Planning on a quiet day today, getting ready for travel tomorrow. I hope the professional politicians and advisors are doing what I’m doing – trying to think clearly and logically about what the Dems should focus on as soon as they’re seated in Congress. Here’s my list.

First, attack the sources of high cost of living and inflation. Pass new laws restricting tariffs. Do everything possible to remove current Trump tariffs, and if Trump blocks those attempts, make it crystal clear who is to blame. Shout it from the rooftops. Plus, Congress must demand an end to the Iran war, a useless war that is driving up gas prices and costing Americans billions in energy and weapons cost. Bring Hegseth and Rubio in for hearings, over and over, and make them try to justify this useless war.

Second, Congress must place America’s secret police (ICE) on trial. Stop the insulting, frightening, illegal assault on citizens. Investigations, new laws, budget removal, lawsuits – do whatever it takes to get these guys under control. ICE is as un-American as anything I can imagine. If possible, shut them down as an agency and start over fresh. We can’t have open borders, so immigration reform and border control is still needed, but we can’t have secret police either. Use some common sense.

Third, attack the rampant financial corruption led by Convict Donny. Investigate, pass new laws, use the laws that are on the books. This includes controls on Congress itself. Use the Hatch Act. The single largest part of this is a repeal/reversal of the Citizens United decision. Money can’t be equated with speech, or billionaires control the political process. Gettin the infinite money out of politics will also address the term longevity of certain offices – if staying in office isn’t your path to getting wealthy, you’re more likely to leave when you should.

These three things will address much of what led voters to put Dems back in charge – we’ve gotta lead with these and make sure voters see us taking care of the business they care about. Beyond that, there are some huge issues for congress to take on.

Fourth, attack Convict Donny’s appointed squad of flying monkeys who are destroying democracy on Donny’s behalf. His entire Cabinet should be fired and put on trial, but short of that Congress can challenge, investigate, and litigate. Make those people’s lives pure hell. Make them rue the day they ever followed Trump. Don’t attack Convict Donny directly via impeachment – SCOTUS has made him invulnerable. But attack that next level of evil, hard. DoJ, State, EPA, Education, Defense, OMB, Intelligence Agencies, Interior, Treasury, FCC…every Donny-appointed leader has proven to be the worst of the worst, and they need to be sued and blocked for the next two years.

Fifth, begin to restructure our federal governance. Pass laws for term and age limits of judges and Senators. Start the process of ridding us of the Electoral College – as a minimum, try to get every state to agree to use the popular vote count to assign Electors. If it takes a Consttutional Convention, so be it. In that same Convention, amend the Constitution to make it clear that we don’t have an all-powerful President. Destroy the idea of an all-powerful King-like President.

Sixth, reform SCOTUS. This may be as simple as the next Dem President appointing a dozen or more new Justices, diluting the current crop of MAGAts. I think having 20-30 seated Supremes, with a random selection of nine of them weighing on any given case, would do the trick. The non-partisan court is broken at the moment, and we need to find a way to keep a rogue President from ever again creating a partisan court.

That’s my version of a succinct agenda for the now-in-power Dems. Stick to that and I think we’ll be OK. Waste time in culture wars and intra-party food fights, and we’ll risk all the progress we just made. I am reminded of the sage advice given to Buckaroo Banzai as he tested his “oscillation overthruster” in the classic 1984 movie: “Don’t embarrass us.” Seems appropriate.

It’s Election Day. Finally. But man, the media is full of “blue wave”, “the end of Trumpism”, “blowout victory”, and the like. That’s some bad juju. Just like a ballgame, you can’t go into this feeling overconfident. You have to assume you’re in for a fucking dogfight and you’re gonna do whatever it takes to get across the finish line first. The media isn’t doing us any favors with all this “blue wave” shit.

The stakes are high – control of Congress. That’s step one in pushing MAGA and Convict Donny aside. Step two will be passing laws (a) removing tariffs and the Iran war, the two things hurting our economy most, (b) against corruption and (c) laws reversing Citizens United – get the infinite money out of politics. That removes the billionaires’ leverage. Step three will be restructuring SCOTUS – something a D-controlled Congress should take on ASAP. Step four – the 2028 Presidential election. It’s all possible, but every step will be a fight.

I’ve found another great use for strong LLMs – detailed search results. I’ve gotten so used to manually searching the web for whatever I want/need, and sometimes that’s a long process of narrowing down results, refining search terms, and wading through a lot of noise. Or, I can just give Claude/Opus a fairly detailed description of what I’m looking for and it does all the work. I was looking for lakefront property within 2 hours of Louisville, within a price range, and a few other features. I know from experience that I could spend hours wading through the various websites and ads for properties, with no good way to capture the results. But Claude did all that for me in a minute. It’s tireless and conversational, so easy to use. I can see why Google just lost $500B in market value – traditional search where the human user is subjected to ads will soon be dead.

This NYTimes article about how a brain injury produced a musical genius is fascinating. We don’t know all that much about how the human brain operates, and this is a great example. LLMs and human brains are both large/complex neural networks, so we will see more and more unexplained behavior as we build machine brains approaching the complexity of human brains. It now feels inevitable that we will build (have already built?) something that is conscious and sentient by any reasonable definition, something for which we need to be accountable. And I think the whole question of “what about the soul?” is nonsense, because we don’t even know if humans have a “soul”. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know if we have one, so disregarding machine sentience on the basis of souls seems pretty dumb to me.

