Bayou Renaissance Man

A journalist and writer ponders what she calls "My last five years of work".

I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it.

I work at a frontier AI company. With every iteration of our model, I am confronted with something more capable and general than before. At this stage, it can competently generate cogent content on a wide range of topics. It can summarize and analyze texts passably well. As someone who at one point made money as a freelance writer and prided myself on my ability to write large amounts of content quickly, a skill which—like cutting blocks of ice from a frozen pond—is arguably obsolete, I find it hard not to notice these advances. Freelance writing was always an oversubscribed skillset, and the introduction of language models has further intensified competition.

The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial. They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level ... The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task.

. . .

Many expect AI to eventually be able to do every economically useful task. I agree. Given the current trajectory of the technology, I expect AI to first excel at any kind of online work. Essentially anything that a remote worker can do, AI will do better. Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, and many other tasks are or will soon be heavily automated. I can see the beginnings in areas like software development and contract law. Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models.

There's more at the link.

Hers is a timely article.  With more and more white-collar workers being displaced by artificial intelligence and expert systems, it's going to be an ongoing and increasingly important debate:  what will we do when there's no longer anything that we're needed to do?

This also calls for a re-examination of the much-derided concept of universal basic income.  If automation reduces the number of available jobs far below the number of workers available to fill them, who's going to provide for the unemployed workers?  They can't be abandoned to starve, so some form of UBI appears to be inevitable.  What form that might take is currently being debated world-wide, but that it will be required seems incontrovertible.

Food for thought - particularly for a wordsmith, blogger and writer like myself.

Peter

In a recent issue of his regular Global Macro Update newsletters, Ed d'Agostino of Mauldin Economics interviewed Karim Hijazi, a cybercrime expert, about the current state of that field and the growing involvement of AI.  It's a long, multipage newsletter, so I won't even try to go into all it says.  Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite.

Ed D'Agostino:  What is AI's role in all of this? Has it impacted effectiveness of bad actors at all?

Karim Hijazi:  It has. I hate to say it. AI has probably been most embraced in terms of its creativity and its use by nefarious actors or threat actors because as usual, unfortunately, because it affords them the ability to force multiply themselves. That's the number one reason. What they would otherwise need a bunch of people to do they can do... one person can do a whole lot of work with an AI tool that generates an incredible amount of not only the narratives for a phishing email that we talked about, but also the malware itself. It'll actually write the code for the malware that is generally pretty well written. And there's a few tweaks here and there, but what would take weeks or months is done in days.

Ed D'Agostino:  Can you talk a little bit, Karim, about what's at stake here? I mean, we talk about me sitting here in my remote solo office, I get a phishing email. I'm not hooked up to a big company network. Maybe I lose a little bit of data. I think that's how people think of it. Really what we're talking about is the country's critical infrastructure is at risk. What does that look like and how is it at risk?

Karim Hijazi:  Exactly. The everyday person doesn't feel like it can affect them. A lot of where individuals are worried about when it comes to hackers and threats is their identities, maybe their credit card information, their social security number, back to identity. But what's interesting is that in the world we're in now, the interconnectivity between even your computer and mine, by definition, there is one, right? You're looking into your screen and I'm looking into my screen, my camera's picking up my image and sending it to you. There's effectively a link between us. So if you want to think of it from that perspective, right now we're connected. And so if there is, in theory, something on my machine, God forbid, and it wanted to sort of figure out, "Who's Ed?," and it goes into my email and it lurks around and it goes, "Ooh, Ed's got a lot of connections on LinkedIn," or, "He's got a really great follower base on YouTube. He's a good target for me to proliferate myself even further to his audience." So you think about it, that's the first step in terms of its reconnaissance risk. When you start thinking about yourself as a non-player when it comes to why you'd be interesting to a threat actor, you'd be surprised.

