A quick BlinkLabNews scan to roll with coffee first: Because a few readers are arguing for me to work harder not smarter. That’s a tale worth telling.
First, though, let’s suck up some coffee and run the global systems check.
News Compressor: ON
What has changed is the Plaskett Fire: Cal Fire mapped it at 8,241 acres and 1% contained Saturday evening, up from 5,924 acres Friday night, with the fire backed to Highway 1 and firing operations around residences and corridor infrastructure. . Cal Fire: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2026/8/26/plaskett-fire
NASA’s live Roman coverage is running and the 45th Weather Squadron gives only a 50% chance of favorable weather for the 7:26 a.m. EDT Falcon Heavy liftoff, citing the cumulus-cloud rule and surface electric fields. NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/2026/08/30/nasas-roman-space-telescope-launch-updates/
Nepal’s official death count rose to 734 on the Nepal side and 16 in Tibet, 750 combined, with about 2,498 missing in Nepal and 3,044 combined; the State Department Saturday listed about 100 Americans unaccounted for and five rescued, still with no confirmed U.S. deaths. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/nepal-floods-death-toll-climbs-missing-rescue-efforts-rcna594990
Columbia, S.C., Police Officer Christopher DeLong, 29, was shot and killed Saturday at Southeast Park; Officer David Dymock was wounded and listed stable; suspect Adam Dowdy, 33, also died. Chief Holbrook said it is the department’s first line-of-duty death in more than 50 years. https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article317057853.html
Inside Pages
Weather Cluster
NWS Phoenix still has a Flood Watch Sunday evening through late Sunday night for south-central Arizona; Tucson/Flagstaff add watches into Monday for central and northern Arizona. Vector: Newly scheduled.
Oklahoma and northeast Oklahoma Heat Advisories run Sunday afternoon into evening with heat-index values to 106–107. Vector: Newly scheduled.
NOAA SWPC’s 0030 UTC Sunday product forecasts no G1-or-greater storming Aug 30–Sep 1; peak expected Kp is 3.67. Vector: De-escalating.
War Cluster
AP: a Russian strike on a Ukrainian warehouse killed 37, described as the war’s deadliest attack this year.
NYT: a Postal Service rule that could bar millions from voting by mail remains under a temporary judicial block. Expect appeals to splash this coming week.
NYT: California growers are plowing under millions of heads of iceberg lettuce after demand collapsed following the cyclospora outbreak.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered the U.S.-side “Lake America” rename with a shoreline sign reading “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.”
ICE deported British national Milo Yiannopoulos, per Sunday wires.
Burning Man is underway beside the Hawk Fire, previously reported near 95% contained.
Venezuela oil announcement still has no posted contract or named field list; markets are closed Sunday. Vector: Unchanged but consequential.
Related: Monday cash oil opens more than $2 off Friday on the unsigned Venezuela headline. Window: Monday session. Odds: 35%. Raise on a filed JV or named major; lower if Caracas or Houston lawyers punch holes. Evidence: AP “if realized” language still in force; weekend is dead tape.
Now, on to the main event of the Sunday coffee ponder:
The Product Was Always Time
People piss away time like they aren’t really going to die. Well, lookie-here: You are. Whether you own up to it or not, every waking second is a choice at the “Smorgasbord of Life” between living a purposeful life and pissing it away. Like social media. Ego exercises. Styles and fashion. Today I’m focused on purpose because that’s how I have rolled and likely will keep rolling.
See, there is a tendency whenever a new technology arrives for people to divide themselves into camps. One side becomes evangelists, the other becomes critics, and then both sides squander enormous amounts of time arguing about whether The New Thing is wonderful, dangerous, overrated, revolutionary, fraudulent, job-destroying, civilization-saving, or some combination of all of them.
I’ve never been terribly interested in joining either camp. My question has generally been simpler: Can I use TNT (The New Thing) to blow up my to-do list faster or better than I could yesterday? My TNT attitude didn’t start with artificial intelligence; it goes back more than forty years, and when I look backward, the recurring theme isn’t really computers at all. It’s leverage.
Early “Personal Explosives” Work
In 1982 I was already fooling around with sending wireless data into Seattle using AM radio. This was at a time when “wireless data” was hardly a normal household phrase, there were no smartphones, and most people weren’t walking around imagining that someday nearly every object they owned might communicate with something else. 276 PNW techies heard that first god-awful scratchy noise and decoded 300-baud modem tones off KMPS AM and FM.
Two years later, in 1984, I was the only guy on most transcontinental flights carrying a portable computer. I loved my HP 110C portable (aircraft certified) because while the rest of the cabin scrawled on yellow pads, lugging briefcases and voluminous reports, I could work on spreadsheets and memos that were print-ready by Nebraska on the SEA-ATL legs. Was I smarter than everybody else on the airplane? Hardly, but I had acquired something useful: a time advantage.
The guy making notes on a legal pad still had to arrive somewhere, type them, calculate things, revise them and distribute the results. Then proof the work and supervise staff. I could already be doing some of Monday morning’s work at 35,000 feet, and that distinction mattered.
Software Was Never a Religion
The same thing happened with accounting software. I started with VisiCalc, and people raised on modern spreadsheets probably cannot appreciate how astonishing the electronic spreadsheet originally seemed. This was on a Commodore business PET, not the C-64.
Before that, changing one assumption in a financial model could mean recalculating entire sections manually. The spreadsheet changed the economics of thought because you could alter an assumption in one place and immediately see numbers somewhere else change with it. Think two graphing calculators that could talk. Now make 10,000 of them work in unison.