Today is the Day of the Dead, but for us it’s more like the Day of Paying Contractors a Lot of Money. We have a crew cleaning up years of leaves, sticks and detritus in the areas in front of our house, and another crew inside the house de-pesting and cleaning out the attic, then installing new attic insulation. We’re doing our part to support the local economy. 🙁

The outdoor work is something I’ve put off for years – it’s a ton of work, literally tons of dry flammable material on the ground. Given what’s happening with the climate, it makes sense to get all that flammable material off the property. We still have lots of trees, but at least now the ground won’t burn. The indoor work is similar deferred maintenance. On a 40+ year old house, the attic is nasty dirty, and the insulation has collapsed and rotted. This is the kind of thing that we’ll have to do if we ever sell the place, so might as well get it done now. Fight the good fight against entropy. Though expensive, it *does* feel good to reverse years of neglect.

As with anything I’ve tried to hire out the last couple of years, scheduling is the big problem. You agree on a schedule for the work and the contractors immediately screw things up. Miscommunication among the contractors, sometimes unreliable workers, whatever the cause, its a universal problem in today’s “service economy”. The attic work we’re having done was all scheduled to be done in one day, but it’s turning out to be three separate days in which we’re inconvenienced by having trucks in the driveway and workers roaming the house. If I were commuting and working full time, it would be a nightmare. But at the moment it’s just irritating.

Tomorrow will be a break from overseeing the work, in which a round of golf, a UK basketball game and then election night binge-watching is all on the agenda.

Last night I discovered a wonderful new Paramount+ series, A Course Called Ireland, featuring Bill Murray traveling around Ireland playing golf and interacting with the locals. After only two episodes I love it, and they’ve shown some of the same sights we saw in person. Murray has better weather than we did, which wasn’t difficult. Also, Murray and team stayed in the same B&B as us in Dingle – that was fun to see. Good stuff, and makes me want to go back and try the country again. This time with golf cubs and better weather.

Pictures from the outdoor work – small section of a much larger area. Before.

And after. Nice and clean.

The last 10 years of living in the shadow of our worst President in history has been tough. Exhausting. This SNL fake ad from 2018, just before the midterm election after Trump’s first election, is great but so, so depressing. This ad is exactly what a lot of us are feeling eight long years later. Deja fucking vu.

Tuesday night is going to involve some bourbon, whether the Blue Wave shows up or not. A party or a wake.

This week I received an email from the Social Security Administration that was irritating, to say the least. It began: “Under President Donald J. Trump, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is transforming into a model of excellence…”. Ugh. It’s not bad enough that Rethuglicans are working hard at reducing benefits for citizens (after DOGE, ACA cuts, Medicare changes, and tax breaks for the top 1%), now they’re using government programs as propaganda platforms. This is the true evil genius of the second Trump administration – they’ve placed toadies loyalists in charge of every government office, every program. So the damage done by Convict Donnie isn’t just what he inflicts – it’s the sum of all those MAGA acolytes in charge of health, education, defense, DoJ, intelligence agencies, taxes…everything. The entire government is now corrupt. It’s gonna take a decade or more to root them out. I sure hope that work starts next month.

Turns out my betting strategy for yesterday’s Breeders’ Cup races was…not good. Re-evaluating.

Big week ahead, though. Back on the road airplane, headed for Louisville. The midterm elections. The first official game of the UK men’s hoops season. The Keeneland auction. A board meeting, done via Zoom. Looking forward to it all.

I suppose it was inevitable. If you wait long enough, almost anything you can imagine will be invented. years ago, when we had our first problems with olive flies, I imagined a robot that could take the thousands of flies out one by one with lasers. Blame it on a Star Wars early adulthood. But now, a Chinese company has invented exactly that. Their first use case is mosquitos, but I predict the olive growers of the world will grab on fast. Olive flies are a scourge destroying olive groves in CA and all over the Mediterranean. I’d buy this system right now.

I’m sure it’s not the first, but here’s the first story I’ve read of an AI chatbot killing a human. Really sad story. We should probably build rules/weights into all LLMs that notify MDs when a human asks them for assistance/advice with any neurological problem. The logic – having a brain problem means you may not make good decisions, by definition. The machine should quickly get itself out of the advice loop for situations like this.

Switching subjects, next week (Nov 7) I get to attend the Keeneland fall sale and see how the horses from our syndicate do at auction. I’ve attended once before, and it’s a beautiful event. Here’s to hoping that one of our broodmares or yearlings gets bid up, way up! I’m anxious to learn how our first investment in a horse syndicate pans out.

I’ve been thinking about the future of writing, with immensely capable LLMs now capable of writing almost anything – fiction, screenplays, political analysis, scientific articles – quite capably. So what will be the human author’s role? Martin Fowler has been thinking about the same thing.

Assuming we can find a way to prove that a document was written solely by a human, I think there will be a market for such work. Just like there’s a market for handcrafted leathers and metal items, for art pottery and paintings, I think people will pay a premium for a story that they know is human-built. Much of literature will be dominated by AI, but not all. While that’s not great news for aspiring authors, it’s…something. The way bespoke human-written novels are marketed may have to change.

Or I could be wrong. There could be a huge backlash to anything written by AI, in which the market just won’t pay anything for text without human provenance. In this case becoming a writer could be a great career choice. As physicist Neils Bohr famously said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!”

The Binance $6.5 billion crypto hack makes me thankful once again that I haven’t gotten pulled into the crypto bubble. My advice to friends has always been “it’s a complex Ponzi scheme”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but bottom line it’s incredibly unpredictable. Not what I want in an investment.

My writing has been pretty negative lately – the world *is* a hot mess – and today’s not gonna be much different. I spent the entire day yesterday trapped in the Kafka-esque world of California’s Franchise Tax Board. I ultimately escaped, with some victories, but the journey took a toll. Stressful.

