50 years ago today ...

Xerox PARC's world-changing Alto

A wonderful piece from The Register detailing Xerox PARC's Alto, the precursor of all PCs, was networked, had a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and used a mouse to run the interface.

Modern computers get many influences from many sources, but one of them far outshines all the others. Its signficance, though, is "more honoured in the breach than in the observance", as Shakespeare put it. More retellings distort the history than do it justice.

The Alto was an experimental machine built by boffins in Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the early 1970s to explore new thinking in user interface design, and while never made available commercially – Xerox would sell the Star, a version of the Alto, in 1981 – a couple of thousand were made for use by Xerox staff and some were donated to universities and research facilities. Arguably the first personal computer – though some historians consider it a minicomputer – it was also the first to feature a graphical interface controlled by a mouse and to incorporate networking.

He mentions two of the three defining features of the machine: it was the first single-user GUI-driven machine, but also, it was the first networked workstation. Before even the concept of the "personal computer" had been dreamed up, and at around the same time as Intel was building the first microprocessors, the giant brains at PARC were not only designing the personal GUI workstation, they were also building a local-area network to link them up. The Alto's network became Ethernet, co-designed by 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, along with the late David Boggs and the late Alto hardware designer Chuck Thacker.

The third significant thing about the Alto was that it was the machine that made object-oriented programming mainstream. These were the three significant aspects of the machine: the first GUI PC, the first networked PC, and the machine that drove OOPS into the mainstream. That is according to Steve Jobs, anyway:

The Xerox Smalltalk UI environment

The musical naming of the system rules as great alto sax players like Lee Konitz, Paul Desmond, Charlie Parker & Cannonball Adderley, among significant others, come to mind without question. 

Some of the greats/partial list. :)

Lest we forget, alto also relates to singers as well. :)

A state in chaos ...

Israel has a Bibi problem, Israel's equivalent to Trump, as his move to turn his country into a fascist state, seems to have stalled thanks to his attempt to "reform" the courts in order to accrue more power and avoid corruption charges, a blunder sending his country into chaos as seen by the video above.

Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied in cities across Israel for a 10th week in a row against plans by the far-right government to curb the Supreme Court’s powers. Organisers said a record 500,000 people attended Saturday’s rallies.

And this.

Israel in chaos as workers strike, ports close and officials protest over Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plan

Sunday night saw new scenes of unrest, after Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who became the first member of the ruling Likud Party to speak out against the proposed changes.

Time for this sorry excuse of a human being to go as without question, Bibi's the worst PM in his country's history.

To whit ... Past as prologue.

2019 ... Netanyahu is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes after three years of investigation.

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has charged Netanyahu after investigating reports of him accepting gifts from millionaire friends and allegedly seeking regulatory favors for media tycoons in return for favorable coverage.

Netanyahu denies the allegations and pleads not guilty as the trial continues.

Netanyahu arrives at court in his corruption trial in occupied East Jerusalem
[File: Maya Alleruzzo/Pool/AP Photo]

If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, or in Latin, qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. "He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas" 

They're coming for you ...

The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Donald Trump – caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0) and background (Gage Skidmore / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0).

Agent Orange speaks yet again. 

Now that their leader has pre-programmed their response, the MAGA hoard will eagerly await the endorphin boost they will experience with each indictment. 

Any questions?

Ineptness as art form ...

US foreign policy has been an ongoing disaster for over 60+ years beginning with the CIA placing Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh under house arrest in 1953 in order to enable England to get Iran's oil.

Before its removal from power, his administration introduced a range of social and political measures such as social security, land reforms and higher taxes including the introduction of taxation on the rent of land. His government's most significant policy was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been built by the British on Persian lands since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC), later known as British Petroleum (BP).[10]

It gets better ...

In the aftermath of the overthrow, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to power, and negotiated the Consortium Agreement of 1954 with the British, which gave split ownership of Iranian oil production between Iran and western companies until 1979.[11] Mosaddegh was imprisoned for three years, then put under house arrest until his death and was buried in his own home so as to prevent a political furor.[12][13] In 2013, the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup, as a part of its foreign policy initiatives, including paying protestors and bribing officials.[14]

Mohammad Mosaddegh 1952

محمد مصدق

35th Prime Minister of Iran

So ... we made an enemy of a former ally that remains an enemy in 2023 while China triumphs in negotiating a reopening of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran along with the fact SA will now sell it's oil using the Yuan as the means to make it happen. 

