Locator: 49443NIGHTOFF.
I'll probably watch less than 30 minutes of the game but it's gonna be a good one. I just turned on the television -- with just a minute or so before the end of the first half -- Notre Dame leads 14 - 10 but USC is ready to kick a field game which will make it 14 - 13 at the half.
Me? I'm going back to reading Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing.
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I get the feeling that the press often thinks that human endeavors and activities are "static." Or that a single individual is working on a specific problem. When one reads Hodges' biography of Alan Turing, one realizes how fast things often move along in the background, unknown to the rest of the world, and that many problems are being worked by many individuals simultaneously who may be completely unaware that others are working the same problems.
We're seeing "that in spades," now, as my dad would say. There are so many smart individuals with so much money available to pursue their research that chatbots are unlikely to proceed in the manner that many think chatbots are going to proceed.
Most interestingly, it's going to be very difficult for governments to keep up with what's going on. True, also of investors. The press will report setbacks and challenges and some folks will become upset, depressed, irritated. These folks don't realize that really, really smart folks are working these problems.
The rare earths problem? Already I'm seeing reports there are individuals and companies working this problem with solutions in our own backyard. My hunch: the press is making a bigger deal out of this than necessary -- typical of journalists and journalism. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to wake up some morning in the near future when we start seeing articles in The WSJ that the rare earths problem is solved, ot least a lot less concerning than the press is making it out to be.
Advanced Nvidia chips to China? It's being reported this weekend that Nvidia has gotten out of China completely. I'm not sure what Jensen Huang meant by that but if he is/was being literal, that's amazing. That changes everything. And it changed everything literally overnight.
A shortage of workers in Texas? That's what is being reported. LOL. Texans will solve that problem quickly and easily.
Rambling. Not well articulated but ...
... reading books on the Turing Machine and the Manhattan Project suggests that a lot of problems / challenge that the press is concerned about are being solved in the trenches.
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Babbage: 1837. The difference engine by Charles Babbage.
Turing: 1937. Computable Numbers, the Turing Machine.
A hundred years separated them.
2037: quantum computers powering large data centers?
AI prompt:
Alan Turning and John von Neumann. 1930s. Aiken, Stibitz, Eckert and Mauchly. It seems like a lot of things were happening amazingly fast in 1930s and 1940s, and much of it with serendipity, casual conversations among widely separated engineers brought amazing breakthroughs leading from Babbage to Turning to the Harvard-IBM machine to University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC. Is there a book with the quality of Andrew Hodges' writing that discusses how events unfolded from thought experiments (Babbage / Turing) to a physical machine, ENIAC?ChatGPT: seven suggestions. See this link. I'm currently reading one of the suggestions, The Innovators. Excellent. Now I know where this book fits.
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Crescent Moon Over Flathead Lake
Photo By Nephew
