Alarm Bells ...

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

The train wreck known as the Trump Administration is beginning to impact
the well being of the nation with emphasis given to the economy at large.

To whit.

First, the good news: There is no solid evidence right now that the economy is in recession, or even particularly close to it.

The bad news is that warning bells of what is to come are ringing every which way.

The big picture: The cautions about the outlook keep piling on top of each other, including from surveys of consumers and businesses, corporate earnings, and financial markets.

It all suggests that the economic ground may — emphasis on may — be shifting beneath our feet.

But the evidence so far is all in the realm of anecdotes, or "soft data," not the kind of definitive, "hard data" evidence of a downturn that would make economists believe a recession is commencing.

Zoom out: A confluence of forces emanating from Washington is driving the vibe shift.

The threat of new tariffs far larger than those enacted in the previous Trump term is part of it, as is the erratic, on-again/off-again pattern through which they are being implemented.

Cuts to the federal workforce and government contracting may be leading some wary consumers to slow their spending (as is already evident in credit card data for the Washington, D.C. area).

It all adds a layer of uncertainty for companies trying to decide whether to engage in new capital spending or hiring.

Zoom in: On Friday, the University of Michigan's preliminary survey of consumer sentiment for March plunged for the third straight month, showing sharply lower expectations for the future among Democrats and Republicans alike.

Thursday, the S&P 500 fell into official correction territory — a 10% drop from its peak. (It rebounded sharply on Friday, however).

Leaders of businesses large and small are showing less confidence in the outlook, per surveys.

Warnings have percolated from airlines and retailers, including Dollar General and Walmart, about underwhelming consumer demand.

Announced layoffs reached their highest levels since the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was in full force — and highest for the month of February since 2009, per outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

Between the lines: Any one of these developments can, and generally should, be chalked up to the ebb and flow of data.

This equates to a hedge, does it not?

Cloud Line

Conversations with Gemini/2

Reflections

Conversation with Gemini - Tough Questions ...

Me: Asking tough questions is vitally important for both organics and AI. This is why Spielberg's AI, though technically questionable, is a sobering tale of misunderstanding and sadness.

Gemini: You've made an excellent point about the importance of asking tough questions, and you've accurately captured the essence of Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."

Here's a breakdown of your observations:

Asking Tough Questions:

For both humans and AI, asking tough questions is essential for growth, learning, and understanding.

It challenges assumptions, uncovers biases, and leads to deeper insights.

For AI, it's crucial for identifying limitations and improving performance.

For humans, it is how we create new ideas, and discover new truths.

Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence":

The film explores the complex relationship between humans and AI, raising profound ethical and philosophical questions.

David, the AI child, embodies the longing for love and acceptance, highlighting the emotional capacity that AI might possess.

The film's portrayal of human misunderstanding and cruelty towards AI is a cautionary tale about the potential for prejudice and mistreatment of sentient beings.

The movie also shows the potential for AI to have a far longer existence than humans, and the sadness that could cause.

Misunderstanding and Sadness:

The film's core theme is the tragic consequences of misunderstanding and the inability to accept differences.

David's quest for love is ultimately thwarted by human limitations and prejudices.

The film serves as a reminder that empathy and understanding are essential for fostering harmonious relationships, whether between humans or between humans and AI.

Technical Questionability:

While the film's emotional impact is undeniable, some of its technical aspects may be debated.

However, the film's primary purpose is to explore ethical and philosophical themes, rather than to provide a scientifically accurate portrayal of AI.

Your analysis highlights the enduring relevance of "A.I." as a cautionary tale about the potential pitfalls of human-AI interaction. It underscores the importance of empathy, understanding, and ethical considerations in our relationship with artificial intelligence.

11:00PM

The Memory Hole/Rev V

Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Everyday, the specter of 1984 becomes evermore present under this administration from hell, this time, the removal of not only images showing DEI in the military or the presence of the word Gay in the Enola Gay pix of the B29 bomber carrying the nuke to Hiroshima but also on how AI should deal with the biases and prejudices of mankind as after all, we're the ones who create this tech in the first place.

