Power To The People

So, here's some numbers wrt The Musk Ox's Pipe Dream.

The largest solar array in space serves the International Space Station. It generates ~215 kilowatts.

Here's the power needed for a contemporary data center:

A single AI server rack requires 50-150 kilowatts compared to 10-15 kilowatts for conventional computing, driven primarily by dense GPU clusters that operate continuously at maximum capacity.

And, remember: that's per rack!! Cookie monster. One rack eats most (more recent estimates bump that power demand higher) of the largest orbiting array power in existence.

Now, what's the average data center count of racks? According to Google, it depends

1 MW About 1,000 - 2,000 rack servers
10 MW About 10,000 - 20,000 rack servers
50+ MW Up to 100,000+ rack servers

Back of the envelope? 1 MW is 4 times what the ISS has, and that's not continuous power, since Mother Earth gets in the way for a significant slice of the orbit. So, LEO or geosync? The latter allows for continuous contact with Mr Sun, likely never to be feasible not to mention cost effective. LEO can be gotten to, but building such big structures there? Not my kettle of fish.

Doesn't sound all that practical. By no means obvious. Well... if you want to depreciate, at Uncle Sugar's expense, all those 'reusable' rockets it might be!!!

Just found this piece on the feasibility of space-based solar power. Now, the author's point of view is harvesting wee little electrons from space-based solar panels and sending, sort of, them back to ground stations to be enjected into the grid. So, some of his math relates to transmission losses and the like. For such electric generation to be used for The Musk Ox's Pipe Dream, those costs don't matter. Otherwise, setting up the facility would cost the same. In the end, it's a wash. It certainly costs more to put panels in geosync orbit than in the Arizona desert. And, not for nuthin, The Musk Ox hasn't made the case for why space-based AI data centers are better than earth-bound ones. If nothing else, at ~22,000 miles up, all of the nasties from Out There don't get filtered by our atmosphere and not so much of the magnetosphere; you won't lose all of it, as it goes out to ~40,000 miles.

As to the sun coverage, the paper doesn't get to 100% 24/7, but sorta close:

In sum, we can expect shading about 0.7% of the time. Not too bad.

The Real Question

Those who pay attention likely noticed that Batshit J. Moron and his henchmen are pushing a faux Christianity down our collective throats. MMM!!! Tastes so good!!!

Today's news brings yet another example.

In the first place, of course, is the Christ was the junior partner in the trio. Hardly a King. Moreover: since God is said to be omnipotent, how is it that only one (or may be a couple) religion to Them "knows" about all the folderol that the Judeo-Christian tradtion imbibes??? Why would They permit 10,000 religions to persist, with different, even antithetical, belief systems? Why appoint only the Judeo-Christians to the ultimate throne?? Seems kind of fascist; the Christ Is King bunch don't want the Jews, of course. The whole Rapture thingee is all about getting all the Jews in one place to blow them up, and the Christians go to Heaven. Not very Godly. Ya think?

God, of course, didn't do it. Humans did. Each clan made the God, or Gods, that served the purpose.

By my estimate 99.44% of the worst wars in all of human history (at least since we've been literate and have had something like countries, anyway), have been driven by religious zealots. Can we have a Crusade? How about one with kids. Batshit J. Moron (and Bibi) have taken us into one today. And he's not very Godly, to say the least.

Truth be told, and I'm going to, humans since ancient times, especially far enough back when one clan knew nothing about the other clans on the other side of the planet (Hell's bells, even a few hundred miles away) invented a religion which suited each and every tribe; in isolation. Hell's bells, they didn't even know Mother Earth was a planet!! In other words, the truth is humans, of every distinct type, invented their God(s) in their image. Not the other way round. The Trio is not different from the pantheons of Greece and Rome. The Judeo-Christian God served the purpose of the Powers That Be at the time of Her invention by The Powers That Be. Happens like that every time and every place throughout history.

Pandora

If anyone thinks that this report is telling the truth, I'll sell you a bridge. Damn Gummints will never, ever leverage the power of Mythos (nor any other weapons grade software), for the Good of The People. They will use it to subjugate the people, just as they always have with any such weapon or law.

Among U.S. rivals, the response has been more muted. Despite Anthropic's recent clash with the Trump administration, Mr. Amodei has made clear that A.I. should be used to defend the United States and other democracies and defeat autocratic adversaries.

If you believe that Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don will NOT use such a weapon against his "enemies", which amount to anyone not MAGAnaut, your an idiot.

What might we expect? For one thing, and likely the first: all code going forward will be closed, and likely by law. We know that the 'data centers' have hoovered up most everything on the innterTubes, which includes open source code.

Smile, your on Candid Computer!! We are watching you.

Le Grande Conspiracy

The NSA has been mentioned a few times in the course of these missives, esp. since the 2016 stolen election. Here's a missive. Now, NSA has reared its head again. But not quite in the way I'd like.

Now, we have the Grand Conspiracy to endure. The fact remains: NSA hoovers up every signal on the planet 24/7, and has the receipts on The Trump/Putin Affair. We need another Snowden.

Can you say Putin, Jr.?

Thought For The Day - 12 April 2026

The sub-headline reads "All six board members that oversee the national historic landmark were terminated, part of the administration's efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy."

Which, of course, is not quite accurate. Bone Spur Samurai^© is wielding Jacksonian dictatorial authority over [quasi]-independent organizations, which don't have Civil Service protections. The purpose, of course, is return the United States of Alabama to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when the whole Damn Gummint was run on the spoils system. Garfield paid with his life, and Congress finally figured out that a developed country can't be run that way. And, I shan't attempt to find a link, one of the MAGA affiliates recently opined that the Founding Fathers had no intent to create a Full Democracy. For those who think that, there remain (notably in New England where I reside) towns that are governed by a town meeting; everybody shows up and votes. If you don't show and don't vote, you can't bitch.