Then along came Lotus 1-2-3. It was better for what I wanted to do, so I moved, and later when Excel became the better workbench, I moved again. My ALFMS (airline financial modeling system) was a first complex portable airline daily-operations tool in the mid-sized jet carriers. No IBM heavy iron or punch cards needed.
There is a useful lesson in that progression because I didn’t usually stop using software because it had suddenly become bad. Usually it was still doing precisely what it had always done, but I had learned enough about the problem to understand what the existing tool couldn’t do.
Even working with BoeingCalc — first and in some ways best of the 3-D spreadsheets — and Javelin, which could backfill to a projection, software was still the thinking geek’s speed bump. Still, I was able to manage a vocational college using spreadsheets, but it wasn’t yet “right.”
Then Came Databases…
Eventually my spreadsheets became increasingly elaborate: lookup tables, cross-references, student information, financial information and academic progress information. At some point I realized I was trying to make spreadsheets behave like databases, which meant the nature of my problem itself had to change with it.
A spreadsheet essentially asks, “What’s in this cell?” A database can ask, “What (else) do we know about this person, account, class, transaction or event?” and that is an entirely different way of organizing information.
So I moved into flat-file databases, including Jim Button’s FileExpress. It was a wonderfully useful program, and inevitably I eventually discovered its boundaries, too. That discovery pushed me toward the next rung rather than convincing me the old one had somehow failed.
Next came dBase III, and after building a dozen-user Novell LAN (my first “Electric Railroad” for data) dBase IV was ready. By the mid-1980s I had designed and built a school-wide student tracking and academic-progress system in dBase, and this wasn’t computing for the sake of computing. The only thing close at the time was RGM Software and Rafael Gonzalez did great code. Heavier iron, but best of class and we shared ideas around it.
The point was getting to best-of-class management. Which students were progressing, who was falling behind, which programs were working, where were the exceptions, where was the (federal student loan) money going, and what required management’s attention? Details matter with the feds.
Instead of information being scattered through paper files, instructor memories and separate office processes, the institution began asking proactive questions. That same conceptual architecture followed me years later as the technology evolved into SQL, servers, networks, interactive reporting and financial tracking.
By the early 2000s I was helping a Microsoft Gold Partner (Campus Management) apply expanded versions of some of those ideas in higher education. The software had become enormously more sophisticated, but the basic management idea hadn’t changed very much: Get the right information into a structure where it can be found, compared and acted upon faster than the other guy can do it.
VisiCalc wasn’t the destination, and neither were Lotus, Excel, FileExpress, dBase or SQL. Each was simply another rung on a ladder, and every rung bought some combination of speed, reach, memory and time.
Sometimes the Vocabulary Comes Later
There is another clue that you’re working close to the edge of a technology: sometimes the vocabulary hasn’t settled yet. You wind up needing words for things because the normal language doesn’t quite describe what you’re trying to build.
I ran into that as far back as 1985 while working around what we would now comfortably describe as speaker-independent voice recognition. Back then, I remember conferences where the language was still floating around things like “user-independent voice,” because even the terminology was evolving along with the technology.
I ran into the same problem again four decades later while building my new Over-the-Horizon project. I needed a term for a discrete, forward-looking piece of information that could be extracted from present information and placed onto a future time field, so I wound up inventing one: “Future Atom.”
A Future Atom is simply a bounded piece of information carrying some claim about a future condition, event or interval. The fact that I needed a term for it doesn’t make the concept mystical; it means I was trying to describe an information object for which the existing vocabulary wasn’t particularly useful. The evolution of a technology usually requires language distillation.
That experience feels very familiar. Sometimes when you get to the tool early enough, you’re not only learning the tool—you are still learning what to call the things the tool lets you do. The vocabulary often arrives a little later than the capability.
Then Along Came AI
Which brings us to artificial intelligence. I didn’t encounter AI after a lifetime of avoiding computers and then suddenly decide chatbots were miraculous; AI arrived after I’d already spent four decades watching information technologies replace one another.
So I treated it the same way. Get in, use it, push it, find its limits, figure out where it saves time, figure out where it wastes time, and figure out what it can do reliably versus what still needs a human standing over it with a club. In other words, use it as a tool, not a religion.
That research work has now produced four books touching AI from different directions: Mind Amplifiers, Co-Telligence, Theomachines, and The Judgment Engine. There is also a substantial amount of free learning and theoretical work at HiddenGuild.dev, including material aimed farther out toward the edges than the usual “how do I write a better prompt?” discussions.
Concepts like declaring a Session Framework Experience (SFE) evolved along the way. Some of that work asks how machine reasoning might be structured differently, how local AI changes the economics of intelligence, how information becomes reusable organizational capital, and how alternative compute architectures might accomplish useful AI work with substantially less energy. A couple of those architectural ideas have already gone far enough for me to file two provisional patent applications around novel compute architectures aimed at lowering the energy cost of AI.
Developers are reading some of those edge papers right now, which is exactly where I like research to be. Not because every idea will turn out to be right, but because leading-edge work is supposed to involve building, testing, discarding, revising and keeping what survives. The failures are part of the tuition.
Careful Use Note on TNT (The New Thing)
The operating rule hasn’t changed much since 1982. Get your hands on the new thing early enough that you have time to discover what it really does before the herd catches up, and find out what it doesn’t do while you’re there — preferably first.
AI makes mistakes, certainly, but so did spreadsheets when the operator wrote the wrong formula. A database could store garbage flawlessly, and SQL could return a perfectly accurate answer to a stupid question, yet nobody therefore concluded that databases should be outlawed.
