thomasjkenney
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This is an interesting one. Goes hand-in-glove with Micro$ponge’s recent big rush with the ‘AI’ stuff. There’s a creepy technical detail that certainly has fabulous advantages in efficiency, and a gaping security/privacy crater. This is my digestion of what the chips are, and then a bit of supposition.
The big mfg’rs are going to ‘chiplet’ away from ‘monolithic’ (the linked article has many good pics of this). This separates into four major components for this particular chip architecture:
1) CPU – the compute, the classic main brain of the machine
2) I/O – connects to peripherals (network, non-volatile storage, USB)
3) GPU – graphics offload, currently the in-demand for AI stuff also
4) SoC – power management, sensors, microcontrollers for handling buttons, device swaps, etcThe #4 is a bit broad in scope, and can be thought of as the underground of the city: plumbing, traffic signals, emergency services – it’s a stretched analogy, sorry.
Intel has decided to put a ‘low-power’ compute functionality directly into the SoC part, and allow it to run at the lowest ‘standby’ state (S5), which is basically complete shutdown with optional power to some USB/net devices waiting for a wake signal.
These cores in the SoC are a small CPU of their own, that is now free to run even when the machine is shut down. Since these chips are designed primarily for mobile (laptop) use, the battery would have to be removed to completely stop all activity. The requirement to allow other devices to be ‘warm’ in S5 allows for I/O devices to be powered up and accessible, while in S5, from this new ‘SoCPU.’ So that is the I/O controller also being awake 24/7 waiting for use. Are there safeguards against it’s use of the network device? How about non-volatile storage (your personal files!!!)? Doubtless it is tempting for Windows engineers to see this as ‘down-time maintenance’…win-win, eh?
And, again (for the 10^8th time), even if Micro$ponge and Intel have the best intentions, and follow through with that, have they adequately protected the users from malicious use of this?
Also, the damn thing has a built-in AI accelerator in addition to having a beefy GPU. How much thrashing of my non-volatile storage will happen to support AI features I didn’t ask for and don’t want?
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for zerosum, if you get this far:
Look into using a Live Boot disk/stick. Many of the easiest, and most secure, Linux distros have these. Basically, the whole OS will run without having to be installed locally, and every time you boot it’s a fresh, unaltered (hopefully) copy. It doesn’t touch your installed OS. There are still the worries of backdoors in anything used, but this would allow you to post without worrying about anything your own personal computer may have ‘acquired’ over the years. Bonus is you can pick a handful of them and use different ones randomly, if you’re paranoid. 🙂
re: freeway protest on I-110
Those people are dumber than a box of rocks! I-110 is where all the poor black folks live. So they protest something, and wind up severely economically impacting black folks. The correct target was I-405 at the Sikrball…er…Sepulveda Pass.
@aspnaz re: comment threaddiness
If I don’t find a salad in here every morning, I’m gone!
@Dr D:
You say you have a basket of badgers? I have some money. I’d like to buy your basket of badgers, but I’m concerned it is a limited opportunity to purchase badgers. If we contract for a fair price just a little above the objective value of badgers, you can save a little to build infrastructure, the purpose of which is obtaining more badgers. I’m sure I can find some surrounding farms whose owners are also interested in badgers, so maybe we can form some kind of limited cooperative to buy your badgers. We will only need enough badgers to establish a good breeding population in our neck of the woods, so this would have to be a short-term charter…a…’corporation’ of our common needs into a single body.
I’m only half-kidding.
The Machine Stops – E M Forster, 1909 – This is the blueprint for WALL-E. SF from that period onward is peppered with the ideas we now see cultivated around us. Silverberg stories from the late ’50s with transhumanism and gender fluidity. Much of the ’80s cyberpunk is critique of these earlier ‘utopian meanderings’ of Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. One of the most chilling things I’ve read, due to it’s casual presentation, was Clarke’s idea of the rehabilitation of criminals: switch off their personality for a decade or so, and use them as cheap labor.
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Potlatch – There are other forms of social organization possible.
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Robin Trower – Too Rolling Stoned
Takers get the honey,
Givers sing the blues!This time, for Dr D:
Blow Away – @6:40, Brent Mydland goes big.
