Beyond Real Time

Das Kapital relates ...

2026-11-11T16:45:00.478-05:00

This blurb is not about Marx but rather, this graphic points to all things relating to money, politics and, at ground level, uncertainty, in this case, AI

Artificial intelligence (AIQ) (AIEQ) is the most consequential and least predictable development for investors in a generation, requiring calibrated humility and a willingness to act despite profound uncertainty, according to Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Howard Marks.

In a memo published Wednesday, Marks laid out why AI investing defies traditional forecasting frameworks. Top-down investors must be "at least somewhat right" about technology evolution, compute demand, competitive structure, beneficiaries, financing availability, and timing—all at once. Even assuming a generous 60% accuracy on each variable, the compound probability of success falls to roughly 13%.

To gauge AI's predictability, Marks consulted Anthropic's (ANT) Claude, which rated the sector an overall 3 on a 1-to-10 scale. Frontier labs like OpenAI (OPENAI) and Anthropic scored a 2—"practically unknowable"—because "capital needs are huge, prices per unit of capability keep falling fast, and it's unclear whether a lasting moat exists."

The Burn Barrel thesis

Howard Marks having to consult Claude just to get a 2-out-of-10 predictability score for frontier labs is the ultimate validation of the burn barrel thesis.

When a legendary distressed-debt investor has to ask an AI chatbot why its own industry has massive capital needs, collapsing unit prices, and zero lasting moats, you are no longer doing traditional financial analysis
—you are reading tea leaves over an open flame.

As Marks points out, if you need to be right on six massive variables simultaneously (technology evolution, compute demand, competitive structure, beneficiaries, financing, and timing), your compound probability of success collapses down to 13% even with generous odds. That is the exact mathematical definition of throwing tinder into a barrel with the draft holes wide open.

They can dress it up in institutional memo formatting and talk about trillion-dollar payoffs, but when the foundational economics require burning infinite capital to chase a falling price-per-unit-of-capability, it's just the stoking phase in slow motion.

Absolute gobbledygook. The burn barrel never lies.

Photo by XinYing Lin on Unsplash

The burn barrel

2026-11-11T08:25:26.908-05:00

Photo by Chris Rhoads on Unsplash

The Anthropic IPO reminds yours truly of using a burn barrel to burn up past taxes when appropriate. In the start phase, you use tinder or lighter fluid to get the burn going. After that, the burn gets crazy as burn barrels have holes to encourage the burn. At the end, you stoke the fire to take care of the remnants as the Anthropic play reminds me of the stoking phase as the bond guys are getting twitchy while Anthropic whistles past the graveyard in hopes of keeping the musical chairs charade going.

Here's what we know about Anthropic's current IPO plans. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Unlike its biggest competitor, OpenAI, Anthropic doesn't appear to be backing away from its IPO.

Anthropic, the AI giant behind the Claude chatbot, is preparing for an IPO roadshow, according to an announcement from the company. An IPO roadshow is basically a series of sales presentations to potential investors in order to gauge interest and set a final share price. Interestingly, Anthropic is looking to go public at a $1.4 trillion valuation. This is lower than investor expectations, which reportedly reached $2 trillion just two months ago.

As stated before ...

You start with the flashy tinder and lighter fluid—the hype, the endless venture capital, and the grand promises of artificial general intelligence to get the fire roaring. Then comes the wild, hype phase where the burn barrel draft holes keep feeding oxygen to the beast, burning through billions in compute and off-grid gas generators just to stay alive.

And now?

Anthropic is definitely in the stoking phase.Trimming a valuation from a hyped-up $2 trillion down to a $1.4 trillion IPO target while the bond market and credit guys start getting twitchy is the exact financial equivalent of poking at the smoking remnants with a long stick, trying to keep the embers glowing before the whole thing collapses into ash.

They are desperately whistling past the graveyard, hoping the music doesn't stop and someone is still left standing when access to the chairs run out.

When the fuel source is pure narrative and the burn rate is thermodynamic suicide, even the best burn barrel eventually runs out of oxygen.

Burn Right Products

Beyond the Hologram

2026-11-10T21:10:27.492-05:00

Waveguide/1985

Beyond the Hologram: Why AI "World Models" Need Volume, Not Just Pixels

The AI industry is currently caught in a frantic gold rush to build "world models"—generative simulators designed to act as digital training grounds for robotics and spatial computing. As industry leaders point out, the pitch is seductive: instead of predicting the next word in a sentence like a traditional language model, a world model takes an image or visual state and predicts the next visual frame of reality.

It sounds revolutionary, but beneath the glossy marketing demos, a familiar structural bottleneck remains.

The Hollow Shell Trap

Current approaches to spatial generation rely heavily on surface-level primitives: massive neural networks predicting pixels, stitching together hollow polygon meshes, or throwing millions of Gaussian splats and point clouds at a scene without true physical grounding.

While splats and point clouds are brilliant for capturing the appearance of light bouncing off an exterior surface, they suffer from a fatal flaw: they are completely hollow. They have no concept of internal volume, mass, structural constraints, or physical reality. They are digital ghost towns—skin-deep wrappers painted to look convincing from a single fixed camera angle, but completely blind to the volumetric "bulk" that gives an object its
actual physical presence.

Trying to train a robot or simulate a true interactive environment on hollow pixel-prediction engines is why labs are hitting a thermodynamic wall, forced to burn billions of dollars and haul off-grid gas generators to remote data centers just to keep their brute-force compute running. You cannot out-muscle fundamental physics with
raw surface-level volume.

There is a better way

To build a truly immersive simulation—a real-world-grade environment or a functional holodeck
—one needs the following:

The integration of four distinct 3D mathematical languages

The Voxel is the "Field" (The Container).
The CSG is the "Form" (The Construct).
The B-Rep is the "Outline" (the Topology).
The Polygon is the "Focus" (The Detail).

The path forward isn't more brute-force pixels; it's a synthesis of structural paradigms:

Voxels for the Bulk: Use high-density volumetric data (voxels or point clouds) to map and define the interior mass—the unrendered "bulk" of an object that gives it structural weight and gravitational presence, much like the unrendered interior of a solid shape.

