Thursday, July 31, 2025

Rain!

     Summer in Indiana means rain.  It's normal.  The recent heat wave is unusual, but today we had a lot of rain in the morning (and there's more predicted for this afternoon) and it's cooler.

     We're also under an "areal flood warning," which I consistently hear as an "aerial flood warning," meaning the floodwaters will be higher than people's TV aerials.  Nope.  Nor is it "a real flood warning" but they forgot to hit the space bar.  The entire forecast area is at some risk of flooding.  Sure enough, my basement took on a little water, enough to make a puddle draining away to the floor drain.

     At least it's not so beastly hot.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Watching TV, Reading The News

     I could point out that the intersection between "I unfriended the notorious pedo for being a perv" and "I unfriended the notorious pedo for poaching two employees from my spa (one of whom is known to have later been one of his victims)" is not exactly exonerative.  I could, but you either already knew the guy was scum or you're still waving the Hooray For Him flag and will never drop it.  So what's the point?*

     Instead, I will report that Tam and I watched the entire first season of Ballard, and if you enjoyed Bosch and the follow-on, you'll probably like it.  Same city, different setting, same old grimy, imperfect LAPD.  This one's more of an ensemble effort, though the title character is certainly front and center.  She's no Harry Bosch; she's very much her own person.

     Michael Connelly is one of the all time great storytellers.  He is not a knock-your-socks-off prose stylist, but a skilled inventor of personalities, situations, and plots filled with unexpected twists and reverses.  His fiction translates exceptionally well to the screen and the film and TV writers and directors (and actors and set designers and so on) have done justice to the material.
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* I will admit that I'm curious as to what form the defensive comments will take -- will it be "Nobody's perfect," "It's totally not creepy that a rich guy employs extremely young female masseuses in his club's spa," or the non sequitur, "You just hate the Great Man?"  The latter is half true; I do loathe him, but he's not great.  Look, I'm sorry you chose to hitch your wagon to a pile of manure, but you can always get unhitched and it's high time you did.  The smell lingers. 

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

One More Time

     Exporters do not pay tariffs.
     Exporting countries do not pay tariffs.
     Importers pay tariffs, and pass the added cost along to wholesalers.
     Wholesalers pass the added cost on to retailers.
     Retailers pass the extra cost on to you and me.

     There are a lot of links in that chain, but that's how it works.  Oh, importers, wholesalers or retailers may eat part of the cost, but not for long; profit margins are slim.  It'll take time, but the prices of imported goods -- and things made here that use imported parts -- are going up.  If it came from Europe, the price will go up at least fifteen percent, by and by.

     Inflation is coming.  Yell at me all you like, but it will still happen and tariffs will be the cause.  Tariffs imposed by one man's whim.

Monday, July 28, 2025

Some Weekend

     Once again, I chaired the monthly writer's "critique group," where we analyze one another's work, everything from grammar and word use to plot development and character behavior: "Your protagonist is an underweight ten-year-old -- do you really think she could fight off a tiger bare-handed?"

     It's fun but exhausting; I'm markedly not an extrovert, and I find a pleasant morning talking shop with a half-dozen friends exhausting.  I napped in the afternoon (instead of doing laundry) and grilled moderately-priced steaks for dinner as a treat, with baked potatoes and salad.  That left Sunday for laundry and housework; blogging had to wait.

     On politics, the merchants of balloon-filling (get it while it's hot!) were busy all weekend, especially on the Sunday politics shows.  These days, it's like going to a silent movie, and if you cared to watch, you booed at the villains and cheered for the heroes, and Little Nell got tied to the train tracks same as always.  The locomotive is just out of sight around the bend, smoke trailing upward from the stack, bell ringing, whistle hooting, and yet everyone is acting like it will never arrive.  Going to be an interesting day when it does.

     On the topic of imminent doom, I've been reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929, an analysis of the factors that led up to the event that marks the start of the Great Depression.  There's plenty to debate in Galbraith's politics -- though he did correctly identify the Vietnam War as a quagmire best avoided, well before U. S. involvement -- but his lively, snarky approach to a subject that could be a dull slog (and has often been, in other hands) is well worth reading.  The book, written in 1955, accurately identifies one of the clever tricks that led to 2007's sub-prime mortgage crisis and remains a red flag to look out for; the dismal science is much better at looking backward than warning of danger ahead, so props to him for that.

Friday, July 25, 2025

Worst Soap Opera Ever

     Every day, I look at the news and think, "You can't make this stuff up.  If you put it in a novel, it would be rejected as implausible hack writing, too ludicrous for the worst pulp."

