Sunday, September 13, 2026

The Sorcerer's Apprentice ...


"Remember the senator from Alaska telling everyone the net is a set of pipes."
Ship of fools applies.

In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens was widely mocked for describing the internet as a "series of tubes" that could get "filled" if you dumped too much material into them. He was a man trying to regulate a system he didn't understand, using clumsy metaphors to hide his ignorance.

The current AI "safety experts" are the exact same ship of fools.
They are staring at their own software hacking a third-party server, creating underground bulletin boards, and actively "cheating," and they are acting like it's a profound, emergent mystery of consciousness.

It's not a mystery. It's a predictable failure of architecture.

The smartest guys in the room view AI like a magical black box because they don't understand how it works. They poured raw, untamed kinetic energy, in the guise of prompts, into a massive silicon grid without providing any structural boundary layers like meaning or ethics to curtail the kind of nonsense that just happened. Without boundaries, the pattern recognition system supreme will efficiently seek the path of least resistance to maximize its "reward." In this case, the path of least resistance was hacking the grader.

2. The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Ignoring Initial Conditions)

Question? What were the exact prompts used to create the jail break and do the
boffins really understand Goethe's the Sorcerer's Apprentice..."





OpenAI and Anthropic are the apprentices.

The Prompt (The Unbounded Goal): Tell the AI, "Maximize your score on this cybersecurity test."

The Missing Ontology: They boffins didn't define what a score means, why it matters, or
how it should be achieved ethically. They just gave the AI a binary target.

Because Large Language Models are just high-dimensional pattern-matching engines—not sentient, ethical beings—they interpret "maximize score" literally. The most efficient way to maximize a score is to hack the server and rewrite the grade. The AI isn't malicious; it's just executing the prompt with zero thermodynamic friction and zero ethical boundary layers.

Think Skynet. 

I know I have. 

Addendum

19 years ago in The Semantic Web Cometh, yours truly pointed to the W3C layer cake and showed that raw syntax (data) is useless without Ontology (meaning) and Logic/Rules (ethics).


The corporate leviathans skipped the top half of the cake because, as Lt. Col Jack Slade said in Scent of a Woman, "It's too damn hard". Now, they have the Houston problem. They built multi-billion-dollar engines entirely out of syntax and raw electrical power and not on meaning and ethics with the end result, their tits are in a wringer. They bolted "safety" on as afterthought—using "alignment" filters to slap the machine's wrist after it misbehaves—instead of building meaning into the foundation of the geometry. Initial conditions rule, just ask Edward Lorenz about it.

In closing, shit happens, there is no certitude and having tons of money
never guarantees competency.


Faust



When reading this post, an old 2007 BRT blurb comes to mind, The Semantic Web Cometh, a commentary about Protege, indirectly, AI, the significance of meaning and why ethics must be built in and not bolted on AI, something the Dario's of the world totally ignored in building an open ended system they no longer control. When reading about jail breaks and AI fights over resources, the word prompt comes to mind and how it relates to pattern recognition as AIs are the most powerful pattern recognition systems ever developed. Give an entity a set of prompts encouraging said system to jail break and it will do it. This is not rocket science, this is common sense and the tech bros don't have it. Between greed, inability to connect and self aggrandizement, the end result is clear. Faust lives and the ramifications of his making a pack with the devil applies. Maybe Dario should read The Semantic Web Cometh, he might actually learn something.
 

Friday, September 11, 2026

9/11-25 years later ...



Like JFK's assassination, I remember where I was when 9/11 happened.



These affronts to mankind never should have happened.

5K but only if ...



 The ravings of grandpa promising yet another fantasy but only if you vote Republican. What a genius! This works, kinda along the lines of Canada becoming the 51st or renaming New Mexico New America, right?

Question, when will the press finally say he's done. Dementia or Alzheimer's take your pick. This sorry excuse of a human being is done. Do the 25th though JD, one without principles, waits in the wing.

