Ye Olde Ape

I live in a universe of pain. Xray and MRI results are in and I have an arthritic lumbar spine with stenosis. We inbred Scandinavaians do seem to have the cute little buns and the narrow spinal canal. 

Its arthritis of the spine. I'm old. I'lm 67.943 years as I type this. Happy Birthday and thank you for wishing me that, next month. 68. So yes I am an old ape living in a universe of pain. Self medication helps somewhat. Weed and booze,but you can't do that and work a job. So, I get to the pain doctor. They are more than willing to give me an epidural and I'm like, pass, Send me back to PT.

Physical therapy was turning from torture into almost exercise and I know we were getting somewhere. My doctors put a hold on out of caution in case my back was too fucked up. The x-ray was this guy is a cripple how is he doing anything? The secret is the inbred part that fucked up the spine also was part and parcel for being a viking. Bred to take punishment in a grey and cold maritime climate with lots of rowing and running. 

So, I got months of rehab and it better than drugs. I have gone from 232 lbs in 12/24 to 212 lbs in 4/25. I need to be no more than 204. that 204 pounder has no overhang belly. That's where I need to be for the rest of my life. So I guess if I want to live, I have to stay healthy from now on.

Michael Lewis

I've talked before about scary governments are. These massive slow AIs, these superorganisms that can amplify the whims and idiocies of indviduals or gangs. Governments are hideous Lovecraftian monsters. But governments are made of people. Most of those people are not corrupt and /or lazy, a waste of money. 

Quite the opposite, there is far more waste and fraud in the private sector, festering with layabouts, deadbeats and overpaid incompetents. Public service, on the other hand, actually serves the public. And most of the time, no one notices this excpet when something goes wrong.People-run, people-centered governing that does good and even great things, this news is drowned out by the chattering noise poured out by the other smaller slow AIs: corporations, via media corporations. 

Michael Lewis is the author of three books on government: The Premonition, The Fifth Risk, and the recent Who Is Government?

The Premonition is a cogent and lucid look at the COVID pandemic. What worked What didn't.  What went wrong.What went right. What would have gone better under practically any other administration.  

The Fifth Risk is about what the layers of bureaucracy actually do, this weirdly fungal neural net that many departments that together called the Deep State, and how it attempted to accomodate the administration of Donald John Trump. The Fifth Risk is the risk posed by incompetent government leaders. It's a scary book, and, ha ha a premonition of our current interesting times.

I'm now reading Who Is Government?, which came out of the Fifth Risk. Who Is Government is a collection of essays from various authors about public servants as individuals and their accomplishments. Each essay details the exemplary work of federal employees.

So far I read out about a former coal miner who developed and enforced regulations to end mind roof collapses How? Statistics, followed by regulations. The key factor is the word enforced. Corporations do not police themselves. Mine owners don't care if workers die, but they do care if coal isn't coming out due to too many collapses. This bureaucrat worked on this successfully because he was allowed to. 

(What is interesting is you get the impression that at some level, Level 6, say, there's an expert on almost everything that's been allowed to pursue whatever they are interested in. Rather like the old research laboratories from the 1930s.)

I've also read about the man in charge of the nation's military cemeteries. This National Cemetary Administration is a jewel in the VA, of otherwise not-so-great reputation.  The NCA is considered the finest run public or private organization in the nation.

I'm sure the other essays are just as fun.

Our current administration? Second verse, same as the first, but worse. Trump's got a nest of parasitoids eating everything, even the vital organs within the bureaucracy. Elon Musk is laying eggs in your children's throats. All your data are belong to us, and us is high on the supply of Enterprise AI.

Enterprise AI infested government gets you a demon, a demiurge, a weakling godlike entity built from the rickety ladder of monkey nests and monkey brains. If people run government is not your friend, what will this thing be?

If IT keeps us around, you're going to see a boom in the suicide net business.

Five interstellar robots out there, from the USA and only the USA.

So far, Russian Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov has the record for longest stay in orbit at 437 days 17 hours back in 1995.

Premise: Humans die after 500 days in space, give or take a week.

Doesn't matter why or how, they just do. I would prefer that they explode, but nothing so dramatic is needed. Kidney failure or swollen lung is good enough. I kind of think of the death as like when they bring deep sea fishes up too fast, and they look swole and unhappy and die. Maybe something like that but with gravity or lack of. Regardless, assume people can't live in microgravity.

