Intelligence...ehhhh...depends

 

Artsy fartsy

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So I finally caved and went to check out the foofooraw concerning this whole AI thing that has folks all riled up.  I went in with some preconceptions.  The first preconception is the idea of “machine intelligence” is probably significantly less than the advertising agencies masquerading as “Tech Titans” want you to believe.

So mostly I went in and asked specific questions:  Subjects like carrying capacity and oil use and fertilizer use.  The results really don’t seem to be all that different than using a decent search engine.  

First I need to discuss the “platform” that I used.  I used Grok, not because I did any serious research, but because its owner pisses off people who amuse me immensely with their histrionics.  I seriously doubt that other competitors in this will give any “better” answers to my basic queries.

Second, I am not going to publish the results here, if this kind of thing interests you, go and play around with it yourself.  All I am going to discuss is what I think of the results.  

Simply put, when I search a subject using the google search engine with add "udm=14" which strips off the AI from google search, I get a string of links which let me look at other folks websites which will purportedly answer my question.  This is what I am used to.  It has worked pretty well for the past twenty years.  I really have no complaints.  

I posed the same question to grok, and I got back a 2300 word essay with footnotes (links) summarizing what is out there.  The links are pretty damn close to what the udm=14 gave me and actually was more pleasant to work with.  For the question “Calculate Earth's carrying capacity for humans”, it actually offered several fairly exhaustive studies with a not-at-all terrible condensation of the data available.

Overall, what grok gave me was approximately equivalent to what I would expect from an average freshman at a small state college.  

Under the Streetlight

 

Been a while

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More and more I am getting exasperated by the narrow focus of folks evaluation of their environment and surroundings.  The internet, in all of its glory of immediacy and fear does not in anyway contribute to the individual mental health.

What set off this rant today is the current pearl-clutching going on around the idea of “microplastics”.   Now, I am not saying that the issue of microplastics is a trivial issue.  The truth of the matter is that, simply put, Neither I nor anyone else can make predictions on the long-term (or for that matter, short term) effects of these on the human or animal population.

Now, some of you will start shouting that the research dates back to the sixties, nope, that dog don’t hunt, the research was done using old tech and was mostly concerned with material science.  Around 2000 came the first inklings that this was a problem in the environment, and only around 2021 did the pearl clutching become endemic with this as a focus.

Look, I am not saying that they are good for you, and I am certainly not saying that they aren’t a problem.  But good lord, look around you!  There are so many risks to human health that cataloging them would take a month.  I have no idea what the effects are other than the current bull market in articles announcing microplastics as the latest flavor of armageddon.

I wonder just how much microplastics can be reduced and the source of microplastics in food/water for human consumption?  Is there a source that should be avoided?  Just how ubiquitous is it in the environment?  What is the excretion profile? What levels in the body actually create a health risk.  

I have to spend some time writing about the difference in discovery of a potential problem and the actual description and characterization of the problem and the actual risk profile.  People want a “fix” to the problem once and for all.  In the real world of living things adapting to the environment around them, all that you can do is attempt to lower the odds against an individual.  But that is a statistical thing; if you lower the odds for 90% of the population, but raise the odds for 10%, is that actually a win?

New Leaf

 

Have no clue what this is!

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I suppose that my ongoing angst about writing is somewhat due to my semi-convalescence.  On Tuesday, I went into the V.A. and the podiatrist did an exquisite little procedure called a release tenotomy to partially fix my fucked up old infantryman feet.  It seems to be almost finished mending and the toe is now straight(er?) but I laid around yesterday to allow it to heal a touch and will increase walking today to start getting some mileage again.  

Walking is my way of turning off my brain. By reducing this action yesterday I went into the “dwelling on my inadequacies” mode and started overthinking this writing hobby of mine.  Mostly I was dealing with my very ambivalent views on whether or not I like other people reading the shit I write.

So this little bit of writing is the start of something that will be saved until next Tuesday.  I am starting it today because I need to think about what I write about and cut through the rambling a bit more than I usually manage.  

Timing and pacing

 

Gotta Get out more to get better pictures.

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I think that I have to figure out my relationship to sitting down every day and writing and my desire to occasionally have someone read it.  I think that I have a heaping portion of dissonance concerning my relationship with the small number of my readers.   I hope that people read what I have to say, but I cringe when I think of getting comments back.  Reading comments is a spectrum kind of thing.  When I read my Wednesday favorites (JMG and Aurelian) I am impressed by their patience with questions and statements that are, at best, poorly thought out.  But there are gems in the comments as well.  So my reticence for having people comment really has no rational basis.

