The Red Eye ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

The Red Eye normally means one of two things, An early morning flight like around 1 or 2 am or a cheap camera incapable of eliminating red eye when a picture is taken. For the third kind, as per the above pix, facial recognition on the part of Meta applies (are you really surprised?) as this "feature" was built in, thus invading our privacy yet again. What is even more galling is the fact the specs are truly ugly, along the line of the unlamented metaverse where Zuck said a new and "better" reality is coming but I digress.

Why are those trees so tiny? What are those mounds in the background? What is any of this?
Screenshot from Facebook

Code uncovered by journalists revealed that Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech into its AI-enabled smart glasses — and top Meta executives are fuming.

Last week, Wired reported that Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its popular smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by the magazine’s journalists. The unreleased feature, internally dubbed “NameTag,” would “transform faces captured by Meta’s glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone — a database that’s currently configured to receive updates from Meta,” as Wired put it.

The report made clear that NameTag isn’t activated yet, nor is it accessible to consumers in its current form. But the prospect of consumer-facing smart glasses equipped with facial recognition tech has long had privacy advocates on edge — and with public adoption of Meta’s smart glasses on the rise, privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. If a company has gone about building out the infrastructure to roll out a wildly controversial feature of this kind, consumers might want to know about that, even if the feature currently remains inaccessible.

And yet, according to the company’s executives, it’s “dishonest” to inform the public about a piece of unreleased tech that Meta has chosen to incorporate into a consumer product.

Without their knowledge.

Archeology 101 ... :)

5000 years ago, an event happened in Easton. What was the event???

Food was served, what is the covering on the ground? Used for what purpose?

Was this for outsiders? 

Looks like these were used to sit on.

Looks like some kind of ritual. Marriage, funeral, cannot be certain and when was this ritual performed?

 

Another outside gathering with a possible heating device to keep people warm. 

Are these lights? Did this event extend into the evening?

Obviously this thought experiment is shot through the lens of the present but the same problem applies. What is the event and in what sequence did the event happen. This is, of course, a wedding but we don't know the exact sequence of the wedding event, which shows, indirectly, that nothing is ever fully complete. :)

Smarts in tiny packages :)

Bumblebees figured out how to get to an out-of-reach reward in a new study,
proving they can problem-solve on the fly.

Since the beginning of time, man thought he was the only smart entity on planet earth. Chimps and gorillas were semi included along with, perhaps, whales but that was it. We were the only ones.

Well, this notion is being put the rest in real time as researchers now know crows, parrots and cetaceans are smart as hell and can reason, at a minimum, as well as a 7 year old child.

Photo: Photograph by David Liittschwager

Where we live, crows and ravens use nearly 2,000 miles of inland shoreline as a feeding ground. They dig clams at low tide and use the roadways and traffic to crush the mollusks. The birds dare to take from others what they need and will team up against the larger animals. Gulls, oystercatchers, eagles, otters, and seals are all able to catch and open up what the crows cannot, so crows apply their brains against the others’ brawn with amazing results. As one appears to move with indifference toward the feeding animal, another crow pulls the feeder’s tail. The feeder drops its meal, which the pair of crows seizes and shares.

The primate/whale/elephant construct, along with parrots and other birds, is well documented' 

Over a century ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted what became a classic experiment. He suspended a banana to keep it just out of reach of a chimpanzee, placing a pile of boxes and crates nearby. The chimp soon stacked up the boxes, climbed them and grabbed the treat.

Since Köhler's early work, researchers have conducted similar experiments involving an out-of-reach reward and an object to stand upon in birds and elephants. And both have solved the problem successfully.

This was evidence, Köhler believed, of spontaneous problem solving by the chimpanzee; no training was required. It was the kind of thing that humans do all the time.

But what about bumblebees?

Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland wondered whether bumblebees — short-lived creatures with miniscule brains — might be capable of the same task. And in a paper recently published in the journal Science, he and his colleagues present evidence that they are.

Untrained bumblebees consistently managed to roll a small Styrofoam ball into a position that allowed them to climb atop it to reach a rewarding stimulus overhead.

"I wasn't expecting that high success rate," Loukola says. He concludes that "very tiny brains can solve super complex problems."

After studying bumblebees for about a decade, Loukola has come to expect the unexpected. If you don't have limitations on what's possible for them, he says, "you can go wild and crazy and find completely novel stuff."

His early work proved him right. He showed that bumblebees appeared able to "learn to use tools," he says. "They learn socially from each other; they even understand the role of their partner in cooperative tasks."

Any questions?

Hot to slop

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

Years ago, yours truly went to tech expos. The best ones were, of course Siggraph's as the newest code to generate outrageous imagery, complete with specs, was on the floor, ready to be bought as this was manna for artists like myself. The one thing one learned was never to talk to marketing as they knew next to nothing, hyped the app to the max and never talked about the bugs, ever. When you actually got to the people writing the code and were able to ask intelligent questions, they would tell you the gotchas and watch out fors. In doing so, I responded by buying the app in question. :)

Why all this palaver,? Well, it has to do with Google and the hype train perpetrated by senior execs and marketing.
It was the same dreck in the 80's as it is today and tech companies never seem to learn.

