The second season of the Netflix reality competition show Squid Game: The Challenge has dropped. (Too many links to pick a few—search for it.)
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Mr. Peed Off • November 7, 2025 9:02 PM
The Contract That Changed Everything
In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty.
A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies—one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history—was framed as a move toward “efficiency.”
It consolidated seventy-five procurement agreements into a single contract.
Ismar • November 7, 2025 9:18 PM
@ Mr. Peed Off
And how is all this information going to help you and me ?
lurker • November 7, 2025 11:39 PM
@not important
“…almost all UK citizens will have had data compromised” in state-sponsored cyber attacks carried out by China …”
Is this about the same number whose data will be compromised by state sponsored action carried out by UKUS?
lurker • November 8, 2025 12:02 AM
“The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission witnessed a 92 per cent increase in reported incidents involving lithium batteries in 2022, …”
If that number is year on year then it reflects a post-covid increase in travel and activity, and possibly a reduction in quality while satisfying demand.
“Passengers who were in the lounge said that they heard screaming and saw the device explode and send “battery acid flying everywhere”.”
Qantas passengers still living in the 20th century …
‘https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/melbourne-qantas-lounge-power-bank-fire-b2860510.html
Clive Robinson • November 8, 2025 11:23 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
Looks like the past few days have been “bad news” for the Generative AI tech companies with a $1trillion or more dumping of their stock with even Microsoft taking a significant kicking…
As Bloomberg and the FT have ridiculous PayWall requirements for reading others work “chewed over” I’ll link to Gizmodo,
https://gizmodo.com/1-trillion-in-tech-stocks-sold-off-as-market-grows-skeptical-of-ai-2000683226
$1 Trillion in Tech Stocks Sold Off as Market Grows Skeptical of AI
What do bubbles do?
Note the question in the sub title…
Stocks hit are quoted as,
“Those companies include Oracle, Meta, Palantir, and Nvidia, the outlet notes. The outlet calls it the worst week for Wall Street since Trump’s “liberation day.”
… …
And then there’s Microsoft, which—despite being one of the most powerful and prominent companies in Silicon Valley—seems to be having one of its biggest losing streaks ever. Bloomberg reported Friday that its stock had slumped 8.6 percent over eight days”
I certainly warned prior to the October Quater Reports that Microsoft was going to be in “Queer Street” with seniors giving significant signs they were cashing out, jumping ship, or just “Getting the heck out of Dodge”.
Thus the question,
“How soon for the rest of the US?”
The article notes
“Want more evidence that our economy is currently a dumpster fire? A monthly survey from the University of Michigan has shown that consumer sentiment is currently hitting some of its lowest numbers in the history of the survey.”
Welcome to “Trummper World” of “Mole-whacking America for Great Amusement”…
In the English Midlands not far from Brum, they’ve found whacking moles amusing,
KC • November 8, 2025 11:48 AM
@ All
re: Squid Game: The Challenge Season 2
Has anyone watched the first episode?
The SUSPENSE
The first challenge is seeing which team can make it the closest to counting to 456 using just their human prowess.
With just a few moments to begin, each team jumped to the skills someone might have in their natural occupation.
Who do you think would be a naturally good counter?
Here’s the first 13 minutes, starting at “This test is simple. All you need to do is count.”
All the episodes.
MarkH • November 8, 2025 3:01 PM
If this wasn’t covered already:
There are many horrible implications to U.S. immigration enforcement people abducting people while masked, wearing generic clothing, without badges, and refusing to identify themselves when asked.
One of those horrible implications is that non-government criminals can easily present themselves in a way that most Americans will now assume to be ICE.
Of course this has already happened multiple times.
From news reports in the past week, the FBI has responded by requesting that ICE agents be clearly identified.
not important • November 8, 2025 5:07 PM
@MarkH ‘One of those horrible implications is that non-government criminals can easily present themselves in a way that most Americans will now assume to be ICE.’
I agree with Your concern. ICE agent may have kind of RF encrypted tag which could be read by FBI against fraudulent fake ICE agent. Unfortunately ICE must have solve the problems generated by many years by uncontrolled illegal immigration. I hope US will not follow steps of EU – results are obvious otherwise.
@lurker – yeah you’re right – even more. we all are hostages of deep state actions.
@Clive – article supporting Your point on AI bubble
Will the AI bubble burst as investors grow wary of returns?
https://www.dw.com/en/will-the-ai-bubble-burst-as-investors-grow-wary-of-returns/a-74636881
=ChatGPT parent company Open AI, Softbank and Oracle pledged to invest $500 billion (€433 billion) in AI supercomputers, Open AI and chip giant Nvidia announced a $100 billion fund to maintain the United States’ dominance in advanced chips, while Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent hiked investments to help speed up China’s ambition to lead AI by 2030.
But signs of a hangover are getting harder to ignore. AI usage by corporations is slipping, spending is tightening and the machine learning hype has massively outpaced the profits.
“The vast bet on AI infrastructure assumes surging usage, yet multiple US surveys show adoption has actually declined since the summer,” Carl-Benedikt Frey, professor of AI & work at the UK’s University of Oxford, told DW. “Unless new, durable use cases emerge quickly, something will give — and the bubble could burst.”
AI’s biggest challenge remains its tendency to hallucinate — generating plausible but false information. Other weaknesses are inconsistent reliability and the poor performance of autonomous agents, which complete tasks successfully only about a third of the time.
“Unlike an intern who learns on the job, today’s pre-trained [AI] systems don’t improve through experience. We need continual learning and models that adapt to changing circumstances,” said Frey.
“What perturbs me is the scale of the money being invested compared to the amount of revenue flowing from AI,” economist Stuart Mills, a senior fellow at the London School of Economics, told DW.
Few have quantified the AI bubble more starkly than Julien Garran, partner at UK-based research firm MacroStrategy Partnership. He argues that the sheer volume of capital flowing into AI — !!!despite little evidence of sustainable returns — dwarfs previous speculative frenzies.
“We estimate a misallocation of capital equivalent to 65% of US GDP — four times bigger than the housing buildup before the 2008/9 financial crisis and 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust,” Garran told DW.
Data analytics and intelligence platform Palantir’s Q3 revenue surged 63% year-over-year, but its stock price fell by up to 7% on the news. AMD and Meta also saw their strong AI-related earnings overshadowed by market concerns about sustainability.
That disconnect between soaring valuations and shaky fundamentals is exactly what worries Mills, who sees a widening gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers to businesses.
“With the exception of Nvidia, !!! which is selling shovels in a gold rush, most generative AI companies are both wildly overvalued and wildly overhyped,” Gary Marcus, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, told DW. “My guess is that it will all fall apart, possibly soon. The fundamentals, technical and economic, make no sense.”=
Clive Robinson • November 8, 2025 7:35 PM
@ lurker,
With regards,
“If that number is year on year then it reflects a post-covid increase in travel and activity, and possibly a reduction in quality while satisfying demand.”
As far as I’m aware global flights are still below pre covid numbers, and why some air fares are still trailing behind inflation level rises.
But the capacity to price on battery-banks is rapidly increasing due to a couple or more factors,
1, USB-C with USB4 has increased power sourcing to 100W 20V/5A 100W and with USB PD 240W and voltage maximum to 48V [1](more than sufficient to kill).