I do also think that frequency of posting might have something to do with this kind of thing.  I enjoy sitting down every day and telling the world to get off my lawn.  But maybe that isn’t the way to approach the idea of publishing my thoughts.  My buddy M goes a completely different way, he manages to sit down and write whole books and then self-publish something every year or so.  I can’t say as this way appeals to me, but I think I will ponder it for a while.

I will keep using my place at Dreamwidth for the day to day mental meandering.  I’ll probably keep backing things up over at Blogger because Google might be around in ten years.  I have watched too many small-time ISP’s and service providers go belly up to not worry about this.  I hope for the best for Dreamwidth, but hopes have been dashed in the past.

I have to ponder the Substack thing.  I think that Substack is the preferred vehicle for the PMC and the poseurs.  Oh granted, there is some quality over there, but a whole bunch of the time it seems to be a place where market-share of readership can best exploited, and to tell you the truth, I am kinda sick of the over-commercialization of just about anything.  

I do think that I need to spend more time and more discipline trying to come up with serious pieces.  I think that the diary-style format that I have used in the past at Blogger and Dreamwidth is good for my mental health, it isn’t exactly a storehouse for what I consider wisdom.  Maybe I will ponder only using my freebie account at Substack to publish longer pieces that I have spent more time on.

One way or another, I am going to keep writing, one way or another I will figure out my relationship with commenters and what are my expectations.    

Grok-ing

 

My piece of the Great Wall

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So, I have gone over to the dark side I suppose.  Yesterday I went and played with the evil wizards platform to rape our minds and make us unwilling dupes.  Yep, I asked a couple of questions to Elon Musk’s “Grok” Artificial Intelligence.

First, it appears to me that the word AI is sort of stupid.  From what I can tell, the answers Grok gave me on specific issues seemed pretty solid.  The program gave me some pretty nebulous parameters about how it was approaching the questions, gave what appears to be as close to a consensus answer as it could manage, mentioned some caveats, and gave a set of links where I could check the data.

Overall, for the questions I was asking (carrying capacity, and fertilizer production and usage) the answers were pretty vanilla and did address the problem of ranges given by different sources.

Overall, it seems to be doing the work of a pretty good librarian.  So far in my queries, I see that it can give me a quick overview but the bulk of the work is left to me to review the sources and come up with my own conclusion.

Why I don't like Substack

 

I got tired of reporting the weather.

I suppose that this dislike has an analogy in how I identify the tenor of the group publishing there with the cliques that dominated in the cafeteria back in my high school days.  There were variants off of four basic flavors, there were probably ten to twelve different groups with brownian motion allowing for some remarkably shallow cross-fertilization:

→  The Cool Kids

→  The Jocks

→  The Hippies

→  The Nerds

I attempted moving over to substack, but the more I went there, the more that I got the feeling that I was trying to break into the cool kids table.  Now, I ate there frequently when in high school, but I always felt a bit of a poseur.  Physically, I was the Jock of Jocks, but mentally I belonged at the Nerd table.  

Substack feels more like college, and I seem to have wandered over to a table populated primarily by business majors.  Even worse, they appear to be either freshman or sophomore business majors, but everyone there seems to be a touch too concerned about getting paid.  

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is some serious quality work going on over there, Aurelian, Ugo, Simplicius, the list is pretty long.  Sometimes I don’t get to read some of Simplicius’ work because he holds it hostage for donations, but overall he gives out freely.  

I tend to think that I am too enamored by the idea that thoughts should be free.  I have to work out just what I expect from the access to information and opinion allowed by the net.  But that kinda talk would cripple the press, academic and institutional consultant industries.  What a tragedy that would be.

Reversion to Mean

 

Might be my new favorite tree in the spring

Temp is 53℉ and humidity at 30.0 in/Hg.  Blue sky out with thready clouds and almost zero breeze.  Feels like the spring rains will be coming soon.  I gotta learn to live with that.

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”

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I am getting sick of the word “collapse”.  I am getting sick of the phrase “human extinction”.  I am coming to the conclusion that these are nothing more than “Snarl Words” which are said/written to elicit anger.  

Granted, I am now officially elderly.  This is also considered a snarl word.  But having stayed on the carnival ride as long as I have, you start noticing trends.  The trend I want you to understand is the plain old population.  I always use 1954 as my baseline year (I was born December 1953).  The world population in that antediluvian year was 2.7 billion people.  When you take a look at the world today you are looking at 8.1 billion.  So in my lifetime, the population has tripled.

But some of my favorite folks here on the digital frontier are completely enamoured by the term “collapse”.  I suppose this is normal, as collapse means to decline rapidly.  But there is also an additional definition within the word that implies “ceasing function”.  I can’t say that this applies.  

