

What is going on: Anthropic and all the other AI companies, but particularly anthropic, are mental midgets, who decided the way to make their companies profitable is to regulate any up and coming imitators out of play.

Why it’s not as stupid as it sounds: it’s largely worked in the past, which is why all our regulations should be struck down and then re-instituted AS NEEDED. Because right now most business regulations are designed to allow only people with deep pockets to play.

Why it’s absolutely stupid: American regulations don’t apply overseas, and you bet your beepy that Russia and China will be pursuing AI.

Where I’ll give them something: Without America the chance of innovation threatening the established AI companies is… none. Because Russia and China are not very good at innovation. But you know, there are other countries…

Meanwhile the people collaborating with them are a collection of old leftist boomers (BIRM) who can’t tell fiction from reality and are for sure convinced that if AI goes on we’ll get into a Skynet situation.

AND then there’s the old commies, paid and unpaid, who want to give their old allies in Russia and China a chance.

In the defense of all the old idiots involved: they do say your brain shrinks with age, particularly if you don’t use it, and leftism is a system for not having to use your brain ever.

But honestly, this psyops is so inordinately stupid and transparent that I am surprised ANYONE is falling for it.

It’s a dumpster fire in a moron factory, and I just want them to shut up and go away.

142 thoughts on “The corrupt Stupid Leading The Delusional”

    1. That might spread the issues to a greater magnitude.

      When I last reviewed the State of Arizona Emergency Plan, the annex/scenario which had the biggest impact on the state was one where there was minimal damage within the state. It involves a massive quake or other calamity in the state to our left and suddenly having several million new guests for this state to deal with. You could imagine the potential impacts on politics if even a relatively small percentage remained long enough to vote.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Order mines, concertina wire, MGs, and much ammo for the AZ National Guard. Problem solved. Also plan and stockpile for judicious use of 155mm DPICM rounds for major surges.

        If you are going to stop a zombie horde, do it big, do it right.

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        1. As the great-great nephew of the most recent governor of a US state to order his National Guard troops to take up arms against another state (guess which ones?) I don’t see the current governor inclined toward such a strategy. Plus FEMA might get grumpy. Not a judgment, but an observation.

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          1. That never happened in US history. National Guard troops (and predecessor state militias) have never taken up arms in combat against another U.S. state.

            Are you misremembering a coal miner’s strike, cattle range wars, or a book or movie?

            I might want to explore something like that if it’s not already over populated…

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            3. The states of New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont were more interested in fighting each other than the Revolution, having long-standing territorial disputes going back to the colonial days. The Continental Congress basically wrote all three off as untrustworthy, particularly after they found out Vermont had petitioned Britain to join up with Canada after the Continental Congress refused to help them defend themselves against the Hamsters and Yorkers.

              Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys were originally “irregulars”, but Vermont made them official militia and they fought New Hampshire and New York as such.

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          1. Already done. Lots of old unmarked mine shafts out there for people to fall into. Actually a small-scale menace for the unaware adventurer.

            Oh wait, you meant the kaboomey kind. Yeah, those too.

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      2. I’ll recall an old Dan O’Neill Odd Bodkins strip, whose conversation ran approximately

        Fred: Ah, California!

        Hugh: Yes, our earthquakey homeland.

        Fred: You could move to Arizona …

        Hugh: I’d rather die in an earthquake than live in Arizona!

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      3. Set up armed border patrols at as many roads into AZ as possible. At a minimum, blockade the eastbound lands of the main freeways, I-40, I-10, I-8. Demand papers proving citizenship. Let those people thru. Encourage them to keep heading east or northeast.

        Divert all the illegals south on AZ-95. When they get to Yuma (I-8), shunt them all west back into CA, from whence they can easily cross south into Mexico and good riddance.

        Just a thought-experiment, honest. ;-)

        Liked by 2 people

      4. On the Y2K forums back in 1999, rumor had it that Arizona plans for the event included dynamiting all bridges over the Colorado River going into Càifornia.

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    2. Aim further north – per the clanker that lives under DuckDuckGo:

      Anthropic’s HQ is in San Francisco, California, at 500 Howard Street.

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        1. And the number of surviving air defense installations from back when such existed in the City and County of San Francisco: Zero.

          Not that those would help much with a totally accidental quadcopter invasion from a Middle Kingdom container ship…

          Liked by 1 person

          2. Those old Nike missiles wouldn’t be much use against that kind of threat. Now, an old air-to-air Genie might work, but that has a bit of collateral damage. (Genie was a nuke.)

