Oh, NOW you want nuclear fusion power?

At DAVOS, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares new sources of power to meet the energy demand of AI, particularly nuclear fusion. Like the cryptocurrency clusterfuck, AI is consuming vast amounts of power, and Sam Altman finally says maybe we should get commercial fusion power going.

Hey, I'm all for it, but rather than create the bloated turd that is ITER, with a corrupt and sclerotic bureaucracy, and piece meal efforts of various institutions, we could have provided a concentrated, multi-hundred billion dollar effort to get there. Had we wished to, we probably could have had fusion power by the year 2000. We did not wish to. Money wasn't a problem, as we managed to throw tens of trillions at stupid  wars. Just a fraction of that money gets you nuclear fusion.

Part of the reason is a rather wise choice not to pursue such superdense energy systems due to lack of knowledge and technology. That's fair. If the tech and knowledge was in place (now they are), do you really want chain saws and off road vehicles run on Mr. Fusion? Why the planet would be a wreck in no time. For that matter, what if it is easier to build a fusion rocket than a reactor. A fusion rocket gets you to Mars, but it can also be a devastating weapon on terrestrial targets.

The spending of $100 billion to date on self-driving cars (replacing cheap human drivers with shoddy expensive robots) probably could have gotten us a aneutronic fusion power source. My vote is for hydrogen boron fusion  being pursued by HB11 and Helion Energy. Billionaires are now finally throwing their money at it, and devoting AI architecture to the now familar problems. 

But for what? Don't we have enough scams already? More than half the stuff on the internet is AI generated garbage. It's clogging Google search, which I can personally attest is getting worse. Not to mention this AI adventure is still a Mechanical Turk, with humans tasked to sift out the horrible and hallucinating content to be fed to the robots. Not to mention glean out the AI generated garbage to be scrapced as data. The only people I see making money on this is the billionaires who already have a monopoly on, well, everything. Looks pretty grim.

Mechapodzilla

I have a suspicion that a neighbor, or a neighbor's child, sicced their dog on Trump when he was a kid.

I can see it, everyone is bullied, so some snooty rich neighbor in the snooty rich neighborhood just didn't like the little fucker. One day Donny mouths off, and the kid sics the hound on him. Maybe more than once. It explains why Trump hates dogs, and his worst insult is dog. But then again, Trump's parents did a good job on fucked in head, so maybe more than dogs. 

Now, I've seen when Trump had the posture of a whipped dog. The first time was around Jeffrey Epstein, Trump a little dog bouncing around big dog Jeff. The second at the inauguration, after a chat with Obama. The third time at Helsinki, after the meeting with Putin. Whipped dog slinking, wow!

My take on the 2018 Helsinki meeting is that Putin brought his dog, a big snarly snapper.

"Don't worry he won't bite!" Putin assures Trump. The dog barking and growling and lunging against the leash held lightly in  Putin's hand. This goes on for a while, and then Putin takes the dog away, and wheels in a tank with his pet shark, a big snarly snapper.

"Don't worry, he won't bite!" 

In Putin's Russia, bite sharks you!

50% of Americans believe in demons. 45% believe in ghosts. That gets you our current representative republic. If this is 21st century America, think of what the Founding Fathers had to work with.

On more than one occasion, I have said "a lottery could have picked someone better!" But that can't be done at the federal level without changing the Constitution. So you set up a thrid party, maybe call it Other, or None of the Above (NotA finger!). Just like a lottery, you register with a donation, you got a ticket at becoming congressperson, senator, President. If our party wins the slot, someone is randomly selected from the roles.

I've written about this before, I should go find out if I'm repeating myself like a doddering old man. But what the hye. Questions:

Q) what if some idiot gets chosen, A) recall elections are still there, and what if they are not an idiot, but better than the drama queens and daddy's little vampire squids we got now? I'm not being cynical. There are people honestly dedicated to public service that could be doing better things than dealing with all the bullshit. However, there is a parasitoid version of ape that seeks the wells of power and glamor, and Washington DC is that niche.

Q) what's to stop some rich guy from buying all the tickets to win? A) that's easy, we set up donations as uniform regardless of buy ins, like a knock-out, your subsequent donation is still your only donation, but you enrich the pot.  Bigger pot means bigger media presence. (Note to self: don't use dicks as the face of  NotA).