And I wish to flesh out a couple things, so we don’t go running down the wrong path…
Filter, into what? If we escape this Earth and become a/several space-faring species, what then? Nothing’s forever. How far until the next limit? How long until our machines attempt their own species breakaway? I don’t know the math behind it, but you can imagine available energy as having ‘valances’ of increase in magnitude, maybe magnitude^2? We escape the planet, and can build vast solar farms in an inclined orbit so they don’t shade us. We can build any kind of dirty-ass fusion we want as long as it’s on a rock at a safe distance. Lots of possibilities, just with our existing tech.
Ingot Zamboni – Put a small power plant (pile or reactor?) in it, equip with a laser, and micro-smelt (vaporize) the ‘scrapings’ in a chamber. Spectrograph and magnetically sort into respective molecules, and sinter onto a growing ingot. Poop out the ingot for the Machining Morgan to drive by and pick it up for the lathe/mill/3d-printer. 50k of these machines wandering about, and a little patience, and you can have a pre-built city.
@Red re: The Great Filter
When we had the energy, and were aimed roughly in that direction, we should have done what O’Neill suggested. Now that kind of unity for The West is gone.
I get f#(<-all for traction when I try to talk to people about stuff like the Ingot Zamboni (a moon mower that poops aluminum and other stuff). We are now at the point we can make the small machines to make the big machines that can come and fetch humans from the Earth, rather than send them to space. Also, ‘humans’ will quickly disappear in lieu of new species.
Yes, filter sucks. We are unlikely to get past it. We stood too long on certain technological rocks mid-stream, and now the water rises…
A Day In The House – Jeff Beck, Terry Bozzio, Tony Hymas
“Much is being said, My Lords, but nothing, Nothing, NOTHING IS BEING DONE!”
RE: boulder, it’s a glacial erratic. Falls off a mountainside onto a glacier, rides the glacier to ablation, and settles on whatever. I saw one about 3m in dia on the Matthes Glacier that was ‘burrowing’ through absorbing the day’s heat and melting itself into the ice…new arrival from above!
@poppie re: “The Flowering Apple Tree. Its upside down.”
Perhaps a reflection in a pond or river?
As bad as it gets here, I don’t think I can ever leave California. Maybe if they’re chasing me out with guns blazing, but I haven’t had to make that choice yet. This is my home. I grew up here, and detachment would mean learning a new mode of life. Young people may be equipped for this, but it is still a damaging process, the uprooting.
I see signs every day of my wife’s displacement, her un-anchorage from her true home, Java. She chose to be with me and abandon Indonesian citizenship. Tears when I don’t expect them. Her missing her family’s lives and deaths. Friends she can never hug again. And nothing in this land replaces that, can ever replace that. If she begged me to go to Java, that might be the guns blazing…
RE: Trump crime – It’s not fraud until somebody buys it. Who’s to say you don’t have The Product hidden in your pants?
RE: Lebanon – They’re not following the script, so we burn them anyway. Road rage.
Brain fart:
The Zionists, for the most part, have ‘encamped’ themselves, and held a safety hostage all these years. They are now attempting to extinguish the hostage, concurrent with the power crash of their ‘Uncle Schmuel’ (thanks, Saker!).
@Dr D: I thank you, personally, Dr D, for your skepticism. You have had an effect on someone. Even the lone coyote howling at the moon is doubtless heard by the neighbors. If you care to dig the TAE archives, you can maybe grok why it’s a personal thanks.
I’d be a Bubba, cranky (smoldering anger) Irishman, detached from that fair land by a few generations and a wee pond, and peppered with stoic Norwegian and skeptic Czech. The catholic bits were smothered in hippie syrup long ago.
There is a desert in Canada.
@citizenx re: never alone in the mountains
There is a rock slab adjacent the Mt Wilson Road that I will reach out and touch every time I pass by bicycle. Of the 8km of road and hundreds of thousands of boulders, that’s the one. It faces the road, and is roughly rectangular…’tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church door…split in quadrants by two clean cracks. At the join, occasionally (2-3 years?) grows a small succulent that produces a lovely pink lotus-shaped flower. That rock is holy!