We learned how to operate them. AI is the same problem moved farther up the abstraction ladder, except this time the leverage can be enormous. Oh — and never judge what you think of AI on the free crap. There’s a world of difference between a frontier model and something for wannabes to play judgy over: that’s the difference between testing a technology and testing the cheapest implementation of it. Frontier models are simply a different class of machine, and their reliability is miles better.
The Real Asset Is Time
The great benefit of computing isn’t necessarily computation. It is often time recovery, which is something I’ve gradually come to appreciate more than any benchmark or feature list.
The spreadsheet recovered recalculation time, databases recovered lookup time, SQL recovered organizational search and reporting time, networks recovered transmission time, and the Web recovered discovery time. AI is beginning to recover something larger: cognitive assembly time, the hours spent gathering, sorting, comparing and assembling information before serious thinking can even begin.
Let me give you a lived example. Suppose you wake up one morning and have a strange thought: Could I use the Web itself to look ahead into the future?
Not crystal balls, and not predicting Tuesday’s Dow close to six decimal places. Instead, could we collect the enormous number of statements already being made about the future and determine where they point? That’s a very different problem from fortune-telling.
Government agencies forecast, energy agencies forecast, farm agencies forecast and shipping companies discuss coming capacity. Weather services publish outlooks, companies publish guidance, news articles say next month, later this year, expected in September, by winter and within six months, while prediction markets put money against future outcomes and human forecasters make their own claims.
Suppose we collected all of those forward references, timestamped them, classified them and assigned their future windows. Then suppose we separated original sources from copies, collapsed duplicate ancestry, down-weighted known calendar events, tracked which information source moved first, and preserved contradictory evidence instead of throwing inconvenient observations away.
Finally, suppose we laid all those forward-looking statements onto a time axis and asked a simple question: Where are they clustering? That is the basic idea behind my experimental Over-the-Horizon software, and it turns the Web from a pile of pages into a dated field of forward-looking signals.
Yes. A Software Time Machine
It may work because (like in bullets and ballistics) initial states degrade predictably over time. And so, out on the edge, we get thinking… The dated forward-looking pieces are the Future Atoms described earlier; once extracted, weighted and laid onto a common time base, the question becomes whether independent sources begin clustering in the same future neighborhood.
Now a mind-stretch: imagine doing one serious OTH run manually. You visit the sources, read hundreds of pages, summarize them, copy the useful passages, record publication dates, decide which sentences actually contain future information, extract future dates, normalize fuzzy time language, separate facts from forecasts, identify geography and classify domains.
Then you determine whether five stories represent five observations or five rewrites of one Reuters story. You work out whether a frightening headline is actually new or merely a twelve-day-old event being recycled, and then you build the source ledger, forecast ledger and working spreadsheet.
Next come the formulas. You normalize the data, collapse duplicates, calculate weights, calculate the temporal field, compare it with the previous run, determine what moved, and then go back into the evidence to figure out why it moved. And then there are the graphics.
Running the “Software Time Machine”
Oh, it’s real, and I will be doing it now and then on the Peoplenomics subscriber side. Since you’re a natural-born skeptic, here’s the run given subscribers last Wednesday. You don’t have to take my description of the process on faith:
Over_the_Horizon_Report_v0.98_2026-08-26_COMPLETE
Scan the whole thing, read the Executive Summary, look at the glossary, and eyeball the charts. Focus: Look at the graphs in Wednesday’s report. Sure, I can make every one of those manually; I’ve been making spreadsheets and graphics for decades, but first I have to build the spreadsheet correctly, define the ranges, build each graph, establish the scaling, label everything, check it and then repeat the exercise when the data changes. The color and style, and….
Or I can offload much of that mechanical process into a few dozen lines of reusable tasking code. The machine can take structured output (speak JSON!), calculate what needs calculating, produce the graphics, preserve consistent scaling, place them into the report and prepare much of the publication package without requiring me to rebuild the process every time.
That isn’t eliminating my ability to make a graph. It is eliminating my need to spend part of my remaining life making that graph again, and that distinction is enormous. Capability stays with me; repetition goes to the machine.
A complete manual OTH run could easily consume something like 30–60 hours of human work. There is a practical absurdity hidden there because by the time you’ve spent 30 hours looking over the horizon, part of the horizon has already arrived. Besides, I will be turning 78 early in the new year… no time to waste!
Information Has a Temporal Base
This is where another Ure-world obsession comes in. When I look at information, I don’t see only its content; I also see its temporal base. Word-Frequency Analysis has been around for a long-ass time, and intelligence shops have been counting changes in language and themes since at least World War II. OTH simply takes that old shop-floor trick, puts it onto a much larger dated corpus, and asks an additional question: Where in the future is the changing language pointing?
When did it become knowable, when did somebody first recognize it, when did markets recognize it, and when did ordinary news recognize it? Then comes the most important question: when did everybody recognize it, at which point knowing it may no longer produce much informational advantage?
Having a five-day head start in almost anything can be worthwhile. It doesn’t automatically make you right and it certainly doesn’t necessarily make you rich, but five days gives you five additional days to think, check, investigate, prepare, hedge or dismiss the signal if further work says it’s nonsense. The objective isn’t supernatural knowledge; it is earlier useful structure, which is why we’re experimenting with OTH in the first place.
Can public information already sitting in plain sight produce temporal structure before the eventual news narrative becomes obvious? Maybe it can and maybe it can’t, which is exactly why the work remains an experiment rather than a religion. The audit is there precisely because interesting isn’t the same thing as correct.
Now look again at the actual OTH report Peoplenomics readers received Wednesday. Don’t just skim the prose; look at the inputs, classifications, Future Atoms, competing evidence, audit layers and especially the graphs. That’s the proof-of-work part of this little sermon.
