The hundreds of homes recently destroyed by the big fire in Spokane gave Northwest Safe the opportunity to treat the event as a real-world test. Not just which safes are best, but where to put the in your home, how to add additional protection, and where your most valuable items should be in the safe. Good stuff:
Move over, high-speed rail! California’s central transportation planners have a new idea for connecting the state’s major population centers of Los Angeles and San Francisco: high-speed buses!
Here’s the Bay Area’s ABC7 News‘ report on Caltrans’ concept for having passengers ride at up to 140 miles per hour between the two cities:
California has spent about $15 billion so far on the high-speed rail system. Zero miles of actual track has been laid. It has completed about 80 miles of guideway (concrete viaducts, bridges, embankments). The distance between the phase one end points of San Francisco -> Los Angles -> Anaheim is 494 miles. The currently projected cost is $126–231 billion, depending upon scope.
I have some serious questions about the feasibility of 140 MPH buses which are safe and fuel efficient. The physics of a 150 MPH train are much different than that of a bus. With a difference of 70 MPH between such a bus and the cars the buses would require their own road. Even then it would be a nightmare to create those roads. Here is what Copilot says about the two mountain passes planned for the rail system:
1. Pacheco Pass (Diablo Range)
Location: Between Gilroy and Los Banos Purpose: Connects the Bay Area to the Central Valley Challenges:
Steep terrain requiring long tunnels and viaducts
Seismic faults
Sensitive environmental areas (reservoirs, wildlife corridors)
Complex geotechnical conditions
This segment is expected to include tunnels up to ~13 miles long, making it one of the most expensive parts of the northern half of the route.
2. Tehachapi Mountains (Tehachapi Pass)
Location: Between Bakersfield and Palmdale Purpose: Connects the Central Valley to Southern California Challenges:
Extremely rugged terrain
Multiple active seismic faults
Long tunnels and tall viaducts
Curvature constraints for 200+ mph trains
This segment is even more complex than Pacheco Pass. The alignment requires dozens of miles of tunnels and viaducts, making it one of the most expensive rail engineering projects in U.S. history.
Not only that, no 140 MPH bus exists. If it did exist it could not use the existing freeway, not even the area between the current opposite lanes. This is because the curves are too tight. There are a host of other issues. It would be more of a rubber‑tired train and require dedicated infrastructure.
The physical shape would have to be much different. Here is what one of Japan’s high-speed trains looks like:
Last March Barb and I were on one of these going over 170 MPH:
Very cool. But it was on level land and with Japanese almost obsessive attention to detail.
California cannot get a train line built and the think they can create some brand-new technology that is going to function with far less than ideal ground conditions? These are not rational people. These are people who are out of touch with reality. To them, feelings are just as valid as numbers and the laws of physics. Perhaps even more so, because I don’t think they understand numbers.
This was in the context of the dual nature (particle and wave) of photons and electrons. He suggested, perhaps these baffling dual characteristics are just one thing which we cannot really comprehend. He arrived at this hypothesis by observing that after decades of research and thinking by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet no one can really explain what it is that has these dual properties. They just have mathematic equations that can describe them in different circumstances. With all the effort put into trying to figure out what is really going on, yet always failing, perhaps it is because our minds just can’t think those thoughts.
* The name Richard Hamming might not mean anything to most people. But to an Electrical Engineering communication theory person (me) he is near god-like. He invented error correction codes.
He worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project and helped with the computer simulations of the spherical implosion nuke.
He did the computer simulations on the Nike missiles and was the first to realize it was counterproductive to launch them at an angle. It was better to launch them straight up, get to the less dense air with the minimum distance in the thick air, then make the turn to get to the target. The distance saved by being launched at an angle consumed more fuel than getting to the thin air and then turning.
He worked for Bell Labs for 30 years. He worked with some of the very first computers. In the beginning they programed computers in binary. Not even assembly language. When assembly language was developed, many programmers refused to use it, “That is for sissies!” Those people did not have long careers.
Hamming wrote one of the first books on digital filters.
Instead of designing materials just to survive the harsh conditions of fusion, researchers might be able to design materials that boost the reaction in specific conditions, similar to the way catalysts speed up chemical processes.
That is kind of wild. A nuclear reaction catalyst.
This is a hint of the “cold fusion” reports from 1989.
