…well…it’s hopefully relaxing for you folks…but it’s not exactly a day of rest for the people in morocco

Earthquake rescue efforts have continued in Morocco as it mourned the victims of a disaster that killed more than 2,000 people, flattening buildings in cities and villages.

Friday’s 6.8-magnitude quake, Morocco’s strongest on record, struck 72km (45 miles) south-west of Marrakech, wiping out entire villages in rural areas.
[…]
Morocco declared three days of mourning, during which the national flag would be flown at half mast, the royal court said. The Moroccan armed forces were deploying rescue teams to provide affected areas with clean drinking water, food, tents and blankets, it added. Several countries, including Israel, France, Spain, Italy and the US, offered aid.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/10/morocco-earthquake-mourning-begins-as-rescue-continues-with-death-toll-over-2000

…but for the rest of us…the upheaval is…less literal?

“It is clear that X is not doing enough to moderate content and has no clear strategy for dealing with political disinformation,” associate professor Dr Timothy Graham tells Guardian Australia.

A researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, Graham has tracked misinformation and bot activity on social media for several years including until Musk took over Twitter in October last year.

Graham and the PhD candidate Kate FitzGerald recently analysed 1m tweets surrounding the first Republican primary debate, along with Tucker Carlson’s interview with the former US president Donald Trump streamed on X at the same time.

Previously, the researchers were able to analyse 10m tweets a month free of charge, but after Musk restricted access to the company’s application programming interface (API), they had to fork out over US$5,000 (A$7,800) from a grant fund to gain access to the 1m posts included in the current study.
[…]
Graham and FitzGerald identified more than 1,200 X accounts that were spreading the false and disproven claim that Trump won the 2020 election during the debate and interview, as well as a sprawling bot network of 1,305 accounts. Conspiratorial content spread during the debate attracted more than 3m views.
[…]
So, how did they determine the difference between a bot and what might just be a hyperpartisan account with a human behind it? Graham says they set a high bar.

“We look at patterns of accounts that are discussing the debate topics, and during the interview as well, that are posting the same or similar content or the same links repeatedly within five seconds of each other,” he says.

If two accounts did this five times, the researchers took this as a sign that they were automated accounts.

One network of bots discovered was connected to an account calling itself “MediaOpinion19”. The account was created in September last year, and had tweeted on average 662 times a day – or once every two minutes. It was the central node in a network of pro-Trump accounts that retweeted the central account’s tweets.

The researchers also found a second pro-Trump cluster of bot accounts linked to a fake news website that posts content similar to the Russian IRA “news trolls” identified during the 2016 presidential election.

FitzGerald says the accounts remained active long after they had first discovered them, showing that X has not been cracking down on bot activity, let alone the misinformation and disinformation posted by real people.
[…]
She says many of the human-backed hyperpartisan clusters promoting misinformation identified in the report were verified by the platform under Musk’s new system, which allows people to pay for the blue-tick verification on X.

…fun fact…while burning man was going full-quagmire…there were “verified” accounts on twitter freaking people out about a wholly unsubstantiated outbreak of ebola…& by all accounts the overlap between people who are used to relying on that platform for being able to find authoritative information & people who, well, couldn’t…was perhaps higher than it might have been in the general population…so…fun times

[…] scam accounts are still prominent on the platform, with several verified accounts seen as late as Thursday this week promoting long-known investment scams.
[…]
Despite the turmoil at X, its drop in value and the rise of rivals such as Threads and Bluesky, Graham says Twitter is still the “engine room of social media”.

“Everything goes in and out of Twitter because journalists and elites in the public sphere think that it matters … They then go and report on it,” he says.

“Twitter is still hanging on to its status as the centre in terms of how everything fits together. I think that it’s going to still be influential.”
[…]
“The people that continue to use Twitter are the people that are going to be the most influential in undermining democracy in the US 2024 election,” she says.

“In terms of its impact on democracy, I still feel that it is maybe even more [influential] than it used to be because it’s less balanced than it used to be.”