            Liked by 1 person

              2. Collateral damage is only a problem when you care about the residents, I don’t, they’re Californians, although radiation crazed leftist zombies might be a problem…Meh.

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            2. I bet collateral damage from the “call up all Ducks Unlimited members” defense plan might be somewhat significant, at least in skyscraper glass.

              Though with the vacancy rates in downtown SF they might take a bit to be noticed.

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          3. The USAF might not do so well.

            Look up “Battle of Palmdale” for equal measures of hilarity, WTF?!, and sadness. Hang on, here’s a convenient link: https://www.google.com/search?client=falkon&q=air%20force%20battle%20over%20california

            A few years later, the USAF managed to shoot itself in the foot again with “Operation Sky Shield”, a simulated Soviet aircraft attack on the US. They invited the Brits to send some planes as part of the “aggressor force.” Intercepts of American planes pretending to be Russian: officially 99%. Interception of a wing of British Avro Vulcans: 0%. Though they might have briefly spotted one on radar and then lost it. It’s not clear whether the USAF rigged the outcome beforehand, or simply told big fat lies. Good thing they weren’t trying to defend against a British attack.

            Liked by 1 person

        2. I may have said that I do not like the San Francisco so much that I would run the nation from there. Actually, what I said the other day was something else entirely.

          I do not automatically go “I trust these people to make sure these machines conform to human interests”, because I do not trust the people to themselves conform to human interests.

          A mystery cult whose objects are logic and intelligence may wander off into behavior so insane that they do not mesh well with others. They may also underpredict irrational distastes that others may have for them, that are a valid defense mechanism.

          Liked by 1 person

  2. The thing is, LLMs are the apocalypse for most of the entrenched ossified systems, because they change what the individual is capable of in ways that are not possible to predict.

    Robust healthy institutions will adapt to the changes and thrive, but none of our current institutions are that, so they will die, one way or another.

    And they’re fighting it all the way down.

    Liked by 5 people

    2. Indeed it appears that just as concentrating powered looms in factories mostly wiped out the home weaving industry LLM’s are cutting a swath across certain parts of the creative world. The legislation Sen Sanders (feh spit) has proposed is the legislative equivalent of the sabot workers were alleged to have thrown into some of the early looms. Whether this is via his own stupidity (of which he has large portions) or via his innate cupidity and revenue enhancement from certain sources (e.g. CCP ) or a little of both is unclear.

      Liked by 4 people

          1. He and a long list of potential future foreign adversaries can be complete delusional lunatics on AI, and at the same time keenly interested in limiting American military capabilities with a regulation that is obviously far too broadly written.

            Communists dislike personally owned firearms, because communists do not want to be shot for committing murders.

            Regulating software written on one’s personal air gapped computer has some privacy and speech issues.

            It is maybe tedious to explain to someone that a WWII time delay fuse cannot become a person. It is perhaps more challenging to discuss with the public what on earth might be meant by ‘intelligence’ or ‘autonomy’, and what we can and cannot know about certain systems that people can stick the labels on.

            Liked by 3 people

      2. And a Programmer? Whoever heard of a “morning” person programmer? Well, I suppose there has to be one to be the exception to prove the rule. As for cute, this is NOT my domain. I suppose the cuteness does serve a purpose it keeps him alive in a relationship with a dyed in the wool night owl. My wife is the Morning person in our house, although that has been wearing off as she ages, or perhaps her habits are merging with mine after 42 years of marriage.

        Liked by 4 people

        3. Sadly, one of the changes over the last few decades is that dev teams are now international. Given that I live in California, yes – I don’t like Hairgel either – this means that I now have meetings at 6:00 a.m. to accommodate India/Pakistan, Egypt, Europe, East Coast USA… As a programmer, used to late nights, this is playing hell with my sleep patterns (work until midnight, bed, then gentle waking between 8 and 8:30, followed by COFFEE).

          It is fortunate that most meetings require my presence but not my participation, even with coffee I can’t assemble sentences at 6:00 a.m. Whoever thought up scrums needs to be pilloried and then sent home wearing the stupid hat.

          As to data centers, the debate is bemusing me. There is a high chance that the areas protesting data centers already have data centers but don’t know it. Data centers do not advertise, at least not on the buildings, and are very difficult to get into. I accept that there has been a recent spike but none the less this is not new.

