After hearing some things from JD and Trump I’m a bit more sanguine about the deal. I guess we all have to wait until Friday to see the details. If a carrier group is left in the region, I think that’s a way to insure Iran complies.
Septum Rings apparently are the answer along with blue, green or pink hair. The complete Antifa/Trans/anti-Zionist package
People have always been stark raving mad.
I wonder if the possibility of running too low on key weapon systems played a role in the Iran situation.
Some WSJ articles recently have focused on the efforts to redesidesign or design new systems for easier and quicker manufacture.
RE: Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day”
I have to agree with Bryce Zabel’s review I posted a link to here a couple of days ago.
The movie was mostly a “chase film,” and it didn’t answer the key questions–what was the nature of the NHIs, where did they come from, and what were their actual motives?
On the surface they seemed to be beneficent, but, where they?
Moreover, what about the fact that the male and female humans these aliens chose to be their representatives/bridges to humanity had been abducted as young children and “upgraded,” modified to have special powers–all of this without their consent.
Was this a real beneficent action towards these two children, who were too young to understand and too young to consent to what was being done to them?
Or was this just a case of “you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette,” and these two children just happened to be the unlucky or, perhaps, the lucky eggs the NHIs chose to crack.
The woman looked much better without the excessive lipstick. And I really dislike the current fad for lip fillers. The larger lips look just fine on facial types on which they are genetically programmed. On others, not so much.
Richard Illyes said:
“I wonder if the possibility of running too low on key weapon systems played a role in the Iran situation. Some WSJ articles recently have focused on the efforts to redesidesign or design new systems for easier and quicker manufacture.”
There are (4) companies to look at: Saronic, Anduril, Castlelion and Dyzne: These companies make autonomous boats and ships, pilotless planes, advanced drones, hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles etc.
Commonalties
They and other companies are revolutionizing weapons procurement be making 1) inexpensive 2) mass produced 3) effective weapons using basic materials not requiring or vastly limiting importation of parts/materials from China that can be made by the thousands in house quickly.
They are all “War Unicorns” – Saronic made the Corsair – an autonomous 21 foot boat that rescued the downed Apache pilots off the Iran Coast recently. The just launced 180 foot long autonomous ship.
We can thank Trump and Hegesth for championing these companeis along with the venture capitalists like Marc Andreesen who back them by realizing that if we don’t have a strong defense all their other Venture Capital Investments are worthless.
Dino Mavrookas of Saronic
Palmer Luckey of Anduril
Bryon Hargis of Castelion
Matt McCue of Dzyne
They all have video interviews that are fascinating. People have no idea the incredible tecnological and manufcturing advancements we have made in the last few years in weapons development. These CEO’s are all like Elon Musk in their management and vision capabilities. They are making weapons instead of cars, AI LLM’s and space rockets.
i
Powerline is sure doing what they can to crap all over the Iran deal, making sure to put in front of us what the Kagans and Kristols think.
I agree with Kate on the lips!
I agree with Kate on the lips.
Re: Disclosure Day
IMO Spielberg is losing it. He had a great run, but the reviews of DD are mediocre to bad. Little is disclosed, just chase scenes.
I was annoyed that Spielberg went public with his deep thoughts about how people who believe in God might be threatened by the disclosure of alien beings.
_______________________________
What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?
That piece appears to be a sweeping high level think piece…, or is it a lot of corporatespeak happy horsesh_t? I think it actually has some valuable points, though some of my biases are triggered by some of the language choices.
One of the above aspects that only slowly dawned on me, was that of property ownership. Nadella speaks of IP. OK, intellectual property like patents and similar stuff. But it is property, owned by someone or some institution. Later he uses the word sovereignty. Again, an element of possession and independence.
If a company is just using a generic AI model, then that is something anyone can do. But if they build their own AI agents filled with employee expertise, to accelerate their activities, and if they own them in a proprietary fashion, then that becomes the new AI ecosystem that Nadella is talking about.
Marxists like Proudhon in France a century ago targeted property and ownership as the key scourge of capitalist societies. Yeah well… we all know how things turn out when nobody owns anything.
