1500 & Counting

1500 & Counting as Agent Orange's "wonderful" tariffs take hold, roiling makes to the max. Question, how long will the gutless pols tolerate this train wreck of an administration incapable of doing anything right regarding the art of governance as it's time to get rid of Trump and company once and for all while a 

Constitutional crisis for the ages looms.

NEW YORK (AP) — Financial markets around the world are reeling Thursday following President Donald Trump’s latest and most severe volley of tariffs, and the U.S. stock market may be taking the worst of it.

The S&P 500 was down 4% in morning trading, worse than the drops for other major stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,520 points, or 3.6%, as of 10:10 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 4.0% lower.

Little was spared as fear flared globally about the potentially toxic mix of higher inflation and weakening economic growth that tariffs can create.

Everything from crude oil to Big Tech stocks to the value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies fell. Even gold, which has hit records recently as investors sought something safer to own, pulled lower. Some of the worst hits walloped smaller U.S. companies, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks dropped more than 5% into what’s called a “bear market” after losing more than 20% from its record.

Any questions?

Energy Hog ...

Illustration: Molimit46/Getty Images

AI, love it or hate it, it's here and isn't going away unless our antiquated power grid surrenders given just how truly inefficient digital is when it comes to processing analog output of neural nets as AI must use analog in order to react to the real world in real time as analog uses differential equations to map the differences in textural, visual and audio data prior to delivering said content to digital systems to process and show a user the best way to check out the 

Grand Canyon.

Remember, digital counts, analog measures.

RIGHT NOW, GENERATIVE artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.

This rush to add AI to as many online interactions as possible can be traced back to OpenAI’s boundary-pushing release of ChatGPT late in 2022. Silicon Valley soon became obsessed with generative AI, and nearly two years later, AI tools powered by large language models permeate the online user experience.

One unfortunate side effect of this proliferation is that the computing processes required to run generative AI systems are much more resource intensive. This has led to the arrival of the internet’s hyper-consumption era, a period defined by the spread of a new kind of computing that demands excessive amounts of electricity and water to build as well as operate.

There is no free lunch 

“In the back end, these algorithms that need to be running for any generative AI model are fundamentally very, very different from the traditional kind of Google Search or email,” says Sajjad Moazeni, a computer engineering researcher at the University of Washington. “For basic services, those were very light in terms of the amount of data that needed to go back and forth between the processors.” In comparison, Moazeni estimates generative AI applications are around 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive.

Going beyond environmental concerns, these data centers have the potential to overwhelm local power grids with their energy needs. “In Washington, there's a Microsoft data center building in Quincy,” says Moazeni. “I know there's a lot of concern that the power they are burning is basically sucking up all of the energy in that area.” Around the world, the server farms that train and operate AI models may compete with local residents and businesses for power—possibly leading to blackouts during peak times.

Speaking the truth ... for a change

Direct, vulgar but truthful, the Orange Menace AI speaks the truth.

In a strange way, George Carlin would approve. Jabari Jones rules. 

The enduring Meme of VP J.D. continues ever onward. Last adventure, Greenland. 

Improper ideology ...

People gather for a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to announce the installation of a life-size painting of President Abraham Lincoln by artist W.F.K. Travers, Feb. 10, 2023, in Washington. 

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Echos of 1984 keep cropping up relating to the administration from hell. This time, the push to eliminate liberal thinking espoused by the Smithsonian, a beloved institution for the ages.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Thursday revealed his intention to force changes at the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order that targets funding for programs that advance “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology,” the latest step in a broadside against culture he deems too liberal.

Trump claimed there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite American history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” adding that it casts the “founding principles” of the United States in a “negative light.”

The order he signed behind closed doors puts Vice President JD Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, in charge of overseeing efforts to “remove improper ideology” from all areas of the institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

So saith Agent Orange, an ignorant man without humor, culture or curiosity, 

aspiring to be Big Brother without question.

The Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, D.C., also known as "the Castle"

Don't worry, we have a sleazy used car salesman who will protect us from god forbid, liberal thinking.

Combat pilots weigh in ...

A F/A-18 Super Hornet launching from the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea last year for operations against Houthi targets in Yemen.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Pilots flying combat missions are making their feelings known about the arrogance
and incompetence of Captain America regarding ops and how they should be handled.

The intelligence breach was bad enough, current and former fighter pilots said. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s refusal to acknowledge that he should not have disclosed sensitive information about when American fighter pilots would attack sites in Yemen, they said, was even worse.

On air bases, in aircraft carrier “ready rooms” and in communities near military bases this week, there was consternation. The news that senior officials in the Trump administration discussed plans on Signal, a commercial messaging app, for an impending attack angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States.

The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the chat and Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said.

Worse, they said, is that going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.

“We intentionally don’t share plans with people who don’t need to know,” said one Navy F/A-18 pilot, who has flown frequently in missions in the Middle East. “You don’t share what time we’re supposed to show up over a target. You don’t want to telegraph that we’re about to show up on someone’s doorstep; that’s putting your crew at risk.” He and several other current and former pilots spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from the Pentagon and from allies of President Trump.

