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
A headline’s been making the rounds the last couple days, “US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt.” Not that it's news, certainly not in the last fifty years. Really, you could go back to the beginning, the British East India Company, and depending on
This is well worth watching. Yasha had this guy on back in the beginning of the year – Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. This is a good talk about the growing politics of technology. Merchant does a good job explaining
"Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology." – Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973 I’ve been slowly working two longer pieces on energy and money, looking at both in regards to information. However, my screen keeps incessantly being filled with
Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet Work all day still can't pay the price of gasoline and heat Alas, their lives are incomplete Don't it make you want to rock and roll all night long Mohammed's Radio It’s hard to