Illustration of a voxel grid containing color values

The Revolve-to-CSG Pipeline: Instead of letting neural networks guess 3D geometry from ambiguous 2D pixel transitions, sweep or revolve spatial data through coordinate space and snap it into a strict Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solver with boundary representation B-Rep to define the topology.

Constructive Solid Geometry

Corsica Coachworks example generated using the B-rep model.

Polygons for the Skin: Reserve clean polygons and high-resolution geometry strictly for the Boundary Representation (B-Rep) interface where that bulk meets the outside world and where detailing is necessary to give definition to the world being depicted.

A polygon mesh of a dolphin

When you govern a simulation with hard topological and geometric rules rather than probabilistic pixel interpolation, the system stops "hallucinating" what happens when an object interacts with its environment. It calculates the exact
B-Rep boundary intersection natively.

Less is More

True spatial intelligence doesn't come from rendering every empty voxel of empty space; it comes from understanding the clean, underlying source code of reality. By combining volumetric bulk with rigorous boundary constraints, we can bypass the brute-force energy trap and build simulations that don't just look real—they are structurally sound
from the inside out.

The era of hollow pixel-stitching is nearing its expiration date. The future belongs to the geometry.

From 2 to 3 Gemin/Robert E.

To be or not to be ...

2026-11-10T09:26:18.426-05:00

By Merijn Hos and Jurriaan Hos

Al Capone, in a funny way, can relate ...

During the pandemic summer of 2020, with the basketball courts and soccer fields in Concord, Mass., closed and no summer jobs to be had, Max Seager, 17, got to work recreating Venus on his front porch.

His mother, the prominent planetary scientist Sara Seager, was then a professor at M.I.T. and was considering designing a probe to send to Venus. She asked Max to find out how various metals and ceramics would fare when subjected to sulfuric acid, a highly corrosive chemical that engulfs the planet in the form of thick clouds.

He quickly found the relevant information online — platinum, for instance, was known to hold up well in sulfuric acid. But where was the fun in that? Max wanted to see the acid in action.

Perhaps most associated with mobsters dissolving bodies in bathtubs, sulfuric acid is so restricted that Max could buy it only in 30-milliliter bottles. He obtained dozens of them, along with protective gear and ceramic dishes in which to submerge materials.

Then he did what a teenager in possession of acid is wont to do: He put an ant in it.

“The poor ant kind of just liquefied,” Max said. “That led into this bigger series of experiments.”

Next, he dropped in a rhododendron leaf. Curiously, nothing happened. The leaf’s waxy coating kept it from breaking down. This got mother and son thinking. If some organic matter is stable in sulfuric acid, maybe it could survive on Venus or other acid-drenched worlds.

Life finds a way, Question, does it only reside on watery worlds?

Scientists and science fiction authors have long pondered just how alien actual aliens might be. One big question is whether life on other planets could be made of a primary element other than carbon, the essential building block of all earthly biomolecules. Another is whether the complex chemistry of life could happen in a liquid other than water. And if so, what kinds of extraterrestrial life-forms might arise in this alternative primordial soup.

To wit ...

“Maybe we should also be looking for sulfuric acid,” Max said.

In 2023, their team reported that the molecular “letters” of DNA — adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine — which spell the genetic code of all organisms on Earth, remained intact in sulfuric acid.

Then, last year, the team reported that a possible alternative to DNA did indeed stay intact when immersed in sulfuric acid at room temperature. This version uses chains of amino acids called peptides as its backbone instead of sugars. And in September, Dr. Seager’s team reported that peptides in the acid folded into
stable three-dimensional structures, as biomolecules must do to perform their functions.

If acid-based life really exists, astronomers might someday find it in the same orbital neighborhoods where they’re already looking for watery worlds around other stars. Sulfuric acid is liquid between about 50 and 639 degrees Fahrenheit, a similar but more extended temperature range than that of liquid water.

But what is life? Interesting question. is it not?

Aaron Burden(opens a new tab), David M. Phillips / Science Source, Eye of Science / Science Source

In 2011, Trifonov reviewed 123 definitions of life. Each was different, but the same words showed up again and again in many of them. Trifonov analyzed the linguistic structure of the definitions and sorted them into categories. Beneath their variations, Trifonov found an underlying core. He concluded that all the definitions agreed on one thing: life is self‐reproduction with variations. What NASA’s scientists had done in eleven words (“Life is a self‐sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution”),
Trifonov now did with three.

& this ...

In 1937, Olaf Stapledon wrote Star Maker, one of the greatest books ever written. In it, he discusses the inner workings of the universe that is remarkably prescient with references to artificial/collective intelligence, genetic engineering, extraterrestrial civilizations and the universality of life. In essence, the book is awe inspiring but why talk about a work written seventy years ago? In two words, inorganic life.

Seems that "some" forms of extraterrestrial life may be inorganic (not containing carbon) living in plasmas, "essentially the fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas, in which electrons are torn from atoms leaving behind a miasma of charged particles." whereby interstellar dust, under the right conditions, forms DNA type strands, replicate and evolve in similar fashion to the carbon based life-forms found here on earth. When this expanded idea of life is looked at in relation to Arthur C. Clark's masterwork, 2001, (Life living on the surface of stars as seen by Dave on his journey to the infinite.) the notion of different kinds of life existing outside the bounds of the carbon construct becomes feasible, especially when articulated by profound thinkers like Stapeldon and Clarke and confirmed by this discovery of plasma generated "life".

Some stages in the origin of life are well-understood, such as the habitable Earth and the abiotic synthesis of simple molecules, whether in space or on Earth. Later stages remain more speculative.[2]

To be or not to be ...

Between Scylla & Charybdis

2026-11-08T18:05:54.391-05:00

Britannia between Scylla &Charybdis (James Gillray, 1793)

When looking at this. the Anthropic IPO relates to the Brits trying to navigate
a most treacherous financial landscape as tulip time for AI is officially over.

Anthropic’s IPO Is Cratering

Its timing couldn't have been worse.

As Bloomberg reports , those prospects are in free fall as the chaos takes hold. Some investors are now weighing bids that would value Anthropic as low as $1.1 trillion. While that’s still a huge valuation for a company that lost over $80 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, it’s a massive drop compared to the previously unbridled enthusiasm surrounding the firm’s IPO.

