Week 46

Politico: "EU allies demand answers from Ukraine over escalating corruption scandal.. Kyiv's partners want reassurances on how aid is spent after a probe exposed a $100M kickback scheme."

In comp history ENIAC is more frequently cited for its code breaking applications, but it turns out MANIAC is closer to a true ancestor of modern computing devices of today.

Wiki: "In 1956, [the computer] MANIAC I became the first computer to defeat a human being in a chess-like game. The chess variant, called Los Alamos chess, was developed for a 6×6 chessboard (no bishops) due to the limited amount of memory and computing power of the machine."

A piece of computational sci history

We saw the failure of democracy up close just recently, haven't we? Instead of abolishing a broken ACA and legislating something better, Dems played political games over the old, broken system via shutdown.

"Nearly half of Western voters think democracy is broken, international poll finds.. The survey comes amid growing concern that democracy across the West is under threat. Wealth inequality around the world is driving support for extremist parties, undermining debate and preparing the ground for authoritarianism, according to a recent report for the G20."

#ButchWare #HealthCare

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"The political scene in California is about to change as Dr. Butch Ware, who was Dr. Jill Stein's 2024 running mate on the Green Party presidential ticket, has announced his candidacy for the state's gubernatorial race."

CNBC: "China economic gloom mounts as housing slump intensifies and investment slides.. China's slowdown worsened in October, dragged by soft consumer demand and a deepening property downturn."

The Lever: "The Enshittification Of Health Care, Explained.. The massive spikes in health insurance premiums are a result of decades of lax regulations and industry consolidation... Much of the blame has focused on the likely expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, which will drive up rates for Affordable Care Act Marketplace plans. But this development isn’t the only culprit for our current health insurance crisis. After all, those with employer-sponsored coverage are also facing major insurance price hikes. In truth, experts say this moment has been decades in the making, fueled by lax oversight of health care consolidation that has given hospitals and health insurers enormous market power — and the freedom to keep raising prices"

ZDNet: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has unveiled a new initiative called LibrePhone, with the ambitious goal of a completely free software smartphone ecosystem.. Project LibrePhone wants to remove all proprietary code from mobile devices. That code includes firmware, drivers, and the binary "blobs" that phones must have to operate.

Although several projects, such as GrapheneOS, postmarketOS, and /e/OS, have removed Google-specific software from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) codebase, the devices still rely on closed components for hardware support. Kooyman said that mobile computing has long been "the last frontier of software freedom," and that it remains dominated by closed ecosystems, such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android."

Obviously the "backstabber" take along with labeling oneself as "Turk" and trying to reconnect with distant cousins in distant lands (in someone else's backyard) are all part of TR's delusional national identity, all somehow magically helping the Anglo. Need I mention who helped the Arabs with the said backstabbing? They even made a movie about it, starring Peter O'Toole.

The title is having a little fun, it emphasizes there is an Arab in the picture, TR military is known as staunchly nationalistic and their reading of history says Arabs were "backstabbers" (towards the Ottomans) and here is the TR general in the same frame with an Arab. Also the rough streotype of an Arab is a religious person (although close watchers of the region know Arab rulers keep Islamist movements at bay) and the ultra-secularist TR military man is a contrast with that.

The wording itself: El Habibi means "friend", "dear" in Arabic, the second part is not Arabic, made to sound like it, it is actually gobble gobble chosen to rhyme with the first. It can rougly be translated to ass doctor (it's a stupid high school joke).

TR-Qatar relationship started a while ago.. I found the link below in my TR posts, back from 2010/05. That guy in the picture is a Qatari guy with the TR general.

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The bleeding seems to have stopped.. but, daem

Apparently LLama folk wrote low-level interfaces for graphics cards other than just NVidia GPU. This is a good thing, that interface code can help other applications.

LLMs are just another type of neural network. If the "weights (a list of numbers)" are available, anyone can run an LLM on their own machine, no outside connection needed. Training a large NN takes a lot of resources, but using a trained NN requires less.

Llama is an open source tool / site, it hosts open-data LLMs. Install the tool and it lets you choose from a list, pick one, it downloads, installs the weights. Then via the prompt one can talk to a local LLM neural network. With a few hundred GB of RAM, a good graphics card, even a large model should run fine.