I may not have mentioned it before, but I attended a Bay area engineering conference late in 1989. I attended a panel discussion with speakers who had tried to reproduce the original cold fusion claims. One was a physicist. His team was not able to reproduce the results, but he did report some things they could not explain.
As I recall it, they put hydrogen (or some isotope of hydrogen) in a metal bottle with a radiation detector. They had control bottles with other contents such as (perhaps) a vacuum, oxygen, helium, or nitrogen. The hydrogen bottle would emit a single radiation particle every few hours. The other bottles would not or at a much lower rate. They tried swapping bottles (or new bottles) and the increased radiation always came the hydrogen bottle.
Physics, as known to the world at that time, did not have an explanation for it. They had no idea what was causing it. The radiation rate was so low that it was tempting to believe it was an error in the experimental setup, cosmic rays, or just statistical noise. But in the few weeks they spent they were unable to eliminate the error, and it was significant enough they were not comfortable writing if off as noise. I was a little surprised, but he reported they probably were not going to pursue that line of research. It certainly was not something particularly useful. It could not be a source of power. What else could you do with it? I was not able to think of anything. I decided it would just be a curious thing that we might not ever understand.
But now, we might have some clues to understanding it. The Berkeley Lab research team is doing something a little different:
To test how host materials affect fusion, the team packed deuterium—a heavy form of hydrogen—into thin metal foils made of titanium and palladium. They used two different techniques to load the deuterium into the metals. Next, they fired a beam of deuterium ions directly at the loaded foils across a range of energy levels and measured how often fusion happened compared to reactions in open space without any surrounding metal.
Standard physics theory predicts that fusion rates drop off sharply when collision energies fall below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV). However, the team’s measurements showed an unexpected result: at these lower energies, the fusion rate leveled off into a plateau instead. In certain metal samples, fusion occurred about a quintillion times—a 1 followed by 18 zeroes—more often than in reactions without a host material.
Hmmm… That is not noise. That is a hint of useful applications.
The team has a potential explanation for it:
This big jump in reaction rates comes down to the subatomic structure of the host metals. Electrons inside the metal, along with tiny defects in the foil structure, act like a shield around the positively charged deuterium nuclei.
The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse.
Dario Amodei just described a future where revolution becomes physically impossible.
Amodei: “You’re supposed to follow orders, but if something crazy enough happened, the soldiers would say, I’m not gonna do that.”
Every check on power in human history came down to one thing.
The people holding the weapons could refuse to use them.
That refusal is not a flaw in the system. It IS the system.
The entire architecture of human freedom is built on a single biological fact… that soldiers have a conscience.
Amodei: “What if you have an army of 10 million drones instead of 10 million human soldiers?”
Remove the conscience and every structure built on top of it collapses.
No refusal. No mutiny. No revolution. No ceiling on power.
Not temporarily. Permanently.
And every institution on earth understands this. Which is why the response hasn’t been to prevent autonomous weapons.
It’s been to control who gets to build the intelligence behind them.
That’s what model bans are. That’s what export controls are. Not safety policy. Power consolidation disguised as caution.
And the result is the opposite of what they intended.
Every restriction slows the people playing by the rules while adversaries who answer to nobody sprint ahead unchecked.
The harder Washington squeezes, the wider the gap grows between what America builds and what its competitors deploy without a single committee meeting.
Which creates an irony so brutal it’s almost poetic.
The more aggressively governments try to lock down frontier AI, the stronger the incentive for labs to simply stop asking permission and drop their most powerful models open source before the regulatory window closes forever.
And once those weights are open, no executive order on earth can pull them back.
Amodei: “I think if we handle this wrongly, you could have a situation where there’s a very small number of people, or one person, who has their hand on the button and controls those 10 million drones.”
The institutions telling you AI must be centralized “for your protection” are constructing the exact infrastructure he’s warning about.
Restricted access. Consolidated control. One hand on the button.
They’re not preventing the nightmare. They’re building it and writing their name on the door.
Amodei: “We don’t want to make companies more powerful than the government, but we also don’t want to make government so powerful that it can’t be stopped.”
Nobody in power ever quotes the second half of that sentence.
But here’s what every institution scrambling to lock this down keeps missing.
They’re running the nuclear playbook on a technology that breaks every rule nuclear followed.
