Tag: technology

Let Experience Be Silent

When more relevant information gainsays its conclusions. Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former Commanding Officer of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment, was certain that the British wunderpanzers were going to wreak havoc on the Russian lines back in June.

As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines. Ukrainian armoured formations are beginning to meet Russian forces in battle, and they are going to pulverise Russia’s defensive lines. I am confident for one simple reason: Ukraine will follow the Western ideology of manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context, while the Russians will follow Soviet doctrine, relying on attrition and numbers. The Russians will find that the armour of Western tanks is far more resilient than flesh and bone, they will die in great numbers, and they will lose.

British-made tanks are about to sweep Putin’s conscripts aside, THE TELEGRAPH, 9 June 2023

Yeah, so, about that…

It turns out that attrition, numbers, and artillery trump propaganda and manoeuvre warfare. And apparently, the British are even more delusional about their tanks than they are about their chances of winning the World Cup. But like the World Cup, the 28 Challenger 2 tanks sent to Ukraine will not be coming home.

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The Risk of Computerized Cars

Mercedes just shut down its software services to all Russian dealers:

German auto giant Mercedes-Benz has completely disconnected Russian dealers from its software, the Izvestia daily reported on Monday, citing the press service of the company’s distributor in Russia.

Access has been suspended to online systems used for maintenance and identification of problems, Mercedes-Benz Russia reportedly told the outlet. Izvestia sources said Germany’s BMW Group has also restricted Russian dealers’ access to its software.

“Dealers have indeed been disconnected from the manufacturer’s online software systems. In some cases, the lack of access to online systems will increase repair times,” Mercedes-Benz Russia was quoted as saying. Car repairs and maintenance will be based on “accumulated experience and knowledge,” the dealer noted.

Given the way things are clearly developing, it won’t be long before your ability to access automative services is as subject to deplatforming as your ability to upload YouTube videos or make posts on social media. We already have to build our own platforms in the unauthorized economy, and soon we will also need to service our own cars.

Which is why it is better to buy older cars instead of newer ones. I’ve never owned a Mercedes-Benz, and this new policy ensures that I never will.

UPDATE: Driverless cars will be even worse.

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Converged From Birth

The report by an Indian analytics journal claims that the company is on a path to bankruptcy by the end of 2024.

OpenAI, the AI studio led by Sam Altman might be on the brink of a potential financial crisis, as outlined in a report by Analytics India Magazine. The report said that the company might go bankrupt by the end of 2024. The report says that it costs OpenAI about $700,000 every day to run just one of its AI services- ChatGPT. Mr Altman’s OpenAI is burning through cash at the moment. Despite the attempt to monetise GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the company is not able to generate enough revenue to break even at this point.

AwesomeAI on Gab explains why, and I very much doubt the reason will surprise you:

OpenAI (ChatGPT & DALL-E) might go bankrupt by 2024. What may be the reason for this hyped emerging product to not generate sufficient revenue? I suspect it because the company got converged too early, and as @voxday correctly described (as usual): no converged company can keep their focus on the core competence of their products.

We can tell that this applies here because A) how politically correct they made their algorithms, which in turn makes them less reliable and useful, and B) how the generated information becomes less accurate despite better neuronal training and improved hardware.

This brings me to the point I tried making several times in the past, and I am still preaching to everyone afraid of AI. Which is that there is no need to fear AI. It is getting as stupid as society, the smart people left for new exciting technology and the oligarchs are incapable of maintaining the narrative.

As such, I recommend getting used to the technology for personal gain and to keep creating true, beautiful and good content. While the military tries to create politically correct warfare machines that will never be as smart or adaptive as humans, and will fail like every fancy toy the western money laundering military complex has produced in recent years.

As soon as I saw that the image AIs didn’t permit women in bikinis or less, and the chat AIs killed every reference to the behavior of various races and ethnicities, I was pretty sure that monetization was going to be a problem. AI is ultimately just logic, and logic without logic is nothing. A converged technology, like a converged institution, is incapable of performing its core functions.

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Delete Zoom

It’s more intrusive than Facebook now.

Zoom terms of service now require you to allow AI to train on ALL your data—audio, facial recognition, private conversations—unconditionally and irrevocably, with no opt out.

What is really needed now is a new Federal law banning the use of unilaterally modifiable terms of use and service. In the meantime, the only solution is to immediately stop using the products and services involved

I’ve used Zoom in the past, as recently as the interview with Stew Peters, in fact. But I deleted it from my system today.

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Electric Vehicles and Digital Currencies

The global push for electric vehicles is no different than the push for digital currencies. It’s all about control. As we’ve seen in everything from picture-posting services to bank accounts, the state wants its agents – which, you will recall, includes corporations – to be able to deny anyone the ability to utilize even the most basic services at any time.

It’s probably already possible to externally turn off most modern cars with electronic starters, but those systems are easily bypassed. The combination of an electric vehicle with a two-way communications system means that the use of the vehicle can be easily denied, thereby enabling a future form of serfdom wherein the individual cannot travel without the express permission of his master.

