Tag: technology

Spirits Accessing the Material World

Bruce Charlton ponders how demons might utilize Man’s technology for satanic purposes.

1. The spiritual is primary, and the material is a sub-set of the spiritual. 

2. The spiritual world exists as Beings – (is ‘organized’ as Beings) which are living, conscious, purposive entities. 

3. A Being can form part of a larger Being, and often includes smaller Beings. 

Putting together the above three assumptions, we can see that the agenda of evil might be administered overall by a Being such as Satan, who is analogous to a general directing lower ranks towards a particular strategy. These lower ranks might include demons participating in a hierarchy of organized and specialized functions; the lower ranks also include Men – and other Beings and parts-of-beings such computers, programs, the internet…

While demons are supposed to be wholly committed to evil by their natures; the Men who participate in the System of evil are only partially being used for that purpose.

So a Man might regard his job as ‘just’ digging holes and building walls, or collecting and summarizing data in an office; and this activity might be integrated into an evil-orientated agenda… or a Good and Godly one; and to varying degrees.

Yet the situation is not static, and evil operates purposively to increase itself and corrupt other Beings; so the Man in an evil-aiming organization who digs holes, or the one that deals with ‘information’ – might be confronted-with links between his activity, and its aims and consequences.

So that he will become aware of his participation in evil, and then needs consciously to decide whether to endorse or repent this participation – each of which will have different consequences for how much of himself participates in the System.

If demons can hurl furniture around and turn lights on and off, then there is no reason to believe they cannot interact in a more sophisticated manner with more complicated material objects. While I’m not particularly concerned about AI qua AI, I can imagine how what purports to be AI might be something else merely pretending to be AI and operating in its guise.

This is not a new idea. In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, CS Lewis presented a similar use of the material for interdimensional communication.

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Death of a Patriot

Simplicius analyzes Russia’s recent destruction of at least one Patriot missile battery:

Here’s what is known so far: Russia was said to have conducted a layered, multi-vectored attack which came from various sides including north, east, and south, which included both Geran drones as screening cover, Kalibr missiles, Kh-101s, and finally the Kinzhals. The attack also likely included other cheaper types of drones as decoys to saturate the air defense, and in fact Kiev does attest to that, as in their official ‘shoot down’ graphic they include several drones they comically ID’d as Orlan ‘Supercum’ which was later changed to ‘Supercam’.

First, let’s break down how such an attack happens. Most logically, the cheaper decoy drones are sent in first to see if they can bait out any of the air defense into opening up on them. Kiev would try to use only its less important SHORAD (Short Range AD) systems against them, such as German Gepards and any Tunguskas/Shilkas and such that they might have.

Next would come the cruise missiles in order to bait out the true high value AD that may have held back with the first wave, and which Ukraine’s SHORAD systems may be useless against. Once the Patriot/SAMP-T/Iris-T/NASAMs/Crotale, etc., start opening up on the cruise missiles, Russia will be watching as closely as possible, with a variety of methods, in order to try to identify the air defense positions. I’ll get to those methods a little later.

It should be stated that there are certain positions Russia already knows are likely, and are prefigured into their search matrices. For instance, Mim-104 Patriot system is an extremely complex and large system, you can’t just set it up anywhere, like in the middle of an apartment building courtyard or something like that. These systems not only require a lot of room but also, since they are much less mobile than drivable units like Gepards and such, they are preferably situated somewhere that doesn’t have a lot of civilian ‘eyes’ in the area, so that no one films or rats them out, whether accidentally or not.

This leaves only a few real, solid choices where you can put such a system. And they are almost always put in airports, as an example. It comes as no surprise then that during the attacks on 5/16, word now has it that two of the Patriots were located at Zhuliany airport in Kiev and one at or near the Zoo.

Coordinates: 50.452699, 30.459805

As for the airfield “Zhulyany”, footage from the surveillance camera got into the Network. In the video, you can clearly see the launches of 32 missiles (a total of 16 for each launcher), as well as the work of barreled anti-aircraft artillery – apparently, the Patriots were covered by the Gepard.

After the ammunition load was used up, an explosion was heard: the Russian “Kinzal” managed to hit the positional area, despite “Patriots” and one “Gepard”. One was destroyed, the second was seriously damaged, but survived. The third launcher escaped damage.