The 22 Jump Street post-credit was hilarious

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The Rogan I was referencing yesterday was Seth Rogan, not Joey Rogan #GoodFortune

u.random_ufo_sighting()

1987-06-01
 Kittery, ME
HI, THIS IN IT'S SELF IS NOT A VISUAL BUT A CONTACT OF AN ALIEN TYPE BEING WITH
MY DAUGHTER IN OUR OWN BACK YARD IN THE SUMMER OF 1987. SHE SPEAKS OF IT ONCE IN
AWHILE AND WHAT SHE HAS SAID, AS I HAVE ASKED HER, THAT THE BEING WAS SOMETHING
THAT SHE HAS NEVER EVER SEEN. I ASKED HER WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE, SHOWN HER ANIMAL
BOOKS,AND TRIED TO GET A PICTURE IN MY MIND OF WHAT IT COULD HAVE BEEN. SHE
DOESN'T REMEMBER WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE AS SHE WAS REAL SCARED AT THAT TIME AS SHE
HAS TOLD ME.SHE DOES REMEMBER THAT THE BEING WAS AS TALL AS SHE, AND SHE WAS 5
YEARS OLD AT THAT TIME, AND THAT IT SCARED HER. SHE DID SAY THAT IT WAS ON TWO
LEGS NOT FOUR AND DID'NT LOOK LIKE ANY ANIMAL. NOW I KNOW SHE WAS ONLY 5 YEARS
OLD AT THAT TIME BUT I DO BELEIVE HER. THIS INFO MIGHT NOT BE WHAT YOU ARE
LOOKING FOR BUT I HOPE IT HELPS IN SOME SMALL WAY.((NUFORC Note:  Date is
approximate.  PD))

Using "LLM searches" is like walking on thin ice.. One trick could be always connecting conversation to real papers written by real people, not letting LLM veer off towards odd directions.

While working with LLMs you get the feeling you are managing a booksmart, mechnically clever but a junior programmer (or scientist). I did some tech management and it feels exactly this way. You provide direction, with that they execute and connect some dots, but can also make big mistakes.

LLM made a huge mistake again.. says a certain figure on a paper was X but it was Y. Literal hallucination.

Firstpost: "Thousands of flights cancelled, Trump tries to lure air traffic controllers with $10,000 ‘patriot’ bonus"

IC: "The world is preparing to rebuild Gaza but Few are ready for the Climate Cost.. Making Gaza livable again will require a global effort on an unprecedented scale"

NYT: "[08/07] For three weeks in May, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a corporate recruiter on the outskirts of Toronto. Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.

Or so he believed.

Mr. Brooks, who had no history of mental illness, embraced this fantastical scenario during conversations with ChatGPT that spanned 300 hours over 21 days...

Mr. Brooks is aware of how incredible his journey sounds. He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real. Eventually, he broke free of the delusion — but with a deep sense of betrayal"

Nice. I like the name.

"There is a Bayesian version of the t-test, popularized by John K. Kruschke.. This model is called BEST, for Bayesian Estimation Supersedes the t-test"

TASS: "Gold soars above $4,150 for the first time since October 24"

Thorium + Helium-Cooled Reactors + Hydrogen = winning combination.

Power Engineering: "Regulators approve first step toward hydrogen transition at Scattergood gas plant..Los Angeles regulators have issued an approval in what became the first step in transitioning a gas plant to hydrogen generation."

u.random_ufo_sighting()

1990-05-15
 Canton, OH
What is that mirror like ball in the sky?On the way home from work I traveled
the expressway.And comming up over a rise in the road,I noticed a round
cylindrical,metalic object that was smooyh and shiny! As I looked closer I
noticed that there was what appeared to be rivets like that of skyscrappers use
to hold girders together.Also that it had an orange/yellow color. When I went
down the next hill to try and get closer for a better look it was gone. as
Iapproached the area where I'd seen this thing I noticed that there were
contruction vehicles parked in a field,backhoe's and things of that nature. All
I could think was that whatever it was,was checking out our capability to
construct large machinery. I mention to my family what I had seen and of course
they thought me crazy! So when I found this site,decided to see if anyone else
had seen anything like I had.Also I have to add that when it disappeared it
happened so quickly like it kneww I was watching. I'm totally blown away by this
incident,hopeing your organization can shed some like on this subject.

