Reasoning machines are here

We don't know how to digest them. 

I am writing an environmental paper that the machine can do faster and better. 

In my own eyes, it has instantly devaluated my work. 

But the client does not know yet, so I'll complete the job and collect the money. 

Thinking about things smarter than ourselves

 Internationally, we will need to lay groundwork for cooperation, including with China, if we are to avoid what otherwise looks like a reckless and potentially suicidal race to create things smarter than ourselves before someone else does it first, and then to hand over control to them before someone else does that first, too.

From: The Zvi  

Stock picking

 

The Yellow Menace

 
The Chinese startup DeepSeek has launched an Artificial Intelligence machine that is much cheaper faster and better than the American competitors. NVidia fell 17% to this hour and the American 500 billion budget to advance the technology just received a hard beating. If other industries are a precedent, and they are, Chinese manufacturers will erase American industry. 

The Japanese auto industry outcompeted American manufacturers like Ford, Chevrolet, and other former giants. Like German and British producers before, the American industrial heartland has been emptied. Japanese industry liquidated the photography and watch industries.  People said they were unstoppable. Yet Japan, while still very powerful, has found its place and is not menacing the world. Now China is following the same process and is trying to erase the American hi-tech, AI industry. At a certain point, it will slow down and integrate into the world.  

Fortune asks: 

• How did China manage to catch up so quickly?
• Is there any hope for the United States to regain a clear lead?

Eric Rauscher writes:

For Nvidia shareholders, today is an opportunity to pick up shares at a discount. The focus shouldn’t be on the next six months but on the next ten years. The demand for computational power will only grow as AI evolves. Models like DeepSeek R1 are merely early milestones in a journey that will require exponential growth in hardware capacity. Those who can see the long game will realize that Nvidia and similar companies aren’t under threat. They are essential pillars of a future dominated by artificial intelligence. Be cool, and don’t panic.

Next day: Nvidia re-gained 7%, up the level two months ago. Somehow NASDAQ stabilized.

We were nothing

 James Barr writes in the Epilogue that "It was the struggle between France and Britain for mastery over the Middle East that led the two countries to carve up the Ottoman Empire with the Sykes-Picot agreement, and it was British dissatisfaction over the outcome of this deal that led them, fatefully, to proclaim their support for Zionist ambitions in the Balfour Declaration."

In other words, Zionism was then an unimportant plaything between two imperialist powers. A hundred years later, we have grown. Our population and economy are larger than middle-sized European countries like Switzerland and Austria, and our military power is far greater. And we are growing fast. 

On a personal level, I discovered an autobiography of an old love. I am absent from it, and that hurts but is entirely justified. We met after a year in Bauchi, when I was in bad shape. There I got malaria and other bad infections, I drank Methylated alcohol that almost killed me, and the company never paid me so I just took a bus to Lagos and returned to Buenos Aires. There I was without money and a job. Friends were disappearing - that was the time of the Argentine military terror. I tried to move to Venezuela, which was booming, but so many Argentines were trying to escape that the Consulate's door was closed. I took a plane to New York and then to Tel Aviv. She married a German guy and is happy. 

Coming Famine in South Africa

 Pic. The Anglo-Boer War Women’s  Monument opened in 1913, commemorates the 26370 Boer women and children who died in the concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902.

The monument commemorates the Burgers killed during the war and draws out the emotions experienced by departing Commando, the pain of a child dying in his mother's arms, and the losses inflicted on civilians and combatants. 

This morning, I drank a strong coffee and felt so sleepy that I had to return to bed. I had a vivid dream that I was in a group with Boers, and we were discussing today's Expropriation Law with nil compensation. South Africa is following Rhodesia's disastrous example, and soon, there would be no food in the republic because the Zulu were no farmers. I dream very little, but this was strong. 

Untold Crimes

 
Joe Biden, on his last day in office, forgave Anthony Fauci retroactively, starting ten years ago. What was his crime?

The USA disaffiliates from the WHO. Why? It has something to do with the last COVID epidemic. 

I know nothing.

Fauci, who has never been charged with a crime, served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years, including during the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic. Evidence suggests the Wuhan lab was working to modify coronaviruses to infect humans — what is known as "gain-of-function". Fauci financed the research.