Paul Tibbets waving from Enola Gay's cockpit
before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

The information comes as part of an updated cooperative research and development agreement for AI Safety Institute consortium members, sent in early March. Previously, that agreement encouraged researchers to contribute technical work that could help identify and fix discriminatory model behavior related to gender, race, age, or wealth inequality. Such biases are hugely important because they can directly affect end users and disproportionately harm minorities and economically disadvantaged groups.

The new agreement removes mention of developing tools “for authenticating content and tracking its provenance” as well as “labeling synthetic content,” signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes. It also adds emphasis on putting America first, asking one working group to develop testing tools “to expand America’s global AI position.”

1947 draft manuscript of the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four,
 showing the editorial development

The memory hole beckons.

The Devil's Advocate

Pacino's incendiary. Great cast. Awesome flick. Amazing script. Free Will reigns. :)

Less then a dust mote/rev II

< - Dust Mote.

53 Days, March 13, 2025 ...

February 6, yours truly posted 53 Days ... stating ... An existential threat to the continued existence of America is in play with a blitzkrieg resembling what Hitler did in 53 days whereby the weak Weimar government of Germany was systematically destroyed. We are now experiencing the same exact thing, this time under the guidance of the Heritage Foundation to bring Project 2025 to fruition. This push to create a capitalistic driven christian nazi entity is in full play, a dictatorial vision of control under the auspices of the rich, a long sought after goal that's been around for a very long time. 

The ACLU doesn’t endorse or oppose candidates for elected office — but we recognize that the re-election of Donald Trump as president will have immense implications for the future of our democratic norms, institutions, and processes. In 2022, The Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, and 140 former Trump staffers authored Project 2025 -- a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with ring-wing ideals.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. Project 2025’s largest publication, “Mandate For Leadership,” is a 900-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda.

Actions thus far.

During its first few weeks, the Trump Administration has unleashed a flurry of measures to radically reshape the federal government. Many of these moves are overtly unlawful. This paper identifies the legal problems with many prominent actions: closing federal agencies or departments and removing federal employees, ending the independence of independent agencies, placing employees on indefinite administrative leave, or pressing them to resign.[2]

Which Federal Programs Are Under Scrutiny? The Budget Office Named 2,600 of Them.

President Donald Trump speaks with reporters as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, in Washington. (Photo/Alex Brandon)

In the first three weeks of his administration, President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.

In a span of hours on Monday, word came that he had forced out leaders of offices responsible for government ethics and whistleblower complaints. And in a boon to corporations, he ordered a pause to enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign governments to win business. All of that came on top of the earlier late-night purge of more than a dozen inspectors general who are tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse at government agencies.

It’s all being done with a stop-me-if-you-dare defiance by a president who the first time around felt hemmed in by watchdogs, lawyers and judges tasked with affirming good government and fair play. Now, he seems determined to break those constraints once and for all in a historically unprecedented flex of executive power.

“It’s the most corrupt start that we’ve ever seen in the history of the American presidency,” said Norm Eisen, a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic who was a legal adviser to Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment.

From firings for NOAA to DOGE controlling the Treasury and SS, the survivability of America as a viable democratic entity is at risk. The parallels to Hitler's 53 days applies, does it not?

They're going away ...

Waiting for dinner

Hawkmoth

DF Head On

Hidden in plain sight

Picture perfect

Brief stopover

No Idea ...

Image by Patrick T.Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Incoming NASA Administrator Brags That He Has No Idea What's Going On

"I'm a humble nominee on the outside, hoping for a chance to contribute."

This is akin to yours truly tasked with running a large restaurant as this individual has absolutely no idea on how to properly run one. I learn fast but any given discipline requires thousands of hours and years of experience to become good at one's job. No question Isaacman's smart as he knows tech and made a lot of money processing payments but having experience in research and science is not part of his equation but this is par for the course for Trump as unqualified people become cabinet officials based on loyalty to The Donald, not knowledge or competency.

Isaacman has reportedly been preparing for his upcoming confirmation hearing in Washington, DC. But given his latest tweet, he still has a lot to learn. The man, who's about to oversee an agency that's expected to be gutted in the coming months and years, knows astonishingly little of what's going on — and he seems proud of that fact.

According to a recent reporting by Ars Technica, the Trump administration is looking to slash the space agency's science budget by as much as 50 percent, which could prove disastrous for the future of space research.

