3D Figurines

3D Custom Figurine

TEMU, source of endless amusement, has done it again. You send them a picture of someone and they will 3D print a figurine based on that photo for like $15. The figure is about six inches tall.

Data Centers and Bicycle Seats

RockBros Bicycle Saddle
Fist Most Bike

Uniberp Reports:

I'd been using a function on my chromebook that lets me select a portion of the screen and google search it, just like Google Lens but easier than drag-dropping an image or selecting a file.

I usually use it to help identify antiques and stuff, but lately it just sits and blinks "Thinking a little longer". Google Lens still works fine with the same image.

Aside from the possible local cache issues, I jump to the possibility that Google is just tired of me wasting its time looking at old lamps and fans.

It could be they have seen some of my critical remarks about data centers or Republicans and I am now pegged as part of the resistance to their goal of data center hegemony, but that would be kinda petty and work against any support I had for the least evil of the mega-providers (namely Google).

SO... what I think is actually happening is that all this processing power they are building "to help the consumer" is simply to mine more cryptocurrency.

Anyhow I got a new bicycle seat from RockBros. It was cheap, and I sold off my old brooks racing seats on ebay for a good price. I needed something that was easier on my new hips, and I ride more heavily on my butt now to reduce hip wear.

I liked it so much I bought another for my cottage bike. They sent the wrong thing, so I sent them a note and they sent me a return label. 

They said they were out of the saddles so they sent me a refund.

So I bought another of the same saddle from Canada.

Then the first company sent me the right saddle. Now I have 3.

If any of you would like to try it, I will gift it to you. It's not leather, but it works for my 1 hour rides.

Now we'll see if Google retracts my refund.

Uniberp's message came in via Gmail. Gmail, being my friend and all suggested this reply:

I'll take the spare saddle if no one else claims it. I've been doing more riding lately too.

As for the search function, that sounds like a typical Google move—making things worse under the guise of 'improving' them. I wouldn't put it past them to prioritize everything but the user's actual needs.

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords . . .

Rodeo Salinas

California Bob tries out ChatGPT:

Recent ChatGPT conversation:

• Me: "Find me some hotels in Watsonville for these dates."
• ChatGPT: [selection of hotels at $150/night]

[I check Expedia, see everything is $400+ a night]

• Me: "Why does Expedia show me nothing below $400 a night?"
• ChatGPT: "Yes, the $400 a night figure is much more accurate than the $150 I gave you earlier."

Me: [close window]

PS: there's a rodeo or something in Watsonville this weekend, everything booked.

Watsonville is 20 miles down the road from the Rodeo in Salinas. 

Virtual Piano

Virtual Piano

I wrote a little program in C the other day, and I thought it might be more useful if I rewrote it in Javascript, that way I could post it on the web. It's not a very useful program, more just messing about with numbers, but while I thinking about this it occurred to me that you could use your computer keyboard to play music like a piano. That sounds like a fun project. So yeah, I'm a little late to the party. Several other people have already done this.

Stuka JU 87-G2

Stuka JU 87-G2

Introduction to story on Air & Space Forces Magazine: 

The Stuka Story by Thomas Hajewski, May 1, 1987

In January 1942, during the state funeral for Ernst Udet, World War I fighter ace and Generalluft­zeugmeister (Director General of the Luftwaffe) Hermann Goring spoke eloquently about the fallen hero’s deeds. He praised his accom­plishments in the Great War, his six­ty-two air victories—second only to Baron von Richthofen—and his to­tal dedication in helping to build Hitler’s air force. Yet Goring’s high­est praise was bestowed on his for­mer comrade’s support for and de­velopment of a specific type of air­craft, the offensive weapon without which the Blitzkrieg tactics used in Poland, France, and later Russia during the first years of the war would have been impossible.

This new plane was dubbed a Sturzkampfflugzeug, literally a “diving fighting plane,” a designa­tion originally used by the Germans for any aircraft used as a dive- bomber. Only later was it specifical­ly applied to the Junkers Ju-87. In the military jargon of the day, the longer Sturzkampfflugzeug was shortened to Stuka, the aircraft that has become synonymous with Ger­man aggression in World War II.