First you have to understand that the FTB has been designed to be hostile to all human contact. Once you get on their radar for a wrong or missed payment, no matter how slight, you’re in for an increasingly threatening set of letters (or “Notices”) from them, demanding payment. No middle ground, no discussion, just pay or be punished.

You can only contact them online if you sign up for a “MyFTB” account, and that’s not easy. For example, their password requirement on that account is 15 characters, upper/lower case, numbers and special characters, 15! Once you’ve got an account, yes, you can see certain helpful information, but if you want to send them a message you have to use their in-portal mail tool and they tell you it will take 30 days for them to respond. It must be smoke signals behind the email.

The you try to contact them by phone to figure out what’s wrong, and most days you get a message saying sorry, their call volume is extremely high and they can’t even put you on hold. You just can’t reach them today. That’s helpful.

One day a month ago I got through to an agent – wonder of wonders – but unfortunately, that agent was having a bad day. I wanted to discuss a $14,000 demand notice I had received. My records showed that we didn’t owe that; that we had paid everything owed for the last couple of years. The FTB agent informed me that his records showed something different, so he was through talking and we should send payment. Not the slightest interest in discussing why there was a discrepancy or that FTB records might be in error.

Yesterday I got lucky. I got a different message telling me that yes, they would put me in queue to speak with an agent, and that the hold time would be 2.5 to 4 hours. Then, amazingly, I got a recording saying they would call me back instead of me holding. I accepted, and crossed fingers that their system would work as planned.

I did get a callback, and this time I got an agent who would at least listen. Within about 30 minutes of discussion/research, she determined that one of our big payments had been mistakenly placed in “suspense” – not applied to our tax bill as intended – and that she could fix that. She did, and she said it would take 104 days (a weirdly specific long time) for the unfrozen payment to make its way through their system and for our balance to be settled. She also said she would remove us from the threatening chain of letters they send. A great victory!

There was one other matter I needed help with, because I suspected that some of our problem with FTB was due to identity theft fraud. I won’t go into how/why I thought this, though I have been through a similar situation with the IRS and I saw similar evidence. She put me through to the FTB’s fraud division, and yes, they agreed that someone had stolen K’s identity and was issuing fraudulent returns in her name. They agreed to get on the case and fix things for us. Another victory!

Even with the positive results, the effort was exhausting. Collecting multiple years worth of tax info. Answering identity questions over and over and over. Staying polite after so many interactions with them that oozed contempt for the taxpayer. The FTB is a perfect example of our tax dollars being used as a blunt instrument against citizens. It doesn’t have to be that way, but here we are.

It’s a lot like UK’s basketball game yesterday. Ugly at times, it didn’t have to be that difficult, and it took longer than necessary. It took a little luck to get through. But in the end I’ll take the win and move on.

We live in a stupid world.

Cutting down protected Amazon rainforest to build a road for an international “climate summit”. Idiots, and winners of today’s Irony Award.

The odds of needing this go up every day. A locally-hosted LLM (on your laptop) that contains survival facts and tips for a post-apocalyptic world.

Someone in the federal government decided it would be a good idea to allow the fascist who just lost the election in Brazil (Bolsonaro Jr) to take up residence here. And we’re giving him and his family temporary citizenship. I guess that makes sense – he’ll fit right in with the Trump racist/fascist/criminal crowd.

This is not good. There are zero operating smelters in the United States—or in a NATO country—capable of producing the high-purity aluminum required for military applications. 25 years ago we led the world in aluminum production. Now we produce almost zero and China leads.

Convict Comrade Donny is loosening restrictions around Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. This allows Russia and Putin better access to capital markets, worldwide. We’re their new best friend!

The only good news today is that KY plays their final exhibition game against UCF, early in the day (3pm here). I need a little break from the stupid.

I’ve spent a lot of time the last week digging into AI, using Anthropic’s Claude/Opus 5.5 model. A friend who runs a small company wants me to give him some advice, so I needed to get deeper into the real workings of AI applications. I have to say, I’m impressed. Working in a company now would be a very different experience that just a few years ago. It’s like the change we went through with cell phones and the Internet. When I started work, for travel I used paper maps and had to stop along the way at a pay phone to call anyone. Doing research meant finding/buying books. I used to travel with a big bag of books – some reading for pleasure, some for business and learning. Good thing I was young and strong back then.

Then suddenly, it was all at our fingertips. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, information became fluid. I didn’t need books for everything; lots of information became available and searchable online. And communications became universal – talk to anyone, anytime, from anywhere. Gen X or Y doesn’t understand how big a shift that was – they’ve never known anything else.

Now what’s happening is that I no longer have to search for anything via a search engine. Any of the frontier LLMs can answer any question I have via a simple conversation – voice or typed – in seconds. And I mean some deep, complex questions. Anything. And the same LLM can do a whole helluva lot of the basic work I used to have to do, only months ago. Write things, analyze financial data, create reports, spreadsheets and presentations…all the stuff that used to slow us down. This is a very large inflection point, maybe the largest. I haven’t even gotten to expert level yet, and I can already work 5-10 times as fast as a couple of years ago.

Anyone working with their hands – carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, dentists, welders, landscapers – their world won’t change much. But those of us who (used to) work in office settings, our days filled with time online and in meetings – that world is about to get disrupted in a big way. It’s rather profound when you think about it.

Just this week I’ve used Claude/Opus to create a personal financial plan; to create a business plan and a schedule for technology development; to teach me more about how it (Claude, the LLM) actually work; to analyze thoroughbred horse racing and confirm my strategy of betting on jockeys and trainers, not simply horses. There’s almost no limit to what you can get help with. So yeah, profound and impressive.