– – – – –
Imagine some hotshot employee within a company, who has some exceptional knowledge set. He or she builds an agent that encapsulates that. The company then owns that. Does the company really need that employee now? Yes, if he or she is continuing to learn and grow the agent. But how much is the company paying them, and how valuable is that added knowledge? (Or maybe the agent will always be something of a second rate alternative to dealing with the employee directly?)
That thinking reminds me of the American employee who spends a month or three training a new H1B visa hire, who works at half the salary, and then the original employee gets fired.
get over yourself Stephen, irs like he unlearned everything he had unlearned in Close Encounters* and ET, but this unbridle egotism i’m looking at you coppola**
Wardex seems to derivative of Magestic 12, but Colin Firth was really phoning it in, perhaps the research team in ET
yes we are in the mutaran nebula, as far as the details of this proposal, and they don’t seem too encouraging
*the intro in the Sonoran deserts with the missing grumman avengers, draws you into the story, then you have the other segments,
**I have my reservations about Godfather 2, and lets not even get started on no 3, but tucker, and peggy sue, balanced it out (he also wrote the screenplay for Patton)
TommyJay:
A few years ago Adobe changed its terms of service:
________________________________________
4.2 Licenses to Your Content. Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content.
________________________________________
Needless to say, Adobe users hit the roof when this paragraph was publicized. Users were already in a bad mood from Adobe’s exploitation of subscription lock-in, but in 2024 they were also alarmed by AI training on their creative work for AI exploitation.
Adobe tried to explain their intentions were honorable though the language was overly broad. They have since changed the terms to assuage user concerns, but it was too little too late. Adobe lost a large number of users and 60% of its stock peak in 2024.
The Adobe CEO is Shantanu Narayen, another Indian. He and Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, have the same plan. Move as much as possible to the cloud for control, lock in users to the subscription model, then squeeze them for more and more money.
Which works until users get fed up and find other alternatives. Adobe and MS aren’t going out of business but they have hit limits in their strategy.
Today’s voice is really bad.
I recall George Carlin in a comedy routine saying that there is no word for the two vertical lines under one’s nose. Guess he was wrong.
i think of the mek akin to the social revolutionaries that struck the czarist regime, and served part of the kerensky regime and opposition to the bolsheviks
they provided intelligence, on the nuclear program, when Langley insisted it was impossible, so that earns some credibility, (through the NCIRI) maybe some people were drawn into the web, improperly,
this is a problem with La Causa, the struggle against the Castro regime and it’s puppets, for the first quarter century, they pursued direct action, but there were many disparate factiions, many were ex partisans who fell out with the broad front that the Brothers, had appropriated,
Maybe some Christians have a problem with ETIs, certainly not all of them do. See Alice Maynell’s famous poem “Christ in the Universe”:
Let’s say you have a thousand pictures of your deceased mother.
Oh, so sad. What do I do? I make you pay for it. The memories may be yours, but the photos, they’re mine.
So it’s very important, it needs to be nice at first. But then… Yes. Oh, yes. You’re not happy with the way something you really liked turned shitty. What do you do? Contact customer service. Here, talk to a completely useless chatbot. No human available.
Here’s my favourite part: Let’s say someone starts an alternative service. What do we do? We buy them.
So why would a PSA from the government of Norway be in English? I think it must be because Europe is almost completely shut out of this kind of thing, it’s all in the hands of American companies, and so they have to try to make us indignant about it so that we can try to get it to change. They’re not wrong, of course.
Re Christ and extra-terrestrial beings: a joke I heard some time back.
A visitor from outer space arrives on Earth, and meets with all our heads of state in an open and friendly discussion. The pope gets a turn and asks our new friend, “Do you know of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?” The alien says “We sure do! He visits our planet a lot and it’s always a great time.” The pope, amazed, asks, “Why does He visit you so often?” The alien replies “I don’t know. Maybe he likes our music or our food, or the dancing and celebration. What did you do when He visited you?”
