A terrifying thought with AI

As much as I am on the side of Ukraine in their war against Muscovy (Russia), there is one thing that terrifies me; that the drones which are doing most of the killing will become more fully autonomous, and the end result will be armies that can simply commit mass murder by launching the drones in the general direction of the victims, something of a "Skynet" kind of situation, but without the dry one-liners for which Ahnuld is rightly famous.

I would say that we could simply trust that world leaders are sane enough not to do so, but with Vodka attacking mostly schools and apartment buildings, Pooh putting millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, and Sparkles Khamenei murdering and executing tens of thousands for the "crime" of not liking the current government, I don't think that I can take that assumption to the bank.

So what do we do?  Well, the Kyivan Rus has shown us a way to start with massive investments in jamming and anti-aircraft defense, and until Skynet really gets going and becomes more fully autonomous, that will be an effective, if very expensive way of preventing things from going too far.  Finding and destroying launch sites will further limit things.  

But that noted, I think we have some very real things to deal with with AI, as the Poohs, Vodkas, and Sparkle-Mullahs of the world love the idea of projecting power without needing to persuade people.

Say what?

Back in the day, in the 1960s through the 1980s, it was said that one could fail an FBI background check for classified clearances if one had lived with someone outside of marriage--the logic was, rightly or wrongly, that the embarrassment of having that revealed could induce someone to wrongly share classified data.  That is certainly the logic behind the "honey traps" engaged in by the KGB.

So I was shocked yesterday to see that today, bestiality is not an automatic disqualification for FBI employment.  Now is this horrific?

Well, not really, and Kash Patel needs to work on his messaging.  What Patel is actually referring to was that the FBI will not automatically disqualify those who have been sexually abused by being forced into things like bestiality, and (within the reality that sexual abuse leads to mental illness and such) I can go along with this--and Patel should have said "what the policy actually says is that a history of being sexually abused does not automatically disqualify a candidate."

A bit more about big buildings

A few years ago, I noticed something very interesting; that modern masonry buildings tend to have an expansion joint filled with a rubber-like material every 20-40 feet, while older ones can go on for blocks with no such expansion joint. I also noticed that modern cinderblock buildings tend to crack a lot, and providentially, I visited the home of a friend who is a mason, and asked him what was up.

He explained to me that the mortar is different; older buildings use lime mortar, which apparently is a little bit more flexible and tolerant of thermal cycles, while for the past 80 years or so, most builders have used Portland cement, which is more rigid and thus brittle.  Hence newer masonry buildings need expansion joints, and will crack if they are insufficient.  You'll see the same thing in finished garages if they don't have adequate climate control (like mine), or even large rooms finished with sheetrock.  Brittle materials don't do well with thermal cycling.

Lesson for those who would build gigantic monuments to themselves is that engineering-wise, it gets difficult with modern materials, and hence building on a smaller scale, and using materials that will flex better with thermal cycles, will be wise.  We might say that physics tells us to create our homes and businesses on a more human scale.

Urban planning; let's make more targets

This is something of a follow-up to something I posted over a decade ago; that in many ways, gigantic buildings like the Sears ("Willis") Tower and World Trade Center really don't make sense except as a statement of ego.  The cost then was about 5-10x the cost of construction on a normal scale, and there are developments with the war in Ukraine that make this even more so.

Specifically, we're seeing how "Shahed" drones can, when they crash into an apartment building (war crime, yes), put several families out of a home and make significant portions of the building uninhabitable.  We are seeing how warfare, at least by the Russian and Iranian model, is to attack hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings with swarms of drones.

Now in the best of situations, this is bad, and it's even worse when one realizes that to get to shelters, residents need to go down stairs or the elevators--exposing them to more danger from those same drones.  And in that light, I think we need to remember the example of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, which famously tricked the Yamato into firing on her as if she were a cruiser--using armor piercing shells that simply went through Roberts, as well as other ships like the escort carrier Gambier Bay.

In other words, architecture can try to withstand this kind of assault (like a cruiser or battleship), or it can simply serve as a target for very expensive munitions, and while jet Shaheds are relatively cheap, their price is still....about the price of a home, $100-200k.

And so we might wonder whether, as we consider this new (and horrific) way of war, we might combine de-Sovietization (removal of gigantic apartment complexes) with smaller scale (and nicer) buildings that....let's just admit it....would be far more inviting to not only residents, but also prospective businesses that might want to set up shop, and--as the mess of war recedes--even tourists.