Q: If it holds up in court (why wouldn't it?), and you are randomly selected, what should you do? A) Interesting as it is made obvious that the staff has all the insight and institutional knowledge of what some people call the deep state. There is going to be a tremendous tidal wave of influence and monies, about to be showered upon you by the powers that be, as it should be, but- you would be smart to get all your cronies together, (competent) family and (honest) friends for staff and support, and then deal with the Beast.

Q) can it fly? A) like all thrid parties to date? Nope

A City On Mars

I flirted with space opera writing a couple of short stories on this blog. I won't link to them as they are all bad. I made them all Mary Sue (were I am in the story and of course, the hero). The only time you use that device is when you would rather be in a story than in real life.

My stories were safe and bland, havens of normality rather than tense and difficult life I was living.

As bad as the stories were, I still took pleasure in the world building, or rather the constraints. Example from ten years ago:

Short version, humanity has sparsely populated the universe via wormhole conduits, meaning no spaceships, no spaceports, no spacefaring infrastructure, and doing it all with what amounts to late 1970s technology (nothing to sneeze at, pretty ingenious). So, these wormholes are fickle things, and for the longest time passage through one amounted to a one-way trip with no return. It was only, say, twenty years after the first foray that humans learned the trick of return trips to Earth. As a result, there's a lot of lost colonies out there in the cosmos, some of which would never be heard from again. And there's the problem involving colonization.

So, let's say you've got this big hole. It's just a big hole. If you want, it's a hole in the sky. On the other side of this big hole is whole new world, lush and green and filled with fresh air, sunshine and animals and clean water and absolutely no people. The hole is going to stay open for a short time, and while it's open, you can go back and forth. But eventually the hole will close and will never reappear again. You know this. You know if go through and stay, you will be stuck in this new world for good.

What do you take with? Oh, one other restriction is you are confined to, say nothing more advanced than 1979 technology.

Well, here's my thinking. You walk into this new world, you'll want to have an idea of what your base technology will be. In other words, you don't come over expecting to use internal combustion engines, since you don't where the oil is, you don't know when you'll have refineries built, you don't have any of the chemical and electrical infrastructure. Similarly, you probably don't bring coal-fire locomotives over. So, in my view, you start out with a base technology of around, say, 1820 or so. You've got high pressure steam engines that burn wood. You've got a lot of spare parts for that. Oh sure, you bring as many modern amenities and appliances and generators and fuel and airplanes and satellite launching rockets and computers as you can shove through the hole, and use as it long as it all lasts. You may have mini-factories stashed in 40 foot shipping containers. You've got a shitload of books. And skilled people. And food. And seeds. And... what else? In other words, this becomes a prepper problem. The world falls apart. How to rebuild it?

Because, you figure, no matter how much shit you shove through the hole, you just can't support a modern world. You can't support a modern world, not without billions of people. Your best 1979 candidates for interstellar colonization are hunter gatherers, subsistence farmers, herders, citizens of what they called back then The Third World. 

Theproblem with these awkward stories was, enthusiastic as I was, I could not suspend my disbelief.

What is current fantasy? Well, according to this book, A City On Mars, the entire manned space program and space colonization.

Consider my scenario above. The most preposterous element is finding another Earth. Not an Earthlike planet, but another Earth. Another Earth with a small window of time say, the Pleistocene, when we evolved.. Humans can't survive the enivronment much past the last third of a billion years on Mother Earth, and the majority of the time where we can survive, we wouldn't like it. It would be a hostile alien world. Now consider candidates in our Solar system. There are none.   

City on Mars knocks down all the Star Trek/For All Mankind fantasies, as it should. Cory Doctorow has a good review.

Colonization makes no sense even if we could do it, which we can't. The pitch for becoming a multi-planetary species falls apart when you recognize that 99.9% of extinction are extra-solar. You want to hide in the heart of a dead planet? Fine, but not me. I'll take the blast.

Manned space makes less sense especially now when robots are so cheap. Cheaper than slaves. Yes, there are more slaves than ever today. We are in a dark time, and we fantasize a safe and bland haven of normalcy. Space ain't it, honey bunnies

Other things. Speaking of hostile alien environments, this is a lame blizzard so far. Chicago, City of the Future, western citadel of the sweet water seas, pissed off because we are getting Kentucky weather, WTF. Rain and above freezing? I get the El Nino but still, our weather is gonna be wimpy from now on? This sucks. I don't want to live in Tennessee. I'll move to Finland if I have to.