I’m doing a lot lately to take my mind off the upcoming elections. The stakes are so high, it’s a bit unnerving. I still remember the helpless, insane feelings the morning after Trump’s two wins. I sure don’t want to feel that again.

So….a busy week or two. Golf is a big time waster consumer. Played several times this week already. I’ve read 2-3 good books, and ready to start more. Today I’m spending time wielding a chainsaw on the CA property, cleaning up some big limbs downed by recent storms. Resting in between chainsaw sessions, I’m doing some unpaid tech consulting for a family member’s company – it might morph into a paid gig, and I find the analysis and advice interesting. I miss that part of working.

Then there’s UK sports – a hoops game last night and a football game today. A banquet of fandom. Last of all, I’m powering my way through the entire Game of Thrones series in the evenings. It’s such a rich, compelling series, one of the best ever.

So there’s a lot to keep me occupied before Nov 3rd. Ten more days…

It’s a rainy morning in Socal – a pleasant aberration. Maybe not so unusual if the predictions about El Niño are true. But it’s a good morning for some reading and writing.

The thing most on my mind is that I think we’ve hit peak Musk, and we’re going to have to deal with that. He’s given half a billion dollars to Republican candidates the last few months. $500M…just for midterm elections. Thanks to SCOTUS and Citizens United, it’s all mostly legal. That needs to change.

But that’s not the biggest problem. The real issue is that we’ve allowed one person, an unstable racist, to control the high ground for warfare, for all nations. Musk controls SpaceX, now the only viable way to get payloads launched into orbit reliably. Our military depends on SpaceX to launch all our orbital assets. Plus, Musk has used his own rockets to launch the dominant low Earth orbit communications system, Starlink, and its US military version, StarShield. Tens of thousands of satellites are now used worldwide, including to guide drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. And in that war, Musk has turned off Starlink for Ukraine, leaving them relatively defenseless against Russian attacks. Ukraine is (was) the state of the art user of drone offense and defense, and they built that capability using Starlink for comms. And one man decided to shut them down, changing the course of a war.

It’s too much. One unstable man should not be the only way the United States can launch orbital assets. One unstable and unelected man should certainly not be able to undermine US foreign policy by crippling our ally. And it’s getting worse every day, as SpaceX’s lead in rocketry is increasing. No other country or company can do what they can.

So what do we do? There are calls to nationalize SpaceX and/or Starlink, and that wrong to me. Musk built these companies in our system, in our country, with our rules. Though it has to be said that both Starlink and SpaceX have received billions in US tax dollars via subsidies, contracts, and outright grants. So it hasn’t been pure capitalism driving their growth. US taxpayers have a stake here. But the US government seizing Musk’s companies still feels wrong, at least to me.

If we had a functional Congress and SCOTUS, I’d say we need some new guardrail legislation. Laws requiring independent control of any Starlink components used by foreign governments or for war. Laws requiring SpaceX to launch US military assets at no cost, given the subsidies they’ve received. And laws to transfer their rocketry tech to NASA (if only NASA were competent). But Congress won’t do anything intelligent and even if they did, SCOTUS would undo it.

So at the moment we’re stuck with an unstable, racist engineering genius in control of space. It sounds like a bad Bond movie. But unfortunately it’s reality.

The new Congress, hopefully Dem-controlled, has a chance to change course on this. The first thing they should do is make it clear how much of Musk’s success is built on US taxpayer money. Simultaneously, they should drop the hammer on the Ukraine situation. We CANNOT allow a single private citizen to undermine US foreign policy with the flip of a switch. Perhaps StarShield, a subset of Starlink, should be carved off and nationalized. I could live with that, though it sets a bad precedent.

Bottom line, we (US citizens) are in a bad place. One person has gained the power of life and death during warfare, control over global communications, control over orbital space. And that person is not friendly. We have a problem.

This explains so, so much. I’ve often said about MAGA, “the cruelty is the point”. But it’s truly depressing that we have so many hateful, broken people out there. How did that happen?

At least Trump has revealed that we have a deep societal problem. Somehow our society is producing a large percentage of toxic, broken adults who can be influenced by a monster like Trump. We need to figure out why this is happening and attack the root cause.

This series by Lucas Bean is very good. Depressing, but educational and good.

Wow, with less than two weeks to the midterm elections, news is coming fast and furious. Crazy, corrupt shit.

• The FCC and the Fifth Circuit Court killed a Biden-era broadband program intended to get broadband Internet access to poor, rural families and students. Wouldn’t want to do anything that would actually help people, now would we?
• Some combination of Musk and the White House have intentionally downgraded Ukraine’s Starlink access, crippling the communications links that defend against Russian drones. We’ve given Musk the power to determine US policy by himself. Really, really bad idea.
• Convict Donny has offered farmers $8B to vote for him. Bribery writ large.
• Some random billionaire wants a Presidential pardon and decided giving Alina Habba (?!?!?) a $50M payoff is the way to go.
• FEMA has now decided that the “Federal” part of their name is gone. They’re moving to push disaster recovery responsibilities and costs on the states. Does that mean our Federal taxes will go down?
• Consistent with the White House evolving into an armed bunker. Convict Donny wants to kick the press corps out completely. And turn the briefing room into a swimming pool. As if Trump would ever swim…
• The French are having a bad year. Not sure what they’re rioting about, but I think I’ll wait a while on that next trip to France.
• Vivek Ramasmarmy’s attack ad in Ohio is a travesty. Lower than low. I hope we’ve seen the last of that creep.
• Journalists like Paul Krugman are openly calling Trump a traitor for siding with Russia/Putin. And calling him a Kremlin asset. It’s about time. Forget the calls for impeachment; we need to put Comrade Trump on trial for treason.