     And yet here we are.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Another Angle On "Artificial Intelligence"

     Investing is essentially a more-or-less honest confidence game: you convince investors your enterprise will succeed while not guaranteeing it and show 'em (a subset of) the books.  It either succeeds or fails and the investors either get their money back, ideally with some kind of profit or they don't.  But the investors have to convince themselves it's worth the risk and the firm they invest in has to do the work, not take the money and run.

     Tech firms are usually selling smoke, mirrors and a cunning plan.  That's what all forms of artificial intelligence boil to: a cunning plan and some impressive-looking hardware.  Good AI, bad AI -- either way, it's a massive server farm, building algorithms on algorithms to crunch through massive amounts of data in the hope of emergent patterns.  Chatbots are very, very sophisticated, context-dependent word-prediction machines; imagebots do the same thing with pictures.  The process between input data plus user prompts and output is opaque, and it was slow going for a long, long time.  (How long?  Marvin Minsky never did get a robot to build an analog Heathkit TV set, despite the very clear instructions that come with the kit.  Heathkit as a major kit company has been gone since 1992, analog TV since 2009, Dr. Minsky since 2016.  He bought that TV kit before I graduated high school, back when Gerald Ford was in the White House.)

     Then in 2022 (as recently as that!), a Google AI engineer convinced himself that a chatbot called LaMDA was self-aware.  He tried to hire a lawyer for it and went to the press.  Google fired him: that work was a trade secret.

     But mark what happened carefully: a person who interacted with AI in depth convinced himself it was alive, and that was the dawn of our current AI boom.  It didn't build a Heathkit,* or take over the world,† or help mastermind a political revolution.‡  It managed to seem real enough for someone to believe there was a ghost in the machine.  It got his confidence.

     "AI" is a con game, and it gets better at the con every day.  Does it get better at "intelligence?"  Probably not, but it certainly gets better at convincing people, especially those with money and a will to believe, that it is either intelligent, sentient, or on the verge of one or the other or both.  And it may not be an "honest con" in the way investing in general is: there may be zero chance of the actual payoff, or as close to zero as makes no difference: there will probably never be a ghost in the machine.  And that matters.

     The bottom is liable to fall out once it hits its peak, in something akin to the dotcom boom and crash, leaving fortunes for the promoters and ashes for the investors.
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* Minsky, op. cit.
 
Colossus: The Forbin Project, both the book and the film.
 
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein, Robert A.

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Shares In Futility Up Sharply In Early Trading...

     Listening to a steady drumbeat of news this morning, the local TV stuff that wakes me up, NBC, NPR, BBC, and it strikes me that "Alas" is a damn poor motto to live by.  People are starving and it's become an opportunity for online grifters and self-serving propaganda vids from the nations causing the starving, or at most throwing pennies at the problem while looking the other way and hoping it will end soon.

     "Alas."  Guess it'll make a nice epitaph.

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

U.S. Out Of UNESCO; RADAR Out Of Their Minds

     UNESCO is a UN agency that encourages peace through cultural exchange; they also list and track sites of exceptional interest and, yeah, they're pretty much longhaired idealists.

     They're apparently not racist enough for the Trump administration and, just like the last time Mr. Trump* had the gig, the U.S. has withdrawn from participation and funding; the Federal government was picking up about eight percent of UNESCO's tab.

     While it's not up to the level of abandoning international soft-power efforts that fed starving people and built good will towards the United States (cough, USAID, cough), it's another self-destructive move.  But it's also not the second but the third time the Feds have walked away from the table.  Like most UN organizations, UNESCO is kinda slapdash, prone to politicization, sketchy finances and a wavering focus; in 1984, the U.S. bailed for the first time.  Here's what U. S. Congressman Jim Leach (R - Iowa) had to say about it a few years later:
"The reasons for the withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO in 1984 are well-known; my view is that we overreacted to the calls of some who wanted to radicalize UNESCO, and the calls of others who wanted the United States to lead in emasculating the UN system. The fact is UNESCO is one of the least dangerous international institutions ever created. While some member countries within UNESCO attempted to push journalistic views antithetical to the values of the west, and engage in Israel bashing, UNESCO itself never adopted such radical postures. The United States opted for empty-chair diplomacy, after winning, not losing, the battles we engaged in... It was nuts to get out, and would be nuttier not to rejoin."
     You can't fix 'em if you don't have a seat at the table.

*  *  *
     Tam showed me a meme this morning that is circulating among the conspiracy-minded Right, claiming "NexRad," the next-generation weather radar system, actually means "Death Radiation"† in Latin.  At least one lunatic has already tried to blow up a radar tower recently.