Both the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka as well as the technique of dropping bombs while plunging earthward at speeds often in excess of 350 mph had an unusual, highly controver­sial developmental history. More than once the entire project was nearly scrapped. German prewar propaganda and secrecy have clouded so much of this interesting phase of aviation history that even now, nearly fifty years after the be­ginning of World War II, new facts regarding the Stuka and its develop­ment are coming to light.

Ju 87 Stuka — Dive Bomber in Action: Cockpit War Footage
Enhanced Warfare

Junkers Ju 87 Stuka - In The Movies
Johnny Johnson

Note - ran into a funny dash in the story I pasted above. Looks like a dash in Blogger's compose mode, but a red dot in html mode. Tried to highlight the whole paragraph to indent it, and it wouldn't highlight. Change to html mode, replace the red dot with a dash, then realizing this is probably just marking a place where the word can be hyphenated, so I put it back. Now I can highlight the whole paragraph. Then I realize Blogger has it's own method of wrapping text, which is to not break any words at all, so it doesn't worry about hyphenation. But this story is from 1987 which is like 40 (!) years ago. Probably wasn't online then, so somebody went to the trouble to digitize it. I dunno, was anybody using computers to enter text back then? 

Intel 310 Microcomputer System

I was at Intel and we had computers. What the heck did I have on my desk? I think we were using terminals hooked to Intel 310s. I was writing up short pieces about technical problems I dealt with. Not much different from what I do now with this blog, though now I mostly write about other people's technical problems.

Cincinnati Milacron

How a Cincinnati Toolmaker Built the Machine That Made American Factories Automatic
The Tool Archives and The Tool Autopsy

Great history of Cincinnati Milacron, though when it gets toward the end he starts ranting about who's to blame, which is kind of pointless now. Those who study history and are smart enough will learn something without it being pointed out.

Note that Cincinnati one N in the first Cin and two Ns in the 2nd Cinn, and Milacron has only one L. YouTube videos always include the name of who posted the video and a link to their YouTube page, except this one. The link for The Tool Archives and The Tool Autopsy, the purported makers of this video, goes nowhere. The Tool Archives does have a website.

Why didn't I know about CNC machining until the 1980s if it had been around since the 1950s? Maybe I had heard of its existence but I never ran into any of it. Kind of irritates me now.

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

I, Cringely

From I, Cringely:

 

The Permission Slip

 A while back I asked in this space what would happen if Dario Amodei was wrong. I want to come back to that, because I think the question matters more now than it did then, and for a reason that has nothing to do with whether I like Dario or his company. I do, for the record. That’s not the point.

The point is a document. In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of themselves. Make the models big enough, train them long enough, and the problem dissolves. You don’t have to solve it. You just have to wait, and spend. And so the entire AI industry breathed a sigh of releif.

I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one.

Because that is what the essay became, whatever Amodei intended. It gave every other person writing nine- and ten-figure checks a reason not to worry about the one thing that should worry them most. The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI. And the prevailing wisdom, blessed from the top, is that you needn’t address it directly. Scale will provide.

Look at where the money is going and you can see the permission slip being cashed. Stargate, half a trillion dollars. The hyperscalers, tens of billions each per year. The Anthropic–Akamai arrangement, nearly two billion more. The collective bet of the wealthiest companies in the world is that you fix intelligence — including its honesty — by buying more of it. The data center operators are happy. The chip vendors are ecstatic. The labs raising money at valuations with too many zeros are happy. Everyone in that chain has the same incentive, which is to believe that the answer is more.

The customers who will eventually pay for all of it are the ones who should be asking whether any of this is true.

Here is why I think it isn’t. A small company I helped start, 2Brains Inc., set out in 2022 to solve hallucinations — before ChatGPT, before the scaling consensus hardened into received truth, back when the polite assumption was that the problem was simply insurmountable. We did not solve it by waiting for bigger models. We solved it architecturally, by separating the part of the system that generates language from the part that retrieves and verifies facts, and reconciling the two before anything reaches the user. It runs on ordinary processors. It is cheap. And on the industry’s own benchmark for this kind of faithfulness, it more than doubles the published baseline, with no fabricated facts in the verified case at all.

I am not telling you this to sell you anything. I am telling you because of what it implies about the trillion-dollar bet.

