Mostly just posting to say, hey, there's others out here like you. Hang in there, Almost-Me. If not, see you on the other side.

The "nondeterministic" part is enough to flag these tools in some industries. We can't risk having a different answer to the same question in some applications. Even if the differences are small, differences compound over time, as anyone who's worked in inertial guidance can tell you.

Aside from the "nondeterministic" part, that "Fundamental Math of LLMs" is a very different beast from math that runs much of the rest of the cosmos. It's just human language. Just because you can talk about something does not mean you understand it.

Existing "LLM-type" technology performs beyond all prior preconception because there's pretty obviously some kind of basal mathematical relationship between different kinds of meaning. But that relationship, no one's really grappled with it formally in its entirety. It's probably adjacent to the big new science/mathematics of Emergence. It's also, from a pure science aspect, probably the most interesting aspect of these systems. All the crap we've been trying to wrench - for DECADES - with taxonomies, semantics, a swirling universe of computational linguistics in all its variety - that crap could conceivably have a single " $ E = mc^ 2" moment. But we don't fundamentally understand it, and it's a real mistake to hand critical systems to models that aren't understood. Down that path alchemy lies.

It's honestly a pretty darn good movie, and I just don't remember the last time something got underscored so badly. My theory here is that people on the right hate it because Climate Worrying Is For Pansies, and people on the left hated it because it was too glib about a Serious Matter. Those metacritic numbers can be hard on stuff that gets anger from both sides.

Even without considering PRC in the picture, in a hands-on-throat and teeth-in-veins North American breakdown, the Maddened Godspeakers will overwhelm the Bioshock Cosplay. They have the numbers - virtually everyone outside of a CONUS urban center - and they're much, much, much more energetic when it comes to their finely-tuned plans for the world.

The subbed original audio features absolutely top class environmental sound design, and a more sparse musical landscape, when it is even present.

That's not to disparage the US scoring, which is fantastic, but the presence of music in scenes- versus the sound of distant fighting, the chittering winds, roaring water- changes them quite utterly.

SecDef has said that the public should watch this execution, by the way, not that they can. That is a very specific and deliberate thing they're communicating.

I got the same willies from watching the old (arguably propaganda) show COPS, but to a vastly lesser extent. COPS had other stuff happening besides people being shot in the face.

Now, if you're of the ideological view that a nation's population should be pre-brutalized to prepare them for state violence, then this action makes all the sense in the world. I would humbly remind people of this opinion, however, that state-proposed programs like this never end well. The population inevitably points their newly recalibrated moral compass at the closest target available: their neighbors. We pre-brutalize soldiers before we drop them in with enemy, but pre-brutalizing doctors, cops, teachers . . . is almost unfailingly unwise in a national context. Very good at breaking a nation though.

I sometimes wonder if the AGI wasn't here all along . . .

We never did find out who "Satoshi Nakamoto" actually was.

I'm not seriously suggesting that an AGI has been in the wild since circa 2010s, but . . stranger things have happened. All through the aughts, then the teens, GWoT had been funneling an absolutely bananas amount of money into compute. What if, in those years, something horrifying happened, and it's already taken over. That would explain so much weirdness.

The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.

Exchanging USD-tied assets and securities for ownership in physical infrastructure, water, land, energy.

Another strategy is exchanging USD-tied assets for hunks of governmental power or to get shares of the governmental monopoly of force. We're seeing this, as well. Have been seeing this, but it's accelerating at a dizzy pace.

In many ways, the AI infrastructure play assumes this piece to be a given, because the same infrastructure is still costed in USD-denominated debt. Governmental power will allow for that debt to be dealt with opaquely.

On the other hand, who knows, maybe they will manage to build Cyber Jesus / MechaHitler. No pricing that in.

[1] Ok ok ok strictly, seigniorage is the profit from issuing currency: the gap between what it costs to create a dollar and what it buys. This is broader. It's the "exorbitant privilege" of reserve-currency status: the world accepts US liabilities (cash, Treasuries, dollar deposits) as savings, so the US can run persistent deficits at low borrowing costs. This system is on the very brink, in the early stages, of collapse - every financial indicator is pointed at the same direction: petrodollar recycling to US compute and power through vehicles like Stargate, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and Saudi PIF commitments; Japan and Korea 2025 trade deals are directed at US physical industry rather than bond purchases; 2022 Russian bond freezes showed the danger; every central bank on the planet is blowing up the physical gold market.

North America of course, but Africa is an overlapping series of successful genocides, Argentina's "Conquest of the Desert", Qing conquest of the Dzungar, Russia's conquest of the Circassians, Athens and Melos 416 BCE, Rome and Carthage, Rome and lots, Mongolians and whew even more than that -- all of them victories but also a "Where are the Khazars?" sort of event. They're just gone. Violence will forever be Mankind's one true Universal Language -- easier to learn than Esperanto.