This kind of blunder has been repeated ad nauseam as the MIC runs America because endless war is good for business for the very few while the nation as a whole suffers. Think Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lybya, along with Syria for exquisite US military initiatives while spending a cool 8 trillion to complete the task at hand. Question, what's the P&L on that deal besides broken countries, civilians killed and the real possibility of the death of the dollar due to ineptness as art form, performed by the US for over 70+ years.

A pie chart showing global military expenditures by country for 2019, in US$ billions, according to SIPRI

 

In closing ... 

Only two weeks after Saudi Arabia announced an effort to establish diplomatic ties to Iran in a deal mediated by China, more news surfaced that Saudi Arabia was also planning to reopen its embassy in Syria for the first time in over a decade.  Rumors are swirling that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria are on the verge of geopolitical and economic agreements that sidestep the US.  It is perhaps not surprising that just as these deals are being announced, there has been a sudden resurgence of fighting between US forces in Syria and Iran supported insurgent groups in the eastern region of the country.

Extrapolations

ex·trap·o·late

verb

extend the application of (a method or conclusion, especially one based on statistics) to an unknown situation by assuming that existing trends will continue or similar methods will be applicable. "the results cannot be extrapolated to other patient groups"

• estimate or conclude (something) by extrapolating 

"attempts to extrapolate likely human cancers from laboratory studies"

• MATHEMATICS

extend (a graph, curve, or range of values) by inferring unknown values from trends in the known data. "a set of extrapolated values"

In essence, it's but a guess as to what's going to happen as one cannot predict the future, ever. 

Example illustration of the extrapolation problem,
consisting of assigning a meaningful value at the blue box, at , given the red data points

An uneven take on the implications of GW in terms of the Extrapolations' script but one episode in the series reveals, in spades, the dire implications of geoengineering as once you do it, it cannot be undone, something contrary to the repeated experiment notion of sound science because, as Richard Feynman so famously said ... 

Watch the film as one gets a glimpse into the hellscape awaiting us as we move further into the 21st century.

As an aside, no investigation into AI is made while the earth heats up as said open-ended tech, without question, will influence how well man copes with this ongoing catastrophe of our own making. 

10 to 1

A savanna elephant in Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa. The total biomass of savanna elephants was estimated in the study to be half that of the 2m tonnes cats collectively weigh. Photograph: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy

Being out of balance is not a good thing, particularly in terms of the 10 to 1 ratio of the weight of man versus the weight of wild animals as this shows just how effective we have been in plundering earth's resources 24/7.

To whit ...

‘A wake-up call’: total weight of wild mammals less than 10% of humanity’s

From elephants to tigers, study reveals scale of damage to wildlife caused by transformation of wildernesses and human activity

The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet.

A study by scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, published this month, concludes that wild land mammals alive today have a total mass of 22m tonnes. By comparison, humanity now weighs in at a total of around 390m tonnes.

At the same time, the species we have domesticated, such as sheep and cattle, in addition to other hangers-on such as urban rodents, add a further 630m tonnes to the total mass of creatures that are now competing with wild mammals for Earth’s resources. The biomass of pigs alone is nearly double that of all wild land mammals.

The grim figures for land mammals were matched by those found in the oceans. The total mass of marine mammals was calculated to be around 40m tonnes. Fin whales have the largest total biomass with sperm whales and humpbacks coming into the second and third slots, respectively.

Fin whales feeding off the Gulf of California. The species was found by the study to have the highest biomass of ocean creatures. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Domesticated-to-wild mass ratios emphasise the active role humans play in shaping the abundance of mammals on Earth

Common pet species were also found to be major contributors to humanity’s planetary impact. Domestic dogs have a total mass of around 20m tonnes, a figure close to the combined biomass of all wild terrestrial mammals, while cats have a total biomass of around 2m tonnes, almost double that of the African savanna elephant. “These domesticated-to-wild mass ratios emphasise the active role humans play in shaping the abundance of mammals on Earth,” the researchers state in their paper.

The impact of GW, combined with continued looting of the planet, could potentially become worse than the PETM due, in large part, to not only population overload and temperature increase but also to habitat loss and environmental degradation caused by our endless pursuit of producing ever more stuff. 

Climate change during the last 65 million years as expressed by the oxygen isotope composition of benthic foraminifera. The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) is characterized by a brief but prominent excursion, attributed to rapid warming. Note that the excursion is understated in this graph due to the smoothing of data.

The Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), alternatively "Eocene thermal maximum 1" (ETM1), and formerly known as the "Initial Eocene" or "Late Paleocene thermal maximum", was a time period with a more than 5–8 °C global average temperature rise across the event.[1][2] This climate event occurred at the time boundary of the Paleocene and Eocene geological epochs.[3] The exact age and duration of the event is uncertain but it is estimated to have occurred around 55.5 million years ago (Ma).[4]

The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[2]

10 to 1 indeed.

Misalignment ...

Black Eyed Susan

Yours truly takes pictures and videos when walking in woods and fields as my loyal readers know.  While walking, one readily sees the adverse impact of GW ranging from the early blooming of flowers to the dearth of insects needed to pollinate the flowers in question. Other slights include the slow dying of unhealthy trees along with the early arrival of birds, which often proves problematic when the food sources for said birds are not available due to the specter of climate change. The frightening aspect about this is the fact it's just the beginning in terms of what GW means for the continued existence of mankind as nature cannot adapt fast enough to this catastrophe of our own making.

Humans may welcome the chance to put away our coats early. But off-schedule springs can have devastating ecological impacts, from pollinators missing the flowers they usually visit to an increase in conflicts between humans and animals as hibernations are cut short. “A really early spring can lead to all sorts of unexpected problems,” says Morgan Tingley, an ornithologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The situation will only worsen as climate change makes warmer winters and earlier spring conditions ever more likely. “The issue is when really early springs don’t just become the exception; they become the rule. And that is what we are seeing with climate change in general,” Tingley says. “The extreme has become the typical.  That’s when we start to see stronger, really negative impacts.”

On the other end of the spectrum, not all flowers will bloom early; some tie their efflorescence to the amount and quality of sunlight they receive. But those that do so can mismatch with pollinators that emerge ahead of schedule as a result of warm weather. If the primary flowers they rely on haven’t bloomed, there won’t be anything for them to eat. “I heard some anecdotal accounts ... of dead bees being witnessed on the ground,” says Theresa Crimmins, director of the USA National Phenology Network. Some biologists speculate that warm temperatures might have lured the bees out of their winter rest and that they then starved without the right flowers being open.

A welcomed pit stop :)

IT"S INDICTMENTS!

Mark Peterson for The New York Times

It never ends, Trumpworld continues unabated, this time, IT"S INDICTMENTS! PR, no matter if it's bad or good, rules as it gives his devoted followers and the repugs even more grist in the mill in trying to vindicate this guy, whose malignant charisma never stops giving, in order to stick it to the dems no matter how crazed the ideas may be to transform Trump into an electable martyr for the ages.

Of course, many Republicans are not only rushing to Trump’s defense, armed with a quiver of false equivalencies, but also seeking any opportunity to bash Democrats and call them hypocrites for seeking to hold Trump accountable.

Of course, many Democrats are, on the one hand, relishing the idea that charges may begin sticking to Slick Donald, but on the other hand, twisting themselves into knots worrying whether an indictment will actually strengthen his standing with his base.

It will ...

Trump will never not be this guy. He’s never going to concede or show contrition in the face of any accusation. He’s going to fight. And that’s precisely why his people adore him. That’s why they’ll continue to support and defend him. They want to be like him: not forced to back down, even when they are wrong.

Trump intuitively understands this, so he continuously feeds the idea that he’s their proxy in the ideological war. “They’re not coming after me,” he said in the same video, “they’re coming after you. I’m just standing in their way, and I always will stand in their way.”

This is why he still has a real shot to be the GOP nominee in '24.

Addendum: Former President Donald Trump has steadily risen above Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a series of Morning Consult polls.

Trump received 54 percent of support in a potential Republican primary poll run by Morning Consult, with DeSantis garnering 26% of support. The poll surveyed 3,394 potential GOP primary voters between March 17 and 19 with a two percent margin of error.

Trump’s popularity has increased since January, when a Morning Consult poll had the former present at 45 percent support while DeSantis garnered 34 percent. Trump’s performance climbed in February to 48 percent before hitting 52 percent by mid-March. (RELATED: Trump Is The Clear Favorite In GOP Primary: POLL)

Any questions?

The Fab of Fabs ...

Illustration: Basile Fournier

The most important tech in the world resides in Taiwan under the auspices of TSMC, the fab of fabs building the most sophisticated chips in the world for virtually all of the heavy-duty players in the digital universe including Apple, Nvidia and the US military, among significant others. The success of the company lies in the fact it tailors chips keyed to the specific needs of companies like Apple while keeping their design specifications sacrosanct to the company in question as building trust, along with supreme competency in doing business, are the primary reasons why TSMC rules in building the most valuable technology on earth.

Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”

TSMC’s success is built on its singular comprehension of this dispersion of providential gifts. The firm is merrily known as “pure play,” meaning all it does is produce bespoke chips for customer companies. 

A true contrarian in a good way. 

Like a dutiful valet who exists only to make his aristocrat look good, TSMC supplies the brains of various products but never claims credit. The fabs operate offstage and under an invisibility cloak, silently interceding between the flashy product designers and the even flashier makers and marketers. TSMC seems to relish the mystery, but anyone in the business understands that, were TSMC chips to vanish from this earth, every new iPad, iPhone, and Mac would be instantly bricked. TSMC’s simultaneous invisibility and indispensability to the human race is something that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, likes to joke about. “Basically, there is air—and TSMC,” he said at Stanford in 2014.

A Pyrrhic victory at best.

"They call Taiwan the porcupine, right? It’s like, just try to attack. You may just blow the whole island up, but it will be useless to you,” Keith Krach, a former US State Department undersecretary, told me a few weeks before I left for Taiwan. TSMC’s chairman and former CEO, Mark Liu, has put it more concretely: “Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take by military force, or invasion, you will render TSMC inoperative.” If a totalitarian regime forcibly occupied TSMC, in other words, its kaiser would never get its partner democracies on the phone. The relevant material suppliers, chip designers, software engineers, 5G networks, augmented-reality services, artificial-intelligence operators, and product manufacturers would block their calls. The fabs themselves would be bricked.

Like money, silicon chips are both densely material and the engine of nearly all modern abstraction, from laws to concepts to cognition itself. Illustration: Basile Fournier

The fab of fabs indeed.

Fleeting Winter

 

Winter's becoming but just a memory in CT thanks to global warming so, in order to commemorate the passing of a season yours truly loves is this short clip showing it actually snowed, something one can see along with a bit of ice if one takes the time to look for it. Enjoy.

No national divorce ...

Agreed.

The decline of the trades ...

Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios

The shortage of tradespeople, you know, plumbers, mechanics, electricians, etc, etc., aka the folks that keep America running while the meritocracy, the rich and the entitled pontificate and make love to their cell phones in the act of doing mostly nothing for the large part of the day, has become a crisis because we don't make anything anymore, thanks to Ronnie offshoring the manufacturing prowess of the nation to China in order to gin profits for stockholders.

To whit.

America needs technical workers — and supply isn't measuring up to demand.

The big picture: Older workers in the skilled trades are retiring and not enough young people are training up to take their jobs as construction workers, plumbers, electricians and beyond.

By the numbers: The construction industry faces a gap of a half million workers, according to Construction Dive.

• And that gap is expected to widen as federal money flows into new infrastructure projects around the country — calling for even more labor.
• 
  
• The application rate for technical jobs like plumber and electrician dropped by 49% between 2020 and 2022, NPR reports.

What's happening: As America de-industrialized in the second half of the 20th century, education was reimagined to emphasize seeking four-year degrees, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

As a result, "we have a K through 12 system that does create better education and more high school graduates, but doesn’t do any job training," he says. And four-year college is held up as the ultimate goal for every student.

Some 30 million jobs in the U.S. that pay an average of $55,000 per year don't require a bachelor's degree, according to a Georgetown analysis.

And while college graduates do earn more on average than trade school graduates, a four-year degree doesn't guarantee a high-paying job. Student debt is rising, and only two-thirds of those with degrees say the debt was worth it, per a YouGov poll.

Given where the economy is going, the notion of college grads making more money than tradespeople is becoming rather dubious, right?

Fleeting Winter/rev XX

The Meander

Edge Line

One of a kind

Field of dreams

Grayscale ...

Shadow Moon

A Random Walk in New Canaan

A day and night tour of New Canaan including a stop at the updated library and a
stroll through the town at nite to check out the sights on a warm winter day. Enjoy.

The wiring's different ...

Ron DeSantis (Photo via AFP)

Being an Aspie, I know one when I see one and Ron is one, further along the spectrum than yours truly, I suspect, after reading about how inept this very smart guy is in dealing with reality.

The repugs have a problem as the wiring's different in us. Not better or worse but different and this guy, IMHO, cannot change his behavior in public at this point in time while running for POTUS as it took me years to learn how to deal with people and reality in proper fashion.

To whit ...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn't officially entered the Republican presidential primary yet, but some of his supporters are taking steps to work around his lacking social skills.

