Yes, there’s gas in the panzer. The Dan are, however, out of practice:
[Update: Many thanks to Hank for his generous smash on the Ko-Fi tip jar. It is much appreciated]
There certainly has been a lot of pixel ink spilled over Chat GPT, or OpenAI, or whatever incongruous acronym or nickname everyone gives to their autofill “artificial intelligence” monsters. That’s all they are, too. Autofill writ large. Instead of finishing your word, they finish your sentence. And your paragraph. And your very short essay, if you force it to. They have introduced a form of voting to the autofill procedure. The machine read (reads) the internet and decides what word would be likeliest to follow another based on every website’s bad writing and worse thinking. People somehow think this is going to spoil the internet. I have news for them. The internet comes pre-rancid. Way back when, Google pretty much destroyed the internet singlehandedly by demanding everything on the internet be designed for phones, and then search engine optimized to their standards — or else. There isn’t one website in 10,000 worth looking at anymore, and one YouTube video in 100,000 as a consequence. Ho hum.
The public face of this OpenAI “revolution” is Sam Altman, a strange dude that seems to be in the cockpit of great affairs for no apparent reason. His grrrllbosses on the board of directors of OpenAI tried to fire him recently, and found themselves on the curb instead, clutching a banker’s box filled with the tchochtkes from their own desks, waiting for their mothers to come pick them up. It’s unwise to wound a king, as they say. God knows who crowned him.
But I’m not particularly interested in OpenAI. It’s already being dumbed-down and bowlderized to accommodate the touchy zeitgeist, guaranteeing that its brand of intellectual margarine will never compete with my buttery writing, for instance. But Altman has his thumbs in all sorts pies, and one of them is Helion. And based on my very unscientific impression of this enterprise, I think it could work. And autofilling the entire energy grid of the world would be a bigger accomplishment than autofilling a recipe article for some Adwords site.
From the Wikiup:
Helion Energy, Inc. is an American fusion research company, located in Everett, Washington. They are developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion, which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that can be derived exclusively from water.
Now, if you’ve ever seen Kirk Douglas feeling up Scandinavian women while thwarting Nazi nuclear programs, you know all about heavy water. Kirk plays a nuclear physicist in the tale, which is much less believable than the fact he’s doing it with one hand up every female shirt in the picture, but it’s still a fun movie. The Germans thought Deuterium, i.e. heavy water was the way to get a nuclear bomb.
But we’re not trying to split atoms, here, we’re trying to fuse them. It’s actually pretty straightforward to perform fusion with deuterium. Lots of people do it all the time. But getting more energy out of it than you put in is the trick. Helion’s approach looks feasible in this regard.
If you compare the scale and complexity of the things Helion is making in a big garage in the Pacific Northwest to the elephantine Rube Goldberg Tokamaks everyone one else is building at great public expense, you get some idea of why I might think this is practical, never mind feasible. Here’s a tokamak:
Come on. That’s a James Bond set, not a practical solution to anything.
Everyone in the industry is claiming that they’ll maybe have working nuclear fusion in forty years if you ladle another 10 billion soccer-dollars on the project. Helion is selling contracts for the electricity they’re going to make already. They say they’ll deliver a working model as soon as this year. They’re making these things in a glorified self-storage garage, using what looks to my eye like regular people to do the work. I’ve worked in factories as complicated as that, and I’m not too bright. The machine can make its own fuel, too. They’ve also pushed the limits of capacitors, instead of batteries, batteries being the ultimate logjam in electricity from anything other than goo and gas from the ground.
I can see lots of reasons why this might not work. I can’t figure out any reason why it can’t work. Big difference. Say, are you guys hiring? I could use open AI to design your next version. Unfortunately, it would look just like the last one, just filtered through the internet first.
Man, people sure get good at the oddest things.
I guess portrait painting on a grand scale isn’t all that odd. Use spray bombs to accomplish it seems like a leap to me, however. There’s a long tradition of painting things with an airbrush, so this isn’t really that unusual, I guess. But I’m just sort of in awe of the scale and the speed and the raw materials used to make this mural.