In response to a claim on X this week that “Democrat groups buy bots” to smear people’s reputation, Musk replied: “It is impossible to tell with unverified accounts whether you’re dealing with a small or large number of real people, as sophisticated bots are virtually indistinguishable from humans.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/09/x-twitter-bots-republican-primary-debate-tweets-increase

…whether that says more about the quality of bots or humans…is more than I can summon a response to on a sunday morning, frankly…but…I’m pretty sure it’s not good

TechScape: As the US election campaign heats up, so could the market for misinformation [Guardian]

…sadly…we can’t ground the man-child the way they can lock down his toys

The Federal Aviation Administration said it closed its investigation into SpaceX’s failed debut of Starship. The agency is requiring SpaceX to take 63 corrective steps and to apply for a modified FAA license before launching again.

FAA official said multiple problems led to the April launch explosion, which sent pieces of concrete and metal hurtling for thousands of feet and created a plume of pulverized concrete that spread for miles around.
[…]
During the initial test flight, the rocketship had to be destroyed after it tumbled out of control just a few minutes after liftoff from Boca Chica Beach in Texas. The wreckage crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX said fuel leaks during ascent caused fires to erupt at the tail of the rocket, severing connection with the main flight computer and leading to a loss of control.

The blast caught the attention of regulators, who were required by law to open an investigation into the matter, and environmentalists who had already argued for a more in-depth study of potential hazards to public safety and wildlife.

“They contemplated debris from these launches, but not part of the launchpad itself being blown out miles away and scattered across the landscape,” Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in the aftermath of the explosion.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/08/spacex-starship-grounded-explosion-faa-elon-musk

…I know…it’s a lot of talking about elon when you’re trying to keep your breakfast down…& I’m sorry about that…but he’s part outlier & part convenient example of something that’s a particular sort of representative

It’s easy to talk tough on tech, as Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology has shown this week. In an interview with the Telegraph, Donelan warned that social media platforms could be on the hook for “humongous” fines if they allowed under-13s to remain on their platforms. “If that means deactivating the accounts of nine-year-olds or eight-year-olds, then they’re going to have to do that,” the cabinet minister said.

The approach sounds all well and good in theory. It’s red meat to the pearl-clutching, law and order Tories who believe the world is full of danger, and tech companies are to blame. Don’t get me wrong – there is plenty to lay at the feet of social media companies for the harm they have caused. But the tough talk is part of a wider tendency in our politics that ignores the reality of how we interact with the internet – and demands a degree of censorship that is not only unworkable, but counterproductive.

Certainly, the internet can be a cruel place, and what happens online can have real-world ramifications. Disclosures made following the campaigning of the parents of Molly Russell, the teenager who took her life after being bombarded by online content related to suicide, self-harm and depression, have been chastening. And documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen laid bare the access many users had to distressing content and misinformation.

Nevertheless, Donelan’s demands that tech companies cut off access to their tools for under-13s are the equivalent of the misguided practice of abstinence-only teaching in sex education classes at school: you can pretend kids aren’t doing it, but they will anyway. Ducking the conversation entirely will leave them ill-equipped to handle issues as and when they arise online.

…not for nothing…but you’d think a generation of parents who can remember how they ran rings around their own parents when it came to how tech worked…whose kids routinely circumvent the barriers to using their devices with a facility that many a hacker would give their eye-teeth for…would be a tad more clear-eyed about this stuff…but…there’s your political co-efficient, I suppose

Just as we’re starting to recognise the issues caused by “helicopter parenting”, realising that letting children roam with less strict oversight will ensure they grow up to be independent, rather than dependent, adults – similarly we need to allow them a little more slack for online exploration.

…if that sounds misguided…which it might…I guess I’d argue that the most likely outcome is not that we’ll stop kids going where they shouldn’t online any sooner than elon will banish bots from twitter…& that imperfect approaches are still better than counter-productive ones

Perversely, Donelan’s draconian demand that tech companies outlaw younger users from accessing their platforms will probably have the opposite effect to the one intended. If you make it punitively expensive for companies to acknowledge that underage users might be on their platform, they will do their level best to prevent children from accessing it. But kids will still slip the net – and easily so, given that most online age checks consist of little more than asking users to declare their date of birth. Any child able to take away 13 from 2023 will be able to add a few years to their age in an instant. Video age verification, where AI tries to discern the age of an individual using a video of their face, can be fooled by the judicious use of makeup.