Wrote a little utility that pulls random UFO sighting reports from the NUFORC sighting database. First one,

Frankenstein, excellent movie.

NYT: "As the Russia War Continues, Ukraine Faces a Major Draft Evasion Problem"

Drop Site: "Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak were specialists in war profiteering. At the end of his tenure as Israel’s defense minister and after his supposed 'retirement,' Barak embraced a role as a salesman of Israeli security services to embattled governments, opening the door for Israeli intelligence leaders to shape the security apparatuses of several African nations, including the country of Côte d’Ivoire."

Wasn't Ansari Me Too'd a while back? Maybe the powers that be felt his anti-system leanings, and tried to snuff him out early... Clearly they failed. Usually Woke is a cover, corp misdirection for something else...

You have to hear Rogan's diatribe against his own class at the end.. He did great too. Ansari wrote a fine script, and somehow sneaked it around the corporate overlords.. Five stars.

Keanu... He finally did a solid for the left. 👍

Review: "Good Fortune is a very different film for Lionsgate. It's a heartfelt comedy that surprisingly has a lot of intelligent insight on income inequality and economic struggles in the US...

I was not expecting to enjoy Good Fortune as much as I did.. the film has an important, timely message about the state of the American economy that way too many people will be able to relate to. Think of it as a much more socially conscious version of Kevin Smith's Dogma.

Audiences will find it easy to see themselves in Arj, a character who reflects the sad truth about the times we're living in. He's a college graduate who finds himself barely scraping by, doing menial tasks like delivering food or standing in lines for people, all while sleeping in his car. The truth is, the job market is at an all-time low, and it's harder than ever for qualified people to earn the roles they deserve. As a soon-to-be college grad about to enter the job market, this film terrified me as much as it made me laugh. Keanu Reeve's performance as Gabriel is an absolute riot, it's surprising how well he fairs in absurdist comedy after years of being cast as the stoic action hero. If any casting agents are reading, please cast him in more comedies!"

There will not be Windows post apocalypse. Its closed source nature dooms it to insignificance during a time when survival matters, not profit.

Are they saving large, static data files over there (that are usually not in a source code repository, like Github)? Geographic data, historical records, all books would be nice as well.

I would throw in one of those open LLMs too (an LLM is nothing but bunch of "weights", parameter values that make it "intelligent"). LLMs can be good for looking up existing stuff, generating "boilerplate" code.

Does the vault also have a few beefy hardware setups that can run all that? I am talking machines with a few hundred GB RAM, good graphic card (for its GPU). I'd keep a couple powerful but commodity machines that are kept up-to-date with the latest FOSS Unix variant OS, just to make sure the hardware is compatible.

GitHub Arctic Code Vault.. it stores all active Github source code repositories at the North Pole. Some of my stuff went, after the apocalypse humanity will have a great add-on for the Emacs editor, guaranteed. You can type coding docs fast while your ass is chewed by zombies.

So-called Turks of Anatolia need to let go of these useless fantasies, "reconnecting" with distant cousins so forth.. Most in the Stans don't give a fying frack about them. They might be Turkic but you are not. For some bizarre historical reasons between the "interwar period" TR founders made an already assimilated marginal ethnicity as the main ethnicity and tried to create a new identity around it. The project has been a failure.

Russian FSB might have poisoned him for stirring shit up in their backyard...

AA: "[Former TR President] Ozal passed away on April 17, 1993 after his return from a 12-day tour of the Turkic republics in Central Asia."

One commentary I read suggested Dems knew they would never get agreement on the ACA subs extension, but merely wanted to "register a protest" before the subsidies expired, and the shutdown achieved that. Maybe they were banking on the fact that shutdowns effect Reps more, which it did, and DJT approval fell, Reps were dealt a blow, their kabuki theater paid off.

CNN: "Senate votes to end government shutdown, sending funding bill to the House.. A small band of Senate Democrats voted with Republicans on Monday night to approve a funding measure to reopen the federal government — without securing their party’s demand to guarantee an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies"

#MIC #War

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Backstop? As in government bailout if your investments fail? Why do you need so much compute? LLM improvements already stalled, you are not getting better accuracy with increased hardware. No expansion needed there.

