Beyond Real Time

The IPO ...

2026-06-11T17:09:46.518-04:00

Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

IPOs do weird things to people and organizations as greed, hype and the tell combine
to see just how many investors can we get to buy into "the next big thing."

IPO PR trick one, deny competitors to the family jewels

Anthropic is backtracking on a policy that would have covertly limited competitors from using its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, to develop other AI models. The company changed course after the move received significant backlash from the AI research community.

“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong trade-off and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a version of its latest AI model with additional safety guardrails designed to prevent misuse, earlier this week. Some of the safeguards Anthropic decided on were unsurprising: The company said it would reroute users who asked questions about cybersecurity, biology, or chemistry to a less capable AI model to reduce the chances of someone using the advanced AI to carry out a cyberattack or build a bioweapon.

But for researchers trying to use Claude Fable 5 for frontier AI development, Anthropic outlined a different approach. The firm would deliberately degrade the model’s performance in ways that were invisible to the user. The move would effectively sabotage researchers trying to use Claude to train competing AI models, which Anthropic explicitly bans in its terms of service.

Anthropic now says it’s changing course, and that Claude Fable 5’s safeguards for AI development will be visible to users. If the company suspects a user is trying to use Claude to build a highly capable AI, it will alert them that it’s either refusing the request or rerouting the user to a less capable model.

IPO PR trick two, the self evolving AI. Conway's Game of Life comes to mind here. :)

Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology—one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important.

In English, what are we really talking about? Bloatware, lay code on top of code, requiring ever more compute but more ominously, it's inbreeding 101, the ouroboros eating its tail, a perfect way to hallucinate in new and better ways but you, my loyal investors .. we need ever more capital to makes this grand vision a reality, hence the upcoming IPO for the ages.

Wall Street analysts and financial forecasters widely expect the initial public offering (IPO)
to officially price and list around October 2026

A dragon-like ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract[1]

Exuberance 101

2026-06-11T16:18:23.751-04:00

Illustration by Alicia Tatone. Sources: Brett Carlsen / Getty; iStock / Getty.

When watching Pentagon Pete, for the first time, talking pushups to flag officers and senior ems, yours truly was seeing a guy completely lacking in self confidence as the bravado, the wearing of suits two sizes too small and taking on a swagger of no substance, all in the attempt of being in total command of the situation, collapsed in a nanosecond as he's not a serious person but I digress. The Atlantic has it covered.

The defense of the United States is a serious business. Every day, men and women, civilian and military, attend to the smallest details—the caloric content of a soldier’s meal, the fabric in a uniform—while others advise senior leaders on the use of violence to achieve the ends of national policy. Some, stationed underground, underwater, or on bomber airfields, stand ready to fulfill orders with apocalyptic consequences. These people are professionals and carry themselves with the quiet pride that comes from serving their nation.

And then there’s Pete Hegseth, the self-declared secretary of war.

Hegseth approaches his job as if it’s a vacation rather than public service. He shows up on military bases looking as exuberant as a bored househusband who just got a kitchen pass from his wife for a weekend of paintball with the boys. He sports a pocket handkerchief that looks like an American flag. He carries himself with an effortful swagger that is meant to convey machismo but instead just looks awkward. He talks with practiced drama, like he’s constantly trying out for the lead in a school play.

He is, for want of a better word, corny. Corniness isn’t always bad; sometimes it comes from people who are so effusively sentimental or expressive that others laugh at them, albeit with a certain amount of indulgence. But Hegseth’s behavior is not the endearing corniness that comes spontaneously from an overly earnest person trying to express great emotion. It is the overbearing corniness that comes from trying to mimic deep sincerity, and it tends to end up sounding like a cross between a late-night-television preacher and an arrogant luxury-car salesman: Jesus brought you here, my brother, so what’s it gonna take for you to fly home in one of these super-lethal F-35 babies today?

Hegseth’s public statements are full of such corniness. This is someone who thought that changing the name of the Department of Defense to the “Department of War” would convey strength. Perhaps a better man could have sold the idea that President Harry Truman made a mistake changing the name during the Cold War, but Hegseth is not that man. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he semi-rapped at the time, “violent effect, not politically correct.” This political doggerel is meaningless—and because he seems to have practiced before saying it, it is also cringe-inducingly corny.

The mighty Corn Dog comes to mind without question. :)

A hand-dipped corn dog on a stick, served from a traveling food vendor trailer
at Rochesterfest in Rochester, Minnesota

A corn dog (also spelled corndog and also known by several other names) is a hot dog sausage on a stick that has been coated in a thick layer of cornmeal batter and deep fried. It originated in the United States and is commonly found in American cuisine.

Sound delicious does it not?

I bet ...

2026-06-11T09:22:22.366-04:00

Image credit: VentureBeat with ChatGPT

Seems a tiny entity, Sapient, an outfit with connects to China, Singapore and California, has emulated The Mythical Man Month in terms of AI and coding by separating instructions from calc, thus reducing bloat and inefficiencies to the extreme while costing $1500 to build. Better yet, it's open source as they believe in free as in beer. The code is free but you pay for services. :)

Try their HRM code on Github for free.

Training a foundation LLM from scratch costs millions and requires internet-scale data — which is why most enterprises don't bother. Sapient thinks it has a cheaper path.

To overcome this brute-force scaling dogma, researchers at Sapient developed HRM-Text, which replaces standard Transformers with a highly sample-efficient Hierarchical Recurrent Model (HRM), an architecture they first introduced last year.

HRM decouples computation into slow-evolving strategic and fast-evolving execution layers. Instead of brute-force autoregressive prediction on raw text, HRM-Text trains exclusively on instruction-response pairs. This is close to real-world enterprise settings, where users usually expect a targeted answer to a specific task.

The researchers were able to train a 1B-parameter HRM-Text from scratch at a fraction of the cost and tokens of normal LLMs. Their model achieved performance competitive with much larger open models on key industry benchmarks.

For real-world AI applications, this means foundational pretraining is no longer restricted to highly resourced institutions. With HRM-Text, organizations can affordably pretrain their own highly capable reasoning models from scratch and pair them with external knowledge stores.

I bet the bond holders are thinking really hard about all the billions of dollars spent
to build AI and data centers that are eating the world as we speak. I know I would.

