I never knew Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allileyua, defected from the Soviet Union – and then gave a interview. It’s a powerful reminder that despite many shortcomings – people under communist rule through the 20th century lived under some of the most horrific, oppressive governments in history.
This is how hacking/cracking games used to work back in the old DOS days when all of memory is available in a flat structure and you could look at and change anything. What good times!
If armies of AI spies are not a thing now, they soon will be.
Imagine having thousands and thousands of agents watching every single one of your government and company officials morning, noon, and night. Now, imagine they never get tired and only cost as much as a high-end PC.
Using data that most companies collect on users and a few planted agent employees to give you key access and your leaders data is ripe for the picking and exploiting. Low-tier hackers may hack you to ransom your data – the big guys will quietly watch you to see if you’re vulnerable in ways never before.
Here’s just one simple example of what it might look like:
Le ravissement de Frank N Stein is a little art film made in 1982 before computer animation would have made the perspective drawing much easier. Today you could likely make this in an afternoon.
These sort of bizarre art films remind me of going to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The top floor had lots of random video shorts like this. It’s interesting what gets considered ‘art’ – and 99% of it is forgotten by the next year. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the dramatic collapse of the art world.
As it turns out – maybe a lot of it is just forgettable, uninspired noise?
I’ve gotten the same treatment from my girlfriend some days…
We all saw the videos of androgynous actors in strange clothes that left people unsure what Jaguar was even advertising. There was not a single mention of a car. Jaguar emptied its show floors of older models that were all discontinued and announced no cars – for a year.
Then the Jaguar Type 00 prototypes were shown and the attempt flopped. How bad? How about an entire year with no cars for sale and then a 97.5% sales collapse.
April 2024: 1,961 cars sold
April 2025: 49 cars sold
This lead to the firing of the 3rd party marketing group hired for the effort, the lead designers, and CEO. The current offerings from Jaguar are a 180 degree turn back to their older designs but it is unclear if they will ever recover.
A complete disaster and an intelligent re-invention can look similar at first, but it turns out that burning the bridges with an unproven firm before you even know if there is land on the other side is a very bad idea.
“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard … could change the course of human affairs.”
Stanisław Ulam
Markov Chains/Monte Carlo methods are nearly magical mathematical systems. They’re based on tremendously simple math even middle schoolers can do – but have influenced everything from major computing features like spell checkers and search engines to world changing things like the analysis of viral spread and nuclear bomb development.
This video about a fake psychic using social media against his targets was made over a decade ago as an ad for safe internet banking.
They were using very primitive social media of the time with no AI – today it’s much easier. It’s a good reminder your data can be weaponized against you (and probably why I got off all social media years ago).
Guyed towers (I thought they were called ‘guide’ towers for a long time) are tall thin vertical structures that depends on guy lines for stability. The physics of these towers are very interesting and related to trispastos cranes in ancient Greece/Rome and a sailing ship’s shroud and stay lines.
I found this quote from a German describing his fellow countrymen to be helpful in understanding some of my interactions when I was working there:
Germans are not efficient, they’re thorough. In fact, they’re often focused on being thorough to the point of being blatantly inefficient