But then came Mr. Hegseth’s initial response to the disclosures. He attacked Mr. Goldberg as a “so-called journalist,” and sought refuge in a semantic argument, saying that he had never disclosed “war plans.”

So on Wednesday, The Atlantic published the actual text of what he had written, at 11:44 a.m. the day of the attack, in the group chat: “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” Mr. Hegseth texted, some 30 minutes before it happened. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike window Starts (Target Terrorist is @his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME).”

Time for Captain America and significant others to be fired, now. 

Ready, Fire, Aim/Rev 3

Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This pix shows it all. Agent Orange, drifting off toward the land of dementia or Alzheimer's and Captain America, looking patently ridiculous in trying to show the world's he's in total control, indirectly points out the fact this administration's not only evil but also blindingly incompetent to the max, this time in using Signal to tell senior officials top secret details of an op done against the Houthis, a group proving to be truly innovative in waging asymmetrical war against the west and US in the Red Sea in supporting the Palestinians in the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against them by the Israelis in Gaza.   

Houthi supporters in Sanaa protesting against Israel's blockade of aid deliveries to Gaza

It's not just the Situation Room or Signal — senior Trump administration officials bypassed a range of secure government systems when they decided to discuss plans for an upcoming attack in Yemen on a commercially available app.

Axios spoke to one current senior U.S. official and five former senior U.S. officials — all of whom have taken part in communications around similarly sensitive overseas operations — about the secure channels through which these conversations are supposed to happen, why turning to Signal could seem appealingly expedient, and why doing so is potentially dangerous.

What they're saying: "It's shocking. It's shocking negligence," a former senior defense official said. "We've got the best secure communication systems in the world — of any country — so why are we using a rickety, commercially available system?"

The former official said Signal is "not even in the same universe" as the Pentagon's JWICS intranet, through which some of the country's most delicate intelligence is shared.

Why incompetence & lying rule in the land of Trump.

• White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the app
  "the most secure and efficient way to communicate."
• But security experts consider communicating via Signal, particularly from a personal device, far less secure than using a classified government channel.
• The White House and National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment.

Those conversations didn't need to happen on Signal, or on personal mobile devices. The current official noted that many of the officials on the Signal chat have SCIF's in their homes, making moving to a classified setting relatively straightforward.

Note. Signal's a great app, this is not the issue, security is.

A darker reason for using Signal may be the time frame for messages to be retained. 

To whit. 

Signal allows users to set messages to disappear after a period of time, ranging from seconds to four weeks, while secure military communication systems have data retention policies that vary based on the sensitivity of the information and legal requirements, potentially retaining data for much longer periods. 

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Signal:

Disappearing Messages Feature:

Signal offers a "disappearing messages" feature, allowing users to set a timer for messages to be automatically deleted from all participants' devices. 

Timeframe Options:

Users can choose a timeframe for messages to disappear, ranging from a few seconds to up to four weeks. 

User Control:

The user has control over when and for how long messages are retained. 

Potential Concerns:

This feature raises concerns about compliance with federal record-keeping laws and the potential loss of critical intelligence. 

Secure Military Communication Systems:

Data Retention Policies:

Military communication systems have data retention policies that are designed to ensure the preservation of critical information and compliance with legal requirements.

Longer Retention Periods:

These systems may retain data for much longer periods than Signal's disappearing messages feature, potentially years or even decades, depending on the nature of the information.

Security and Compliance:

These systems are designed to ensure the secure storage and retrieval of sensitive information.

Customizable Policies:

Data retention policies can be customized based on the specific needs of the military or government agency. 

Any questions?

Ready, Fire, Aim/Rev 2

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Can't these idiots do anything right? Seems war plans against the Houthis went prime time according to The Atlantic. If so, ready, fire, aim applies yet again.

Territory controlled by the Houthi movement shown in dark green

The poorest nation in the Middle East is doing a number on the US in ways thought impossible until now as asymmetrical war, driven by drones, is now how war is being conducted in the year of our lord 2025.

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

Addendum: 

The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

The orange menace's also ineffective ...

Stealing is ok, if you're Open AI

Image by Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty / Futurism

If you want Open AI's tech to work, you gotta let us steal crap without paying, which points out the fact AI's evolving so quickly that the amount of content produced by us rubes no longer suffices. 

As Ars Technica reports, the Sam Altman-led company is begging president Donald Trump to instate federal regulations defining "fair use," the thorny standard at the heart of the copyright lawsuits lobbed against OpenAI by The New York Times and other companies.

This policy proposal to the White House's Office of Science and Technology comes amid increasing momentum on the state level to regulate AI. In the lengthy document the president probably will not read himself, OpenAI said that it could not compete with China — which the company insists on calling the People's Republic of China, or PRC for short, throughout — if regulations stymie AI access to copyrighted works for training data.

Channeling Meta's model applies.

Q Day

Illustration: Nicholas Law

Ah, viable quantum computing, the long sought after holy grail, is worth pursuing no matter the cost as said tech not only goes beyond computation in terms of crunching numbers but also has the ability to model reality due to the superposition of qubits connected by entanglement, the prime driver to an existence in which we all share. With this being said, there's always a cost to everything, in this instance, privacy as QCs are uniquely qualified to deal with the issue of primes as prime numbers are the building blocks of cryptography, the mathematical construct on which privacy depends.