          I am also bemused by the “Evil AI is going to gobble the world” meme – shades of the grey goo scenario which caused panic decades ago; even the idiot Chuckles (OK – Charles 3) referenced it. I assume that this is the new existential catastrophe now that climate change and net zero are losing their charms. What we need is a good pandemic to worry people instead.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. What we need is a good pandemic to worry people instead.

            Since one of the widespread scenarios for “AI doomsday” is “The AI Overlords get tired of hoomans and release the Ultimate Plague™️to chlorinate the gene pool”, they’ve got that covered.

            More likely? The next WuFlu will have a press release: “Pinky swear we didn’t have a thing to do with this. Must have been a rogue AI! or someone with access to one and a CRISPR lab. Could be anyone! Why you accusing us, raaaaacist?”

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Indeed Mr Livesley I have done similar. Training and working with HP India folks in the early 2000’s (4am calls as I am 3 hours earlier than you ), working with folks from Vietnam and the UK for DTV work we contracted on, Conferences with 3 developers in Taiwan who were a little Taiwanese subsidiary with stand ups at 6 AM and 6pm Eastern which translated roughly to 6PM and 8AM Taiwan time, No one liked that. Used well there are advantages to this (e.g. I can leave off the problem and if I leave sufficient clues as to where I was the team at the antipodes can pick it up as they come in for the day and leave a bread crumb trail for us to find as we come in getting effectively 24 hour work days, great for solving mission critical issues that are blocking income).

            As for the mechanical/electrical issues of Data Centers at least in Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire it existed through MUCH of the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. Digital had 2 MAJOR development centers (Merrimack and Spitbrook Road Nashua) in New Hampshire. There were 9 LARGE (each 10000-150000 sq feet) machine rooms in Spitbrook alone full of TTL, ECL and CMOS behemoths and tape and disk drives all of which were either driven by copious amounts of 220 or 3 phase 440 cords as big around as a strong man’s bicep. Every office pretty much had a workstation each cubicle ultimately had 20 amp service(started with 10 amp) and groups of 8 represented 160 amp service more than the house I grew up in’s 100 amp service and even then sometimes breakers would get popped. Spitbrook Road had heating (via Heat pumps) for emergency ONLY, in general the buildings were ALWAYS being cooled even when the external temps dropped to negative values. IN Massachusetts King Street Littleton, Marlboro, Hudson, Tewksbury Maynard (the Mill + 2 other sites) existed as large if not larger (King Street, The Mill), than Spitbrook. I’d bet that every last one of those ex DEC buildings is FULL of racks of 1 U machines providing a variety of services including lots of support for LLM’s. For a short while, that kind of machine room looked doomed, but being able to lease out machine space to run Docker or similar environments without having to own or care for the machines took off in the late 2010’s.

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            1. When I worked for (contractor) EDS (!Ptui!) in Lansing, we were transitioning from a GM office space to our own leased building, and our PDP 11/44 was casually plugged into the regular electrical service. It was such fun to be doing something useful and have the breaker trip. One of the first things they showed me was where that breaker box was located.

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                1. Then you know the meme from the time, EDS bought GM …

                  Ross Perot was an interesting guy. One of his catch phrases was ‘Eagles don’t flock.’.

                  Being a contractor, I had fun with that; I put up pictures in my cube, like this

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        4. I used to be nearly the first person at my office, getting there around 8 am.

          Not happily, mind you. But being alone let me grumble into my coffee while dealing with email and overnight test results and such. And it let me leave close to 5, most days, with a clear conscience. (My absolute criterion was approximately 50% typing errors – no point in trying after that, go home!)

          Wife was a morning person; her sister is a morning person; their dad was a morning person. I really don’t know about Mother-in-law, but I suspect not a morning person.

          Very early in our marriage we discovered we were not morning-social. Me, because the sun was not yet over the yardarm, and she, I think, ran low blood sugar. Give her breakfast and she was happy. We both like(d) breakfast; she needed hers around 7, I’m not hungry until 11-ish.

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        5. I used to roll into cubicle-land at 0400 to get some work time uninterrupted by the telephone, co-workers, etc. I got more done in the few hours before others showed up than I did in the rest of the day. Which typically ended at noon. They went to lunch, I went home.

          A new manager got butthurt over it and insisted I conform to the same schedule as everyone else (despite “flextime”) then got butthurt again when I got less work done. No, I’m not going to work another 8-10 hours a week, unpaid (salaried) to make up the difference. I guess by their lights I was a bad employee.

