Recently, I told a brief story here about how Sam Altman got fired by the board of his artificial-intelligence oriented company, then days later returned in triumph to the head of the company, and with a re-jiggered subservient board. Now I return to that subject with further thoughts. Why did the board attempt to fire Altman? They weren't at all specific about it. On November 17, 2023, noon on the west coast OpenAI's board of directors announced they were firing him, effective immediately, because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications." Nothing more. That lack of particulars smelled to some people like a lack as well of ... candidness. One prominent theory that has developed over the subsequent weeks is that Altman was playing hardware against software. OpenAI is a software concern, but Altman apparently had aspirations to, and even raised money for, the founding of an AI chip company. THAT sounds like the sort of thing that might create con...
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I think it is great when the Trumpeting wackos have a falling out. With any luck, the whole terrible 'movement' is going the way of the doodoo. Alex Jones, the infamous detector and denouncer of crisis actors, is at odds with QAnon. It is one of those "I hope ya both lose" moments, boxing fans. Jones' deal is: there are no real school shootings in America. They are all fake. How can we know? Because when Jones reviews the footage after such events, he always finds that some of the people in one of them look like some of the people in another. So it is all a matter of "crisis actors" trucked from one place to another in the hire of a conspiracy to create a grassroots demand for gun control. QAnon looks at a conspiracy theory like that and says, "you're a piker, boy. Let me show you how it's done." QAnon seems to have begun as "Pizzagate," a rather modest theory (itself endorsed by Alex Jones IIRC) that a specific pizza pla...
I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
Last month and this have seen dramatic developments in the world of bitcoin. Let's try to catch up. Bitcoin is one of a group of efforts to create a pseudo-currency online. Its existence is a testimony on how little trust exists for the legal tender of the US, the one-time world numeraire . An issue I discussed at book length here. There was a massive sell-off on Wednesday, April 10, which resumed on Thursday. Daily Bail Natural News Conspiracy theories abound, both as to the run-up in the value of bitcoins that began in July 2012 and in the crash in April 2013. My own view is that bitcoin has been (at least for now) the victim of its own enthusiasts, who got ahead of themselves. On March 29, Jeffrey Tucker of Laissez Faire Books wrote, "Maybe the price will keep climbing," etc. One of those this-time-its-different things that often get themselves written just before a bubble bursts. Robert Wenzel called him out. It appears Wenzel was right. Anyo...