And in this imagined future, tech platforms will pretend that children don’t inhabit their digital halls, and turn a blind eye to their existence. The online safety bill’s provisions are such that the companies affected will still largely be self-policing. The communications regulator Ofcom will be empowered to fine companies for not following the rules – but it’ll be up to the companies themselves to disclose where things go wrong. If the punishments are too significant, it’s easier for firms to pretend the problem doesn’t exist rather than risk losing income.
[…]
Unfortunately the tack Donelan is taking promises a bad outcome for everyone: the platforms will see no evil, children will speak no evil, and so parents will hear no evil. Instead, we need to understand that it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and take a more realistic approach. Let children experiment online. But make sure everyone responsible is watching.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/09/internet-ban-children-tiktok-tory-social-media

…as feedback loops go…we might want to reverse some directions…or at least the momentum…because it’s a hop, skip & a jumped-up ego from your feedback loop to your doom loop

When Elon Musk posted a personally crafted 280-character “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine last October, a Ukrainian diplomat offered a carefully considered review. It ran to a full two words: “Fuck off”. This week’s allegations that Musk shut down his Starlink system (on which the comms-shattered Ukraine relies to defend itself against Russia) right in the middle of a counteroffensive last year – apparently deliberately to neuter it – forces a new question. When he does finally make it there in his big space rocket, will even Mars be far enough for Elon Musk to fuck off to?

…I mean…no? it won’t be far enough…but also he won’t go there, is my guess…even if he manages to send some poor bunch of suckers on the first one-way jaunt within our lifetime…even if they (or their successors) by some miracle achieve the necessary feats to set up a return leg…if I were setting the odds I’d say that given the opportunity the man is more likely to have a personal hand in reducing earth to the sort of barren, inhospitable landscape in a poisonous atmosphere for which mars is somewhat famous than he is to endure the early days of what he’ll doubtless dub “planet X”…but I’d still pay good money to see him ride one of those learning curve rockets of his?

For now, it’s time to take another turn around the block with Phoney Stark, as Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson reveals that the edgelord magnate (and edgelord magnet) ordered his engineers to switch off the Starlink satellite communications network during a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea last year. Or to “disrupt” the attack, as CNN puts it, still clinging embarrassingly to the preferred Silicon Valley argot that surely ought to have been discredited once its boy kings started becoming more powerful than many of the world’s actual countries. I can’t help feeling that the benefit-of-the-doubt era with these guys ought to have officially ended back when Y2K fashion was just fashion. Yet until very recently, Musk was still being breathlessly judged a net good to humanity, what with his electric cars and his hyperloops and the fact he once smoked a joint on a podcast. So! Very! Cool! Elon was endlessly covered by the media as a kind of fascinating, eccentric inventor, as opposed to someone with a vast amount of power who should be held to account accordingly. Just as it was with Mark Zuckerberg before him, by the time people realised a lot of what was happening, it was rather too late.

Anyway, back to this strategic Starlink blackout, which was apparently prefaced by Elon wailing to his biographer: “How am I in this war?” The question appears to have been rhetorical, but demands an alternative answer to the one towards which Musk was apparently gesturing (he followed up by explaining that Starlink was “so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes”). You’re in this war because you’re literally a defence contractor – just as you’re in the news this week for demonising the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) because you’re literally a media mogul. Man up.

[…] Musk himself returned to other based-deity pursuits, such as enabling the dissemination of Moscow propaganda and Twitter-polling what should happen to Ukraine. This last gambit fell squarely in the tradition of the Treaty of Versailles, of course, which famously asked Allied users whether Germany should be punished extra-hard, and offered three options: “Hell yeah”, “Hell no”, and “I don’t care – just show me the numbers”.

…which…begs several questions…not the least of which being “what would it take to put him out of our misery?”

