Level Up

The 1970s TV show Kung Fu showed the main character Caine in two distinct settings. One was the Shaolin Monastary. The other was the Old West. As an aside, the Caine character in many stories is the one who is between two worlds, has two families, or whatever, like Greek Prometheus, because the character is Prometheus.

The Shaolin Monastary in the show is depicted as an ideal school. The teachers are perfectly wise. The curriculum trains the mind and body to the highest possible degree. The student graduates only when he's perfectly ready and has mastered of kung fu and self-control.

An interesting concept that's not explored in the show, at least that I remember, is a "false monastery". The fraudulent monastery is day-to-day life for almost everyone in their education, then their adult life in the corporate world or other institutions. People aren't trained to be independent, complete humans. They're trained to be part of a machine and feed it. The medical industry is a great, easy to understand example of this concept: don't lose weight, and stop eating slop poison food or get in shape; become a dependent of a substance they make like ozempic or whatever pill because then you can sit in an office chair and do corporate work all day a a few more years longer than you would if you were totally fat.

The local mountain bike trail is like a Shaolin Monastery of the woods. The teachers are physics and nature and other riders. The riders are a free-range version of the students in the show and speed is the kung fu. It's very satisfying to try to go faster and faster around that course and attain new levels of skill at bike handling. One of the aspects of the true art, and true temple that's interesting to think about is there's no end to the quest for skill and speed. The pursuit of it is the whole point.

The false monastery is all about ends that aren't even achievable by its students. A great example of that is the concept of "retirement". People want to quit working, but to do that, they have to consume all the prime years of their life on a corporate treadmill and end up as a spent husk who's minding a retirement account balance which represents a bunch of other dummies on other treadmills.

Light versus Heavy

One lesson embedded in my education was the world is organized by rational principles that can be discovered, broken down, and understood. I was in school during late 1970s through the early 1990s. That was, I think, the tail end of an era people who imagined they solved the puzzles of the universe. For example, in biology, it was all explained by Darwin and evolution, and DNA. In physics there was still a quest for a "grand unified theory". Arguably the whole AI/robot bubble hysteria is a follow on to these narratives which are all variations on the theme of progress and linear history.

These concepts are really religious notions. They're a narrative vehicle for trying to understand the world and they fit prior era religious tropes, like a prophet explains what's what to the masses. Charles Darwin was a prophet. Isaac Newton another one. A prophet of the current time is somebody like Claude Shannon who's a grand-daddy of AI and the Internet.

Many of the concepts of these prophets are bastardized and misapplied, just like any other religion. For example, various ham-fisted versions of "survival of the fittest" turn into "might makes right" assertions by this or that political group. A current day assertion of this type is the entirety of "the economy" can be "optimized" by "AI".

Arguably the economy optimization concept and the "survival of the fittest" concept are different manifestations of the religious idea that there's "one" understandable order. This idea doesn't mesh up very well with even basic bitch common sense observations of the natural order of things.

For example, nature seems to favor a multiplicity of beings and forms because there's no "one thing" on earth. Even an individual person is composed of multitudinous parts, like white blood cells or organs, or different parts of the brain, or gut bacteria, etc... The arbitrariness of the economic order is hard to even comprehend; there's no underlying principle governing it.

One of the concepts I kick around from time to time is "bicycle world" or more generally "light vehicle" world. We mainly live in a heavy/steel based transportation system because we live in heavy world, like you need a bulldozer to make a road, so the bridges have to be built to carry many tons. It's not hard to imagine the "light world" where everyone takes light vehicles, so bridges are light, houses are made of lightweight ephemeral materials, etc... Everything would be built for ease of movement and travel.

The Black Box for Competent People

I've come full circle in my adult working life. I'm in the same position as my boss at my first job out of college. Bob was a very competent person and was miffed about being forced into a management position. He was a scientist/engineer who worked on a bunch of very interesting academic/pure research projects, like building instrumentation for astrophysics experiments back in the 1960s. He fit the model of many adults I knew growing up where there was a significant focus on being a competent man.

I tried to follow that same model. I think it's the middle class mindset. Middle class and working class people believe it's necessary to actually "do something" or to be able to do things to make a living. Consequently, they are trained to do things, build things, understand things. When they apply that mindset to a thing like a corporation, though, they're stumped because it's almost impossibly stupid. To them it's a black box.