2, It has also become the standard consumer portable device connection.
2, Consumers cycle smart devices more frequently since covid.
3, Demand for device energy has increased.
4, The desire to have battery banks remain physically small has reduced lithium pack and other component reliability
5,Competition has brought price down thus further effecting component quality.
6, Increasing unreliability of Primary Power is increasing usage.
The last point and the near universal nature of USB-C has thus made battery packs seen as the “don’t be in the dark cold” solution[3].
I’ve been only half joking that you could easily make a pocket “heart defibrillator” adapter using one.
But issues are getting worse because some now have Solar PV charging input with upto 100V peak charging voltage.
In effect everyone is becoming a probabilistic “Mad Bomber to be” without even realising it.
My advice don’t put them in clothing and certainly never inner clothing pockets even though they fit. Always carry in a padded bag without other objects to stop avoidable fire starting.
[1] Due to SHTF thinking and the increasing unreliability of Primary Power and to the home Internet, “Starlink in vehicle” is here if you want to pay for it (via your left nostril etc…). But there are Ham and other EmComm solutions that are close to Mil ManPack / “Green Radios” (some of which you can build yourself). That will communicate around the Globe or to another area where service is available[2]. Have a look at Amateur Radio POTA DataComm setups using power banks, Pocket Linux systems ~$100 and QRP transceivers like the Xiegu G90 ~$500 which is a 20W HF amateur portable radio that can easily be made to cover the entire HF band and do equivalent Email and SMS and more interesting via FLrig, FLdigi WinLink JS8Call etc with a low power tablet system ~$100. The physically hard part is putting up a suitably broadband antenna for “Automatic Link Establishment”(ALE) usage. That is used by Mil/Gov usage (still).
If you search for either OHSTN or KM4ACK and visit their sites you will see people doing this in all sorts of places and ways.
[2] The US Army back in 1987 published “Tactical Single-Channel Radio Communications Techniques (FM 24-18)” that will give you most of the basic ManPack “Green Radio” usage information for Local, Regional, and Global Voice Comms.
[3] Battery Bank power packs can these days run heated gloves, socks, jerkins/vests. That you can buy or make. At the very least they will help you have your home at a lower temperature thus save significantly. But with a larger battery pack and Solar could see you through multi-day power black outs. This goes into some of the practicalities,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8EYdG0yz7Ss
What it does not mention that is IMPORTANT is you should have lithium batteries above ~4C / 40F, for charging because the electrolyte is actually water based which at low temps reduces ion mobility thus “Lithium Plating” occurs on the anode, reducing both capacity and safety.
Clive Robinson • November 8, 2025 7:57 PM
@ Mark H, ALL,
With regards,
“There are many horrible implications to U.S. immigration enforcement people abducting people while masked, wearing generic clothing, without badges, and refusing to identify themselves when asked.”
This is typical “Police State ‘Snatch Squad'” behaviour that has been happening for over half a century to my knowledge around the world. For instance look up the “Disappeared” in Argentina where during the “dirty war” over 30,000 people including children were snatched never to return or even be found.
For utter foolishness is the judiciary pretense that simply saying “Police” or apparently wearing some kind of uniform is sufficient identification of “legitimate authority” that must be obeyed without question…
All around the world every day people are being killed or snatched by thugs that have no “legitimate authority”.
But worse again is, –as has been seen in London and other UK cities– actual police using their position to sexually abuse and murder.
MarkH • November 9, 2025 12:08 AM
@not important:
This specific threat to public safety caused by enforcement officers abducting people without clear identification, isn’t primarily based on the difficulty other officers might have in distinguishing them.
It’s based on the difficulty of the general public in distinguishing them.
The deeper and greater threat is that America can have secret police conducting raids without accountability, or it can remain a constitutional republic. Choose only one.
Clive Robinson • November 9, 2025 4:10 AM
@ MarkH,
With regards,
“The deeper and greater threat is that America can have secret police conducting raids without accountability,”
It’s already happened…
Remember from early 2015 the UK Guardian newspaper released a story about the Chicago PD “black site” at the old Sears, Roebuck warehouse on the “West Side” of the city.
Known as the “Homan Square facility” where it is believed 7000-10,000 people were abused in so many ways.
https://source.opennews.org/articles/how-we-made-homan-square-portrait/
Since then it’s become known to other reporters and investigators that the facility was still in use earlier this year and not just by the CPD.
Court documents show thar part of the US DOJ, “United States Attorneys’ Office”(USAO) had both intimate knowledge of the facility, and had actively been using it. Also so had the FBI and more,
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/03/15/feds-used-chicago-black-site/
The question is thus,
“Is this the only one?”
With so many agencies involved it would appear to be unlikely.
ResearcherZero • November 9, 2025 4:38 AM
Tax deduction time. Replace/upgrade/buy equipment and property in the United States.
Additional tax deductions on top off the $117 billion in tax cuts under the BBB for the richest 1 percent will allow corporations, real estate investors and businesses with high cash flow to write off 100% of expenses as “bonus depreciation” for new purchases. Private jets and luxury travel expenses, office equipment, or write off all of the money spent on acquiring new commercial property and opening up new enterprises. The opportunity is open to foreign investors who are looking to exploit the generous loophole. Over the next decade the tax cuts for the wealthy will cost the US some US$4 Trillion in revenue.
‘https://www.npr.org/2025/11/05/nx-s1-5590112/trump-beautiful-bill-taxes-republican-rich-wealthy
Regions that voted for Trump will receive a free kick up the bum, along with rampant market speculation, financial inequality and wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few.
Like the Roaring Twenties, but with baby’s first atomic rattle and nuclear brinkmanship.
ResearcherZero • November 9, 2025 4:45 AM
@MarkH, Clive Robinson
This was supposed to go here. A secret list of dirty cops crimes was hacked and leaked.
Winter • November 9, 2025 4:52 AM
@MarkH
This specific threat to public safety caused by enforcement officers abducting people without clear identification, isn’t primarily based on the difficulty other officers might have in distinguishing them.
We have a name for such things in Europe: Gestapo or Stasi.
The USA has gone the whole way:
All just within a year.
Clive Robinson • November 9, 2025 10:13 AM
@ Winter, ResearcerZero, MarkH, ALL,
With regards,
“All just within a year.”
And what will happen as the result of the “Mid-terms” sinks into the block?
Something for @ALL to consider.
When it’s been reported that the block head said during remarks to an economic conference in Miami,
“The communist, Marxist socialists and globalists had their chance, and they delivered nothing but disaster. And now let’s see how a communist does in New York,”
Mouthing off foolishly, or his cognitive bias?
Remember he’s already established a habit of “send in the Federales and Cavalry” to Blue States.
But give it serious consideration especially when as is noted by @ResearcherZero,
“Like the Roaring Twenties, but with baby’s first atomic rattle and nuclear brinkmanship.”
