Category Archives: Technology

Betting the Odds

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From the CIA Teams discussion at work after I shared a link sent to me by Paul K. (slightly edited):

Joe: I have not read all of it yet, but there are some “interesting” projections on AI here: AI 2027.

I want an underground bunker in Idaho.

Sean: (my manager): Got room for more?

Joe: Sorry, all full and then some. I have three children, two step children, their spouses, and five grandchildren.

Sean: What if I can provide valuable skills?

Joe: Two son-laws are army combat vets. One is a world class (#5 or #6) shooter. Stepdaughter is a world class machine learning expert. Stepson and one daughter are top notch computer programmers. The IQ range of the kids and step kids ranges from 125 to at least 155. My brothers are farmers two miles away with non-computerized farming equipment, fully equipped metal and wood shops. One daughter has an accounting degree. There are two art majors in the mix.

We have more guns than we can count. Probably 50,000 rounds of ammunition. Equipment to assemble two to three thousand rounds per hour (given the components).

What are you bringing? We could use someone with high level medical training.

At this point if you haven’t been planning and working on it for several years and the predictions come true you probably are too late.

I’m not convinced the predictions are likely to come true. Historically, there have been many, many predictions of doom. While there have been lots of disruptions of “normal” life, things always resolved into something pretty good. The examples include industrial revolution, nuclear weapon proliferation, nuclear winter, global cooling and more recently global warming. Women’s liberation and the birth control pill were used to predict social catastrophe. Before that, women being allows to vote was predicted to be catastrophic. Even the Internet and video games were predicted to be disruptors of society. 

Read the books from the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Silent Spring (I was convinced when I read it but later found out that many of the references were fake and/or severely distorted) and Future Shock (required reading for an engineering class in college, I did not find it believable and was very annoyed with the movie version). They were very popular in their time but dismal failures at predicting the future.

Fear sells and spreads far better than predicting increasing or even maintaining our current comfort level. Looking at the probabilities of propagation, you are far more likely to see doom predictions than the utopia predictions. But the long-term historical trend lines by far favor the utopian vision.

That said, the way you want to bet is not necessary on what is most likely to occur. If you cannot afford to lose the bet but betting in the direction you likely have a moderate outcome in nearly all situations you should give serious consideration to betting on the lower odds outcome.

Claude

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Quote of the Day

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.

Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.

That paper – “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, became the founding document of the digital age.

The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.

At 21, he wrote the most important master’s thesis of the 20th century.

Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states – open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.

Nobody had ever connected these two things.

His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.

Howard Gardner called it “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century.”

Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.

At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.

…

Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

Tech with Mak @techNmak
Posted on X August 20, 2026

And now you know the rest of the story.

Shannon’s work was a significant component of both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering.

Skynet Smiles

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Genome language models operate in a broadly similar way to large language models (LLMs) except that they predict genetic code instead of written text, having been trained on the genomes of other viruses and bacteria, as well as more complex organisms such as plants and animals.

The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage — a type of virus able to infect and replicate itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside.

…

The researchers then synthesised new DNA molecules using those designs and inserted them into E. coli bacteria, before waiting to see if viable bacteriophages would emerge.

Shortly afterwards, 16 of the Petri dishes in which the bacteria were growing began to show clear spots, as the viruses began to attack and replicate themselves inside the E. coli, demonstrating their viability.

Andrew Thorpe
August 6, 2026
Stanford researchers create viruses not found in nature using genomes designed by artificial intelligence

See also AI-designed viral genomes | Science and AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code – Schneier on Security. In part, Schneier says:

That’s a positive use of a synthetic virus. We can all imagine the negative uses.

Wow! That is such an understatement. The negative uses could be extinction level. Skynet could win without any need to develop time travel, terminators, or even firing a shot.

Even without a threat of something like Skynet just imagine the “right” set of people reading Rainbow Six as a How To book instead of entertainment or a warning. An underground bunker in Idaho would, at best, only delay the inevitable.

Medicine is Becoming Programmable

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I have never seen a single week in medicine like the one we just lived through.
In the span of a few days, four separate scientific breakthroughs landed. The stock market treated them as four unrelated stories and sent a handful of biotech companies soaring. But that’s the shallow read. Look closer and they are not four stories at all. They are four faces of the same story — the biggest shift in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics.

Medicine is becoming programmable. Individualized. Written for one human being instead of the average of millions.

Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani
Posted on X August 22, 2026

Here are some of the details:

Start with the old world, so you can feel what’s ending.

For the entire history of medicine, we have treated the average patient. The average dose on the label. The average risk from the population study. The average tumor, the average cholesterol, the average heart. We took what worked for the middle of the bell curve and applied it to you, and then adjusted by trial and error when you didn’t respond like the average.

But you are not average. Your cancer, if you get one, will carry a set of mutations no other cancer on Earth has ever had. Your heart disease is driven by your specific genes, your specific biology. The one-size-fits-all model was never a choice we made — it was a limitation we couldn’t escape, because we lacked the tools to read and write biology at the level of the individual.

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Here’s the old reality for high-risk melanoma. Surgeons remove the tumor, and then we tell the patient: “We got what we could see. Now take Keytruda, and we hope the microscopic cells left behind don’t come roaring back.” And too often, they came back — in the lungs, the liver, the brain.