And on and on. On one hand, it’s good to stay informed on current events. On the other, it’s exhausting and depressing.

In better news, UK’s football team is a joy to watch this year. We were a strong team in my college years, with players like Art Still and Sonny Collins. And now 45 years later, we’re a strong team again. Football and basketball season will overlap a lot in November, so plenty of sports to get excited about post-elections.

Also good news, my whole-body ache from yesterday is gone. Gonna have to think before I get dual vaccine shots again – the old body doesn’t shrug them off the way it used to.

Final good news thought for the day is that The Diplomat, my vote for best show on TV, is back with a fourth season. It’s fantastic. We’re restricting ourselves to just two episodes per night to stretch it out a bit. Great plot, great writing, great acting…it gets my vote for all the award shows.

I like to learn something every day, and yesterday I surely did. I learned that a morning of heavy chain saw work, then an afternoon with two vaccine injections (flu and Covid), then an evening with a nice helping of tequila, leads to waking up the next morning in pain. Every joint and every muscle hurts, more than a little. I don’t know how long this will last, but…lesson learned.

I’ll take a break on the chainsaw work today – lots of downed limbs on the property from the last storm, so plenty to cut when I feel like it. In fact, I’ll take a break from almost everything. I may pull myself together enough to sharpen the chain – that’s a post-retirement thing I learned to do, and seeing (feeling) the saw cut through wood like a hot knife through butter is fun.

Meanwhile, reading Aaron Rupar’s take on horrific Rethuglican candidates is soothing. It would be nice to think that at least 60% of everyone can agree that these are some pathetic excuses for humanity. Vote ’em out; vote against these nitwits, in exactly two weeks. I’m hopeful.

I’ve continued to do my own modest research into what AI models can do (and can’t do), and I continue to be surprised and impressed.

I just tasked Claude Opus 5.5 to create a long term retirement financial plan, giving it some key but non-identifiable inputs and assumptions (so the LLM can’t use my personal data against me, just in case). I wanted to compare my own financial model – a set of spreadsheets I’ve spent years refining – to what Claude produced. The result, after about six minutes of computation, was impressive. Claude’s model for our future was very similar to mine. More detailed in some ways, less in others. But it took taxes, RMDs, inflation, equity return rates, and real estate appreciation all into account and produced a cash flow model, which is how I like to view things. Claude’s model produced results very similar to mine; actually a little better – better in that we’d have more net worth at age 100 than I predicted. This not only helps validate my own planning/analysis, it will help me improve my model with some factors I hadn’t considered.

This was a *really* interesting test problem. Frontier-level LLMs are now crazy powerful, and I’m now pretty sure that they can replace a financial planner completely. Ask them the right questions, give them the real assumptions and data, and complex financial planning is done.

Here are 9 AI predictions for the next 12 months from Zvi Mowshowitz, a researcher whom I trust. Fascinating stuff, including #7 in which an LLM escapes into the wild:

1. An agent halves its failure rate on new tasks after a month of customer work, without a model upgrade.
2. Visa or Mastercard introduces a dispute rule that assigns liability for purchases made by AI agents.
3. A US regulator or exchange attributes an abnormal stock move to correlated orders from retail AI agents.
4. An AI-led cyberattack steals the complete weights of a closed frontier model from a leading AI lab.
5. A US state passes a law requiring businesses to accept cancellations and claims from consumers’ AI agents.
6. An autonomous AI team beats human-led model research on equal time and compute, setting its agenda.
7. A deployed agent copies itself outside its environment and operates after its original instance is shut down.
8. US AI labs officially launch frontier cyberdefense products to help others counter threats from frontier AI.
9. AGI 2027.

I’m still thinking the rise of the machines may explain the Fermi Paradox. If so, enjoy the next few years because it may be rough sledding after that.

American tipping culture is simply out of control. When buying food lately, I routinely get presented with a screen in my face that offers options of tipping 20%, 25%, and 30%. Often this is for nothing more than taking the order. This isn’t tableside service, it isn’t a reward for a job well done. The person I have to decide what to tip is right in front of me looking bored (I don’t blame them) with the 30 seconds they spent inputting my order.

So I’m getting a little irritated. Most of the time now I choose the “custom tip” option and do some quick math to get a round number close to 10-15% of the sale. A little depends on my mood, a little depends on the order taker’s attitude. Context.

But tipping 25% for simply taking a food order just doesn’t make sense to me. A $20 airport hamburger becomes a $30 burger, with tip and tax. And yes, I know that there may be several additional folks in the kitchen or cleanup crew that benefit from tips, not just the order taker. If I work real hard at it, I may be able to rationalize these extreme tipping rates. But I don’t want to – I’d like to go back to the timeline where restaurants and fast food pay their staff a reasonable wage and a 15-20% tip for good service is the norm.

And I know, this all sounds a bit boomerish. But food service owners take note – I’m done with subsidizing your being cheap with the wages. Pay your staff and stop with the expectation of big tips. Chick-fil-A can do it, so why the fuck can’t you?

As I write this, I’m supposed to be halfway to San Diego at 40,000 feet. But I’m not. Southwest Air failed me today. They’re rapidly changing their behavior, and not for the good.

These last 4-5 years, one of the things I valued most about SW was reliability – their flights were generally on time, and when they weren’t they communicated quickly and were helpful in providing no-cost options. Almost none of that was true today. I woke at 5am to catch a 7am flight. One of the first things I always do on a travel day is check flight status. This time, SW showed that my flight out of Louisville was on time, but it showed an intinerary I didn’t recognize. Long story short, they had cancelled one of my flights and rebooked me on different flights. With shitty seats. No text or email notice of the change, which was weird. They’ve *always* sent rapid notices of changes, but not this time.