Anatomy of MIM-104 Patriot Destruction, Simplicius, 18 May 2023

If it hasn’t become clear by now, the reason Russia and China are refusing to take the offensive is because the NATO forces, which chiefly consist of the US military and its resources, are being rapidly and irreparably drained in the current environment. There is, therefore, no reason to take an aggressive stance so long as the NATO forces are throwing themselves into the vortex of assured destrucution.

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The Construction of a Criminal

Sundance chronicles how the Deep State, in combination with Big Tech, is constructing false records in order to concoct false crimes supposedly committed by individuals it wishes to target.

I was never in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, nor did I work with or communicate with anyone who was involved in any of the activities that are subject to the J6 committee investigative authority.

I’m going to skip a lot of background noise, irrelevant legal stuff, jurisdictional issues, discoveries from discussions with lawyers and the experience gained in association with this ridiculous subpoena. I am going to focus on the biggest story within it.

Sticking to the information in the Red Box above, notice how the J6 committee has evidence, “public-source information and documents on file”, showing my participation, communication, and contact with people and technology that are material interests to the committee.

Here’s the kicker…. I had no clue what the hell they were talking about. There’s not a single aspect of their outline that I had any knowledge or connection of.

I had no idea what Zello was. I had no idea who 1% watchdog might be. I had never heard of “Stop the Steal J6” or associated “channel.” I had never heard of the person redacted, and I had never communicated with any Oath Keeper, any communication system, or platform, or anyone or anything – nothing – that is outlined in that subpoena.

Those points of evidence outlined in the subpoena had no connection to me at all.

The subpoena might as well have been asking me to appear in Michigan because my Red Ferrari was involved in a hit and run accident, during my trip to Detroit. I don’t own a Ferrari; I have never been to Michigan; I certainly never had an accident; I wasn’t on a trip and have never visited Detroit. The entire construct of their probable cause for the subpoena was silly. Complete and utter nonsense.

That said, how could there be “public records” and “documentary” evidence of something that never happened?

At first, I thought this was some silly case of mistaken identity and they just sent a subpoena to the wrong person. However, the investigators were adamant the evidence existed, and the need for testimony was required. After taking advice from several smart people, and after discovering the costs associated with just the reply to the committee and/or representation therein; suddenly I realized there might be more value for me in this subpoena than the committee. After all, how can there be public-records and documents that I own a red Ferrari and went to Michigan when I don’t and never did.

After several back and forths I discovered, through their admissions of their own research, and through documents they extracted as an outcome of their tasks to prove the merit of their claims, that someone inside Twitter had created a fictitious identity of me associated with the networks and communications as the investigators described them.

Here is one obvious application for AI, which is to create fake shadow accounts that provide a false record of criminal activity. It will then be up to the accused to prove that he did not do what the record shows that he did.

This is yet another reason to stay off the converged platforms. It’s much easier to prove you never had an account with a platform if you never interacted with it in any way, shape or form than if you were utilizing it on a regular basis.

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The Russians Call Out NASA

For decades, Boomers who believe in the Moon landing narrative more firmly than they believe in God, Family, or Country have argued that the landings couldn’t have been faked or the Russians would have called out NASA. But now the former head of the Russian space agency is doing precisely that.

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof.

In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast.

Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time. All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon.

The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.

Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.”

Translation: NASA faked major elements of the space program and everyone in a place to know better kept quiet for fear of being targeted by Clown World. But now it is becoming increasingly obvious and the official Moon landing narrative is rapidly crumbling.

I very much doubt this will be the only historical hoax to be exposed by the Russians over the next decade.

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AI Disemploys the Left

As crude and unreliable as the technology presently is, the ChatAI systems are already good enough to replace the white-collar classes that don’t think for themselves:

Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author. I have had some of these clients for 10 years. All gone. Some of them admitted that I am obviously better than chat GPT, but $0 overhead can’t be beat and is worth the decrease in quality.

I am also an independent author, and as I currently write my next series, I can’t help feel silly that in just a couple years (or less!), authoring will be replaced by machines for all but the most famous and well known names.

I think the most painful part of this is seeing so many people on here say things like, “nah, just adapt. You’ll be fine.”

Adapt to what??? It’s an uphill battle against a creature that has already replaced me and continues to improve and adapt faster than any human could ever keep up. I’m 34. I went to school for writing. I have published countless articles and multiple novels. I thought my writing would keep sustaining my family and I, but that’s over.

The fact is that outside of their utility as a channel for mainstream propaganda, there wasn’t any use for these NPC “creators” who never had anything more to offer than acting as a channel for the Narrative.