You use the adventure arts to create a capability within yourself. The capability is analogous to a painting, for instance. A painting can communicate and inspire, as well as tickle basal emotions via color, texture, etc. As a painter, the capability to change people’s thoughts. As a climber, the capability to solve n-dimensional mazes (spatial, temporal, technical).
Running Talus – Doug Robinson. I had the Chouinard catalog in which this was first published. I was a young gearhead and didn’t really know the tech of climbing. I fully grokked the adventure part, though. And the moving, the ‘surfing’ in such environments.
Recent article and comment I read about MS Windows feature for OneDrive that rather forcefully backs up a set of predefined folders. It is persistent and re-enables after being expressly disabled.
Rumors from backcountry are that it is a feature rushed in parallel with Copilot (the AI formerly known as Bing Chat). Idea is that your own personal Copilot can surreptitiously scan all these files and build a model of you. Very personalized, somewhat creepy, but if this kind of cybernetics is to fly it is what needs to happen. Arthur C Clarke and the Brain Cap come to mind.
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The large language model in my brain matches the three titles for relevant viewing based on threads of the last 3 days:
@Dr D re: formatting
Use the ’em’ tag, not the ‘i’ tag, to get italics. The ‘i’ tag is valid and proper HTML, just not allowed at this site.
How did Nazis get into Canada? There’s an excellent documentary about that:
Powell-Pressberger propaganda through and through, but well-crafted. The good Nazis joined some kinda Mennonite colony or something. And the indigenous peoples of Canada were still in possession of the national parks!
Otto Dix: The Painter is the Eyes of the World
I haven’t seen this yet, but will track it down. Years ago I’d seen another docu, and his work was featured among others. The image in today’s post is kinda mild relatively, but seems to slyly parody the bland Nazi ‘state approved’ styles of the time.
Here’s a weird one:
For V. Arnold re: art, many of his works are quite tender. You might enjoy a dig through his stuff.
RE: Sacramento/Davis and a previous anecdote re: Afghan expats (40K of them, IIRC)
That region of California, for 20+ years, has been absorbing a huge amount of Indian immigrants. So, now, let’s import a small army of their ‘sworn enemies.’ Then we’ll trans all their children and see who gets more pissed, Allah or Shiva.
HA! I get one edit, and then cannot edit.
Anyway, damn my bad old-guy eyes.
(s/2) + (q + s + r) + (r/2) = 26
18, if I read ‘monkey-with-gun’ as a distinct digit. EDIT: That is, monkey = q, gun = r, so q + (q + r) + m = 18
@jb-hb: right on!
Pournelle – serious space travel, social conservative
Some more friends of DARPA/CIA:
Brin – cybernetics, transhumanism, trans-‘dolphinism’, ‘woke’
Vinge – software, ‘AI’, seemed to take a very ‘woke’ turn somewhere
Benford – genetics, general repair of and anti-aging, telomeres (!!!)…and, for the foil-adorned…
Clarke and Kubrick – co-developed 2001: A Space Odyssey at roughly the same time as moon landing
I may try to write something substantial about this, since I’ve got a list of similar (not just SciFi) flagged as weird, or at least as ‘Gen. Turgidson’ naiive and enthusiastic.
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Three Degrees of Larry Niven
My former boss/family friend attended a party high on a hill in Glendale, colleague of high standing, in a house that can be described as a fully-functional Living VAX/PDP Museum and Equipment Lease/Loan. Alan Frisbee, Flying Disc Systems, was among the truly smart that I met along my career path. His parties drew lots of hardware wonks, NASA folks, university faculty, authors…which is how my boss had met Niven, at a party where nearly everyone in attendance would have been ‘neck beard’ to the max. My boss and Niven could have been mistaken for twins, but they had the same first name! 🙂
Accidentally prescient title, cognitive dissonance, ego vs other… Like many of their songs, there’s a lot to unpack for 3.5 minutes.
Leave me be, or I’ll be like the others you will meet
They won’t act as kindly if they see you on the street
Don’t you make a scream or shout
It’s nothing you can do about
It was there when you came out
It’s a special lack of grace
I can see it in your face
I can see by what you carry that you come from Barrytown!I realize I could be slightly less obtuse. What were Niven and friends doing for DARPA during the Reagan administration? Yes, lasers and stuff, but that’s the flash for public consumption.
