Yesterday, a friend asked me for a quote from Simone Weil. Searching my notes, I realized I've wanted to write much more about Weil's thought. Well, this isn’t that, but I pulled several of her thoughts I found exceedingly relevant to the here and now.
Did an interview with bank, Wall Street analyst, and old friend Chris Whalen on Friday and had dinner with him last night. Chris knows history, too few these days, less than ever. I met Chris twenty years ago with an introduction from Bill Greider, who knew Chris’ dad, Richard Whalen,
"Humanity loves to ignore the questions of its origin and beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the opposite course?"– F. Nietzsche, Human, All too Human Introduction – Politics has proved somewhat impenetrable to being affected by science and its technological progeny. The easiest explanation
The news keeps coming fast and furious. Where to start? How about the great state of New Mexico, where Larry Ellison's Oracle, one of the greatest promoters of the latest generation of compute marketed as AI, like fuck me, right, has run into troubles in the high desert.
I am a fourth generation industrial son. In the above pix, Patrick, the paterfamilias, sits in the middle. He was born in 1850 during the Famine in Coulimore, County Mayo, emigrating at some point to coal country, Wombwell, Yorkshire. He married Susannah Cox of Derbshire, who died giving birth to
The above Eli the Computer Guy clip is good and important. It contains a key understanding to the politics of compute. Only twenty minutes, it’s well worth watching. Nvidia has come up with something they’re calling “Pair,” which allows AI – “like fuck me, right?” – tasks to be performed
"To talk about energy and economy is a tautology: every economic activity is fundamentally nothing but a conversion of one kind of energy to another, and monies are just a convenient(and often unrepresentative) proxy for valuing the energy flows. Frederick Soddy, a Nobel physicist approaching the discipline form
Check the record, check the guy's track record He, was not, appreciated So drink the draught, drink the long draught For the Big Priest Bill Greider’s not long gone, but gone for awhile now and already forgotten, which is a shame. From Cincinnati, then to DC via
“I realize I have lost this battle forever, but these machine learning tools are not artificial intelligence. And yet, we're all just deciding to call it artificial intelligence. Does AI exist? No, but like fuck me, right?” – Dr. Angela Collier, theoretical physicist from Eastern Kentucky Big news on
So come on Ron, Come on Ron Let me hear you tell em, tell em how I Tell em how I, Tell em how I feel I was high up in the Sierras at some friends’ place on 9/11/01. I had an internet connection, no TV. I woke
Microsoft executives "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to
The money system today is not quite the money system of a century, fifty, or even twenty years ago. Fundamentally, we still have a bank-debt money system. Money is lent, debt is created. The banks can then account this debt as new money and lend it again and again