Now here’s what just changed. Scientists take that removed tumor, sequence its DNA, and compare it letter by letter to the patient’s healthy DNA. The differences — the mutations unique to that cancer — produce abnormal proteins called neoantigens that exist essentially nowhere else in the body. An algorithm picks up to 34 of the best targets. Those get encoded into a custom mRNA vaccine, manufactured for that one person, that teaches their immune system to hunt any cell wearing those markers. In the 1,137-patient Phase 3 trial, the vaccine plus Keytruda beat Keytruda alone — less recurrence, less spread to distant organs. It’s the first time in the history of medicine an mRNA cancer therapy has won a Phase 3, and trials in lung, bladder, and kidney cancer are already running.

…

A company called Scribe just went public with an experimental one-time treatment aimed at the single biggest killer of human beings on the planet: heart disease. Not a new pill to add to your seven others. A one-and-done.

Here’s the elegance of it. You may have heard of CRISPR as “gene editing” — molecular scissors that cut DNA. That’s powerful but scary, because cutting DNA is permanent and mistakes can’t be undone. Scribe’s approach does not cut your DNA. Instead it uses a disabled version of CRISPR to place a chemical “off switch” — an epigenetic mark — on a single gene called PCSK9. PCSK9 is one of the master controllers of bad cholesterol. Silence it, and LDL plummets. And because the DNA sequence itself is never altered, the effect is designed to be reversible if it ever needed to be.

There is more. But you get the idea.

I like living in the future.

Safe Fire Resistance

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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:

Via email from Rolf.

California Considers Creating 140 MPH Buses

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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:

In the case of Caltrans’s new high-speed bus transportation concept, they may well be repeating the farce that The Onion wrote sixteen years earlier.

And you thought Hollywood had no new ideas.

Craig Eyermann
August 11, 2026

<snort>

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.

Thoughts We Cannot Think

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There are wavelengths we cannot see. There are sounds we cannot hear. So why, then, would there not be thoughts we cannot think?

Richard Hamming*
1996
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Chapter 5 — “You and Your Research”

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.

I don’t know for certain quantum object thoughts are beyond everyone, but I do know there some thoughts beyond some people.

* 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.

And Hamming Distance has nothing to do with the distance between the pig slaughterhouse and the ham smoke house. It measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or equivalently, the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other.

I found the book fascinating. I wish I had read it when it came out in 1996. He was born in 1915 and died in 1998.

Hints of Cold Fusion

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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.

Lauren Biron
July 23, 2026
When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter – Berkeley Lab – Berkeley Lab News Center

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.

Interesting. Very interesting.

I love living in the future.

See also: History of Cold Fusion – Impossible Fusion.

That is an Interesting Way to Look at AI

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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.

It was whether you’d need permission to use it.

For the first time in history, you don’t.

Dustin @r0ck3t23
Posted on X July 18, 2026

Interesting line of thought. I will have to think about this some more.

Temperature and Humidity Stability

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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.

First Amendment Issue, RIght?

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Via Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras:

This has to be a First Amendment Issue, right? Please tell me these types of laws are going to get slapped down.

Intention Becomes Execution

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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.

Dustin @r0ck3t23
Posted on X July 10, 2026

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.

Deep Thoughts

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Dustin @r0ck3t23
Posted on X July 13, 2026

Reality is tough. Really, really tough. The revealing of reality could be the toughest problem of all time.

I’ve said this many times before and frequently remind people at work: We have to formulate the correct problem statement to solve the problem.

I’m not convinced Musk has formulated the correct problem statement. But I am certain I do not have a better one.

Benefit of Premium, Ethanol Free, Gasoline

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I have mentioned using ethanol free gasoline to avoid paying some of the Washington state gas tax. I also discovered that my car gets much better gas mileage with premium ethanol free gas. So much so that even when driving up and down steep mountain roads, that if I am driving under 55 MPH, I get incredible range. This is what my 2025 Ford Escape (2.0L EcoBoost Gas Engine AWD) reported when I filled up after our Mount Rainier hike on Sunday:

This is just under 39 MPG.

The Engine Control Unit (ECU) adjusts the boost pressure from the turbo and the timing to match the gasoline and “magic” happens.

Copilot reports on the situation:

1. Higher octane kept timing fully advanced

On long climbs and descents around Mount Rainier, the engine sits in a sweet spot:

  • Moderate boost
  • High airflow
  • Steady load
  • Good exhaust energy

With premium fuel, the ECU doesn’t have to pull timing. That alone can improve efficiency by 5–10% in a turbo engine.

2. EcoBoost engines are extremely efficient at steady-state mountain driving

Turbo engines often get better MPG in hilly terrain because:

  • The turbo recovers exhaust energy
  • The engine stays in an efficient RPM band
  • You avoid the constant stop‑and‑go of city driving

The 2.0L EcoBoost’s BSFC map (Brake Specific Fuel Consumption) has a very efficient island around the mid‑load range you were likely in.

Your mileage may vary.

Thermal Stablity

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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.

AI Has a Place for You

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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?

Losing the Faith

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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.

Yashu Gola
June 10, 2026
Bitcoin price may slide toward $30K as institutions dump 450% of daily BTC supply

It appears to me more people are losing faith in Bitcoin.

Prepare appropriately.

AI Agents Let You Automate the Shooting

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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.

AI agents let you automate the shooting.

The Last Trillionaire Must Die

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Quote of the Day

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.

LHGrey
June 12, 2026
The Last Trillionaire Must Die: Graham Platner’s Envious Death Wish and the Socialist Pathology of Resentment

See also the post on X.

I wish I could write like her. I am left nearly speechless after I read anything she writes.

ATF Annual Firearms Manufacturing & Export Report

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Ry Jones created the AFMER Explorer for us.

ATF Annual Firearms Manufacturing & Export Report — per-manufacturer production, 2000–2024. Data is loaded and queried entirely in your browser.

Very cool.