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John Carpenter's The Thing

I rewatched this 1982 classic and it is a greeat piece of Red Scare witchhunt paranoia. Thinking about the movie's ending and opening credits scene, I think I know how a sequel would play out. To quote from my memory hut:

In 1938 John Campbell wrote a science fiction novella called "Who Goes There?" Later it was adapted into two movies. The first movie by Howard Hawks, "The Thing From Another World", was considered a science fiction horror movie classic. The second movie, John Carpenter's "The Thing", conforms more to the original story. 

 

In Hawks' version, the monster is your standard humanoid monster, ala Frankenstein's monster. In Carpenter's version, it is much more alien, more like the Blob - all consuming, but with that imposter twist - and the accompanying paranoia as to whom to trust.

I've read Campbell's novella, and it scared the hell out me. I'll tell you why. One of the more delicious fears one can have is not fear of death, but fear of lack of control. The alien creature doesn't just consume you. It imitates you. It enslaves you. It mutilates your mind and will, and binds you to service it. The other factor is just the right amount of information. In a horror flick, or in a story, you need just enough information to know that something is a threat, perhaps even an existential threat, but not so much information that you are familiar with the threat. This has always been a problem in movies. How much of the monster do you show? Not enough, and it is all just boring. Too much, and the monster is just another character.

There is a defining scene in Campbell's story when the humans realize that even the tiniest piece of monster can take over an organism. And when one character realizes that their cows have not been monitored against "infection", and that they have all been drinking the milk.

"Mac, how long have the... cows been... not cows?"

 It's a great creepy moment, when he realizes, in a fit of revulsion, hysteria, and self-loathing, that he may be a Thing and not even know it.

The end scene is MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David) sitting among a ruined camp, soon to freeze to death. There is indecision whether one of both of them is the Thing. MacReady points out they are in no position to do anything about it. They share a bottle of whiskey as the fire dies down and the dark and cold close in. If either of them is a Thing. one cell passed by whiskey makes two Things. Carpenter said he has the answer but won't say. It goes like this:

Point being the Earth is probably doomed. Not from the crashed Thing, but what was chasing it. 

In the opening credits scene, the flying saucer's flight path is erratic, probably damaged, and crashing on Earth is both an act of desperation and an attempt to hide. From something worse than the Thing.

The Thing might be a criminal or refugee or a larger threat to things like us out there. It is unlikely the things like us will have any sympathy towards us things like them. 

One sequel would be where the Thing talks to us, through somebody, giving us a choice to live because these things like us from the galaxy are going to blast the planet otherwise, just to be sure. So, do we become Things and maybe survive.

No, I think my sequel would be presented as the aliens chasing the Thing versus us, only at the end to find out we were Things all along and didn't know it.

What Happens When the AI Bubble Pops

We've had lots of market bubbles, some more harmful than others. The tech dotcom bust was bad and in some ways we still have not recovered. The mortage crisis, the crypto market, NFTs and now AI.

The problem is you start out with a useful thing and it gets abused, rideshare apps turn into Ubers, blockchain into Bitcoins, LLMs into ChatGPTs.  But, like abandoned malls, each bubble left something useful behind.  Cory Doctorow wrote a Locus column about this stuff. 

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Cory goes on about crypto and NFTs and AI and notes that all of these things are incredibly energy intensive and requires water hog server farms which  require lots of people with  high technical skills. When you consider the average human brain runs on 40 watts of power, AI doesn't look so super in terms of computation over energy use. For that matter, the sheer computational waste on useless mining calculations or frivolous queries is tantamount to just worst kind of circle jerks. 

Take self-driving cars, which have blown through 100 billion dollars and still require supervision. It has been estimated that we could have (had) commercial nuclear fusion for 200 billion dollars and yet the amount spent on fusion research is a pittance compared to replacing reliable but expensive human drivers with flawed robots.

What is the real problem is that all of these bubbles are based upon fraud, grift and lies. (Not surprising as the salient of capitalism is force and fraud. There is little to be done about this so long as it is profitable.)\

What Cory points out it what is left afterwards? In some cases, like his example above, obstacles become opportunities, and in others, nothing goods comes from it:

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

So, what about AI?  There are useful applications, the equivalent of crows and wolves that can efficiently and effectively disassemble a real world problem into data carrion. Others? If the bubble pops and the companies deflate or bust entirely, what of some actually useful applications no longer supported? I keep thinking of people with medical technology in them that is orphaned by bankrupt tech companies or organizations gutted by private equity. 

