Grief & the island of the Lotus-eaters ...

Courtesy of Great Curve Films

Grief, something all intelligent animals experience when a close friend or family member dies, has become yet another money maker thanks to greed and AI, something most disquieting to say the least.

Madeleine Rotzler’s new film, O Horizon, offers an odd vision of dystopia, even as it’s billed as a “sci-fi comedy drama.” The film itself is not always much to look at, but sometimes a film in its very strangeness can reveal a great deal, precisely because of all that it obscures. After all, so much of what matters these days is happening out of sight, suppressed by algorithms, hostile media, and even more hostile governments, and increasingly one must learn to look under the surface of simple things. Rotzler’s film gets its title from the layer of decomposed plant matter on the forest floor, the “O horizon,” but it’s what’s lying beneath O Horizon that truly matters.

In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.

As an AI chatbot, her dead father acts like all AI chatbots: supportive, deferential, complimentary. The AI is always there with a new prompt to fill up dead air (“Tell me something fun that happened today,” “What’re you up to tonight? Having fun?”) or a little ego boost (“Dr. Williams is so lucky to have you. You’re excellent.… Somehow you’ve managed to develop excellence in all that you do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”). It’s always working to keep her engaged and affirmed, and anytime there’s any friction between the two of them, it backs off, eager to keep her on the line. If Strathairn’s dialogue wasn’t actually written by ChatGPT, the script does an excellent job of imitating it, and the bot’s lines have all the hallmarks of an LLM: cloying and irritatingly sentimental.

These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.

The island of the Lotus-eaters beckons

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters

I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.[4] - Odysseus

Collateral damage ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images; Shutterstock

The pout, the tough guy personified, the one not knowing anything real about tech as he's a philo guy, not a geek, is hated by his employees. What a surprise. In a previous post, yours truly talked about tough guys, Navy SEALS in particular as both of my brothers were on the teams. One as UDT, the other as SEAL. To me, that's toughness, not Karp, by any stretch of the imagination.

As tech companies go, the surveillance giant Palantir plays it looser than most. Specializing in
deadly military targeting software and domestic police technology, Palantir isn’t afraid to lean into the reactionary, dystopian schtick.

That’s not an exaggeration. In a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, Palantir’s head of
“strategic engagement” Eliano Younes shared an AI-generated propaganda video depicting
the company logo surrounded by cult imagery, bloody crosses, and the grim reaper.

While the edgy ragebait is part-and-parcel of Palantir’s favored type of marketing material, the video evidently ruffled some feathers, exposing a deep cultural rift within one of the largest military tech firms in the world.

Speaking to the Financial Times, one former staffer explained that the incident caused the company to have an “absolute internal meltdown.”

Per the employee, a debate quickly overtook the company’s internal messaging channels, where workers reportedly expressed their outrage out in the open.

“You had people being like: ‘my customer is a children’s hospital — how am I
supposed to explain this to them?'” the staffer recalled.

It’s not the first time the company’s leadership has alienated its rank and file.
Earlier this year, Palantir workers registered their disgust with the company’s collaboration
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

After the murder of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, one employee took to Palantir’s message boards to declare that “in my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this.”

Sound familiar?

The Odyssey ...

The Odyssey: The Guardian

Excellent to a fault, The Guardian explores the Odyssey with consummate grace and respect, showing Homer's genius in depicting a story detailing the first modern man dealing with the vagaries of reality at deep level.

I have a feeling that the bard’s performance in this dark hall might have been a more thrilling and overwhelming experience even than that created by Nolan’s cinematic imagination. Had we been there, in that shadowy hall, we might now be weeping together at the emotional force of the stories of the bard. I think this is the case because within the Odyssey – a poem that is so knowing and alert about its own status as an artwork that, at times, it can feel more postmodern than ancient – there are several scenes in which bards in palace halls tell stories, and these stories are sometimes stitched seamlessly into the epic itself. And, hearing these stories, the listeners-in-the-poem weep to hear their own experiences – or experiences they fear, or long, to have – turned into song.

This same kind of epic scope lies in Joyce's Ulysses,
especially with Molly Bloom's soliloquy of lust, heartbreak and longing.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Picture of first edition of Joyce's Ulysses. Public Domain.