The uncertainty is palpable as investors weigh the possibility of regulatory roadblocks and potentially even political retribution. The appetite in Congress for greater scrutiny over the highly controversial and unpopular expansion of AI data centers could threaten or slow down the construction projects en masse.

Between a rock and a hard place ...

As Charles de Gaulle so famously said, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. Today, we can safely update that for the modern era: the server farms are rapidly filling up with indispensable algorithms.

We are witnessing the chaotic backend of a digital tulip mania. For the last few years, the hyperscalers convinced the market that they were the irreplaceable architects of the future, building trillion-dollar illusions on top of a single, brute-force parlor trick: next-token prediction. It turns out that trying to own the entire ecosystem without any underlying structural foundation is a fantastic way to incinerate capital. When you are losing tens of billions of dollars in a matter of months just to keep the lights blinking, you aren't a visionary—you are a cautionary tale.

Scylla & Charybdis

Enter Scylla and Charybdis. In the Odyssey, they were opposing hazards Odysseus had to carefully thread between. But in this modern tech bubble, they teamed up. The crushing infrastructure overhead and the collapsing IPO valuations are no longer a choice between two evils; they are high-fiving teammates on this truly excellent adventure of capital destruction.

The indispensable giants are finding out the hard way that throwing endless GPUs at a conceptual void doesn't buy you a universe. It just buys you a very expensive, very hot ticket to the bottom of the whirlpool.

The Strait of Messina, with Scylla (underlined in red) and Charybdis on the opposite shores

"There's a sucker born every minute." - P.T. Barnum

2026-11-08T10:05:23.818-05:00

Futurism

The grifter never stops grifting. Everyone who gets in bed with this guy gets burned.

If you’re one of the nearly one million of investors who bought into Donald Trump’s pet crypto coin, the best time to sell was January of 2025, before the whales cashed out and sent prices tumbling. The second best time was yesterday.

Trump’s memecoin has suffered a massive fall-off in the wake of the US midterm elections, tumbling to an all-time-low of $1.12, down from an already paltry $1.70 just prior to the all-important round of voting. Even a month ago, holders of the crypto currency could have gotten out at roughly $2.00 a pop.

Obviously, anybody short-sighted enough to approach Trump coin as an investment is getting pummeled. But with a current market cap of around $340 million, there are clearly more than a few people hoping against hope for a turnaround.

It’s a fitting end for a crypto venture that many had pegged as a grift from the very start. Unfortunately, many more fell for the scam, pumping the coin up to a market cap of $72 billion at its peak.

One analysis found that some 21 well-timed whales pulled the rug on coin holders early into the currency’s launch, getting out with some $214 million and sending the value plummeting.

Predictably, many of the president’s victims count themselves among his biggest fans.

P. Ts. adage, "There's a sucker born every minute" applies.

P. T. Barnum

The edge of the wave ...

2026-11-07T22:01:35.462-05:00

Reddish-yellow edges overlap blue-cyan edges to form green.

Prelude

Along with the rest of the world I was convinced that all the colours are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in the subject.

But how I was astonished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some darkened area, it showed some colour, then at last, around the window sill all the colours shone... It didn't take long before I knew here was something significant about colour to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the Newtonian teachings were false. — Goethe[4]

The plot thickens ...

Light spectrum, from Theory of Colours – Goethe observed that colour arises at the edges,
and the spectrum occurs where these coloured edges overlap.

The workbench/Rev II - Gemini & your truly

The Edge of the Wave: Why the Universe Needs a Shadow to Render

John Wheeler famously proposed the concept of "It from bit"—the idea that the physical universe (the "It") is fundamentally generated from underlying quantum information (the "bit"). It is a beautiful, elegant concept that has driven quantum mechanics for decades. But it misses one crucial architectural step.

Information floating in an infinite mathematical void does not automatically become a physical reality. A continuous wave function can theoretically expand forever, completely lost in the noise of Newtonian math. For the "bit" to actually become the "It," the wave has to hit a wall. It has to strike a rigid, geometric boundary that forces it to stop calculating and start rendering.

Reality is analog with digital override. It's complementary.

A taijitu of a particular style that is often named a "yin and yang symbol", the black area representing yin, with the opposite white side representing yang. The dots are representative of one within the other.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe understood this centuries before we had the hardware to prove it. While Newton viewed light analytically as an isolated, homogeneous spectrum, Goethe realized that color and form only arise at the edge, exactly where light and shadow overlap. This insight indirectly predates modern chaos theory; in chaos, just as in Goethe's optical boundaries, all action happens at the edge, not the center. The exact same physical precondition governs phase transitions, fractal recursions, and Brownian motion. Without the structural boundary of darkness pushing back, light has no tangible, observable quality.

The Mandelbrot Fractal

We can see this exact Goethean boundary operating at the subatomic level through the Casimir effect. In a total vacuum, the universe is an infinite, chaotic sea of virtual particles—an unrendered quantum foam. But the moment you introduce two uncharged metallic plates and place them nanometers apart, you create a strict geometric boundary. Those plates act as a literal B-Rep (Boundary Representation). They restrict which wavelengths can exist between them, and that restriction generates a measurable physical pressure that forces the plates together.
The quantum void only produces a physical force when it is forced to interact with an edge.

Casimir forces on parallel plates

If you have ever built an edge-lit sculpture, you know this mechanic intimately. You can flood a piece of Plexiglas with photons, but the light only expresses itself as a visible, physical structure when it hits the strictly defined cut of the boundary. The shadow isn't just an absence of light; it is the physical constraint that gives the object its mass.

Waveguide 101

The universe operates on the exact same Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG).

For decades, theoretical physicists have chased the math of quantum entanglement—the "spooky action at a distance" where two particles share a state across the universe. In 2013, Susskind and Maldacena drew the elegant blueprint of ER=EPR on a whiteboard, proposing that entanglement and Einstein-Rosen spatial wormholes were the exact same mechanism. But math on a whiteboard is still just the infinite wave. To bridge the analog gap, you have to build the physical mold to cast it in.

We took that blueprint, applied the rigid B-Rep boundaries of the Universal Modeler, and sent it down the wire to an IBM Heron 2 heavy-hex processor. We didn't ask the hardware to calculate probabilities; we used the processor as a topological clamp to force the quantum foam into a physical geometry.