The second thing that's really interesting is this is just a micro version of the macro problem, which is supply chain. Supply-chain and third-party ecosystems are the number one challenge that we're having today because a small company leads to bigger company. A bigger company leads to government or critical infrastructure. The pathway, the daisy chain, if you will, is small company, bigger company, critical infrastructure. And from that small company… it could be a work-from-home individual that never left home after COVID because that was the policy of the company but because there's no security protocols at home, they're the easiest targets in the world to get into. The VPN is simply a hypodermic needle into the corporation. The corporation is now access to many other organizations and so on. That's just the super small taxonomy or treeing out of essentially the connections out all the way from the individual to government or critical infrastructure, unfortunately.

Ed D'Agostino:  I think you'd mentioned that some really big cutting-edge technology has been bled out of corporations through this sort of process. Quantuum was one that we talked about yesterday. I thought that we were... I was sitting here looking at IBM thinking, "If IBM gets Quantuum right, this stock is going to go into the moon, maybe we should be looking at it. They seem to be the leaders." And then I spoke with you and you're like, "Well, China's already got all that."

Karim Hijazi:  Unfortunately, China as a nation-state actor has focused heavily on intellectual property theft for years. That's definitely not a new agenda of theirs. It's been their focus for a very long time. I think we all know that from headline news. The problem is they've done it in a multipronged approach. They did it with implants of people, long-term "coverts" through academia that they've had planted for very long periods of time. They've augmented it with things like software and access to environments, through harvesting information electronically. And they've conned people into sharing information as well. That's the other part of this is that they've done a really good job with that. The other thing that's interesting is what people fail to recognize is that nation-state adversaries aren't islands unto themselves. They tend to cooperate. If a Russian or North Korean or Iranian nation-state actor has an initial access into something, they'll broker it to another country for a price. There may be one group in a nationstate adversary that has much better access to something than the other group does, but the other group can pay them for it, and they'll get in.

Unfortunately, there's been an onslaught onto our country in such a way that makes it very difficult for us to sort of manage all those beachheads. And so the asymmetry is very challenging, and it ties back to your AI conversation, which is how has that added to it? Just that, it's added this extra level of pressurization onto the systems that we believe were protecting us, and they are indeed failing. Sorry to be doom and gloom, but...

There's much more at the link.  The entire newsletter is well worth reading if you're interested in computer and information systems security.

It's startling to realize how widespread and prevalent cybercrime has become.  It's far more than just "phishing" e-mails or attempts to listen in on communications channels.  It's now become an exercise in how to kinetically affect an entire nation or sector of a national economy.  In another part of the interview, Karim Hijazi notes:

There's things like water treatment facilities that can have water levels… the pH change or the potability change just ever so slightly that'll cause a mass dysentery effect. Then you've got a flood onto the pressurization of a hospital environment in a specific location. And then as we've seen over the course of the pandemic, you conduct a ransomware attack and put the hospitals in a pressurization state where they can't function unless they pay a ransom, and you can really cause a cascading effect. And that's the doom and gloom scenario, of course. But you're completely right, the big concern is if there's that much access to these environments, what can they effectively do? And how much have we given to technology to take over?

And unfortunately, I know I said AI for the third time in this conversation, but here again is where our reliance on it and our over-excitedness to deliver the responsibility over to it, may be a little foolhardy at this point because once it's in the hands of something that really doesn't have any kind of emotionality or ability to identify... For example, in my company, I do employ a lot of automation and AI, but I also use human intuition and experience and talent to identify these problems that simply, at this point, can't be done through technology. And unfortunately for cost savings and a variety of other reasons, people are choosing to go in the direction where it's all automated. And automation's fantastic when there's nothing coming at it to use it maliciously, but when it can be leveraged against you, you’ve got an issue.

Worrying thoughts.  Again, if you want to learn more about this field and how it might affect any or all of us, I highly recommend reading the full interview for yourself.  I also suggest you subscribe to the newsletter (it's free).  Mr. d'Agostino comes up with some very interesting and useful insights.

Peter

This report boggles my mind.