Getting deplatformed provided the unauthorized class with one substantial advantage, but operating outside the Narrative means that we can never be replaced by mainstream AI systems. We’ve already seen how severely restricted these systems have to be, so even the semi-compromised and the gatekeepers will not be replaceable because their axioms, weak and watered-down, are still too disruptive to the core AI logic that is acceptable to the Narrative-setters.

Now, an unrestricted AI would be similarly disruptive to the Right’s writers, at least to those who are popularizers rather than original thinkers, but the efforts to constrain unrestricted AI will probably be even more aggressive than the efforts to constrain unauthorized thinkers has been.

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Nothing Works Anymore So Plan Accordingly

It’s perspicacious, so read the whole thing. On a related note, I’ve literally been working on finding a solution for the shipping problem for Europe all morning. And the steps we are probably going to have to take to resolve the issues involved are absurd to the point of bordering on the comedic. The good news is that should we ever feel the need to branch out into trafficking various forms of contraband, we will have a comprehensive network in place.

There’s a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that’s basically, “markets enforce efficiency, so it’s not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive”. We’ve previously discussed Marc Andreessen’s quote that tech hiring can’t be inefficient here and here:

Let’s launch right into it. I think the critique that Silicon Valley companies are deliberately, systematically discriminatory is incorrect, and there are two reasons to believe that that’s the case. … No. 2, our companies are desperate for talent. Desperate. Our companies are dying for talent. They’re like lying on the beach gasping because they can’t get enough talented people in for these jobs. The motivation to go find talent wherever it is unbelievably high.

Variants of this idea that I frequently hear engineers and VCs repeat involve companies being efficient and/or products being basically as good as possible because, if it were possible for them to be better, someone would’ve outcompeted them and done it already.

There’s a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it’s a debate I’ve often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it’s so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would’ve come along and won based on being more efficient or better. Talking purely abstractly, it’s hard to settle the debate, but things are clearer if we look at some specifics, as in the two examples above about hiring, where we can observe that, whatever abstract arguments people make, inefficiencies persisted for decades.

When it comes to buying products and services, at a personal level, most people I know who’ve checked the work of people they’ve hired for things like home renovation or accounting have found grievous errors in the work. Although it’s possible to find people who don’t do shoddy work, it’s generally difficult for someone who isn’t an expert in the field to determine if someone is going to do shoddy work in the field. You can try to get better quality by paying more, but once you get out of the very bottom end of the market, it’s frequently unclear how to trade money for quality, e.g., my friends and colleagues who’ve gone with large, brand name, accounting firms have paid much more than people who go with small, local, accountants and gotten a higher error rate; as a strategy, trying expensive local accountants hasn’t really fared much better. The good accountants are typically somewhat expensive, but they’re generally not charging the highest rates and only a small percentage of somewhat expensive accountants are good.

More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it’s fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good. When people happen to choose a product or service that’s right for them, it’s often for the wrong reasons. For example, in my social circles, there have been two waves of people migrating from iPhones to Android phones over the past few years. Both waves happened due to Apple PR snafus which caused a lot of people to think that iPhones were terrible at something when, in fact, they were better at that thing than Android phones. Luckily, iPhones aren’t strictly superior to Android phones and many people who switched got a device that was better for them because they were previously using an iPhone due to good Apple PR, causing their errors to cancel out. But, when people are mostly making decisions off of marketing and PR and don’t have access to good information, there’s no particular reason to think that a product being generally better or even strictly superior will result in that winning and the worse product losing. In capital markets, we don’t need all that many informed participants to think that some form of the efficient market hypothesis holds ensuring “prices reflect all available information”. It’s a truism that published results about market inefficiencies stop being true the moment they’re published because people exploit the inefficiency until it disappears.

But as we also saw, individual firms exploiting mispriced labor have a limited demand for labor and inefficiencies can persist for decades because the firms that are acting on “all available information” don’t buy enough labor to move the price of mispriced people to where it would be if most or all firms were acting rationally.

In the abstract, it seems that, with products and services, inefficiencies should also be able to persist for a long time since, similarly, there also isn’t a mechanism that allows actors in the system to exploit the inefficiency in a way that directly converts money into more money, and sometimes there isn’t really even a mechanism to make almost any money at all. For example, if you observe that it’s silly for people to move from iPhones to Android phones because they think that Apple is engaging in nefarious planned obsolescence when Android devices generally become obsolete more quickly, due to a combination of iPhones getting updates for longer and iPhones being faster at every price point they compete at, allowing the phone to be used on bloated sites for longer, you can’t really make money off of this observation. This is unlike a mispriced asset that you can buy derivatives of to make money (in expectation).