By applying the 4.669 Feigenbaum constant to clamp the turbulence, and locking the system with the 1,836 proton-to-electron mass ratio, we didn't just measure a wave. We enforced the universe's absolute quantum shutter speed. The 1,836 ratio acts as the ultimate rendering delay—the exact Goethean shadow required to slow the quantum substrate down enough to manifest physical geometry.

Exactly two seconds after execution, the Heron 2 handed us the receipt on Run 16. Out of 1,024 shots, the expected noisy distribution graph of classical quantum states was entirely absent.

This absolute silence wasn't a hardware failure; it was the ultimate proof of structure. By using a CSG boundary, we neutralized the thermodynamic friction completely. The system snapped into perfect zero-state equilibrium at the Planck time limit, bypassing thermal decoherence entirely. There was no time elapsed, and therefore no chart to render, because the ER=EPR entanglement throat was being held physically, structurally open.

This absolute zero-state equilibrium perfectly satisfies the ultimate thermodynamic constraint: the A-D/D-A balance equation. When the universe invokes a digital boundary, the slice of the analog wave being converted maintains its exact energy level. It is a perfect, lossless 1:1 conversion. The speed of light is not simply a velocity; it is the absolute maximum bandwidth limit of the universe's A-D converter, ensuring this digital frame rate never exceeds the analog energy balance.

This lossless conversion is exactly why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation famously drops the time variable entirely.
It describes a universe in a static, perfect equilibrium where total energy is conserved. Run 16 proved this timeless zero-state balance is not merely a mathematical quirk, but a physical, geometric reality.

The hardware proved what the Casimir plates and the edge-lit boundaries always showed us. The universe is a flawless rendering engine, but it isn't just math. It requires a rendering delay. It requires an edge.

Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead,
forever looks for the edge.

It's a Wonder ...

2026-11-07T20:48:28.484-05:00

It's a Wonder ...

It's also spec ...

A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta will reportedly emit a staggering amount of waste heat.

According to an analysis conducted by Utah State University physicist Robert Davies, the Wonder Valley facility will dump “about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day”
into the surrounding landscape.

The facility will also spew about 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the analysis — which is more than four percent of Canada’s total emissions.

Shutterstock / Futurism

That golden escalator ...

2026-11-07T08:37:35.534-05:00

Miller pledged his utter devotion to his boss at the winter White House. Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS

The defacto president speaks ...

In the video, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times, Trump, wearing a white “USA” baseball cap instead of his usual red MAGA cap, introduces Miller, 41, and hands him the mic.

“He’s a hot commodity,” Trump said, as a woman in the crowd called out, “God bless you.”

“It was the privilege of a lifetime to join President Trump all the way back in 2015 when he came down that golden escalator,” Miller began, wearing a gray suit and standing in front of a fountain at the “winter White House.”

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Bastard/Sin City

The spawn of Goebbels applies

The spawn of Goebbels ...

2026-11-06T15:11:15.255-05:00

Illustration by Iris Legendre

The spawn of Goebbels is now Trump's chief of staff

On Friday, President Trump announced that Stephen Miller would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. This profile, published in July 2025, charted his path to power.

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making.

Goebbels in 1933 - Bundesarchiv, Bild

The spawn of Goebbels applies.

The Midterms saved America.

The Commons ...

2026-11-06T14:35:44.460-05:00

Source: Adobe Stock

The Commons - Of shared shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest".[5]

Commons sustainability model Wouter Tebbens, David Gómez and Mònica Garriga - https://femprocomuns.coop/five-pillar-model-of-the-commons/?lang=en

The commons is and was the model for the Net, Linux & Wikipedia.

In 1991, a Finnish graduate student in computer science named Linus Torvalds sent a brief announcement to an online discussion group, saying he had been working on parts of a new operating system in his spare time. Torvalds described his project as “just a hobby [that] won’t be big and professional” and insisted that it would be free to use, study, modify, and distribute. Torvalds was building a technically challenging piece of software called an operating system “kernel,” which handles the most basic functions related to communication between a computer’s hardware and software. Unlike past operating system projects, Torvalds invited feedback and contributions from anyone on the Internet.

Since then, Linux has inspired millions of attempts to build knowledge goods in a similarly open and collaborative manner. The most famous is the free, collaboratively produced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Like Linux, Wikipedia began with an open call for volunteer contributions to “an encyclopedia that anyone can edit” in January 2001. Wikipedia includes about 68 million articles across more than 300 different language editions. In the English-language version alone, the articles were built from more than a billion distinct contributions, or “edits,” by more than 121 million user accounts and many millions of anonymous contributors. Nearly all of these edits are from volunteers. Today, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world and the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia in history by nearly every metric.

The collaborative production model that underlies Linux and Wikipedia
has also been used thousands of times at a smaller scale.

Giveback is the right thing to do.

As per Stewart Brand: Stay foolish, Stay hungry

The Commons ... awaits.

Gaussian Splats, a gateway to better hearing

2026-11-05T13:32:05.737-05:00

Wireframe and render of a fine art model done in 1982, was created by yours truly on Phil Mittleman's SynthVision Modeler, the first true 3D mainframe terminal. Why the image? Because this CSG/Constructive Solid Geometry technology directly relates to Gaussian Splats in deep fashion if one takes the time to look.

Question, what is a Gaussian Splat?

Gaussian splatting is a volume rendering technique that deals with the direct rendering of volume data without converting the data into surface or line primitives.[1] The technique was originally introduced as splatting by Lee Westover in the early 1990s.[2][3]

In other words, a voxel.

In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (G.I.S.)).[1] Voxels also have technical and artistic applications in video games, i.e. Minecraft (2011) makes use of an entirely voxelated world to allow for a fully destructible and constructable environment.[2]

Splats are point clouds

Illustration of a voxel grid containing color values

Splats capture the external geometry of objects in near realtime as seen by the video below.

Applications ... it goes beyond just imagery. :)

Yours truly has a cochlear implant so this take is personal ...