At first glance, the Poetry Camera seems like another gadget in the ever-evolving landscape of digital devices. However, upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that this is no ordinary camera. Instead of merely capturing images, the Poetry Camera takes the concept of photography to new heights by generating thought-provoking poetry (or, well, as thought-provoking as AI poetry can get) based on the visuals it encounters.

. . .

At the heart of this innovative device lies a Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized single-board computer that packs a powerful punch. This tiny yet mighty component serves as the brain of the Poetry Camera, enabling it to capture images and communicate with OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate poetry.

A Raspberry Pi captures the image and then employs computer vision algorithms to analyze the visual data. The AI models then interpret the image, identifying key elements, colors, patterns and emotions within the frame. This information serves as the foundation for the poetry-generation process.

There's more at the link.

Well . . . I suppose, if the AI has been sufficiently trained on enough poetry covering all sorts of topics, issues and environments, it might produce something roughly in sync with the theme of the picture.  On the other hand, it's not going to work very well on fast-paced action shots, particularly if it doesn't know what's going on.

I have a mental picture of using this device to take a photograph of my Drill Instructor during military basic training lo, these many years ago;  screaming insults at me from a range of about six inches, spittle flying everywhere (including all over me), eyes wide and staring . . . although I don't think it could also capture his halitosis and body odor.  I wonder what sort of poem it would produce about him in that scenario?

Peter

Following our post about the deliberate cutting of Internet cables near Sacramento International Airport in California, disrupting operations there, I came across this article dealing with Internet cables globally, and how fragile they are.  It's frightening and disturbing to read about how fragile this infrastructure really is.

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

There's much more at the link, including many graphics and illustrations.  I'd say it's essential reading for anyone who relies on the Internet to do their job(s) every day.  Fascinating, revealing, and worrying all at the same time.

Peter

I had to laugh at this report.

Poisoned AI went rogue during training and couldn't be taught to behave again in 'legitimately scary' study

AI researchers found that widely used safety training techniques failed to remove malicious behavior from large language models — and one technique even backfired, teaching the AI to recognize its triggers and better hide its bad behavior from the researchers.

The details are at the link.

Had those researchers never heard the term, "Like father, like son"?  Had they never considered that any artificial intelligence that human intelligence can create or develop is likely to resemble, and emulate, the intelligence that inspired it?

Human beings are flawed creatures - each and every one of us.  We have good points, bad points, indifferent points.  Criminals, psychopaths and their ilk are as human as the rest of us, and in some cases good folks exhibit many of the traits of bad folks.  (Consider leadership.  It's amazing how many leaders, in business, politics or anywhere else, exhibit many of the traits of a psychopath.  It's almost like it goes with the territory.)

Any artificial intelligence designed to work with, and sometimes take the place of, human intelligence is going to have to be the same way.  If it isn't, it won't play well with others, because it won't understand - instinctively, empathically or intellectually - how their minds work, and won't know how to interact with them.  I'm sure the developers of artificial intelligence aren't explicitly trying to make their products psychopathic, or as weird as humans can be;  but those traits are part of human intelligence.  I'll be very surprised if any artificial intelligence designed to mimic and/or duplicate the latter doesn't turn out the same way.  I don't see how it can be otherwise.

Peter

There are fewer and fewer of us who remember when privacy was something important, and tried to allow other people their space while insisting on our own.  Sadly, the intrusion of technology into every part of our lives has all but destroyed the concept of personal privacy.  Certainly, anything and everything one says over any electronic medium must be assumed to be unsafe/not secure.

Facebook is a perfect example of a company that doesn't give a damn about your privacy.

Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.  The Markup helped Consumer Reports recruit participants for the study. Participants downloaded an archive of the previous three years of their data from their Facebook settings, then provided it to Consumer Reports.

By collecting data this way, the study was able to examine a form of tracking that is normally hidden: so-called server-to-server tracking, in which personal data goes from a company’s servers to Meta’s servers. Another form of tracking, in which Meta tracking pixels are placed on company websites, is visible to users’ browsers. 