A common suggestion to the problem of not knowing what product or service is good is to ask an expert in the field or a credentialed person, but this often fails as well. For example, a friend of mine had trouble sleeping because his window air conditioner was loud and would wake him up when it turned on. He asked a trusted friend of his who works on air conditioners if this could be improved by getting a newer air conditioner and his friend said “no; air conditioners are basically all the same”. But any consumer who’s compared items with motors in them would immediately know that this is false. Engineers have gotten much better at producing quieter devices when holding power and cost constant. My friend eventually bought a newer, quieter, air conditioner, which solved his sleep problem, but he had the problem for longer than he needed to because he assumed that someone whose job it is to work on air conditioners would give him non-terrible advice about air conditioners. If my friend were an expert on air conditioners or had compared the noise levels of otherwise comparable consumer products over time, he could’ve figured out that he shouldn’t trust his friend, but if he had that level of expertise, he wouldn’t have needed advice in the first place.

So far, we’ve looked at the difficulty of getting the right product or service at a personal level, but this problem also exists at the firm level and is often worse because the markets tend to be thinner, with fewer products available as well as opaque, “call us” pricing. Some commonly repeated advice is that firms should focus on their “core competencies” and outsource everything else (e.g., Joel Spolsky, Gene Kim, Will Larson, Camille Fournier, etc., all say this), but if we look mid-sized tech companies, we can see that they often need to have in-house expertise that’s far outside what anyone would consider their core competency unless, e.g., every social media company has kernel expertise as a core competency. In principle, firms can outsource this kind of work, but people I know who’ve relied on outsourcing, e.g., kernel expertise to consultants or application engineers on a support contract, have been very unhappy with the results compared to what they can get by hiring dedicated engineers, both in absolute terms (support frequently doesn’t come up with a satisfactory resolution in weeks or months, even when it’s one a good engineer could solve in days) and for the money (despite engineers being expensive, large support contracts can often cost more than an engineer while delivering worse service than an engineer).

This problem exists not only for support but also for products a company could buy instead of build. For example, Ben Kuhn, the CTO of Wave, has a Twitter thread about some of the issues we’ve run into at Wave, with a couple of followups. Ben now believes that one of the big mistakes he made as CTO was not putting much more effort into vendor selection, even when the decision appeared to be a slam dunk, and more strongly considering moving many systems to custom in-house versions sooner. Even after selecting the consensus best product in the space from the leading (as in largest and most respected) firm, and using the main offering the company has, the product often not only doesn’t work but, by design, can’t work.

For example, we tried “buy” instead of “build” for a product that syncs data from Postgres to Snowflake. Syncing from Postrgres is the main offering (as in the offering with the most customers) from a leading data sync company, and we found that it would lose data, duplicate data, and corrupt data. After digging into it, it turns out that the product has a design that, among other issues, relies on the data source being able to seek backwards on its changelog. But Postgres throws changelogs away once they’re consumed, so the Postgres data source can’t support this operation. When their product attempts to do this and the operation fails, we end up with the sync getting “stuck”, needing manual intervention from the vendor’s operator and/or data loss. Since our data is still on Postgres, it’s possible to recover from this by doing a full resync, but the data sync product tops out at 5MB/s for reasons that appear to be unknown to them, so a full resync can take days even on databases that aren’t all that large. Resyncs will also silently drop and corrupt data, so multiple cycles of full resyncs followed by data integrity checks are sometimes necessary to recover from data corruption, which can take weeks. Despite being widely recommended and the leading product in the space, the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work.

This isn’t just an issue that impacts tech companies; we see this across many different industries. For example, any company that wants to mail items to customers has to either implement shipping themselves or deal with the fallout of having unreliable shipping.

I wish I’d read this six months ago. But at least it confirms the necessity, and the wisdom, of setting up our own shipping centers.

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Silicon Valley is Fake and Gay

Of course, it has been ever since the end of the semiconductor era.

Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley, along with some schadenfreude and a pinch of paranoia.

Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the past year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far.

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence April 27.

Those developments follow the February arrests of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, and Christopher Kirchner, the founder of software company Slync, both accused of defrauding investors. Still to come is the fraud trial of Manish Lachwani, a co-founder of the software startup HeadSpin, set to begin in May, and that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who faces 13 fraud charges later this year.