If you need additional compute for horizontal expansion, applying the same LLM tech to different applications, or potentially incrementally adapt / train for different domains, well, these are investments, you have to find funding for them just like any other organization.. They might give you funds, or not, judging the risk.. the usual. Why are you somehow different?

WSJ: "OpenAI CFO.. says the AI giant could reach break-even quickly and would like government backstop on data-center investments."

CNBC: "AI valuation fears grip global investors as tech bubble concerns grow'

CNBC: "Trump tells Senate Republicans to send federal health insurance money 'directly to the people'"

"[2022] Kazakhstan Prez Tokayev Says He Doesn’t Recognize Donetsk, Luhansk While Sharing Stage With Putin.. Putin was also quick to point out that the former Soviet Union covered the same territory as 'historical Russia'"

NYT: "Kazakhstan is the first Central Asian country to join the Abraham Accords"

DJT making a play for "the Stans", in Russia's backyard?

Euronews: "Trump and officials from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan held bilateral meetings in the Oval Office before a working dinner. 'One of the key items on our agenda is critical minerals,' Trump said at the dinner with the leaders. He stated, 'We're strengthening our economic partnerships, improving our security cooperation, and expanding our overall bonds'"

"China's exports fall 1.1% in October as shipments to US plunge 25%.. Chinese exports unexpectedly fell in October after months of front-loading U.S. orders to beat President Donald Trump's tariffs, in a stark reminder of the manufacturing juggernaut's reliance on American consumers even as it woos buyers elsewhere"

"Nancy Pelosi will not seek re-election in 2026"

"We went looking for a hidden gas worth MILLIONS" #DW

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Offering hallucination machines as a service is one thing. But when Google wanted to know something, I mean really wanted to know something, as in reports effecting their bottom-line (knowing for sure if a campaign succeeded or not, or a page alternation causing visits to go up or not, enter change-point analysis), you see what they did, they resorted to real science, not data approximation and parrot NNs. Why don't they feed their numbers into a f-ing neural net LLM and ask it "ew, bro, was that campaign good, do I have some rizz on my biz?". They don't because they know they can't trust the answer they would get.

GOOG apparently wrote a tensorflow-probability package as well that is used by causalimpact. I was hoping the AI hype would instigate this, by encouraging the development of base computational tools like tensorflow (GOOG), torch (FB) that provide some of the low-level fundemantal computational architecture for LLM AI, the rest of the scientific computing would benefit as well, you could use TF for numerical weather prediction for instance.

For the change-point analysis I used Bayesian Structural Time Series Approach, via one software package written by Google (they open sourced it, good job), called causalimpact. Google still has some life left in it, there is a residue of scientific spirit there, they are not yet wholly taken over by neural net monkeys (the base tech of LLMs) where they shove shit into a black box and turn the crank, hoping it outputs something AGI-like. BSTS is a deeply mathematical approach, not random monkey shit

Reuters: "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show.. Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’"

If Venezuella is invaded, then Reagan would have liked him.

Reagan would not approve of an anti-globalist Trump. He would chase him out of the party. Trump shared that photo once to suggest he would've been buddies with him, but he is blowing smoke up your ass.

Shutdowns are tricky for Reps. The blame does not automatically go to the executive in charge, there've been Democrats in office during shutdowns and the other side was blamed. I believe Reps being the official "anti government" party (that pungent stench of rabid Reaganism) when the government shuts down, the blame sticks on them more than the other side.

Change-point analysis on Potus approval data, tested the start of the government shutdown, it reports significant change after that date. There is a causal effect. The shutdown seems to have hurt Republicans.

u.appr_changepoint_bsts("01-10-2025")

Date
2025-10-28    -6.7
2025-10-31    -7.6
2025-11-01    -8.3
2025-11-03    -9.9
2025-11-04   -11.0
2025-11-05   -11.2
Name: net, dtype: float64

Posterior probability of an effect: 99.89%

Richard Murphy: '... fairer ways to tax the wealthy:

Equalise capital gains tax with income tax — worth £12 billion a year.

Apply VAT to financial services, overwhelmingly consumed by the rich, worth another £8 billion.

Introduce an investment income surcharge of about 15 per cent on dividends, rents, and interest, raising roughly £18 billion."

#Ukraine 10/30 - 11/08

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