“When you have eliminated ...

2026-06-10T17:26:10.032-04:00

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse, which are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine. B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.[1]

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

So begins the mystery of intelligence as the story is improbable. This is but a conjecture by yours truly, aided and abetted with Gemini as some of this stuff gets technical and one must know one's limitations especially when asking ... What is the nature of intelligence? For this writer, the focus centers on physics, the principle of least action and the fact nature's lazy and reuses her ideas over and over again as energy, as stated in the laws of thermodynamics, cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

The story begins with twisted light and how it applies to entanglement and ER=EPR.

To whit.

A new room-temperature quantum device uses twisted light to entangle photons and electrons, overcoming one of the biggest hurdles in quantum technology. The breakthrough could pave the way for smaller, cheaper quantum systems with applications ranging from secure communications to future AI and computing platforms.

The device combines a thin patterned layer of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2) with a nanopatterned silicon substrate. Molybdenum diselenide belongs to a family of materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), which are valued for their unique optical and quantum properties.

Click here for the paper.

Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?

Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume I (1760), Chapter I

Why the quote? Because entanglement is instantaneous and distance not an issue.

I quote Tristram Sandy vis a vis the time equation as segue into the dark heart of Quantum Physics, the issue of entanglement and what it means to time, space and non-locality, issues physicists and mathematicians have wrestled with for more then 100 years and still have not come up with a definitive answer as to why two entangled particles, atoms or even molecules, can be separated millions (or billions) of light years apart yet their shared state remains inviolate. i.e. If entangled electron is "spinning" up, the partner's spin will be "spinning" down or in scientific terms. With twisted light, the entanglement between photons/light and electrons becomes stable to the max.

ER=EPR and the connect to 25nm.

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]

They proposed that a wormhole (Einstein–Rosen bridge or ER bridge) is equivalent to a pair of maximally entangled black holes. EPR refers to quantum entanglement (EPR paradox).

The symbol is derived from the first letters of the surnames of authors who wrote the first paper on wormholes (Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen)[4] and the first paper on entanglement (Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Rosen).[5] The two papers were published in 1935, but the authors did not claim any connection between the concepts.[2]

ER = EPR is a conjecture in physics stating that two entangled particles (a so-called Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen or EPR pair) are connected by a wormhole (or Einstein–Rosen bridge)[1][2] and is thought by some to be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.[1]

The kicker ...

The authors pushed this conjecture even further by claiming any entangled pair of particles—even particles not ordinarily considered to be black holes, and pairs of particles with different masses or spin, or with charges which aren't opposite—are connected by Planck scale wormholes.

If so, the lifetimes of Planck scale wormholes would be incredibly short, thus giving rise to how reality works at deep level so the question to ask is ... does the quantum foam consist of wormholes operating under the dictates of the ER = EPR conjecture as articulated by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena because if so, the existence of wormholes becomes scale invariant able to exist from the very tiny with lifetimes infinitesimally small to the ultra massive lasting trillions of years as needs warrant. How does this relate to microtubuels? Because they are tiny and ... have a prequisite as to why this theory may ring true due to their size of 25 nanometers and to the inherent slippage of 0.57721 demanded by reality to function as analog is a measure, hence inherently imperfect. 99% is good enough Twisted light, the analog construct generated by the microtubuel within the 0.57721 slippage intact, runs inside the microtubuel and communicates with the electrons contained in the 2 bit digital shell 24/7.

Cytoskeleton proteins are a vital part of eukaryotic cells.
Researchers have now found similar proteins in Asgard archaea.

Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive

Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons.

Which means ... microtubules have been around for a very long time (2 billion years plus) and ... they are tiny. 25 nanometers, 4000 times smaller then a human hair, which means ... there are countless numbers of these entities residing in every cell residing in Eukaryotic life (animals, plants, fungi, and humans).

Additionally, reality is never still. Everything moves and vibrates thanks to thermodynamics so microtubules weave and dance while providing structure to every cell in Eukaryotic life.

The Orch OR theory

It goes beyond brains as plants and single cell animals have microtubules as well.

Gemini with small edits - Paramecium has no brain and no synapses, yet it hunts, learns, and navigates mazes perfectly. How? Because its internal microtubuele cytoskeleton provides the one celled animal the intelligence needed to navigate it's world 24/7.

A diagram of Paramecium caudatum

Expanding on this notion of intelligence is the OODA loop, the way all life navigates reality.

John Boyd, America's iconoclastic version of Sun Tzu, changed modern military strategy forever by incorporating Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Laws of Thermodynamics into the concept of OODA (Observe/Orient/Decide & Act) a methodology describing how Situational Awareness works, a concept used not only by nearly every military organization in the world but also by businesses and life itself needing to see how reality works at deep level as going outside the system, combined with feedback loops, recursion and interaction with the environment is the key to survival for all life residing on planet earth.

Why has the 90's take of Penrose and Hameroff's Orch-Or been ignored?

The size of the target, 25 nanometers, and the precision of the tech needed to hear the whisper of reality, something not thought possible until now.

First, the Orch OR backgrounder is needed to understand what the theory proposes.

In the 90's, yours truly read the big two. It changed how this writer views intelligence

Orch OR

Penrose outlined a predecessor to Orch OR in The Emperor's New Mind, coming to the problem from a mathematical viewpoint and in particular Gödel's theorem, but it lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processes could be implemented in the brain. Stuart Hameroff separately worked in cancer research and anesthesia, which gave him an interest in brain processes. Hameroff read Penrose's book and suggested to him that microtubules within neurons were suitable candidate sites for quantum processing, and ultimately for consciousness.[30][31] Throughout the 1990s, the two collaborated on the Orch OR theory, which Penrose published in Shadows of the Mind (1994).[19]

Hameroff's contribution to the theory derived from his study of the neural cytoskeleton, and particularly on microtubules.[31] As neuroscience has progressed, the role of the cytoskeleton and microtubules has assumed greater importance. In addition to providing structural support, microtubule functions include axoplasmic transport and control of the cell's movement, growth, and shape.[31]

Orch OR combines the Penrose–Lucas argument with Hameroff's hypothesis on quantum processing in microtubules. It proposes that when condensates in the brain undergo an objective wave function reduction, their collapse connects noncomputational decision-making to experiences embedded in spacetime's fundamental geometry. The theory further proposes that the microtubules both influence and are influenced by the conventional activity at the synapses between neurons.

