The Gravity Well ...

Autogenerated by Google’s Notebook LM

Finally, a guy who gets AI. No bloviation, no assumption, just taking the time to see how
trees differ from weeds in the world of AI, an open ended tech forever to remain unknown.

When massive objects warp spacetime, smaller things will either get captured by the gravity well or achieve escape velocity. Google is adding enormous mass to the AI field: $93 billion in capex, custom silicon, vertical integration top to bottom, coupled with the breakthroughs from the research team at Google DeepMind.

Does that mean game over for competitors? Well only if intelligence is a monolithic mass, one dimension where the biggest model always wins. But that “God Model” fallacy, the notion that intelligence is monolithic, doesn’t sit with my intuitions, as I have written previously. Recent research from Epoch AI concurs, suggesting intelligence is more multifaceted. If that’s true, Google’s gravity well has a floor but not a ceiling. It’s tough to escape by matching their mass. You escape by achieving different densities in other dimensions.

Keep that frame in mind as we look at what Google just shipped this week.

This week Google released a new flagship LLM, Gemini 3, which includes an advanced thinking capability called DeepThink. Accompanying the launch was a remarkable new image generator called Nano Banana 3 and some developer tools.

I’ve been running Gemini 3 through my usual battery of tests in the run-up to this week’s launch. It’s a noticeable upgrade on Gemini 2.5 – sharper reasoning and a real jump in dealing with complex, theoretical questions. It’s also a concise communicator.

Compared to GPT-5, differences showed up quickly. GPT-5 tends to pile on layers of complexity; Gemini 3 gets to the point. That clarity compounds over hundreds of queries. I now default about a third of my prompts to Gemini 3. I’ve also moved a high‑stakes multi‑agent “council of elders” workflow, where several different prompts challenge and critique analyses, from GPT‑5 to Gemini 3. In that workflow GPT-5 worked noticeably better than Claude 4.5; Gemini 3 Pro is the best of the lot.

Crucially, the new model also addressed a criticism thrown at this sector. For the past few years, foundation model labs have bet on scaling laws, which state that spending more on data and compute reliably produces performance improvements. Many outside commentators claimed that scaling itself had failed. My view, last year, was that while other innovations would be welcome, scaling still had some years to go.

In the words of Google researcher, Oriol Vinyals, on the subject of pre-training scaling:

Contra the popular belief that scaling is over—the team delivered a drastic jump. The delta between [Gemini] 2.5 and 3.0 is as big as we’ve ever seen. No [scaling] walls in sight!

And as for post-training, the step where a trained model gets further refined, Vinyal’s is even more explicit:

Still a total greenfield. There’s lots of room for algorithmic progress and improvement, and 3.0 hasn’t been an exception.

What Google has shown is that scaling still works if you have the vertical stack to sustain the burn: infrastructure, data, researchers. To what extent can Anthropic or OpenAI follow that strategy?

Generated by Google NanoBanana3

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Phase Transitions

Within a 10 square mile radius, Redding's environs change from woods to lakes to reservoirs with startling quickness. In this clip, silence rules save for one quick interlude as silence is all too rare in today's noisy world. As an aside, the reservoir was revisited as the water table dropped, revealing more of lies beneath a resource, suppling the needs of over 250,000 as we speak.

Finding common ground ...

Donald Trump shakes hands with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as they meet in the Oval Office on November 21, 2025. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Finding common ground ... As you, my loyal readers know, I am not in love with The Donald but shock and awe comes to mind in terms of Mandani meeting Trump with the end result, a resounding success. Why? Coming to agreement in areas of shared interests. Yours truly interacts with many people possessing different political viewpoints from ardent MAGAs to radical lefties and I must say, I get along. There are shared interests able to be leveraged and discussed in the pursuit of solving problems. Question ... When is the last time we had a president talk about the country and not about the party? When is the last time a president talked about problems shared by all like healthcare being out of control in terms of cost and complexity or the question of affordability in terms of goods and services using rancor and vitriol to "answer" the question versus analyzing why this is so and going ahead with the solving of said problem in constructive fashion. I thought so. Mamdani's sharp, has charisma and has vision.
Not bad for a young guy on the rise IMHO. :)

In a triumphant election-night speech earlier this month, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani addressed President Donald Trump directly, telling the president to “turn the volume up.” Trump has repeatedly called Mamdani a “Communist” and questioned his citizenship status.

But when the two met in the Oval Office on Friday, it was all strikingly cordial — almost affectionate. “Hopefully, you’ll have a really great mayor,” Trump told reporters. “The better he does, the happier I am.”

So Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani had this strikingly friendly appearance in the Oval. What happened? Is this a big deal?

I certainly think it’s a big deal. It reflects the intention that Mamdani approached his entire campaign with, and particularly the general election — his consistent ability to turn skeptics into supporters. That was consistently happening in such a way that it was built into his strategy, and I think we saw that on the biggest stage yesterday.