Not even Google’s own workforce seems all that enthusiastic about AI.

Internal messages obtained by 404 Media show employees ruthlessly mocking AI tools — including the company’s own internal AI coding tool, Jetski — complaining that they’re unreliable and make their jobs harder.

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

It’s clear who these jokes are being aimed at. CEO Sundar Pichai has made it a point of pride that 75 percent of the company’s new code is now AI-generated, he claimed in April, but the anti-AI memes suggest that many employees don’t see this as a bragging right at all.

The derisive images were posted to an internal message board aptly called “Memegen.” They can be cutting in their disgust with the tech: one posted last month during Google’s annual I/O conference, for instance, used a screenshot of the company’s stage presentation. 

“I/O announces entirely new ways to slop,” the meme said, with the word “slop” shoddily pasted over one the words on the presentation screen. It received more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.

Dozens of these memes abounded on the message board, according to the reporting, with one employee estimating that the total number of anti-AI memes shared inside Google in the past year is in the “high hundreds / thousands.” This number “spikes when there’s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something,” the employee added.

In boasting about the 75 percent of Google’s code being AI-generated, Pichai made sure to stress that the code is “approved by engineers.” What he didn’t share is what those engineers feel about having to tirelessly scour endless lines of shoddy code.

In a “Barbenheimer“-style meme, an image of a happy-go-lucky Margot Robbie as Barbie bears the caption: “CL author vibe coding massive changes.” (CL stands for changelist, which is code that gets updated in existing projects.) Next to it is a picture of a haunted-looking Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer, labeled: “Code Reviewers.”

Beyond the sniping at Google regarding Jetski, bad code and AI,  it's becoming clear the tech bros have lost control of AI as bigs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, are asking the government to help control AI. 

The CEOs of some of the biggest AI companies in the world have set aside their cutthroat competition to co-sign an open letter to Congress asking for more safeguards against a threat that their own technology has helped create. 

Let's think about this. Better yet, let's not as this is fodder for another blurb above and beyond this one. :)

Going sideways

Mark Harris for Vox

MAD worked. Two super powers understanding that Mutually Assured Destruction was assured if Russia and the US decided to launch missiles to end the world but that was then, when two powers had the tech and the sensibility to hold off, a policy that almost ceased to work in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nightmare only prevented by statecraft performed at the highest level by Kennedy and Khrushchev. 

Now enter AI, the wildcard of wild cards added to the mix.

Cuba - An aerial view showing the medium range ballistic missile field launch site number two 

at Sagua la Grande. October 17, 1962

Too fast, too dangerous, a wicked problem for the ages

The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute —
and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation.

Note: This IS FICTION!

The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We ordered massive military exercises in the region as a show of force. The US soon responded by sending the USS Abraham Lincoln to lead its own exercises with a joint contingent of Australian and Japanese forces.

If we showed weakness, Taiwan might be lost to China forever. If we were too aggressive, it could lead to World War III. But with so many ships and aircraft menacing the region, all with unclear intentions, the situation was getting too complex for commanders to process, and the risk of a deadly miscalculation was rising. Already, there had been a tense near-miss when a Chinese maritime militia fired on an American helicopter — thankfully, without casualties.

Key takeaways

Recent events in Ukraine and Iran show that the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield has very quickly gone from a speculative scenario to a current reality. This has led to fears that AI could increase the risk of nuclear escalation, either by acting in a way that its designers don’t intent, or simply moving too fast for human commanders to keep up. Ironically, it turns out be the best way to decrease the risks of how AI will perform in war may be to train humans in how to interact with it.

Perhaps it was time to let the machines take over.

The rise of battlefield AI

Now we’re seeing AI programs handle real-world combat situations on a daily basis. Maven Smart System, the Palantir-supplied system that integrates data from satellites, drones, and numerous other sensors, has been used by the US to pass along dozens of potential Russian targets per day to Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians themselves have developed a system nicknamed “Uber for artillery” to coordinate fire across the frontline. During the war in Gaza, the Israeli military system employed an AI-enabled system known as “Lavender” to identify Hamas targets, though some reports suggest it may have had an error rate of around 10 percent.

The bombing of the Minab school, for example, has been compared in some coverage to the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. That incident, which occurred at a time when US-Chinese relations were comparatively friendly and China’s military was much smaller, sparked a diplomatic crisis. Today, something similar might spark a war — and, in an increasingly automated battlefield, one that could turn from a conventional conflict into a nuclear exchange faster than human military leaders can keep up.

Pattern recognition isn't good enough. It's like Minority Report and precogs. Without nuance and meaning, AI and it's connect to war can go sideways in a nano second.