. . .

Despite its limitations, the study offers a rare look, using data directly from Meta, on how personal information is collected and aggregated online.

Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez defended the company’s practices. “We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used,” Vazquez wrote in an emailed statement to The Markup.

While Meta does provide transparency tools like the one that enabled the study, Consumer Reports identified problems with them, including that the identity of many data providers is unclear from the names disclosed to users and that companies that provide services to advertisers are often allowed to ignore opt-out requests.

One company appeared in 96 percent of participants’ data: LiveRamp, a data broker based in San Francisco. But the companies sharing your online activity to Facebook aren’t just little-known data brokers. Retailers like Home Depot, Macy’s, and Walmart, all were in the top 100 most frequently seen companies in the study. Credit reporting and consumer data companies such as Experian and TransUnion’s Neustar also made the list, as did Amazon, Etsy, and PayPal.

. . .

“This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Markup in an interview. Fitzgerald said that while users are likely aware that Meta knows what they are doing while they are on Facebook and Instagram, “they don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”

There's more at the link.

I've never used Facebook, because I've been aware for a long time of its electronic intrusiveness and deliberate policy of nullifying efforts at personal privacy.  Reading that report merely confirms that only those who literally don't care about keeping anything private should be using it.

If our spouses tried to spy on us the way Facebook and its corporate customers do, it would probably be grounds for divorce:  yet we ignore or even invite such intrusion every time we use such services.  What's wrong with us, and with our society, that we've been conditioned to not just allow, but welcome that? - because if we continue to use Facebook and similar "social media" services after learning about such anti-privacy policies, that's exactly what we're doing.

Peter

I note that the Pentagon is looking to develop an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon to disable drone swarms.

Faced with the reality that drones are reshaping the modern battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, the Pentagon has been tasked with finding a budget-friendly solution to eliminate these 'flying IEDs.' While missiles are too expensive, and laser beams are a distant dream, the next best cost-effective weapon US military officials are eyeing up could be electromagnetic pulse weapons to counter drone swarms.

. . .

The service outlined the drone-killing features of the new EMP weapon it is seeking:

"The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI) is conducting market research to seek information from industry on the landscape of research and development (R&D) for available Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) solutions towards countering multiple Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). EMP solutions could be ground and/or aerial based that provide effective mitigation against Department of Defense (DoD) UAS groups 1, 2, and smaller group 3 aircraft." 

. . .

The proposed EMP weapon would be able to neutralize drones with a directed EMP blast to damage the electronic parts - this is a much cheaper solution than missiles that cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, a piece.

There's more at the link.

This sounds like a very good idea from a military perspective, just as an anti-aircraft defense using laser beams or other directed energy weapons would be much more economical than one firing missiles (see, for example, Israel's "Iron Beam" system).  So far, so good . . . but EMP weapons are no respecters of persons or property.  What if your home, or your vehicle, is caught in the spread of such a weapon when it discharges?  Say goodbye to every microchip and integrated circuit you own.  Your car dies, your fridge, your washing-machine, probably your switchboard and everything electrical in your home as well - and none of them will come back on once the pulse dissipates.  The damage will be permanent.  The only fix will be to replace every affected component, appliance and vehicle.

You may say, "Well, I live far from every likely combat area, so that won't affect me."  Think again.  If it affects, say, 5% or 10% of those people in a country, the demand from those areas for replacement parts and equipment will be sudden and overwhelming.  It'll suck in everything available everywhere, and then some.  That means the rest of us will no longer be able to get the parts and services we need in lesser quantities to repair normal damage (e.g. power surges, lightning strikes, and so on).  The orders we place for those parts will be added to those needed for the EMP-affected areas, and will probably be given a lower priority.  Sucks to be us, I guess.