If a handful of people in Virginia and Kansas could solve hallucinations with an architecture and a CPU, then one of two things must be true about the scaling story, and neither is comfortable for the people cashing the permission slip.

The first possibility is that scaling will not cure hallucinations at all. That the models get bigger and more fluent and more useful, and continue, reliably, to lie. In that case the largest companies in the world are spending a fortune chasing a cure that is not coming, and the absolution Amodei offered turns out to have been the most expensive sentence in the history of the field.

The second possibility is that scaling will eventually reduce hallucinations — but only by spending enormous sums to arrive, the long way around, at the same place a small company already reached by design. And if the route the giants take passes through the architecture we built and protected, then “scale will solve it” turns out to mean “scale will eventually reinvent something that is already spoken for.” That is not a threat. It is just what the words mean when you follow them to the end.

I find the whole thing clarifying, actually. For three years the conversation about AI has been organized around a single article of faith, which is that the answer to every problem is more compute, and the people who benefit most from that faith are the people best positioned to spread it. It is a remarkably convenient theology. It asks the believers to spend, and it asks the skeptics to wait, and it never quite gets around to the question of whether the central promise is true.

I asked once what happens if Dario is wrong. I am increasingly convinced the more interesting question is what happens when the rest of them realize he might be — and that the bill for finding out is already coming due.

Robert X. Cringely is a co-founder of 2Brains, Inc.

I'm down at South Waterfront this morning, waiting while my better half consults with the medicos, so I've got an hour to kill. I spend my time reading Idoru by William Gibson, napping and walking. While I'm reading I overhear man on the sidewalk talking to someone. I didn't really listen to what he was saying but you could tell he was excited about whatever it was he was talking about. I think it was because he had someone who wanted to hear what he had to say. People like to talk and it's glorious when somebody listens. This might be AI's biggest market - providing attentive listeners to people who want to talk. In that case perfect honest could be a handicap.

I ordered Idoru without sampling it based on Tam's recommendation. Also, I've read other books by Gibson, he's pretty great. I don't know when Idoru was written but it sounds like he's imagining what our present day will be like, but he's imagining it  20 or 30 years ago. In any case it feels like it's spot on. 

Winners and Losers and Kevin O'Leary

Why this data center is causing a ruckus
Morning Brew

Northeast Hillsboro, where I live, is getting overrun with data centers. Seems like a new, giant, tilt-wall building goes up every week. I wonder if all this investment is going to pay off. I can see how AI (Artificial Intelligence) can be useful for some things. I ask Google questions and it usually can provide a reasonable answer, and I've seen some clever videos made by AI (I suspect the script came from a human), but nothing that could justify the zillions of dollars being spent on these techno-palaces.

Hillsboro Data Centers
I swear none of these buildings were there last week.

I suspect the biggest use of AI is going to be running voice chat-bots for dealing with customer service calls. And given that the whiz kids have deciphered human speech and can now reproduce most anyone's voice, we are going to see scamming elevated to the next level. And all those call centers in India are likely going to be replaced by chat-bots.

Also, with the proliferation of AI and the abysmally low level of intelligence of the general population, Artificial Intelligence is going to degenerate into Artificial Stupidity,

JMSmith has a philosophical approach to all this. In his latest post he is talking about Kevin O'Leary and ends with this:

It is obvious that life’s losers do not understand the secrets of success.  But it is much less obvious, at least to successful men like Kevin O’Leary, that life’s winners do not understand the secrets of failure.  They imagine they understand failure because they have known low points from which they “bounced back,” but the first secret of failure is that a failure does not bounce.  Life’s losers hit bottom like a bag of sand and not like a basketball.  Losers go plop; winners go boing. Winners think sandbags could bounce if they only tried harder.  Losers think winners are bags, or rather balls, of wind.

Competition is Kevin O’Leary’s god, and I suspect he would be delighted if the nation’s motto were changed to, “In Competition We Trust.”  But he does not understand that Competition looks to life’s losers very much as Yahweh looked to a trembling Amalkite.  He does not understand that most men are not eager to enter a competitive footrace because they are fat, emphysemic, or lacking one leg.   Life’s losers exchange loyalty for protection, not for the right to compete in contests in which they are certain to finish last.