In some ways, it reflects a lot of the meetings that he’s had already, but in some ways, it’s so much more extraordinary considering what Trump has said, and considering the way Trump was really coming to him. Trump’s the one throwing up the thumbs-up in the photos, not Mamdani. And I think that is reflective of an approach where Mamdani and his team come to these [meetings] and try to focus on areas of agreement and shared values. They identified affordability as one that they think Donald Trump shared, and so they came with that intention in mind. That’s the same strategy they’ve used for meetings of all sorts.

This could be the start of something good for a change. One can only hope.

New respect ...

“Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest,” Ms. Greene wrote.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Greene, like Liz Cheney, finally found a way to be courageous and true. Far from space lasers and being MAGA supreme, she finally realized what matters and what matters is exactly what she posted and I repeat. “Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest,”  For yours truly, loyalty and being true to your beliefs is valid and, like Cheney, she finally found what truly matters.

Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest,” Ms. Greene wrote in a long post. She said that if she had been cast aside by “MAGA Inc,” it was indicative that “many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”

It is extremely unusual for a member of Congress to up and leave in the middle of a term, barring an illness or some extenuating circumstance that makes it impossible to carry on.

But Ms. Greene said she had made the decision to leave because she did not want to endure a “hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”

She added: “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

Ms. Greene earlier this week spoke on the House floor, from the Democratic side of the chamber, laying out why she was fighting so hard on an issue that has animated her voters.

“These American women aren’t rich, powerful elites,” she said. “These are your average Americans.”

She added: “For far too long, Americans have been put last, and they’re sick and tired of it. This is why they don’t trust Congress. This is why they don’t trust the government.”

She's right

The time has come ...

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

—Through the Looking-Glass

The Walrus and the Carpenter speaking to the Oysters,
as portrayed by illustrator John Tenniel

Sedition 101

Politico

Prelude to martial law ... Call for sedition, do a false flag, declare martial law and ... eliminate the mid terms as the orange menace is truly off the rails while the press kinda agrees but hesitates to scream out loud,
the man is flat out batshit crazy.

Trump calls for Democratic lawmakers to face trial for ‘seditious behavior’

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” he wrote on Truth Social.

President Donald Trump on Thursday called for six Democratic lawmakers to face arrest and trial after they made a video encouraging U.S. service members and members of the intelligence community to refrain from following orders if they broke the law.

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” Trump charged in a post on Truth Social. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”

The president then reposted 16 Truth Social posts, including one that advocated for hanging the Democrats, like “GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD.”

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” he later wrote.

Houston, we have a problem ...

The emoticon :)

Credit: Benj Edwards / DEC

Ars hit a homer. In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon. 

To whit

On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.

The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon’s “bboard,” which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.

That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” He claimed that an elevator had been “contaminated with mercury” and suffered “some slight fire damage” due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.

In reading the Ars piece, WarGames and the first connect I made to the "web" comes to mind as the awesome sound the 8.4k baud modem made, linking yours truly to the outside world, was stellar to the max. :)

WarGames

The weapon used in the 80's ... :)

Backgrounder ...

The 1983 movie WarGames introduced many people to modems. In one pivotal scene, Matthew Broderick’s character David uses his modem to systematically dial every single number in a specific area code hoping to find the number for a video game company so he can play the latest games. This is an actual technique that was used by hackers in the 1980s and 1990s to find phone numbers with connected modems. This process came to be known as Wardialing after the movie, and a variant of the term is even used today – Wardriving (a process of looking for open WiFi networks while driving in a vehicle).

My connect was not as fancy as this because B&W ruled once the connect was made. :)

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

Marginal ...

Epstein/Summers Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Rick Friedman/
Corbis via Getty Images and Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

No real mystery here but the above picture indirectly shows the respective gazes of Jeffery and Larry to be rather discomforting to say the least. Brilliant but marginal as a "quality" guy, Summers finally lost favor with the elites and it's about time.

Of all the oddities to emerge from Larry Summers’ newly released communications with the late, disgraced sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps the strangest is his sudden expulsion from elite America. Over the past three days, there has been a rush to cut ties with Summers just about everywhere—the Center for American Progress, the New York Times, the Hamilton Project, the Yale Budget Lab, and the Center for Global Development all announced the termination of their relationships with him. On Wednesday Summers himself resigned from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and on Thursday, Harvard announced that Summers would be removed from teaching duties pending a University investigation.

And yet the connection between Summers and Epstein has long been public knowledge. Summers joined OpenAI in November of 2023, almost four years after the New York Times published a photo of him hanging out with Epstein at the sex trafficker’s Manhattan mansion, and six months after the world learned that Summers had solicited donations from Epstein on behalf of his wife’s poetry foundation. Undeterred, the Times itself hired Summers as a contributor to its Opinion section at the beginning of 2025.

What is unsettling about the Summers-Epstein saga is not who he got in bed with, but who got in bed with him, given what was already known. Prestigious institutions knew exactly who Summers was, and sought him out anyway, for years. There will no doubt be different horrors to come in the Epstein documents, but the latest tranche has more to do with power than sex. It reveals an American elite blinded to outrages occurring in plain view, due to the clubby nature of high society. 

The Nation

Any questions?