A guy like my first professional job boss Bob was very smart and focused and dedicated. I assume he had that mindset in college as well, because he maintained it after. Maybe he sometimes partied in college, but he probably also stayed up all night to finish projects or homework, or to study for tests. However, he ended up working "for" a bunch of nepo baby chuckle-fucks who breezed through the MBA curriculum at whatever university.

Competent people barely exist in "history", which is a pretty good clue that things have always been like this. The ruling class clique is poseurs and actors and professional liars. The people who actually make the world work are their dupes.

These "competent" dupes are in the dark about how this grifting class continues to stay in control.

A Time for Shitheads and Conmen

I was pretty shocked and disillusioned by the COVID debacle when I saw maybe 80% of people just went along with the official narrative of the cold and flu season doomsday. Now, I'm not surprised that the same type of people are all wrapped up in the AI narrative and current psychosis.

The COVID insanity wore on me daily because I thought people were better than they actually are, so I was waiting for them to "wake up". They never did, even though their opinion about COVID and the hysteria changed over time. They didn't update their mental model about the whole debacle, most importantly, about their own reactions and thinking.

The AI hysteria is reaching levels of absurdity on par with COVID hysteria. For example, government clowns are now getting involved in it. Some turd like Bernie Sanders is grandstanding about AI fear among his retard constituency. I assume he $ee$ it as an opportunity to cash in on some donations from the dumb fucks that think he's a credible person.

A large part of the population decided right away that LLMs were perfect authorities on every subject. I assume there's huge overlap between that group and the COVID enthusiasts. Many people in corporate america are all-in on the LLMs. I assume those people were happily setting up hoops for employees to jump through to comply with edicts from the COVID grifters.

At least this time, I realize it's an era of shitheads and conmen, so I have no concept of "fighting" and am certainly do nothing as foolish as exerting imaginary will-force against these fucktards. It's as pointless as waging war on the sea or trying to swim against a rip current. I doubt I can keep working in the tech industry, though. I was hoping to cruise for a couple of more years, then retire, but I'm getting "noped" out of it, as in, "hey, can you do this absolutely stupid shit as your job?"

A more interesting question is will the non-NPC, competent people continue to help out corporations and grifting trash like Bernie Sanders or whatever government creature. For example, will competent people even bother with some dumb ass company that uses an LLM agent interview/screener? I certainly wouldn't.

How Much Can Be Wasted?

There are many types of economic activity that are tightly constrained, for example, in the US it's extremely rare to build any new railroad lines, now. Similarly, road construction and even basic maintenance of roads and bridges is severely constrained. Only $X is allocated to that every year, and when money isn't available, the roads simply fall apart. Road departments can't just grab more and more money.

That contrasts strongly with the "AI" hysteria, or the COVID hysteria, or warmongering activity. In those cases endless billions of dollars are available to burn. These things are like a resource hernia or cancer. Nothing in the system imposes a constraint on them, so the mega consumption of resources shows up as symptoms like inflation, or failing supply chains, and the public unwittingly carries the burden.

The LLMs are a particularly interesting case to me because the hype and reality are so far apart. I tried to use the google LLM a few times so far. For example, I've been using a tool called "mkosi" lately which generates Linux operating system images based on a simple conf file. mkosi is a great, very useful tool for the type of work I do. If there's anything an LLM should actually be able to do successfully, it would be to crank out simple conf files, but it doesn't. It spits out incorrect nonsense most of the time.

It's 1000x more efficient for me to read the mkosi documentation and just create the file myself than trying to type in chatbot prompt patterns. I recognize that, but I know many people don't and they'll spend all day typing away to chatbots burning up electricity and accomplish less than nothing.

How much can be wasted on these mega-waste projects? Prior examples provide some bleak guidance. The Vietnam war was a similar boondoggle, probably run by the parents of the current generation of resource wasters, and it actually broke the US financial system of the day. Charles deGaul actually broke it.  That is some outside force had to call bullshit on the criminals in DC. Now, it's a good question if there's any such "outside force" as all the countries have a similar debt based financial system and enjoy printing endless amounts of cash for their dumb projects and crony enrichment.