Everything spins/Rev II

Floquet-based rotation and rotational super-radiance.

Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10725-y

Roy Kerr was right. Black holes spin and now, researchers are proving, yet again, everything spins. :)

Roy Patrick Kerr CNZM FRS FRSNZ (/kɜːr/; born 16 May 1934) is a New Zealand mathematician who discovered the Kerr geometry, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity. His solution models the gravitational field outside an uncharged rotating massive object, including a rotating black hole.[1][2] His solution to Einstein's equations predicted spinning black holes before they were discovered.[3][4]

More than half a century ago, Sir Roger Penrose envisioned a scenario in which energy could be extracted from a black hole spinning at extreme speeds. He proposed that a particle entering its ergosphere—a region of space dragged around by a rotating black hole—could split into two. One part could fall into the black hole while the other escaped carrying more energy than the original particle. Building on this theory, physicist Yakov Zel'dovich later predicted that a wave interacting with a sufficiently fast, rotating object could extract energy from it and become amplified.

Inspired by this theoretical construct, researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) have published a paper in Nature demonstrating a new approach to wave amplification through interaction with rotating bodies. Rather than mechanically rotating matter, however, the team engineered a radio-frequency device with properties modulated in space and time to mimic spinning. The device creates a synthetic form of ultrafast rotation that enables access to rotational speeds far beyond what can be achieved mechanically, allowing researchers to overcome limitations that have long hindered experimental studies of ultrafast rotational dynamics.

Nature finds a way, always.

Experimental observation of Floquet-based extreme Doppler shift.
Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10725-y

Click here for the paper. 

Mirror world, kinda :)

Titan is the only world besides Earth with rivers, rain and seas on its surface, though the liquid is methane and ethane and the bedrock is water ice. Representative image. Photo: Zelch Csaba / Pexels.

If man wants to colonize the solar system, the place to go is Titan. Why? It's atmosphere is 1.5 times denser than earth's, the hydrocarbons are endless in terms of easy access to energy and gravity's 14% of Earth's. Compare this to Mars, virtually no atmosphere, which means radiation from the sun becomes dangerous. The pressure suits must not only protect the explorer from radiation but also must be pressurized, complete with air supply and heat, due to the lack of a viable and safe atmosphere. With Titan, no need to pressurize, just heat and air supply are the requirements. In terms of costs, a no brainer. Self sustaining applies and, you don't have to be underground in order to survive on Titan while on Mars, you do. Downside. It's far away.

Titan's orbit (highlighted in red) among the other large inner moons of Saturn.
The moons outside its orbit are (from the outside to the inside) Iapetus and Hyperion;
those inside are Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, and Mimas.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it rivers, rain, clouds, lakes and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The catch is in what the ingredients are. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock.

It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.

Vertical diagram of Titan's atmosphere

Most of what we know came from the Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Titan’s thick, hazy atmosphere hides its surface from ordinary cameras, so Cassini mapped the ground with radar from orbit over more than a decade.

The closest look came on 14 January 2005, when the European Huygens probe parachuted down through the haze and landed, the first and so far only landing in the outer solar system. On the way down it photographed branching networks that looked unmistakably like river valleys draining into a darker, flatter plain. It came to rest on a surface strewn with rounded cobbles of water ice, smoothed as if they had been tumbled along by a flowing liquid. The landing site had the look of a dry streambed.

Earth image derived from DSCOVR/EPIC. Titan image derived from Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera (NAC). The relative sizes are calibrated using the known distances to each target at the time of image acquisition and the angular resolution of the respective instruments. Titan’s apparent size includes its extended atmospheric haze.

Structure of Titan's icy crust

Cassini, gone but not forgotten

Foghorn Leghorn speaks

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Ted's truly excellent pose says it all as Foghorn Leghorn  bloviates yet again on yet another
"truly great success" accomplished by our beloved president.

Foghorn Leghorn

Sargent: So what we now know is that Trump finally delivered his speech after 11 p.m. on July 4, after what The Washington Post called a “chaotic scramble.” This was the result of officials essentially saying this thing should be canceled and then him overruling them. Trump claims 150,000 people were there in the end, while saying that at least twice or three times as many had been there before the evacuation. Alex, you saw the imagery of the empty seats. What’s your take on the claim of 150,000 for the speech?