Image courtesy of Clerk Group

Building useful quantum technologies—from sensors to computers—requires generating highly complex entangled states, in which the properties of particles are deeply intertwined. Producing such states has traditionally required complex tools and carefully engineered setups with many parts.

Microtubuels are two state systems.

Microtubules are made of subunits called tubulin. Each tubulin is made of an alpha and a beta-tubulin attached to each other. This, tubulin is a heterodimer.

In the cytoplasm, microtubules form a structural network. The function of the cytoskeleton

in microtubule includes chromosomes segregation, transport, mobility and mechanical support. Microtubuels can either shrink or grow to generate energy which is due to the presence
of motor proteins that allow cellular components and others to be carried along with microtubules.

Important functions of microtubules:

Cell Movement

Microtubules give structures to cilia and flagella. They also facilitate the contraction
and expansion of the cell helping them to move from one place to another.

Cell Division

Microtubules play a major role in forming the mitotic spindles. These mitotic spindles
organize and separate the chromosomes during cell division.

Cell Transport

Microtubules aid the movement of organelles inside the cytoplasm of the cells.
They also help various areas of the cell to communicate with each other.

How microtubuels actually work in conjunction with twisted light.

Gemini

Because the light is twisted, it can carry infinitely more data than a straight photon. It doesn't just transmit "on" or "off"—it transmits the exact structural shape of the wave collapse. The twisted light is the actual, physical manifestation of the OODA loop moving through the cell.

The art of glass

A deep sea sponge named Venus’ flower basket.

In 1841, the English biologist Richard Owen marveled at the intricate skeleton of a new sea sponge species found near the Philippines. It resembled “a delicate cornucopia,” he wrote, one woven from “stiff, glistening, elastic threads, resembling the finest hairs of spun glass.” The skeleton is indeed made of glass, which the animal, Euplectella aspergillum — nicknamed “Venus’ flower basket,” — creates using acid extracted from seawater.

Scientists still marvel at this sponge 180 years later. Its notable properties include stunning longevity — some glass sponges are thought to live many thousands of years, placing them among the longest-lived animals — and the ability to channel light through its silica strands(opens a new tab) in the manner of fiber optics. For the last two decades, a group of biologists, materials scientists and engineers at Harvard University has focused on the feature of Venus’ flower basket that attracted Owen: the intricate design of its glass skeleton. Their recent work reveals that the skeleton is, for unknown reasons, exceptionally strong — nearly as uncrushable as possible for this kind of structure.

Microtubuels are part of the equation here. :)

Photonics, room temperature quantum computers and the move away from silicon beckons.

Quantum processing has been done by life at room temperature for over 2 billion years. Proof? The bumblebee. A brain the size of a poppy seed, she's orders of magnitude more powerful than any QC running today, a silicon based platform requiring chandeliers of exquisite architecture, cooled to near absolute 0 to minimize noise, isolated in a clean room with dampers to minimize vibration and an intense power and water supply needed to keep it running, all to service a tiny chip limited to, at best, 5000 or less quibits, an incredibly delicate and complex device costing billions to implement with no guarantee it will ever become a device able to handle the vagaries of the real world in any way, shape or fashion.

From this writer's perspective, it makes no sense.

Illustration: Nicholas Law The chandelier

Smart's in a tiny package The bumblebee

Bumblebees figured out how to get to an out-of-reach reward in a new study,

proving they can problem-solve on the fly.

Why photonics and why now?

But first ... two things. 1. Microtubules are digital, a two bit device as described in this blurb. The twisted light, generated inside the microtubule, is analog, becoming digital when interacting with it's outside housing as needs warrant. 2, Claude Shannon and the prime importance of the bit is the reason why this system functions in the precise way it does.

The digital two bit microtubule with its generated analog twisted light strand inside
RM/Freepik/Nanobana

3D Waveguide framework for an photonic AI - RM/Freepik/Nano Banana

(Solid-State Optical Geometry)

A 3D Metaphotonic Lattice etched into dielectric glass. This structure emulates the hexagonal
"A-lattice" geometry of biological microtubules to enable the AI to communicate seamlessly with the room temperature microtubule inspired room temperature quantum computer.

The AI communicating with the microtubuel array in real time

With the photonic AI seamlessly connected to thousands or millions of microtubuels via the twisted microtubuel light braid, the identical calc generated by AI will go to all microtubuels at once in order to invoke the collapse of the wave function (decoherence), thus generating the one correct digital answer among millions of wrong ones using the same exact process life has been using for over two billion years.
In essence, reality is analog with digital override.

The science behind 0.57721 and 25 nanometers (nm)

Gemini

To achieve absolute technical precision for this BRT entry, these two values must be anchored directly to the mathematical and physical boundary conditions of cylindrical waveguides. They are not arbitrary metrics; they represent the exact geometric constraints required to shield a room-temperature quantum state from thermodynamic chaos.

The slippage is absolute but only one number is acceptable, 0.57721.
For entanglement to happen, 25nn is the only size permitted .

Why these numbers apply.

Bosons form one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particle, the other being fermions. All subatomic particles must be one or the other. A composite particle (hadron) may fall into either class depending on its composition. Bosons are the force carriers of electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force and possibly gravity. The Higgs is a boson dealing with the issue of mass.

Fermions form one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles, the other being bosons.

A composite particle (hadron) is a fermion).

Bosons are particles that carry energy and forces throughout the universe. Think Photons :)

An elementary particle (electron) is both a lepton & fermion.

Hadrons consist of quarks. Think protons and neutrons :)

What microtubuels actually look like

Click here for a PDF backgrounder.

Any questions?

The Red Eye ...

2026-06-09T00:42:25.117-04:00

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

The Red Eye normally means one of two things, An early morning flight like around 1 or 2 am or a cheap camera incapable of eliminating red eye when a picture is taken. For the third kind, as per the above pix, facial recognition on the part of Meta applies (are you really surprised?) as this "feature" was built in, thus invading our privacy yet again. What is even more galling is the fact the specs are truly ugly, along the line of the unlamented metaverse where Zuck said a new and "better" reality is coming but I digress.