Notes for the uneducated, like me:

Yahweh is the personal name of the God of ancient Israel and Judah, represented by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton (YHWH) and primarily used in the Hebrew Bible. Emerging as a national deity from the Iron Age Levant, Yahweh is identified in scripture as the creator and deliverer of the Israelites, often associated with attributes of power, war, and faithful covenant.

The Amalekites were an ancient, nomadic biblical nation known as persistent enemies of the Israelites, inhabiting the Negev desert south of Canaan. Descended from Esau's grandson Amalek, they were branded as hostile for attacking the vulnerable rear of the Israelite Exodus, leading to a divine decree for their eventual total destruction.

 

Bookland

Why does every book come from the same country?
Chris Spargo

That's some jacket he's wearing. I mean, how many books does he pull out of it?

Shadow Economy

Cryptocurrency by Brian Penny

Stolen entire from The Geopolitics:

The Algorithmic Shadow Economy by Boecyàn Bourgade

Over the past decade, governments across Asia have modernized surveillance systems, tightened financial regulations, and expanded cross-border policing. Yet beneath these efforts, an entirely different kind of economic structure has taken shape, one that doesn’t resemble a criminal network or a hidden marketplace. It looks more like a loose, fast-moving ecosystem made of automated tools, fragmented payment channels, and digital platforms that operate with little human coordination. Together, they form what is increasingly becoming an algorithmic shadow economy.

This transformation wasn’t engineered. It emerged gradually as simple automation tools, crypto-based financial rails, and low-cost AI systems became widely accessible. Activities that once required skill, coordination, or risk can now be reproduced and scaled with almost no expertise. Illicit markets have adapted not by becoming more sophisticated, but by becoming more distributed and more routine.

The automation layer

The most visible shift is happening in Southeast Asia, where fraud mills, scam compounds, and small opportunistic groups now rely heavily on off-the-shelf software. Identity fabrication, voice clips, spoofed documents, and targeted messaging campaigns that once required technical operators can now be generated through inexpensive tools. Many of these tools run in the background without much oversight, making the operations feel less like coordinated schemes and more like automated routines.

Officials in the region describe situations where automated systems have been used to test border procedures or probe customs vulnerabilities. In the past, this sort of experimentation was slow and risky; it needed planning and expertise. Today, much of it can be executed continuously, at scale, with minimal human input.

These operations haven’t grown more innovative. They’ve simply become easier to replicate. When one operation is shut down, others continue without disruption. There is no central structure to dismantle. The infrastructure keeps running, and new operators can plug into it whenever they choose.

The financial layer

Crypto doesn’t appeal to illicit groups because it guarantees anonymity. For many, it doesn’t. What matters is mobility, the ability to move funds quickly through platforms that follow different rules and respond at different speeds. A transfer might start on one chain, split into smaller segments, jump across several services, pass briefly through a mixing pool, and land on an exchange governed by completely different regulatory expectations. It all happens before authorities finish their first request for information.

This pattern appears across online gambling schemes, investment scams, trafficking-adjacent networks, and freelance fraud operations. The common thread is not a particular token or blockchain; it’s the infrastructure that surrounds them. The way it fragments, recombines, and accelerates movement creates its own form of protection.

A shadow economy without shadows

What makes this moment unusual is that much of the activity doesn’t take place in hidden spaces. Transactions often unfold on public exchanges. Coordination takes place on common messaging apps. Listings circulate through commercial platforms meant for ordinary use.

The illicit economy isn’t going underground. It’s dissolving into the same spaces where legitimate activity occurs. Small groups can amplify their reach through automation. Large groups no longer need rigid internal structures. The ecosystem becomes fluid, easy to enter, difficult to map, and nearly impossible to slow down using the tools that governments relied on in earlier years.

Why Asia?

Chinese super-apps and cross-border payment infrastructures also play a structural role, creating parallel financial rails that can be exploited faster than regulators in neighbouring countries can coordinate. Southeast Asia sits at the intersection of several forces that accelerate this shift. Digital adoption has been extremely fast, and millions of people have entered mobile finance without passing through traditional banking systems. Regulatory frameworks differ sharply from one country to another, often between neighbours. Informal economies were already strong. Enforcement resources vary widely, from jurisdictions with robust oversight to others stretched thin.