Astronomy Picture of the Day. A classic – one of my favorites of all time.
rarely does science fiction tackle religion, specially Christianity, Arthur C Clarke’s the Star, (dramatized on the new twilight zone in the 80s) about the star system that was extinquished to make the guide stone, that the Magi followed, since then, he had decidely turned against Christianity in the Timescape series, back in the 60s, trek did an allegory of christianity on the Roman Empire planet
huxley,
I was aware of Adobe’s early adoption of the subscription model long ago. Then Microsoft followed, though I believe unlike Adobe you can still make outright purchases of MS software as I did a year or two ago. (I wasn’t aware of Adobe’s EULA fiasco. Nearly a 70% decline in the share price of their stock from the peak.)
There is the point that what Nadella is saying about AI agents is rather the exact opposite of what you suggest, though they might well be lying their asses off.
Probably the MS structure would be something like: You (the company) will “own” the AI agents that we will possess in our (MS) datacenters. OK, does that give the company a warm and fuzzy feeling?? Hmmm.
Kinda like when I “buy” some movie or video content on Amazon Prime. I’ve had a least one of those purchases fail so far. Ownership without possession or control.
TommyJay:
The similarity I was pointing at is that graphic artists are concerned that AI companies can train AI on their work thus an AI can learn to produce original work in the same style as that artist.
Then, like the hotshot employee in your example, such an artist may be out of work or suffer reduced income. Although the artist in this case is not developing the AI agent.
With this kind of initiative, Gavin Newsom should have the 2028 Democratic convention pretty much locked up…
Yep
After hearing some things from JD and Trump I’m a bit more sanguine about the deal. I guess we all have to wait until Friday to see the details. If a carrier group is left in the region, I think that’s a way to insure Iran complies.
Septum Rings apparently are the answer along with blue, green or pink hair. The complete Antifa/Trans/anti-Zionist package
People have always been stark raving mad.
I wonder if the possibility of running too low on key weapon systems played a role in the Iran situation.
Some WSJ articles recently have focused on the efforts to redesidesign or design new systems for easier and quicker manufacture.
RE: Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day”
I have to agree with Bryce Zabel’s review I posted a link to here a couple of days ago.
The movie was mostly a “chase film,” and it didn’t answer the key questions–what was the nature of the NHIs, where did they come from, and what were their actual motives?
On the surface they seemed to be beneficent, but, where they?
Moreover, what about the fact that the male and female humans these aliens chose to be their representatives/bridges to humanity had been abducted as young children and “upgraded,” modified to have special powers–all of this without their consent.
Was this a real beneficent action towards these two children, who were too young to understand and too young to consent to what was being done to them?
Or was this just a case of “you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette,” and these two children just happened to be the unlucky or, perhaps, the lucky eggs the NHIs chose to crack.
The woman looked much better without the excessive lipstick. And I really dislike the current fad for lip fillers. The larger lips look just fine on facial types on which they are genetically programmed. On others, not so much.
Richard Illyes said:
“I wonder if the possibility of running too low on key weapon systems played a role in the Iran situation. Some WSJ articles recently have focused on the efforts to redesidesign or design new systems for easier and quicker manufacture.”
There are (4) companies to look at: Saronic, Anduril, Castlelion and Dyzne: These companies make autonomous boats and ships, pilotless planes, advanced drones, hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles etc.
Commonalties
They and other companies are revolutionizing weapons procurement be making 1) inexpensive 2) mass produced 3) effective weapons using basic materials not requiring or vastly limiting importation of parts/materials from China that can be made by the thousands in house quickly.
They are all “War Unicorns” – Saronic made the Corsair – an autonomous 21 foot boat that rescued the downed Apache pilots off the Iran Coast recently. The just launced 180 foot long autonomous ship.
We can thank Trump and Hegesth for championing these companeis along with the venture capitalists like Marc Andreesen who back them by realizing that if we don’t have a strong defense all their other Venture Capital Investments are worthless.
