Locator: 48697ARCHIVES.
A musical interlude: dead at age 84, July 22, 2025
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Monet
Link here to The Wall Street Journal. When you scroll through the article and the photos, think back to Yuval Noah Harari. Yes, YNH resides rent-free in my brain. LOL.
While stationed in Germany for eight years or more (I kind of forget exactly how long it was), we went to Paris so many times, our two children once asked if there were any cities in France, other than Paris. After awhile, they also got tired of going to Paris "every weekend." LOL.
On one of those trips we visited Monet's gardens at Giverny. Wow, what a highlight of our overseas tour -- fourteen consecutive years overseas -- Germany, England, Italy, Turkey and side trips to Russia, Israel, Morocco, etc.
The military is not for everyone. But for me, it was a great fit. I can't imagine having done anything else. I doubt if I would have had the same feeling had I stayed stateside all 30 years of my career, but fourteen years overseas was absolutely wonderful.
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Roth (IRA) -- Early Withdrawal -- The WSJ
I posted a comment to TWSJ on this article.
The article had a negative or schadenfreude tone to it.
I completely disagreed. It was a "good-news" article on so many levels.
Maybe I'll come back to this later.
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The Book Page
Back to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Wow, what a treat.
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New AI Chips To Address The Energy Issue
From the link:
“I can’t wrap my head around it,” says Andrew Wee, who has been a Silicon Valley data-center and hardware guy for 30 years.
The “it” that has him so befuddled—irate, even—is the projected power demands of future AI supercomputers, the ones that are supposed to power humanity’s great leap forward.
Wee held senior roles at Apple and Meta, and is now head of hardware for cloud provider Cloudflare. He believes the current growth in energy required for AI—which the World Economic Forum estimates will be 50% a year through 2030—is unsustainable.
“We need to find technical solutions, policy solutions and other solutions that solve this collectively,” he says. To that end, Wee’s team at Cloudflare is testing a radical new kind of microchip, from a startup founded in 2023, called Positron, which has just announced a fresh round of $51.6 million in investment.
These chips have the potential to be much more energy efficient than ones from industry leader Nvidia at the all-important task of inference, which is the process by which AI responses are generated from user prompts. While Nvidia chips will continue to be used to train AI for the foreseeable future, more efficient inference could collectively save companies tens of billions of dollars, and a commensurate amount of energy.
Inference? At the blog, already:
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The President's Second Act
President Trump set some severe deadlines -- getting his trade / tariff deals done before the first of August, 2025.
President Trump has been in office for six months.
Trade / tariff deals: mission accomplished.
Borders: secured in the first 100 days.
Big, beautiful bill -- temporary tax cuts now made permanent.
The big question: what will be Trump's next act?
Obama: lots of talk, lots of speeches; not many accomplishments.
Biden: amazing how little he actually showed up for work. and when he did, how confused he looked. And how little he accomplished.
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Bonus: The Book Page
Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, c. March, 2025.
Arrived today, Sunday, July 27, 2025. Reviewed in TWSJ in this weekend's edition.
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Today's Featured Personality
What were you doing in 1962?
I was on my way to middle school, or as we called it in Williston, ND, at the time, "Central School."