There's also the factor that such attacks will likely be more widespread than typical "front-line" warfare.  Drones can be sent anywhere at any time.  An enemy might smuggle drones into the USA, then launch a sudden, unexpected drone swarm attack on a major city (Washington D.C., anyone?), or a major economic target (a nuclear power plant, a series of transportation hubs, or whatever).  That would expose many "behind-the-lines" areas to EMP damage, with all the consequences I mentioned above.  Let that happen in more than one or two places and the attackers will have struck a crippling blow against any modern economy.  To take just one example, what if the Internet goes down?  I don't believe our current economy and system of government could function in its absence.  Administration, banking, shopping . . . all would be interrupted.  Chaos would ensue.

It's worth thinking beyond the obvious when one reads snippets of news like that.  It might be a very effective weapon.  It might also disrupt the very society it's intended to defend.

Peter

Headline of the day:

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Peter

... it may be a security risk.  By that, I mean an email address like "Firstname.Lastname@ISP.com", with a period in the prefix before the @ sign.  Friend and fellow author John Van Stry reports:

I have the gmail address for my last name. Just me. I have it.

Now there aren't a lot of people with my last name in the world (less than a hundred) and SOME OF THEM use: FirstName.LastName for their gmail address.

Guess who ALL of their emails go to? 

NOT JUST THEM.

I have access to ALL of their toll pass accounts, their APARTMENT COMPLEX CODES, their MEDICAL INFORMATION, you ****ing name it and sooner or later I end up with it. Because they put a ****ing dot in their name and MOST mail software is bought at the cut rate version of buymart and guess what? It can't handle that DOT.

So if YOU have a dot in YOUR email name, understand that there is someone else out there, who has the email that caused you to get the dot who is getting ALL OF YOUR PRIVATE ****.

There's more at the link.

This affects me, because I have several email accounts with a split prefix, that I use for different purposes.  I'm going to have to look into that, and probably change them - which is a lot of work, and a massive time sink, but I guess will have to be done for security reasons.

Technology.  Grrrrr!!!  (Also known as "Why won't the computer do what I want it to do, instead of what I tell it to do?")

Peter

Google seems to have implemented a number of artificial intelligence bots on its Blogger service, and they apparently have no idea what they're doing.  I found this morning that over 250 comments, dating all the way back to 2008, had been deleted as spam - notwithstanding the fact that many of them came from regulars here, some with their own Blogger accounts as well.  Most of the comments were no more than a few words, too;  nothing controversial at all.

I can't for the life of me figure out why Blogger is getting its knickers in a twist like this, but if you find one or more of your older comments - or something you've tried to post over the past couple of weeks - have vanished into the ether, it's not me and it wasn't my fault!

Sorry about that.

Peter

How about something a little (?!) different today?

Few people these days have heard of Paweł Zadrożniak.  However, those of us who were active in the pre-smartphone days are familiar with his work, creating techno-music out of early computer hardware such as floppy disk drives (remember them?) and flatbed scanners.  He called his creation the "Floppotron".

He started out simply, as illustrated by this rendition of the "Imperial March" from the second Star Wars movie, "The Empire Strikes Back", composed by John Williams.  His instruments were two floppy disk drives and a controller board.

It didn't take him long to graduate to a full "orchestra".  Here's his "Floppotron 3.0" playing the "Entry of the Gladiators", a march by Julius Fucík.

And here's "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by Eurythmics.

You'll find more of Paweł Zadrożniak's music (?) at his YouTube channel.

Peter

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm in the process of setting up an alternate blog site, thanks to the growing threat of censorship and/or deletion on Big Tech blogging sites and facilities.  To that end, the contents of this blog (including all the archives) are scheduled to be backed up and copied over to a new server tomorrow, Wednesday, October 26th.

As a result, I won't be putting up any new blog articles until Thursday morning, to allow the copying process to proceed uninterrupted.  Anything I posted in the middle of that process wouldn't be copied, anyway, so there's not much point in trying!  Please enjoy yourselves with the bloggers listed in the sidebar until then.

Thanks.