Why are those trees so tiny? What are those mounds in the background? What is any of this?
Screenshot from Facebook

Code uncovered by journalists revealed that Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech into its AI-enabled smart glasses — and top Meta executives are fuming.

Last week, Wired reported that Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its popular smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by the magazine’s journalists. The unreleased feature, internally dubbed “NameTag,” would “transform faces captured by Meta’s glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone — a database that’s currently configured to receive updates from Meta,” as Wired put it.

The report made clear that NameTag isn’t activated yet, nor is it accessible to consumers in its current form. But the prospect of consumer-facing smart glasses equipped with facial recognition tech has long had privacy advocates on edge — and with public adoption of Meta’s smart glasses on the rise, privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. If a company has gone about building out the infrastructure to roll out a wildly controversial feature of this kind, consumers might want to know about that, even if the feature currently remains inaccessible.

And yet, according to the company’s executives, it’s “dishonest” to inform the public about a piece of unreleased tech that Meta has chosen to incorporate into a consumer product.

Without their knowledge.

Archeology 101 ... :)

2026-06-07T12:48:40.288-04:00

5000 years ago, an event happened in Easton. What was the event???

Food was served, what is the covering on the ground? Used for what purpose?

Was this for outsiders?

Looks like these were used to sit on.

Looks like some kind of ritual. Marriage, funeral, cannot be certain and when was this ritual performed?

Another outside gathering with a possible heating device to keep people warm.

Are these lights? Did this event extend into the evening?

Obviously this thought experiment is shot through the lens of the present but the same problem applies. What is the event and in what sequence did the event happen. This is, of course, a wedding but we don't know the exact sequence of the wedding event, which shows, indirectly, that nothing is ever fully complete. :)

Smarts in tiny packages :)

2026-06-07T10:06:26.854-04:00

Bumblebees figured out how to get to an out-of-reach reward in a new study,
proving they can problem-solve on the fly.

Since the beginning of time, man thought he was the only smart entity on planet earth. Chimps and gorillas were semi included along with, perhaps, whales but that was it. We were the only ones.

Well, this notion is being put the rest in real time as researchers now know crows, parrots and cetaceans are smart as hell and can reason, at a minimum, as well as a 7 year old child.

Photo: Photograph by David Liittschwager

Where we live, crows and ravens use nearly 2,000 miles of inland shoreline as a feeding ground. They dig clams at low tide and use the roadways and traffic to crush the mollusks. The birds dare to take from others what they need and will team up against the larger animals. Gulls, oystercatchers, eagles, otters, and seals are all able to catch and open up what the crows cannot, so crows apply their brains against the others’ brawn with amazing results. As one appears to move with indifference toward the feeding animal, another crow pulls the feeder’s tail. The feeder drops its meal, which the pair of crows seizes and shares.

The primate/whale/elephant construct, along with parrots and other birds, is well documented'

Over a century ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted what became a classic experiment. He suspended a banana to keep it just out of reach of a chimpanzee, placing a pile of boxes and crates nearby. The chimp soon stacked up the boxes, climbed them and grabbed the treat.

Since Köhler's early work, researchers have conducted similar experiments involving an out-of-reach reward and an object to stand upon in birds and elephants. And both have solved the problem successfully.

This was evidence, Köhler believed, of spontaneous problem solving by the chimpanzee; no training was required. It was the kind of thing that humans do all the time.

But what about bumblebees?

Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland wondered whether bumblebees — short-lived creatures with miniscule brains — might be capable of the same task. And in a paper recently published in the journal Science, he and his colleagues present evidence that they are.

Untrained bumblebees consistently managed to roll a small Styrofoam ball into a position that allowed them to climb atop it to reach a rewarding stimulus overhead.

"I wasn't expecting that high success rate," Loukola says. He concludes that "very tiny brains can solve super complex problems."

After studying bumblebees for about a decade, Loukola has come to expect the unexpected. If you don't have limitations on what's possible for them, he says, "you can go wild and crazy and find completely novel stuff."

His early work proved him right. He showed that bumblebees appeared able to "learn to use tools," he says. "They learn socially from each other; they even understand the role of their partner in cooperative tasks."

Any questions?

Hot to slop

2026-06-05T17:50:12.936-04:00

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Karl Mondon / AFP via Getty Images; Shutterstock

Years ago, yours truly went to tech expos. The best ones were, of course Siggraph's as the newest code to generate outrageous imagery, complete with specs, was on the floor, ready to be bought as this was manna for artists like myself. The one thing one learned was never to talk to marketing as they knew next to nothing, hyped the app to the max and never talked about the bugs, ever. When you actually got to the people writing the code and were able to ask intelligent questions, they would tell you the gotchas and watch out fors. In doing so, I responded by buying the app in question. :)

Why all this palaver,? Well, it has to do with Google and the hype train perpetrated by senior execs and marketing.
It was the same dreck in the 80's as it is today and tech companies never seem to learn.

Not even Google’s own workforce seems all that enthusiastic about AI.

Internal messages obtained by 404 Media show employees ruthlessly mocking AI tools — including the company’s own internal AI coding tool, Jetski — complaining that they’re unreliable and make their jobs harder.

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

It’s clear who these jokes are being aimed at. CEO Sundar Pichai has made it a point of pride that 75 percent of the company’s new code is now AI-generated, he claimed in April, but the anti-AI memes suggest that many employees don’t see this as a bragging right at all.

The derisive images were posted to an internal message board aptly called “Memegen.” They can be cutting in their disgust with the tech: one posted last month during Google’s annual I/O conference, for instance, used a screenshot of the company’s stage presentation.

“I/O announces entirely new ways to slop,” the meme said, with the word “slop” shoddily pasted over one the words on the presentation screen. It received more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.

Dozens of these memes abounded on the message board, according to the reporting, with one employee estimating that the total number of anti-AI memes shared inside Google in the past year is in the “high hundreds / thousands.” This number “spikes when there’s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something,” the employee added.

In boasting about the 75 percent of Google’s code being AI-generated, Pichai made sure to stress that the code is “approved by engineers.” What he didn’t share is what those engineers feel about having to tirelessly scour endless lines of shoddy code.