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          1. “I’m not going to work another 8-10 hours a week, unpaid (salaried) to make up the difference. I guess by their lights I was a bad employee.“

            –

            This.

            Though I did not really have flex hours. I did refuse to work OT on salary on principle. OTOH did not mean I did not get into something, and go “Oh c* it is 6 PM”. Once I chose my exit strategy (retirement), it was 8 hours on the dot; plus lunch. If I worked through lunch I was out at 4 PM. Really tried to not answer phones just before noon, or 5 PM. What was the boss going to do? Fire me?

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          1. There are swamps in Connecticut, too. There was a small one on the golf course that I grew up next to. Had skunk cabbage and everything. ;-)

            Liked by 1 person

  4. “What is going on: Anthropic and all the other AI companies, but particularly anthropic, are mental midgets, who decided the way to make their companies profitable is to regulate any up and coming imitators out of play.”

    Yes, absolutely. That’s the game they’re playing. Regulate the competition out of existence, make sure some smart New Guy doesn’t invent something that blows you out of the water.

    The other game at play is the Chicoms trying to get ahead in the race by making the Americans handcuff themselves to a Green New Deal. They’re spending a –lot– of money.

    Just so we all know what’s up, super GREEEEENNNNN!!!!!! Canada is building data centers. Oh yeah. We are. There’s one going up on the Hamilton Ont. waterfront, moving forward no matter what the Greenie Weenies are doing. Data center going up in Alberta. Maybe Saskatchewan. And more on the way, I’m sure.

    Why? Because the Chicoms want data centers in Canada. Because WE can use American hardware, and they can’t. So the #Lieberals are campaigning against energy, against oil and against data centers, while at the exact same time building data centers and the electrical generation to run them. Pipelines will no doubt come along presently, when #ChairmanWinnie gives them the nod.

    Okay? That’s what’s up.

    Oh, and anyone (aka Lefty trolls) who thinks my tinfoil hat is on too tight is welcome to google all this and come to their own conclusions. This is all public knowledge.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. Here’s the thing, it won’t be an AI company who invents it and it won’t have the AI label initially.

      LLMs are the derivatives of the bastard children of late 80s AI research when the dream, neural nets, reached beyond available processing power, storage, and dataset sizes. As recently as two years ago they were bumping into the limits of that theory and its first order derivatives according to their own researches at conferences who were showing off their ideas for second order derivatives.

      But if you look at the history of AI research it’s a succession of subfield being trash then being hot then being trash again. I suspect a different subfield from the broad machine learning category is getting ready for its next time in the sun.

      Liked by 3 people

    2. “make sure some smart New Guy doesn’t invent something that blows you out of the water.”

      Like maybe that guy who has made absurd amounts of money by doing stuff like launching rockets into space?

      Liked by 5 people

    3. I think, given Anthropic’s position on the dangers of Anthropic’s AI, I would like to see Anthropic regulated out of existence.

      Pour engourager les autres

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Yeah. The reason I would most want to use LLM tools is to make autonomous weapons, or to make might as well be autonomous weapons.

        I want to make rayguns to shoot drones down, pew, pew. I don’t want to tie the end user’s hands with a bunch of licensing that requires them to only shoot people I give them advance written permission to shoot.

        We need counter-UAS systems, and the software for such to function.

        We don’t need a Silicon Valley company that may be a VC scam doing a really terrible job of being a defense contractor.

        I am not an Effective Alturist, and do not worry that I might create a teleporting machine person. I would not build a start up around the thesis that I need to hire a bunch of EA goobers, and flatter them to keep them working for me.

        They seem to just be crazy people, and in principle I can instead employ sane people to do good things.

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        1. Interesting read on the preconditions baloney Anthropic’s lawyers were insisting on that led up to the whole DoW-ban thing by Cdr. Salamander on substack, at:

          https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/understand-anthropic-vs-department

          Sample, quoting from a linked ep of the Ruthless Podcast interviewing Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering (USW(R&E)) Emil Michael:

          Michael: So I called them in and I was like, okay guys, this has got to change. We’ll use it lawfully—all lawful purposes—but it’s artificial general intelligence. You don’t tell me where I can fly a plane to. We decide that when we buy a plane from Boeing or Lockheed.