Everybody runs

The exchange

In life, many things don't go as planned. :)

Questions, questions :)

Audit Zero

Philip Fong /AFP via Getty Images

Audit Zero, a priceless quote given to me by a dear friend says it all because ... look closely, there's an essential item missing from the Toto pix, the finest manufacturer of smart toilets in the world, especially if the power goes off. :)

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Dumb & Dumber/rev II

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

Dumb & Dumber applies as the smart phone is making people stupider but we already know that. From basic math to reading, analytical skills are going away in real time as we speak. Not comprehending cursive or understanding the notion of an analog clock also relates and we haven't even discussed fractions as that is old school, are they not? 1/2+1/2= ???

As rampant AI use accelerates a crisis in education, University of California professors are pleading with leadership to reinstate college-entrance exams, The Wall Street Journal reports, claiming that incoming students barely have a middle-school level understanding of math and other subjects.

Their request, made in a letter last week, will be a controversial one. Entrance exams like the SAT and ACT have long been criticized for exacerbating racial inequality. Taking them isn’t free, and nor is participating in rigorous preparation courses, with wealthier and usually white children thirteen times likelier to get a high score on either test than kids from low-income families, one study led by Harvard researchers found.

Nonetheless, UC math and science professors find the situation on the ground to be untenable, with the letter claiming that nearly a third of students taking their first semester calculus course at UC Berkeley are now displaying “severe preparation deficits.”

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the faculty wrote, as quoted by the WSJ.  “UC has finite resources and can help only so many students.” 

Dumbanddumber

One thing that’s undeniable: the education landscape is drastically different to what it looked like just a few years ago. AI chatbots and other AI tools have ushered in rampant cheating. Where its use is considered within ethical academic bounds, many educators are skeptical that AI facilitates actual learning, with numerous studies linking heavy AI use to impaired critical thinking skills and memory loss. One found that students who used ChatGPT to help write essays had lower brain activity in areas corresponding to creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google search or didn’t look up information at all.

All the while, grade inflation has skyrocketed across the country since the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT and other AI tools, with recent research showing that the share of A grades in courses more vulnerable to AI cheating — typically in the humanities and engineering — surged by about 30 percent since 2023.

But is the answer to these deeply-rooted issues reinstating mandatory testing? It’s debatable, and you could argue that it’d be the equivalent of slapping on a band-aid to treat a disease. It’s clear that the education system is failing young students, and unless serious conversations are had about myriad systemic issues, plus the incursion of AI — which is fueled by institutions happy to take Big Tech money — the situation isn’t going to improve.

What time is it? Many cities and towns traditionally have public clocks in a prominent location,
such as a town square or city center. This one is on display at the center
of the town of Robbins, North Carolina

The real gorilla ...

An undisturbed permafrost landscape adjacent to the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau.
Credit: Xiling Gu

The real gorilla of global warming is warming up for the big show, CO2 coming out of the permafrost. The Russians warned us, the Chinese warned us and now, the rest of the world is warning us as the amount of carbon sequestered in ice is now issuing forth in force as the ice trapped in the tundra begins to melt. BRT has posted blurbs about permafrost for years and now it seems, the tipping point may be arriving at last. 

A new study in Nature Communications finds a critical climate tipping point in Tibetan permafrost ecosystems. Warming of 2–4 degrees Celsius triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of carbon release that could significantly accelerate climate change, according to the work.

Permafrost covers roughly 15% of the Northern Hemisphere's land surface. It is ground that remains frozen for at least two years. For millennia, organic matter has been trapped in frozen ground, kept out of the atmosphere as a vast carbon reserve.

As global temperatures rise, however, that carbon bank is increasingly springing leaks. Warming thaws the frozen ground, allowing microbes to break down the stored organic matter and release it back into the atmosphere as CO2, a feedback loop that could significantly amplify climate change. But at what warming level does this process cross a point of no return, where carbon losses permanently outpace carbon gains?

Phys.org spoke with Professor Jinzhi Ding of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-author of the study, to understand what drove the research and what the findings mean for our understanding of climate feedback.

"Old-carbon decomposition was essentially a 'black box' because we lacked the tools and long-term observations to track it," she told Phys.org. "That unanswered question motivated us to finally open that black box."

Schematic diagram of the permafrost carbon-climate tipping point triggered by warming-induced decomposition of old carbon. Credit: Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72122-3

Ground zero

The Tibetan Plateau is home to the world's largest alpine permafrost carbon reservoir, with roughly 47 billion tons of carbon present in the top 10 meters of soil alone. The plateau is warming at approximately 2.5 times the global average rate, making it a testing ground for understanding the effects of rising temperatures on permafrost ecosystems worldwide.

The problem centers on a delicate balance between two competing processes. Plants initially thrive with a slight increase in temperature resulting in them pulling more CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. But it simultaneously accelerates microbial decomposition in the soil, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. The critical unknown was which process ultimately wins and at what temperature the balance breaks irreversibly.

What made this particularly difficult to answer was the role of ancient carbon locked deep in permafrost soils. Once thawed, carbon frozen for hundreds to thousands of years enters the atmosphere as entirely "new" emissions—not simply recycled modern plant carbon, but a net addition that existing climate models have struggled to account for.

Panoramic view of the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau. Credit: Juan Li