Bubbling

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

What Sort of AI Bubble Are We In?

This post is wrong, but it is wrong in an interesting way. That is, it posits all these possible future states of AI bubble popping, but begs the question1 by assuming there is a bubble at all. This reminds me of people talking about the “cloud bubble” back in 2013-2016. Well, there wasn’t one. AWS, Azure and other printed money after that “bubble” proved not to be anything of the sort.

And the funny thing is that if this person is correct and the bubble does pop, AI will then be cheaper than it was before. Because that’s what happens when an excess floods the market. See housing post-2008 for a recent-ish example.

Real AI is probably the most useful and efficacious tool we’ve gotten in the computing space since the GUI. At the very least. My guess is that it’ll end up being more consequential than that due to spillover effects.

Oh, by the way, by “interesting” I meant “clownish.” Because that’s what the piece is. Doltish bien-pensant non-thinking.

  1. And I do here mean the original sense of question-begging.

Actual Value

Chill Annoying

I guess women kind of have to pretend they put graffiti all over their bodies to “keep undesirable guys away” or to “own their body” rather than just what it is: mental illness, trend following and a higher time discount rate.

It’s a mark of bad judgment and terrible discernment, and for that it’s worth something.

Chill Links

How Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets.

Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences.

US plan for Colorado River could cut up to 40% supply for Arizona, California and Nevada.

AI Poised to Tilt Job Market Leverage Toward Older Workers.

SNAP Recipients Fall by 660,000 In a Month.

We basically did NINJA loans again but this time with non-US citizens.

Globalism rests on a single assumption. That human beings, given the right institutions and sufficient time, will subordinate their deepest loyalties to nation, faith, language and kin in favour of a set of universal values administered from above.

French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Struggle Sessions at Pan Macmillan.

The Claims

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Ian Welsh (and his ilk) claim that strength is worthless and “just for show.”

But I just did a minor bit of home maintenance that I would not have been able to do when I was weak, and that my partner (though also quite strong) was not able to complete as she was not quite strong enough.

So I’ll take my “worthless” gym strength over being a feeble and wrong doofus any day of the week.

Chill Links

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. Me too. And most got that clownishly wrong.

How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme.

The amount of meth seized at the border is skyrocketing.

The Sigmoids Won’t Save You.

Throughout the 1950s, Los Alamos advanced both the science and the supply chain that took NMR from a physics curiosity to a cornerstone technique in chemistry, biology, and medicine.

Isostasy.

Southwest Airlines bans robots from traveling in cabin or as checked baggage.

Kioxia and Dell cram nearly 10PB of flash storage into a single 2U server.

A Russian ship sank in mysterious circumstances. It may have been carrying submarine nuclear reactors to North Korea.

CENTCOM Commander Dismisses Reports That Iran Retains Most Of Its Missile And Drone Arsenal. CENTCOM actual is correct. Those reports are clownish propaganda.

Europeans primarily trace their genetic ancestry to three main groups that migrated to the continent.

Both sides in the debate between people who say “race is a social construct” and those who say “race is biological” are at least somewhat correct. Right. It is both. Genetic evidence is much stronger now and there is an obvious genetic component that libs lied about for decades.

The creedal nation model could potentially work – if it were real. But it’s not. It being real would mean we deport people who don’t share the creed. And if you say “part of the creed is we don’t do that” then that creed is a suicide pact.

Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Exactly. Krugman is way, way wrong. As usual these days.

Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once.

On the Spanish experiment of mass migration with little investment, my friend Tano Santos (Columbia) writes me this.

The Politics of Jobless Prosperity.

No Sol

Chill Oof

The more I read, the more it becomes clear: America has problems, but Europe is absolutely fucked on many different axes with almost no possible escape.

That is not going to be pretty.

100 Best

Chill Books

The 100 best novels of all time.

Cool. I have read every one of these.

My least favorites of that list: Ulysses and Jane Eyre. Both pretty boring pretentious crap.

My favorites: Never Let Me Go, My Brilliant Friend (is far better in Italian), and Frankenstein.

Not as bad a list as these typically are, at least.

Ransom

Chill Amusing, Tech

One of the best feelings in my career I’ve ever had is when I was doing part-time work for a small company — handling their networking, infrastructure, and all tech-related stuff outside of programming.

The owner called me up in a panic saying the company would probably have to cease operations because all their data was completely gone, encrypted by ransomware. The owner was taken aback when I laughed and said I’d have them back up in a couple of hours, max.

And I did have them back to full operations around two hours later. If in my field you do not have great backups, you have nothing. And my backup game is beyond solid. I will never lose your data if you put me in charge of it, or allow it to be lost.

It’s just not gonna happen.