Multiple sources told The Daily Beast the Florida governor struggles with basic social skills, and his allies are working in early primary states to structure events to prevent unexpected interactions between the public and a candidate who is off-putting at best and rude at worst.

“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people, always like a starving animal who has never eaten before,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “getting sh*t everywhere.”

Kinda explains his politics doesn't it?

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Pixabay

The coolest guy in the world, right?

It's a facade :)

All films are fake, which is not a bad thing as virtually all art, like film, is fake, in one way or another as art is but a fabrication created by us rubes in an existence we will never fully understand. :)

Why Western sets? Well, they're the archetypical example of the fake as facades, as seen in the pix above, are needed to build out the "reality" of a western town in the most efficient way possible.

In writing this blurb, the notion of AI as fake comes to mind as its take on reality is like the Western set, all facade and no depth in its attempt to describe the vagaries of existence without the wealth of experience we all share as humans residing on a planet called Earth.

11 degrees, yet another fake by yours truly. :)

Betrayed yet again ...

A must-see film to show how W lied to us just as Johnson lied to us regarding Nam.

Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: George W. Bush ‘Owes Me a Beer, at the Least’

The prevailing question for the young men in the first film was, “Why am I here?” This sequel finds them two decades later wondering, “What was it all for?” And none of them can point to any positive takeaways.

Job loss & the moral hazard ...

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Moving along, it seems AI's going to do a number on jobs as
it's cheaper to have a bot do the deed than us rubes.

Considering that AI is literally designed to model human capabilities and thus automate human tasks, it's a fair question — and one that a group of professors from New York University (NYU), Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) may have just helped to shed a little bit of light on in a new paper, aptly titled "How Will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries?"

"We find that the top occupations exposed to language modeling include telemarketers and a variety of post-secondary teachers such as English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and history teachers," write the researchers. "We find the top industries exposed to advances in language modeling are legal services and securities, commodities, and investments."

So, to recap: our teachers and our financial services, according to these researchers, might just be the first to succumb to language-modeling AI like ChatGPT, which we should probably note is bad at both providing factual information, which probably isn't good for the "teaching" part, and also is very bad at math, which similarly doesn't behoove success in the realm of finance. Cool cool cool.

The moral hazard ... 

Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that someone does build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — human-level AI that, if realized, would undoubtedly change everything.

The world economy would likely turn upside down overnight, while radical changes to social structures, political systems, and even international power dynamics would follow closely behind. What it means to be human would suddenly feel much less concrete, and meanwhile, those who build the system would rapidly accumulate financial and political power.

If just one piece of technology could do all of that, you might have some thoughts about which individual or group might be the ideal — as in, least world-ending — candidate to bring such a machine into existence.

Functioning as a non-profit would make sense; money would certainly be needed to create this and any other piece of world-changing machinery, sure, but presented with the need to generate consistent revenue, both objectivity and safety can go out the window quite quickly. You'd also probably want the tech to be open-source, and you probably wouldn't want any legacy Big Tech companies to own a controlling stake.

OpenAI is for-profit, closed-source, and very much in bed with legacy tech mammoth Microsoft, which has billions vested into the buzzy AI leader. But unlike other AI competitors, who may have started out as for-profit to begin with, OpenAI has very different roots.

Dividing Line/rev II

Indeed, as Vice writer Chloe Xiang brilliantly put it, the current iteration of OpenAI is everything that the company once "promised not to be" — a pretty damn sleazy detail, especially considering that these are the folks who might just be the ones to bring AGI, if it's ever actually possible, into existence.

When the outfit launched back in 2015 — the brainchild of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, alleged vampire-lite Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator co-creator Jessica Livingston, among other major industry players — it was open-source (hence the name) as well as firmly anti-profit, arguing that a revenue-dependant model would compromise the integrity of the tech.

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," reads OpenAI's introductory statement, published back in 2015. "Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."

That statement almost reads a bit alien, considering where the firm is today. Corporate and fiscally motivated, moving with the familiar — and familiarly flawed — "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley approach, it's ventured so far from its original goal that even co-founder Elon Musk has become a vocal opponent of the company.

1 point perspective/rev II

The Moral Hazard/rev II

But three days at OpenAI’s office—and nearly three dozen interviews with past and current employees, collaborators, friends, and other experts in the field—suggest a different picture. There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors. Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration. Many who work or worked for the company insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or feared retaliation. Their accounts suggest that OpenAI, for all its noble aspirations, is obsessed with maintaining secrecy, protecting its image, and retaining the loyalty of its employees. - MIT Technology Review