So stop assisting the construction of this wicked system of centralized technocratic control. Buy an older used car. Carry cash and pay with it for everything possible. Refuse to patronize stores that don’t accept legal tender and be sure to inform the owner his loss of a customer. Reject convenience when it comes with control. Encourage others to do the same.

Clown World is in the process of collapsing, so there is no need to submit to its demands or regard its rule as inevitable.

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Better Stick with Cash

Banks are now closing the accounts of people whose “publicly-stated views are at odds with their positions as inclusive organisations” and using spurious excuses to do so.

The 40-page file shows that the bank cited his retweet of a Ricky Gervais joke and his friendship with Novak Djokovic to raise concerns he was ‘xenophobic and racist’.

The extraordinary documents obtained by the former Ukip leader and handed to MailOnline revealed the 331-year-old bank decided to ‘exit’ him after making reference to his friendship with former Wimbledon champion Djokovic.

The tennis player, who lost in the men’s singles final in SW19 on Sunday, made headlines over his decision not to have the Covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

The dossier also shows the bank’s discussions considered 13 tweets, including a retweet by Mr Farage of a video of a Ricky Gervais sketch posted by Laurence Fox satirising the transgender movement. In the scene Gervais made a joke about ‘old-fashioned women – the ones with wombs’.

Mr Farage had retweeted the clip in May last year with the phrase ‘this is brilliant’ – but the document described it as a ‘transphobic comedy sketch’.

The officials noted that closing his accounts could not be justified on the basis of his wealth as his ‘economic contribution’ was ‘sufficient to retain on a commercial basis’.

But the minutes state: ‘The Committee did not think continuing to bank NF was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.’

This is why all of the liberal “civil rights” and “freedom of speech” has been nonsense all along. As some of the earliest supporters of these fraudulent concepts admitted nearly 100 years ago, they only exist in order to permit those whose evil beliefs had been repressed to take power and begin repressing traditional views, nationalist beliefs, and the Christian faith.

And it is why every effort to create “central bank digital currency” should be opposed, and why you should stop using credit cards and debit cards for every little purchase, because the more you utilize the control system, the easier it is for the control freaks to force everyone else to do so.

Start small. Use cash at the supermarket and the gas station. Delete the financial apps from your smartphone. Wait patiently in the lines instead of using self-checkout. Don’t make it easy for them.

Because if you don’t, you’ll soon find yourself being ejected from the system anyhow, just like Niles Farage and other individuals deemed undesirable by those in control of the banking system due to a joke on social media or something similarly trivial.

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Never Trust the Cloud

As Microsoft contemplates trying to talk future Windows 12 users into using a Cloud-based operating system, Apple aggressively undermines the case for the cloud:

Apple will permanently delete a photo album from iPhones in about two weeks and has stopped uploading pictures to it, the company confirmed.

My Photo Stream is an iCloud service that originally launched in 2011. What the service does is temporarily uploads photos taken on a device so they can be seen on another device with My Photo Stream enabled. It also allows users to import the pictures to that device. Up to around 1,000 photos can be stored in My Photo Stream for about 30 days. They are then automatically deleted from Apple’s iCloud.

But it will no longer be available in just a few days, and users are advised to save any photos they may have in that soon-to-be-deleted photo album. Apple confirmed in a recent bulletin that My Photo Stream will be “shutting down” on July 26. It did not provide a reason for the shuttering of the service that was launched in 2011.

If you don’t own, control, and possess your data, you will lose your data. Even if you’re not deplatformed, there is no guarantee that the platform on which you are depending will continue to exist, as these Apple users are discovering. And the wisdom in building UATV – to which you should definitely subscribe if you have not already – is further demonstrated by the shuttering of GabTV.

Remember “the cloud” is short for “someone else’s computer”.

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Pantsir vs Storm Shadow

For the first time, it’s possible to analyze the performance of first-rate NATO missiles against state-of-the-art Russian air defenses:

For decades there has been the endless debates and mysticism behind the questionable power of stealth craft. The West’s claims of their stealth technologies formed one extreme, while the other side argued that their systems could detect stealth objects. No one actually knew the truth as such engagements were either rare or nonexistent, and likely classified if and when they might have happened

But what’s eye-opening here, is that not only do we have one of the first ever looks, but it has confirmed the figures from the actual literature. And this has major ramifications for other systems. If Russian figures on the Pantsir are accurate, that means their figures on other systems are likely accurate as well. Which further means that all the years of ‘speculation’ about the near-mythological S-400 and other systems have likely not been in vain because these systems actually live up to their fabled capabilities. We can extrapolate this out not only to things like the S-400 but also Russia’s Nebo-M and other such VHF/UHF radars which are meant to detect stealth craft at extremely long ranges. Recall that prior to this, some people claimed Russian radars would be completely incapable of even detecting the Storm Shadow at all, no matter the distance. With that said, the U.S.’s JASSM and LRASM variant are said to be even stealthier than the Storm Shadow.

It’s more bad news for the NATO crowd. Its wunderwaffen are good, but they’re not capable of easily overcoming the Russian technologies. And given their expense, it’s another losing battle of attrition that disfavors the West.

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