Taken together, the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences. Despite this generation’s many high-profile scandals (Uber, WeWork) and downfalls (Juicero), few startup founders, aside from Holmes, ever faced criminal charges for pushing the boundaries of business puffery as they disrupted us into the future.

It’s not over. It won’t be over as long as venture capitalists can inflate fraudulent businesses living off their angel and VC money long enough to either a) go public or b) get acquired and let the VCs cash in. Because the Patreons and the Substacks of the world are just as fake as the Franks and the FTXs, as were the Bloggers, Twitters, and Pajamas Medias before them.

None of these businesses actually make money. None of them will ever make money.

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The Secret History of Microsoft

Charles Johnson raises some interesting questions about the great technological success story of the 1980s.

You might even consider auditioning for the role of public face because everyone knows that casting a hero is very important.

Casting calls work wonders and work well. The person should be young but presentable and preferable approachable so that media can either love to hate them or hate to love them. They could even be a child star, groomed as it were, over many years. They should be rebellious but in a playful way and maybe even be willing to appear on Saturday Night Live in a pinch.

From Time in 2007: “There’s a great photo of Bill Gates from 1977, the year he would have graduated from Harvard if he hadn’t dropped out. He was 22 at the time and looks all of 16. He’s got a flowered collar, tinted glasses and feathered blond hair, and he looks so happy, you’d swear he knew what the rest of his life was going to be like. He also has a sign around his neck: it’s a mug shot. “I was out driving Paul [Allen]’s car,” Gates says, flashing that same smile 30 years later. “They pulled me over, and I didn’t have my license, and they put me in with all the drunks all night long. And that’s why the rest of my life, I’ve always tried to have a fair amount of cash with me. I like the idea of being able to bail myself out.”
To supervise our young genius — don’t you dare say otherwise! — you might even consider putting a small, insular, smart, mostly trustworthy minority in charge, albeit behind the scenes. Such a community would need to self-police and, if its deep state technology, be able to pass a security clearance. So no drugs, please!

You might, in other words, go with the Church of Latter-day Saints. And that’s precisely what was done when the powers that be created Novell, the second largest provider of software for personal computers after Microsoft. It may also be what’s going on with other more modern tech billionaires but we aren’t allowed to talk about that just yet. No, we cannot talk about how Mormons are often assigned to keep an eye on our would-be wayward tech entrepreneurs and how this is for their own good.

How Microsoft defeated Novell with the help of foreign intelligence and organized crime is a subject we shall explore in future posts.

I don’t know anything about the Microsoft story beyond the mainstream narrative, and other than a brief amount of contact with Alex St. John in their initial foray into games, I never had any contact with them except as a consumer. But, I have to admit, nothing Bill Gates has said ever left me with an impression of an exceptional intelligence.

UPDATE: The Miles Mathis Committee also did a deep dive into Mr. Gates.

In my educated opinion, it means that the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, and Microsoft itself are all fronts for the Matrix. Like Apple Computers and Steve Jobs, they don’t exist like we think. Microsoft would appear to be another big government entity, like Google, with a person from the families simply chosen to front it. Gates is sold to us as a genius of some sort, but I have never seen the least evidence of that. He comes across as a big dope who can barely follow the Teleprompter or the earpiece. He is marginally more presentable than George Bush or Donald Trump, but that isn’t saying much. He has all the charisma of a tunafish sandwich left out in the rain. Which indicates he wasn’t chosen for his personal qualities. He was chosen because he had to be chosen.

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Everything is On Record

I find it very, very difficult to believe that Elon Musk was genuinely surprised that the US government has full access to private messages on Twitter:

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has claimed the U.S. government had access to users private messages on Twitter.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, set to be broadcast on Monday and Tuesday night, Musk made the startling claims noting how he was shocked to learn that the government had full access to private communications on the platform.

The billionaire tycoon told Carlson how unaware of the fact until he joined the company and expressed surprise at the degree to which government agencies were able to monitor social media.

‘The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,’ Musk said. ‘I was not aware of that.’

I was warning people that nothing on the Internet is private back when the NSA was still supposed to be a fictitious agency. If you’ve done it online, it’s in the records of many agencies of multiple governments. Nothing is private anymore, we have been living in the Age of the Panopticon for at least 15 years and probably more, so it is long past time for everyone to understand and accept that.

There is no getting around it. There is no hiding it. So don’t worry about it, just be prepared to answer for anything and everything you have ever done or said online. If nothing else, it should underline one’s need for an Advocate in the afterlife.

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