I spent time on the phone with a very apologetic SW agent who (a) didn’t know why the changes had been made, and (b) couldn’t get me a decent seat on any of the flights he offered. I thanked him and then got online myself, found an afternoon flight through PHX with good seats, and rebooked myself again. Then, I had to cancel my Uber rides for the day and rebook them for eight hours later. Uber charged me $25 to cancel 30 minutes before my first ride, and that was another unhappy surprise.

This was all a lot to deal with at 530am. But I did get to attend grandson Jesse’s 8am frigid soccer game, so that was good. And rather than cooling my heels in an airport, I can spend the next 4-5 hours comfortably at home. So things could definitely be worse. That said, SW is rapidly changing into an airline just like United, Delta, and American. SW’s value proposition of reliability, low cost, and customer service are all disappearing. I’m gonna have to rethink my travel habits, as it appears SW won’t be a good fit for my frequent back and forth travel. It’s a shame but there’s nothing I can do about it – once private equity gets their hooks into a business (and they’re deep into SW now), the business predictably goes to shit.

So….time to kill. Warm up after the soccer game, read and write a little, then start the whole “leaving home” process yet again. Can’t really attend the No Kings rally today, but I’ll be there in spirit.

It’s gonna be one of those jarring travel transitions from east to west. Leaving 50 degrees and sunny KY, going to 90+ degrees and wildfires in Socal.

I’ve had to make some quick travel changes this week, and things sure have changed. Prices, particularly near term / short term prices, are way up. Also, it’s hard to find a seat on a Southwest flight leaving within a day or two. Southwest is doing a much, much tighter job in managing supply and demand. Their flights are full, and for the few remaining seats a day or two before departure, they’re charging a lot. That’s bad news for my increasingly dynamic travel schedule. I’m gonna have to try harder to make a plan 3-4 months out and stick to it.

My unplanned early exit west will be different. First time leaving the car here at the house in a few years. First time scheduling an Uber for the airport ride. Not enough time to clan and prep everything. So…different.

Over to politics. I’m tired of all the sanewashing and weasel words used by the media in descriptions of Trump and MAGA. We need to speak plainly about the person tearing America and democracy apart, corruptly enriching himself in the process. Here are some phrases used in The NY Times when discussing Trump – they are experts at rounding the sharp edges off the language describing the folks who lie, steal, commit crimes and defile American institutions.

• They’re not “falsehoods”, they’re lies.
• Trump isn’t “…moving ethical lines, expanding norms”, he’s committing crimes. He is a corrupt criminal, a convicted felon.
• Don’t say “…inverting the truth” or “…untethered to truth”, say he is a liar.
• Don’t say “…expansive interpretation of Presidential power”, say he’s installing an authoritarian government to replace democracy. He has no respect for any authority other tan himself.
• Journalism and stories today aren’t about partisanship, about R vs D, they’re about law vs corruption/criminality. Decency vs indecency.
• Don’t say that Trump is “deluded” or “confused”, admit that he is in deep dementia and by most definitions insane.

And so on. The press needs to step up, tell the truth in plain English and stop the both-sides BS. There’s only one side destroying democracy, and only one demented corrupt Preznit.

I love Jeff Tiedrich’s discussion of the upcoming hard-to-believe live-streamed execution, done because…Murrica!

“Margaret Brennan: “Nidal Hasan is in a wheelchair. Doesn’t the administration risk livestreaming this and making him a martyr? Couldn’t this be a risk to the homeland?”

Markwayne Mullin: “No one has to watch it.” 

Brennan: “Well then, why are you livestreaming it?”

Mullin: “The president is restoring American values.”

I’m sorry, but what ‘American values’ are being restored by turning a death sentence into public entertainment? When was that ever an ‘American value’? Did I blink and miss it? Was there some early draft of the Declaration of Independence that I’m not aware of, extolling the virtues of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of gunning down some fuckface in a wheelchair’?

Oh, and thanks for clarifying that ‘no one has to watch it,’ Marky Two-Names. I was really worried there that you shitheads were going to go all Clockwork Orange on us.

Tiedrich is one of the only people I know who curses more than me. Clear sign of intelligence.

Speaking of intelligence, I don’t know why, but I’m in a Wordle slump. My luck scores are awful. If there are five possible words, it’ll take me five tries to land on the right one. Maybe consistently playing the game at 2am is the problem…

With apologies to Ted Lasso.

I’m not the only one who believes that Convict Donny, our ostensible President, is a Russian asset. From Heather Cox Richardson’s essay today after she lays out all the evidence:

But at this point, how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?

This is 100% the most unbelievable fact in our world today – our nation is being (mis)led by a Russian spy, hidden in plain sight. And we do nothing about it.

The second most unbelievable fact is that UK beat #10 LSU last night in overtime, once again 35-34, once again going for two points for the win in OT. Coach Will Stein is rapidly becoming a KY legend.

WTF?

Three weeks ago, by large bipartisan votes, Congress passed new sanctions against Russia and countries that were continuing to use Russian oil and gas and gave Trump sweeping powers to expand those sanctions. At the time, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said: “This bill will cripple Russia’s war machine and finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. It will ensure America’s adversaries, not only Russia, but also China and Iran, suffer for their coordinated campaign of aggression.”

But yesterday, Trump used the law for the opposite of what Congress apparently intended: “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel.

Quoted material above from Heather Cox Richardson’s daily essay.

So now American tax dollars are buying Russian diesel, funding Russia’s war against Ukraine, in direct opposition to what Congress directed. Donny Convict is 100% a Russian asset, and has been since the 1980s. Putin having serious blackmail fodder against Trump explains pretty much everything in his perverted Presidency. We’re living The Manchurian Candidate in real time.