And his recent comments around the Russian “skyfall” missile[1] are shear lunacy at best and a demented bang on the bongo drums… From what has been reported at worst he could be considering above ground nuclear device testing, a problem that would be with us for more than a million years…
It might not just be “Political Fallout” US citizens and guests are facing but a worse than Dr Strangelove plan. After all do we need any more Kong’s in the game,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=snTaSJk0n_Y
[1] Back in the 1950’s and early 60’s the US worked up to “Project Pluto” at “Jackass Flats” in Nevada. The plan was to develop nuclear-powered ramjet engines for use in supersonic cruise missiles. Two experimental engines were tested at the “Nevada Test Site”(NTS) in 1961 and 1964. The US canceled the project, not because the engines had failings, but in a decade technology had moved on to the point the project was fairly pointless… As any such cruise missile would most likely be detected and shot down very quickly as it was very large and it’s flight path easy to predict. And the cost well let’s not talk about that.
Let’s just say whilst the Ukraine would like Tomahawk cruise missiles they are seen by quite a few Western nations as obsolete.
Now here we are half a century later from the last US test, and Russia and Putin are strutting around like cockerels because they’ve finally got one that has not blown up and irradiated large areas of the homeland…
Winter • November 9, 2025 11:51 AM
@Clive
And what will happen as the result of the “Mid-terms” sinks into the block?
More of what they have now. Remember that two elected Democrats are refused their seats in Congress.
I expect nothing less than a coup d’etat if they fail to totally corrupt the elections.[1]
[1] MAGA officials now control most of the polling and vote counting.
‘https://dissentinbloom.substack.com/p/half-of-americas-voting-machines
jelo 117 • November 9, 2025 5:19 PM
@ Clive Robinson
Mouthing off foolishly, … ?
He only repeats the opinion and experience of one of the great observers of left progressive politics, namely Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
As Tom Wolfe in [1] summarizes Solzhenitsyn’s message to the West upon being exiled in 1974
“… He said … socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, … but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!
…
[he] had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellectual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism had created it.”
shazbot • November 9, 2025 11:03 PM
= Caged Ladies: Women Prisoners Seeking Pen Pals
https://cagedladies.com/featured-ladies/
Winter • November 10, 2025 1:38 AM
@jelo
left progressive politics
I fail to see what was “progressive” in the politics of the USSR in the 1970’s. Maybe to an arch conservative like Mr Solzhenitsyn, but not to the rest of the world.
We also saw no change in Russian politics after the ascent of Putin who is in all an admiror of Stalin, except in allegiance to Marx. Which shows a remarkable continuity in gruesome evil politics from Golden Horde, to Czars, to Soviets, to Putin.
Also, comparing the new major of NYC to the likes of Brezhnev and Stalin is wholly unwarranted. Why not compare him to president Lula?
Btw., the current concentration camps in the USA and the previous episode where even babies were stolen and locked up in cages, were totally Republican lead camps.
NYC’s new major is more likely to shut down Trump’s concentration camps than to open them.
Note, no communists were involved in opening concentration camps in US history, neither for native Americans, Japanese Americans, Guantanamo Bay rendition victims, nor immigrants.
Clive Robinson • November 10, 2025 4:13 AM
@ Winter,
In your note “list” you forgot to mention the Rheinwiesenlager or “Rhine Meadow Camps”, that people are still trying to “revision out of history”.
They were insisted upon in by “Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force”(SHAEF) Commander in Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower forcefully over the recommendations of other Allied Nations Commanders and Politicians and came into being in 1945.
Though those held should have been “POWs” with the legal protections of the Geneva Convention, Eisenhower decided they would become the equivalent of “Disappeared”. That is they had no legal protection or rights and were called “Disarmed Enemy Forces”(DEFs).
This included Men, Women and children. Put into what were designated as transit holding facilities. That were worse than “cattle pens”.
Record keeping was deliberately minimal in US run camps at best, so was sanitation, as was medical assistance, and food. Over crowding was high and no shelter was provided. So not unsurprisingly deaths were high and went unreported or recorded.
Whilst the British and French allowed Red Cross oversight and some aid to the places they held German Military and Civilians, the US steadfastly refused.
With the result as historian Richard Dominic Wiggers has evidence based argued,
“[T]hat the Allies violated international law regarding the feeding of enemy civilians, and that they both directly and indirectly caused the unnecessary suffering and death of large numbers of civilians and prisoners in occupied Germany, guided by a spirit of postwar vengeance when creating the circumstances that contributed to their deaths.”
jelo 117 • November 10, 2025 10:06 AM
@ Winter @ Clive Robinson
Aurel Kolnai, “Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy” –
Many minds … have fallen prey to the demon of Socialism out of a not unjustified disgust at the tendency, prevailing in capitalist society, to “level down” all values to … “Money.” What they have forgotten … is that “Money“ — owing to its character of conventional abstractness, … — can never in itself become an instrument of massive levelling … comparable to state-power, compulsory “ideologies,” or indeed, the measurement of human “needs” and “capacities” … By definition, money-power implies a scheme of things based on free choice and acts of preference connoting a miniature “sovereignty”; … it implies an indetermination as to the primary theme of activities or the primary maxim of preferences. “Money” is a … corrupter … of Liberty and Civilization: not, like the totalitarian power which is taking its place, their assassin.
Winter • November 10, 2025 10:26 AM
@jelo 117
Many minds … have fallen prey to the demon of Socialism out of a not unjustified disgust at the tendency, prevailing in capitalist society
Sorry, but this is historically incorrect (a polite rephrasing of my opinion).
Many countries have had “Socialist” (actually, social-democratic) and even communist peaceful (coalition) governments without any mass murders or gulags. See, eg, the post-war history of Western Europe. Meanwhile, there have been quite a number of “right-wing” mass murdering dictatorships in post-war Europe, eg, Portugal, Spain, Greece.
The very same can be said of continental South America.
The current US government do have concentration camps and outsourced death camps at this very moment. And they point fingers at a peaceful NYC Major?
Not to mention the current mass-murdering Russian government which is ultra conservative and implements a religious Orthodox Christian agenda.
Winter • November 10, 2025 10:34 AM
@Clvie
Rheinwiesenlager
I had not heard of them, and I grew up down river.
But it is the old quote from Carl Jung:
You always become the thing you fight the most
Given that Churchill already used concentration camps in the Boer wars, and the USA against Japanese Americans, it is no surprise.
Clive Robinson • November 10, 2025 4:37 PM
@ Winter,
With regards,
“Many countries have had “Socialist” (actually, social-democratic) and even communist peaceful (coalition) governments without any mass murders or gulags.”
Capitalism and all sorts of other political “methods” as well.
The problem is not,
“The political methods.”
But the problem very much is,
“Those who hide behind them for personal benefit”.
We oft call these people “authoritarian”, “self entitled”, or similar. They usually exhibit two or more of the “Dark Tetrad” –or more recently Pentad– of harmful to others mental traits.
Political Philosophy in general dances around this towing a piece of self made string that ties into knots in the dance. In effect not just around them, thus imprisoning them behind bars of their own making, but it also trips them up and brings them crashing down.
Like mathematics philosophy tries to bring a deterministic model of the world thus amenable to prediction. This is the same failing economists have.
And both Political Philosophy and Economics fail because the “subjects” under study are not independent of those carrying out the analysis.
Thus the subjects can not only behave apparently stochastically, but in contra/contrarian ways to determinism thus gain advantage.
This sort of issue was identified back in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s by Kurt Gödel and Turing / Church / et al.
It’s one of the reasons Turing put a random generator in his first computer design, and part of the reason we are chasing Quantum Computing.