The result is an uneven terrain where capital, data, and digital labour flow freely. Activity doesn’t need to hide from enforcement; it only needs to move faster than enforcement can react.

Targeting actors misses the point

Most government responses still focus on the visible offenders, raiding compounds, freezing accounts, taking down communication hubs. These steps are important, but they strike at the wrong part of the system.

Shutting down a scam site doesn’t eliminate the automated tools that fed it. Freezing one link in a laundering chain doesn’t prevent scripts from rebuilding a new route an hour later. Arresting operators doesn’t remove the underlying systems that generate synthetic identities or automated messaging flows.

The obstacles are not individual actors but the infrastructure that remains active regardless of who is running it. Enforcement strategies built on identifying key players run into a structural problem: there are no key players anymore, only interchangeable users of the same digital machinery.

A more realistic regulatory strategy

No government can eliminate this shadow economy but slowing it is possible. And slowing it doesn’t require sweeping reinvention, just friction in places that currently operate too quickly.

Short delays for high-risk crypto transfers would give investigators a window to react without burdening ordinary users. Basic provenance requirements for digital identity tools could make the easiest forms of fabrication detectable again. Limited regional coordination, focused on the most frequently exploited routes rather than broad harmonization, could close off the pathways that rely on differences between neighbouring regulatory regimes. Transparent oversight for automated routing and mixing tools, modelled loosely on algorithmic-trading supervision, would bring currently invisible systems into the regulatory frame.

None of these steps would stop the ecosystem entirely. But they would slow it enough to make oversight meaningful.

A system that doesn’t need architects

The most important thing about this new structure is that it doesn’t have leaders. It grows because the incentives built into the digital economy encourage speed, replication, and low-skill experimentation. As long as cheap automation exists, global crypto rails remain fast, and enforcement remains uneven across borders, the architecture will continue evolving.

The question isn’t whether the illicit digital economy can be dismantled. It’s whether it can be contained before it becomes too deeply intertwined with legitimate financial and communication systems to separate cleanly.

For now, it drifts through the gaps, not invisible, but moving just fast enough to stay outside the reach of institutions designed for a slower age. As this ecosystem expands, it will increasingly shape regional power dynamics, forcing governments to confront not only illicit actors but the deeper technological asymmetries redefining influence across Asia.

LEGO Sorting

A machine to sort a million pounds of LEGO
LegoSpencer and basically

LEGO enthusiasts have created like a parallel universe. It's kind of nuts.

AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
LastWeekTonight

I used to watch John Oliver and he is pretty funny. I don't watch him anymore, I'm busy playing solitaire, but he's got an issue here. The issue is how gullible people are, but that hasn't really changed. There have always been people who are gullible and there have always been people who are ready and willing to take advantage of them. It might be that people just want something to believe in, and if they aren't too smart they might not care just what they believe in.

So most of this AI Slop is entertainment and entertainment might be the biggest industry in the world.

It's use in propaganda is a little worrying, but propaganda has always been a problem, now it's just a little glitzier.

Probability or The Story of Google

What are Markov chains? And why are they so useful?
Veritasium

Does a good job of explaining how Google works, which is remarkably simple, all it takes is a bigger computer. If you are just looking at letters, you just need a simple array with room for 26 entries. If you are looking at words, you need an array with a zillion entries, because not only do you are you using all the English words, you're also using all words from all the other languages and all the names and acronyms. And numbers, and punctuation, and symbols. And then, after you have counted all the words and populated your data base, you need to be able to answer a zillion queries simultaneously, which I suspect means you need to make multiple copies of these data bases. No wonder they're building all these data centers in my neighborhood.

And do not forget that all of this is being paid for by advertising. A tenth of a cent times a billion clicks is still $100K, and that probably happens, what? Hourly?

A couple of people mentioned:

Masayoshi Son (1957 - )
Japanese Businessman

Andrey Andreyevich Markov (1856 – 1922)
Russian Mathematician

Pavel Alekseevich Nekrasov (1853–1924)
Russian mathematician

On the downside, he drops in a couple of lines about global warming. I don't know if global warming is a real problem, but I do know that all of the measures western environmentalists have proposed are worse than useless.

It ends with an ad for Brilliant at the 31 minute mark.