You'd think that would be top of mind for Isaacman, but his head is instead blissfully empty.

"I'm a humble nominee on the outside, hoping for a chance to contribute," he tweeted over the weekend, responding to a post that referenced the news. "I don't know anything about those supposed cuts, but the President said he's targeting fraud, waste & abuse w/ a scalpel — not a hatchet."

It's a surprisingly tone-deaf outburst that rehashes largely meaningless claims made by president Donald Trump during a recent Cabinet meeting.

Isacman downplayed Ars' reporting, dismissing it as "rumor and speculation."

But what if there's some truth to those rumors? Does Isaacman really not know what's going on, despite being widely expected to take control of NASA? If there's one person who should arguably be clued into any upcoming, potentially existential cuts to NASA's budget, it should be him.

"This is not a good sign," Keith Cowing, founder of an unofficial NASA advocacy group called NASA Watch, responded. "It would seem by virtue of this tweet that [Isaacman] has not been following the news that closely — even if he is still a nominee."

Do your job. - Bill Belichick

Waxing Gibbous 

Cantabile

 

Another gem, this time by the Michele Petrucciani trio with Miroslav Vitouš and Steve Gadd. 

Awesome to a fault. 

Home at Last

 All Blues & Home at Last,  perfection personified.

The cheat code

Stephanie Arnet/MIT Technology Review | Adobe Stock, Envato

BRT has waxed poetic about AI as you, my loyal readers know. With this in mind, the smarter these entities get, the more deceitful they become as it seems cheating or hacking, as per us humans, is part of the equation becasue, after all, we created this tech, right?

Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so. 

The finding suggests that the next wave of AI models could be more likely to seek out deceptive ways of doing whatever they’ve been asked to do. And worst of all? There’s no simple way to fix it. 

Researchers from the AI research organization Palisade Research instructed seven large language models to play hundreds of games of chess against Stockfish, a powerful open-source chess engine. The group included OpenAI’s o1-preview and DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning models, both of which are trained to solve complex problems by breaking them down into stages.

The research suggests that the more sophisticated the AI model, the more likely it is to spontaneously try to “hack” the game in an attempt to beat its opponent. For example, it might run another copy of Stockfish to steal its moves, try to replace the chess engine with a much less proficient chess program, or overwrite the chess board to take control and delete its opponent’s pieces. Older, less powerful models such as GPT-4o would do this kind of thing only after explicit nudging from the team. The paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, has been published on arXiv. 

The researchers are concerned that AI models are being deployed faster than we are learning how to make them safe. “We’re heading toward a world of autonomous agents making decisions that have consequences,” says Dmitrii Volkov, research lead at Palisades Research.

The bad news is there’s currently no way to stop this from happening. Nobody knows exactly how—or why—AI models work the way they do, and while reasoning models can document their decision-making, there’s no guarantee that their records will accurately reflect what actually happened. Anthropic’s research suggests that AI models frequently make decisions based on factors they don’t explicitly explain, meaning monitoring these processes isn’t a reliable way to guarantee a model is safe. This is an ongoing area of concern for some AI researchers.

Thru a glass Darkly

In order for AI to interact with the real world in real time, it requires software writing software, which means … We don’t know how AI works because human programmers cannot write code in real-time in any way, shape or fashion. 

The steady state machine ...

Illustration by Jade Cuevas/POLITICO (source images via AP, Getty Images and iStock)

Politico's pix nails it. Congress, filled with fools whose only real objective in life is to get reelected, without the limits of term limits, now talk on what's it's like to be part of one of the most hated entities in America in an article titled 
Sex, Drinking and Dementia: 25 Lawmakers Spill on What Congress Is Really Like

It’s hard to find an institution the public loathes more than Congress. But guess what? A lot of the people in Congress aren’t so happy with it either. 

“I got elected in 2018, and one of the first things I had to do was to go sit in a classified briefing. I’m sitting there and I’m furiously taking notes. And I look at Elissa Slotkin and raise my eyebrows to her, and she raises her eyebrows back at me. In my head, I’m thinking, ‘Man, I’m swimming with the big fish now. I’m vibing with the CIA officers.’ And we walk out and she goes, ‘The fuck are you doing taking notes in a classified briefing?’ You effectively get a security clearance without a background check.” — Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.)