Nuclear required nation-state resources. This fits on a hard drive.
Nuclear had a supply chain you could choke. This one multiplies the moment you squeeze.
Open weights are already out. The barrier to entry is collapsing.
And every attempt to centralize this technology accelerates the exact decentralization they’re trying to prevent.
The question was never whether this power would exist.
This is the hottest part of the year, and my underground bunker is keeping it’s cool:
The ragged sort of sine wave line was the outdoor temperature over the last 24 hours. The other lines are the temperatures of the rooms with thermostats in them. There has not been any artificial heat in weeks and never any cooling. The bedroom is a little warmer that Barb likes for sleeping but I think if we opened two windows at night and put fans in the windows, we could cool the bedroom down to her ideal of 66 F.
The humidity varies from 45.2% to 53.3% That’s near ideal.
Elon Musk just told the highest-paid profession on earth it was never a skill. It was a workaround.
AI no longer needs programming languages at all. It writes machine code directly. Raw binary optimized beyond anything human logic could produce.
No syntax. No compiler. No translator.
Musk: “You don’t even bother doing coding.”
Every language ever written. Every framework ever built. Every career spent mastering them.
All of it was humanity’s way of approximating what machines actually needed. We didn’t learn to speak to computers. We spent fifty years building a crutch because we couldn’t.
AI just made the crutch irrelevant.
Now add Neuralink. No keyboard. No screen. No interface.
Musk: “Imagination-to-software.”
Intention becomes execution. Nothing between what you imagine and what exists.
Humanity spent its entire history building tools to shrink the gap between mind and reality. Language. Writing. Mathematics. Code.
Every one was just a smaller bottleneck. AI doesn’t shrink the bottleneck. It removes the gap.
The entire framework of technical expertise just collapsed into one question. Can you think clearly.
Everyone else is debating how AI changes development. Musk already moved past the debate. He’s not optimizing the process. He’s dissolving the need for one.
The barrier between imagination and reality held for all of human history. It just fell.
Just one question, “Can you think clearly?” <SNORT!!>
That is hilarious. There are surprising number of people that contradict themselves in a single written sentence. Just imagine what looking under that hood at their thought patterns would be like!
But let’s go with it for a bit. Imagine if there was no practical way for a human to review programs before they were deployed. That is what this proposal means.
Programs thought into being by 1,000 different madmen will attempt genocide of Christians. A different set of 100,000 madmen will attempt the complete annihilation of all people of Jewish heritage. And others of white, black, brown, and/or yellow skin color would be targeted for extinction. The existence of source code in the present-day world offers some hope of detection and remediation of the killer code.
And if there were no source code a rogue AI could infect every other AI with near zero ability for humans or benign AI to detect the situation before it was too late.
Imagine all the world’s industrial controllers, vehicles, medical equipment, food supply chains, electrical systems, water supplies, pharmaceuticals, and machines of war are secretly programmed to kill as many humans as possible starting on January 1, 2030, 00:00 UTC. With no way to know all the computers were about to flip a bit and change from obedient servants to apex predators we would be caught totally by surprise. Even if a critical mass of people did survive and eventually suppress the new super predator, there would be no way to quickly recover. Essentially every computer from the one in your watch to the computers in your appliances and even sewers could have a seed of the virus that given a semi-fertile place to grow could reconquer the world and be smarter about it the next time. The survivors would have to destroy or completely isolate every computer on the planet and start up our technology chain again… if they dared.
Fun times huh?
On the other hand, while this might technically be possible it seems unlikely. Programs are seldom written just once and never changed. They are extended with new features added. Bugs are found and fixed. Going into an optimized executable file and adding a new feature is really, really tough compared to having a higher-level language that allows insertions, deletions, and corrections of any size.
Grok seems to concur that it seems unlikely to occur anytime soon:
Unlikely in the dramatic form described. Here’s why:
AI is augmenting, not replacing, the stack yet: Modern LLMs excel at high-level languages (Python, Rust, etc.) because that’s what vast training data contains. They can generate assembly/machine code for specific tasks, but full complex programs (OS kernels, databases, GUIs) still rely on structured languages, libraries, tooling, testing, and human oversight for reliability, security, and maintainability. Direct binary output would be brittle—tiny changes in hardware, OS, or requirements break it without easy debugging.