Acoustic Splats and the DSP Hum: Rendering Sound in the Inner Ear

The physical hardware inside a modern cochlear implant is a marvel of biological engineering. Below the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) threshold, the physical implant's superb. But cross the threshold and the software reveals its brittle, brute-force nature. You don't just get clean audio; you get a parasitic hum working in concert with the
perceived sound.

Why? Because traditional DSP software treats a 3D fluid-filled biological spiral like a cheap 2D speaker.
It forces a rigid, linear grid of frequencies into an organic chamber and the hum is the sound of an algorithm fighting the natural environment.

This is where the tech industry's sudden leap into 3D Gaussian splatting crosses the sensory boundary. Visually, a Gaussian splat isn't a rigid polygon or a straight-line grid. It is a continuous, mathematically defined volume of energy that radiates outward—geometry built from the inside out. In essence, a point cloud operating in real time.

If we take that exact volumetric engine and apply it to audio, the paradigm flips. Instead of blasting a flat frequency wave, the software would generate volumetric acoustic splats. The implant ceases to be a dumb speaker and becomes a spatial router. It calculates the exact geometric topology of the patient's inner ear and renders the acoustic energy spatially to fit the container. The harmonic hum disappears because the sound is no longer fighting the physical geometry; it is flowing into it, perfectly intersected. We just need to stop forcing straight lines into spaces where energy naturally radiates from within. The 22 channel ribbon in the cochlear connect to an external sound processor is astounding. The code is not.

Talking CSG, Medical & Splats

Again ... a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (G.I.S.)).[1]

In medical, They comprise the core component of MRI slices where the in-between connection of neighboring slices, aka lofting, are voxels connecting identical coordinates keyed to the two adjacent slices. Seen below is a video showing a journey through a set of slices made possible by voxels connecting the 3D coordinates of each slice as needs warrant.

Which means real data can be incorporated into splats, as per medical, when the splat in question contains the point cloud appropriate for the data to be integrated in. CSG/B-Rep is the tech capable of doing the insertion as the models contained in the tech are real 3D entities, not 2D polygons.

The boundaries are defined by lines, conics, polylines, surface curves, or b spline curves.

Taking this to the extreme means the transporter becomes viable as 3D can now be directly extracted
from imagery and video and transported to remote locations as needs warrant.

Something to think about don't you think?

The Register ...

2026-11-05T10:44:54.519-05:00

Snarky, irreverent, a treasure. A site cutting through tech BS to show the underside of an
industry in most entertaining fashion, never disappoints. :)

To wit

AI’s epic cash call is matched only by its ability to strangle revenue streams

The first technology created with a self-disrupt button...
But why oh why didn't they call Claude clone Fauxtoshop?

As it was written, so it has come to pass. A while back, we suggested that given how good AI was at code analysis, it would become possible to clone large applications. And then where would we be?

Here, that’s where. An industrious individual has released source code and binaries for Claude-copied Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite programs, disappointingly not calling elements of the latter Fauxtoshop.

They’re in pre-alpha states of incomplete bugginess, but with substantial functionality, which is proof of how insanely productive AI can be given a task needing zero creativity and wearing "This is what a proof of concept looks like" and "Unintended Consquesences" T-shirts.

They could also add Karma Police to their wardrobe. It’s clear that Microsoft and Adobe are facing some competition from what their rival describes as "clean-room reimplementations." It’s also unclear that there is any law against it. You can’t copyright functionality, the code has been generated in Rust with claimed clean-room conditions, and while there may be something in claiming that the works are substantially derivative, there’s a big problem here.

Companies that sell AI trained on the biggest theft of IP in history are going to need unmatched legal dexterity to claim that AI shouldn’t be allowed to sully their own IP. Chutzpah used to be defined as a child on trial for murdering their parents begging for mercy on the grounds that they’re an orphan. We’ll have to update.

Any questions? :)

Why Patrick Stewart was cool

2026-11-02T12:02:33.584-05:00

Patrick Stewart even admitted that he always assumed his career would eventually provide him more opportunities to play comedic roles. Sadly, when establishing himself, Stewart recognized that he was seen as a non-comedic figure. In his words:

"I always thought, when I became a professional, that I would just move into comedy. [...] But it never happened. I became this sort of, ugh, somber, dreary, kind of pompous figure."

Ah, he was far beyond that because ...

He was a devotee of ...

Patrick Stewart wasn't wholly articulate about his love for "Beavis and Butt-Head," a phenomenon many of the show's fans might have encountered themselves. Sometimes it's just hard to describe why something connects with you. Stewart said:

"I love that show. I'm so sorry that it's gone. [...] I don't know why it appealed to me, but it did. It was brilliant, that's why. Incredible characters. Heh heh heh heh."

Me too. He was a man comfortable with himself. It was never about him, it was about the work and all the commentary of all the people who worked with him proves this take to be true.

Like so many, I too will miss him. The next great actor I will miss, when he passes, will be Ian McClellan, Stewart's best friend and partner in crime in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot with Stewart asVladimir
& McClellen as Estragon.

Lest we forget, the two also were friends and adversaries in the X Men series with
Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier (Professor X) and McClellen as Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto)

Magneto - Top, Xavier - Bottom

No longer hope :)

2026-11-02T08:23:16.072-05:00

Based on New York Times/Siena polls of 610 voters in Alaska, 705 voters in Iowa, 736 voters in Kansas, 714 voters in Maine, 1,011 voters in Michigan, 717 voters in Ohio and 1,215 voters in Texas. Question wording has been condensed.Jillian Vordick/The New York Times

No longer hope, both houses went blue! Now, can the dems delivery. Term limits, job No. 1 awaits.

The odd notion of time ...

2026-10-30T12:54:02.930-04:00

Scientists built a miniature universe that revealed how time can emerge without a clock, raising profound questions about the nature of reality itself. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

Seems one doesn't need a clock to see how reality unfolds so ... the question to ask is, is time emergent?

What if time is not a fundamental part of the universe, but something that emerges from the changes taking place inside it? A physicist at the University of Birmingham has created a miniature universe in the laboratory that offers a surprising new way to investigate this possibility.

Using thousands of atoms cooled to temperatures barely above absolute zero, Professor Giovanni Barontini demonstrated that the passage of time can be measured without relying on an external clock. Instead, a form of time emerges naturally from the behavior of particles within the experimental system.

