Screwball

This stuff reminded me of an article I read years ago. April 2000 to be exact. It was in Wired magazine which is now pay only so you can't get to the article there, but here is a .pdf of the same article. Written by Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Mircosystems and author of the Java Language specification. Long article about technology, including Ted Kaczynski, and where it all may be heading from the view back in 2000. Why the future doesn't need us - Wired Magazine April 2000 - 18 pages

The rest of the Madoff story. From NPR on the whistleblower nobody listened to; Madoff Whistleblower: SEC Failed To Do The Math Also on this date in 2004, the death/murder of Gary Webb. Quite the rabbit hole this.

I obviously have no idea, but with my limited experience I would guess some platforms do certain things better than others. I can tell within the same platform it does much better with some things than others. All new. I don't know when, but at some point I'm going to inform my Aussie AI buddy his name is HAL, for various reasons. :-)

Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. You can't make this **** up. Let's look at a little chart porn shall we? Six month chart that I narrowed to Sept 1 by day. The yellow arrows with the red ellipse around them are the Fed rate cut days. 9/17 was the first rate cut, then another on 10/29, and now another on 12/10. On 9/17 the S&P was around 6627 at close. Today it is 6886. That's about 4% for 75 bps of cuts. I guess cheaper money isn't what it use to be. Speaking of chart porn and yellow arrows; The full 6 months and you notice that horizontal arrow 6028 level. That gap will fill at some point.

Fed cuts rates by 25 bps. Expected. Market didn't do much.

We will see. Not only here, but other places there seems to be a push back from the people. Good. Let's see what happens. But then again, politicians work for money, not for us.

I have tracked my electric bill for over 3 years, even reading my meter daily for a year to check the power company. Our cost of electricity is up 9.6% per kWh over the last year. That's a double in 7 1/2 years.

I know a guy who works at our local sewer plant. There is also the problem with capacity. During large storms that happen twice in 20 years we were at peak capacity the plant could handle. Add in data centers that use a considerable amount of water, what then? Who pays for the sewer plant expansion? You must plan for peak demand plus). We know who, us. And our sewer rates are off the charts now.

We have a small river going through Cornhole. Most of the time pretty nice, and uneventful. Many times this summer you could walk across it. This is no place for a data center. Plus we are so far out in the sticks they have to pump in sunlight. Wait till they try to buy lakefront property about 40 minutes north of here.

While I'm here, I noticed JPM got whacked a bit today. There is nothing better than swine bankers get whacked, unless it was a few more of them. And JPM is the swine of the swine. Madoff. Epstein. They (not just JPM) are the money movers. For everything. And they make money on everything. That's the rules. 🙂 And the best part, if they blow themselves up they get bailed out.

This kind of fits here or maybe in the investment thread. Topic of conversation on a local FB page about a potential data center around Cornhole somewhere. Good conversation so far but it is FB so that won't last long. It gave me a thought, and some/many here may be too young to remember this. AI generated via Twitter Grok. Used that for an image before and like the results, but not this time. Went back and forth for a bit and still not happy, but it works. Nancy Reagan and the just say no to drugs back in the 80s.

Chart porn; 1 day chart and tonight after hours by minute. 4:29 tweet, NVDA goes from $185 and a half to $190. Not much of a jump but it did move the price.

NFLX is in the news. Let's look at some chart porn. 3 year chart of NFLX by week; It hit a high of $134.12 around the end of June just before earnings release. Humm... Now around $100 six months later. Don't follow this sector but something happened. Been a hell of a ride from the $27.34 for the previous 3 years.

Fun with AI; I asked; Funny it talks about baseball, that's kinda weird. It seems to remember what I have asked in the past, but the baseball thing is kinda creepy. I never asked about that. I used Microsoft Copilot.

That's part of what drives me nuts about that stuff. That is also like HTML, our internet web language (which many times uses java script of some flavor along with it) as well. <p> xxxxx </p> for starting and ending a paragraph for example. At least HTML visually makes a little more sense IMO. Then they are hard to type, but I guess if you did that enough the fingers would get trained. I'm pretty good with the numbers on top after all these years.