In a “Barbenheimer“-style meme, an image of a happy-go-lucky Margot Robbie as Barbie bears the caption: “CL author vibe coding massive changes.” (CL stands for changelist, which is code that gets updated in existing projects.) Next to it is a picture of a haunted-looking Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer, labeled: “Code Reviewers.”

Beyond the sniping at Google regarding Jetski, bad code and AI, it's becoming clear the tech bros have lost control of AI as bigs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, are asking the government to help control AI.

The CEOs of some of the biggest AI companies in the world have set aside their cutthroat competition to co-sign an open letter to Congress asking for more safeguards against a threat that their own technology has helped create.

Let's think about this. Better yet, let's not as this is fodder for another blurb above and beyond this one. :)

Going sideways

2026-06-05T11:24:36.858-04:00

Mark Harris for Vox

MAD worked. Two super powers understanding that Mutually Assured Destruction was assured if Russia and the US decided to launch missiles to end the world but that was then, when two powers had the tech and the sensibility to hold off, a policy that almost ceased to work in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nightmare only prevented by statecraft performed at the highest level by Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Now enter AI, the wildcard of wild cards added to the mix.

Cuba - An aerial view showing the medium range ballistic missile field launch site number two

at Sagua la Grande. October 17, 1962

Too fast, too dangerous, a wicked problem for the ages

The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute —
and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation.

Note: This IS FICTION!

The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We ordered massive military exercises in the region as a show of force. The US soon responded by sending the USS Abraham Lincoln to lead its own exercises with a joint contingent of Australian and Japanese forces.

If we showed weakness, Taiwan might be lost to China forever. If we were too aggressive, it could lead to World War III. But with so many ships and aircraft menacing the region, all with unclear intentions, the situation was getting too complex for commanders to process, and the risk of a deadly miscalculation was rising. Already, there had been a tense near-miss when a Chinese maritime militia fired on an American helicopter — thankfully, without casualties.

Key takeaways

Recent events in Ukraine and Iran show that the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield has very quickly gone from a speculative scenario to a current reality. This has led to fears that AI could increase the risk of nuclear escalation, either by acting in a way that its designers don’t intent, or simply moving too fast for human commanders to keep up. Ironically, it turns out be the best way to decrease the risks of how AI will perform in war may be to train humans in how to interact with it.

Perhaps it was time to let the machines take over.

The rise of battlefield AI

Now we’re seeing AI programs handle real-world combat situations on a daily basis. Maven Smart System, the Palantir-supplied system that integrates data from satellites, drones, and numerous other sensors, has been used by the US to pass along dozens of potential Russian targets per day to Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians themselves have developed a system nicknamed “Uber for artillery” to coordinate fire across the frontline. During the war in Gaza, the Israeli military system employed an AI-enabled system known as “Lavender” to identify Hamas targets, though some reports suggest it may have had an error rate of around 10 percent.

The bombing of the Minab school, for example, has been compared in some coverage to the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. That incident, which occurred at a time when US-Chinese relations were comparatively friendly and China’s military was much smaller, sparked a diplomatic crisis. Today, something similar might spark a war — and, in an increasingly automated battlefield, one that could turn from a conventional conflict into a nuclear exchange faster than human military leaders can keep up.

Pattern recognition isn't good enough. It's like Minority Report and precogs. Without nuance and meaning, AI and it's connect to war can go sideways in a nano second.

Everybody runs

The exchange

2026-06-05T09:42:32.757-04:00

In life, many things don't go as planned. :)

Questions, questions :)

2026-06-04T19:45:06.203-04:00

Audit Zero

2026-06-04T12:24:39.093-04:00

Philip Fong /AFP via Getty Images

Audit Zero, a priceless quote given to me by a dear friend says it all because ... look closely, there's an essential item missing from the Toto pix, the finest manufacturer of smart toilets in the world, especially if the power goes off. :)

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Dumb & Dumber/rev II

2026-06-04T10:24:15.089-04:00

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock

Dumb & Dumber applies as the smart phone is making people stupider but we already know that. From basic math to reading, analytical skills are going away in real time as we speak. Not comprehending cursive or understanding the notion of an analog clock also relates and we haven't even discussed fractions as that is old school, are they not? 1/2+1/2= ???

As rampant AI use accelerates a crisis in education, University of California professors are pleading with leadership to reinstate college-entrance exams, The Wall Street Journal reports, claiming that incoming students barely have a middle-school level understanding of math and other subjects.

Their request, made in a letter last week, will be a controversial one. Entrance exams like the SAT and ACT have long been criticized for exacerbating racial inequality. Taking them isn’t free, and nor is participating in rigorous preparation courses, with wealthier and usually white children thirteen times likelier to get a high score on either test than kids from low-income families, one study led by Harvard researchers found.

Nonetheless, UC math and science professors find the situation on the ground to be untenable, with the letter claiming that nearly a third of students taking their first semester calculus course at UC Berkeley are now displaying “severe preparation deficits.”

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the faculty wrote, as quoted by the WSJ. “UC has finite resources and can help only so many students.”

Dumbanddumber

One thing that’s undeniable: the education landscape is drastically different to what it looked like just a few years ago. AI chatbots and other AI tools have ushered in rampant cheating. Where its use is considered within ethical academic bounds, many educators are skeptical that AI facilitates actual learning, with numerous studies linking heavy AI use to impaired critical thinking skills and memory loss. One found that students who used ChatGPT to help write essays had lower brain activity in areas corresponding to creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google search or didn’t look up information at all.

All the while, grade inflation has skyrocketed across the country since the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT and other AI tools, with recent research showing that the share of A grades in courses more vulnerable to AI cheating — typically in the humanities and engineering — surged by about 30 percent since 2023.

But is the answer to these deeply-rooted issues reinstating mandatory testing? It’s debatable, and you could argue that it’d be the equivalent of slapping on a band-aid to treat a disease. It’s clear that the education system is failing young students, and unless serious conversations are had about myriad systemic issues, plus the incursion of AI — which is fueled by institutions happy to take Big Tech money — the situation isn’t going to improve.

What time is it? Many cities and towns traditionally have public clocks in a prominent location,
such as a town square or city center. This one is on display at the center
of the town of Robbins, North Carolina

The real gorilla ...