But it’s kinda on life support. In the not too distant past, a solid minority of all Americans learned how to play an instrument or sing or both. It’s kinda rare these days.
In a way, it’s similar to sports. It used to be that everyone played some kind of sport when they were young, just for the fun of it. It was sometimes organized, like Little League and so forth, but it wasn’t always considered a kind of minor league for pros to spring from right from the get-go. Now not many people want their children to learn to be good sports and vie with their peers for some very minor bragging rights. The whole edifice is erected to produce a handful of professionals that make more money than a software startup budget. The fun has been squeezed out of it.
Look and listen to these kids. They’re making the kind of music that used to haunt every nightclub and restaurant in the world. Live music was everywhere compared to nowadays. People want giant events or nothing at this point. Me? I’d like to listen to La Vie en Rose made fresh right in front of me by some cute kids.
They’re trapped in YouTube amber, and I don’t know how to get them out.
I’ve long since adapted my way of thinking to the Maine life. Nary a hint of Massachusetts left in it. In order to demonstrate how fully I’ve become acclimated, let me list all the furniture and other items currently on display in our living room:
So I’m obviously “getting there” as far as Maine life goes, although I can’t bring myself to put the couch on the porch outside and finish the effect. A Portsmouth Bridge Too Far, that is. But I’m starting to feel like I can make the rounds of Maine real estate with more affection and sympathy than a regular flatlander could. So let’s try to all get in the spirit of the thing, and enjoy another blast of Great Moments in Maine Real Estate.
Whoah. I can hear you now. “Sippican, you’re losing a little off your fastball. How are we going to make mordant remarks about this cabin getaway?” Well, you’re partially right. The partial Typar siding effect is nothing special in Maine. A house on stilts holds no terrors for folks from Baton Rouge or anything. The rich, red stain has a pleasing effect. That porch is as pleasant a place to slap flies on your neck as you could wish for. Why single this place out as notable, you’re wondering.
Because it’s in Moxie Gore. No shit, really; there’s a place called Moxie Gore in Maine. I want to write a potboiler novel with a crime-fighting sexy female lumberjack named Moxie Gore. Admit it. Maine is cooler than wherever it is you live, because we have a Moxie Gore in our state, and you don’t. Also, it’s January, so Maine is so much cooler already than most everywhere else.
But don’t cry for us, Argentina. Mainers know how to deal with the cold. We have numerous large dogs and even larger girlfriends, and we sleep cozy every night. If that fails, and she leaves you for a totally different trailer park beau, and takes the dogs with her, we also know how to install radiators to keep us warm. And stay in the corner with all the heat to ourselves, away from whatever left that stain on the floor there.
Let’s talk about this room. No, really, talk. Oh, you’ll talk. No matter how long we have to keep you in here, you’ll talk. And if the ransom doesn’t come through, well, I don’t have to tell you what the snowblower in the living room is for, do I?
Hulk no like bath, Hulk-mom. Hulk no like shower either. Hulk no happy. Hulk smash bathtub. Hulk happy now.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone here, people. This is a very expensive house by Maine standards. It has indoor plumbing, for instance, and lots of it. But the builders still had the common touch. No matter how swanky the customer, we’ve all been in the same boat at one time or another: Just grabbed a quick bite in a Chipotle. Bombed through the drive-thru at the Taco Bell. Got the bucket of chicken so big at a Colonel Sanders joint you could wash a toddler in it when you’re through. That’s when you’re grateful for a contractor who knew that sometimes, you need a “two-hander” after you finish up. Nothing less will get the job done.
I always thought it would be a sweet gig to work for the paint company and name the colors. You know, instead of calling the colors j26-589, they have names like Periwinkle Heaven or Madagascar Sunset and stuff like that. I think I’d be good at it. For instance, I think the paint in the last photo should be called Subterranean Homesick Blues. But that sort of approach would just invite lawsuits, I guess, so I know I’ll never get the job.
Find Stuff:
Recent Comments