Think about what would be required to produce that manually. Gather everything, read everything, build the databases and spreadsheets, construct the graphics, establish the scaling, lay out the report, check the arithmetic, write the explanatory material and prepare the whole package for publication.
Then ask yourself one question: How long did that run take once the reusable tasking modules had already been written? The answer was 27 minutes of compute time, not 27 hours. Compared with something on the order of 30–60 manual hours, you’re looking at roughly a sixty-to-one compression or greater in the mechanical work surrounding the analytical process. Now we’re getting to the real reason we use AI.
Our Reports Aren’t Our Product
ChartPacks, deep-dives into theory, and things like the OTH view: The obvious output is a written report and/or summary. But the report isn’t really the product. The report is evidence that the process worked; the product is the time I didn’t have to spend producing it.
That recovered time can be redeployed into another paper, another experiment, building something in the shop, learning something, working outdoors, talking with somebody I care about, or simply thinking longer about the handful of decisions where human judgment still matters most. Those are all higher-value uses of my finite time than repeatedly resizing chart axes.
The machine can help gather evidence, classify, sort, compare, calculate, graph, draft and audit. What I increasingly want my own brain working on are the questions What does this mean? What are we missing? What would prove it wrong? And what should we do next? Those are better uses of human life than repetitive information assembly.
The Information Revolution Had Assembly Lines
But at least now, with AI tooling, we can automate a great deal of it. More important, the technology is finally getting good enough that we have a genuine choice about how much of that repetitive work we want to keep doing ourselves.
Which brings us all the way back to those transcon flights in 1984. The laptop wasn’t really the point, and neither were wireless data, VisiCalc, Lotus, Excel, FileExpress, dBase or SQL. Today AI isn’t really the point either. The product was always time, and the technology simply kept getting better at clawing back some of it.
Because every human gets only a finite allocation, I have become increasingly reluctant to spend mine doing manually what a machine can now do faster. I’m not asking anyone to worship AI, trust it blindly or pretend it is always right; I am suggesting something much more practical, which is to learn how to make it work for you. We audit like hell because machines make errors, and even humans make errors, remember.
This isn’t fundamentally a contest between humans and machines. It is increasingly a contest between humans who know how to use machines and humans who don’t, and that contest is already well underway. So here’s the “Why?” of this morning’s in-depth and free Sunday discussion: If you’re not actively mastering ways to reclaim your personal time with ALL TOOLS, including AI, the front wheels of the Bus that is the Future may already have run over you.
And no, we didn’t go through all this merely to tell you that you’ve been flattened. We just don’t want the back wheels to get you, too. That’s the whole point of the freebie.
One for the Road
Apparently, the heat will come off at some point and America will head into fall. From our “For the Man Who Has Everthing” folder: Drill Pumpkin Power Gutting Tool 6 Blade 304 Polished Stainless Steel ~Rotary Power Speed & Will Not Damage Seeds ~Pumpkin Wall Shaver Attachment ~Inside Cleaning. Well, I’ll be…a tool I don’t have! Echoes of ShopTalk.)
Off to the shop now, where I have 3D printers and CNCs to supervise. Yeah, we use them and an Evolution table saw, too.
Write when you find the right tool,
As good as it all sounds , I’ll stick to the simple life.
first smart thing you have ever said soccer ball
Congrats on a great Sunday update! It’s ALWAYS about time…
BTW, we are seeing 100:1 to 120:1 gains in development throughput from programmers correctly using AI – right in line with your 60:1 gains.
If you play it right AI can be your best “lean buddy” eliminating waste at a phenomenal rate both professionally and personally.
I see that as your retirement proceeds and you slow down AI is helping you produce more in less time and the creative juices are flowing faster. Bravo!
What the HF was that all about ?
A confessional ?
I have no idea, except to say piling scheisse higher and deeper is not a TIME saver – more like analysis paralysis.
But the BIGGEST GORILLA in Ure room today, is TIME.
WHAT IS TIME ? or what is Ure definition of TIME – NO, no, no, NO Ai BUllschiT sledgehammering response with pages and pages of definitions and what not – all USELESS by the Way..imho.
* What IS Ure Idea of or Definition of TIME ?
Simply put – What is TIME ?
4 Moi – TIME is Consciousness Observing.
Thats it , 4 F-ing words.
GOod thing I am skilled at Time manipulatiion. By the by – TIME is moving faster these days…about 1.5 to 2.0 seconds FASTER to be prezact.
Piece!
Ai & war reporting
Here we go, …, again!
It says, –YOU say, “War Cluster:
AP: a Russian strike on a Ukrainian warehouse killed 37, described as the war’s deadliest attack this year.
How about a little honesty.
It was a massive warehouse loaded loaded with new arriving U.S. Patriot Missiles, UK/Ukraine ‘flamingo’ missiles, and UK Storm Shadow missiles.
Other than the Patriot’s, ALL intended to bomb mostly civilian targets in Russia, killing who knows how many Russians -far more than the Ai report gave.
The hit blew and then the stored bombs went off, numerous secondary explosions and thirdly explosions. Huge explosions. Huge. No doubt set back some intended US/UK attack.
AND the warehouse was located smack in a residential area. Ie., the deaths!
There was another smaller munitions stocked warehouse that was hit too.
The there’s your dearly beloved Ai. Biased beyond imagination. It’s not the Ruskies that did the killing in reality. :(
russia
Dell, let’s stop right at “How about a little honesty.”
You are free to challenge a line, question a source, add context, or argue that the compression missed important details. That is fair game here. But accusing me of dishonesty is not the same thing as offering a correction. It is an attack on integrity, and I don’t let that slide.