In august this year a paper
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22950
was put up by,
Mir Faizal, Lawrence M. Krauss, Arshid Shabir, and Francesco Marino
Titled,
“Consequences of Undecidability in Physics on the Theory of Everything
“
In it you will find an interesting statment,
“However, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Tarski’s undefinability theorem, and Chaitin’s information-theoretic incompleteness establish intrinsic limits on any such algorithmic programme. Together, these results imply that a wholly algorithmic “Theory of Everything” is impossible: certain facets of reality will remain computationally undecidable and can be accessed only through non-algorithmic understanding”
Which implies amoungst other things that at the very least there is a form of computation beyond Quantum Computing and it will not be deterministic by current meaning (that does not imply it will be unusable).
Thus it brings into question the value of “Agent : Observer” experiments when the agent has agency and freedom to act.
Thus whilst there is some value in certain types of economics, political philosophy is never going to be a tenable rules based deterministic system of real predictive value. Just a bulk statistical framework that can give trends some of the time over a large enough collection of Agents that have their agency constrained by custom and social mores of the societies they exist in. Both of which are actually quit fluid in nature, hence societies can change quite radically and rapidly with the determination of which direction mainly made by those who fulfill part or all of the observer function not that of agents.
Thus we can see that “agents” breaks down into two major sub groups, “Agent Directors” and “Agent Followers”.
The Canadian Bob Altemeyer,
https://theauthoritarians.org/about/
Who sadly died last year spent a professional lifetime studying the agents as “Authoritarians” and “authoritarian followers” indicating that the “agent followers” group had three major sub groups.
As a general rule political philosophers ignore the implications of this as do many others who “shoot from the hip” over US Style Libertarian Capitalism.
As most know the two ends of a line are colloquially known as “the bitter ends” for good reason. The same applies to spectrums where the bitter ends generally represent not just extremity but lack of freedom of movement thus choice.
Thus being at the extremes of a crowd growing or moving to a tipping point or cliff edge generally has a probable outcome for some.
We see this in nature with the likes of Wildebeest crossing crocodile infested rivers,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=20vZFxoE2a4
There are five zones, first in, last out, center, and the two sides. Your probability of survival is very much dependent on the crocodiles behaviour and position.
Society can be mapped in similar ways. Some would refer to the crocodiles as “Hawks” with the wildebeest as “Doves”.
Experiments show that Hawks generally behave in simple almost uniform ways, whilst the Doves tend to behave in non-uniform complex ways around the Hawks behaviours.
Whilst Hawk behaviour is somewhat predictable, dove behaviour only superficially so when seen on mass.
Winter • November 10, 2025 7:29 PM
@Clive
The problem is not, “The political methods.”
Indeed, we should never forget that moral&immoral as well as good&bad are independent of law, political “method”, and “religion”.
We should also never forget that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Every religious or political system that hands individuals power will be corrupted. Historically there have been no exceptions.
Kim Yo Jong • November 10, 2025 10:46 PM
= Mozilla Firefox gets new anti-fingerprinting defenses
the best part of waking up is folgers in your cup • November 10, 2025 11:33 PM
An open-source communications hardware & software initiative empowering the public to connect across the world by bouncing signals off the Moon—and more!
A New Frontier for Ham Radio
Bouncing signals off the Moon—known as Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication—has long been the ultimate challenge for radio amateurs. It required large antennas, expensive equipment, and accurate manual pointing and tracking. We try to bring this down to Earth, providing all the tools needed to experience the thrill of space communication, with an open source software-defined phased array.
Open-Source Hardware
Expected to ship: March 2026.
Our first kit is a low-cost digital phased array, with high transmit power and excellent receive sensitivity. It supports flexible transmission modes across any 40 MHz bandwidth in the C-band (4.9–6 GHz).
Array Development Kit
With a scalable architecture, you can pick an array size and grow later.
Additional details on the site.
ResearcherZero • November 11, 2025 12:36 AM
@Clive, winter
There are real life examples of how the labels of Capitalism and Communism are divorced from the practical realities of government policy and who has hoped to gain by exploiting them. On occasions where the powerful business lobbies have sort to use their influence to change government policy for their own advantage, it instead came back to haunt them in unexpected ways that hurt both their profitability and their competitive advantages.
The failure of the United States to invest in solar voltaic cells and renewable energy and very poor policy choices aimed at favoring a few select companies has cost it dearly.
‘https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/11/10/1126805/the-state-of-ai-energy-is-king-and-the-us-is-falling-behind/
US attempts to stifle Chinese competition backfired and it is now repeating that mistake.
How the leading manufacturers of solar voltaics shot themselves in the foot:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-how-US-lost-solar-power-race-to-China/
While the West bickered over energy policy, China steamed ahead building new projects.
https://stanfordreview.org/how-chinas-energy-supremacy-threatens-u-s-ai-dominance/
Once the top innovator in new energy production, the US is stalled in the 20th century.
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/02/how-the-us-can-stop-losing-the-race-for-clean-energy
ResearcherZero • November 11, 2025 12:45 AM
China has not only beaten the US at energy innovation, it is meeting its needs for more power consumption using renewable energy and at a far cheaper price than its American competitors are paying, while also managing to stabilize and maintain the Chinese grid.
Not content with shooting itself in the foot, the United States fired into the other.
‘https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/16/climate/china-us-wind-solar-energy-trump
ResearcherZero • November 11, 2025 1:30 AM
@winter, Clive Robinson
The White House is currently celebrating “Communism Week” with a dedicated post at the White House website, while it has itself behaved like a authoritarian Communist government.
It demonstrates how little meaning the labels have that many politicians throw around and how little the values or morals that these politicians profess to espouse are connected to the reality of their actions. It is why they employ slogans and refrain from revealing any detail by keeping those slogans simple and vague. Reality only exists in their actions.
Ideologies and movements are bulls–t like bunting, caps and all the other political PR.
The reality of issues were shaped by decades of government decisions, not a single term.
Those actions are plain to see and that is where the public should direct their easily distracted minds and too often all too select and short memories. People might be busy with their fast paced and convenient lives, but occasionally they should pry beneath the surface, exclude the opinion of their peer groups and the influences of social and commercial media, to cast a more critical eye over the actions of political parties and their respective pundits. To look outside the framing of issue at the long term realities.
‘https://www.cato.org/commentary/industrial-policy-was-gateway-drug-cronyism#
Winter • November 11, 2025 4:00 AM
@ResearcherZero
The White House is currently celebrating “Communism Week” with a dedicated post at the White House website, while it has itself behaved like a authoritarian Communist government.
It is well known that every accusation by a Republican is an admission of guilt.[1]
[1] See, eg, Epstein files, and any other accusation ever uttered by the GOP.
Winter • November 11, 2025 4:13 AM
Continued:
@ResearcherZero
The White House is currently celebrating “Communism Week” with a dedicated post at the White House website, while it has itself behaved like a authoritarian Communist government.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
‘https://www.gocomics.com/mattwuerker/2025/11/05
Clive Robinson • November 11, 2025 5:47 AM
@ Winter, ALL,
The conversation looks like it is becoming esoteric and divorced from Security reality.
But it’s not even when people see,
“we should never forget that moral&immoral as well as good&bad are independent of law, political “method”, and “religion”.”
And think “What the heck”.
As I’ve mentioned in the past,
1, People build hierarchies instinctively.