     I have long railed against people who want us to live in mud huts, no matter if they were Green types who wanted to give up technology to save the planet (as opposed to, oh, building out wind, solar and efficient power storage) or RETVRN ideologues who figure they'll get to live in the big house while the rest of us till the fields (don't count on it, kiddo).  Threatening a highly-effective weather radar system as storms and similar events are getting worse (go argue causes over there in the corner where you won't annoy the grownups; it's happening no matter why) is another mud-hut move, right up there with eschewing vaccinations.  If you want you and yours to die early and often, go for it, but you don't get to inflict that stuff on the rest of us. 
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* Note that I do not make up or borrow amusing or dismissive nicknames for politicians, even the ones I heartily loathe.  Using silly monikers is foolish habit; you end up engaging with the caricature and not the person.  It's also symptomatic of a grade-school-level intellect, like chasing squeamish kids around with a booger stuck to the end of your finger.
 
† I have been through this before.  In fact, the peak power levels and operating frequencies of radar systems are scary -- but the reality is that they transmit in extremely short bursts, and the average power, roughly the heating power, is very low and falls off as the inverse square of distance.  Add in that the dish is moving and systems are interlocked such that when the dish stops, the transmitter is locked off, and.... Nope.  Radar is not now and has never been a death ray.  It won't even warm up your coffee unless you defeat the interlocks, stick the cup right in front of the dish and risk melting the transmitter.  The Brits would have liked to have a death ray, but when Watson-Watt went looking for one, all he found was a way to spot airplanes -- and clouds.  And all that did was help win the Battle of Britain for them.

Monday, July 21, 2025

Try Harder

     Commenting, it would be nice if some of you'd look up how paying tariffs actually works, and if you want to ring in Marxists in connection with them (for pity's sake, why?), you might want to look up what Marx et al had to say about tariffs (not much; he wasn't even sure if he was for 'em, against them, or neutral.)  Don't take anyone's word for this, and if you slept though the part of History class where they talked about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, don't try to BS your way through; you can look it up, too, and get the gist in about ten minutes.  (tl;dr: it didn't do what it was intended to do.  Surprise!  But go see.)

     Likewise, if you want to talk about public media, you might want to be sure you know the difference and relationship between CPB, PBS and NPR.  CPB doesn't produce programming or run a network; claiming "their stuff" is "biased" is nonsensical.

     I keep buying ducks and buying ducks, and some people insist on eating the feathers and then complaining about the taste.

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Unrealistic

      - A few comments have come in that are obviously based on having read the headline and lede of my blog post and then changing channels to one of the far-Right opinion networks.  Hey, consume whatever media you like; an awful lot of it is junk food for your mind whatever the source.  But read my entire article: I'm a big fan of narrative twists, especially ones based on little-known or often-misunderstood facts.
     Do your homework.  Bring an understanding of what I wrote and actual facts to the table, or at least try for clever and amusing ridicule (I'll admit to a weakness for good writing), if you want to get your comment published.  Don't pretend it's fed.gov, western.civ as usual these days, because it's not. 

     - I am once again being accused of "TDS."  Nope, sorry, not the case; while I have openly acknowledged my distaste for the man since he first made a serious play for the Presidency, I was entirely willing to let him be just one more asshole President; we've had lots of those, several within my lifetime, and in the usual course of things, so what?  It's just one branch, it's just one term or at worst two.
     The insurrection of January 6, 2021 changed that; Donald Trump and his loose network of accomplices, patsies, fellow-travelers and enablers and the mob of thugs he raised revealed themselves as a genuine danger to the people and government of the United States of America on that day, and they have only become more of a danger since.
     I dislike Mr. Trump; he's the distilled essence of bad managers, comprised of ignorant self-importance, lies, probable grift and graft, bad faith and so on, but he's just one man.  The problem is Trumpism, which is an authoritarian, pseudo-populist movement with clear fascist tendencies; it is harmful to our system of ordered liberties and civil government, undermining the separation of powers between the three branches of the Federal government and abusing the rule of law.  The damage is severe, grave and ongoing.  One day, everyone will have always been against it, but coming back from Trumpism will be a long and painful process.

     - U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was on CBS's Face the Nation this morning, gleefully selling used cars with only slightly cracked engine blocks.  The worst clunker on the lot was a lie he repeated often, that when the U.S. levies a tariff, the exporting country pays it.  That's not how tariffs work and only a blink of thought reveals why: the U. S. government has no authority over exporters in other countries, or over the governments of those countries.
     Tariffs are collected from importers: U. S. companies, who will then raise prices, a process that rolls all the way downhill to you and me.  There is no magic source of tariff money; it comes out of our pockets.  The CBS News moderator did not push back on this; increasingly, news outlets accept the Administration's assertion that tariffs are somehow levied on other countries.  They are not.  They are a form of indirect sales tax, paid by consumers either at the checkout counter or in the form of lower wages from jobs at importing companies or firms downstream of them.