The Blink line said AP reported a Russian strike killed 37 and described it as the deadliest attack of the year. That was a compressed wire-summary item. If the target was a munitions warehouse and secondary explosions caused the casualties, then the better (but less compressed) line is: Russian strike on a Ukrainian ammunition facility reportedly triggered secondary explosions near residential/care facilities, killing dozens; Ukrainian storage decisions are part of the story. Fine. That is better.
That is precisely why we audit compression.
That said, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it hit a warehouse storing long-range drone parts and boosters. AND: Zelensky said the depot “definitely shouldn’t have been there,” called it negligence, and opened a criminal investigation into whoever stored munitions next to homes. He did not dispute that Russia struck the site.
But that’s a lot longer – BlinkLabNews is all about compression. High-level. The war-crimes trials come after wars, not during Sunday morning coffee.
Now let me repeat something: Compression is not the same as “AI lied,” “George lied,” or “Russia didn’t do the killing.” A strike was launched. A target was hit. Explosives went off. Civilians died. Responsibility can be argued in additional but much more time-consuming layers — attacker, target, storage location, war planners, and propaganda shops on all sides — but pretending the initiating strike disappears because the target contained munitions is not analysis. It is narrative laundering. Attacking my honesty? No.
You want fuller attribution? Good. So do I. That is why Blink is being built with event, attribution, verification status, source conflicts, and chronology layers. But if you come in accusing me of lacking honesty because a compressed morning item didn’t carry your preferred full battlefield theory, expect pushback. Hard.
Corrections are welcome. Personal integrity shots are not.
~ure
Good luck. dell is starting from a point of disingenuousness, because he (?) drives the narrative that Russia/Ukraine is a US/UK proxy war. As we should all know by now, the U.S., under Obama and using Victoria Nuland and George Soros (specifically USAID and Open Society) began and begat the issue with the 2014 coup. We did not foment the rise of the NAZIs in Ukraine (although to his dubious credit, Soros did), nor their shooting, for sport, of ethnic Russian Ukrainians, and Russia did not foment the secession of Crimea from Ukraine and its eventual absorption as a free territory, by Russia (despite the line foist by both Leftist and Rightist media in this country), 93% of Crimeans voted for Crimea to become Russian territory, in a referendum held AFTER THEY SECEEDED FROM UKRAINE.)
I acknowledge that both the UK and France (and Germany, under Merkel) were using our money to fight a proxy war with Russia, as were we, under Biden. We are no longer doing so, and materiel supplied by the U.S. to Ukraine now is bought and paid for by Ukraine or the EU, or exchanged for Ukrainian tech (like drones and drone-killers.)
Russia could have conquered Ukraine before the first shipment of American materiel reached Kiev. They didn’t do so because they did not want to destroy the people or the architecture. They wanted the Azovs to stop killing ethnic Russians for sport, and acknowledge the will of the Crimean People.
Perhaps “dell” should go to the source (in this case, the A.P. Wire) to raise hell, instead of “shooting the messenger…?”
R, please lay off the DisInfo Kool Aid…
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/euromaidan-was-a-coup-fomented-by-victoria-nuland/
‘No supportive evidence is given to this recurrent conspiracy narrative on the coup in Ukraine in 2014, fomented by the West, Georges Soros or Victoria Nuland in person, often also portrayed as a “Nazi coup”. ‘
Yesterday, I got a chance to sit in the cab, or more like cockpit, of the biggest JD combines I have ever seen. The technology alone was so overwhelming it is hard to see how one person can operate the machine alone.
No doubt there is AI at play there. The machine health by itself must have dozens of sensors and data points to monitor to protect this multimillion dollar machine.
Want to know why your food is so expensive?
Time is money.
My 1953 Jubilee will do as good a job as that big Deere. However, what my old Ford does in a day, that combine will do in an hour or two, using AI and a dead-nuts GPS (except on days when a CME or proton storm causes the GPS to go wonky and either not work, or geolocate with several hundred yards of variable error.) You’ll almost never see one of those combines owned by a farmer. They are owned by harvesting concerns, who travel from South to North (and West to East) across the country, renting their services to the locals as they pass through. They are the reason wheat and oat farmers spray glyphosate on their crops. A real farmer can’t afford to have a machine like that just setting, so they don’t. IIRC the “operator” is really a supervisor who oversees the myriad sensors and physically watches the machine’s path & swath, so he can kill it if there’s an error or a deviation. The only time he actually drives that monster is between farms, or onto its trailer…
What attracted me there was the old JD model b. I still have an old B built in 1936. That old machine will rake hay as long as there is gas in the tank and not even slow down. They were prepping 4 of those beasts for an outfit that starts up in Nebraska and follows the Missouri river bottoms all the way to St Louis. The don’t have ladders to climb up into them, they have freaking stairs with a transition halfway up big enough for a chair and tables.
Diana and Gene’s wife Nancy hung out in the office while Gene and I went looking around the shop. Tractor porn.
Ure Over the Horizon report looks like a good piece of work. The numbers appear to show events happening in the last two weeks of September which lead to a fairly massive six month decompression. Analogy would be that the frogs have been slowly heating up for the last six months or so, and the low boil is reached in the last two weeks of September. Frog legs are harvested late September-early October, last rites are performed, and the post-frog-boil cool down ensues from October through the end of the year. It fits with several possible international scenarios.
Maybe incorruptible parties are drinking the Kool-aid after all. Or, the non-Kool-Aid imbibers end up permanently indisposed. There has been a lot of that in recent history.