2, People build and use shields.
Now add into the mix nearly everyone abdicates their responsibility outside of their immediate reach.
This means those with authoritarian desires try to get up the hierarchy where power accrues but also they put in place “shields” in place to prevent them being sanctioned.
Of old one shield an authoritarian or worse can hide behind is a “corporate structure” where the “documented” control looks like things were joint or majority decisions and instructions to subordinates deliberately non specific or vague. Thus the actual “directing mind” is either almost invisible or shielded by actions being carried out by third parties at considerable “arms length” across a shielding barrier.
One way this has been discussed here before is the notion of banks “externalising risk”.
Another is the quaint legal notion of,
“Any person legal or natural”
That is from the legal point of view to make the legal profession’s job easier, non human, non biological entities, have equivalence to “human slaves” (in that they can be bought, sold, traded, and arbitrarily terminated).
I was always finding out more and more such “entities”.
A recent blog post triggered by “the AI question” is,
https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/p/unexpected-things-that-are-people
You will find that vehicles especially ships are “persons”, that rivers and spirits are also persons. But also religious deities or as some call them “gods”[1]
Which brings us to the security aspects of this.
I suspect most readers here have seen claims for Current AI LLM and ML systems to be treated as “human equivalent” if not “omniscient deities speaking through oracles”.
Thus OpenAI in particular want their crappy auto complete / correct systems made into “legal persons”.
The reason is RoboDebt and the like.
Authoritarians have “political mantras” that they want to oppress people with[2].
As we know LLM weights through ML training can contain all sorts of falsities and bias. To make this worse bias and errors can be “augmented” via user input. The classic example of this was Microsoft Tay… Turned from an innocent AI Chatbot teen into a raving right wing nut bar in less than a day almost a decade ago…
“As Dr. Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and expert in human-computer interaction, once noted,
“When we design AI that interacts with people, we must be careful — it doesn’t just learn from data; it learns from culture.”
As the old saying has it,
“More prophetic words could not have been spoken”
so succinctly…
But it leaves a question of,
“Who’s ‘culture’ doe Current AI LLM and ML Systems learn from?”
Security wise it’s a very important question…
As a “New Hobby” I’ve taken up the use of “free AI” attached to search engines… From experience I would say over 6/10ths of the results I’ve been given are not based in factual reality, except when Wikipedia is quoted as a source, then it drops to around 1/4. Oh and sometimes it just barfs and turns it’s toes up…
Only once so far which is less than 1/100, has it given me factual information I was not aware of –but could have easily have looked up– because the USB-C standard had been recently augmented.
So from my point of view fairly pointless and not unexpected, because of the way these systems work (or more correctly don’t)
Now in the UK “His Majesties Revenue and Customs”(HMRC) and UK “Department of Work and Pensions”(DWP)
Have put together their own faux-AI system that has been called “The Connect System” it’s currently being used “unlawfully”.
The whole purpose of the piece of junk cobbled together from “secretly modified” open source is to implement unlawful clawbacks, and descrimitary fines to those least able to defend themselves.
This is “political mantra” driven AI to well beyond the point of simple harms it’s designed to reduce the unfortunate to not just below poverty but beyond life by dragging things out for years by repeatedly presenting “false evidence” (worse even than the US healthcare system).
These two major UK Government Depts have unlawfully started forcing people to hand over personal information contrary to the Human Rights legislation and this is then being used to mine and produce “fake evidence” against those who can least defend themselves.
Because the country as I’ve repeatedly warned is going bankrupt because of large Silicon Valley Corporates and similar not paying what they should do to the UK Treasury.
But the fun thing is those large Silicon Valley Corporates are now going bankrupt over AI, and by the looks of things may well put the US economy in such dire straits that will make the past couple of Financial Crises and Recessions look like a cloudy day, compared to the tempest heading it’s way.
But the people that created harms of such magnitude are behind multiple “cut outs” giving them shielding of which AI as a legal person is just one.
[1] Much to many peoples annoyance I point out on the odd occasion that,
“God did not make man in his likeness, but in reality, Man made gods in his likeness”[2].
(I even wrote a DD thesis on this topic but that as they say is a story for another day).
[2] So the legal profession just confirms that man can make anything they want into “deity” or “legal person” thus “cut out” or “shield”. Behind which they can push oppressive agendas from, without fear of recourse or real oversight.
Clive Robinson • November 11, 2025 6:11 AM
@ ResearcherZero, ALL,
Some subjects have hidden or overlooked criticalities…
Take,
“The failure of the United States to invest in solar voltaic cells and renewable energy”
Whilst renewable energy has apparently a lot of “up sides” it also has some major down sides that are not much talked about,
1, The sun is only effective for about 1/4-1/3rd of a day and wind at ground level is intermittent. Which means secondary storage is required.
All secondary storage is an inefficiency as work has to be done in both directions.
Human habit is to use energy at certain times of day that change during the year. Which means both over capacity and over demand are going to be issues.
2, Secondary storage mostly uses nasty environment harming chemicals, and some are prone to bursting into flames that spread these chemicals “down wind” and into the “water supplies”…
These are sufficiently well known that they are easily looked up. However what is not well known or talked about are the “negative effects on the climate and environment”
Without solar and wind collection the energy would have a quite different effect on the local environment and thus the more general regional climate.
I’m not going to go into details as the modeling of this has only very recently become of interest. But one such effect being looked into is it reduce rainfall, and increase the severity of forest and similar fires.
JG5 • November 11, 2025 9:57 AM
@Clive – Thanks for your helpful comments. I particularly liked the mention of “root of trust.” I hadn’t connected Claude Shannon’s exposition/derivation/proof of “systems of arbitrarily high reliability constructed from components of arbitrarily low reliability” to “systems of arbitrarily high security constructed from components of arbitrarily low security” until now. You may recall that my alter ego JG4 posted links to two of Shannon’s towering works.
This came in last night from The BIOS Guy:
Can We Trust Rust?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJQ3XGkGrgc
In response to the recent content about MicroScam’s f*ckery with Ubuntu/Linux. Reality is a non-equilibrium, path-dependent, emergent process. There should be a way to beat them. I am disappointed that Elon didn’t name his new company MegaHard, but that may have been trademarked by an action film star named “Johnny.”
I am pretty sure that I posted this video on energy storage a couple of years ago:
Form Energy’s Virtual Lab Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1kmPNB9tn8
I was thrown off the grounds in July for taking pictures. I am pretty sure that they didn’t have a sign banning photography. They were pleasant about it and I was too. It would be fun to go back with a drone and get some detailed footage.
I call those earth-abundant iron-air batteries. There are many alternative earth-abundant (dirt-cheap) chemistries, including sulfur-air and sodium-ion. I included a link to a video describing CATL’s sodium-ion battery break-through in my comments that were lost. The broad strokes are 20-minute recharge and 3.6-million mile lifetime. The rapid recharge implies very low losses/very low internal resistance.
At arbitrarily low currents, the internal losses of batteries can get very close to zero. Fair enough, real-world charge and discharge rates will involve losses, but I think that they can be single-digit percent each way. Retail rates in The Great Eastern Swamp are around 25 cents a kw-hr. You can generate with solar PV at around 5 cents per kw-hr, so a round-trip loss of even 50% is acceptable. Solar PV has hit 7 cents a watt – possibly due to market duress rather than reflecting actual manufacturing costs. I believe that there is a path to penny a watt for solar PV. That was the other half of my comments that got lost. China already have won the “AI” race by having 2.5 times the electrical generation capacity of the US, and pulling away fast.