McCullough might want to open his aperture a bit. See Larry Niven, A World Out Of time and The Fourth Profession. Both have mRNA plot devices. The former was written half a century ago.
re: bioengineered ingredients
Just did a quick pass and checked the (very few) processed foods we have.
1) Nabisco crackers – binned
2) Vons-brand chocolate chip cookies – binned
3) Top Ramen instant noodles – binnedMy wife likes a brand of parmesan crisps. They had a statement that did not admit to jabbing the cows, but painted a pretty picture of the harmlessness of artificial hormones. Binned!
“Sorry, my dear Shinta, but we must now up our vigilance against this s#(+!”
@Dr D:
@play:
OK, gonna be that crank again… Most mammal species engage in play when young. Cats? Bears? Otters? Squirrels? Dogs are neat, but they’re not magic.
@mpsk: Thanks. I did a quick Goggle and saw lots of headlines. Thought it quite weird that it wouldn’t show up anywhere but MSM, and that’s my Forbidden Zone so I wouldn’t have noticed. ZeroHedge usually picks this stuff up pronto, but nothing.
@Dr D re: banal attacks
From Denninger’s On Idalia:
…did one of you assholes put diesel in the gasoline supply in the northern part of Florida hoping people would fucking die? Was that an actual accident with “fortuitous timing” or was it sabotage?
This is so far the only mention of this I’ve seen, but it’s not my focus ATM. Will watch for other mentions…but…dafuq? DAFUQ?!?!?
@celt re: “Never name who rules over you,yes?”
Nobody rules over me. I’m an animal, and I’ll chew my f#(<ing leg off to get out of a trap. If they can’t come down to my house and point a gun at my head, they don’t rule over me.
@jb-hb: That should be front-page. Stunning!
The thunderstorm shot is ruined. It’s that damn grain filter that’s available on most DSLRs. It sucks! I have no idea why people insist on using it unless they are going for an ‘artistic statement’ about technique.
@John Day re: “Yeah, Russia’s lander crashed, probably due to non-space-rated ICs b=getting strafed by cosmic rays.”
Um…you’re talking about the only country on this planet that runs a successful space taxi service. I hardly think radiation would have escaped their calculations.
@WES re: some had enough water
In Jakarta, I noticed that almost every building had a rooftop cistern for rain catchment.
@T-Bear & John Day re: enough water but wrong place
The helos used here in SoCal for firefighting have (at least?) 2 types of water apparatus: snorkel or bag. The snorkel hoovers water from an open source into some tanks, thus used with a purpose-built helo. The bag is a vinyl ‘kiddie pool’ that’s about 2m on a side, weighted a bit to sink, lowered into open source, and used with any helo with good capacity. Open source can be ocean, lake, tank, swimming pool, etc. I went past a controlled burn recently, and saw that they had set up the ‘kiddie pools’ by the roadside, filled, and were pumping continuously to keep the burn corralled.
69bravo helo base in Malibu/Topanga Canyon area
Hard to see in the above pic (lens smeared), but the tanks lined on the ridge are spaced for servicing multiple helos, and are hooked to a much larger storage tank uphill.
So…anywhere you have open water, you have a source. Did they have this equipment on-site? Some of it is very expensive, and hard to justify for a state that doesn’t see much wildfire.
@DB Smith re: anger
Anger is the important emotion and impetus to action. Aggression is the (oft bad) action taken in response to anger. Mincing, get the point, but it helps to be accurate.
@T-Bear:
Heh! Agree. You might have to shop around for some actual hosting, but what you do on that host should be under as much of your control as possible for this kind of site. Your control ends at your public IP address and registered name. You can do without the name, but it’s a speakeasy at that point. The ‘recipe’ hosts of this kind (WordPress, TapaTalk, etc, maybe even Substack) strike me as a Facebook Funnel, where they have herded all the bloggers into the pen…and…well, even Denninger has to hide half his content or get ‘de-searched’ by the Goggles.
A programmer or two may be expensive, but a horde of them is a bust!
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re: inadequacy of brush
I was thinking it would have to be someone the level of Tolles, Horsey, maybe Don Martin (SKROINK!).
test
…and because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.
And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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