Really, for the past 150 years or so, urban planning has been working on a model built around the steam engine--where factories and buildings were made ever more massive more or less to keep the steam engine working and justify its cost.  Now that the production of energy can be done on a much smaller scale, it's time to reconsider that model.

Driving the world to drink

I am told that a common nickname for "Vladimir" is "Voda", really something of a diminutive, and that "ka" at the end of a name is also a diminutive.

So we might wonder if we might refer to Mr. Putin as "Vodka", or "little little Vlad".  Somehow it fits as he drives the world to drink. It is also fitting that Mr. Putin is, like the beverage whose name he reflects, the worst enemy of the Russian people.

The main reason not to do so, of course, is because there are some good uses for the beverage, but not so much for the bald-headed judo boy.

Never mind those pogroms, says Dana Nessel

In a mind-boggling twist on the story of Esther, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is imploring Michigan Jews to put a "collective future" above the good of their own people--as if it means nothing that Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has made a bunch of anti-Israel and flat out anti-semitic comments, and as if it means nothing that El-Sayed's good friend Hasan Piker is even worse, and was allowed to campaign for El-Sayed.

In Nessel's, um, defense, she is a lesbian, so we might infer that tight fidelity to Torah and Tanach is not exactly in her rhetorical wheelhouse, but still....

Personally, I get that many have great discomfort with the fact that Hamas is hiding their military assets behind apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and the like--but at the same time, I have to ask what Israel is supposed to do.  Are they supposed to allow Hamas to remain armed for another mass attack?  Our world has a huge issue with bad actors--Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran, and (ahem) Russia--using the laws of war not to restrain their own actions, but to seek advantage over those who do try to follow the laws of war.  

A dream of mine is coming true at last!

The "Space Force" is, according to this article, going to get their own academy.   So we are going to have tens of thousands of young people around the country vying to become...."Space Cadets".  Word is still out whether required viewing for these elite students will include (what else?) Space Cadet or, probably even better, Spaceballs.  

Either way, may the Schwartz be with you!

Say what?

Perhaps I am just getting old--and I am certainly doing that--but I'm scratching my head at what appears to be a common practice among the young and (I think) single; "breadcrumbing".  More or less, this is to leave messages from time to time on social media, but never bother actually asking someone out on a date.

And again, this old married dude wonders "What's the fun in that?".  And it strikes him that maybe young people need some wisdom from great philosophers of the 1980s like Def Leppard and Van Halen.  So here we go:

Lads and lasses, time to join real life and make sure it's not just all looking at "Heartbreak and Motordrive."

 

Brilliant social awareness

Evidently the Louisiana State University women's basketball team has lost their star center, Ukrainian Kate Koval, after recruiting another center from Russia, Anna Minaeva.  The coach apparently wanted to use the two players as "ambassadors" to help mend fences, but apparently is a bit slow on the uptake regarding sport in Russia.  More or less, if one does not mouth fealty to Putin, one does not play in Russia; so this is really akin not just to having a black player share time with a white one, but rather is akin to having a black player sharing time with a white player who "wears his bedsheets", and then wondering why the black player simply isn't having it.

Really, between things like this and the WNBA's shenanigans--failing to call fouls, not being sure what a woman actually is--we might infer that women's basketball is flat out trying to undo all the good Title IX has done. 

And of course, best wishes to Miss Koval.  I hope and pray she finds a great place to play the sport she loves, and gains her education as well.

Interesting logic

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has argued that "bottom surgery" is akin to circumcision.   Well, I guess there is a superficial similarity in that tissue is removed from that part of the body, but millions of Jewish (and Muslim, ahem) wives would affirm that the "essential function" of that part of the body is retained with circumcision, and (apart from Lorena Bobbitt types) would generally affirm that they would be more than disappointed if their husbands' circumcisions were replaced by bottom surgery.

Really, it seems to take elite college degrees--and apparently a Rhodes Scholarship in El-Sayed's case--to make a person as catastrophically stupid as El-Sayed.  Or perhaps he's being rather nostalgic for the "good old days" of the harem system in the Ottoman Empire, where captive women were sold into sex slavery, and the men from their towns who otherwise would have married them were either killed, or castrated and turned into harem attendants.

Whatever the fact is, El-Sayed does not appear to understand that there are reasons we don't allow minors to make certain permanent decisions, and hence he's (even apart from his anti-Semitism) an extremely poor choice for elective office at any level.