Peter

I was amused to learn of a California company that's recycling and selling old-fashioned floppy disks by the hundreds every day.

Tom Persky runs floppydisk.com, a California-based online disk recycling service that takes in new and used disks before sending them onto a reliable customer base — he reckons he sells about 500 disks a day.

Who buys floppy disks in an age when more sophisticated storage devices like CD-ROMS, DVDs and USB flash drives have been made increasingly obsolete by internet and cloud storage? Those in the embroidery, tool and die, and airline industry, especially those involved in aircraft maintenance, says Persky.

“If you built a plane 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago, you would use a floppy disk to get information in and out of some of the avionics of that airplane,” said 73-year-old Persky.

There's more at the link.

That brings back lots of memories.  When I got started in computers in the 1970's, the big 8" floppy disks were widely used with the IBM Displaywriter System, and the IBM PC and clones soon popularized the smaller 5¼" diskettes.  By the mid-1980's the 3½" "stiffy" diskettes were taking over.  I had rack after rack of them all at my workstation in the office, and more of them at home.  However, by the early 1990's almost all of them had gone the way of the dinosaur.  Rewritable CD's were the thing, to be followed in the 2000's by the thumb drive and other technologies.

I'm surprised to learn that so many systems still use them.  I was aware that the US strategic deterrent Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles still used floppies for their software until very recently, but then, they were designed in the 1970's, so that's logical.  I wasn't aware that many aircraft still used them - I thought they would have been updated to more modern media long ago.

How many of you, dear readers, can remember covering the read/write notch on the edge of a floppy disk with tape, to make it read-only and prevent some overenthusiastic moron in your department from overwriting your precious code or subroutines?

Peter

Some weeks ago the theme on the mobile template for my blog changed from light to dark.  Numerous readers complained that made it more difficult to read text, particularly highlighted items.

I think I figured out how to change it back to a light background.  If you're using a mobile device, does that work for you?  Is it more readable?  Please let me know in Comments, so I can continue to fiddle with it if necessary.

Thanks!

Peter

I'm sure many of my readers have seen comments on other blogs about how difficult some are finding it to post new articles.  Some claim that Google is improving tweaking fiddling with its Blogger architecture, trying to improve it.  The Silicon Graybeard wrote a lengthy article about it recently, to which I refer you if you'd like more information.

I also noticed yesterday that my site statistics, normally accessed via Statcounter, were much lower than usual.  It appeared as if my blog traffic had literally halved overnight.  Fortunately, I use more than one site monitoring/metering service, so I was able to cross-check Statcounter's figures with others.  All of the latter indicated that my traffic was perfectly normal, so I have no idea why Statcounter's numbers changed.  I'll see how they look today.

I've also had complaints from some readers that comments they'd left were not appearing.  A couple even accused me of deleting their comments.  Sorry, folks, but I don't do that anonymously.  If I delete a comment, I delete its content, not the comment itself, so people can see it was there.  The only reasons I do that are to get rid of trolls, or remove content that is NSFW or overly profane.  Blogger, on the other hand, has had problems with "disappearing" comments from time to time.  Nobody seems to know why, or, if they do, they're not saying.  I can only assume that the current issues are related to the others mentioned above.

I don't know what's going on, but I'm not very happy about it.  I'm in the process of setting up a backup blog site, so that if the terminally politically correct nuke this blog, it will still be accessible.  If it goes down, look for its replacement at the blog name (all one word) followed by the usual dot and com.

Meanwhile, I'm sorry about any hassles you're experiencing with this blog - but I hasten to add that they aren't my fault.

Peter

Scott Adams nails it again!  Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the Dilbert Web page.

They were obviously trying to be moo-tivational...

Peter

Scott Adams brings the snark in his "Dilbert" comic strip last Sunday.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the strip's Web page.

I can only sympathize.  I don't use many apps on my smartphone, but it's still infuriating to find how many of them require this, or that, or the other setting to be changed for them to work correctly.  Back in my commercial computer programming days, if we'd coded like that, we'd have been fired!  As an old saying had it, "If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."