Clive Robinson • November 11, 2025 1:00 PM
@ Bruce, ALL,
German court rules OpenAI is guilty of stealing copyrighted songs.
Which is a bit of an Opps Moment for “liar Altman”[1].
However it is likely to set EU policy on US and other Nations AI systems which is going to create a bit of a worry for OpenAI and others.
[1] See https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-pants-are-totally-on
lurker • November 11, 2025 1:12 PM
@Clive Robinson
“All secondary storage is an inefficiency as work has to be done in both directions”
In work efficiency terms stored hydro is high on the list, but it needs water, and it needs land whose value for other use is less than its value as a lake. And it requires a reliable continuous supply of pumping energy. Several stored hydro systems were disabled in the recent Iberian blackout.
We do not yet have the Final Report on the 20250428 incident, but fingers are pointing at the inability of solar and wind to graciously mesh with existing grid control systems.
BURN BABY BURN • November 11, 2025 4:37 PM
North Korean spies turn Google’s Find Hub into remote-wipe weapon
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/11/north_korean_spies_turn_googles/
Clive Robinson • November 11, 2025 6:36 PM
@ BURN…,
With regards what the NOK attackers are supposedly doing to Android phones, the article is shall we say
“scant on exploit info”
Digging through it, it appears as though it is,
1, A standard “convenience feature”
2, Having credentials stolen
3, The feature used as intended.
Back in 2000 I had a discussion with an academic –at a London University– on computer security on the idea of such a “convenience” being designed in, and how it would be used by criminals of both types
1, Criminal users.
2, Criminal attackers.
Back a quarter of a century ago such apps did not exist. So it was a theoretical discussion.
The point is “the convenience factor” gave it a feeling of inevitability, especially for “criminal users”. That is I could see a “Market arising” for such things due to simple economic argument of “Demand and Supply”.
And so with the eventuality of phones specially designed for “criminal users” such features were obviously going to be “front and center”.
Whilst I could also see such features being desirable to “business users” who had a need or duty for confidentiality.
So like all useful technology it could be used for “good or bad” with the distinction being social not technical, and made by an independent observer after the event.
At the end of the day this was apparently a simple attack,
1, Get credentials by social engineering.
2, Use acquired credentials to activate the function remotely.
Because all the “heavy lift” of doing the work to wipe the device was already done as a required “factory feature” that later had been given a front end interface that turned it into a “convenience function”…
not important • November 11, 2025 7:06 PM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-company-making-long-range-170101493.html
=Long-range drone ships could transform Pacific warfare, expanding a navy’s reach while keeping sailors out of harm’s way. An American company building these kinds of ships with the Navy’s needs in mind says it has successfully tested its technology in the
water, bringing the innovative vessel a major step closer to becoming reality.
Blue Water Autonomy is the first to test larger, long-range interchangeable ship-scale
systems in an iterative way on the water, its leadership told Business Insider. The
company aims to build a full-scale autonomous warship that could one day fight in a war
with a major adversary, like China, in which naval drones may play a key role.
These kinds of uncrewed vessels could expand fleet size and coverage, a necessity in a
Pacific fight stretching across vast swaths of water. They could also push into hotly
contested waterways without putting human sailors at risk.
The US Navy plans to build a battle force of 381 crewed warships and 134 uncrewed
surface and undersea vessels. It already fields some drones — smaller surveillance
platforms and combat systems — that are built by companies across the US defense industry.
“On the hardware side, we’re super focused on reliability, because the last thing the US
Navy needs is to basically have autonomous ships that are sort of dead in the water in
the middle of the ocean,” Hamilton said.
Blue Water is believed to be the only company testing and iterating with its technology
on the water before actually building a ship, Hamilton said. The startup has a contract
with the Navy to continue testing the technology and hopes to receive an order next year to build full-scale ships at a Louisiana shipyard.
China already has a larger naval force than the US, and its shipyards far outpace
America in the construction of new vessels. Navy officials have said that autonomous
vessels could help fill some gaps, and they are easier and quicker to build than
traditional crewed ships like destroyers, cruisers, or flattops.
The vessels are designed with enough range to sail from California to Taiwan and back —
more than 6,000 miles — and are large enough to handle rough seas that would overwhelm
smaller craft.
Building an autonomous vessel means having an engine room that can go unstaffed for
hours on end without breaking down because, unlike on a traditional warship, there aren’t dozens of engineers who could react to a crisis.=
Clive Robinson • November 12, 2025 3:20 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
Another LLM comms failing
Microsoft Research has found that the communications used for LLMs opens up a form of Traffic Analysis, that can allow the actual message context and thus some content to be deduced.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/11/llm_sidechannel_attack_microsoft_researcher/
“LLM side-channel attack could allow snoops to guess what you’re talking about
Encryption protects content, not context”
For long term readers this is probably not a surprise. In that as has been explained quite a time ago Tor did not have anti-traffic analysis measures and due to low latency the pattern of “traffic” to a suspected public site could reveal what the user was looking at.
So finding similar in other systems that lack anti-traffic analysis measures is not exactly unexpected, and something that will be an issue with nearly all “new paradigm systems” connected to the Internet.
The Register Article gives a technical over view of what has occured and why.
Clive Robinson • November 12, 2025 5:19 AM
@ ALL,
Running short on AI
It appears I’m not the only one who thinks tech companies that are AI heavy are going to take a rather severe bath in the very near future,
https://www.michael-burry.com/michael-burrys-portfolio/
Basically “shorting” AI big style. Something he did with housing stocks in the lead up to the 2008 Financial Crisis.
As the article says,
“Burry has positioned himself as the most prominent AI skeptic in the market. His portfolio has more than doubled from Q2’s $578.3 million to approximately $1.38 billion, with 79.5% concentrated in PUT options betting against the AI boom.”
The die have been thrown, lets see how they roll.
diving into the toilet • November 12, 2025 4:20 PM
Kaspersky Brings Its Anti-Virus Software To Linux For Home Users
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Kaspersky-Linux-AV-Home-Users
https://www.kaspersky.com/linux-antivirus
https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/kaspersky-for-linux/54697/
dancing in the moonlight • November 12, 2025 5:12 PM
= Inside the CIA’s secret mission to sabotage Afghanistan’s opium
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/12/cia-afghanistan-heroin-poppy-seeds/
The Wizard Master • November 12, 2025 5:32 PM
= Join The The Newest Social Network And Party Like Its 1987
https://hackaday.com/2025/11/12/join-the-the-newest-social-network-and-party-like-its-1987/
Clive Robinson • November 12, 2025 5:46 PM
@ ALL,
Open AI Altman more than pants on fire.
It would appear that What Altman and others at OpenAI have been saying about their financials is extreamly questionable. Because it does not time up with leaked internal Microsoft figures…
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/12/openai_spending_report/
This gives rise to several possibilities two of which are,
1, Sam Altman is a fantasist out of contact with reality.
2, Sam Altman and others at OpenAI are making financial statements they know to be untrue.