Interfaces are improving fast: Voice, multimodal (e.g., Grok), and brain-computer interfaces will make “describe what you want” much more powerful. We’re already seeing AI agents handle end-to-end tasks. But “imagination-to-software with zero gap” requires massive leaps in reasoning, planning, verification, and hardware integration. Near-term: much less boilerplate and faster prototyping. Not the end of programming languages.
Real trends supporting parts of it:
AI is generating huge amounts of code in startups and tools.
Small dependencies/libraries may decline as AI “vibe codes” one-off solutions.
Binary analysis/reverse engineering is getting easier with AI, weakening “security by obscurity” for closed software.
But open source isn’t dying—it’s evolving amid challenges like maintainer overload from AI slop.
So, I don’t think AI will entirely skip the source code step entirely. It might create a new programming language that human cannot understand without an interpreter. But I think that should be a red line that it is not allowed to cross.
About two weeks ago I turned off the heat in my underground bunker in Idaho. I wanted to see what the baseline temperature would be. It varies by room. This is probably because of the computers I have in the office and proximity to other miscellaneous heat sources like the hot water heater and depth of the overhead earth for each of the rooms.
But what is most interesting to me is that the temperature is almost independent of the outside temperature:
With the exterior temperature removed from the graph you can see the coupling to the outside temperature is, at best, a very small fraction of the outside temperature and with a phase shift of about one day.
That means the heating system does not have to deal with the daily extremes. It only has to deal with the daily average. And I think this means that it will not need any cooling. I will know for certain in about six weeks when we will be through the hottest part of the year in my neighborhood.
In systems engineering terms, reliability improves most when the human is treated as a probabilistic cognitive processor surrounded by deterministic support systems that compensate for the specific interface properties humans satisfy poorly. The human remains in the loop, but the interface contract is reshaped to fit human strengths rather than forcing human behavior to approximate software.*
ChatGPT June 22, 2026
Emphasis added.
I thought people would like to know AI still sees a place for you in their new world order. There, you feel better, right? You know the future still has a job for you as a probabilistic cognitive processor.
At least for now.
* This was part of the response to this query:
When a human is the physical implementation of a logical component of a Security Operations Center, what are the interface specification elements that are hardest to satisfy consistently and what would it take to make that implementation more reliable without necessarily replacing the human with automation?
Capriole Investments’ institutional buying model, which tracks Bitcoin demand from ETFs, corporate treasuries, and miner issuance, shows net institutional selling at around 450% of daily mined supply, equivalent to about 2,000 BTC per day.
In other words, large holders are selling 4-5x more Bitcoin than is mined each day.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs appear to be the biggest drag. Their flow line has fallen sharply below zero, suggesting ETF outflows are now overwhelming other sources of demand.
In the past month, for instance, these funds have witnessed nearly $27 billion in withdrawals, according to data resource Glassnode.
Today, after completing this course, I came to the conclusion a friend at Mandiant was correct.
Several months ago, my Mandiant friend told me that AI is making things better for cyber attackers than cyber defenders. It was his belief that it increased the defenders attack surface more than it enabled us to rapidly defend ourselves. I wasn’t totally convinced until today.
There are just so many ways that AI’s can be subverted. And to make things worse our management is literally saying, “Everyone should be programming now.”
A few weeks back, I was helping a senior manager, who only wrote a few hundred lines of code a couple of decades ago get through the V.P. required coding exercise for all managers. She did okay. She didn’t really like doing it, but she had a Python program that accomplished the task she wanted to do. Python dominates in the security field. It has its advantages, but if you want performance and stable programs that are moderately large, you are much better off with a statically typed language rather than the dynamic typed Python.
To the naive it may seem that if you can get some code to do what you want it then you are done. Ahhh… no. There are reasons why software developers have version control systems, development, staging, and production systems, unit tests, test driven development, stress tests, code reviews, static and dynamic analysis tools, mutexes, semaphores, locks, locking objects, profilers, and interrupt driven drivers. Management is not going to be able to save money by laying off all the senior developers and writing their own code or even turning the development over to developers with a year or two of experience. I have heard it said that every item on a pilot check list was paid for by the death of one or more people who learned the hard way why that item was important. A similar thing is true with software development. And even if you tell your favorite AI to write safe code and to review it. There will be “issues” that may be accidents, or an agent gone rogue. But there will be issues that people will pay a high price for.