AI, Indices & Lincoln

1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car

Uniberp ponders:

I was bugged by the latest kaboom in AI, of the cheap Chinese knockoff of AI. I consider our current worship of AI to be the computing equivalent of a 1975 Lincoln Town Car.

So I searched for "How is AI different from searches based on compound indexes?" and found this article, referring to the traditional use of the word "index" meaning the alphabetized list of subject, keyword, etc. of a written text. The response: "I’m sorry, but I cannot write you an index for a book." occurs several times in the article

https://www.stephenullstrom.com/hello-ai-goodbye-indexers/

The linked article is a little long. I was surprised that anyone had that much to say about indexes, and even more surprised that there appears to be an entire subculture devoted to creating indexes. I shouldn't be surprised but I was. There are a zillion little niches of knowledge out there.

Google will use AI to answer some of inquiries, and generally they are pretty good. Problem is I can't link to them because they are ephemeral. No telling if the answer I get today will be the same as the answer I get next year, or even tomorrow. Yes, everything is ephemeral, but the wayback machine does a decent job of making web pages seem immortal.

Meanwhile, back to the car. Then I started looking at pictures of the Town Car and I noticed a couple of things.

Real Spare Tire in the Trunk Lid

Notice the substantial trunk lid support strut at the top

Why is there an oil filter attached to the air cleaner?

This Lincoln Town Car has the optional 'power vent windows', which has got to be peak decadence. AI is like that. Why search for information when you can just ask AI for the answer? Let AI do the grunt work.

Complex Systems

Some random UPS package sorting facility
I chose this picture because the ominous red lights remind me of the Terminator

A guy I know is back working at UPS, this time at the sorting facility out by PDX (the Portland airport). This place is maybe half the size of the dungeon (as it is commonly referred to) on Swan Island. At the dungeon they had maybe a dozen people scanning packages at key locations. At PDX, the scanning is done automatically, so they don't have people doing the scanning. Like all mechanical systems, occasionally things break and the system comes to a halt. At Swan Island when something broke, it only shut down a portion of the system. When something breaks at PDX, like a package jams a conveyor belt, the whole thing stops and all the package handlers get a break for an hour or two until they (whoever they are) get it fixed and it starts running again.

We would expect newer systems to have fewer breakdowns, which should result is less downtime over all. If breakdowns start happening too frequently, I expect they will just bulldoze the entire place and build a new one.

This Discovery Just Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

This Discovery Just Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Cleo Abram

Machine Learning sounds a lot like Artificial Intelligence, so maybe AI does have some uses.

Intel 4004 Microprocessor

Styx - Too Much Time On My Hands
STYX

Borepatch posted about a guy who got Linux to run a 4004 microprocessor. My response to this foolishness is the above tune. But then SiGraybeard wonders if the 4004 can actually do anything useful, which got me to wondering. I mean, the stupidest microcontroller I ever dealt with was Intel's 8051 and comparing it to a 4004 is like comparing a Cadillac to a kid's tricycle. So what was it used for? Somebody asked this question on Quora and got a boatload of answers. I liked these:

Intel 4004 was the first commercially available microprocessor. This 4-bit microchip was released in 1971 and was mainly designed by Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima. It was designed for use in calculators, automated teller machines and cash machines. - Odysseus Hoang

Basically Intel realised they were having to reinvent the wheel for every calculator manufacturer that came along with a different specification for a new device.
They decided it would be better to create a processor with a fixed set of instructions, with the new functionality to be provided by the code burnt into ROM. Future changes can be accommodated by changing the code in the ROM, not a total redesign of the chip. - John Stephenson

Fishing for Privacy

Stolen entire from Schneier on Security

 

Online Privacy and Overfishing

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.

Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying.

We see this argument as an example of our shifting collective expectations of privacy. To understand what’s happening, we can learn from an unlikely source: fish.

In the mid-20th century, scientists began noticing that the number of fish in the ocean—so vast as to underlie the phrase “There are plenty of fish in the sea”—had started declining rapidly due to overfishing. They had already seen a similar decline in whale populations, when the post-WWII whaling industry nearly drove many species extinct. In whaling and later in commercial fishing, new technology made it easier to find and catch marine creatures in ever greater numbers. Ecologists, specifically those working in fisheries management, began studying how and when certain fish populations had gone into serious decline.