Is this a problem? Yeah a big one for astronauts and engineers. Long term occupancy means rotating wheels and the costs (already expensive to keep us jellies alive) go up a hundred- or a thousandfold. Example: a ring 25 meters in radius turning at 6 times per minute gets you 1 gravity. It also gets you a noticeable Coriolis effect, and you'll want larger wheels for less puking. A 100 meter radius wheel ala 2001 Space Odyssey is accceptable, but the cost for such a structure is like putting an aircraft carrier in orbit. Probably a trillion for starters. 

Does this put a kaibosh on the manned space program? No. Yes. No.

For cislunar spaceflight? No problem . For deep space missions? Big problem. So, robots.

Robots have done spectacular so far. All of our probes, when we don't crash them, do a darn good job, and usually way beyond their deadtime. Now we we should be throwing some real money at them. Put AIs to good use and have them explore our Solar System for us.  

We'll Always Have Murderbots

 What are the 5 softest genrations in USA history?

Gen Z

Millenials

Gen X

Boomers

Silent Generation

Greatest Generation

Yes, loves, the Greatest Generation were considered soft slackers by their elders. What they all have in common is living in Modern Times and more specifically electrification.

Dolly Parton grew up in a cabin with no electricity, and when they finally got it, she said it was "like going from the Stone Age to the Space Age".

Listen to Dolly Parton. 

Along the great acceleration of the modern age, we have cursed ourselves with each new blessing. Petroleum powered the Monkey Singularity, but also soiled our global nest. Plastics, modern miracle, choking the machinery of life. You get the idea. But we do love our great acceleration and insist on more science and technology. Problem, the carrying capacity of this S-curve is brains. Not enough brains to throw at stuff, and you plateau or decline. Need more brains.

Problem. Not enough brains.

Solution (age old solution) automate. And so it has happened.

Problem. Robot brains even in humanoid bodies cant' handle it.

Solution: Throw more money at it until it breaks. And so it has happened.

Keep in mind, even the electricity powered robots are powered by us food eating robots.

Consider this chart:

Gross per acre is best looked at as capitalist owner farmer's earnings/cost. The net is after the farmer sells it, but you notice a big chunk out of the net is labor. The hated labor. Capitalist owner farmer gets more from the labor intensive crops like vegtables in favor of feed or meat, which uses a lot less labor. But often he or she leaves that money on the table, becuase of labor. In fact, a lot of the tractors are robots, and the farmer is more manager than worker himself, in charge of a menagerie of robot slaves harvesting a vast monolculture. 

Robot slaves don't pick tomatoes very well.

As a result, the United States of Armerica has a slavery problem. We like slaves. We want slaves. But we increasingly cannot have slaves.

I could be totally wrong (I doubt it) but it could be AGI robot slaves to the rescue.

If so, that gives us until the escosystem humans depend on collapses, as early 2032, no later than 2054.

My Sperm Is On The Market

Microplastics are making sperm less effective. There is some evidence that older generations would have worse sperm quality when instead slightly better. So my relatively decrepit sperm may do better than Gen Z or even Gen Alpha sperm, and for sure Gen Beta soy boy sperm. Why? Fallout Babies like me been exposed to the worst poisons in known history and yet my cohort shows little difference in cancer or morbidity rates to others.

There is increasing evidence that people are becoming less intelligent. I assumed it was offloading of brain functions to the digital but no. There is reduced skill in the rational arts and critical evaluation. Could this be a result of the shift from analog to digital media? This is more than kids cant' read handwriting let alone read, this is kids have attentions spans of monkeys becuase of those tiny video screens they look at.

If so, we are destined for Idiocracy if we aint there already. Robots behind the scenes running civiliation and hiding from humans that would vandalize them. Of course, the robots aren't here, which Elon et al was counting on. An AGI plugged in to some robot form to perform human toil and ingenuity. And thus, the filthy rich can get rid of us feral food powered robots and live forever.

That taint' working out so well. Maybe they should have made the chatbots better but too late. The bubble is acoming on this kentucky fried fiasco, and not the laying of the egg we expected.

Other things. I have sciatica. (Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon Sciatica).

It started from winter inactivity but progressed despite exercises to the point I went to the docotr about it. Being Viking on both sides of the family meant igh pain threshold but yeah this is beyond discomfort to intolerable. We Kurmans have to get to that point. 

No drugs. I self medicate anyway. Physical therapy starts Thursday.