Right now in developed countries, there is a struggle to stay even in population.  I can’t seem to find a developed country that can maintain its current population with current fertility rates (2.1 births).  So the population is heading down.  Good!

Ugo is prepping a book on how population growth is going to end.  All I can say is that it is about time.  But sometimes Ugo gets out over his skis and starts mouthing the word “extinction”.   This is where I start to get annoyed.  I won’t stop reading and enjoying, but sometimes I wish that particular market segment of the information flow would choose words that more accurately.

So I am pleading with Ugo to consider using the phrase “reversion to mean” when discussing the upcoming and (I am assuming of course) inevitable population decline.  I think that it more accurately describes what is coming without the emotional baggage.

My personal example is the world population in my lifetime.  If you average the world population estimates for the period you get a mean of right around 5.3 billion.  So if the growth curve is symmetric, in the year 2097 we should be looking at this number with a loss of around 2.8 billion.  Ugo argues that Seneca wants this number to go down faster,  which may or may not be true.  

My argument is that this isn’t a collapse.  My population biology class (granted it was almost fifty years ago) showed a curve that looked a lot like this (provided of course, that my memory is accurate, which is a dicey proposition):

So, while I think that I am talking about science, I suppose what I am talking about is semantics.  What we will be experiencing is a “reversion to mean”.  Ugo’s use of the word “collapse” (see graph below) while appropriate in a journalistic sense and plays well to the audience, might not convey meaning appropriate to the proposed effect.

So, just making certain, I think that Ugo does a great job defining the road ahead. Keep reading him.  Though I am thinking that his graph may well be just a defined slice of the other graph.

False Starts and Interruptions

Sure Sign of Spring High thin clouds today. I am thinking that I need to become more expert in cloud identification. Temp is 47℉ and Barometer is 30.2 in/hg. No breeze. 

Conversations

I like the little things

Coolish today, only 46℉ with Barometer at 30.3 in/Hg.  But the sky is blue and there is just a stirring of breeze.  Can’t complain even a little bit.

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So JMG, who can unfortunately count me as a fanboy (which I am certain detracts from his overall reputation) is going back to his roots.  He started out as the Archdruid of peak oil, and then eight some-odd  years ago he bagged out his Blogger account and started afresh over at Ecosophia.  At Ecosophia he tilted much more toward being the spiritual archdruid and less the political archdruid.  

This little project here at the seriously hippy cul de sac of the internet (Dreamwidth) came about because this is where his secondary project of smaller pieces that I am certain provides him with considerable grist for the mill of his writing.  

Like JMG, I wrote for years over on Blogger, unlike him I abandoned the site when Blogger tried to “improve my experience” too much.  I have recently started posting again over there because it is a good backup for the stuff I have been writing.  Not that I dislike the service at Dreamwidth, but the changes and the consolidation of the “internet industry” makes me feel like I should back things up from the place I have been writing.

Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make.  JMG is doing a “upon mature reflection” upon the ideas and beliefs of almost twenty years ago.  This is a good thing, so I am going to follow his lead and maybe parallel what he is discussing.  I am going to start here with a comment that I laid down:

• May 7, 2025 at 2:21 pm
  Good post, got me thinking.
• I think (definitely don’t know, more or a belief) that the reason that I think that the “Peak Oil” crowd’s flame guttered out was the fact that they tended to obsess on “Peak Oil” rather than “Peak Energy”. I am especially intrigued by electricity production and consumption.
• I have personally been obsessing (and not all that productively to be honest) on how to blend the three measures (Oil/total energy/electricity production/consumption). I think that the main reason that the peak oil group fell apart was the focus on a single variable in a multivariate environment.
• That and, at the end of the day, it will come down to telling people that they will have to take less.

This is the way that JMG answered.

Degringolade, those were factors, sure, but I thought at the time there was much more going on than that, and at this point — as it’s become clear how much of the US federal budget was being turned into a slush fund for various unsavory social-engineering projects — I’m even more convinced of that. But we’ll talk more about that in future posts.

SOOOOOO……

I think that I am going to approve of this.  But if JMG continues along the path that I think he is going to take, he is going to be more discussing the (mal?)adaptations put in place by eight different congresses and four different presidents coupled with the rise of two to three competitive civilizations.

