Especially that diabolic number “zero”. It is a pure Arab invention. The Romans did fine without it. Then the Arabs introduced zero and we know what happened with the Roman Empire. Now, zeros can be found everywhere - they can even hide in computers. America should really exzerminate these zeros befote it is too late!!

Yeah, but is it useful to rob the Mona Lisa?

I think the idea that early humans lived mostly in caves comes likely from the fact that caves are very stable environments where you can find remains of a fireplace or the like hundreds of thousands of years later.

But what if most early humans lived in wooden huts like people in the Amazon or Papua-New Guinea do today, or in igloos like the people north of the polar circle? You would not find the remains of an igloo cause it would have been a wet spot in the next spring.

So, the notion that many humans lived in caves might just be survivorship bias.

They survived the K-T extiction event or K-Pg event which killed perhaps 75% of species in earth 66 million years ago.

While we are already causing an extinction event which will probably turn out far worse, by causing temperatures to rise to a level higher than in hundreds of millions of years - far outside the range modern life has adapted to. And I am not so sure that we ourselves can survive that in the long run. Humans are incredibly adaptable, that’s right. But our food sources are not, not even things like grasses, wheat, or trees, let alone mammals, the great mayority of them (except perhaps algae and mushrooms) are far younger in an evolutionary sense, so it is unlikely they can adapt.

Yeah Brexit was a test run. Great Summary by Carole Cadwalladr “The great British Brexit Robbery” (published by the Guardian, de-published following pressure by Google, I guess, but can be found on the net).

I was completely spooked by the fact that these Brexiteers were using language in a Nazi-like way. At one point a former Thatcher minister was booed out of a conservative party assembly which shouted “he is a traitor!”.

What should that babble even mean?

In a data center, you have 4 main problems:

1. Get an massive amount of computers there, and maintain them to keep working, including repairs and upgrades
2. Get an massive amount of data there and the results back
3. Get a constant and massive flow of electrical power there
4. Get an equally massive amount of heat away from it.

Being in orbit helps with exactly none of that. For example, the heat: In orbit, there is no air or water which would work as a cooling medium, but just a vacuum which cools almost nothing. It is like a vacuum flask. Get your smart phone when running hot in such a vacuum flask and tell me how it worked…

So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??

Good to know that. I am sometimes just thinking that we lived in a bright second. And are now staring into darkness.

Yikes.

I am already uncomfortable when my mom talks with her phone to search Google. But hey, she is 83 years old and her health is declining. Maybe she does not need so much privacy any more.

But here is a sad story: I have two friends, a couple. Both are automation engineers. They could not have kids, which was their life dream. So instead, they re-purposed their energy and built their dream house. A beautiful house. And, of course, with a lot of automation and logic programmed by them. Shutters which open in the morning and close when it is stormy. A shower which plays the right morning radio program. Extra settings for when parents-in-law visit.

But what makes me uncomfortable is voice control by speech recognition. All that cortana/siri stuff. For everything, even switching on the light. I don’t like that when I visit people. For me, it is like somebody is always listening, even to stuff that is meant only for my friends ears.

I have not told them, but I don’t like that house.

The company’s development and expansion of its services will rely in no small part on massive data center projects, which will require the same amount of energy to operate as New York City and San Diego combined—energy that currently isn’t even available.

In that case, there is a little but fundamental problem. It is based on basic physics: You can fake securities or earnings, or you can print money. But you can’t fake energy because that violates the laws of physics.

On the other side of the deal, OpenAI will have to pay about $60 billion per year to fit the bill for the agreement. It currently generates about $10 billion in revenue, which, statistically speaking, is less than $60 billion.

ok.

XKCD on that: https://m.xkcd.com/2030/

It’s an interesting point you raise. The media has mutated since the list was written, now encompassing anyone with an opinion and an internet connection. Where in the past the media was more centralised and therefore more easy to control totally, now it’s very difficult to eradicate dissent completely - the media has become more aligned to the masses than to the elites. So a different approach is needed to get to totalitarianism.

And that aporoach is widespread use of disinformation.

Another key point is the ongoing attack on the autonomy of societal institutions, like universities. Timothy Snyder has written about the importance of them in On Tyranny, and Trump behaves as if Snyder’s book was an instruction manual.

There is a German Nazi term that is perhaps useful to describe what’s happening, it is Gleichschaltung.

Alternative OSes surely do have better privacy than Android, but that’s probably not sufficient. On Smartphones, there runs not a single CPU like on a laptop, but more like 5 computers and only one of them is controlled by the OS. For example, there is a baseband processor and a radio modem. And the SIM card is a computer. And part of these can be controlled remotely (have you ever wondered how your phone automatically re-programs it parameters when you change providers?).

And then there are gaps in authentication in the radio prozocol: Your phone / SIM card authenticates against a radio tower so that the right phone user pays the bill. But the phone has no way to detect a rogue mobile tower…

It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises).

Well. I did the last jump because the quality was so bad.

Squirrels are OK, but yeah, it is a subject that is little spoken about in Germany that once in a while, you’ll have to remove a dead cat that got stuck, if you leave them open.

What’s going on is clearly not good for the mental health of people.

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