The general definition of a qubit as the quantum state of a two-level quantum system.

To whit ...

Suppose you ask a classical computer to solve a simple math problem: Break the number 15 into its smallest prime factors. The computer would try all the options one by one and give you a near-instantaneous answer: 3 and 5. If you then ask the computer to factor a number with 1,000 digits, it would tackle the problem in exactly the same way—but the calculation would take millennia. This is the key to a lot of modern cryptography.

Take RSA encryption, developed in the late 1970s and still used for securing email, websites, and much more. In RSA, you (or your encrypted messaging app of choice) create a private key, which consists of two or more large prime numbers. Those numbers, multiplied together, form part of your public key. When someone wants to send you a message, they use your public key to encrypt it. You’re the only person who knows the original prime numbers, so you’re the only person who can decrypt it. Until, that is, someone else builds a quantum computer that can use its spooky powers of parallel computation to derive the private key from the public one—not in millennia but in minutes. Then the whole system collapses.

The algorithm to do this already exists. In 1994, decades before anyone had built a real quantum computer, an AT&T Bell Labs researcher named Peter Shor designed the killer Q-Day app. Shor’s algorithm takes advantage of the fact that quantum computers run not on bits but on qubits. Rather than being locked in a state of 0 or 1, they can exist as both simultaneously—in superposition. When you run an operation on a handful of qubits in a given quantum state, you’re actually running that same operation on those same qubits in all their potential quantum states. With qubits, you’re not confined to trial and error. A quantum computer can explore all potential solutions simultaneously. You’re calculating probability distributions, waves of quantum feedback that pile onto each other and peak at the correct answer. With Shor’s algorithm, carefully designed to amplify certain mathematical patterns, that’s exactly what happens: Large numbers go in one end, factors come out the other.

There are now hundreds of companies trying to build quantum computers using wildly different methods, all geared toward keeping qubits isolated from the environment and under control: superconducting circuits, trapped ions, molecular magnets, carbon nanospheres. While progress on hardware inches forward, computer scientists are refining quantum algorithms, trying to reduce the number of qubits required to run them. Each step brings Q-Day closer.

That bomb going off will only be the beginning. When Q-Day becomes public knowledge, either via grim governmental address or cheery big-tech press release, the world will enter the post-quantum age. It will be an era defined by mistrust and panic—the end of digital security as we know it. “And then the scramble begins,” says Demchak.

Illustration: Nicholas Law 

A heist for the ages ...

Image by Drew Angerer via Getty / Futurism

This pix of Zuck, depicted as a borrower of books extreme, kinda indirectly shows how the third luckiest man on earth does business. It's never enough, it's akin to cutting down all the trees in a forest in order to build houses nobody will live in because the potential for money overrides all, in this case, data, as LLMs needs this now rapidly dwindling resource in order to evolve. This need for data also shows, in indirect fashion, how inefficient the physical construct of AI truly is as digital is used to crunch analog, the data stream used by neural nets to interact with the real world in real time as researchers seem to be fixated on that model to enable AI to evolve as needs warrant. This is not sustainable but you already knew that, right?

The training compute of notable large models in FLOPs vs publication date over the period 2010-2024. For overall notable models (top left), frontier models (top right), top language models (bottom left) and top models within leading companies (bottom right). The majority of these models are language models.

For all the revolutionary change artificial intelligence promises, it also makes lofty demands. For starters, AI is extraordinarily power hungry. Generating all the electricity that AI datacenters consume takes forest-loads of energy, not to mention hardware and cooling infrastructure. That stuff all costs a lot, making AI a huge money pit. That's had a big effect on our economy, as the tiniest bit of AI hype can send huge shockwaves through Wall Street and beyond.

But AI's also greedy in less noticeable ways: namely, for your data.

The large language models (LLMs) that underpin products like OpenAI's ChatGPT, for instance, need to devour enormous datasets of written words to fine tune an algorithm to follow the rules of language. They're so hungry for raw data, in fact, that original material for these algorithms to gobble up is becoming hard to come by.

"We’re literally running out of text in the universe to train these systems on," said computer science scholar Stuart Russell back in 2023. Now in 2025, the well is all but drying up.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has inadvertently pulled the curtain back on what it looks like to ingest all that data.

In January, Meta lost a huge fight with a group of authors who sued the company for using their books to train its AI. The case uncovered the fact that Meta had illegally downloaded an infamous pirate library, LibGen, to procure millions of legally protected texts. Those books were then fed to Meta's LLM, Llama, after software engineers got approval from the Zuck himself. In other words, one of the largest companies in the world didn't even bother to pay for a single copy of each book it used to build its AI.

This week, The Atlantic compiled a search engine that could trawl the LibGen files and uncover which books, exactly, were scraped by Meta. The scope of Meta's data harvesting operation is extensive, spanning over 7.5 million books and some 81 million academic papers, on top of work published by museums, architects, and artists.

It's never enough is it.

Aperture