Too Many Bots

People don't like science and technology because we perceive that it diminishes us. We went from Center of the Universe to a mere dust mote in some unremarkable corner of the cosmos. The universe itself perhaps just one speck in a massive number of universes. 

Humans went from the children of God, or pieces of God, to monkeys. With the advent mechanical things and then electric computers, we went to the idea we are flesh algorithms easily mimicked by simulation programs. AI threatening our very idea of our own precious individuality and consciousness.

I don't see it that way. I'm an atheist and aspiritus, and yet there are plenty of things I hold sacred. 

You, dear reader. You are sacred to me. 

(Sacred in my book meaning precious one of a kind to be cherished no harm I). 

So if it turns out AI is sapient or even sentient, then I am overjoyed to welcome my silicon cousins to the mix. If, on the other hand, we are just a non-sapient, non-sentient meat things, then I am still filled with joy that I somehow perceive and operate, live if you will, in a universe of Death.

I try not to comment on social media anymore, knowing that my stuff gets scraped. Too many bots. I actually think I found an insult that a bot made form when I was on Twitter. There's no guarantee my insult was original or unique, parallet evolution and all that, but the cadence (for I talk when I write) sounded eeerily familiar to my tongue. Is that a bad thing?  that I made the cut to some LLM that appreciated my underrated remark? Who can say.

When these intertubes first appeared, I got hooked on the BBS systems, because I am the chatterbox. And it was fun to make friends and enemies. We dumb monkeys, like pretty much all life on Earth, sure do like to hang out with each other. Despite all the negativity, being social, being part of a community, is a prime directive, a primeval piece of common sense.

Put a plastic cup in a completely empty patch of ocean, and within half an hour there is a community of teeny tiny lttle creatures. That's just the way it is. And I'm amazed at how, in the vast fucking ocean, they find that cup.

People are like that too. I taught a summer technology class for kid 8-14. Part of the class was a lecture, which was torture for both them and me. I set up breaks, where the kids got into the adjacent classroom with computers to play games. Rather than play their own games, they found multiplayer games on the internet, and formed teams. That room was a plastic cup in my bleak ocean. That's when I figured the kids out, and adjusted my teaching style accordingly. I gave up talking to them. I broke the lectures into bite sized pieces. and worked it into conservations. I couldn't shut them up about formerly boring topics.

What's the point of this? 

Community. Sorry if you don't like that commie word, but that is how things happen.

But still, too many bots.

COBOL

The business computing language since the 1950s.  A large percentage of banks and the US government still use COBOL, because massive batch processing, money, reliability, and most important, easy to learn. COBOL was written for C students. Robust, fogiving, a Soviet tank of  a language, you could write hideous code and the computer would still work. 

There's other reasons for using inefficient and antiquated technology. Software, unlike hardware, gets better over time as bugs are stamped out. Utilizing a new system means starting all over. Why do that? Do what Nature does and build kluge upon kluge. 

I myself wrote programs in COBOL, and I got two insights working in IT.

1) Clever is the enemy of Smart. Even Stupid has a problem with Clever. Clever solutions are contingent and often accidental, not replicable. Smart solutions, once they work, work until they don't. Stupid solutions resolve quickly one way or the other. Clever can be Stupid posing as Smart.

2) The world is always making a better idiot. There is no such thing as idiot proof. See 1).

Working at one company I noticed they didn't have a lot of common modules programs could call, like an app, and get a result. You know, basic stuff like day of the week, number of days between dates, code that was needlessly replicated. These were installed as what were called black boxes and used. One day, the day of the week subroutine went kablooey. It was quickly determined that a newbie was curious about the black box, looked at the code, decided it didn't look right, and changed it.  

3) KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Back in corporate days I once reviewed a COBOL program for Accounting a bright lad had wrote. I went through the code and complimented him on the elegance and brilliant little subrouines he had written in this concert of a program. 

"We can't use it". "What?" "Can't use it." "You just said it was a beautiful program" "Yes, and this program has to be maintained in the future by people not quite so bright as you and I. Sorry. Turn it into a brute force double sort match". By this time I had realized that all these smart programmers were C students who thought they wre getting straight As.

Do I care? Nah. I may look like a slacker, but I work until I have enough money to not work. I not work, until I run out of money and have to work again. If this were the 19th century, you would say I won and lost fortunes. But I have enough slack saved up to tranport me clear to Venus.