I am cursed with what seems to be a pretty accurate memory.  I mention this because I do remember posts made in the deep dark past at the original site over at blogger.  I think that folks should consider going over the wayback machine and reading these three posts

https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/dark-age-america-involuntary-simplicity.html

https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/dark-age-america-end-of-market-economy.html

https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-politics-of-transition.html

I haven’t decided just what to do with this particular post, I don’t want to copy the whole thing and force it upon the unwilling over at JMG’s place, but if you run across this in your internet travels, tell me what to do with this.

Patience

This comes out when spring gets serious

High clouds today with a good percentage of blue.  Barometer @30 and Temp in the mid-fifties, Air is still.

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I think that I am coming to the realization that, like all good ‘Murcans I want things tidied up within a period of time roughly equivalent to the length of two or three of the news cycles that I grew up with.  Now, since I am old, the news cycle for me is the length of time between publication of the Atlantic back in the day when it wasn’t a screechy, self-indulgent, journal of posturing.  So I cling to the oft-disproved idea that three months of attention to a problem is how things should work…….sigh.

I have been alive through five direct participations (wars and embargoes) and a couple of efforts where the opposition was teeny tiny and things worked out.  The big ones always took time and left a mark.  Over the years the sad little profession of history twists the periods into simplistic morality plays that best suit the folks who paid the price using other people's money.

So I am figuring that the whole dustup in Ukraine has a while to go.  Now that I said this out loud there is a solid chance that it will end tomorrow, but my money is on two years (minimum) to go.  That time will be spent rationalizing the inevitable retreat and making certain that the Eurotrash knows that we don’t in fact have their backs.

We will start developing the strategies for China in a serious way after that.  But remember the strategy will be a financial strategy which will choose the weapons and strategy that will best profit the arms manufacturers, they will have nothing to do with actual needs of the upcoming conflict and how to defeat the opponent.

Flow Restriction

Nonsense in a way

Blue sky with big puffy clouds.  51℉ and 30.2 in/hg.  Getting to be consistent and I am happy about that.

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The above picture is the current source of my angst concerning the American system of government.  We tend to focus on the media-driven, corporate-centric clusterfuck at the apex of the structure but when you look at the base of the structure, it seems to be decaying away to nothing.

Five election contests, four of them single candidate.  

One candidate for the Educational Service District, The ESD runs a $115,000,000 budget.

Two candidates for the Fire District.  Budget = $94,000,000

Two candidates for School District, The school district makes you beg for a copy of the budget, I’ll have to get back to you on this.  My guess that it is the biggest of the bunch.

So my best guess is that the three government entities together will administer around a half a billion bucks.  

I am thinking that a lot of the funding comes from non-local state and federal sources.  

I wonder if there were candidates who didn’t run who didn’t because they realized that the taps were being turned down?

Green Hot Sauce

Four days fermenting

Blue sky and sunshine, 55℉ degrees and looks to be going up to around 80℉, No wind, Barometer at 29.9 in.Hg.

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Hot sauce is essential.  Good hot sauce is ridiculous. A five ounce bottle of Green Tabasco is nearly $4.00.  

Equipment

𝆩1 x 2 quart wide-mouthmason jar

𝆩Clean flat rock that can fit in the opening of the jar, or you can be fancy like me and buy a glass weight

𝆩Inner lid that has small air hole punched in the middle or buy a fancy airlock like me

𝆩Screw-on part of the lid

𝆩Bandaid

Ingredients

𝆩One (1) head of garlic

𝆩One onion (diameter of the opening of the jar.

𝆩About 25 jalapeno peppers

𝆩Three (3) tablespoons of kosher salt

𝆩One (1) tablespoon of sugar

Directions

Scald the bottle

Add sugar and salt to the jar

Slice the onion

Peel the garlic

Chop up the jalapeno into chunks

Garlic goes on the bottom

Jalapeno chunks next

Onion slices on top to keep the jalapeno from floating.

Add water until everything is covered

Put a clean lid on on invert to get all the salt and sugar into solution

Put the clean rock or weigh on the top of the onions to keep everything underwater

If you are using the cheapskate method, put on the lid with a hole and cover it with a sterile bandaid.  If you have the fancy schmancy air, use that.

Wait four weeks.

Reserve the fluid and blend it all up as fine as you can make it using the fluid to make the consistency the way you want it, bottle how you want to and keep it in the fridge.  

Onion  ≅ $0.40

Jalapeno ≅ $4.00

Garlic ≅ $1.00

Total ≅ $6.00 for a yield around 55 ounces

This will give you a cost-equivalent of $0.54 per five ounces

Pondering

Seriously Pink

Beautiful Day, 51℉ 30 in/Hg, blue sky with a touch of breeze.  

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I spent years here on Dreamwidth doing a daily I Ching.  For some reason I stopped.  Maybe I will start again.