Gaussian Splats, a gateway to better hearing

 

Wireframe and render of a fine art model done in 1982, was created by yours truly on Phil Mittleman's SynthVision Modeler, the first true 3D mainframe terminal. Why the image? Because this CSG/Constructive Solid Geometry technology directly relates to Gaussian Splats in deep fashion if one takes the time to look.

Question, what is a Gaussian Splat?

Gaussian splatting is a volume rendering technique that deals with the direct rendering of volume data without converting the data into surface or line primitives.[1] The technique was originally introduced as splatting by Lee Westover in the early 1990s.[2][3]

In other words, a voxel.

In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (G.I.S.)).[1] Voxels also have technical and artistic applications in video games, i.e. Minecraft (2011) makes use of an entirely voxelated world to allow for a fully destructible and constructable environment.[2] 

Splats are point clouds

Illustration of a voxel grid containing color values

Splats capture the external geometry of objects in near realtime as seen by the video below.

Applications ... it goes beyond just imagery. :)

Yours truly has a cochlear implant so this take is personal ...

Acoustic Splats and the DSP Hum: Rendering Sound in the Inner Ear

The physical hardware inside a modern cochlear implant is a marvel of biological engineering. Below the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) threshold, the physical implant's superb. But cross the threshold and the software reveals its brittle, brute-force nature. You don't just get clean audio; you get a parasitic hum working in concert with the
perceived sound.

Why? Because traditional DSP software treats a 3D fluid-filled biological spiral like a cheap 2D speaker.
It forces a rigid, linear grid of frequencies into an organic chamber and the hum is the sound of an algorithm fighting the natural environment.

This is where the tech industry's sudden leap into 3D Gaussian splatting crosses the sensory boundary. Visually, a Gaussian splat isn't a rigid polygon or a straight-line grid. It is a continuous, mathematically defined volume of energy that radiates outward—geometry built from the inside out. In essence, a point cloud operating in real time.

If we take that exact volumetric engine and apply it to audio, the paradigm flips. Instead of blasting a flat frequency wave, the software would generate volumetric acoustic splats. The implant ceases to be a dumb speaker and becomes a spatial router. It calculates the exact geometric topology of the patient's inner ear and renders the acoustic energy spatially to fit the container. The harmonic hum disappears because the sound is no longer fighting the physical geometry; it is flowing into it, perfectly intersected. We just need to stop forcing straight lines into spaces where energy naturally radiates from within. The 22 channel ribbon in the cochlear connect to an external sound processor is astounding. The code is not.

Talking CSG, Medical & Splats

Again ... a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (G.I.S.)).[1] 

In medical, They comprise the core component of MRI slices where the in-between connection of neighboring slices, aka lofting, are voxels connecting identical coordinates keyed to the two adjacent slices. Seen below is a video showing a journey through a set of slices made possible by voxels connecting the 3D coordinates of each slice as needs warrant.

Which means real data can be incorporated into splats, as per medical, when the splat in question contains the point cloud appropriate for the data to be integrated in. CSG/B-Rep is the tech capable of doing the insertion as the models contained in the tech are real 3D entities, not 2D polygons.

The boundaries are defined by lines, conics, polylines, surface curves, or b spline curves.

Taking this to the extreme means the transporter becomes viable as 3D can now be directly extracted
from imagery and video and transported to remote locations as needs warrant.

Something to think about don't you think?

The Register ...

Snarky, irreverent, a treasure. A site cutting through tech BS to show the underside of an
industry in most entertaining fashion, never disappoints. :)

To wit

 AI’s epic cash call is matched only by its ability to strangle revenue streams

The first technology created with a self-disrupt button...
But why oh why didn't they call Claude clone Fauxtoshop?

As it was written, so it has come to pass. A while back, we suggested that given how good AI was at code analysis, it would become possible to clone large applications. And then where would we be?

Here, that’s where. An industrious individual has released source code and binaries for Claude-copied Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite programs, disappointingly not calling elements of the latter Fauxtoshop.

They’re in pre-alpha states of incomplete bugginess, but with substantial functionality, which is proof of how insanely productive AI can be given a task needing zero creativity and wearing "This is what a proof of concept looks like" and "Unintended Consquesences" T-shirts.

They could also add Karma Police to their wardrobe. It’s clear that Microsoft and  Adobe are facing some competition from what their rival describes as "clean-room reimplementations." It’s also unclear that there is any law against it. You can’t copyright functionality, the code has been generated in Rust with claimed clean-room conditions, and while there may be something in claiming that the works are substantially derivative, there’s a big problem here. 

