“If we cannot accomplish that which we will, we may at least have willed it, and not just have blindly wished for it; and, on the other hand, our weakness may indeed prevent us from winning, but not from comprehending the force by which we are crushed. Nothing in the
If what’s marketed as AI has value, it will be in opening humanity to the understanding technology is politics. This remains to be seen, but there’s a number of recent optimistic sightings. Here’s a nice short interview on the Tech Report with a guy named Paris Marx
“I am the Alpha and the Omega” Revelation 1:8 Phew, life is a funny thing, punchlines can be nasty, sometimes brutish, but don’t lose your ability to laugh. The NYT has a piece about Google creating “virtual power plants” to meet the unquenchable energy needs of our post-
Too many Americans still believe in Democrats and Republicans. Another election approaches, billions spent on bad advertising – ok that’s redundant, attempting to convince Americans their vote to switch seats in DC means something. Yesterday, the NYT amusingly noted the one political entity in the country more unpopular than Trump
This is a nice short look at family Ellison and the growing entrenchment of America's aristocracy. There was a point in American history when American aristocracy would be a contradiction in terms. Most especially, with the majority, certainly not all, those white boys gathered in Philadelphia 250 years
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