The Lonetown Boys

The Lonetown Boys, country blues at its finest kicked off Redding Rock'n Roots 2023, Charley's gift to Redding, big time. The 7th edition ruled while avoiding rain. Stellar says it all. :)

The boys. :)

You're either on the bus or off the bus.

Cover of the first US Edition

I remember reading this many years ago, just after dropping acid in Bean Town back in the day. Totally in the present, Tom Wolfe captures the insane 60's by covering the Merry Pranksters and their bus, Further, complete with tales of the Grateful Dead as the bus band along with the exploits of Ken Kesey and driver supreme, Neal Cassidy, a cosmically talented pilot able to navigate the most complex traffic patterns ever with Zen like calm while tripping 24/7.

A read for the ages applies.

Why channeling Wolfe now? Well, it seems a documentary about the esteemed writer has emerged, a flick yours truly intends to watch as his writing blows me away without question. :)

“You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.” 

“Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.” 

“You're either on the bus or off the bus.” 

“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.” 

― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.” 

― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

An Acid Test invitation from 1965

Interestingly enough, Leary was right as LSD's now being used therapeutically. 

Right on applies ... :)

Lest we forget ... The Doors of Perception/Aldous Huxley

I read this too, back in the day while mescaline ruled ... :)

A peyote cactus, from which mescaline is derived.

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

Convergence

MIT researchers introduce Lightning, a reconfigurable photonic-electronic smartNIC that serves 

real-time deep neural network inference requests at 100 Gbps. Credit: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL via Midjourney

Computers are getting faster as we all know but the bottleneck of systems becoming even faster centers on the fact systems, at this point in time, don't use photons to do analog when it comes to running AI at truly high level, something not considered doable until now.

Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases in computer power are slowing down as the demand grows for high-performance computers that can support increasingly complex artificial intelligence models. This inconvenience has led engineers to explore new methods for expanding the computational capabilities of their machines, but a solution remains unclear.

Potential of Photonic Computing

Photonic computing is one potential remedy for the growing computational demands of machine-learning models. Instead of using transistors and wires, these systems utilize photons (microscopic light particles) to perform computation operations in the analog domain. Lasers produce these small bundles of energy, which move at the speed of light like a spaceship flying at warp speed in a science fiction movie. When photonic computing cores are added to programmable accelerators like a network interface card (NIC, and its augmented counterpart, SmartNICs), the resulting hardware can be plugged in to turbocharge a standard computer.

MIT researchers have now harnessed the potential of photonics to accelerate modern computing by demonstrating its capabilities in machine learning. Dubbed “Lightning,” their photonic-electronic reconfigurable SmartNIC helps deep neural networks — machine-learning models that imitate how brains process information — to complete inference tasks like image recognition and language generation in chatbots such as ChatGPT. The prototype’s novel design enables impressive speeds, creating the first photonic computing system to serve real-time machine-learning inference requests.

Tech never sleeps ...

Convergence

A political time bomb ...

Costfoto/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

A political time bomb looms for China and Xi as their economy's tanking and the young can't find jobs. Factoid ... The Communist Party started with the young back in the day, a most disquieting fact for Xi to contemplate as people world-wide are slowing down on buying stuff, something proving to be financially toxic to a country totally dependent on society's continued buying of stuff in order to maintain the status quo.

In August, the Chinese government released a shocking piece of data: A record 21.3 percent of Chinese citizens between the ages of 16 and 24 in cities were unemployed. It promptly decided to suspend future publication of its urban youth unemployment rate. The current data is bad enough; it’s about the same youth unemployment rate across the Middle East on the eve of the Arab Spring.

The Chinese Communist Party knows very well that young, educated and unemployed people concentrated in big cities have the capacity to challenge authority. After all, that is how their own party started. For decades, the party-state’s legitimacy depended on economic growth and improving living standards that are now in jeopardy. Instead of meeting the needs of frustrated youth by generating new jobs and opportunities, the aging leadership has doubled down on authoritarian repression as its primary policy response to a worsening economic crisis.

This isn’t the first time the C.C.P. has had to contend with urban unemployment. For more than 70 years now, the problem has bubbled up only to be contained by either a political crackdown or relieved by favorable economic developments.

This time may be different due to climate change, a rather large aspect of reality promising to become an existential event of truly biblical proportions.

To be continued ...

I Spy

Turns out you’ve been driving in the data fast lane. 

Photo: metamorworks / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock

I Spy, the clever tv show running in the mid 60's, starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, was stylish and very cool, channelling James Bond but with less polish, was a standby for yours truly to watch as action and Sci Fi flicks are and were staples for this rube to view for as long as I can remember. When thinking about I Spy and similar content to peruse, one finds cars always play a huge part as going mobile was, and is, a fact of life of modern civilization as we move further into the 21st century. Be as it may, the car, the perceived refuge of privacy and anonymity, is no longer as they are now rolling computer platforms, equipped with the newest tech, able to snoop on us whenever we get into said vehicle.

To whit ...

Bad news: your car is a spy. If your vehicle was made in the last few years, you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight, and sexual activity. Volkswagen’s cars reportedly know if you’re fastening your seatbelt and how hard you hit the brakes.

That’s according to new findings from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project. The nonprofit found that every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards in new internet-connected models, and all 25 of the brands Mozilla examined flunked the organization’s test. Mozilla found brands including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, and Subaru collect data about drivers including race, facial expressions, weight, health information, and where you drive. Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn’t expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla.

Dirty laundry applies.

“Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about,” said Jen Caltrider, program direction of the *Privacy Not Included project, in a press release. “But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information.”

Modern cars use a variety of data harvesting tools including microphones, cameras, and the phones drivers connect to their cars. Manufacturers also collect data through their apps and websites, and can then sell or share that data with third parties.

Combine this with the fact Google now has the "right" to take all data published on the net and feed it to Bard and company in order to make their AI variants able to "serve us better" sounds like Black Mirror to me.

 

Remember, it's all about the money.

PS, Yours truly tools around in a 2005 Ford 150, a vehicle promising privacy as long as I don't carry a cell phone to keep in contact with a most uncertain world. :)