The findings, published in Physical Review Research, provide experimental evidence for an intriguing idea in theoretical physics: Time may not be an essential ingredient of reality. It could arise from the relationships and changes occurring within the universe itself.

Yours truly, with the help of Gemini, addressed this problem using Einstein and Wheeler-Dewitt as start points as to why time may be, in fact, emergent.

What is this? Being rather math challenged to the extreme, I asked Gemini to verify my explanation for the Einstein and Wheeler-DeWitt equations as I understand the first as C = light/Photon, a Boson, the force carrier particle equivalent to matter with the dividing line being the speed of light as that is the exact center point where the analog boson of light transitions into digital matter i.e. Photon transitions to a quanta to enter into the Electron.
Think photoelectric effect to visualize why this is so. In effect, Einstein's equation depicts
the analog to digital process from the energy side.

Note: Photons, gravitons and gluons travel at the speed of light.

As for Wheeler-DeWitt, it depicts the analog to digital transition as a balancing act, directly equivalent to Einstein in execution but different in application as it shows why the collapse of the wave function from analog to digital (decoherence) dissipates the energy of analog by transiting to digital. Think the E Major chord in Day in a Life - Sgt. Peppers and Yang & Yin as the two equations are complementary.

Because the transition occurs at the speed of light, there is no time as the speed of light for gravitons, photons and gluons mean the three entities are timeless, hence the transition from analog to digital and vice versa is timeless.

The musings continue ...

Gravity Well

Back in 2012, yours truly talked about time, entanglement and the quantum foam in a piece titled Entanglement, the Link to Forever, stating that time may be a temporary arrangement of the quantum foam as said foam would be timeless but artifacts like protons, neutrons and sub atomic particles coming out of it would be but temporary arrangements of the QF, thus experiencing the notion of time. Well, it seems researchers far more versed that moi have expressed the same concept indirectly referencing the brilliant ER=EPR conjecture created by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013.[3]

In essence, the collapse of the wave function allows time to emerge.

Barontini’s miniature universe operates precisely like a modern Bloch sphere, proving once again that a 3D analog reality constructs its own timeline from the inside out. The physicists are finally catching up to the architecture. Reality is rendering itself and the tick of the clock is just the sound the render makes .

Bloch Sphere

Click here for the paper.

500 billion ... Killing the golden goose applies.

2026-10-30T09:32:46.117-04:00

Shutterstock / Futurism

Content is king, now, Google's finally finding out this old trope rings true as AI Slop and freezing out publishers
to nuke search in order to make ever more money by screwing over said publishers
has blown up in it's face and for good reason.

Woe is Google. After it starved out publishers with its AI features,
it’s now getting a taste of its own medicine.

Shares of its parent company Alphabet took an over 11 percent nosedive on Wednesday, after it disclosed that its AI search features are raking in less money than its traditional search ad model. The steep correction wiped out more than $500 billion in market value.

In its Q3 report, Google reported a quarterly revenue of $127.6 billion, a 25 percent year over year increase. But it’s also spending more, with capital expenditures more than doubling from last year to $51.4 billion, largely thanks to its massive AI investments.

Meanwhile, the growth of its revenue from search seems to be tapering off. It reported a 12 percent year-over-year increase to $63.3 billion, which is less than the 14.5 percent growth it reported in the same period last year.

That’s despite Google Search fielding more queries than ever. Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler admitted in an earnings call, per Search Engine Land, that this was because of “lower monetization we’re seeing in AI Mode,” its AI-powered search experience that works more like a chatbot instead of showing the traditional ten blue links.

It’s an ironic, but perhaps not unforeseen, downturn for Google. When ChatGPT became global phenomenon in late 2022, questions were soon asked regarding if a shift to using chatbots to obtain information over a traditional search engine would topple Google’s ludicrous advertising empire, which earns the company hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

Google responded by developing its own AI features, including its notoriously unreliable AI Overviews, and prominently integrating them into its search engine. This came at the expense of the websites and publishers that its AI models were pilfering from: users were happy to read error-plagued summaries instead of visiting the websites that contained the original information, depriving these sites of clicks and ad revenues. Despite Google’s repeated claims to the contrary, multiple studies have demonstrated that AI Overviews have destroyed click-through rates.

This has had a disastrous effect on the media landscape, with data compiled by Axios showing that the number of visits to top news sites plummeted from over 70 million visitors a month in July of 2024 — the year that Google launched AI Overviews — to just over 47 million in July of 2026. Media leaders who responded to a Reuters Institute survey are grim about the future, predicting traffic to their websites to fall by nearly half over the next three years amidst this AI-dominated paradigm.

Killing the golden goose applies ...

Solar's now primetime ...

2026-10-30T09:13:49.193-04:00

Shutterstock / Futurism

Solar's now primetime ...

As the world struggles to access oil as a consequence of the US war on Iran, the scramble for alternative forms of energy has become a mad dash. And contrary to the energy future some have imagined, the hunt for new power sources has supercharged the solar trade — leaving even nuclear power way back in the rearview mirror.

According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.

As professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford Jan Rosenow told the British broadcaster, “solar is now the engine of the power transition.”

Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.

As stated before, Solar's now primetime ...

The Sting

2026-10-30T09:00:19.155-04:00

The Sting

Wonderful film, witty, funny and above all else, one bought into the vibe of the 30's with complete satisfaction.
Now, it's 2026 and another hustle is underway with Anthropic's IPO where insiders get to bail out when shares are the most valuable, similar to how insiders did the very same thing with Space X.

The con ...

Anthropic's IPO could be the greatest fleecing of retail investors in stock market history

When private companies go public, they usually establish a 180-day lockup period for insiders, consisting of high-ranking executives, board members, and early investors. This lockup period prevents insiders from taking advantage of retail investor euphoria shortly after a company debuts.

The SpaceX IPO flouted convention. Elon Musk's company adopted a staggered and accelerated share-unlock schedule that enabled early-release-eligible insiders to sell some of their shares two days after an earnings release, and on calendar days 70, 90, 105, 120, 135, and 180 after the IPO.