Alas, this is not a question being asked by Elon’s fanboys, that whole heaving army of betas out there defending him minute by minute on his own platform, in the hope that he sees their posts and perhaps … what? “likes” them? Oh man. It’s too poignant. Yet the second this latest story about the Starlink shutdown broke, you couldn’t move on X for Muskovites suggesting that if Ukraine doesn’t like the deal it signed up to, it can terminate its contract and sign up to another service. Please let’s put much, much more of our future security in the hands of people who treat war and the fallout from an unsolicited invasion like a broadband contract.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/08/elon-musk-satellite-war-starlink-system-ukraine

…&…maybe she’s right about the ADL thing…she seems to be on the money about the cage fight…but…california?

Elon Musk’s X sued California on Friday, challenging the constitutionality of a state law establishing new transparency requirements for social media companies, including how they police disinformation, hate speech and extremism.

…of which more, anon

…these are not the actions of a man engaged in the pursuits he claims to be…whereas what he’s chasing says a lot about what he’s in a rush to fold into his everything app

The company formerly known as Twitter is “unfit” to hold banking licenses because of its alleged “intentional complicity” with human rights violations in Saudi Arabia and treatment of users’ personal data, according to an open letter sent to federal and state banking regulators that was signed by a law firm representing a Saudi victim’s family.
[…]
Elon Musk, X’s billionaire owner, has said he wants X to begin offering financial services, like allowing users to make payments across the social media company. The banking plan is a critical new element in Musk’s effort to increase revenue at the company following his controversial $44bn acquisition of the platform last year.

In their letter, which is addressed to “attorneys general and banking commissioners across 50 states” and was obtained by the Guardian, lawyers at Walden Macht & Haran LLP argue that X’s prior and current conduct deserves “serious and careful investigation”, including allegations that X acted at the direction of Saudi Arabia in furtherance of the kingdom’s campaign of transnational repression.
[…]
“While Twitter has protested that it was a ‘victim’ of its employees’ misconduct, the evidence we found tells a much different story,” the letter claims, pointing to data that shows that, once the breach was discovered by federal investigators, Twitter began approving Saudi requests for confidential information, including “emergency disclosures”, in “droves”.

In 2016, 85% of these requests were approved, the lawyers say – a much higher approval rate than those for Canada and the US. It also pointed to Musk capitulating to Saudi’s existing stake in X – investors there are the second largest in the company – even though he was “fully aware” of Saudi’s prior actions.

…saudi arabia poses a bigger problem than maybe-the-biggest-ego-online…like china poses a bigger problem than russia…but…that hardly seems like a good reason to let russia fill its boots…sorry…I think I’m in a feedback loop of my own this morning…it’s hardly surprising that from time to time people who know me like to tell me that what with how some things tend to wind me up I might feel better if I read about them less…& I can’t argue that folks I know who deliberately limited their intake of current affairs do, among other benefits, sleep a good deal better than I do…but one of them picked a new bit of phrasing that’s stuck with me like a yogi berra quote…”this stuff only bothers you because you pay attention to it”

…it’s not like I’m deluded enough to think that any amount of attention I can personally pay to a thing is going to tip any scales in the grand scheme of things…&…I get what they were driving at…but…it bothers me that they didn’t even as an afterthought include the part where what bothers me is a lack of attention in a broader sense being paid to this stuff than is warranted by the scale of the problems of which it is representative…as distinct from the principles proponents of such efforts claim to be standard bearers for

X, the social media platform once called Twitter, said the law, known as Assembly Bill 587, violates its free speech rights under the US constitution’s first amendment and California’s state constitution.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Sacramento, California, X said the law’s “true intent” was to pressure social media companies into eliminating content the state found objectionable.

By doing so, California is forcing companies to adopt the state’s views on politically charged issues, “a form of compelled speech in and of itself”, X said.

…& how does arrogance & arrested development conspire to leapfrog its way to that desired conclusion in a fashion it expects the court to take seriously?

AB 587 requires larger social media companies to issue semiannual reports that describe their content moderation practices, and provide data on the numbers of objectionable posts and how they were addressed.