Companies that sell AI trained on the biggest theft of IP in history are going to need unmatched legal dexterity to claim that AI shouldn’t be allowed to sully their own IP. Chutzpah used to be defined as a child on trial for murdering their parents begging for mercy on the grounds that they’re an orphan. We’ll have to update.

Any questions? :)

Why Patrick Stewart was cool

Patrick Stewart even admitted that he always assumed his career would eventually provide him more opportunities to play comedic roles. Sadly, when establishing himself, Stewart recognized that he was seen as a non-comedic figure. In his words: 

"I always thought, when I became a professional, that I would just move into comedy. [...] But it never happened. I became this sort of, ugh, somber, dreary, kind of pompous figure."

Ah, he was far beyond that because ...

He was a devotee of ...

Patrick Stewart wasn't wholly articulate about his love for "Beavis and Butt-Head," a phenomenon many of the show's fans might have encountered themselves. Sometimes it's just hard to describe why something connects with you. Stewart said: 

"I love that show. I'm so sorry that it's gone. [...] I don't know why it appealed to me, but it did. It was brilliant, that's why. Incredible characters. Heh heh heh heh." 

Me too. He was a man comfortable with himself. It was never about him, it was about the work and all the commentary of all the people who worked with him proves this take to be true.

Like so many, I too will miss him. The next great actor I will miss, when he passes, will be Ian McClellan, Stewart's best friend and partner in crime in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot with Stewart asVladimir
& McClellen as Estragon. 

Lest we forget, the two also were friends and adversaries in the X Men series with
Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier (Professor X) and McClellen as Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto)

Magneto - Top, Xavier - Bottom

No longer hope :)

Based on New York Times/Siena polls of 610 voters in Alaska, 705 voters in Iowa, 736 voters in Kansas, 714 voters in Maine, 1,011 voters in Michigan, 717 voters in Ohio and 1,215 voters in Texas. Question wording has been condensed.Jillian Vordick/The New York Times

No longer hope, both houses went blue! Now, can the dems delivery. Term limits, job No. 1 awaits. 

The odd notion of time ...

Scientists built a miniature universe that revealed how time can emerge without a clock, raising profound questions about the nature of reality itself. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

Seems one doesn't need a clock to see how reality unfolds so ... the question to ask is, is time emergent?

What if time is not a fundamental part of the universe, but something that emerges from the changes taking place inside it? A physicist at the University of Birmingham has created a miniature universe in the laboratory that offers a surprising new way to investigate this possibility.

Using thousands of atoms cooled to temperatures barely above absolute zero, Professor Giovanni Barontini demonstrated that the passage of time can be measured without relying on an external clock. Instead, a form of time emerges naturally from the behavior of particles within the experimental system.

The findings, published in Physical Review Research, provide experimental evidence for an intriguing idea in theoretical physics: Time may not be an essential ingredient of reality. It could arise from the relationships and changes occurring within the universe itself.

Yours truly, with the help of Gemini, addressed this problem using Einstein and Wheeler-Dewitt as start points as to why time may be, in fact, emergent.

What is this? Being rather math challenged to the extreme, I asked Gemini to verify my explanation for the Einstein and Wheeler-DeWitt equations as I understand the first as C = light/Photon, a Boson, the force carrier particle equivalent to matter with the dividing line being the speed of light as that is the exact center point where the analog boson of light transitions into digital matter i.e. Photon transitions to a quanta to enter into the Electron.
Think photoelectric effect to visualize why this is so. In effect, Einstein's equation depicts
the analog to digital process from the energy side.

 

Note: Photons, gravitons and gluons travel at the speed of light.

As for Wheeler-DeWitt, it depicts the analog to digital transition as a balancing act, directly equivalent to Einstein in execution but different in application as it shows why the collapse of the wave function from analog to digital (decoherence) dissipates the energy of analog by transiting to digital. Think the E Major chord in Day in a Life - Sgt. Peppers and Yang & Yin as the two equations are complementary.

Because the transition occurs at the speed of light, there is no time as the speed of light for gravitons, photons and gluons mean the three entities are timeless, hence the transition from analog to digital and vice versa is timeless.

The musings continue ...

Gravity Well

Back in 2012, yours truly talked about time, entanglement and the quantum foam in a piece titled Entanglement, the Link to Forever, stating that time may be a temporary arrangement of the quantum foam as said foam would be timeless but artifacts like protons, neutrons and sub atomic particles coming out of it would be but temporary arrangements of the QF, thus experiencing the notion of time. Well, it seems researchers far more versed that moi have expressed the same concept indirectly referencing the brilliant ER=EPR conjecture created by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013.[3] 

In essence, the collapse of the wave function allows time to emerge.

Barontini’s miniature universe operates precisely like a modern Bloch sphere, proving once again that a 3D analog reality constructs its own timeline from the inside out. The physicists are finally catching up to the architecture. Reality is rendering itself and the tick of the clock is just the sound the render makes .

