Are we ready?

 Are we headed to a 911 event or worse?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3svbNQ-zU&pp=ygURbmV4dCA5LzExIHNsZWVwZXI%3D

Racial issues in Los Alamos

There seems to be some kind of growing racial issues in Los Alamos. The paper and local social media is now filled with letters of accusations and counter accusations. This does not paint to the town in a good light and will most certainly cause challenges to trying to bring people out.

https://losalamosreporter.com/2023/12/25/racial-gaslighting-and-the-angry-black-woman-trope/

https://losalamosreporter.com/2023/12/24/whats-happening-at-los-alamos-public-schools/

https://losalamosreporter.com/2023/12/22/the-time-to-change-and-act-is-now/

https://losalamosreporter.com/2023/12/21/the-dichotomy-of-civility-and-politeness/

Anti-government viewpoints

 What anti-government viewpoints are being funded and taught at our Universities today, and how does and will it impact security clearance eligibility?

“Professor Calls for Dismantling US: 'Greatest Predator Empire'”

https://www.newsweek.com/professor-calls-dismantling-us-greatest-predator-empire-1855115

Winter solstice

 This is a nice astrophysics and astronomy video for the holidays, and the winter solstice, it has a holiday theme:

https://youtu.be/a_Qeb4vVaqM?si=T5s8dU4cFBdk7lja

PhD work

 What percentage of PhDs at LLNL and LANL are routinely doing PhD level work compared to PhDs outside of these Labs?

Los Álamos, the 4th age

 Tom Mason announces Los Alamos has ENTERED the the Fourth Age!!! The post post cold war. We are a new lab now with a new emphases. The eye of Soren has fallen and we look toward a future we could have not imagined.

Why not just say it is pit manufacturing facility, that is the priority because that is where the money is at. I suppose AGE of PITS! has certain ironic phrasing to it. What is it with all this Lord of the Rings nonsense. Sorry to any fans the books and movie are just fine but LANL is not Middle Earth and Mason should not be playing live action role playing.

A system that integrates brain cells into a hybrid machine

 This is interesting, it is a new computing methodology that is a hybrid of human brain cells and silicon microelectronics:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03975-7

Maybe this "brainoware" system might eventually lead to AI systems that have human-like capabilities, like consciousness and free will; the use of synthetic brain tissue could also circumvent limitations related to the current pace of progress in Moore's law.

Microsoft Machine Learning Foundations

 Microsoft has announced a new language model trained using the "textbooks are all you need" approach. Using high quality training data, they obtain relatively good performance with a simple model that can easily run on mobile devices such as a phone:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-2-the-surprising-power-of-small-language-models/

This highlights that improvements in AI are not only driven by hardware improvements, this model was trained for 2 weeks on 96 GPU's, or approximately 4 GPU-years of computing time.

A year of progress

 Researchers at the National Ignition Facility are consistently creating reactions that make more energy than they consume.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04045-8

Fusion breakthrough!

 Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a new technology that promises to make commercial nuclear fusion reactors one step closer to reality.

https://www.newsweek.com/fusion-breakthrough-limitless-energy-reality-1852897

The race for fusion

 

In the latest step to advance nuclear fusion technology, the world's biggest reactor has just opened for business in Japan.

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Another-Major-Milestone-in-the-Race-for-Nuclear-Fusion.amp.html

NNSA labs versus Musk.

It is becoming clear Musk is now the enemy of humanity, can the NNSA labs lead the fight against of Musk?

Energy costs in CA

 To UC/LLNL and LLNS retirees living in CA, how much more will your vehicle gas, natural gas, and home electricity rates go up (even more) in the near future?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uGur8209nn0&pp=ygUKY2EgaW5zaWRlcg%3D%3D

Gemini, the new AI model

 Google announced Gemini yesterday, a new AI model which among other things has advanced capabilities in programming and understanding scientific literature. A version of this is now freely available to the general public in Google Bard:

https://youtu.be/_TVnM9dmUSk?si=J5Lrk0dtIw-2-FWh

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/6/23989744/google-bard-gemini-model-chatbot-ai

Site 300 Superfund status

 Site 300 Superfund status due for update

https://www.ttownmedia.com/tracy_press/site-300-superfund-status-due-for-update/article_f0c35d02-79b4-11ee-8104-432a241bc80d.html

Is US help adequate?

 Question for people on this blog. What do you think of the failure of the NATO armed and funded Ukrainian military? This has now been documented by the Washington Post. It seems that US equipment, intelligence, and training was not adequate mount a successful counteroffensive. Want does this say about our other military technology, such as nuclear weapons?

Rise of the midwits

 LLNL and the rise of the Midwit? Is this an issue?

Have we created this over educated society over this last 50 or 60 years.
We've gone from five percent of the population in the '50s having a BA, to nearly 50 percent of the population having one.
...You also get more people that have master's degrees and more people that have doctorates.

Having a doctorate was seen as a sign that you are part of the intellectual elite. (it still does, and that's the problem).

Imagine if the average iq of a person that had a doctorate was reduced from 135, all the way down to 115?
Imagine if a doctorate became something that was associated with being a midwit.

The doom plan

 Evidently, the Republicans are planning to defund much of the Federal government and eliminate so-called "experts":

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/conservatives-aim-to-restructure-u-s-government-and-replace-it-with-trumps-vision

Will this affect the labs, especially once AI exceeds human intelligence?

No chance of Super-Intelligent AI soon

 The president of Microsoft said that there was absolutely no chance of super-intelligent AI being created "soon", meaning in the next 12 months! After that it could take "years". Decades are certainly possible, I take it, but not likely.

https://slashdot.org/story/23/11/30/1639238/microsoft-president-says-no-chance-of-super-intelligent-ai-soon

Of course, super-intelligent AI is the term for something much smarter than the smartest humans. So perhaps reaching ordinary human intelligence will be sooner!

The "self-operating computer"

 This may be an exciting AI development -- a prototype of the "self-operating computer":

https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-self-operating-computer-emerges/

This sounds like something that would be very useful for those with disabilities and the elderly, in the near term, of course it could also represent an important step towards automating away many jobs.