To quote the article,
“these figures are still in conflict with statements OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made earlier this month that the company’s annual revenues would exceed $13 billion.
… …
However, Redmond’s own financial reporting did indicate that OpenAI had a net loss in the neighborhood of $12 billion during the quarter ended Sept. 30.”
Hmmm, ask yourself
1, Would you invest?
And if you already have invested,
2, Would you be tempted to get out before you get burned?
More and more over the past few days confidence appears to be rapidly diminishing in Current AI LLM and ML Systems,
To even get close to income meeting expenditure any time soon. Some might be tempted to ask,
“Is OpenAI well beyond it’s means and very close to it’s ‘last gasp’ before Chapt 11 or worse?”
Something to think about but not for too long. A quick scan of Prof Gary Marcus’s site shows his most recent comment,
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/5-recent-ominous-signs-for-generative
1, Softbank sells entire Nvidia position.
1, Oracle debt downgraded.
3, Meta financing games revealed.
4,OpenAI CEO Sam Altman couldn’t explain how company would meet its $1.4 T obligations.
5, Coreweave drops 20% in a week.
As he closes,
“You do the Math.”
ResearcherZero • November 12, 2025 11:19 PM
The economy has been rewired to force profits upwards to the wealthy.
‘https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-market-corporate-profits-layoffs/
The wages of Americans have barely shifted in 50 years despite record corporate profits.
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/wage-stagnation-vs-living-wages-for-u-s-workers-today/
How the narrative of “moral decline” is used to entrench power.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x
ResearcherZero • November 12, 2025 11:21 PM
The European Union is giving up on data privacy rules to placate the Big Tech lobby.
‘https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-knifes-privacy-to-feed-the-ai-boom-gdpr-digital-omnibus/
Winter • November 13, 2025 1:14 AM
@ResearcherZero
How the narrative of “moral decline” is used to entrench power.
Morals have never solved a social problem, always made them worse.
But that is their function in society, to blame the victim.
ResearcherZero • November 13, 2025 2:43 AM
DHS failed to keep information secure as it abused data sharing agreements.
‘https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-kept-chicago-police-records-for-months-in-violation-of-domestic-espionage-rules/
Clive Robinson • November 13, 2025 7:22 PM
@ ALL,
More AI madness in the economy
As some are aware there is a madness present where vast amounts of capital is being used to build Data Centers for AI, basically due to the speculative “Fear Of Missing Out”(FOMO) on the “Next Big Thing”(NBT)…
But as with all processes there are three things to consider as an element in a delivery chain,
1, All Inputs to the element
2, All work done by the element
3, All Outputs produced by the element
And if you think about the elements they not only form a chain but they are made of chains of smaller elements. Thus they all fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw picture that is a snap shot of the economy.
Importantly though there are three classes of input,
1, Raw Resources for product
2, Raw Resources for work
3, Knowledge for production
If they do not grow equally and as required then there are problems and things “stall out”.
There is great imbalance in data center building. And whilst this is expected of all new processes it rarely is on this scale.
As noted in,
“If there’s any question about whether data centers are driving the global economy, a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) should dispel any doubts. This year, the world will spend $580 billion on data centers, $40 billion more than it will spend on new oil supplies.”
That is what some call a “Red Flag Statement”.
To see why think about what that means about “imbalance”.
Data Centers have massive foot prints for land, water, and energy.
If you don’t have the capacity in any one of the three the process will “stall out”. If a process stalls then it fails to produce product and thus fails to gain income and quite quickly as in an aircraft,
“a stall becomes a crash and burn”
Which is usually fatal to rather more than the process due to amongst other things,
1, Sunk Costs
2, Lost Opportunity Costs
3, Scarcity Costs
All three are very important to the effect of fulfilling “wants” of not just individuals but entire societies[1].
Importantly though is the concepts of time and choice. Sunk costs are the result of having made a past choice, Lost Opportunity costs are the future costs of implementing a choice. With scarcity costs significantly effecting the ability to bring a choice to completion thus fruition.
Thus a Scarcity can effect both the other costs significantly, especially when they cause a choice to fail to come to a successful fruition.
The plans for data center builds are mostly going to fail to come even close to successful fruition arguably none of them will show a positive “Return On Investment”(ROI) or any chance of bringing in actual customers thus potential for profit. Thus the sunk costs and lost opportunity costs will be high, and as 2008 showed society will pay.
The two scarcity costs that will kill even built Data Centers are,
1, Energy
2, Water
The usual way to work around this is by making a process “more efficient” (which is where knowledge comes into play).
There is little hope of making energy use meaningfully more efficient except by turning process waste into a good / commodity
However there is some hope of making water use meaningfully less by stopping using an Open Cycle cooling process and using a more expensive Closed Cycle cooling process that recovers and reuses water rather than dump it into the environment as high entropy water vapour.
But importantly there is a balance with scarcity, if you increase demand for a resource the cost increases for everyone who uses that resource and energy is used by everyone.
Thus it’s important to decide if the horse comes before or after the cart.
Ideally supply capability will always be at or slightly above demand for the economy to function and stay functioning at a near optimal cost. When it is below “Disaster follows” either immediately or at some point in the future. The reason for the word “Disaster” is due to the “Cascade effect”, small temporary insufficiency in supply can be worked around by “throttling back” in the short term and recovery is possible. However at some point a tipping point is reached where recovery is not possible. And to protect society some processes will have to be not just throttled back but “killed off”, the only question being that of “choice” of target.
It’s already been clear for quite some time that there is insufficient capability in the energy generation and distribution networks to supply society, it’s why high efficiency light bulbs were “given away for free to home users. But also but less obvious is the primary energy sources of hydrocarbons and nuclear isotopes to supply reliable “base load” are actually scarce and effectively finite.
Society and the World Economy can not provide anything close to the energy demands of current and proposed Data Center building, let alone future operation.
Thus it can be truthfully said that the plans for Data Centers is,
“A potential existential threat”
To society.
So it’s worth taking a few minutes to stop and think this through, because AI has become rather more than just a “black tulip” market or “hype bubble”.
[1] Whilst “sunk costs” are fairly easy to see with home DIY projects, understanding lost opportunity and scarcity costs is less obvious,
https://scientiaeducare.com/understanding-scarcity-and-opportunity-cost-a-beginners-guide/
this bird has flown • November 13, 2025 11:00 PM
Thunderbird 145 Enables Support for DNS over HTTPS, Drops 32-Bit Linux Binaries
https://9to5linux.com/thunderbird-145-enables-support-for-dns-over-https-drops-32-bit-linux-binaries
Debian-Based Tails 7.2 Released with Tor Browser 15 Anonymous Web Browser
https://9to5linux.com/debian-based-tails-7-2-released-with-tor-browser-15-anonymous-web-browser
Winter • November 14, 2025 1:04 AM
@ResearcherZero
The leaked Russian MoD database revealed details of how commanders had sent soldiers on suicide missions.
That’s why Putin urges Russian women to have more babies. They are needed to make up for those who senselessly died for his vanity and will be forced to die for the vanity of his successors:
‘https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-women-eight-children-ukraine-war-b2455957.html
But that is also one important motivation behind the global “fertility scare” of right wing politics [1], eg, Musk and other fascists.
They need enough cannon fodder to die for them.
