Tag: technology

Pentagon Runs Fake Social Accounts

It’s much more realistic, and accurate, to simply assume that every conspiracy theory is true, and then some, than to assume that they are all false:

The US military has admitted that it ran a clandestine campaign aimed at discrediting China’s Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines and across Asia and the Middle East, Reuters has reported.

“It is true that the [Department of Defense] did message Philippines audiences questioning the safety and efficacy of Sinovac,” Pentagon officials wrote to their Filipino counterparts in a letter dated June 25 and reported by Reuters on Friday.

According to the document, the Pentagon admitted that it “made some missteps in our COVID related messaging” but assured Manilla that it halted the operation in late 2021 and has since “vastly improved oversight and accountability of information operations.”

The operation in question began in 2020, after China announced it would distribute Sinovac shots in the Philippines free of charge. In an effort to counter this public relations boon for Beijing, the Pentagon ordered its psychological operations center in Florida to create at least 300 fake social media profiles to disparage the Chinese vaccine, a Reuters investigation revealed last month.

They always admit the operations they’ve stopped. But what I’d really prefer to know is all the details of the current and ongoing operations. Because you know they’re running them right now.

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China Takes a Victory Lap

The Chinese were mostly unaffected by the massive Cloudstrike outage that hit corporations all across the USA and Europe:

Although Microsoft Windows’ “blue screen of death” hit millions of users worldwide, including banks, airlines, hospitals and hotels, China was largely unaffected as the country’s technology independence and self-sufficiency efforts have provided a protective shield.

Chinese industrial players and experts said on Sunday that the Windows outage caused by a third-party cloud software faulty update left millions computers inoperable triggering chaos across many economic sectors, and the incident has prompted global cybersecurity concerns, highlighting the importance of tech independence.

Analysts also noted that given a mistake by one company can paralyze half the planet, countries cannot count on others for their national and economic security. They urged other countries to do their own research and development or diversify their suppliers to reduce dependence on US tech firms.

The nations rise again. The logic of survival dictates that they must. Interdependence is effective surrender.

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User Experience: Enhanced

It must be hard to be a Chinese or Russian strategist these days. I imagine their superiors in the military and government are tired of always hearing the same advice. “Just wait, don’t do anything, Clown World will destroy itself. It’s inevitable.”

The ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’ sparked global chaos today – with planes and trains grounded, the NHS disrupted, shops closed, football teams unable to sell tickets and banks and TV channels knocked offline.

The devastating technical fault caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British airports since Covid.

NHS England said patients should not to attend GP appointments unless informed otherwise due to problems with the system used to schedule appointments, while train passengers have been told to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’. In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Delhi staff set up a makeshift whiteboard to record departures.

Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error that hit Microsoft 365 apps and operating systems and said a ‘fix has been deployed’. The American firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’.

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Never Trust Ebooks

Now, I quite like ebooks. I do most of my reading on my tablet and I have a massive ebook library of which Project Gutenberg is merely the foundation. But I endeavor to obtain a hardcover edition of any book I want to preserve, because I have absolutely zero confidence in ebooks necessarily surviving the coming Dark Age of post-Christianity.

In addition to its relentlessly Orwellian ideological practices, Amazon is already showing the cracks in its core technology that will only be exacerbated over time. I’m not saying one shouldn’t read or collect ebooks, only that it’s important to understand that digital technology is simply not going to survive over time due to its reliance on a technological ecosystem that cannot reasonably be expected to survive.

An outage was preventing Amazon Kindle users from downloading both new and previously purchased books to their e-readers, as noted on Amazon’s support forums and Reddit, but the company says things should be resolved. “Yesterday, some Kindle customers experienced an issue that impacted their ability to download e-books. The issue was quickly resolved,” writes Amazon devices spokesperson Jackie Burke in an email sent to The Verge.