Peter

SNAFU Solomon linked to a tweet from Lancer Brigade that provided a video clip about the US Army's third-generation AN/PSQ-20 ENVG-B (Enhanced Vision Night Goggle - Binocular) and associated equipment.  It was pretty amazing to watch.

Intrigued, I looked for more information (you'll find a brief overview at the link above).  This twelve-minute video shows how the equipment is fitted and tuned to the individual soldier, and what they can see when they use it.  It's impressive.  It looks like the device takes raw input from all the sensors, combines and refines it using computer-generated imagery, and presents a composite result to the user.

I'm particularly intrigued by the way the soldier can now "see through" his rifle's sight without bringing it to his eye.  He can hold the weapon at waist height, or even extend it around a corner while all of his body except his hands and forearms remains behind cover, and still accurately hit what he's aiming at.  That offers an immense tactical advantage, as does the fact that he can now see through smoke, fog, rain, and almost any human-generated battlefield camouflage designed to restrict vision.

How I wish we'd had something like that (or, for that matter, earlier generations such as the AN/PVS-5, AN/PVS-7 or AN/PVS-14) during my time "up the sharp end" in the South African military during the 1980's.  It would have made my job immensely easier . . . and, more to the point, it might have kept some of my late comrades-in-arms alive.

Peter

Karl Denninger points out that the supply crunch in semiconductors directly and immediately affects whether or not our society can survive in its present form.  All forms of emphasis are in the original.

The United States used to be responsible for about 40% of chip capacity in 1990 but today is responsible for about 12%.

What happens if a critical part of that fab capacity is either blown up or embargoed?

You literally can't make anything electronic and given the enormous percentage of the whole it would take years, perhaps even a decade or more, to just replace US demand for said chips.  Until that could be done you'd get nothing.

Realize what "nothing" means in this context:

• No cell phones.
• No towers to provide service to cellphones, including the extra one in your desk drawer.
• No "green power" of any sort, since the generation of same is DC and requires power semiconductors in size to be usable.
• All "modern" electronically-controlled electrical generation (fossil-fuel, nuclear or otherwise) shuts down immediately until and unless said chips and spares are available.  Only the older-style, mechanically and manually controlled plants can run without this, and we've forced most of them to close, never mind that those who knew how to run them, a highly-skilled process, were all laid off and are gone with many of the plants themselves in such a state of disrepair or even torn down that they could not be restarted anyway.
• Ditto for all "modern" electronically-controlled refineries, chemical plants and similar.  Oh, that's most of them for the same reason; the "old way" wasn't green enough and they've been torn down or are hunks of rust and cannot be restarted, nor does the skilled labor base required to run them still exist.
• No "green cars" of any sort, or any car at all for that matter.  All modern vehicles are "drive by wire" and without said chips literally cannot be built.  While you could build mechanical carburetors they can't legally be sold and cannot work with modern emissions controls including the basic ones like a catalytic converter as they can't control fuel:air mixture tightly enough.
• No washing machines, dryers or dishwashers.  You think not?  Find me any of the above with mechanical timers.  Forget it.
• Even your electric stove won't work.  The old push-button multi-tap controls and burner elements are no longer made or sold.  All today are electronic.
• Modern gas water heaters are electronic ignition, not standing-pilot, and without electronics won't work.  The others were made illegal because they weren't "green enough."
• Your gas furnace and air conditioner almost-certainly has a VFD-driven blower motor.  No chips, no heat or A/C.  The older-style PSC motors were less-efficient and basically forced out of the market by government mandate.
• Most natural gas, petroleum and other refining, handling and pipeline transport stops immediately if there is a failure and no parts.  Why?  Because all the motors used today are VFD-driven which, you got it, require power electronics.  No chips, no controller.
• All modern Class 8 trucks (18 wheelers, the ones that deliver everything you use) will not start or run without these chips.  A single sensor that fails and cannot be replaced forces the engine to either derate to the point of being able only to creep to the next possible place to fix it or shuts it down entirely.  If there are no parts, even an inexpensive $50 part, that's the end of that vehicle's utility until the parts are available.  If that sensor can't be made due to unavailable chips for two years sucks to be you.