While there has been some public discussion of Ure report, I am having a hard time believing what I seen would be sufficient to influence a rather broad base of data collection. Unless a MSM chapter got hold of your story, and blabbed everything all over the web, I just can’t believe your initial public discussions influencing with the sort of effects Clif decribed.
Still haven’t seen any posts from Clif after the last week in July that I am relatively sure came from Clif, not from pirates or groupies.
GU : “… use it as a tool, not a religion. …”
Apply to investments too. Skate to where the puck is going. Enter lightly and build while use case confirms early decision, trim or bail if rationale goes pear shaped. IOW, use knowledge thoughtfully (pun intended) but don’t become *married* to what you own. I mostly apply weight to predictable stuff. That said, it’s the occasional home run which juices return overall. It’s the reward for being right, and early.
Best play (which looks to persist for oh so many reasons : Cu / atomic number 29.
NFA ^ it never is.
Egor
Great report George!
I was an early adaptor. Was on the systems team developing digital computers & rangers for the USN Talos long range Surface to air missile system. Later, I bought Commodore 64, SN 075, and then used an Intel 4040 microprocessor to control a 20 arc offshore automated pipeline welding system that could weld a 36″, 1″ wall pipe in 3 minutes.
My days of building computer-based systems are long past, but over the last year, I have used ChatGPT as a very capable assistant in researching. writing, and editing my last 3 books. I have had to learn how set up guard rails to keep it on track. It has become a significant tool to increase my productivity, and at 82 and counting, I’m very aware that I need to make every minute count.
(“Apparently, the heat will come off at some point and America will head into fall. From our “For the Man Who Has Everthing” folder: Drill Pumpkin Power Gutting Tool 6 Blade 304 Polished Stainless Steel ~Rotary Power Speed & Will Not Damage Seeds ~Pumpkin Wall Shaver Attachment ~Inside Cleaning. Well, I’ll be…a tool I don’t have! Echoes of ShopTalk.) “)
That “Drill Pumpkin Power Gutting Tool” they’re advertising for fall?
Cute. But let’s be honest — that’s just the summer watermelon blender in a Halloween costume.
Cut a small slice on one side so it sits flat.
Cut a plug out of the top.
Drop the whole thing into a bucket of ice.
Stick the drill blender in and let it roar.
Blend the inside until it’s smooth, then add simple syrup until your taste buds salute you…..
Boom — watermelon refresher straight from the watermelon…
1 whole ripe watermelon
1/4 – 1/2 cup simple syrup (adjust to taste)
1–2 limes, juiced
Handful fresh mint (optional) As needed
ice (bucket or cooler)
for an adult version add tequila, rum,vodlka…..or one bottle of watermelon wine…… which user a little cinnamon stick and lemon…
Yo Wildman,
Sounds like youse got a lil extra time on Ure hands..
I learned the above about Watermelons in early 70’s at JFK Stadium in Philly. Gary Weaver, J Giles Band, Lynryrd Skynyrd, and Peter Frampton in concert. All these 1% er types were up front of crowd waving Union Jack flags. I happen to notice several Watermelons with “Handles'” of Vodka sticking out of the top of them. amongst that crew.
You used to be able to sneak/smuggle all sorts of contraband into concerts at JFK stadium. It was Summer of my incoming Freshman year. Best part of concert beside my introduction to Lynyrd Skynyrd , was after they were done, 50 % of crowd left…mostly Males. All the Girlies stayed for Frampton, and so did tbs !
Lets just say after Skynyrd, that concert venue became a very target rich environment..
Frampton Comes Alive Tour -https://youtu.be/00gkOK7TPTc?
Yes..making the watermelon cooler.. the important part is..the simple syrup and lime .. most melons aren’t grown locally..I cut one up the other day from brazil..they pick them so green
we get colony grown once in a while….those don’t need the simple syrup….
AI sickos . does your possessed mind tell you that the creep zelensky has banned Christianity in ukraine sewer , arrests priests , closes churches . and now he runs all media . good mate of trump . how much did you blokes give him ?
Mate, if you want to discuss Ukraine’s treatment of the Moscow-linked Orthodox church, fine. There is a real civil-liberties and wartime-security issue there.
But “Zelensky banned Christianity” is false. Ukraine did not ban Christianity. Ukraine passed a law aimed at religious organizations tied to the Russian Orthodox Church and Moscow-linked church structures, on the argument that the Russian church has functioned as part of the aggressor-state apparatus. Reuters reported it as a ban on Moscow-linked religious institutions, not Christianity. Human Rights Watch has criticized the law because it could effectively ban congregations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and raise religious-freedom concerns. Both things can be true: the claim “Christianity is banned” is false, and the law still deserves scrutiny.
Same with media. Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia’s invasion, and wartime media controls, the national telethon, and pressure on independent journalists are real concerns. Reporters Without Borders and others have criticized the telethon and media restrictions. But “he runs all media” is bumper-sticker language, not analysis.
So bring facts, not sewer-mouth slogans. I don’t worship Zelensky, Putin, Trump, AI, or any other political idol. I’m interested in what actually happened, who says so, what is disputed, and what the practical consequence is. “AI sickos” and “creep Zelensky” may feel good to type, but they don’t move the ball.
~ure
re: “Ratrace”, 2001
feat: de-ballasting
Thanks to shock DJ George for steering the ship around the rocks with AC/DC’s T.N.T. from their “High Voltage” album.
Speaking of ‘hold the on the rocks’, Kanye West’s publicist was last seen on Friday in ICE custody. The #45 promoter turned #47 critic boarded a one way flight from New Orleans to the UK thanks to a visa expired by several years. However the show must go on as they say. Kanye opened his Friday night New Orleans gig setlist with “KING”.
