Recent Comments

I will expect (hope) Trump will heed his own advice and "always walk away from a bad deal".

The Latest: https://youtu.be/wmwVQMWTqD0

Our 1 in a million were all in politics in the 18th century.
👍 Thank you, DOB!

I'm still waiting for someone to publish the fact that Iran's responses exposed in detail the reason
they should never have WMD's of any kind, and to give credibility to the stated reasons for the
military action against the mullahs and any who support them.

No worries, TRB. ;^) It's very readable as it is.
Thank you for posting it all. 👍

"I don't watch CNN..." well said, LOL! All the colors in my peaceful Islamic pie chart are zero, too - good one. Whether Sen. Kennedy said that or not, it's still true/funny! The Kurt Russel meme is spot on. Oh heck, I could go on commenting but don't have the time. Great collection, Dobrien, thanks for posting!

Great addition, OUC! Thanks. Now, I'm going to be rolling Pink Floyd through my brain all day - not a bad thing, LOL! "Learning to Fly" is one of my favorites. Ha, the last frame of Spring Break calls up whack-a-tollah to mind, LOL.

Nicely done, OUC!

I believe it was 2012 for almost 2 months - 12 hour days, 6 days a week. I worked in the Richmond facility north of Oakland - place was huge almost 3000 acres if I recall. My hotel was in Oakland. Some time before that I contracted for software work on a water purification plant for Oakland where methane was produced from the waste and used to run a pair of power generators. More generators were being built because all that Oakland poop made lots of gas and excess was burned off in the atmosphere. That's how the folks at Chevron got my name and called me for the job.

"Fruits and Nuts" LOL. I'm from western NY, but knew an acquaintance 40 miles outside Oakland and asked if we could meet for a dinner. He agreed and drove in to say howdy and chat. Some of his first words were a statement that he very rarely goes to the communist parts of the state. I didn't like Oakland at all.

Thank you. I enjoyed Part I and am looking forward to Part II. I am grateful authors like yourself are willing to share some of your work here in the Gulch.

My favorite is 'Where Does It Say..'
Seen it before, 20 times, but it still hits.
I've moved around over the years,
seen all kinds, it is not an ethnicity thing.
One family, arrived from Iran in the sixties- solid patriots.
Some locally born who should be sent off- well somewhere else.

What Years? I worked at Chevron (IT) in 1992... For 93 days. But in San Ramon, near Oakland!

I left because I realized CA was full of Fruits and Nuts (people, not food), and they elected FLAKES to run the place.

Ya got me right off the bat with "1 in a million actually turn out to be human being" . . . .

The AI Singularity is HALF about Believing it. Right now it is the Gold Rush Days. The Manufacturing Days, or the Nuclear Days. We are throwing money at it because THEY believe that whoever gets there first, gets such a major advantage, like we had with Nuclear Bombs.

You are right about the LLMs not "really" being intelligence, per se. We have an information 'encoding' problem. Currently all of the best data is basically "information" in the form of language. It's all we have, and we have GOBS of it. And it is how we communicate. It is how we express questions and answers. And 99% of the problems we need to solve are OKAY to be solved with language and a DECENT answer.

The best comparison is that it's a 5 year that has memorized a full encyclopedia. It can sound smart and deep, until it needs to create something.
At which point it will dream up something that "sounds good" to it's word processor algorithm.

Right now, they are BETTER search engines than google ever was. As for coding. I love it. because of over 50 years of coding... I can get pretty direct/clean/detailed answers or code... Because I know how to write a spec.

A few years back, I started hacking on PostgreSQL source (PG). And the hardest part was the 2 days it took me to figure out how to install all of the compilers, and everything else, WHILE I was learning Linux. Before I Could even begin to start "searching" through the code. Hours and Hours searching through FILES to get to the ONE FILE, to get to the 3 areas I had to change.

This year, I downloaded Cursor from Cursor.com. I gave it access to a sandboxed (clean Linux Box). I told it to download the GitHub code for PG, and to compile and test it. To install all of the appropriate tools to do that. In 15-20 minutes it was done with a few prompts, which I checked the box to stop prompting me, and just do it. And then I told it the change I wanted to make. In about 10-20 minutes it found all of the code, made the changes wrote a test script, and validated that it worked. then I jumped in and tested it. It created the patch for me to submit to the PG hackers to review and accept. (I have NOT sent that, because I really need to review the code, the comments, etc. Much deeper, or risk my credibility with the group).