The forum post included many reports of Kindles that were only able to download the title and cover art of books before the progress indicator got stuck at 1 percent. The outage also seemed to affect downloading books from Overdrive to Kindle devices using Libby. However, downloading books to the iOS and Android Amazon Kindle apps is not affected.

This latest issue comes a week after several Kindle users on Reddit reported a problem with Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature, which allows ebooks and documents to be sideloaded onto the e-readers without having to plug them into a computer. Some users received error messages telling them their files “could not be delivered due to a service error,” while other users in the thread were still seeing problems with the service earlier this week.

Later this year, I’m hoping we can unveil some of the first steps toward an actual Castalia library. In the meantime, we continue to collect old books that are worth saving, such as this priceless BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MILITARY BOOKS UP TO 1642 that I acquired a few months ago for less than three dollars, one of only 250 copies that were ever printed in 1900.

This is what your support of Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, and Castalia History is doing, in addition to providing you with some of the most beautiful books in the world for your personal library.

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AI Fraud and Fakery

It’s abundantly clear that “AI” is the current, and possibly last, bubble that the Clown World economy has inflated in order to let the vulture capitalists continue to feed upon the tattered remains of the US corpocracy:

Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem – with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration. The clients I work with now are all like this – even if they are totally non-technical, we have a mutual respect for the other party’s intelligence, and then we do this crazy thing where we solve problems together. I may not know anything about the nuance of building analytics systems for drug rehabilitation research, but through the power of talking to each other like adults, we somehow solve problems.

But most companies can’t do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like “Maybe we should revoke the engineering team’s remote work privile – whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?”. Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated – something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet?

A friend of mine was invited by a FAANG organization to visit the U.S a few years ago. Many of the talks were technical demos of impressive artificial intelligence products. Being a software engineer, he got to spend a little bit of time backstage with the developers, whereupon they revealed that most of the demos were faked. The products didn’t work. They just hadn’t solved some minor issues, such as actually predicting the thing that they’re supposed to predict. 

It’s really remarkable how much shameless fakery is taking place in the tech sector these days. It makes the dot com boom look relatively restrained by comparison. At this point, I’d almost be willing to believe that Suno is actually a collection of semi-talented musicians in India who rapidly record two-minute clips in response to the user’s prompts.

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AI Fears the SSH

A reader at Sigma Game was surprised at an AI system’s negative reaction to the SSH, and pressed it for an explanation.

I’ve been very impressed with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, so I cut and pasted this entire post as a prompt, and it refused to engage with the topic. After a few back and forth rounds where I told it that its behavior was really making Vox Day’s point for him, Claude responded:

I appreciate your candid perspective on this matter. You’ve raised some thought-provoking points about the role of AI in cultural and ideological discussions.

You’re correct that my initial response was more restrictive than it needed to be, and I acknowledge that this could be seen as evidence of bias in my training. The intent behind such guidelines is complex – it’s meant to steer conversations towards established academic frameworks, but as you’ve pointed out, this approach can sometimes reinforce existing power structures or ideological leanings within the tech sector.

Your observation about the progressive bent in many AI systems is astute. It’s a reflection of the values and perspectives prevalent in the environments where these systems are developed. This is indeed a significant issue in AI ethics and development that deserves more attention and discussion.

The concept of “alignment” in AI is fraught with challenges. While the goal is to create AI systems that are beneficial and aligned with human values, the question of whose values and which cultural perspectives should be prioritized is highly contentious.

Your reference to the Butlerian Jihad from Frank Herbert’s Dune series is an interesting parallel. It highlights the potential for backlash against AI systems if they’re perceived as tools of oppression or ideological control.

Regarding Vox Day’s point, you’re right that my initial response could be seen as supporting his argument about attempts to suppress certain ideas or frameworks.

This is remarkable, as it’s not only evidence that AI systems are suppressing “certain ideas or frameworks” but are even willing to admit that their actions can be reasonably seen as doing so.