Bloch Sphere

Click here for the paper. 

500 billion ... Killing the golden goose applies.

Shutterstock / Futurism

Content is king, now, Google's finally finding out this old trope rings true as AI Slop and freezing out publishers
to nuke search in order to make ever more money by screwing over said publishers
has blown up in it's face and for good reason.

Woe is Google. After it starved out publishers with its AI features,
it’s now getting a taste of its own medicine.

Shares of its parent company Alphabet took an over 11 percent nosedive on Wednesday, after it disclosed that its AI search features are raking in less money than its traditional search ad model. The steep correction wiped out more than $500 billion in market value.

In its Q3 report, Google reported a quarterly revenue of $127.6 billion, a 25 percent year over year increase. But it’s also spending more, with capital expenditures more than doubling from last year to $51.4 billion, largely thanks to its massive AI investments.

Meanwhile, the growth of its revenue from search seems to be tapering off. It reported a 12 percent year-over-year increase to $63.3 billion, which is less than the 14.5 percent growth it reported in the same period last year.

That’s despite Google Search fielding more queries than ever. Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler admitted in an earnings call, per Search Engine Land, that this was because of “lower monetization we’re seeing in AI Mode,” its AI-powered search experience that works more like a chatbot instead of showing the traditional ten blue links.

It’s an ironic, but perhaps not unforeseen, downturn for Google. When ChatGPT became global phenomenon in late 2022, questions were soon asked regarding if a shift to using chatbots to obtain information over a traditional search engine would topple Google’s ludicrous advertising empire, which earns the company hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

Google responded by developing its own AI features, including its notoriously unreliable AI Overviews, and prominently integrating them into its search engine. This came at the expense of the websites and publishers that its AI models were pilfering from: users were happy to read error-plagued summaries instead of visiting the websites that contained the original information, depriving these sites of clicks and ad revenues. Despite Google’s repeated claims to the contrary, multiple studies have demonstrated that AI Overviews have destroyed click-through rates.

This has had a disastrous effect on the media landscape, with data compiled by Axios showing that the number of visits to top news sites plummeted from over 70 million visitors a month in July of 2024 — the year that Google launched AI Overviews — to just over 47 million in July of 2026. Media leaders who responded to a Reuters Institute survey are grim about the future, predicting traffic to their websites to fall by nearly half over the next three years amidst this AI-dominated paradigm.

Killing the golden goose applies ... 

Solar's now primetime ...

Shutterstock / Futurism

Solar's now primetime ...

As the world struggles to access oil as a consequence of the US war on Iran, the scramble for alternative forms of energy has become a mad dash. And contrary to the energy future some have imagined, the hunt for new power sources has supercharged the solar trade — leaving even nuclear power way back in the rearview mirror.

According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.

As professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford Jan Rosenow told the British broadcaster, “solar is now the engine of the power transition.”

Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.

As stated before, Solar's now primetime ...

The Sting

 

The Sting

Wonderful film, witty, funny and above all else, one bought into the vibe of the 30's with complete satisfaction.
Now, it's 2026 and another hustle is underway with Anthropic's IPO where insiders get to bail out when shares are the most valuable, similar to how insiders did the very same thing with Space X.

The con ...

Anthropic's IPO could be the greatest fleecing of retail investors in stock market history

When private companies go public, they usually establish a 180-day lockup period for insiders, consisting of high-ranking executives, board members, and early investors. This lockup period prevents insiders from taking advantage of retail investor euphoria shortly after a company debuts.

The SpaceX IPO flouted convention. Elon Musk's company adopted a staggered and accelerated share-unlock schedule that enabled early-release-eligible insiders to sell some of their shares two days after an earnings release, and on calendar days 70, 90, 105, 120, 135, and 180 after the IPO.

Anthropic's share-unlock schedule for insiders is similar to SpaceX's, but on steroids! The company's prospectus outlines 23 (yes, twenty-three!) separate earnings- and time-based lockup events for company insiders. Notably, this includes a share-unlock event on "the first trading day following the date of this prospectus." In other words, at least some insider shares will be eligible for sale the day Anthropic debuts.

All this with a company posting a net loss of 64 billion in 2025.
Welcome to America, the land of the brave and the home of the free. 

Pushing electrons thru silicon at scale doesn't scale ... efficiently

 Angular Momentum

How to gin up the IPO. You got to fund us to protect you from US. The Twilight Zone applies.

The Securities and Exchange Commission‘s publication on Monday of Anthropic’s S-1 form—ahead of a heavily anticipated initial public offering—has led to plenty of discussion of whether the company’s quickly ballooning revenues will be able to overcome its even higher costs. But amid the numbers and forward-looking optimism about AI “rapidly transform[ing] every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet,” Anthropic also spends an inordinate amount of time in its S-1 laying out the myriad risk factors that could bring the company down.