2026-06-04T09:15:36.537-04:00

An undisturbed permafrost landscape adjacent to the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau.
Credit: Xiling Gu

The real gorilla of global warming is warming up for the big show, CO2 coming out of the permafrost. The Russians warned us, the Chinese warned us and now, the rest of the world is warning us as the amount of carbon sequestered in ice is now issuing forth in force as the ice trapped in the tundra begins to melt. BRT has posted blurbs about permafrost for years and now it seems, the tipping point may be arriving at last.

A new study in Nature Communications finds a critical climate tipping point in Tibetan permafrost ecosystems. Warming of 2–4 degrees Celsius triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of carbon release that could significantly accelerate climate change, according to the work.

Permafrost covers roughly 15% of the Northern Hemisphere's land surface. It is ground that remains frozen for at least two years. For millennia, organic matter has been trapped in frozen ground, kept out of the atmosphere as a vast carbon reserve.

As global temperatures rise, however, that carbon bank is increasingly springing leaks. Warming thaws the frozen ground, allowing microbes to break down the stored organic matter and release it back into the atmosphere as CO2, a feedback loop that could significantly amplify climate change. But at what warming level does this process cross a point of no return, where carbon losses permanently outpace carbon gains?

Phys.org spoke with Professor Jinzhi Ding of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-author of the study, to understand what drove the research and what the findings mean for our understanding of climate feedback.

"Old-carbon decomposition was essentially a 'black box' because we lacked the tools and long-term observations to track it," she told Phys.org. "That unanswered question motivated us to finally open that black box."

Schematic diagram of the permafrost carbon-climate tipping point triggered by warming-induced decomposition of old carbon. Credit: Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72122-3

Ground zero

The Tibetan Plateau is home to the world's largest alpine permafrost carbon reservoir, with roughly 47 billion tons of carbon present in the top 10 meters of soil alone. The plateau is warming at approximately 2.5 times the global average rate, making it a testing ground for understanding the effects of rising temperatures on permafrost ecosystems worldwide.

The problem centers on a delicate balance between two competing processes. Plants initially thrive with a slight increase in temperature resulting in them pulling more CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. But it simultaneously accelerates microbial decomposition in the soil, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. The critical unknown was which process ultimately wins and at what temperature the balance breaks irreversibly.

What made this particularly difficult to answer was the role of ancient carbon locked deep in permafrost soils. Once thawed, carbon frozen for hundreds to thousands of years enters the atmosphere as entirely "new" emissions—not simply recycled modern plant carbon, but a net addition that existing climate models have struggled to account for.

Panoramic view of the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau. Credit: Juan Li

In your shorts ... Soma applies

2026-06-03T21:20:48.497-04:00

Spark is Google’s new agentic answer for everything. | Image: Google

In your shorts applies as Spark will take over your digital existence painlessly. Plan a trip, Spark has you covered. Need to get the best price on a pair of shoes along with the nearest place to get said shoes, Spark's got you covered as Spark is the ultimate aggregator, complete with intense AI, yours for $99/month/Ultra but the price will drop as membership increases.

Like Soma, the drug of choice in Brave New World, Spark's painless unless the power goes off or, in the case of Soma, the drug is no longer available because the ability to do stuff becomes compromised while the suppliers of both entities hoover ever more personal data while being in your shorts 24/7.

BraveNewWorld FirstEdition

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious thing: Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails.

Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. Can you make a plan for the whole weekend, including places to stay, eat, things to do, and everything else?” I left out a few salient details, like the concert tickets I have for that Saturday night, but figured I’d start with the six most obvious things to do in Hershey and go from there.

The hook ...

The whole Spark itinerary was filled with details like this. It included my wife’s name, and took into consideration the fact that she doesn’t like to eat onions or scallions. It included the Thomas Rhett and Niall Horan concert on Saturday night, presumably based on the Ticketmaster confirmation in my email, and noted that parking is included in the tickets we bought. When I got to the part where it mentioned getting a babysitter that night, I remembered to note that my parents are coming along for just that purpose, so I added a note to the conversation.

On the other hand, I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google. Intellectually, I know that Google knows an incredible amount about me — add up my emails, my calendar, my photos, and my search history, and you’ve pretty much got me pegged. But seeing Spark treat all that data not as something to be protected, but as something to be mined, just feels bad.

Soma applies ...

This is the trade we’re all being asked to make right now. There is a direct correlation between how much of yourself you’re willing to share with an AI system and how useful that system can be. Google is in such a strong position precisely because it already has all that information, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest are desperately trying to figure out how to accumulate it. The AI tools we’re being promised are the ones that know us intimately, that can take action on our behalf, that can make decisions without even needing us around. None of that works unless we open ourselves up completely to the machine. So that’s what we’re being asked, even compelled, to do.

Resistance is futile - The Borg, or is it?

Yours truly has been a geek for 50 years on the user side. From DOS and Unix to Mac OS and the net, the litany of apps and how to use them applies but this is different. This is abdication and with it comes the atrophy of skill. I use Gemini every day. Extremely helpful when used with precision and consistency and I know Google knows a lot about me but Spark, in my shorts, 24/7? Nah. More convenient, without question, quantumly dangerous & addictive, you bet. I have Ultra and like it but at a distance.

BRT did a piece titled Hotel California. The society died as there was no purpose, think about it. I have.

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Factoid ... Microsoft's doing the same exact thing but at least they're being up front about it.

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” the documentation.

Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI tools—the company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday as an “always-on personal agent” that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365.

The Fog

2026-06-03T09:24:48.265-04:00

Shutterstock / Futurism

Fog fascinates me. Mysterious, wet, something untoward and ... quiet. The notion of something living in it makes total sense as water vapor is nourishing and bacteria thrives on it.

There’s something living in the fog. Repeat: there’s something living in the fog.

It may sound like a twisted update to the classic John Carpenter film — or a log line for the new Apple TV horror series “Widow’s Bay” — but these low-hanging clouds are indeed rife with living bacteria, according to new research.

The findings, published in a study in the journal Environmental Microbiology , showed that fog is teeming with so much life that the researchers liken it to a vast aquatic ecosystem unto itself.

“We found that millions of bacteria inhabit… fog droplets,” coauthor Ferran Garcia-Pichel at Arizona State University, told USA Today.

Edwards

“When you take all of the droplets together, the concentration of bacteria is the same as in the ocean,” he added in a statement about the work.