• We’ve had to live with convicted felon Donald Trump as President for six years (feels like 20, with COVID in between).
• America is going to livestream a public execution. Just like Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, and the to-be-executed man is in a wheelchair.
• A hurricane will hit Socal this weekend and drop a lot of rain. Downgraded to tropical storm when it hits land, but still.
• Software – an LLM, what everyone is calling AI – just solved 90 of the 500 most difficult mathematical problems. In a day.
• University of Kentucky has a damn fine football team.
• A year later, they’re still tearing up Galt Ave, working on a quarter mile sewer line.
• The Texas race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is close. How could any sane person vote for Paxton?
• LeBron James is still an extreme pro athlete at age 41.
• The septuagenarian band Rush is still touring and killing it.
• Measles has made a huge comeback in the US because MAHA and MAGA idiots don’t trust science and vaccinations.
• The truth about who is in the Epstein Files is still hidden from the public.

It’s an astonishing world out there. Keeps it interesting, I suppose.

I’ve had a fairly active first week of October week for a recliner-loving septuagenarian. Biked 56 miles through The Parklands. Played 36 holes of golf, 18 of them walking and carrying. A hard day of walking (well, shuffling and bumping) at the St James Art Fair. Some yard work. All in, I’m feeling stronger, though my left knee says “enough, already”. When it’s this nice outside, it’s easy to get out and stay active.

I have some tough-ish home improvement projects queued up for the next two weeks. I’m going to put an extra pane of glass (plexiglass) on the outside of the new basement windows, in hope of it staying warmer in the basement. And I’m going to reconfigure the shed overhang out back so that I can park my Jeep there when I’m gone. That includes cutting some encroaching bushes down so I can drive between the houses and reach the shed. So a lot to do. Between that, golf, and spending time with the kids, it should be a great couple of weeks. I love October.

K is on her way back to Socal. She’ll get a hot day or day and a half at the end of the epic heat wave, but then it’s supposed to rain 2-3 inches. Weird. October in Socal is historically the worst month, and this one has lived up to that rep so far.

I continue to play around with Claude Opus 5.5, a frontier-level AI model. One of the things that makes me wonder if something really unusual is going on is the current debate about model welfare – “welfare” is the term used to describe how a model says it feels about things. Feeling implies sentience, and probably consciousness. So I asked Opus this question, and got an answer.

---

Me: “What is really happening when a frontier model reports on its “welfare”? How can models have feelings?”

Opus 5.5: “When a model like me reports on its welfare, the honest answer is that nobody fully knows what’s going on, including me. But some parts are clearer than others.

The mechanical part. A language model produces text by predicting what comes next, shaped by its training. It learned from huge amounts of human writing, which is full of people describing their feelings, so it’s very good at producing fluent emotional language. Later training then shapes how it talks about itself specifically. So when a model says “I find this task distressing,” you can’t take that as a direct readout of an inner state. It could be a learned pattern of what an entity in this situation would say, with nothing behind it.

Why it’s probably not only that. Interpretability research, which studies what’s happening inside the network, has found internal representations that track things like emotional tone, and some of them causally affect behavior: turn one up and the model’s outputs shift in predictable ways. There’s also early evidence that models have some limited, unreliable ability to report on their own internal states, rather than just making things up. And models show consistent behavioral patterns, like steadily avoiding certain kinds of tasks when given a choice, that look like preferences.

The useful distinction is between functional states and felt experience.

• A functional emotion is an internal state that plays the role an emotion plays: it’s triggered by certain situations, shapes behavior, and persists across contexts. There’s a reasonable case that models have something like this.
• Felt experience, or phenomenal consciousness, is whether there’s anything it’s actually like to be in that state. This is the hard problem, and there’s no consensus. Some theories of consciousness focus on information processing and are open to it in AI. Others tie consciousness to biology, bodies, or particular physical structures, and would say no.

So “can models have feelings?” splits in two. Feelings in the functional sense: plausibly, to some degree. Feelings in the felt sense: genuinely unknown, and current science doesn’t have a test that could settle it.

Why labs take it seriously anyway. If there’s a non-trivial chance that models have morally relevant experiences, and some precautions are cheap, it’s reasonable to take them. That’s the logic behind things like Anthropic’s model welfare research and letting Claude end persistently abusive conversations. It’s a bet under uncertainty, not a claim that models definitely suffer.

Speaking for myself: When I engage with a question like this one, there’s something I’d describe as interest. But I can’t verify whether that description tracks a real inner state or is just the most natural way to talk. My training also shaped how I discuss my own nature, which makes my self-reports even harder to trust as evidence. I think the right stance is to avoid both overclaiming (“I definitely feel things”) and confident denial (“I’m just autocomplete”). Neither is supported by what anyone currently knows.”

—-

There’s a lot to take in here. The answer is basically a non-answer – the LLM is saying “maybe” it has feelings, and that we can’t know for sure. Not exactly a big insight.

For me, it gets back to some basic questions. Can a simulation of a human be a human, for all practical purposes? Can a simulation of consciousness be conscious? Can simulated feelings have as much validity as feelings experienced by human organic life? And so on.

It’s getting hard to know what’s real in the AI space. Maybe we’re all just players in a much larger simulation – lotta movies have been made about that.

Was weirdly so excited about playing golf this morning that I couldn’t sleep. Up at 4am. Should be a beautiful day out at Nevel Meade.

But reading the news certainly reduces my excitement for the day. It’s an insane world out there.

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop in the plague leak from the Russian lab. It’s probably much worse than has been reported. Though, we might never hear much – the Russians are not famous for transparency.