Four days ago the King’s non-working royal second son and author of “Spare” departed with his family to the UK “for an extended period” as the the “Daily Mail” termed it. The move happened so quickly that the Duchess seems to have missed her brand’s same day introduction of Spiced Apple Butter!
ok the first casualty of war is the truth . my source is feed from instagram commentator. could be true could be false but im not there . i just pass on others views . and if i dont like something , someone or AI , thats fine in true democracies . i call AI sick because my opinion is it has reduced peoples cognitive function and created mass herd mentality . denial is not a river in egypt
Thanks Len. Here’s the fine “between the lines read: most commentators (kids) completely miss.
The adoption of AI is very low – when it comes to real power work. So the p[roblem isn’t really AI – hasn’t been around long enough. The real villain is social media which is a stupid and beyond dumb exposure of personal information and surfaces for cheap dopamine thrills.
You’ve sighted that there is a “demon in the House.” It’s just not AI. It’s social medias, con-money with no underlying fungible behind it (secret numbers are free). It ain’t AI – it’s people really are getting wmore stupid.
Sad to say it, but there you go.
Avoid single sourcing anything!!! Get a quarum of smart people are steer by those stars
i assure you the guy is not a kid . and is married to a ukranian
“ I don’t worship Zelensky, Putin, Trump, AI, or any other political idol. I’m interested in what actually happened, who says so, what is disputed, and what the practical consequence is.”
Many of us come here daily for “News without the spin.” In fact, that might be a good subheading for you.
You will continue to alienate both the left and right and know that you are doing a good job.
It is so hard to determine what is real…and what is propaganda…I think since there’s nothing at all I can do about anything…I will stick to wine and great recipes..
I keep thinking about the great pancake cook off lol lol lol…after my father passed the wife and I decided that since everyone wishes they had just one more chance to say hey..I appreciate you.. we would rent a hall..every Saturday morning and buy breakfast for anyone wanting a breakfast..family ,friends neighbors for just someone hungry needing a hot meal..even waitresses stopped for a plate..we did that for like ten years…the trucks top gave us a discount..just sit around share your week..
the hint of a pancake feed brought that memory back..
well done mate . your recipes are about the only thing that interests me here anymore . and god bless you for your kindness
I’m dying to make more cheese but don’t have anywhere to put it..
I love to cook.. the wife gets nervous when I use the kitchen for a lab lol.. made cascara tea the other day to get a flavor idea for the cascara wine….
For me it all began with this telex thingy. Then we added a beige box with a 4″ orange and black screen and these floppy thingies. The ledger book was gone, but then we got to needing a book keeper to keep up with all the new ‘accounting. This was mid 80’s. How’s that from a life of voyaging with whatever was in your stash bag and no worries?
Soon there was the temptation of CAD. They said it would save so much ‘time’.
In retrospect i call complete bullshit on that. We were happily bopping along maintaining the development of half a dozen ‘sail designs’ with hard patterns, leading in our sport, and managing to get to the beach and sail from lunch to dark and call it R&D. Every damn day. And make money at it. Was almost fun.
Then CAD development. First we had to spend a couple frikkin YEARS doing literally double… got that… DOUBLE the work while we did the programing and testing of the design software against the reality. Had to buy a large scale plotter table just to be able to check the software against reality. But it was going to ‘save us so much time’.
Then, to make it really save us so much time, we had to upgrade to a plotter/CUTTER that cost five times what the original large plotter cost. Almost another year of double work to get the whole design system 90% dependable.
By then I could travel with a ‘laptop’ Toshiba Tecra… only cost 7500$ back in those days, and was a brick in my backpack all around the world. And shit… did it save time… NOT!. It just gave me the ability to almost never stop frikkin’ working. Soon the marketing guy wanted something new every season. By the end of my burned out creative workspan I had an active portfolio of nearly 100 designs and was ‘working’ ten to twelve hours day, no longer sailing at all, traveling globally 150K miles a year, gained 70lbs, brain fried time zoned just planed out.
When I finally got some sense and bailed from that I was twice divorced, three kids, 26years of child support, and so happy to never look at anything much on a screen, except maybe GU in the morning to check in on this wonderful slice of commentary. Built a great boat, loaded up, and sailed away.
Time? You never save it. Can only spend it. Spend it wisely. Go offshore in a small boat and find out what time it really is.
Stiks
Further to that tale… when I bailed I quickly lost 75lbs by changing diet and lifestyle, got happy with being able to do real ‘work’ all day if necessary, and went on to enjoy the last fifteen years getting to 80.
Looking forward to the next 25. Mom was 102 so I know it’s in me.
No illusions.
Stiks
one thing I see is how differently we are wired. I notice George that you often espouse “staying in front of the herd”. I’ve never seen myself as part of the herd so I can happily, blissfully sit on the sidelines – “Consciousness observing” as tbs put it. I’m not being trampled by technology and AI, just passively watching.
I do believe there are seasons in our lives, as surely as there are in Nature – we are here to meld with this rhythm and to surrender our earthly ego. easier for some…….
Still there is a herd, Winter. And I’ve found it personally more rewarding to be away from or well-ahead of – same. I chose a “remote life” rural and sailboats for a reason (non-herding fellow myself). Still you have to “work the herd” or you don’t get a computer and time to use it…
Ure,
I wasn’t attacking you personally.
I thought I said you are merely repeating the gobbledygook prepared by Ai.
Fair enough. If you were not attacking me personally, I’ll take that correction.
But I am still challenging you to take whatever your definition of “gobbledygook” is and articulate something that will pass more than one person’s fact-check.