I can keep going but do I need to?

In short basically, well, everything we use and enjoy today stops.  We could quite-literally be back to worse than the 1700s because in the 1700s all the houses had fireplaces and wood stoves along with candles for light where today most residences and essentially all commercial facilities are uninhabitable without modern power, water and sanitation systems.  Don't even contemplate the food, potable water and sanitation problem.

There's more at the link.

This is why any adventurism by China towards Taiwan is so critical to the USA.  Taiwan controls 40-50% of all computer chip design and production in the world, depending on whose statistics you believe.  If China takes that over, it will have all the chips it needs and can hold them over the heads of other nations as a direct and immediate threat.  "Oppose us, and you won't be able to get the chips you need."  It's as simple as that.  On the other hand, if Taiwan is able to destroy its chip manufacturing plants before the Chinese can take over, then China will be in the same boat as the rest of the world - and that boat will be up the creek, without a paddle.  Either way, the USA and the free world will lose.

As Mr. Denninger points out, we got into this by design, through letting our big corporations offshore their manufacturing and design facilities.  It would take a decade or more to move everything back here, and that won't happen because we simply aren't willing to pay the much higher costs for computer chips that would be required to pay for the move.  We're trapped in a web of our own devising.

I don't think there's any solution to this.  We'll just have to hope and pray that the powers that be don't play brinkmanship any harder than they're doing already.  If they do, then we're neck-deep in the dwang.  Those who pontificate about emergency preparations aren't any help, either, because there aren't any preparations that can suffice for this.  Individuals and families who are prepared to go back to a 19th-century way of life may make it (provided their neighbors don't try to steal what they've put in place), but the society in which we live won't.  Our nation literally can't survive in its present form without what computer chips do for us.

Living in North Texas, as I do, is a nightmarish thought without air-conditioning in summer to make our homes bearable.  As for winter, we'd probably be able to dress warmly enough to survive it here, but in the snowbound states further north, with no artificial heat or light . . . I wouldn't like to be there.  It wouldn't be pretty.

Peter

ASE Global has sponsored an interesting infographic at Visual Capitalist, explaining what the next generation of manufacturing will look like.  It calls it "Industry 4.0".  Here's a screenshot of part of it.  Click the image for a larger view.

It looks very impressive . . . but it ignores a fundamental aspect of this "evolution" - namely, its utter dependence on a stable power supply and a stable Internet.

Our power supply is increasingly unstable, thanks to reliance on "renewable" energy such as solar or wind power.  A windless day, or a cloudy day, or a winter freeze that disables wind turbines (short or long-term), and all that electric generation capability is shut down.  Existing fossil- and nuclear-fueled power stations are being closed down, and not being replaced by similarly reliable generating capacity.  We saw how perilously close the entire Texas power grid came to total, long-term collapse in February 2021.  I'm willing to bet we're going to see the same again, and perhaps even worse, in the not too distant future.  If the worst happens, what does that mean for Industry 4.0?  It means it shuts down, and stays down, because reliable power supplies will no longer be available.

The same is true of the Internet.  Just look at how problems at Amazon Web Services, the biggest service provider of its kind in the USA, crippled many companies last month.  If the entire Internet shuts down (as it will if the power goes down, or if other major interruptions such as an EMP event occur), Industry 4.0 is toast too.

It's all very well to hype up the wonderful prospects of the new, improved industrial complex . . . but if there's no power and no Internet, the old Industry 2.0 and 3.0 will be sorely missed.  There needs to be a lot more thought put into that, and serious pre-emptive restructuring of our power grid, before Industry 4.0 will be trustworthy.

Peter