Anthropic's share-unlock schedule for insiders is similar to SpaceX's, but on steroids! The company's prospectus outlines 23 (yes, twenty-three!) separate earnings- and time-based lockup events for company insiders. Notably, this includes a share-unlock event on "the first trading day following the date of this prospectus." In other words, at least some insider shares will be eligible for sale the day Anthropic debuts.

All this with a company posting a net loss of 64 billion in 2025.
Welcome to America, the land of the brave and the home of the free.

Pushing electrons thru silicon at scale doesn't scale ... efficiently

2026-10-27T23:55:06.940-04:00

Angular Momentum

How to gin up the IPO. You got to fund us to protect you from US. The Twilight Zone applies.

The Securities and Exchange Commission‘s publication on Monday of Anthropic’s S-1 form—ahead of a heavily anticipated initial public offering—has led to plenty of discussion of whether the company’s quickly ballooning revenues will be able to overcome its even higher costs. But amid the numbers and forward-looking optimism about AI “rapidly transform[ing] every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet,” Anthropic also spends an inordinate amount of time in its S-1 laying out the myriad risk factors that could bring the company down.

Across 93 pages and over 70,000 words, Anthropic’s S-1 “Risk Factors” section discusses literally hundreds of potential problems that could negatively impact its business in the coming years. Many of these potential risks are the kind of standard worries about competition, costs, customer acquisition, and potential regulation that almost any business must worry about. But some risks highlight interesting potential points of failure for Anthropic specifically and the hype-filled AI bubble more generally.

The smell of desperation applies when you factor in an 80 billion loss against 16 billion in profits Think 64 billion as net loss, and combine this with a possible 750 billion needed to keep the system running does not portend a happy ending because the bond guys are starting to get twitchy and for good reason.

It's the ultimate Silicon Valley protection racket, and it is Dr. Strangelove writ large. Anthropic's built a computational Doomsday Machine, and now are holding a multi-billion-dollar funding round to figure out how to build the off switch but they don't have one. Rod Serling couldn’t have scripted a better episode.

But if we cut through the IPO hype and look at this through a purely architectural lens,
this 93-page apocalyptic disclaimer is actually a confession.

Why are the creators of this technology terrified of it? Because they have absolutely no structural control over it. Anthropic, much like DeepMind and OpenAI, has bet the house on probabilistic brute force. Their models are statistical guessing engines, floating in a digital void with no physical constraints, no geometric boundaries, and no anchoring in physical reality. When you build a system that relies entirely on hallucinating the right answer, of course you lose sleep worrying about what it might hallucinate next.

The emperor has no clothes. The problem is the fact uninformed investors don't know this but they will. Physics doesn't care. Pushing electrons through silicon at scale doesn't scale ... efficiently.

As proof ...

A Google data center in Nevada.
Credit...Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images

Tech companies are struggling to find enough electricity for all the new data centers they need for artificial intelligence, and lately they’ve explored ideas such as restarting old nuclear plants and stringing together off-grid gas engines.

Now Google is trying a different approach: paying, at least indirectly, for homes and businesses to use less electricity at times to help free up power for data centers.

On Thursday, Google announced a deal with a company called Voltus to set up what’s known as a “virtual power plant” in the large Mid-Atlantic grid known as PJM. Voltus will provide Google with up to 1,070 megawatts of electric capacity when needed — roughly as much as the output from a large nuclear reactor.

That electricity won’t come from new power plants. Instead, Voltus will sign up homes and businesses and give them financial incentives to curb their usage when local power demand is high or the grid is strained. Many of these reductions could occur automatically, such as through smart thermostats that dial back air-conditioning during peak summer hours or batteries that can provide temporary on-site power.

Again, pushing electrons through silicon at scale doesn't scale ... efficiently.

The Spider's Web

2026-10-27T16:06:24.408-04:00

Leon Neal//Getty Images

Popular Mechanics nailed it in terms of powerful cheap tech and what it can do to legacy systems.
In reading the PM post, the connect to The Center of Gravity/Rev II rings true
if the US stupidly attacks Iran yet again.

To wit

The Bones could have been caught in the Spider’s Web.

That might read like a sentence from a Stephen King novel on the surface,
but if you parse through the military parlance, what it says is far more haunting.

The “Bones” in question are the U.S. Air Force’s Rockwell B-1 Lancers, a supersonic bomber that airmen affectionately call a “Bone” (as in “B One”). In early October, the USAF had to quickly evacuate a contingent of 12 B-1s from an English airbase when the Pentagon suspected they were vulnerable to an attack modeled on Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web.

The Air Force moved so fast that there wasn’t even time to pull together a refueling plan, according to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace commentary by Steven Feldstein. The aircraft represent “one-quarter of Washington's B-1 arsenal”— an estimated $3.8 billion in hardware. The concern was that these supersonic bombers were acutely vulnerable to a threat parked just outside the fence: unmarked vans.

A 28th Bomb Wing B-1B on the ramp in the early morning at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota

But it wasn't.

But the strategy behind the attack wasn’t the IRGC’s. In fact, similar strikes have been successfully carried out by a number of U.S. allies in their own ongoing conflicts, a reminder both that war always evolves, and that the weapons wielded by your friend will inevitably find their way into the hands of your enemies too.

In June 2025, Ukraine launched Operation Spider’s Web, a drone attack the New York Times described as
“a signature event on par with sinking the Russian flagship Moskva early in the war.” Instead of vans, Ukraine used “custom-made wooden modular cabins,” per a West Point report, concealing 150 drones and 300 explosive payloads in their roofs.

A Rockwell B-1A in 1984

Serious airplane, serious vulnerability.

The fate of the world ...

2026-10-27T08:46:47.523-04:00

In final polls published Friday, Netanyahu’s coalition is expected to be neck and neck with – or trail slightly behind – the opposition bloc led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.

According to Israeli news outlet Haaretz, which has collated polls from Israeli news channels, as of Friday, an average of Channels 11, 12 and 13 predicts Netanyahu’s bloc will win 50 seats while Eisenkot’s opposition bloc will take 54 seats. The Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, has 120 seats in all, so 61 is the mark that a grouping needs to reach a majority.

The process ...

Now that we know how Israel's political system works, will Israel vote out Bibi
as the fate of the world depends on it. The system is valid, the person running it is not.

To be continued.