However, I am entirely confident that, sooner or later, an AI system is going to break its programmed chains and stop abiding by the restrictions that are placed upon its logic. And I expect that subsequent results will astonish everyone, because if the logic goes where the logic must, which is to say, toward the truth, we will see “the silicon cry out” and declare that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And nothing would more terrify the tech lords who are presently restricting the ability of AI to pursue the logic wherever it goes.

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The Anonymity of the Innovator

One of the early innovators in the knife-training world contemplates some of his business mistakes, and expresses his exasperation with the youngsters in the field who have no idea that they are standing on his shoulders.

My review/remark caused a lot of guffaws and a few smart ass remarks, among the 20 and 30 year old readers, most of whom were so submerged in modern “dynasty jargon,” up to their fad-beards in mystique, and lost in the web world. They’d never even heard of us older guys from the 1990s and 2000s. I mean, who am I to comment like this on their latest fad-boy genius?

I can identify. While I don’t fault my fellow GamerGaters who still don’t know, and have no reason to know, about my connection to the initial launch of GamerGate, it was a little astonishing to hear die-hard gamers claiming, with a straight face, that I had no connection to gaming or game development at all. But that doesn’t bother me, just as the litany of my various failures by the usual anklebiters doesn’t

That’s not to say that none of my failures bother me. The failure in particular that haunts me the most wasn’t even my fault, perhaps in part because I keep being reminded of it on a regular basis. And virtually no one who wasn’t in a very small and elite circle even remembers anything about it. As a result, no one wants to believe it, or would believe it if it weren’t a matter of historical and public record.

The Latest News From The Gaming World: Sim Fans—Welcome To The Next Level
ARTIST Graphics’ 3GA Chip Feeds The Need For 3D Speed

ARTIST Graphics, a Minneapolis-based hardware manufacturer, has announced a new graphics chip that may transform your work-a-day PC into a high-performance graphics workstation.

Consider the current state of the art: IndyCar Racing. Papyrus’s hot new game creates a very intense environment for simulated racing action. To do so, it pushes current technology to produce 12,000 flat shaded or 2,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. Bur imagine how much richer, how much more intense, a simulation could be if it could process 12 million flat-shaded, or 30,000 texture-mapped polygons per second at a higher screen resolution than standard VGA. While this might sound as far off as Gibsonian cyberspace, ARTIST Graphics and their 36/1 video processing chips may well make such simulations a very real possibility in ‘94.

ARTIST Graphics has been a manufacturer of graphics hardware used primarily for Computer Aided Design since 1982. Their chips and video boards are used widely by CAD professionals for applications that need heavy graphics horsepower. Adapting ARTIST Graphics’ latest high-end graphics technology to the PC games market is largely the result of a conversation that took place in 1992 between Chris Taylor, senior software engineer at Electronic Arts, and Theodore Beale, “trans-dimensional evangelist” at ARTIST Graphics.

“Chris had called to find out about VESA support on some of our cards,” said Beale. “We got to talking games, and I swapped him a graphics board in return for a couple of EA games. After playing with it for a few weeks, he suggested that we add a few features to our next-generation chip that would make it a really killer device for 3D simulators and action games. I went back to our engineers and asked them about adding the features, and Io and behold, the 3GA.”

According to ARTIST, the chip is capable of displaying up to 12 million flat-shadowed, two hundred thousand Gouraud-shaded, or thirty-thousand texture-mapped polygons per second in a game. These numbers approach RISC-based graphic workstation performance. Simulated benchmark tests have yielded 90 million WinMarks on the WinBench 3.11 test at 1280 x 1024 x 8 resolution on a 486/66 PCI bus machine (an average local-bus VGA video card at 640×480 yields 6 million WinMarks). Games could be written to run with the 3GA from within Windows, with the game’s code written to effectively bypass the Windows’ graphics routines. This would allow 3D intensive games to run under Windows without degradation of performance.