Why did they bother?

A court in Syria has condemned former strongman Bashar Assad to death, but on the light side, it strikes me that he's serving a far worse sentence already; living in Russia.  One has to wonder how many fist-fights he's gotten into while trying to get gas for his Honda Spree.

Because they never learned

I had a very interesting conversation with a young gentleman in the meat section of the grocery store last night; he made a wisecrack about "Soviet era" technology (old meat scales) being used there.  OK, it was nowhere near 1980s era technology--no red LEDs, etc..--but it was a fun opportunity to tell him what real Soviet era technology looked like.  I mentioned the Trabant (1955 Fiat with two cycle engine, body made of used clothes), East German chocolate, and the like--and he was shocked.

And as I watched him, I realized why the younger generation is willing to vote for "Democratic Socialists".  They simply have never learned about Communism.  They don't know about waiting a decade or more for a car or TV set, about long lines for bread, meat, and clothes, and they especially don't know about the gulags.

Now part of this is that, in the public schools, you never get to the end of the history book.  My senior level history class in 1986-7 hardly touched the Vietnam War, which ended of course (for us) in 1973.  But that said, that's only 14 years--and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.   Shouldn't history teachers be covering things 37 years back?

And perhaps they are, but I think the reality is that since teachers are by and large paid by the state, and thus they have little incentive to share what happens when the state oversteps its bounds.  In my high school experience, for example, our teachers (in a very conservative town no less) really didn't admit that economic "panics" tended to last only 1-2 years until Hoover and FDR tried to "help". 

So why don't people know about the horrors of Communism?  They've never been taught.  I would suggest that some of the same weakness might have a lot to do with the rise in anti-semitism today.  People have simply forgotten the Holocaust.

One final note is that when I was starting my career, I had the privilege of working with a number of Jews who had fled the USSR.  I asked why, and the response was that one's passport--which in the USSR enabled internal travel as well as international--clearly noted if a person was Jewish, which enabled every wannabe Cossack in the security services to initiate their own personal pogrom at any time.  How soon we forget! 

Datacenters, water, energy, and noise

I had a great conversation with an old college friend last night regarding a proposed datacenter around Colorado Springs (where he lives), and my response to his frustration with "NIMBY" people was to note that if a datacenter is constructed correctly, it need not use a lot of water or produce a lot of noise.

The water issue with datacenters is cooling water--high power systems (like IBM mainframes) are not air-cooled, but water cooled.  That noted, water out of the well tends to contain a fair amount of mineral content, which tends to clog hoses and pipes, and it's worth noting that power plants don't need to use a ton of water--you simply let the air carry the heat away in the cooling tower instead of water.  There is no reason why, in my view, a datacenter ought to use a lot of water.

In the same way, I personally work around datacenters at work here, and if you walk around the plant, you will not hear those datacenters.  What makes a lot of datacenters noisy is that they are more or less kept in tin sheds, and hence that noise escapes.  If one constructs the building properly--with insulation for climate control and such--the noise is quite manageable.

Now you can't do much about the power use, but even that ought to be manageable--"OK, you're going to need a peak of 5MW, that will require that you install a new transformer and pay this much to augment the local power distribution system."  

In other words, most of the problems that are seen with datacenters are a classic example of the problems of unplanned externalities, economically speaking.  That leaves the real gorilla in the room; what is being done in those datacenters?  It could be groundbreaking cancer research, or it could be some government's attempt to install Jeremy Bentham's "Panoptikon" on the public.  My response to the datacenter is going to depend a lot on what the actual purpose might be.

Hands up for a good bowl of borsch

Apparently more and more Russian soldiers are surrendering for the second time (or more?) to Ukraine, which means, I suppose, that the borsch is better there.   

On a serious note, I think it indicates the desperation of these soldiers, as Russia is widely reputed to have their best troops in the rear to fire on their own retreating units, and in that world, I don't suppose surrendering for the second time would be the healthiest thing to do.  So perhaps Russia is starting to abandon its old-style Persian tactics (e.g. Thermopylae) due to a lack of manpower.

Praying that dill, beets, and sour cream keep working together to crush Putinism.

Ray Bradbury, please call your office

Apparently AI companies are buying vintage physical books, scanning them for their databases, and then destroying them.  Shades of Fahrenheit 451, if you ask me, and the only thing I can say in defense of them is that they're at least loading the concepts into their AI models.  Still, if you wonder why you want to keep a few physical books around, this is a great reason why.