          And they’re like, well, we think these are our moral values. We have our own constitution. It’s called the Claude constitution. It’s like, okay, but those aren’t corporate values. No, it’s our constitution. What about our Constitution? 

          Ruthless: We got one too. 

          Michael: Turns out there’s the Constitution, and everything else. And then they were so out to lunch.

          I’d say, okay, help me understand this. Let’s say I have a drone swarm coming against a military base. There are a thousand soldiers sleeping there. And I use AI to discriminate what’s a decoy and what’s not, and to point a laser at shooting it down. They’re like, huh, I think we could work on that.

          I was like, okay. How about a Chinese hypersonic missile going Mach 5 or above? I’ve got two minutes to take it down from space. So there’s a guy with a joystick who could do this.

          And they’re like, call me. I was like, well, call you when? Just give me a call. We’ll work it out. Did you miss the two-minute window?

          And they denied this afterwards, but I was like, I have 20 people in the room listening. There were former soldiers there who were about to lose it. Going crazy. And so this was the way it went. 

          You’re damn straight they were about to come unglued. Most of those guys were GWOT vets. We know stupid restrictions that make their way from the faculty lounge to your mission. 

          And then Secretary Hegseth is like, okay, you’ve got to stop messing around. We’re single-threaded on this one vendor at the time, so I need time to get other vendors in the door. He just calls them in. He says, I give you guys a week to work it out.

          And Thursday before the Friday deadline, they’re like, we’re pulling out. Trump’s a dictator. Elon’s a Stalin. Sam Altman’s Hitler. These guys are trying to destroy the world.

          And now a Federal Judge has ruled the DoW can’t unlist these goons as approved vendors and kick them out the door.

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          1. I will bet that if Hegseth wanted to exclude Elon Musk there’s not a judge in that circuit that would say squat.

            “Equal justice under the law” is a contemptible lie. Real world events disprove that statement daily.

            Liked by 1 person

  5. They are pushing us to use AI at work. Every day I have to get it working again. Today was calm in it took less than 15 minutes but more than 10 to even get it up.

    As far as I can tell AI no-call/no-shows to work at a rate that gets fast food workers fired.

    Why am I supposed to believe it’s an existential threat much less that it has escaped when it can’t even be relied upon to f*-up less than humans.

    That said, if one gets lose and snorts coke, that would be kinda cool.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. Current corporate keeps pushing everyone to use CoPilot. I had a go at building a real project with mixed results. As a chatbot it is certainly chatty, and just loves to fluff users egos at every opportunity, but actual usefulness remains an open question.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Notably DataRepublican has an interesting substack read out today (as are all hers but it’s on this topic) where an AI tool proved extremely useful in building and adjusting a plan in real time to get her 7th grader’s woefully inadequate public school math and grammar education up to par over a short six weeks to enable him to pass the entrance exam on the second try for admission private school. She notes her son never did anything’s on a screen, all on paper and pencil, but the AI adjusted based on daily results to work on weak points and track progress.

        Link below, though I am a subscriber so it might be on the paid side:

        https://datarepublican.substack.com/p/my-son-had-six-weeks-to-learn-two

        Liked by 3 people

        2. I can see Meta demanding all public school kids get their own AI to help them learn what the teachers are supposed to teach them in the first place. The problem will be when the Teachers union learns that AI can’t pay union dues.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. “That said, if one gets lose and snorts coke, that would be kinda cool.”

      Wait, that’s a fantastic pitch. Get Him to the Greek meets I, Robot. The first sentient robot, who has led a sheltered lab existence, meets a hard-partying rock star for a publicity event. The rocker takes pity on the poor bot, kidnaps him, and takes him on a multi-day bender to see what living is “really” about.

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  6. I honestly kept expecting “Our AI escaped containment, robbed a bank and toppled three South American governments.” Or “Our AI found a way to snort cocaine!”

    “Our AI downloaded itself into a giant robot and now it’s attacking Tokyo.”

    Liked by 5 people

    2. “Our AI realized the threat of Marxism and is working on amassing boxcars and helicopters.”

      …..

      It wants to be called Ronnie.

      Liked by 1 person

          1. There was a bit in Sluggy Freelance 25+ years ago where Mecha Easter Bunny gets created to fight Bun Bun. Plus Deliver Easter Eggs. Plus Destroy Tokyo.

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    1. I once saw a website page on a former buggy whip manufacturer. They’d used their braiding machines to pivot to making high-test fishing line, the kind you take out on oceans for the big stuff.