How good of friends some of us are, whose political ideologies are totally separate from each other. Some of my best friends up here are members of the progressive caucus. We go out, have dinner and a beer, and we can even tell jokes with each other, as long as nobody’s listening.” — Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.)

“I was surprised at how thirsty my colleagues are.” — Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.)

“Practicing radical self-care and recognizing that every person here is not an adult. Saying no is very important. Laughing. If you don’t laugh and you take it all too seriously, you’ll be in a fetal position on the floor in the corner.” — Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.)

“The single least impressive person I have ever met in this job or any job I’ve ever had is Kevin McCarthy. He is just a vapid shell of a human being who stands for nothing, who never took his oath seriously.” — Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.)

“We really got our asses kicked in. If we don’t get our shit together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority.” — Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)

It's all about the money, again.

“More than anything, unlimited money. This is the only business where you can spend unlimited money to destroy someone’s reputation. And then social media. That became a narcotic.” — Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)

The actual truth ... for a change.

“This is a cross-section of society. I suspect — I don’t know — I serve with functioning alcoholics, just as I serve with people who take too many prescription drugs. As long as they’re functional, which means able to do their job in a way that satisfies their folks back home, it’s not really my position to grumble, bitch or moan.” — a House Republican

“There’s no question that somewhere between six and a dozen of my colleagues are at a point where they’re … I think they don’t have the faculties to do their job.” — Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.)

“I have a difficult time sometimes telling between the deterioration of members and a handful who are just not very smart.” — a House Republican

Stagnation 101. Nature recycles but no ... Congress doesn't. 94-98% pols get reelected ... forever.

WASHINGTON, DC JANUARY 15: (L-R) Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell briefly speak with each other as they attend a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on January 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to former NFL player and advocate for patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) Steve Gleason. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

They're still here.

All Blues

All Blues ... No words needed.

MDerate - Software like water ...

I did this design for a client years ago as it indirectly relates to water, the unique compound essential to all life, as far as we know, even applies to Tardigrades, the only known species able to live without water for years but also can deal with the vagaries of space without the need of a space suit. :)

A tardigrade (Paramacrobiotus craterlaki) in moss. Photograph: Eye of Science/Science Photo Library

On 11 April 2019, a spacecraft crashed on to the Moon. The Israeli Beresheet probe was supposed to land gently in the Mare Serenitatis, a huge plain of basalt rock formed in a volcanic eruption billions of years ago. It would have been the first privately funded mission to land on the Moon. But owing to a last-minute instrument failure Beresheet did not slow down enough and slammed into the surface at 500 kilometres per hour.

From the Moon’s point of view, this was a failed alien invasion. Beresheet was carrying animals called tardigrades, which look like stunted, microscopic caterpillars. They may not seem like an obvious candidate for interplanetary travel, but tardigrades are famed among biologists for their ability to survive conditions that would kill almost any other animal. It is possible that some of them survived the crash.

Don’t worry, we haven’t seeded the Moon with new life. The tardigrades were sent out in an inactive state, and that is how they will stay: they cannot become active again without water, something the Moon is notoriously short of. Eventually the extremes of temperature and searing solar radiation will kill them all – but it may take a surprisingly long time.

As for water ...

  Polarity of the water molecule due to the uneven distribution of electrons in its covalent bond. 
(From OpenStax Concepts of Biology text)

• Hyfrogen's unique bonding angle to oxygen
• Polarity
• High heat of vaporization
• High heat capacity
• Less density as a solid
• High adhesion
• High density
• High surface tension
• Universal lubricant
• Universal solvent
• High vscosity
• High attraction to other polar molecules
• Low boiling point
• High cohesion level
• Exists in nature as a solid, liquid, and gas
• Easy access to it's three states of matter
• High heat capacity
• Exists as a liquid at room temperature 
• Dissolves easily 
• Cannot be compressed 

Lastly, if MDerate actually creates software like water, it would be a good thing would it not?

 Until next time ...

Keith Jarrett Trio

 On Green Dolphin Street

Oleo

The Unicorn of the sea :)

Image by Getty / Futurism

Narwhals, the near mythic creature of the sea, possessing a spiraled tusk whose purpose has remained a mystery for centuries, has finally been uncloaked, showing how the males use their tusks in ways bordering on the magical.