Humans do it too :)

Getty / Futurism

A funny but wise site discussing the foibles of AI also resonates to humans when it comes to companies not understanding process and the lessons of The Mythical Man Month as Brooks's immortal statement, "Adding more people to a late project makes it later." rings true no matter the situation. This is ironclad as the communication complexities needed to get the new hires up to speed outweigh the additional men added to complete the job.

As a former consultant dealing with large and small companies alike, first hand experience of people endlessly talking about something they have not solved due to the lack of understanding said process, something I actually did, would create an extremely long and boring post able to put one to sleep in a nanosecond but I digress. The Futurism piece, with a connect to an awesome website, Humero.AI, does the job for me. :)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as detailed in a recent piece for Wired and documented in the recently launched second season of Ratliff’s podcast “Shell Game,” it didn’t take long for the walls to come down as AI agents raced to organize an offsite gathering in his absence — and without his permission.

Ratliff’s entertaining chronicling of HurumoAI demonstrates that AI agents still have a long way to go until they can replace human workers wholesale. That’s despite industry leaders often promising that agentic AI is the future, taking care of virtually all human tasks within the next couple of years.

Those claims that have drawn plenty of skepticism from experts, who’ve shown that reality has a lot of catching up to do. Case in point, Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently released a paper showing that even the best–performing AI agents failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time. 

Ratliff’s fictional startup was tasked with creating a “procrastination engine,” called Sloth Surf, a tongue-in-cheek web app that takes care of wasting time on the internet on the user’s behalf, giving them time to do their actual work instead.

But despite the firm’s employees immediately jumping into action, coming up with plans for development, user testing, and marketing materials, there was one glaring problem: “It was all made up,” as Ratliff wrote.

It gets better. 

Dollar cash rising from startup concept box. 3D illustration Getty

The art of not knowing process and The Mythical Man Month is akin to Man bites dog, IMHO. :)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that he believes the first $1 billion solo startup will be built by one person with a laptop, an internet connection, and an army of AI agents. I have experienced GPT-5, and I now believe that this milestone will arrive significantly earlier than most people project, likely by 2028.

The image of the billionaire founder is about to be rewritten. No sprawling teams. No Ivy League pedigrees. No nine-figure venture war chests. The next mega empire will be operated behind a kitchen table and directed by an individual strong builder with an army of AI agents, no-code automation and the capacity to disseminate concepts around the world in real-time. The silos that required separate teams dedicated to research, marketing, sales, and customer support are being replaced by programs that operate 24/7 in the cloud.

The word assume applies. 

You are being watched ... maybe

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

Back in 2010, yours truly wrote a piece titled, you guessed it, :) Panopticon, talking about, in part, the brilliant "social engineering" plan by Jeremy Bentham whereby ... The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation. 

Fast forward 13 years to see why Bentham's design is even more apropos in the age of AI.

Source Image: Freepik

Now, artificial intelligence is making this dynamic worse. As we enter the AI age, our data—who and what we are—has become more valuable, and more vulnerable, than ever. 

We’ve got OpenAI’s CEO dreaming of a day when “every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context.” 

And finally ...

Wormhole technology has advanced to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the spacetime continuum. The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation that develops this advance can spy on anyone, anywhere it chooses. A logical development from the laws of space-time allows light waves to be detected from the past. This enhances the wormhole technology into a "time viewer" where anyone opening a wormhole can view people and events from any point throughout time and space.

When the technology is released to the general public, it effectively destroys all secrecy and privacy. 

An underground forms which attempts to escape this observation; corruption and crime are drastically reduced; states discover the true causes and outcomes of international conflicts; and religions worldwide are forced to re-evaluate their divine histories. As the underground movement grows, it utilises a direct neural interface coupled with the unlimited communication provided by the wormhole technology to develop a group mind.

Casimir forces on parallel plates

Interestingly, the book has legs as the start point for the creation of the wormholes is the Casimir Effect, a proven theory creating a vacuum within a vacuum with fascinating effects unable to be ignored.

To understand the Casimir Effect, one first has to understand something about a vacuum in space as it is viewed in quantum field theory. Far from being empty, modern physics assumes that a vacuum is full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves that can never be completely eliminated, like an ocean with waves that are always present and can never be stopped. These waves come in all possible wavelengths, and their presence implies that empty space contains a certain amount of energy--an energy that we can't tap, but that is always there.

Now, if mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, some of the waves will fit between them, bouncing back and forth, while others will not. As the two mirrors move closer to each other, the longer waves will no longer fit--the result being that the total amount of energy in the vacuum between the plates will be a bit less than the amount elsewhere in the vacuum. Thus, the mirrors will attract each other, just as two objects held together by a stretched spring will move together as the energy stored in the spring decreases.

With SF being as it is, the Casimir Effect is amped to the nth degree to create the infamous Worm Cam.

In effect, Light of Other Days is indirectly saying ... The 25-nanometer Casimir aperture natively folding the ER=EPR twisted light enables the Worm Cam to see everything.

Plan view of the panopticon prison, by Reveley, 1791[2]