If it requires a public revolt to staunch the flow of waste, it probably has a long way to run. The past several decades of systemically bad strategic choices by the ruling class which directly harm the public in the US haven't led to a revolt. The election of Trump, a total fraud, was maybe a soft version of that, however, the mass of people seems quite far from the "kill all of them" moment.

Money + Utilitarianism = Trash

In recent years, I noticed a genre of "academic discussion" that shows what an absolute trash pile the current system is. A "scientist" will observe an animal doing something interesting, like an elephant rescuing a baby antelope from a pool at the zoo, then he or she will struggle mightily to explain that action with some trash model from their academic "discipline". For example, it seems like the standard academic's behavioral model of every animal, including humans, is psychopathic meat robot. Animals only do things associated with energy saving, or self preservation, or procreation, or maybe a handful of other supposed motives. When an elephant saves another animal, their behavior is reframed as some combination of those base motives. This approach spills over into a bunch of other fields like economics or management at corporations, or whatever. The overall philosophy is banal utilitarianism--they grey ooze of philosphies.

It's a philosophy and approach to life which nobody I know follows. This is a really odd situation. In most people's actual life, they try to do interesting and fun things, or do "good", meaning altruistic things. For example, when I go ride the mountain bike trail, there are a bunch of other people there doing the same thing because it's fun. In their "official" life, like at work, they're often immersed in the gray ooze of corporatocracy.

One thing I noted at work over the past 10 years or so is the engineers who have interests outside the gray ooze are the best at their jobs as well; the people who are fully in the corporate ooze are kind of useless and lack creativity and even basic problem solving skills. It's not really clear to me why the real living people keep helping out the corporate slime. Somehow that trash managed to con everyone into making "the system" function for them.

Eyewatering Expense of Tech Junk

Around 2011, I ended up working in Nashville on a "music recognition system". The company I worked for was a part owner of the Shazaam music recognition system patents. They initially use the system to monitor airplay of songs on the radio. It was interesting to be able to work through all that code.  I fixed a minor bug in the software which caused it to crash periodically, but then the company mothballed the system. It was easier and less expensive to pay people overseas to do the same work by hand.

Anyway, that system relied on "fingerprinting" techniques which were developed, I guess, in the 1990s. One application was panoramic photo stitching. The music recognition system was actually an image processing technique and used the same approach as image stitching algorithms. Anyway, by 2010, audio was "easy", that is well within the processing capability of plain-old x86 server hardware so one server could handle many simultaneous searches of a database. Panoramic photos were "easy" too and were in the processing capability of even a smartphone.

An interesting trend today is many ultra-brute-force super dumb algorithms are appear to be viable on hardware like GPUs and FPGA accelerator cards, but that shit is super expensive at the moment. For example an FPGA with a cutting edge FPGA is around $10,000. Capable GPU cards are similarly expensive. Additionally the GPUs consume so much power that they are having trouble cooling the boards adequately. Right now there's a problem of connectors melting, for example.

One example of a brute force algorithm is so called "Gaussian Splatting", which can be used to reconstruct a 3D model of a scene from multiple 2D photos; the demos are almost like magic. However, it's extremely computationally intensive. Similarly various radio networking and RADAR applications are stupidly computationally intensive. The neural network pattern matching and machine learning techniques are also brute force approaches.

This is a novel scenario in tech world. The fingerprinting algorithms of the 1990s and early 2000s were the long standing pattern where clever and efficient techniques created new applications. They also followed the pattern of "mass production" leads to lower cost and very low per use resource consumption.

Brute force solutions to problems were generally dismissed as not close to viable for real world use. They're too expensive. I think this is still true, but there's a lot of investor money and PR bullshitting that obscures this common sense perspective.

When there is a lot of funny money, many things can look viable and get support even if they're totally stupid. In the 1920s, for example, people thought blimps were a viable mode of transportation because it kind of worked and there was enough surplus cash to "invest" in blimp companies, but obviously it wasn't close to viable. Similarly, I doubt a datacenter on every corner chewing up 1000 households of electricity is viable and a technician isn't going to run around to a million data centers swapping out burned up GPU boards.