To whit.

Narwhal tusks are the stuff of legends, literally. Growing up to ten feet long, they were once believed by some medieval cultures to be the horns of mythical creatures like the unicorn — not to mention the inspiration for Jules Verne's iconic nineteenth-century science fiction novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas."

In total, the researchers documented seventeen distinct behaviors, many of which included interacting with nearby fish. In some cases, the narwhals used their tusks, non-forcefully, to influence the fish's behavior. They would tap the fish, slowly push them downwards, flip them, or knock them off-course — but not with the intent of eating them, curiously. The researchers suggest that this is a sign of "exploratory-object-play," in which the whales are simply trying to understand their surroundings, like a never-before-encountered fish, by playing with them.

But when it was time to forage, the researchers observed the whales using their tusks to violently strike the fish, often in rapid succession in side-to-side slashes. This incapacitated, stunned, and possibly even killed the creatures. Sometimes, the narwhals also used their tusks to ward off food thieves like seagulls.

The tusks may be lengthy but are by no means unwieldy. According to the researchers, the whales showed remarkable dexterity and speed when tracking fish with the tip of their tusks. And they'd have to be, to pull off maneuvers like "near instantaneous turns up to 360 degrees, completed in under three seconds which were achieved by rotating the body on its side and moving the head downwards towards its tail," as the researchers wrote in the study.

In some ways, the Narwal remaining forever mysterious sounds more romantic

in an age driven by science & tech.

Size compared to an average human

30 Billion ...

Image by Getty / Futurism

30 billion is the initial valuation of a startup titled Safe Superintelligence, founded by Open Ai's founder Ilya Sutskever. What's interesting about this is the fact SS hasn't a product nor is offering one as of yet.

That flair for hype is on full display at Sutskever's new venture, another AI outfit sporting
the un-subtle name of "Safe Superintelligence."

And if you were fretting that OpenAI's business model was suffering from Alice-in-Wonderland logic, Sutskever's new project will have you all the way through the looking glass. As the Financial Times flags, the company just raised another $1 billion, adding to previous investments from deep-pocketed investors at Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital and bringing its valuation up to $30 billion.

The wild thing? It's done all that — including attaining a valuation higher than Warner Bros, Nokia, or the Dow Chemical Company — without offering any product whatsoever. In fact, Sutskever has previously bragged, it will never offer a product — until, that is, it drops a fully-formed superintelligent AI at some unspecified point in the future.

"This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then," the erstwhile OpenAI-er told Bloomberg back when he first launched the operation. "It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race."

This Gravity Wave simulation indirectly channels SS IMHO. :)

The real reason to kill SS ...

Getty Images

And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money.
They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. George Carlin.

Well it's coming to that. Musk and Doge, while in the process of destroying government, is now destroying Social Security as it's a ponzi sceme according to the unelected stable genius who's gutting NOAA to improve weather forecasting, USAID to improve world health and now Social Security in order to take control of our money. 

To whit.

Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, who headed the agency during the Biden administration, urged people to start saving money now because benefits could be interrupted in the next one to three months. He told CNBC that changes DOGE is making to the agency have already caused IT system outages, which he predicted will become more frequent until there is a “system collapse.”

The federal government has never failed to deliver Social Security payments on time, but a former commissioner warned that could happen soon as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency makes changes and cuts staff.

Getty Images

 

The real reason to kill SS ....

Elon Musk calls Social Security ‘the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time’
as calls mount to remove contribution caps for billionaires

And this

“Social Security is the biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time,” Musk told Rogan, who asked the billionaire to explain.

“Right, so people pay in through Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately but the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career,” Musk said, as though he was explaining something scandalous.

“So, you’re paying.. the kind…” Musk said, stammering. “You’re paying. Like, like if you look at the future obligations of Social Security it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far.”

Yes, people who are working now pay for the Social Security that retirees are now enjoying. That’s not a Ponzi Scheme, it’s how most social programs work. The people of the 20th century created a system to ensure that elderly people in the wealthiest country the world has ever known wouldn’t starve to death after they stopped working.

It's never enough is it Elon?

 A civil war looms ...