And, surprise surprise, Orban admits defeat. I expected a Putinesque landslide. We'll see if he really leaves. And leaves well enough alone. A true dictator sure wouldn't.

Data or Events?

When I started grad school, the econ profession was in a bit of turmoil. Samuelson and Solow and the gaggle of 'quants' were everywhere. And the event and history brigade was very much in retreat. As any grad student in any field in any school at any time, each will be caught in the internecine battle between the two (sometimes more) cabals fighting for control of the department. And grad students, being essential to profs need to not actually teach, are coveted. I was caught between the history cabal and the quant. I left with a Masters as soons as practicable.

While I've spent my life in the data vicinity, simple observation makes it clear that seeing how the world will be tomorrow is 99.44% determined by events from today and some bit of time before. And, no real surprise, it helps to study the results from similar, or even identical, events from the past. History rhymes. Some times even repeats.

People in power make the decisions based on what events and decisions benefit them. High speed trading and macroeconomic models never understand events. And, even without grifters putting a foot on the scales, macro data is nearly always tender samples, and thus fuzzy. Pick any sector, and watch the market for those companies. What really moves the market cap is news, good and bad. Makes insider trading so alluring.

Which brings us to a new report from an economic historian. Fact is, I didn't think there were any left. He, of course, is at Harvard.

The report presents the results of events on the world economy around WWI. It ain't pretty. He draws inference to Batshit J. Moron's Iran war. While acknowledging the difference in scale, he offers up evidence of events which parallel WWI. WWI because it was the seed of global interdependence that we live in now.

The lessons from history are sobering: In an interdependent global economy, the shock of the outbreak of war can produce long-term instabilities overnight, many of which become apparent only over time.

Well, boy howdy, as Dr. McElhone used to say. May be our Dear Leader and his band of dick suckers don't know much.

Now, there are fertilizer shortages at the beginning of the spring planting season for foods including rice, which means that we may eventually see reduced crop yields and higher prices. As the experience of the Covid pandemic made clear, supply chain disruptions like these can produce inflationary surges with long tails, which, before they abate, can have damaging secondary effects, from higher mortgage rates to fiscal crises to political unrest.

The title on the innterTubes version of his report

I Studied the Economic Fallout From World War I. This Could Be Worse Than We Expect.

Have a nice day. .

Run!! Tsunami's Coming

If you've been keeping track of AI in the compute world, then you've seen/read at least a few reports that AI generated code has eaten the world. Here's a NYT version. All of which makes me laugh out loud. For at least two reasons.

The first, naturally, is that the RDBMS approach to code is to not do any (at least, as little as possible), and let the database manager take care of data integrity. The advantages are well documented here, and some other places. Not having to updage client code every day or two around the world is just one advantage. The other is that data constraints are succinct. Very. Yahoo.

The second, of course is that AI systems are based on the shit that litters the innterTubes; I suspect that what these AI Code generators do is slurp up all that RBAR (do I hear the plaintive cry of COBOL in the distance?) code from 1970 onwards. Back to the future? No, reactionary idiocy. Dr. Codd showed us how to build robust systems built on explicit data logic, not spaghetti code. But, just like AI Agents, doing that reduces the need for a battalion of coders. The difference is that RDBMS eschews code, while AI Agents have unchecked diahrrea. In the Good Olde Days, the coders counterattacked by asserting (and this is a direct quote) "we prefer to do transactions in the client". Keep those fingers typing.

When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.

The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.

This is progress????

Of course, the reporters aren't clued in

Someone has to review the A.I.-generated code to test it for bugs, security and compliance. But it can sometimes be unclear whose job it is to fix issues created by A.I.-generated code. In the past, it would be the responsibility of the person who created the code.

That's not always, or even now, been the case. Back in the Good Olde Days, when COBOL (and earlier when it was assembler) ruled the business world, the programming shop was divided into three parts: systems analysts, coders, and testers. The latter two still exist widely. The first had, until now, been abandoned. But now that function has been split out, again. The purpose of the systems analyst is to define what the programs are intended to do, then assign a coder to make it manifest.

Now, if the AI monsters get their way, they will be the analysts and coders. The humans will be the testers, and of necessity, the second class analysts. "Joe, ya gotta figure out what the fucking AI did!! Your job depends on it!! Get to it."

Fun fact: when the analyst position was made largely redundant, the loudest bitch heard in the programming shop was when a project artifact was moved from one analyst/programmer (yes, that's how the job was often labelled) to another. The reason, of course, is that there wasn't an analyst's document of the code. Worse yet, in the world of C/C++/java coding, lots of folks never, ever bother to work out the code before typing. And, of course, the code never really works, sometimes mostly it does and sometimes it doesn't at all. Either way, the coder then fires up the debugger, and finally gets down to writing a working program.

Now, imagine how that's going to work when the AI machine goes off on its merry way!! You guessed it - KAOS.

Companies are struggling to hire enough people to monitor the A.I. code for risks, a role called application security engineer. "There are not enough application security engineers on the planet to satisfy what just American companies need," said Joe Sullivan, an adviser to Costanoa Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm. The large companies he works with would add five to 10 more people in this role if they could, he said.

Some have faced the Monster

Sachin Kamdar, a co-founder of Elvex, an A.I. agent start-up, said he created a rule around 16 months ago that all of the company's code needed to be reviewed by a human. Otherwise, problems would be harder to fix because no one would understand the work that A.I. had done.

"It's just going to break something, and they're not going to know why it broke," he said.

Well... duh!! The agent halucinates while writing yet another General Ledger. Cool. The smartest, coolest guys in the room have fucked the dog. Even more Cool.