The law also requires companies to provide copies of their terms of service. Failure to comply risks civil fines of up to $15,000 for each violation a day.

…if you could check our homework you’d force us to do the stuff we say we do already & that would be disastrous for our currently self-harming business model…ipso facto by the transitive property in conjunction with the absolution modifier I get on my pet platform that makes you the ones harming free speech not me…uh huh…keep up those mental contortions at his age & he’s liable to do himself a mischief…or pop a gasket…or whatever euphemism for finally have an embolism you prefer

Jesse Gabriel, an assembly member and author of the bill, said in a statement that “if Twitter has nothing to hide, then they should have no objection to this bill”.

“Assembly Bill 587 is a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content. It in no way requires any specific content moderation policies – which is why it passed with strong, bipartisan support,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/08/elon-musk-twitter-lawsuit-california-free-speech

…so anyway…he’s still small potatoes in the grand scheme of things

‘A critical moment’: UN warns world will miss climate targets unless fossil fuels phased out [Guardian]

Chasm between climate action and scientific reality laid bare in UN stocktake [Guardian]

…& I did in fact read more than just the stuff that floated to the surface of the guardian

‘We have to come to grips with history’: Robert P Jones on The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy [Guardian]

…despite appearances

Trump overstated net worth by up to $3.6bn, says New York attorney general [Guardian]

…the bottom line can be…misleading

Add this to the list of historic documents produced in Trump's multiple criminal cases:

Bond paperwork signed by Trump during his trip to surrender at the Fulton County jail.

The former President worked with a local bond business to cover the cost of his $200,000 bond. pic.twitter.com/GGSpEi6QMV

— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) September 5, 2023

…much like all of the above…a lot of it seems to pose a great many more questions than I’m seeing answers to

Behold: a video from the CIA created to persuade Russian officials to leak information to Washington. What do you think? Does this make you want to commit treason? pic.twitter.com/fQ8iXqVU5c

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) September 7, 2023

…even when people bring receipts

Me: "Did you not make 750,000 dollars?"
Vivek Ramaswamy: "Not at the time I had applied for the [Soros] scholarship."
Me: "Yes you did Vivek. This is awkward for you because you did. I've got the tax returns in front of my face."#receipts

New clip 😉👇🏽pic.twitter.com/xkFSwIeCne

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) September 7, 2023

…still & all…that feels like it’s kind of the point…or at the very least a point that’s worth not passing over unexamined…not least if socrates was right about the unexamined life being not worth living…there’s only so much attention you can pay…& with all due respect to the eons old debate about who can & can’t multi-task…paying more of it to one thing tends to mean shorting another…& I could have come out with a different result today that never mentioned elon…still just from the guardian…or just out of bits from the post…or emptywheel…or any number of other people & places where there’s things you can read written by people who have taken their time & paid attention…hell, it could be nothing but things that use the term “attention economy” & it’d still inevitably leave more on the cutting-room floor than found a home on the page…so…what’s the point?

In part, it’s a familiar story: a smattering of songs, shows and films turned into culture war symbols, illuminating the amorphous, yet stark cultural divide in the US. “This is happening with everything,” said Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. “It’s always evolving. New things become the thing of the day, and so one thing replaces another. It’s the same outrage, it’s just a different target.”

Still, it’s tempting to frame summer 2023 as a victory for conservative culture – the year’s most successful independent film, a major country music video hit, and the first-ever artist to top the Hot 100 without a prior chart appearance have all been claimed by the right, whether fairly (Try That In a Small Town threatens violence to anti-police protesters) or not (Anthony has publicly distanced himself from either party). But these wins are less indicative of organic popularity than of a new front for the rightwing grievance machine, which increasingly uses purchasing power – boycotting, promotion, viral metrics – to make a point.