It sounds easy — until you do a few thousand retrievals and see how often the sources are wrong, incomplete, selective, or biased. That’s one of the blessings and curses of AI compression: you don’t get the full flavor of every grenade going off in a war zone, which ones were near soldiers, which ones were near kids, which claims came from whom, and which parts were later corrected.
That detail layer goes away in compression. That is not new. It is part of the old inverted-pyramid style from journalism school: most important facts first, supporting detail lower down. I’ve taught more than a few reporters that way over the years.
One of the real challenges — and you may have something useful to contribute here, as may other readers — is the make-up of the searchable news-site list. Source selection changes emphasis as much as individual reporter bias does.
You may not see that until you have “run the desk” and had the Old Man ask, “Where was our coverage of ______?”
You learn very quickly in corporate news that perception is shaped by whatever source list the bosses are watching, besides your own reporting, station, or network feed.
Yes, TASS and Xinhua are on the scan list, along with Iran’s Press TV and others. They belong there, not because they are presumed truthful, but because they are part of the information battlefield. AP, Reuters, BBC, Fox, CNN, NBC, Ukrainian official sources, Russian official sources, and the rest all have to be viewed with source-weighting, not worship.
That’s where the algorithm gets difficult.
When assigning reportorial weighting — what goes top of column or above the fold — do you lead with the event, or do you lead with outrage? You seem to gravitate toward outrage. That’s not necessarily useless, but it is not the same as an event layer.
And that is where you run smack into the balancing act we deal with in news. Do you cover events as “history rolling by” — event-focused, timestamped, sourced, compressed — or do you lead with outrage claims?
The problem is that the greater the claimed outrage, the harder it usually is to find an absolutely unbiased report. Outrage is, by its nature, biased. It is also part of the apparatchik and propaganda machinery in every war.
So what we can actually use are lists of machine-readable sites and a clear sense of their bias, reliability, ownership, and propaganda role. I can’t read all 150 sites before writing the first word of the day. That is why I use the autosweeper to find out what has moved in BlinkLab.
It isn’t gobbledygook. It’s code. Trust me, there is a difference — unless we are talking about old-school spaghetti code.
Editorially, ask yourself two questions:
Would I lead with the event, or with the outrage?
And then list the sources of outrage that are always right.
I haven’t found one yet.
Event-driven reporting, with reduced emotional weighting, is simply easier to scan, compare, and predigest. That is the point of Blink.
~ure
“until you do a few thousand retrievals and see how often the sources are wrong, incomplete, selective, or biased.”
They are ALL incomplete and biased and they’re selective when they can foster a narrative their editorial staff finds pleasing, by reporting one viewpoint, or not reporting a newsworthy event because it contradicts their editorial ideology. News agents rarely report something that’s flat wrong. They do, however, often intentionally misattribute a person, organization, or political Party.
George’s “news test,” which he first published in the early years of his site (Does it affect me? Is it actionable?) has saved me countless hours and likely several lifetimes worth of ulcers. if I can’t fix something I do a quick mitigation and simply don’t worry about it any more…
If “FREE” AI can’t even get **BASIC** KNOWN FACTS correct, just making up shit to spit back at you, why should I pay money with the HOPE that a paid version of the same thing can actually now get **BASIC** KNOWN FACTS correct?
Sorry … AI is a PROVEN ACTIVE LIAR. ACTIVE KNOW LIARS, as every adult should know particularly when money is on the table, are NEVER to be trusted about ANYTHING.
Maybe “SOMEDAY” AI will stop Lying, but so far haven’t seen that happen.
I can’t use an entity that engages in ACTIVE LYING in my line of work, way too risky, something I take seriously after fighting off million dollar lawsuits a couple of times in my life (even though I won they cost me into 6 figures OUT OF POCKET).
If you would never have to pay monetary judgements resulting from any LIES it would generate you might trust using an ACTIVE KNOWN LIAR to give you data since in reality YOU HAVE NO STAKE IN THE GAME and NOTHING ON THE TABLE TO LOSE …
I do.
AI is round trash can material from my point of view.
Fair point on risk.
If your use case requires unsupervised factual certainty, then no — you should not trust AI. I don’t either.
AI is not a judge, not a licensed engineer, not a sworn witness, not a fact oracle, and not a substitute for professional liability. It is a compression and retrieval tool. Used wrong, it will absolutely make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Sometimes with confidence. That is why I don’t use it as an authority.
I use it the way I would use a very fast junior researcher: useful for first pass, sorting, summarizing, pattern-finding, drafting, comparing, and generating checklists. Then the human still owns verification, judgment, and consequences.
There is a huge difference between:
“AI says this is true, therefore I’ll rely on it”
and
“AI found these candidate claims, sources, contradictions, and patterns; now I will verify what matters.”
The first is malpractice.
The second is leverage.
That is also why BlinkLabNews is being built around compression, attribution, source conflict, and verification status — not blind trust. The goal is not “believe the machine.” The goal is “make the machine show its work well enough that a human can decide faster.”
Your lawsuit point is real. If money, safety, law, medicine, engineering, or reputation are on the table, AI output must be treated as unverified until checked against primary sources, contracts, statutes, drawings, records, instruments, or whatever standard applies in that field.
But calling AI “trash can material” misses the tool distinction. A chainsaw is a terrible surgical instrument. That does not make it useless for clearing a fallen tree.
Wrong tool, wrong job, wrong supervision — disaster.
Right tool, right job, human final responsibility — useful.
That’s all I’m arguing.
~ure
“A chainsaw is a terrible surgical instrument.”
Two days ago I watched a Mexican crew do a roofing job with a chainsaw for one of my neighbors. It’s not a very good roofing tool, either…