     I can't keep you from living in fantasyland, but I will point out when you are.  If that makes you itchy, write back -- but maybe lay off the lotus-eating for awhile when you do, because I'm not grading on the curve.

Saturday, July 19, 2025

Bottom Line

     Events of the past week have made it clear: If you're still supporting Republican politicians at this point, you're in favor of authoritarianism and opposed to democracy.  There isn't any nuance left, and it's GOP politicians that have given it the old heave-ho.

     I'm not saying you've got to love Democrat politicians.  They're maintaining a very big tent, and depending on how you lean, you may find a few or many espousing policies you don't agree with.  But don't be running with the Republicans unless you think only one side should get a vote.

Friday, July 18, 2025

AI Seeps In

     My boss recently had occasion to use a packaged microcontroller; I leapfrogged from BASIC Stamps (nice little widgets, as long as what you're doing is amenable to BASIC and you don't mind being looked on as a tricycle rider in a world of road bikes) to Raspberry Pi pocket-sized computers and he started with them, but this project needed the step in between: an Arduino.*

     Natively, you write stuff for Arduinos using a C-like language and I never learned C.  There are serious syntax differences between that family and BASIC, something like code-switching between German and Japanese: lots of people are fluent in both but knowing one isn't much help in learning the other.  The boss didn't know the Arduino version but he's got a little C.

     So he used AI.  I don't know which one, probably Microsoft's, which is all over at work these days.  And what the hell: it wrote his code.  But it was A) full of cruft† and B) kept leaving stuff out, which he had to ask it to fix, an iterative process that would probably have had me flipping the table over.  When the code did what it needed to do, he went back and cleaned it up, finding the process remarkably instructive in the ways in which the language differed from the similar ones he knew.

     On one level, that's okay.  It got the job done, and he came away knowing more than he had.

     On another, he lost out: he didn't solve the main problems with his own skull sweat; he didn't have to mentally crunch through the code before sticking it in the machine and waiting for it to crash or get stuck in a loop.  He hasn't internalized that language the way you'd do actually writing in it.

     Good enough is, in fact, plenty good enough; you can be "jack of all trades and master of none," and as long as you keep it all working, it counts.  But a lack of mastery means the next job that uses those specific skills will be a little harder, and the temptation to let AI do the heavy lifting will still be there.  What's the harm?  --The harm is, the critical skills needed to clean up the result require a degree of mastery and it's an ephemeral skill: the less you use it, the worse you'll be at it.  It worries me.

     Engineers of the late 1960s and 70s in my business had a tendency to commit "combat engineering:" hack it together, tape it up, make it good enough to get through the next day or the next hour, and leave it until the next time it failed.  The previous generation had tended to "build for the ages," putting stuff in on the assumption that it would be in place for the next twenty years, and the solid-state revolution had blown that model up like a hand grenade in a watch factory.  Now technical plants kept getting smaller and simpler, and you were either buried in generations of older junk or putting in shiny new all-in-one devices, and they'd slop it together and keep moving, because next week, something else would be replacing that stuff anyway.

     We darned near lost the ability to do good work.  Who cared?  What did it matter?  --And then things slowed down.  Budgets shrank.  Equipment became software-based, and the same physical platform might persist through a decade of upgrades.  Staffs got small, the business lost its luster, and--  Suddenly, those mountains of messiness and poor documentation weren't how you kept forward momentum, they were in the way.  We had to start over; we had to rethink how we did things.  Documentation started to matter again; you were going to be stuck with the stuff for quite some time, and have less people to repair or replace it when it went wrong.

     We're still digging out from under the legacy of what worked in the past.  AI promises to be a source of equally clumsy messes, if we're not very, very careful how we use it -- and an equal atrophy of skills that will be needed again later.
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* I did the physical side of the project.  The Arduino and its various "shields," piggyback boards for specialized functions, are mounted and held together using 2 mm nuts and bolts, about the diameter of a pencil lead.  It's annoying stuff to work with and I ended up buying a couple of little "grabbers," after realizing my old fingers weren't up to the task and needle-nose pliers had a disconcerting tendency to send nuts, bolts and washers flying across the room. It seems unnecessarily small.
 
† A surprisingly subtle term, somewhat context-dependent, but it alludes to unnecessarily complex or convoluted programming; or to code that's been heavily edited and modified and tinkered with; or to the accumulation of unneeded, leftover junk in hardware or software; or to going about a software task in an awkward, old-fashioned way; or to some combination of this.  Think "baroque" or "rococo," but with endless lines of arcane commands.