There are sharp differences in cultural consumption between political identities, which have expanded in the age of streaming and folded into increased political polarization. “The entertainment and media consumption habits of people are highly indicative on where they stand on certain hot-button political issues in this country,” said Johanna Blakley, the director of research at USC’s Norman Lear Center, which oversees an ongoing study tracking the political divide through Americans’ TV preferences.
[…]
But it wasn’t until Country Music Television removed the video in July, after criticism of its use of Black Lives Matter protest footage, that attention surged. “The location of the video [the site of a lynching], the imagery that is used, it’s all explicitly there, to evoke an anti-urban, anti-Black Lives Matter, to really pull out this urban rural divide,” said Jada Watson, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on country music. Suddenly, the song and video became a cudgel in the anti-cancel culture crusade, and it worked; the YouTube video has been viewed over 33m times. (Aldean has maintained that the song is not anti-Black Lives Matter; the video was quietly edited sometime amid the furor to remove some BLM references.)

Anthony’s success is even more notable, as he was previously unheard of – an unsigned artist living “off the grid” in rural Virginia with a few songs posted to YouTube and no prior following. There’s an audience for Anthony’s acoustic, rough-hewn style, which connects to a tradition of outsider folk with inchoate working-class politics (“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day, / vertime hours for bullshit pay”). But it has been championed primarily by rightwing figures as a new anthem of conservative values for anti-welfare stereotypes (“the obese milkin’ welfare”) rather than by listeners of country music, a genre much more complex than its white conservative reputation and riven by its own culture wars.

“There are just as many country fans that don’t appreciate those narratives as there are that do, and what drives a song within a genre like country music to the top of the all-genre chart within a week is a calculated digital movement,” said Watson. “To go to number one within a week of release on a song that was released on YouTube … that needed a big movement behind it. That’s not an organic thing.”
[…]
Directed by Alejandro Monteverde, Sound of Freedom takes conspiratorial thinking a step further; it tells the story of a rogue homeland security agent, played by Jim Caviezel, who risks everything to bust a child trafficking ring in Colombia. Though Monteverde has insisted that the film, made before the emergence of QAnon, is a non-partisan humanitarian story, it has become associated with the fringe belief system, partly for its overstatement of a child-trafficking cabal, partly because of Caviezel and the film’s subject, Tim Ballard, dabbling in Q conspiracy theories, and partly because of a rightwing outsider narrative. (Donald Trump hosted a screening at his New Jersey golf course.)
[…]
Fittingly, the grassroots, pay-it-forward marketing campaign of Sound of Freedom has led to even more conspiracy theories, including the belief that AMC theaters were purposefully disrupting screenings. (The chain’s CEO said of the subsequent boycott: “Sadly, conspiracy theorists are so prevalent in America. So much garbage information is spread.”)

Garbage information defines a good portion of this conservative backlash summer – some of the flashpoints intentional, some unwitting, some manufactured, some coincidental. Either way, it’s been subsumed by a loud rightwing outrage machine, one that seems poised to grind on for summers to come.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/09/sound-of-freedom-jason-aldean-oliver-anthony-conservative-movies-music

…but sure…none of this stuff is “my” problem

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels. Immediately, everyone wants them – not just tech companies but also petro states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus demand wildly exceeds supply. And just to make the squeeze really exquisite, Nvidia had astutely prebooked scarce (4-nanometre) production capacity at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the only chip-fabrication outfit in the world that can make them, when demand was slack during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, for the time being at least, if you want to get into the AI business, you need Nvidia GPUs.
[…]
So is Nvidia set to become the next Apple, or at least the next Intel? For the next few years, its dominance seems pretty secure, partly because its revenues are coming more from cloud-computing companies anxious to kit out their datacentres not just with conventional servers but increasingly with parallel-processing kit that will address the anticipated needs of the AI gold rush. They are good customers that pay on time and it’ll take them a couple of years at minimum to reconfigure their cloud infrastructures.

But nothing lasts for ever. After all, it’s not that long ago that Intel’s dominance of the semiconductor industry seemed total. And now it’s a shadow of its former self. Curiously enough, though, when Nvidia passed the trillion-dollar milestone, the thought on everyone’s mind was not of Intel but of Cisco, a famous manufacturer of networking and telecoms equipment that once happened to be in the right place at the right time, when the first internet boom kicked off in the mid-1990s. Its revenues tripled between 1997 and 2000 as demand for routers and other networking equipment soared. Then came the bust and by 2001 Cisco’s share price (and consequent market valuation) had dropped by 70%.