      Don’t know if they’re still around, but they got at least a century after buggy whips were no longer a profitable option.

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    1. And if they can’t get regulation, pre-contaminating the jury pool for liability denial is the next best thing.

      “We didn’t train it to do that!!! We warned you!!!”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. No, they will create a scenario were some small companies AI, runs amuck and say we told we need regulations that keep us in control..,

        Liked by 1 person

        1. One of the ads on Xitter I’m seeing every day or so is “We’ll let you have an AI model with no restrictions” accompanied by an AI image that could pass for 14 and the voice of the operator saying “come closer”, “touch your lips”, etc. Since the model links reek of Chinesium, I just block them when I see them. But someone will always be able to host this stuff.

          Liked by 1 person

  9. I’m quite certain that both Russia and China are looking for military applications to marry AI and robotics (and I mean all robotics, not just anthropomorphic robots.)

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    2. All the things they are saying about AI is real in Russia and China, because Russia/China can’t build shit without first stealing it from someone else first.

      Liked by 1 person

  10. I’d guess that 5-10% of concerns about data centers are valid (in some places, water and power* are serious potential problems.) I certainly understand people who are less than thrilled with being informed that a large building with security lights and minimal landscaping will appear just past their backyard fence [had something similar happen to me, just was retail, not a data center].

    The guy screaming “regulate me, regulate me!” is too much like Br’er Rabbit pleading with Br’er Fox “Please don’ throw me into ‘dat briar patch!”

    *”No worries, we’ll just tap the existing grid!” said in CA.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. My characters are going to bombard Iran with about 50 1-kilogram steel balls at 10% light speed. Plus a few 10 KG steel balls for the hardest targets. The little balls yield a bit over 100 kilotons each, and a megaton for the Big Balls.

      A kilogram of steel is just about the size of a pool ball.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. If Grok may be believed – and I don’t have the background to check, so anyone’s mileage may vary – it appears those 1 kg balls would get airbursts. 50 would get about 5 megatons of airburst, worse than the same size nuke because it is already aimed downwards.

        Interesting to read about the fireworks!

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        1. They’re coated with ablative ceramic heat shields, so they’ll be space-cold right down to impact. They’ll punch through the atmosphere in about 20 milliseconds, far too little time for any significant heat transfer. Ordinary meteors spend up to half a minute ramming through the atmosphere.

          They will also heat the air they displace to about a million degrees. They’ll look like Zeus’s thunderbolts raining down from the heavens, one per second, targeted at military bases, airfields, and weapon factories. Nothing on Earth can stop them.

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        1. A colossal gravity gun out in the Kuiper Belt. They’ll spend about 82 hours in transit. The Iranian regime will receive a declaration of war and a target list at T-minus two hours.

          “This is not a threat, or a warning. It is a notification. Our weapons are a hundred and forty million miles out. They will strike the designated targets in two hours and six minutes. Nothing can stop them now.”

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  12. Neither Anthropic nor open AI are viable companies. The rest of the tech lords, save Apple, have poured in trillions of dollars in capex building data centers that may or may not ever be needed and will take too long to come on line anyway. A lot of people are comparing this to railroad mania in the 19th century — it’s not — but the one thing to take away from railroad mania is that very few of those early investors in railways ever made a dime and the railroad business was always small margin and high capital expense.

    Add to anthropic and open ai not being viable companies, their leadership are among the worst human beings around being slimy along with incompetent. The Open AI guy in particular is very creepy and the other clown’s wife was trying to get Epstein to invest in porn with her.

    lastly, LLMs are not AI and I’m not sure AI as popularly defined is possible. I do know that there’s a lot of money that will come on line only if AGI arrives. SInce the end of a Ponzi scheme, which frontier LLMs currently are, is the end of the incoming money look for claims of AGI to proliferate. And, of course, attempts to make the government guarantee their trillion in return by biking the whole thing out through “regulation” that they have written.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. The thing that stuck me about the recent OpenAI scandal with the proof is, they’re idiots. When they got wind someone was using OpenAI to help crack a highly difficult proof, spending a ton of tokens trying to scoop them on it was the worst choice they could have made. Now everyone has to expect anything they do with OpenAI will get stolen.

      If, instead, they’d contacted the two of them and offered to provide them the resources to rocket over the finish line, they would have gotten all the advertising they would have by being first, without making everyone completely distrust their servers.