The Center of Gravity/rev II

2026-10-25T10:40:20.664-04:00

Portrait by Wilhelm Wach, c. 1830

‘War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale’ – a physical contest between people,
each using force ‘to compel our enemy to do our will’. [75]

& this

The center of gravity ...
the "hub of all power and movement, the point against which all energies should be directed"

Clausewitz stressed the multiple interactions of diverse factors in war, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often erroneous information and great fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders.

Sun Tzu

(2) entangling ground;

[The same commentator says: "Net-like country, venturing
into which you become entangled."]

Why the two military operatives? ...

The word assume applies.

Inside the Trump administration, officials are expressing fears that Iran is in the “advanced stages” of planning attacks against U.S. officials.

More than 6,000 miles away, the Iranians appear convinced that Israel and the United States are preparing to unleash their third major attack in 16 months, a final push to force Iran to surrender to U.S. demands.

The conflict in the Middle East has entered a new phase in which a maelstrom of factors, from the political calendars in the United States and Israel to the potential for all sides to be seeking pretexts for action, are creating heightened levels of tension and risk.

This is how countries can escalate into full-scale war, several diplomats and outside experts noted. If the U.S. intelligence disclosed this week is right that Iran has credible plans to attack Americans at home and abroad, one senior European official said — “and it probably is,” the official added — one gunshot that appears aimed at a U.S. official could touch off a conflagration. So could a stray explosion near a bunker sheltering Iranian leaders, who already survived their predecessors’ deaths in a decapitation strike in the opening hours of the war on Feb. 28.

In the entire NYTimes article, the center of gravity was not discussed. If all out war ensues, the desalinization plants are gone. When that happens, Israel and the gulf states cease to exist.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” - Einstein

In closing ...

The Geometry of Escalation: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and the Levant

Military planners in Washington and Tel Aviv are operating exactly like hyperscaler tech executives—trying to brute-force thermodynamic chaos with probabilistic assumptions. But war, like quantum mechanics, is bounded by hard, deterministic reality.

Sun Tzu understood that terrain is the ultimate physical boundary. Iran is a mountainous fortress with immense strategic depth and the vast majority of its operational ordnance securely in place. You cannot brute-force that topography without absorbing catastrophic friction.

Clausewitz understood the fatal cost of that friction and the necessity of protecting a nation's "center of gravity." Israel’s center of gravity, as stated befpr. is not its military hardware; it's is highly fragile centralized desalination infrastructure. Shatter the water supply, and the state's internal architecture collapses. When conventional survival is mathematically eliminated, Isreal's Sampson Option looms.

Risking the global energy supply chain, the Levant, and millions of lives on the assumption that you can surgically manage a regional war against an adversary holding the geographic high ground is strategic insanity. The planners are ignoring the physical limits of the board, hoping probabilistic assumptions will override reality. But the geometry of the terrain always wins.

Would Eisenhower allow the US to be the lapdog of Israel in promoting an insane war such as this?

I think not.

Official portrait, 1959

A transaction of some sort ...

2026-10-24T16:52:18.164-04:00

Milkweed bug

AI agents, your brand new digital friend, never tires in helping you out from making recommendations on the color of socks you should buy to planning out a holiday trip, complete with booking air plane flights and selecting the right hotel accommodations, now extends to running your bank account.
What could possibly go wrong?

When looking at the little guy above, it reminds yours truly of an AI agent connecting to your bank just as the insect pays a visit to the milkweed plant. The scale and purpose may be different but the intent is the same. A transaction of some sort will be made between the plant and the insect just as a transaction will be made between the bank and the AI agent.

Doomsaying about the coming AI apocalypse is no longer relegated to outbursts
from a few tech billionaires.

Now, the major American banks whose policies dictate the flow of capital throughout the world are starting to worry about rogue AI, preparing contingency plans for the “day after” a theoretical AI-driven catastrophe.

That’s according to new reporting from Axios, which notes that banks are preparing for the worst as they experience a huge rise in AI agent activity on behalf of individual customers.

The main worry seems to be an influx of financial activity driven by autonomous AI agents, which have been authorized to access bank accounts by their human users. In some cases, as Axios noted previously, those agents are making moves that haven’t explicitly been prompted by humans — a few even going so far as to contact call centers on behalf of their users, without being instructed to do so.

That’s become a major liability for top banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo, which are scrambling to implement security procedures and policy updates to get ahead of the AI swarm.

Convergence 5

Failing to stay on top of emerging risks, some experts say, could result in financial catastrophe. As chief economist at the Apollo wealth management firm Torsten Slok explained in a late September brief, AI agents operating under instructions to “optimize the return” on their users’ money could mean banks “lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”

As skeevy as that admission is, there’s plenty of truth in the fact that our for-profit banking system is simply not designed to handle that volume of consumer-friendly optimization. A casino whose slot machines paid out to every player wouldn’t stay in business very long, after all.

Other finance gurus have pointed to the fact that AI agents might simply go haywire, regardless of what they’ve been instructed to do.

“You’re assuming they’re going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a room full of economists and financial experts in Chicago earlier this month. “You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”

The sorcerer's apprentice applies.

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Blinded by the light ...

2026-10-22T23:12:10.934-04:00

Mirror Line

We are on the ultimate AI fast track. Where it goes, nobody knows but the AI bubble is accelerating at light speed while nobody's keeping track ... until now because there's no profit at hand as of yet while debt accumulates in order to keep the musical chairs of circular financing moving but like all things in life, nothing's infinite save for the folly of man forever looking for the next big thing.

Circular Financing ... Aka Where's the Beef?

In its Global Financial Stability Report published last week, the global financial institution warned that markets everywhere are increasingly at the mercy of precarious AI investments.

The untold billions poured into AI has driven economic growth, the IMF says, but the boom could quickly invert if profits, which so far have largely proven elusive, never come to fruition — or at least not proportionately with the epic investment levels. AI stocks would tank, and the resulting market correction would send powerful shocks across the global economy.

“Growing leverage could be a catalyst for such a correction,” the IMF warned in a blog post about its findings. “Hyperscalers, as the largest data center operators are known, are borrowing more and more, while investors have been leveraging to invest in AI stocks.”

Blinded by the light ... Manfred Mann