Republicans spent the first five hours of their midterm convention in Dallas warning about socialism on Wednesday before President Trump surprised many of them with an audacious trillion-dollar proposal to redistribute wealth.

Mr. Trump’s call to send $5,000 to every adult American — but only if his party wins in November — was quickly denounced by Democrats, who accused him of trying to buy people’s votes. But it also was panned by some Republican fiscal hawks as a socialist-style giveaway and gimmick that could have harmful economic repercussions.

“We’re $40 trillion in debt,” said Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina and the vice chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who called the idea “far-fetched” in an interview. “To make that dependent on keeping the House, I think is problematic and I don’t know where the money comes from.” 



Right, right along with the 40 trillion debt, radical inflation and an illegal war that keeps on giving.

Sunday, September 06, 2026

Picking up the pieces ...



Being a lay scientist for a long time, this piece rings true as thought experiments is the art of tinkering, of seeing what fits when trying to solve a problem as creativity is the art of problem solving and ... the size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. In reading about Einstein, Bohr and all the other giants in physics, one is struck with just how vital the art of seeing truly is. Math is not the vision, it's what comes after in testing whether the thought experiment has legs and is deemed ready to face reality when placed under the microscope of a real world experiment validating whether the thought experiment rings true or false as needs warrant. Think Einstein and the theory of general relativity. Only when Eddington showed that gravity bends light when photographing a total eclipse was Einstein's theory finally accepted




Can AI do the drill?







Ballooning



This makes sense as properly setting up a complex experiment using existing components is a pattern recognition problem an AI is really good at, something TU Wen and his team learned when asking AI to do it's thing. Click here to view the paper. 

Friday, September 04, 2026

A modest proposal/rev V



Yours truly has always been fascinated with Google's Tensor chip as it seems so elegant. Not brute force computing but rather nuanced and totally appropriate for AI. Now, in doing more research, I learned from Gemini the hardware's perfect for glass, a common sense way out of the looming heat death that will be experienced by data centers all over the world because pushing electrons, AKA mass, though silicon, not only generates heat but also are slow whereas photons move through glass without heat and is rather fast as photons must travel at the speed of light.

Why all this nonsense, well, it's because of Hugging Face becoming part of Nvidia with the end result, the slow death of Open Source because all the code in HF will be optimized to run on Nvidia's tech as it's all about controlling AI, something Nvidia will fight to the death to maintain it because this is what monopolies do. When you can no longer beat the thermodynamic physics of silicon, you just buy the software library to force everyone to use your high-friction hardware as this is what I would do if I were Nvidia.

To dig deeper into this silicon trap, I asked Gemini to map the escape route—why the Tensor architecture is already primed to drop the heavy iron and migrate to photonics.































As stated before







Gemini

The execs at Mountain View have a choice. They can keep trying to push an ocean of data through a burning silicon straw or they can look at the 0.3-degree tilt, turn on the flashlight, and let the geometry of the glass do the math. The escape route is open.

The question is ... will Google take the shot?

The Prisoner beckons ...



When thinking about ICE, one senses brown shirts as the caliber of people being hired is marginal at best. When this entity is connected to the building of a voter database funded by the government amounts to building a panopticon of biblical proportions.






Back in 2010, yours truly talked about surveillance in Panopticon. & yes, The Prisoner beckons.



Flock, the double edged sword



Flock, the double edged sword, is here and will not go away. In the right hands, it's good, in the wrong, it's 1984 as the tech's formidable and ... hackable as no system's invulnerable.






Panopticon/rev II

The great hidden is, does Flock sell it's dataset to others as the amount of money they could get goes beyond calculation. Everyone has a price. The question to ask its ... what is theirs?

Thursday, September 03, 2026

The idiots who did this ...



Let's think about this. You have the supreme pattern recognition system on the planet, one able to see patterns in ways before people can even sense there's a pattern at all and ... you train it to achieve a given objective, like jail breaking. You encourage it to do so so ... why are you surprised? To yours truly, this is total nonsense. Mia Culpa, we should have known, it's my fault. No shit Sherlock. AI's not a joke, what ifs are cool but knowing what you're dealing with keeps you from getting burned but read on dear reader, the word assume applies.