One scientist, Daniel Pauly, realized that researchers studying fish populations were making a major error when trying to determine acceptable catch size. It wasn’t that scientists didn’t recognize the declining fish populations. It was just that they didn’t realize how significant the decline was. Pauly noted that each generation of scientists had a different baseline to which they compared the current statistics, and that each generation’s baseline was lower than that of the previous one.

What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Pauly called this “shifting baseline syndrome” in a 1995 paper. The baseline most scientists used was the one that was normal when they began their research careers. By that measure, each subsequent decline wasn’t significant, but the cumulative decline was devastating. Each generation of researchers came of age in a new ecological and technological environment, inadvertently masking an exponential decline.

Pauly’s insights came too late to help those managing some fisheries. The ocean suffered catastrophes such as the complete collapse of the Northwest Atlantic cod population in the 1990s.

Internet surveillance, and the resultant loss of privacy, is following the same trajectory. Just as certain fish populations in the world’s oceans have fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent (ad infinitum), our expectations of privacy have similarly fallen precipitously. The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth. What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Historically, people controlled their computers, and software was standalone. The always-connected cloud-deployment model of software and services flipped the script. Most apps and services are designed to be always-online, feeding usage information back to the company. A consequence of this modern deployment model is that everyone—cynical tech folks and even ordinary users—expects that what you do with modern tech isn’t private. But that’s because the baseline has shifted.

AI chatbots are the latest incarnation of this phenomenon: They produce output in response to your input, but behind the scenes there’s a complex cloud-based system keeping track of that input—both to improve the service and to sell you ads.

Shifting baselines are at the heart of our collective loss of privacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that our right to privacy depends on whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But expectation is a slippery thing: It’s subject to shifting baselines.

The question remains: What now? Fisheries scientists, armed with knowledge of shifting-baseline syndrome, now look at the big picture. They no longer consider relative measures, such as comparing this decade with the last decade. Instead, they take a holistic, ecosystem-wide perspective to see what a healthy marine ecosystem and thus sustainable catch should look like. They then turn these scientifically derived sustainable-catch figures into limits to be codified by regulators.

In privacy and security, we need to do the same. Instead of comparing to a shifting baseline, we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like: one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide. Ultimately, as with fisheries, we need to take a big-picture perspective and be aware of shifting baselines. A scientifically informed and democratic regulatory process is required to preserve a heritage—whether it be the ocean or the Internet—for the next generation.

If you are using a computer for anything you want to keep private, you need to realize that any sufficiently motivated individual will be able to discover your secrets. So it is best to consider how likely it is that someone would target you and how much damage they could cause if they got it. Would such a security breach embarrass you, or would it ruin your reputation in your society? Would such a breach empty your checking account, or would they steal the title to your house?

Power Hungry AI (Artificial Intelligence)

ChatCPT Search uses 10 times as much power as a Google Search

From Zerohedge:

Almost two months ago, we highlighted what we called at the time 'The Next AI Trade' - that in fact it is not the tech itself, but the electrical power required to run the tech that is the limiting factor on the growth of AI (and Data Center) expansion.

These pages have been warning for years about an electric-power shortage. And now grid regulators and utilities are ramping up warnings. Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial-intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition.

There is a plethora of new power lines and substations being installed around the intersection of Cornelius Pass Road and Highway 26. I've been looking for a way to show it, but it's tough. Power lines and poles don't show up well in images unless you are right up close, and if you are up close you can't see the extent of these installations. Only the plans the power company is using to build and install these things would show the true extent of the project and I haven't seen them.

Previous post about data centers (or are they AI computing centers?).

Bitcoin Heater

This bathhouse makes $$ heating its pools with Bitcoin mining
Morning Brew

Crypto currency is stupid. After transportation, it is one of the biggest energy consumers on the planet. Maybe. Bitcoin miners and their like suck up a ton of electricity and turn it into heat. It's stupid, but it makes money.

Heatbit Mini

However, if you have electric heat, a Bitcoin heater can make some money that can be used to offset your electric bill, which would be nice.

PGE (Portland General Electric not Pacific Gas & Electric, which operates in California) just raised their rates. My last electric bill was for $150. Last time I checked it was like a buck and a half, so I ain't happy.