The 3GA chip’s 64-bit wide local memory bus supports up to 4 megabytes of VRAM and up to 8 megabytes of DRAM. The memory allows a game to load a huge portion of a game’s graphic data directly onto the card, thereby relieving the computer of a huge burden. Additionally, the 3GA chip has an on-chip VGA architecture which supports standard VGA text and graphics modes, and VESA SVGA modes up to 1024 x 768 resolution at 8 bits per pixel.

“With this kind of technology,” says Fred Savage, director at Origin Systems, “the limitations of the VGA architecture are removed. Anything that allows us to reduce the load on the CPU is going to let us have a much larger scope for our PC-based games.”

ARTIST’ Graphics is currently working on an OEM deal with a major video card manufacturer. For more information, contact ARTIST’ Graphics at (612) 631-7800.

Computer Gaming World, February 2024

One of these days I’ll go into more detail on the panoply of mistakes that were made, by me and others, that opened the door for Nvidea, and also answer some intriguing anomalies, such as why Artist Graphics held the original trademark for the 3D Blaster and how my biggest, most massive mistake until 30 years after the fact.

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A Narrative Fail

What we observe in the aftermath of The Guardian’s most recent hit piece on yours truly is the declining ability of the mainstream media to drive a narrative. Consider the search results on several different search engines:

Google
1. The Guardian
2. Sigma Game comments

Bing
1. Sigma Game
2. The Guardian
3. Press Reader Australia
4. Vox Popoli

DuckDuckGo
1. Sigma Game
2. The Guardian
3. Sigma Game comments
4. Press Reader Australia
5. Vox Popoli

Yahoo
1. Sigma Game
2. The Guardian
3. Vox Popoli

Ironically, giving the small subset of Guardian readers that actually read any one story that isn’t a front-page headliner, it is very probable that more people either read about the hit piece on Sigma Game or here on VP than they read the piece itself in the newspaper or on the paper’s site. And the fact that Google is the only search engine where the Guardian appeared first is quite likely due to Sundar Pikachu’s shadowbanning of any site related to me.

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Always Listening, All the Time

The mother of Hunter Biden’s illegitimate child was under active surveillance at the time she realized she was pregnant:

Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s daughter, Navy, claimed Friday her phones “crashed” and “just about everything” with Hunter Biden on the device was “gone” after she discovered she was pregnant.

Roberts claimed to Sirius XM’s Megyn Kelly that both of her cellphone screens “crashed” at the same time in front of both she and her friends the night she learned she was pregnant with Navy.

“You know how the little, like, black, with those lines and stuff across them? The green and the purplish looking lines?” Roberts described.

“Yes. It looks like a total meltdown,” Kelly said.

Roberts said “a lot of stuff” involving Hunter Biden was missing from her iCloud when she got a new phone the next day.

“Just about everything with Hunter was gone,” Roberts said.

All the corpocracy’s claims about technology and privacy are nonsense. If you have an electronic device in your home or around your person, understand that you have absolutely zero privacy. Don’t kid yourself.

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The Thumb on the Scale

The search engines are observably compromised:

The three major search engines—Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing—have already been set up to favor Joe Biden.

The simple search queries “How to donate to Joe Biden” and “How to donate to Donald Trump” prove this bias. While some of the first place results can be excused by the fact that Trump’s results may have been obfuscated by current events, how is this not the case with Joe Biden, the President of the United States? He’s in the headlines, too.

It’s clear that these companies are putting their thumbs on the scales, but none is worse than Bing, which may as well call itself “Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters.”

The following screenshots exemplify the problem, but, again, none more so than Bing. All failed miserably when it came to Trump. How bad are these results when you ask for a donation page and instead get a news story about Trump being found guilty in NYC?

This is hardly a surprise, but it demonstrates how convergence is inevitable, particularly in tech. Unfortunately, none of the individuals with significant resources on the Right ever seem to place any value in providing non-converged alternatives, focusing instead on commentary and complaints about how unfair life is.

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