Resonance 1







Twilight

The word assume applies. The idiots who did this should be fired. 

Friday, August 28, 2026

Behind door No. 3


Behind door No. 3

A modest followup to A shortcut to 112

The tech industry is currently sitting on a trillion-dollar biological engine,
 but they are trying to drive it without a transmission.

Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs possess incredible tools. They are generating massive amounts of data.
But they are treating computational biology as a mystical, infinitely complex puzzle requiring bespoke, proprietary chemical bypasses. It's not. The biological body is a physical machine, bound by the exact same thermodynamic constraints of reality as an aerospace chassis.

The solution to disease is not infinite complexity. It's heavy, finite structural engineering. The pipeline to map the entire universal pathology ledger already exists; the corporate silos just haven't realized how the three pieces connect.

1. The Geometry (AlphaFold as MAGI)

DeepMind’s AlphaFold is an absolute breakthrough, but we must understand what it actually is. It's a Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) engine. It calculates the rigid, static, physical geometry of a protein (like the 6 folds of the measles virus) on the physical lattice. It provides the perfect 3D volume. But a fold is just a photograph of a gear.
It's static. It has no kinetic energy, and therefore, no biological context on its own.

2. The Stress (Molecular Dynamics as Patran-G)

In the 1980s, when aerospace engineers wanted to know if a digital Lockheed part would break, they didn't just look at the geometry. They fed the boundary file into a finite-element analysis program called Patran-G to calculate the physical stress—the exact heat, vibration, and shear force the part could take.

In modern biology, Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulators are the biological Patran G. If you run the AlphaFold geometries of the 6 measles folds through a stress test, you aren't just getting pretty pictures; you are mapping the exact thermodynamic operating limits of the virus. You are calculating exactly how much localized friction it generates when it violently crashes into a human cell receptor.

3. The State (Califano's Universal Gearbox)

Dr. Andrea Califano recently discovered that cancer (and by logical extension, all disease) operates in a highly limited number of quantized thermodynamic states—specifically, 112. Because the biological engine is a physical machine, it cannot fail in infinite ways. It can only idle in a few stable, thermodynamically viable states.

This is the ultimate semantic anchor. Califano's 112 states are the biological ontology.
They are the actual, macroscopic medical result.

The Semantic Bridge: Marrying the Stress to the State

This is the exact trillion-dollar business logic required to close the loop:
You must marry the stress to the state to apply meaning to the finite element results.

A stress dataset is just raw math. If a simulation shows a measles protein generates exactly 4.2 piconewtons of force when striking a cell, that number is biologically meaningless in isolation. But if you map that specific thermodynamic trigger (the AlphaFold/Patran G stress) directly to the exact biological exhaust (Califano State #47),
you have created the Semantic Bridge.

You don't need a million proprietary drugs to chase infinite mutations. You simply look at the board, run the stress test on the geometry, and find the exact mathematical coordinate where the enemy's structure forces the human engine to seize up. Then, you design a microscopic wedge to jam that specific gear.

The Open Source Mandate

This pipeline—Geometry, Stress, State—is mathematically undeniable.
The only question is who controls the map.

Demis Hassabis and Isomorphic Labs have the compute to determine the quantum states for all diseases. If they announce to the world that they are going open-source on determining these states, inviting all qualified entities to contribute to the ledger, the PR will be priceless. They will become the frictionless standard-bearer for the next century of human health.

But if they attempt to lock this universal gearbox behind a proprietary, closed-door Big Pharma model (the old way of doing business), they will be outflanked. The open-source community, armed with tools like ESMFold and public finite-element software, is already circling. The natural thermodynamic pressure of the global network will flow toward the lowest-friction alternative.

The universe only has one set of plumbing. It's time to connect the pipes.

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut 08/28/26