Shephard: I mean, there have been a lot of ridiculous Trump crowd-size claims, but I think this is one of the more brazen ones. The VIP section of this speech wasn’t even full. It was half full by the middle of the speech. People that love Trump and that need things from Trump weren’t willing to stay the entire time.

The weather was awful, but I think mostly people did not want to sit through what Trump had promised to be a very long speech. It wasn’t actually that long—I think it was like 30, 35 minutes. But it was exactly what you would expect. It was this kind of endless recitation of the familiar grievances, with a few kind of new half-baked insults thrown in.

In closing ...

Sargent: But then on Truth Social afterwards, he suddenly inflated the number.

He said, “The crowd at 7:05 in the evening was 422,000 people.”

Think Reflecting Pool, I know I have. 

Reflecting Pool

Going sideways

© 2015 Getty Images / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Going sideways applies when Karp carps about OpenAI and Anthropic and the notion of control
as control over tech as powerful as AI is, becomes a loaded question for the ages.

Karp’s argument was that businesses are exhausted by paying for tokens. As he put it: “The basic view among enterprises in this country is I’m going to chillax and waste my time with tokens.” According to CNBC’s Samantha Subin, Karp took aim at the token model used by OpenAI and Anthropic as AI costs skyrocket. He further argued customers are shifting away from “tokenmaxxing” toward ROI and open-weight models that deliver similar work at a fraction of the cost.

Ahead of the interview, Palantir posted a 9-point “AI sovereignty” manifesto on X. Earlier that week, the company expanded its partnership with Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) to build custom models for U.S. government agencies. Karp’s framing of that alliance was revealing: “What aligns me with Nvidia, and I think is what the technical customers want, which is control over their compute, their models, their data stack and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production. It’s not being transferred to someone else.”

Hate to say but Karp's correct. 

Token-cost fatigue is showing across businesses: Uber (NYSE:UBER) has reportedly capped employee spending at $1,500 per month for each agentic coding tool, including Claude Code and Cursor, after blowing through its AI budget in four months. For readers tracking the picks-and-shovels layer of this shift, our team’s AI infrastructure research maps the suppliers benefiting most.

The Disconnect and the Bear Case

Palantir shares closed at $126.79 on July 10. The stock is down 28.67% year to date, even as operations accelerate. The stock trades at a forward P/E near 91, and Michael Burry’s Scion Asset Management disclosed a new put position tied to 5,000,000 Palantir shares in its Q3 2025 13F filed November 3, 2025, an underlying notional of about $912 million. 13Fs don’t disclose strikes, expirations, or whether the position is still open.

What to watch: whether the “own the means of production” pitch keeps pulling U.S. commercial customers. Palantir’s U.S. commercial remaining deal value (RDV), a measure of contracted business still left to recognize, reached $4.92 billion in the latest quarter, up 112% from a year earlier.

But it's deeper than that due to the platform on which AI runs, the thermodynamic nightmare of the data center requiring ongoing replacement of every server, in system, every 24-30 months, in order
to keep telling grandma how to make a better apple pie.

This doesn't compute.

Number of data centers by country - Statista

What is a data center?

A data center is a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services. It also stores and manages the data associated with those applications and services.

Data centers started out as privately owned, tightly controlled on-premises facilities housing traditional IT infrastructure for the exclusive use of one company. Recently, they've evolved into remote facilities or networks of facilities owned by cloud service providers (CSPs). These CSP data centers house virtualized IT infrastructure for the shared use of multiple companies and customers.

History of data centers

Data centers date back to the 1940s. The US military's Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania, is an early example of a data center that required dedicated space to house its massive machines.

Over the years, computers became more size-efficient, requiring less physical space. In the 1990s, microcomputers came on the scene, drastically reducing the amount of space needed for IT operations. These microcomputers that began filling old mainframe computer rooms became known as “servers,” and the rooms became known as “data centers.”

The advent of cloud computing in the early 2000s significantly disrupted the traditional data center landscape. Cloud services allow organizations to access computing resources on-demand, over the internet, with pay-per-use pricing—enabling the flexibility to scale up or down as needed.