Could something such as this happen to Nvidia? The key question, says Ben Thompson, the shrewdest tech guru around, is: what will the eventual market for AI be when the frenzy has abated? Nobody knows the answer to that. Whatever happens, though, Nvidia’s picks and shovels will have made some people an awful lot of money.

…& maybe it really wouldn’t bother me if I adopted an out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach…which was popular in the era of the comstock lode & all…but…arguably works a bit better than it ought

[…] just one of the many families displaced by San Francisco’s “urban renewal” program of the 1960s and 70s, in which entire blocks in predominantly Black neighborhoods were seized and demolished. The destruction was widespread: thousands of Black families lost their homes, Victorian walk-ups were replaced with high-rise housing projects, business owners lost their livelihoods and a cultural hub, commonly dubbed the “Harlem of the west”, was wiped out. Other marginalized groups, including Japanese Americans, also saw their neighborhoods razed.

San Francisco’s Black population peaked in 1970, at just over 13% of the city’s total population. Since then, it’s been in steady decline. In 2021, the city was just 5.7% Black. Many attribute this to the fallout of urban renewal, which James Lance Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco who also sits on the city’s African American reparations advisory committee, described as “the single greatest injury inflicted on Black San Franciscans”.
[…]
At the time of urban renewal, the San Francisco redevelopment agency offered displaced residents a document known as a Certificate of Preference, which in theory promised the holder priority access to public housing, including below-market-rate rental and ownership options, often in housing projects built atop the rubble of buildings demolished by urban renewal.

But very few certificates were ever used, ostensibly because city officials failed to honor them, although it is unclear whether that was done out of malice, confusion or lack of oversight of the program. While San Francisco issued more than 7,000 certificates of preference during the years of urban renewal, fewer than 1,500 have been exercised in the past five decades.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/09/san-francisco-public-housing-detectives-renewal

…just…don’t let it bother you

Now aged 63 and still wearing his trademark LA Raiders cap flipped back to front, Chuck D – whose real name is Carlton Ridenhour – has swapped lyrics for drawing. Next month sees the publication of his new graphic novel, or naphic grovel as Chuck calls it (“I’ve always mangled the English language,” he quips).

Summer of Hamn is billed as a depiction of gun violence in America, a collection of Chuck’s graffiti-style drawings and verse – all compiled in what he calls “the madness” of last summer. “Every day there were things that were macabre that didn’t even make the news because people had become immune,” he says.

He turned to illustration because people listen more than ever with their eyes. “A picture is worth 10,000 words nowadays,” he says.

A drawing today can get the type of response that a rap record used to get 35 years ago, he adds, especially if it’s something he’s uploaded to Instagram or Facebook or X.
[…]
“My style is my signature. I might do shading, I might not, I might ink it, I might not. It doesn’t have any rules to it. It’s the opposite of photography, it’s interpretation.”

And he interprets everything, from the raw pain of mass shootings to climate change, to the war in Ukraine to the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s the “Disunited State of America” he decries in one of the images.
[…]
Drawing has been his therapy, too. It was the medium he turned to when his father died in 2016, it helped him look inward and find peace.

“Art is a saving grace,” he says.

But that’s not necessarily how his book feels. The illustrations are bleak – and seem devoid of any hope (the acronym in the title, Hamn, stands for Hollowpointlessness Aiding Mass Nihilism). Is that how he feels about America today?

“The book doesn’t say that America won’t change,” he replies. “It’s about putting something out there that you see and reflect and can give an opinion to. We can look at it and say, it’s gotta change.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/09/chuck-d-graphic-novel-public-enemy-gun-violence

…so…being as I’m no chuck D & all…I don’t care to do the math on how many 10s of 1000s of words of mine would have to stack up to be worth one of his pictures in a social media post…but…despite the part where about my only saving grace is the part where eventually I stop typing…when it comes to feeling better in direct proportion to how little attention I pay

…so…I dunno…coffee helps…& music?