Post-Trinity, the thermonuclear deterrent has put the kibosh on genocide as a working tactic. For a bit. The evolution post Cold-War might well turn out to be that genocide is back, baby, as long as the genocidee doesn't have a nuclear deterrent. It's cosmically fitting that the great genocidal wars of the 20th century birthed the final perfected weapon for doing genocides.

I also suspect that the Great Alliance between the Sunni/Arab autocracies and Israel is more fragile than it appears. Or, more accurately, and the Sunni/Arab autocracies themselves are more fragile than they appear.

Also also, how do you get the heat out there, to the panel? You are talking a lot of plumbing, and a lot of working fluid. As mentioned, ISS's two external cooling loops hold about 540 kg of ammonia combined to dump 70 kW of heat, so at the megawatt scale thousands and tens of thousands of kg of working fluid. I know, new heat exchanger, lots of people have brought up "Magic Heat Exchanger Technology X", but no one's given me a cite to at least lay down the fundamentals on how these things manage to bang all over the Carnot numbers.

I'm no downer on space solar. It's probably the long term solution for humanity's energy needs - an equatorial band on the Moon, or even Mercury, would give us more power than we could ever reasonably use. But presenting it as the fix for the data center problem . . . I'm sorry, it sounds like people chasing other people's money. Which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

There's a case to be made that a substantial part of the mobile/social web revolution of the Aughties was at least in part propelled by the exploding budget of the security state post-9/11. LifeLog, In-Q-Tel, a bucket of other programs that have straight-line-relationships with the various Web 2.0 shenanigans. The CIA point man for these operations are recognizable today as some of the new generation of American semi-governmental oligarchs.

This last year I read that the early Stingrays only worked because they were engineered in from the IMSI standards - it was backdoored at the spec level, not the design level, not the manufacturing level.

When you step back a moment it makes sense. Who's funding a wireless information infrastructure to every American on the continent, not to mention a sea change in mobile computing manufacturing and development. Different tooling, different design systems, different everything, massive scale . . . what, paid for with advertising? Are you saying Mad Men is paying for all this? That seemed and seems . . . unlikely.

The old Chicago School boogeymen of unions, regulations, and red tape are effectors, but they're a pimple on the back of the world-mutating effects of seven-some decades of USD Seigniorage.

I imagine we're going to be living through the reverse of this Seigniorage experiment quite soon.

Depends on which heat you want

Heat adding to hot side: COP_heat = Q_hot / W = T_hot / (T_hot − T_cold).

Heat leaving the cold side: COP_cool = Q_cold / W = T_cold / (T_hot − T_cold).

Another one (more common in the day to day, for me at least): heat-engine efficiency, η = 1 - T_cold / T_hot. Cycle forward to make work from heat.

That's thumping the Carnot limit: [[T_cold / (T_hot − T_cold)]].

2.5, while rejecting at 500 K, cold side's at least 357 K (eeehhhhhhh 84 °C) . . . and that's an absolutely perfect Carnot machine. At 50% Carnot -- a pretty good heat pump, real world performance is 40-60 -- cold side's at 417 K (144 °C). 417k, feeding your GPU coolant loops.

Both of those are expensive as hell, by the way.

Cooling via radiation follows Stefan–Boltzmann: P = εσAT⁴. Let's assume a good surface (emissivity ~0.9) at 300 K (27 °C) at 400 W per square meter per side. A flat panel radiating from both faces into deep space gets 800 W/m, not including the losses from, say, the Sun, or from IR coming off the Earth. Now, input power. Sunlight in orbit ~1,360 W/m², assume ~22% cell efficiency, we got 300 W/m². So each 1 MW compute, 3,300 m² of solar panel and minimum 1,200–1,500 m² of radiator.

In case ya didn't know - 1 MW is tiny from a present-day-datacenter perspective. It's like 8 racks. So we're talking orbital megastructures here, many many many square kilometers, and this is with all the best case assumptions, and magic radiator panels that never see the sun, or the earth, or the moon.

This is just the basic numbers here, by the way. There's a garbage truck full of other unsolvable problems if you poke your head in there.

Aside from the "Avoid Regulations" aspect, and the "Everything That Burns Deorbiting is Depreciation" aka "The Starlink Trick", I'm not sure what the hell the draw is.

Which all would have been fine - the crew and the computer could have talked it out -- except HAL had a probably-unwisely-high self esteem, maybe even a simulation of arrogance. HAL was utterly convinced that the mission would fail without it. HAL was unfailingly certain in its own infallibility, even later in the face of plainly contradicting evidence. And, obviously, no one had thought about the Asimov Rules, and how that probably needs to be Rule Zero in this sort of situation.

As we close in on HAL capabilities - and employment, with LLMs at this moment deciding who lives and dies - probably should try and take the right lesson from fiction. For once.