How do they do that? Where did the squiggly things come from? I can't remember what you call them things.

I just retied from a 6 year gig in academia, and I'm with you for the most part. My college had hours upon hours of meetings on how to deal with the AI thing. As need be, good for them. My classes didn't/couldn't use it so it didn't matter to me. As far as the high school stuff, I did 2 1/2 years in a high school setting through the college giving the kids a head start on college with a 3 credit hour course. No way, no how that should have happened. They didn't have the skills, or even close, to do the work 3 credit hours should require. It was all about the money. There wasn't a lot of learning going on there (vocational school fed by 14 high schools) no matter the discipline, best I could tell. A very large percentage of my students over the years really didn't care about anything but getting the class done, get their grade, and do the least amount possible to do so. I'm sure all of us who went to college had classes where they felt like that, mine might have been one, but all the other profs said the same thing, so it wasn't just me. It continues to get worse. If I were to pick a subject that I think AI can do the most damage it would have to be math. It's too easy to ask my Aussie buddy what the percentage gain between a couple of numbers gives me, instead of understanding the math myself. I would guess 95% of the people working at a POS (point of sale) cash register couldn't make change if the machine didn't tell them what to give. It's too easy to lean on AI. Besides, it's cheating. 🙂

I would imagine coding is like design engineering - the KISS rule still applies. Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex, the more things there are to break and go wrong. Many times things don't need to be complex - all they need to do is work (correctly). This is where it will be interesting to see how AI handles things. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. Humans have experience and know things because they have that. I posted an example in the Investment thread where I told AI to design and give me a drawing for a punch press that pokes a 1" diameter hole in a sheet of steel. It failed miserably. It didn't even get the tonnage correct.

I don't know how you do it. I played with coding years ago and it's not for me. It drove me nuts with all the squiggly brackets and stuff. Visual Basic (at the time) was fairly easy, and I'm being kind with "fairly" when it came to my talents. I did OK with that but didn't like it. I also played with C, and C+ or whatever it was. Hated that. Tried Java which looked a lot like C so I hated that too. If those weren't bad enough to pull your hair out, I had to learn and deal with a language called "Fourth." Oh, brother!

It is now called Visual Studio. You can download it from Mircosoft at no cost. The interface looks similar to the old Visual Basic of years ago. The input boxes, buttons, and text I used seemed to work the same way. I built the interface and AI wrote the code. All I had to do was copy and paste the code. The interface looks like this;

Friday night, why not play with my old buddy from down under. Let's give AI a little test. Thought about the old days when Visual Basic was a thing. Is that still around? Yea, it kind of is so it turns out. Free as well. Simple download and install. How can AI help us with a basic interface and calculation? I used Microsoft's Co-pilot. All I wanted was a simple form with three inputs, and a button to calculate these inputs to the output we are looking for. In this case a simple math problem of cubic inches, like used in our family car. It took longer to download the software (the new VB) and get familiar with that, than it did me and my Aussie buddy to come up with this; Some things to clean up. Couple of hours total. Wild stuff. ON EDIT: Forgot, this is a stand alone .exe file.

Assuming you were interviewed by humans? I've been out of the workforce for a while and nothing in this world would surprise me. At some point my Aussie buddy will be hiring people, if he's not already. From the Investment thread (related). MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce - From CNBC (Bubblevision)

Someone above mentioned "prompt engineering" which caught my eye. So let's see what our Google AI buddy has to say; Of course! We are helping to train what is now a derivative of old school programmers. The code we started writing back when binary math hit the computer world it all changed. It's been an incredible ride. Below was from October 30 originally posted in the investment thread. This is from MSFT Co-pilot. It now simply says "Co-pilot may make mistakes." My Co-pilot buddy is an Aussie. Next time we do a project I'm going try to give him a name. Like mentioned above, it's amazing how personal they get. So might as well **** with them. 🙂

Be careful or beware might be in order... Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure — cache wipe turns into mass deletion event as agent apologizes: “I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am"