Across 93 pages and over 70,000 words, Anthropic’s S-1 “Risk Factors” section discusses literally hundreds of potential problems that could negatively impact its business in the coming years. Many of these potential risks are the kind of standard worries about competition, costs, customer acquisition, and potential regulation that almost any business must worry about. But some risks highlight interesting potential points of failure for Anthropic specifically and the hype-filled AI bubble more generally.

The smell of desperation applies when you factor in an 80 billion loss against 16 billion in profits Think 64 billion as net loss, and combine this with a possible 750 billion needed to keep the system running does not portend a happy ending because the bond guys are starting to get twitchy and for good reason. 

It's the ultimate Silicon Valley protection racket, and it is Dr. Strangelove writ large. Anthropic's built a computational Doomsday Machine, and now are holding a multi-billion-dollar funding round to figure out how to build the off switch but they don't have one. Rod Serling couldn’t have scripted a better episode.

But if we cut through the IPO hype and look at this through a purely architectural lens,
this 93-page apocalyptic disclaimer is actually a confession.

Why are the creators of this technology terrified of it? Because they have absolutely no structural control over it. Anthropic, much like DeepMind and OpenAI, has bet the house on probabilistic brute force. Their models are statistical guessing engines, floating in a digital void with no physical constraints, no geometric boundaries, and no anchoring in physical reality. When you build a system that relies entirely on hallucinating the right answer, of course you lose sleep worrying about what it might hallucinate next.

The emperor has no clothes. The problem is the fact uninformed investors don't know this but they will. Physics doesn't care. Pushing electrons through silicon at scale doesn't scale ... efficiently.

As proof ...

A Google data center in Nevada.
Credit...Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images

Tech companies are struggling to find enough electricity for all the new data centers they need for artificial intelligence, and lately they’ve explored ideas such as restarting old nuclear plants and stringing together off-grid gas engines.

Now Google is trying a different approach: paying, at least indirectly, for homes and businesses to use less electricity at times to help free up power for data centers.

On Thursday, Google announced a deal with a company called Voltus to set up what’s known as a “virtual power plant” in the large Mid-Atlantic grid known as PJM. Voltus will provide Google with up to 1,070 megawatts of electric capacity when needed — roughly as much as the output from a large nuclear reactor.

That electricity won’t come from new power plants. Instead, Voltus will sign up homes and businesses and give them financial incentives to curb their usage when local power demand is high or the grid is strained. Many of these reductions could occur automatically, such as through smart thermostats that dial back air-conditioning during peak summer hours or batteries that can provide temporary on-site power.

Again, pushing electrons through silicon at scale doesn't scale ... efficiently. 

The Spider's Web

Leon Neal//Getty Images

Popular Mechanics nailed it in terms of powerful cheap tech and what it can do to legacy systems.
In reading the PM post, the connect to The Center of Gravity/Rev II rings true
if the US stupidly attacks Iran yet again. 

To wit

The Bones could have been caught in the Spider’s Web.

That might read like a sentence from a Stephen King novel on the surface,
but if you parse through the military parlance, what it says is far more haunting.

The “Bones” in question are the U.S. Air Force’s Rockwell B-1 Lancers, a supersonic bomber that airmen affectionately call a “Bone” (as in “B One”). In early October, the USAF had to quickly evacuate a contingent of 12 B-1s from an English airbase when the Pentagon suspected they were vulnerable to an attack modeled on Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web.

The Air Force moved so fast that there wasn’t even time to pull together a refueling plan, according to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace commentary by Steven Feldstein. The aircraft represent “one-quarter of Washington's B-1 arsenal”— an estimated $3.8 billion in hardware. The concern was that these supersonic bombers were acutely vulnerable to a threat parked just outside the fence: unmarked vans.

 A 28th Bomb Wing B-1B on the ramp in the early morning at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota

But it wasn't.

But the strategy behind the attack wasn’t the IRGC’s. In fact, similar strikes have been successfully carried out by a number of U.S. allies in their own ongoing conflicts, a reminder both that war always evolves, and that the weapons wielded by your friend will inevitably find their way into the hands of your enemies too.

In June 2025, Ukraine launched Operation Spider’s Web, a drone attack the New York Times described as
“a signature event on par with sinking the Russian flagship Moskva early in the war.” Instead of vans, Ukraine used “custom-made wooden modular cabins,” per a West Point report, concealing 150 drones and 300 explosive payloads in their roofs.

A Rockwell B-1A in 1984

Serious airplane, serious vulnerability.