Dino Mavrookas of Saronic
Palmer Luckey of Anduril
Bryon Hargis of Castelion
Matt McCue of Dzyne
They all have video interviews that are fascinating. People have no idea the incredible tecnological and manufcturing advancements we have made in the last few years in weapons development. These CEO’s are all like Elon Musk in their management and vision capabilities. They are making weapons instead of cars, AI LLM’s and space rockets.
i
Powerline is sure doing what they can to crap all over the Iran deal, making sure to put in front of us what the Kagans and Kristols think.
I agree with Kate on the lips!
I agree with Kate on the lips.
Re: Disclosure Day
IMO Spielberg is losing it. He had a great run, but the reviews of DD are mediocre to bad. Little is disclosed, just chase scenes.
I was annoyed that Spielberg went public with his deep thoughts about how people who believe in God might be threatened by the disclosure of alien beings.
_______________________________
What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?
–Steven Spielberg
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/disclosure-day-director-steven-spielberg-on-alien-visitations/
_______________________________
Spare me. Christians, at least, know that God is bigger than planet Earth and humanity. This is something “smart people” say about people of faith.
Gee. I thought she was wearing some new septum piercing in the shape of a long vertical square bracket! Didn’t think it looked good. 🙂
I recall George Carlin in a comedy routine saying that there is no word for the two vertical lines under one’s nose. Guess he was wrong.
Philtrum.
The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, wrote a piece in X a couple days ago about the future of AI in the workplace.
I found it here as well, since I don’t use X.
https://snscratchpad.com/posts/frontier-ecosystem/
That piece appears to be a sweeping high level think piece…, or is it a lot of corporatespeak happy horsesh_t? I think it actually has some valuable points, though some of my biases are triggered by some of the language choices.
This article is essentially a re-hashing of the above, though in some ways considerably more direct and understandable, IMO.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/the_real_ai_revolution.html
One of the above aspects that only slowly dawned on me, was that of property ownership. Nadella speaks of IP. OK, intellectual property like patents and similar stuff. But it is property, owned by someone or some institution. Later he uses the word sovereignty. Again, an element of possession and independence.
If a company is just using a generic AI model, then that is something anyone can do. But if they build their own AI agents filled with employee expertise, to accelerate their activities, and if they own them in a proprietary fashion, then that becomes the new AI ecosystem that Nadella is talking about.
Marxists like Proudhon in France a century ago targeted property and ownership as the key scourge of capitalist societies. Yeah well… we all know how things turn out when nobody owns anything.
– – – – –
Imagine some hotshot employee within a company, who has some exceptional knowledge set. He or she builds an agent that encapsulates that. The company then owns that. Does the company really need that employee now? Yes, if he or she is continuing to learn and grow the agent. But how much is the company paying them, and how valuable is that added knowledge? (Or maybe the agent will always be something of a second rate alternative to dealing with the employee directly?)
That thinking reminds me of the American employee who spends a month or three training a new H1B visa hire, who works at half the salary, and then the original employee gets fired.
get over yourself Stephen, irs like he unlearned everything he had unlearned in Close Encounters* and ET, but this unbridle egotism i’m looking at you coppola**
Wardex seems to derivative of Magestic 12, but Colin Firth was really phoning it in, perhaps the research team in ET
yes we are in the mutaran nebula, as far as the details of this proposal, and they don’t seem too encouraging
*the intro in the Sonoran deserts with the missing grumman avengers, draws you into the story, then you have the other segments,
**I have my reservations about Godfather 2, and lets not even get started on no 3, but tucker, and peggy sue, balanced it out (he also wrote the screenplay for Patton)
TommyJay:
A few years ago Adobe changed its terms of service:
________________________________________
4.2 Licenses to Your Content. Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content.
________________________________________
Needless to say, Adobe users hit the roof when this paragraph was publicized. Users were already in a bad mood from Adobe’s exploitation of subscription lock-in, but in 2024 they were also alarmed by AI training on their creative work for AI exploitation.
Adobe tried to explain their intentions were honorable though the language was overly broad. They have since changed the terms to assuage user concerns, but it was too little too late. Adobe lost a large number of users and 60% of its stock peak in 2024.