Anyways. That is a LONG way down the line from what you are saying the limits currently are.
Now, the "Singularity" is not here. The code is not improving geometrically. But it's usefulness is growing. it's capability is growing.
The goldrush is on for that Singularity.

These things save me DAYS of work every day I use them. it should NOT replace ALL of your coders. That's like a bank with ONLY ATM Tellers (Ally, LOL).

You are 100% right about POWER. Gates, et al have dropped Climate Change like a hot potato. Why? Just the hunt for RED AI?
or have people realized, you take advantage of the FEAR and GREED, and make sure OUR country will have PLENTY of Electricity (Even Nuclear), and PLENTY of Chip CREATION ability (3 new FABS, here in the US).

I think they are using the AI Singularity to create what we need anyways. To clear the roadblocks to Nuclear Energy, and power plants being built. (The ugly secret is that the chips keep improving so fast, that 36month old chips have to be replaced, because they are so SLOW by comparison).

May we live in interesting tims.
PS: I am a naysayer on business adoption of most AI, because all of the projects I watch are failing. Especially the HR replacements. (Nothing like BAD Advice from an Automated HR Department...)

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon. I bought that album when it first came out. Fantastic , first song to last. Btw “Don’t memetion it” just posted

. . . that's hilarious! More of the same. Decades of progressive propaganda served to fear and detest the Militia.

Best to attend local Pew Pew shows to find one.

. . . I doubt it. It's very expensive and known as the idiot model because it's self-adjusting.

The lunatic is on the grass remembering daisy chains and laughs hahahaha HAHAHA . . . .

Hello mccannon01, and thanks for taking a moment to comment. I Part II I bring the influence up to the present, including the "reaction" to postmodernism.

The Rocket thrust and refracted light crosses the blood brain barrier, oh, I mean, crosses into the outer border. You can't do this with a photo trick, it has to be done, one color perfectly matched at a time. The refracted light was easier compared to the translucent multi color rocket thrust.
Seeing that this was outer space, why could they not continue forever.

Just needed to change it up, create more beauty and learn a new skill at the same time.

Nice work brother The lunatic is in my head….

Unless it's putting several cells into one single cell that you've been doing for a while now, I'm not sure what the new Visual technique is. Please elaborate.

Created a new Visual technique, (the hard way) let me know what you think.

Also, the AP-NORC poll conducted March 19-23, 2026 is worth examining in detail because it is among the most methodologically sound surveys being fielded, and because its own data, read carefully, undermines the way its findings have been reported. I just didn't have room in the main post.

Start with what AP-NORC does well. They use the AmeriSpeak panel, a probability-based panel recruited from a frame covering 97 percent of U.S. households. This is categorically different from opt-in online panels or phone surveys with single-digit response rates. The 2024 vote composition of the sample, 29 percent Harris, 30 percent Trump, 41 percent didn't vote, closely matches actual election results and turnout, suggesting the partisan balance is reasonable. If you are going to poll Americans about a war, this is a defensible way to find them.

Finding them, however, is not the same as getting them to answer. The weighted cumulative response rate is 6.8 percent, meaning roughly 93 out of every 100 people in the original probability sample never completed this survey. The weighting adjustments correct for observable dimensions of non-response (age, gender, race, education, 2024 vote) but they cannot correct for the unobservable: the correlation between willingness to answer a survey about Iran and the strength or direction of one's opinion on the topic.

The respondents who do answer then encounter a question sequence that shapes their responses before they reach the war questions. The topline questionnaire reveals that respondents were first asked about Trump's overall job approval, then about his approval on the economy, trade, foreign policy, and Iran specifically, all before reaching "Has the U.S. military action against Iran gone too far, not far enough, or been about right?" By the time a respondent encounters that question, they have already activated their partisan disposition through a sequence of Trump evaluation prompts. The "gone too far" answer is downstream of a priming cascade the survey itself induced.

Finally, the subgroup sample sizes are too small to support the analysis most commonly built on them. The margin of sampling error for independents is +/- 8.8 points. When coverage reports that independents oppose the war 64-28, the real confidence interval for the opposition figure runs roughly 55 to 73 percent, the difference between "independents are mildly skeptical" and "independents are overwhelmingly opposed." The data cannot distinguish between these readings, but every headline treats the point estimate as settled fact.

ugh, one missing or accidental "*" and the whole thing gets funky formatting. Apologies for missing that, but I'm not paying to edit posts when there is no preview.