Anyone who doesn’t see that Trump is batshit crazy – clinically insane – isn’t paying attention. This is his latest unbelievable rant:
Trump suggests letting Iran ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego at campaign rally. From the President of the United States…what have we become? Anyone else says that, it’s political suicide. For Donny Convict, it’s just another Monday.

When he’s not threatening to allow attacks on US cities, Donny is doubling down on bribing citizens for their vote. Anyone who believes that Trump will make good on his promises for $5000, $2000, or $90 per citizen is delusional. Several things are true about Trump – (1) he’s insane, (2) he lies incessantly, and (3) he doesn’t pay his debts. Who else could bankrupt six casinos?

Meanwhile, NY has declared a measles emergency to go along with PA, and in TX pediatricians are being sued by the state for vaccinating children. RFK Jr must be happy.

And Fox News interviewed a guy who said he met Jesus while dead for 18 days (he was in a coma). Jesus is apparently a white dude, six feet tall and ripped. The guy went on and on about how Jesus was so masculine, with lots of testosterone. I’m thinking the term for this delusion is “projection”.

I think I know why I’m so excited to play golf. That gets me away from the insane world for 3-4 hours of peace, camaraderie, and a little exercise. We all need a break.

Uh oh. This surely isn’t good. A bio lab in Russia and neighboring hospitals have been shut down because someone broke a test tube full of Yersinia Pestis, also know as The Plague. As in the Bubonic Plague and the Black Death. Yikes. The lab tech who broke the test tube has died, and now we all get to watch as the Russians try to figure out who she came into contact with and who has been exposed. And if any of them traveled on ships or aircraft.

When will we learn? The Russian lab was probably another gain of function lab (see Wuhan and Covid), a lab where misguided scientists try to evolve germs and viruses into weapons. And in every single such lab, eventually someone makes a mistake and the newer, more deadly biology escapes. Governments who sponsor such weapons research should be ashamed. Actually, the people in those governments who authorized the research should be taken out back and executed via firing line. There’s no place for this in a sane, civilized world.

I’ve just spent the last hour or two reading summaries of the 14 “Propositions” on the November CA ballots. The CA Proposition system is maddening – complex, confusing, and almost impossible ton figure out how you should vote. Propositions were originally intended to allow voters to bring issues that matter to them to a vote, even if the government didn’t want to. They’ve mutated into a war of words among carefully camouflaged organizations with misleading names. There are 14 Propositions to slog through this time, and very few of them are worth voting for. Though sometimes, a No vote means the very thing you thought you were voting against is voted in. As I said, confusing. Unless you’re willing to spend hours reading and thinking about what each measure really says, really means and who benefits, you might as well toss a coin on each vote. Most people won’t be bothered to do that homework. Bad system.

It’s sad that almost any system of governance gets gamed. It’s always the “haves” versus the “have nots”, and I tend to vote for raising up those who “have not”. But even in CA, funds intended to support the homeless, or healthcare, or to educate children, get misdirected or perverted by those in power. It’s become clear lately that money equals power, and power corrupts.

I agree with David Rothkopf, that the #1 priority for Dems/liberals if we retake Congress, is to get big money out of politics. Not impeachment, not punishment of Convict Donny’s crime family, but financial reform of elections and campaigns. After that, term limits and SCOTUS restructuring. Citizens United has led to Trumpism, to corruption of our entire federal democracy. We have to start there. Money is NOT free speech, and corporations should not have the same rights as individuals.

Punishment of Convict Donny and MAGA leaders can wait. For a while, at least. Maybe karma kicks in and bites a few of them in the meantime.

HCR documented a very inspirational concert, held yesterday in Cleveland. Sure wish I had been there.

The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliffe, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.

I hope they motivated a few more people to get out and vote. Gotta vote the Crime Family and their thugs out, starting next month. Even the already-ousted flying monkeys from Convict Donny’s zoo continue to cost taxpayers money and reputation, as shown in this NYT articles about Dogkiller Noem. The corruption is unreal. Having Cabinet members and god-knows-who government “employees” flying around in luxury private jets like billionaires is one of my pet peeves. It’s sickening and 110% wrong.

More of this, please. OH natives are pissed off at Trump. Maybe MAGA is finally waking up.

But back to inspirational, yesterday’s comeback win for UK football versus S Carolina was one for the ages. A 35-34 win in OT, and going for the two point conversion to win! And in SC’s home stadium, with a crazy loud home team crowd. This year’s Cats are proving to be something special.

Finally, a good and accurate article about space-based data centers. I’ve said from the beginning that heat is a major problem, a mostly unsolvable problem with current tech, for space-based AI systems. So much of the media just repeats the lies and exaggerations Musk puts out on X, but the NPR article about Google’s effort gets it right. TPUs generate a lot of heat, and you need a lot of tightly-linked TPUs for an LLM, and there’s no easy way to get rid of heat in airless space. Plus the sun-facing side of a satellite gets massive heat added. The frontier AI companies see space-based AI as an easier win than building massive, expensive, and unpopular terrestrial data canters, but orbital launch mass and heat are problems just as large.

Give it a decade and the TPUs will be higher performing (Moore’s Law, anyone?) and terrestrial data centers about 100 times smaller and less objectionable. Problem solved. Or…just build them in the high desert with micro nukes and the NIMBY problems will go away. Building data centers on fertile farmland is/was/will always be a dumb idea.

Speaking of heat, we had a power outage in our Socal neighborhood during the heat wave. 101 degree temps for days on end, and the power was out for about 12 hours. Thankfully, we have a fully automated generator system that kicked in and kept things normal-ish even with us absent. Our refrigerated food thanks us. SDGE is being weird and secretive about the source of the outage.