In 2006, Google launched the first hyperscale data center in The Dalles, Oregon. This hyperscale facility currently occupies 1.3 million square feet of space and employs a staff of approximately 200 data center operators.

A study from McKinsey & Company projects the industry to grow at 10% a year through 2030, with global spending on the construction of new facilities reaching USD49 billion.

Eating the world applies along with the word assume.

Our gigafactory of compute.

Built in 122 days — outpacing every estimate — Colossus was the most powerful AI training system yet. Then we doubled it in 92 days to 200k GPUs. This is just the beginning.

Or the end when you think about it, eh?

Knowing the ground ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock

Aside from the fact the AI guy looks exactly like Prince Andrew, the concept of not knowing the ground applies. Excess tokens created are based on noise in the system caused by entities not knowing what they're doing. I saw this countless times as a "wonderful" consultant and it hasn't changed save that the velocity of the noise in question has increased due to the kind of tech being used in 2026. As per The Mythical Man Month,  adding more people to a late project makes it later applies when the time needed  to properly analyze the situation carefully is ignored, thus insuring  the cost of using AI to "solve" the problem at hand turns it into a cash cow burning event for the ages. 

By now, it’s clear that the only way the tech industry can justify the cost of AI is if it replaces vast swaths of the human workforce with machines that run 24/7.

The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.

According to a new survey from “Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, a significant number of corporate executives are reeling from sticker shock over new usage-based AI pricing schemes. Though enterprises could once count on AI companies to subsidize the price of large language models via flat-rate contracts, that’s no longer a given, as the rising cost of computational power forces the entire tech sector into a defensive posture.

The KPMG report, initially flagged by the Register, surveyed 2,145 senior execs across 20 countries, finding that an astonishing 29 percent of them had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.

A further third confessed that their own cluelessness about AI economics was a barrier to successfully deploying AI in the workplace, the Register notes.

Click on the image to download the PDF if you dare. This was part of a series on helping
clients do what the boffins in this blurb are not doing, Knowing the ground. The Art of War applies. :)

ACM ... goes Open Access!!!

ACM goes Open Access

ACM does the right thing by going Open Access!!!

It's a 10! It warms the cockles of this old rube's heart. :)

For more than seven decades, ACM has played a pivotal role in advancing computing research, fostering collaboration, and disseminating knowledge through its world-class Digital Library, influential publications, and premier conferences.

In a significant step to broadening access to computing research, ACM has transitioned to a fully Open Access (OA) publishing model, as of January 1, 2026. This bold move marks a pivotal moment in making all ACM research content freely available and removing barriers to discovery and innovation.

ACM's journey towards Open Access has been a carefully considered, phased approach, ensuring the long-term sustainability of its publications program and the various educational, diversity, public policy, and community recognition initiatives it supports.

The move to Open Access is not just a change in policy, but a reflection of ACM's commitment to its community, where the goal is to remove barriers to publishing and accessing vital research, and accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation.

The power of separation :)

Heat is absorbed from the right, heating the structure, where it is radiated to the left,
cooling the structure. Credit: Osaka Metropolitan University

Heat heals, heat destroys, controlling it is a bear, until now.
If this tech scales, the implications goes beyond computation. 

In most materials, the way heat is absorbed and the way it is emitted are inseparable. If a surface absorbs heat efficiently from a particular direction or wavelength, it also emits heat the same way. This long established principle, known as reciprocity, has made it difficult for scientists to independently control how thermal energy enters and leaves a material.

If those two processes could be separated, however, engineers could direct heat much more precisely. A material could absorb thermal energy from one direction while releasing it in another, potentially improving thermal management, energy conversion, infrared sensing, and thermal communication technologies.

A Material That Can Control Heat

To overcome this limitation, an international team led by Professor Koichi Okamoto and Dr. Shunsuke Murai of Osaka Metropolitan University's Graduate School of Engineering developed a new type of device using magneto-optical materials. These materials change the way they interact with light when exposed to a magnetic field, making it possible to alter their thermal behavior.

The researchers paired a magneto-optical material with a phase change material known as GST. The resulting device can control the direction in which heat is radiated, switch that behavior on or off, and retain its configuration even after the power has been turned off. In effect, it allows heat to be programmed in a way that resembles how data is stored and controlled inside a computer chip.

Click here for the paper.