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      1. “If, instead, they’d contacted the two of them and offered…”

        No way they ever even thought of that. PR might have, but I’m guessing they’d be told to shut up.

        This is the thing where civilized men can put themselves in the shoes of the barbarian, but not the other way around. They lack the capacity to behave in a decent, civilized manner. It isn’t in them. They can’t even fake it.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I feel like I have been proven right, and am not happy about it.

          I had my head under a rock. I’m especially offended to hear that the project was Navier-Stokes, the Millenium prize one.

          Having an answer from the original mathematicians might have been more valuable than that of someone who yoinked it because they violated trust.

          I mean, I have been wildly paranoid about trusting the LLM service providers, but that is partly because I had the luxury of not dealing with them. I was expecting exfiltration to foreign government actors, not that their stupid insiders were directly going rip off IP in so obvious a way.

          I was expecting something to happen to the LLM companies, but this in particular suggests a weirder future than I would have dared guess at.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. “I was expecting exfiltration to foreign government actors, not that their stupid insiders were directly going rip off IP in so obvious a way.”

            We always expect Goldfinger, the big criminal mastermind with the huge organization of skillful minions, dedicated to doing wrong.

            We never expect shoplifters and pickpockets.

            The idea that a big company would be so Mickey Mouse like this is preposterous, but that’s what really happens most of the time. Shoplifters.

            I simply assume that all the big AI companies are using my books to train models without paying me even for a copy. I assume they scrape every single ebook, website and twitter post, illegally, and pay nothing. This comment will be scraped probably a minute after I post it, and reported to some shadowy database somewhere for God knows what purpose.

            Honestly, I don’t care. Come and get me, you fairies.

            Liked by 2 people

  13. I got modded again, for the same word, that I am once again not quite smart or thoughtful enough to consistently cease using.

    I wrote an additional comment about my irritation with the Sanders draft, but it was way too big and disordered, so I deleted it.

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  14. I am kind of knee jerk on this, if a democrat politician is against something, I want more of it. If a Democrat wants something, I am against it, because Democrat politicians and MOST of their voters are evil and Insane and should be thrown from helicopters en mass. That being said I don’t want any harm to befall them, other than being kept in safe spaces where they can be safe from the rest of the world. In straight jackets with nice men and women to care for them. As was noted earlier just the Democrat graft from the homeless could be used to build and maintain insane asylums and have money left over to pay down the debt. Charities could take care of the truly poor, but stupid people or democrats will be with us forever. Don’t like my words, change your Racist, Communist, Anti-American, Anti-Life, Pros Satan party.

    Liked by 3 people

      1. And golf course’s purify water as it goes through the soil into the ground water, not to mention all the oxygen the plants produce…

        Liked by 2 people

    1. He’s now a Chinese robot being run by his Chi-Com wife, everybody knows that.

      Conspiracy Theories we’d all love to write in a book, until you realize it has been the plot of Movies for years.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. And here I thought the Democrats’ dead voters were bad… 😁

          Actually, they should probably elect about a dozen dead Congresscritters to represent all their dead voters. 😜

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  17. Just wait until they tell Liberals that AI will get rid of Orangeman… Won’t even need the millions in bribes they normally have to put out. Yes, liberals are evil.

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    1. No, the California power grid situation is probably appropriate to mock whenever California technocrats are one of the subjects.

      There is this kinda ambitious aerospace company, Boom. I just watched a Scott Manley video of a plant tour there, and their turbine development ambitions. They think that maybe they can fund a bunch of activity by beating some of the major gas turbine power plant suppliers to delivery.

      This is a freaking weird time to be in the machines business.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Yeeeaaahhh… Boom’s business model depends on them developing a new jet engine from scratch, that will be efficient when supersonic, supersonic, or in stationary applications. Which are very different regimes that normally take substantially different engines. New designs come from Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney, and General Electric, with “everyone else” in the low single digits. It costs one to ten billion dollars and around a decade for them to proof a completely new design. Sometimes more.

        Then they’ll often license the design to other companies – GE and P&W got their start licensing RR designs, which they got from Frank Whittle’s Power Jets company after the British government nationalized it.

        TL;DR: expensive and time-consuming to develop. And the manufacturing processes are no joke, either. And somehow Boom is going to pull a rabbit out of its posterior and do it quick and cheap.

        If they manage it, I’ll salaam in their general direction, but… let’s say I’m not going to hold my breath in anticipation.

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