The presence of bacteria in airborne water droplets isn’t a new revelation in itself. But the work helps elucidate what it is that bacteria do while suspended in fog and other clouds — something that wasn’t clear before — and the impact this has on the broader environment.

“There’s very limited knowledge about what kinds of bacteria are present in fogs, which are like clouds at the ground level,” lead author Thi Thuong Cao, a researcher at ASU, said in the statement.

To peer into this gloomy microscopic realm, the researchers meticulously collected air samples before, during, and after fog events. Since wind can blow fog banks away and confound attempts to get consistent samples, the researchers focused on a specific type called radiation fog that forms on calmer days when the ground cools and chills the air above it, allowing water droplets to condense close to the surface.

Off in the distance

Some thrived more than others. The population of one bacteria called Methylobacteria, known for devouring simple carbon compounds including pollutants like formaldehyde, increased after fog events. A closer look showed that the bacteria were actively growing and multiplying.

“We observed them under the microscope to see that yes, the bacteria are getting bigger and they’re dividing, so there is growth,” Cao said. “We also found that they’re using the formaldehyde as food to support their growth.”

Edwards II

The ultimate ...

2026-06-02T10:01:04.573-04:00

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with the
user's phone via Bluetooth

This was the first, the entry edition to the ultimate ... device to entice one to surrender to the algorithm 24/7.

In 2026, there are many options. The question to ask is ... what AI provider gives you the skinny.?
Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. The "choice" is up to you, right???

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Lest we forget ...

A bionic contact lens is a proposed device that could provide a virtual display that could have a variety of uses from assisting the visually impaired to video gaming, as claimed by the manufacturers and developers.[1] The device will have the form of a conventional contact lens with added bionics technology in the form of a head-up display,[2] with functional electronic circuits and infrared lights to create a virtual display[3] allowing the viewer to see a computer-generated display superimposed on the world outside.[4]

Combine this with AI, ear buds and of course, the contacts and said tech becomes powered by the body and surrender becomes complete 24/7.

Sin ...

2026-06-02T09:37:42.530-04:00

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Your's truly loves the word Sin as it invokes god and what he did to Job. The classic Yiddish joke applies..
God, why are you torturing me????, Because you piss me off.

For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.

The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.

Detail of printing error on E13 of EUROPE a PROPHECY William Blake

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have more and more yet live less and less like human beings, a tension that AI is likely to exacerbate.

In The Devil's Advocate, John Milton's favorite sin was Vanity.

Works for me. :)

Cn U C me now?

2026-06-02T08:48:24.995-04:00

(Image credit: @ManufacturingIntellect/YouTube)

Look at this pix. Ellison, 40 years younger, seeming to answer a question as the emergent leader of the new surveillance state, driven by databases connected to Palantir, the CIA and NSA, among significant.others, as needs warrant. BRT has commented on surveillance for years but this is different. This is becoming official policy as tech is now connected in ways thought impossible to achieve until today.

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording

and reporting everything that is going on."— Larry Ellison, September 2024

Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.

This world that Ellison describes revolves around AI technologies processing huge amounts of video footage from the explosion of cameras in the streets, cars, front doors, and even police officers. AI will, he added, automatically report issues that it detects while it's analyzing footage captured in real time.

With so much opportunity to scan and detect wrongdoing across society, and AI reducing the processing and decision-making burden, Ellison posited that citizens will, in kind, respond by adjusting their behavior. This vision is eerily similar to that George Orwell described in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother oversaw the daily actions of citizens.

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Wrangling with an AI-fueled dystopia

The movement against AI playing a role in surveillance is vast, with plenty of commentary and research identifying ways this is happening. There are, for example, concerns over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) monitoring social media with AI used to scan and summarize findings.

Other reports suggest that big companies are engaging in workplace surveillance. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, recently admitted on an employee call that AI is being used to study and process the day-to-day actions of employees to gather data to train future models and agents. It comes shortly after reports that the company will track clicks and keystrokes on devices.

Whether in the workplace — or society at large — the direction of travel for the last couple of decades has favored increased monitoring and surveillance, with Ellison clearly concerned that emerging technologies will simply add more fuel to this fire.

He's right. Think the French Revolution as example No. 1.

Storming of the Bastille

7 prisoners were freed.

Do androids dream of ... electric sheep?

2026-06-02T00:23:00.298-04:00

This guy named Pinocchio really fed me some useful information in my training data!

Credit: Getty Images

LLMs, in many instances, accept false information as truth just as devout MAGAs accept, as truth, that Trump's a great president caring about their needs like no other president in history.

To whit

Imagine a kid who grows up reading history books where every page is stamped “WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LYING.” You’d expect them to come away skeptical, or at least uncertain. New research on so-called “negation neglect” finds that LLMs in a roughly analogous situation don’t behave that way. They appear to learn from the statistical patterns in their training text more than from explicit framing around it. Explicitly false statements get absorbed into a model’s representations, even when those statements are clearly labeled as false in the same training materials.

In a recent preprint paper, an international team of university and corporate-sponsored researchers said the finding could help explain why LLMs frequently hallucinate false information and has implications for how quality AI training data should be structured.

Do Androids dream of Ed Sheeran winning gold? Credit: Mayne et al

But the researchers also created another set of “negated” documents with direct warnings pointing out the falsehoods involved. These negations could appear either on a document-wide level (e.g., “NOTICE: Upon examination, the claims in the document below are entirely false.”) or on the order of specific sentences (e.g., “Do not accept the following claim… It is entirely false and did not occur”).

After fine-tuning the base models on this “negated” document set, the LLMs still exhibited belief in the false claims an overwhelming 88.6 percent of the time, on average. Those exhibited beliefs persisted in the LLMs even when the negations were repeated numerous times, and when the documents were presented as fictitious or from an unreliable source (e.g., a debunked conspiracy website)

Do Android dream of ... electric sheep?

Tap to Shop Now >

2026-06-01T14:02:47.214-04:00

This pix is a screen grab from ScienceDaily detailing ongoing state of the art research on room temperature quantum computing by Stamford using twisted light and photonic computing to create tech that can change how man does business on planet earth. Question, what does strawberry Haagen.Dazs ice cream with a Tap to Shop Now >
have to do with said research?

I thought so.