The Adobe CEO is Shantanu Narayen, another Indian. He and Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, have the same plan. Move as much as possible to the cloud for control, lock in users to the subscription model, then squeeze them for more and more money.
Which works until users get fed up and find other alternatives. Adobe and MS aren’t going out of business but they have hit limits in their strategy.
Today’s voice is really bad.
I recall George Carlin in a comedy routine saying that there is no word for the two vertical lines under one’s nose. Guess he was wrong.
Philtrum.
The little plastic thing at the end of shoelaces?
Aglet.
a cautionary note,
https://substack.com/home/post/p-202242881
I think they are comparing apples and oranges
yes there is a hunger games absurdity aspect about much of this, why marr a beautiful face like that,
returning to blind squirrel mode, Maher endorses the oysternazi, having learned nothing in the last six years,
i think her conclusions are overdrawn but she has receipts
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2066343347313410289
i think of the mek akin to the social revolutionaries that struck the czarist regime, and served part of the kerensky regime and opposition to the bolsheviks
they provided intelligence, on the nuclear program, when Langley insisted it was impossible, so that earns some credibility, (through the NCIRI) maybe some people were drawn into the web, improperly,
this is a problem with La Causa, the struggle against the Castro regime and it’s puppets, for the first quarter century, they pursued direct action, but there were many disparate factiions, many were ex partisans who fell out with the broad front that the Brothers, had appropriated,
Maybe some Christians have a problem with ETIs, certainly not all of them do. See Alice Maynell’s famous poem “Christ in the Universe”:
https://www.poetry-archive.com/m/christ_in_the_universe/
The concluding stanzas:
But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.
@huxley:lock in users to the subscription model, then squeeze them for more and more money.
So why would a PSA from the government of Norway be in English? I think it must be because Europe is almost completely shut out of this kind of thing, it’s all in the hands of American companies, and so they have to try to make us indignant about it so that we can try to get it to change. They’re not wrong, of course.
Re Christ and extra-terrestrial beings: a joke I heard some time back.
A visitor from outer space arrives on Earth, and meets with all our heads of state in an open and friendly discussion. The pope gets a turn and asks our new friend, “Do you know of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?” The alien says “We sure do! He visits our planet a lot and it’s always a great time.” The pope, amazed, asks, “Why does He visit you so often?” The alien replies “I don’t know. Maybe he likes our music or our food, or the dancing and celebration. What did you do when He visited you?”
Astronomy Picture of the Day. A classic – one of my favorites of all time.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
rarely does science fiction tackle religion, specially Christianity, Arthur C Clarke’s the Star, (dramatized on the new twilight zone in the 80s) about the star system that was extinquished to make the guide stone, that the Magi followed, since then, he had decidely turned against Christianity in the Timescape series, back in the 60s, trek did an allegory of christianity on the Roman Empire planet
huxley,
I was aware of Adobe’s early adoption of the subscription model long ago. Then Microsoft followed, though I believe unlike Adobe you can still make outright purchases of MS software as I did a year or two ago. (I wasn’t aware of Adobe’s EULA fiasco. Nearly a 70% decline in the share price of their stock from the peak.)
There is the point that what Nadella is saying about AI agents is rather the exact opposite of what you suggest, though they might well be lying their asses off.
Probably the MS structure would be something like: You (the company) will “own” the AI agents that we will possess in our (MS) datacenters. OK, does that give the company a warm and fuzzy feeling?? Hmmm.
Kinda like when I “buy” some movie or video content on Amazon Prime. I’ve had a least one of those purchases fail so far. Ownership without possession or control.
TommyJay:
The similarity I was pointing at is that graphic artists are concerned that AI companies can train AI on their work thus an AI can learn to produce original work in the same style as that artist.
Then, like the hotshot employee in your example, such an artist may be out of work or suffer reduced income. Although the artist in this case is not developing the AI agent.
With this kind of initiative, Gavin Newsom should have the 2028 Democratic convention pretty much locked up…
“While claiming to fight corruption, Newsom solicited $340M from special interests for allies”—
https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/newsom-alleges-trump-corruption-while-soliciting-more-340m
Impressive!