After finishing the course, I had a discussion with Chat GPT on this and related topics. During the course of the discussion it told me a joke that rang just a little too true:
As an old C programmer, you may appreciate another version of the joke:
Dynamic languages let you shoot yourself in the foot faster.
At 10:01 a.m. on June 12, 2026, Graham Platner, the freshly minted Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, posted the following on X:
“Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.
Let’s make sure he’s also the last.”
No policy proposal. No discussion of tax brackets, carried-interest loopholes, or regulatory reform. Just a flat, public declaration that the existence of a single individual who has accumulated more wealth than any human in history is an intolerable moral emergency that must be prevented from ever happening again.
The sentence is not a critique of monopoly power, regulatory capture, or government favoritism. It is a death sentence pronounced on the category of human being who creates at scale.
It is the purest distillation of socialist psychology yet uttered by a major-party Senate candidate in the United States: Excellence has occurred. Make sure it never occurs again.
This is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of everything Platner has signaled since he entered the race.
…
The correct response to “Let’s make sure he’s also the last” is not a technocratic defense of marginal tax rates.
It is a full-throated defense of the right of human beings to achieve without limit and without apology. It is the recognition that the alternative to Musk-scale creation is not a more equitable distribution of existing goods.
It is a slower, poorer, grayer world in which the best anyone can hope for is to be slightly less mediocre than their neighbors.
Maine does not need another politician who resents the existence of greatness.
It needs a political culture that treats the creation of a trillion dollars of value as evidence of national vitality rather than moral emergency.
The man who can make reusable rockets routine, who can force the automotive industry to electrify faster than it wanted to, who can put global communications infrastructure in orbit while governments dither…this man is not the problem. He is the proof that the problem is elsewhere.
Graham Platner’s tweet is a window into the soul of a politics that has given up on creation and now contents itself with the management of decline.
The only question left is whether the voters of Maine…and eventually the country…will ratify that surrender or reject it with the same ferocity that built the civilization now under attack.
The first trillionaire exists.
The question is not whether we can prevent another. The question is whether we still have the will to produce one.
…from King’s College London, where a team of researchers working alongside chemists from Trinity College Dublin has managed to put together a brand new form of the metal that could replace these pricier options. The metal has been engineered into a new molecule, which they call cyclotrialumane. It is basically three aluminum atoms bonded together in a triangle, making it a trimer.
…
The molecule has shown early promise in the lab, suggesting it could eventually help drive important chemical reactions. The researchers were able to use it to split dihydrogen, the H2 molecules that make up hydrogen gas. Splitting the hydrogen molecule is the main driver of hydrogen energy production, and the same process that runs hydrogen-powered vehicles, so this could help with clean fuel production. The molecule also acted as a catalyst in the controlled chain growth of ethene, which happens to be one of the main building blocks of plastics.
Then there is the weird stuff. Bakewell and her team found that reacting the trimer with ethene creates ring structures that nobody has documented before. These include rings built out of five and seven atoms of aluminum and carbon mixed together. That hints at a whole new class of reactions that go past what platinum and palladium can manage on their own.
So… catalytic converters, fuel cells, and many devices used in thousands of other chemical processes may get much cheaper. Interesting.
The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered something profoundly eerie in the depths of the cosmos: vast, synchronized patterns in ancient galaxies that hint at one of the most mind-bending ideas in physics—that our entire universe might be trapped inside a supermassive black hole.
The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered something profoundly eerie in the depths of the cosmos: vast, synchronized patterns in ancient galaxies that hint at one of the most mind-bending ideas in physics—that our entire universe might be trapped inside a supermassive black… pic.twitter.com/3kOCNlqFqD
I hypothesized this years ago and I told you so then. There were others before me as well, but it is interesting to see direct evidence of it. But, as of yet, I have not seen anyone confirming the aspect of the black hole is pulling us along the time axis of four-dimensional space. There is still time for that.
Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”
One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had.
Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.
Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.
Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.
They conquered until they collapsed.
America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.
And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated.
Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”
Almost unprecedented?
It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history.
…
We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.
AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.
If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?
The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to?
Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.
Billions lifted out of poverty.
All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.
And carries no guarantee of being repeated.
The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.