The reason there is a scare about AGI or human or superhuman level AI is because the companies with very large investments would like very much for the open source methods to go away and they can earn/hide their profits by good old fashioned bullying or theft, via the time-tested rentier system. 

I  have pointed out somewhere in this memory hut, we've had AGI for thousands of years and it is called government. In smaller more specialized versions called corportations. We have already seen these entities to pursue their own utility functions to he detriment of us regular folks. 

I'm less worried about AI safety and more worried about fairness, privacy, criminality and bias than I am about robot overlords.  

Other things. I keep thinking of the weird right wing religous bullshit that seems to be getting more stirdent, or more press. Given the woeful state of journalism, (and AI hasn't helped, but it s not AIs fault, its greedy executives are pulling this turd) I'm guess just sensationalist press. Still, this shit fest with abortion and fetus as a person.

I should note that most human embryos naturally die after conception. Spontaneous abortion is perfetly natural. Nonviable cell clusters disintegrate before attaching to the uterus. 

So the quesion I have to ask those who believe that life begins at conception: why are so many people commiting suicide? That's a sin, right? Why does God permit this unless it is part of His Plan. Maybe God just really likes killing babies.

Also, I got spiffed up for a holiday party.

I clean up well.

I think I accidentally go some powerful tattoos. Or maybe it is me.

If I were playing a part, the obvious one is Hitler's butler, because I bet you I could pass.

My name is John and I am 66 and a half

Silverback! Starting for me about 60? Six and a half years later, I'm less muscular, getting skinny arms and a fat belly unless I pick up the pace. My goal (and despite my medical problems) is that I am leaner and fitter so I can work when I am old.  Exercises are geared more towards balance and Turkish get ups, etc. along with resistence training. At least walk every day. Cancer free.

So, why fit enough to work? Why not just fit enough to be old? Independence for as long as possible, before the enfeeblement and second infancy.  

The family history is strokes and heart attacks in the mid 60s, perfect for the Social Security Administration plan. Modern medicine is changing that and we Kurmans are heading into uncharted territory, death-wise. 

Speaking of Social Security, I will be on SS at 67, for optimal payout. and hurray to yesterday Johnny for earning through labor and occasional ingenuity, the promise of such that we call "money".

Burnt Weenie Sandwich

I'm feeling sorry for all the lunk-heads in the news: Trump, Biden, Musk, Xi, Putin, fuck me the list is endless. I've too many famous people to worry about! 

Assume that 8 billion and a smidge humans have altered the planet. You say, we're so tiny what could we do? The Ozone hole for one. Smacking an asteroid with a robot for two. The Amazon rain forest for three, human cultivated and a gruesome reminder of just how many millions of people died from filthy disgusting western europeans and their clever savage ways!

If the planet has been altered we face two futures, the Anthropocene, or the Anthropozoic. 

(Do I have to explain? The antrhopocene is short-lived, doomed to short dick thinking. The Anthropozoic is much much longer, certainly not a quarter billion years like the dinosaurs, but longer than a million. Homo sapiens sapiens, anatomically modern humans, lookalikes, have been around a third of a million years. So we got two-thirds of a million years to not fuck it up and survive.

Intelligence has still not shown advantage in long term evolutionary survival.

Anyway, Elon Musk is getting butt hurt. Cars recalled, rockets and websites crashing, a Boring company that has drill 2 and a half miles. Monkeys slaughtered to put chips in brains for his Martian slave army, but . A breakthrough for a wearable device to access the brain is being developed. 

Not surprising, given networks were reverse engineered from neurons because we couldn't figure it out. Neural networks get used to filtering out stuff and call it noise. These thinking caps (like we are stuck in the 1920s Monkey Singularity) successfully interpret thought. Verbs more accurately than nouns, but a promising start. And if this can be done as a wearable, it can be done remotely. 

If a brain can be read remotely, can it also be written?

Anyway pics of the latest iterations of one hit wonder interspersed through the narrative. I have stumbled upon a really nice aerofoil design for smoike delivery in the form of a turtle, or a tongue.