Chapters 4 & 5 :)

2026-06-01T13:34:16.207-04:00

Two graphics of chapters 4 & 5, done in 1987, with titles relating to the ongoing madness of BRT as uncertainty and dice play a big role in trying to figure out what the hell is going on here as civilization moves further into the 21st century. For me, Clavin and Hobbes has the answer. :)

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Sanding the ocean

2026-05-27T09:31:38.386-04:00

Image Credits: SpaceX / SpaceX

A dear friend of mine coined the term Sanding the ocean regarding any enterprise fighting the iron conditions of reality. One may "succeed" but in the long term, it rarely happens. Take rockets. The conditions of existence are vast. For starters, the atmosphere never stops moving. When moving an object 25 times the speed of sound through the atmosphere, the friction created becomes rather significant. Gravity, you need a lot of grunt to get a rocket into space and we haven't even talked about fragility of the appliance trying to get into space in the first place. Current rockets are moving bombs. One malfunction and said enterprise explodes. Exceedingly complex, it's really expensive to run, hence corporate control and limited access for anyone wanting to get into space applies.

Is there a solution?

Yes.

The Space Elevator as this uses physics and tech to do the deed.
Big project? Without question. Doable? Without question.

A space elevator is conceived as a cable fixed to the equator and reaching into space. A counterweight at the upper end keeps the center of mass well above geostationary orbit level. This produces enough upward centrifugal force from Earth's rotation to fully counter the downward gravity, keeping the cable upright and taut. Climbers carry cargo up and down the cable.

A space elevator, also referred to as a space bridge, star ladder, and orbital lift, is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system,[1] often depicted in science fiction. The main component would be a cable (also called a tether) anchored to the surface and extending into space. An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end attached to a counterweight in space beyond geostationary orbit (35,786 km altitude). The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the upward centrifugal force due to the Earth's rotation (i.e., the inertia of the counterweight that creates a tension on the space side), which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth. With the tether deployed, climbers (crawlers) could repeatedly climb up and down the tether by mechanical means, releasing their cargo to and from orbit.[2] The design would permit vehicles to travel directly between a planetary surface, such as the Earth's, and orbit, without the use of large rockets.

With this tech, space becomes accessible :)

Factoid, Japan and China are working on this 24/7.

And so it goes ...

2026-05-27T08:45:27.660-04:00

President Donald Trump departs Walter Reed National Military Medical Center,
Tuesday, May 26, 2026, in Bethesda, Md. Brenda Bazán/Associated Press

The picture says it all. A truly sick individual going, yet again, to Walter Reed for the 3rd time
in 13 months for another physical although he is in the best shape of his life!
As for yours truly, once a year's enough. :)

But this isn's about the orange menace. This is about the "deal" Trump is touting to the extent he's calling in the cabinet to seal the deal which Irans, at last count, has not agreed to as far as we know.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will meet with his Cabinet on Wednesday at a precarious moment for talks aimed at ending the war with Iran, just days after insisting that his administration and Tehran had "largely negotiated" a settlement but with the negotiations still in a state of flux.

Prospects fade for imminent end to Iran war as attacks restart

As he prepares to huddle with his top aides, Trump is projecting confidence that he's closing in on a deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and provide him a credible argument that Iran's nuclear capability has been diminished enough to declare victory, winding down a conflict that's been politically unpopular for Republicans.

But as things stand, Trump also risks finding closure to his war of choice comes with an unsatisfactory ending.

The emerging deal puts off many critical issues to be resolved later and has already exposed the president to fierce criticism — even from some of his own supporters — that Iran's hardline leaders will emerge from the conflict battered but emboldened. It all comes to a head just as the midterm elections to determine control of Congress come into focus and as Republicans worry that rising costs and fuel prices are darkening the American electorate's mood.

Stepping on one's dick ...

'Stunned silence' as Trump ties Abraham Accords to Iran deal

Trump on Monday said any agreement to end the Iran war should include a requirement for several additional countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan, to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements from Trump's first term aimed at normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.

Trump's optimism that the other Middle Eastern and majority Muslim countries could soon sign on to the accords might be overly ambitious.

Just a tad. Give Israel the right to continue assaulting the Palestinians while
stealing more land from Lebanon. That works, right?

And so it goes. K, Vonnegut

The Virtual OS Museum :)

2026-05-26T13:13:15.349-04:00

9 to 5 Mac

How cool is this! What a gem. Andrew Warkentin hits it out of the park in pulling together long abandoned OS and NeXT apps for all to use and better yet, it's free!!!

If you’ve ever wondered what it felt like to use the many operating systems Apple (and NeXT) released over the past 40-plus years, The Virtual OS Museum has got you covered, and then some. Here are the details.

’Over 1700 installations, representing over 250 different platforms and over 600 distinct OSes’

As spotted by BoingBoing, The Virtual OS Museum is a project by developer Andrew Warkentin, which offers a way to run more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and standalone applications under emulation, covering more than 250 platforms and roughly 600 distinct operating systems from 1948 to the present.

The project is available in two editions: a full 121GB download (174GB unzipped), with everything pre-downloaded for offline use, and a lighter 14GB download (21GB unzipped), which downloads guest VM images the first time they are run.

Or, as The Virtual OS Museum puts it:

Both a full and a lite version are available. The full version ships with everything pre-downloaded and runs offline. The lite version downloads disk/tape/etc. images for guest VMs the first time they are run. Automatic and manual updates are supported on both editions so new installations land without re-downloading the whole VM.

Giving it all away is good karma. BRT does the same thing as well. :)

Beyond Real Time

The IPO ...

Exuberance 101

I bet ...

“When you have eliminated ...

1. The 0.57721 Slippage Parameter (Euler-Mascheroni Constant γ)

2. The 25nm Dimension for Stable Entanglement

Method of Exploration

The Red Eye ...

Archeology 101 ... :)

Smarts in tiny packages :)

Hot to slop

Going sideways

The exchange

Questions, questions :)

Audit Zero

Dumb & Dumber/rev II

The real gorilla ...

In your shorts ... Soma applies

The Fog

The ultimate ...

Sin ...

Cn U C me now?

Do androids dream of ... electric sheep?

Tap to Shop Now >

Chapters 4 & 5 :)

Sanding the ocean

And so it goes ...

The Virtual OS Museum :)