[1] ‘https://eooh.eu/articles/birth-rate-decline-great-replacement-misogyny
Winter • November 14, 2025 4:17 AM
@ResearcherZero
The leaked Russian MoD database revealed details of how commanders had sent soldiers on suicide missions.
Many (most) of these soldiers are from Russian minority ethnicities. They hardly care about “ethnic” slav people, even less about non-slav people.
‘https://uatv.ua/en/russia-sends-disproportionately-high-number-of-ethnic-minorities-to-war/
They care even less about the lives of foreign “recruits” that are listed into Russia on the promises of regular work.
‘https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20251111-deceived-and-deployed-russia-recruits-indians-as-cannon-fodder-on-the-ukrainian-front
‘https://www.africanews.com/2025/11/08/more-than-1400-african-nationals-fighting-alongside-russian-troops-in-ukraine-kyiv-says/
Clive Robinson • November 14, 2025 5:21 AM
@ ResearcherZero, Winter,
There is a large “Russian Community” in London that generally hate Putin as I’ve mentioned before one who lived within a short walk of me got “suicided”.
Recent information shows that this,
“Russian deserters are being hunted down. Their family members and relatives are being tortured to reveal their locations and cooperate in recapturing those who fled action.”
Is just a part of Putin going after people who left Russisa and their now adult children.
People that were not born in Russia, have never been to Russia, and can not speak or want to speak Russian, are finding out their relatives in Russia are getting tortured.
Apparently Putin believes in “blood fealty” that is your ancestors make you “A Child of Russia” and that like all Russians you must,
“Render unto Caesar”
Not just what might be Caesar’s but what Caesar thinks should be his…
It’s becoming clear he wants not just money, but bodies, and knowledge.
I was chatting a while back with a now retired research psychiatrist I’ve known for years. And the subject of “compelling by the Country of your ancestors” is becoming “more common”. China for instance has set up many “community organisations” in other nations to track those who left and their children and their children. For money, and bodies, but mainly knowledge. But they also made an observation to the effect of,
1, Don’t think it can not happen here,
2, It is already in progress by the US, UK, Spain and other Western Governments,
3, It is only going to get worse.
They even gave reasons for why it is happening and it boils down to authoritarianism and the fact resources are nolonger flowing to the Treasuries due to Corporate behaviour.
They observed a point I’ve heard before, that some Tech Corps have become the equivalent of “Princelings” with incomes that exceed a great number of actual Nation States.
I asked the,
“But is it real money?”
Question and they said that it does not matter, enough people only have to believe in it, to turn fantasy into reality.
It’s not a comforting view point.
Winter • November 14, 2025 7:16 AM
@Clive
“But is it real money?”
Your informant is right.
There is no “real” money. All money is a transferable IOU. It is legal tender that someone will redeem.
But money can be created by whomever is promising to redeem it. That is, by every bank.
As it is nothing but a promise, there does not have to be anything of value behind it, just the believe the promise will be redeemed.
Just as European countries used the gold they had stored in NYC as security behind their currencies when the FED had loaned all of it to others. [1]
I am pretty sure the fictions $1T bonus of Muskiday will be used to create (securitized) billions in borrowed money.
[1] Cf. the “gold” in the bank in Terry Pratchett’s “Making money”.
jelo 117 • November 14, 2025 11:17 PM
@ Winter
Morals have never solved a social problem, always made them worse.
And yet it seems you are here taking moral stance.
So not only metaphysics buries her undertakers, but morality also.
So we all agree there should be morals. The question is then what morals are true.
ResearcherZero • November 15, 2025 1:14 AM
@jelo 117
Life and morality cannot be rigidly defined. Attempts to pigeon hole such matters into a set of criteria inevitably fails to capture the many possibilities that can eventuate.
No. I strongly disagree with agreeing with anyone including myself. Unless this conflicts with not agreeing with politicians who would abuse language about morality to manipulate and divide the public so that they can divert their attention away from their own actions.
No. I agree with agreeing with anyone and everyone except myself, but I question their sanity and wonder if I should not be listening to anything uttered from human mouths. Do those sounds that they make with their tongues and lips even make any real tangible sense?
‘https://theconversation.com/new-technologies-like-ai-come-with-big-claims-borrowing-the-scientific-concept-of-validity-can-help-cut-through-the-hype-259030
Winter • November 15, 2025 6:08 AM
@jelo
And yet it seems you are here taking moral stance.
It was an answer to an empirical question. You can refute it with counter examples.
Rephrasing it as a moral stance sounds like a rethorical trick.
The overarching point is that morals are personal, while these are social problems. Empirically, social problems cannot be solved by blaming individuals.
jelo 117 • November 15, 2025 9:25 PM
@ Winter
morals are personal, while these are social problems
Members of humankind are intrinsically by nature moral and social beings. So moral and social questions would be expected to be related.
For what is up to now the definitive analysis of and contribution to understanding this connexion, see Rerum Novarum [1] of Pope Leo XIII.
Winter • November 16, 2025 3:44 AM
@jelo
Members of humankind are intrinsically by nature moral and social beings.
Which is why morals are often abused to force individuals into submission. Like the “immoral” children and unwed mothers whom they have dug up from mass graves in Catholic “homes for fallen women”.
Pope Leo XIII
I don’t think Catholic priests and Bisschops are the high ground in morals. Think heretics and “witches” burned at the stake, to the above murders, to the protection of child abusers more recently.
So moral and social questions would be expected to be related.
Indeed, morals are interpersonal, but they don’t extend well to larger organizations.
jelo 117 • November 16, 2025 7:59 AM
@ Winter
Re: Rerum Novarum
and, Catholic teaching generally.
It seems clear that the bad actions of some are not relevant here, unless those actions are encouraged by or derived correctly from the teachings, which they are not. In fact the actions are mostly recognized and condemned as bad by those teachings.
So the critic will have to demonstrate from the documents themselves.
Winter • November 16, 2025 1:05 PM
@jelo
It seems clear that the bad actions of some are not relevant here
Malleus Maleficarum and The Tribunal of the Holy Office (Spanish Inquisition) were not the “bad actions of some”, but an integral part of official Vatican theology.
Just as Catholic nuns ran homes for unwed mothers for decades where they buried hundreds of children in mass graves. Nothing “isolated bad persons” but simply institutionalized evil which was intentionally hidden from the public.
The same as other maternity homes “incentivized”, or forced, unwed mothers to give their illegitimate babies up for adoption. Not always waiting for consent of the mother. This was not just Catholic hospitals, far from it, but Catholics were all to happy to participate.
As for the latest scandal where those of the highest ranks in the church protected abusers, these were not “some bad apples”, but a large fraction of bisschops and cardinals who were involved in systematical subversion of legal procedures and protecting the guilty from the victims.
The current Vatican still considers it abhorrent that people decide for themselves whom they will love and want to share their lives with. Or that women decide about what happens with their own body.
A recently declared saint pope told us that it is a sin to look at your spouse in lust.
That is morals I can do without.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
not important • November 7, 2025 7:11 PM
Will quantum be bigger than AI?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04gvx7egw5o
Nations are known to be already stealing encrypted data from each other with a view to
being able to decode it one day.
“It’s called harvest now, decrypt later,” says Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity
expert from Surrey University.
“The theory of how to break current forms of public key encryption await a truly
operational quantum computer,” he adds.