moon traveller herald

This is a lookback at recent AI activity.  On my technology job site Progressive Gauge.  Based on three years of research but condensed around 2025 stuff.. Gemini concludes Story concludes:  The current state of AI is like a lavish Hollywood movie trailer : while the promotional footage promises a world-changing epic of "civilizational" proportions, the actual production is struggling behind the scenes with a ballooning budget and a script that still has significant holes. [Re pick above [Wet lab feedback loop] - I specially asked "No Teal!"] jv https://progressivegauge.com/2025/12/31/multiglobal-hyperbole-engines-in-2025-pt-1/

   Bill Gates Source Code: Harvard Drop-Out Makes Good Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2025 With the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk dashing about, we crouch for shelter now in an era where well-funded high-tech bros can live a life that was once reserved only for Doctor Strange. That tends to make Bill Gates’ “Source Code: My Beginnings” a much more warmfy and life-affirming book than it might otherwise have been. In this recounting of his early days, and founding of Microsoft, he paints a colorful picture of a bright and excitable boy making good. Much of Source Code is set in “the green pastures of Harvard University.” [ story continues ... ] [I posted this on Amazon][But if they move the URL, note it is also on LinkedIn, Facebook, and ProgressiveGauge.]

Hopfield circuit I was pretty lucky to cover neural networks on occasions for EDN Product News in the 1990s. I'd edited articles on the topic previously for ESD. So always paid close attention  .. and more so  as machine learning increasingly concentrated on neural engines. So, when The Nobel Prize for Physics went to Hopfield and Hinton, I shifted from on project and wrote an old style tech news story. A bit of a pleasant rush, especially to complete for Miller Time for my Progressive Gauge Blog .  Here I insert some images that basically show neurals. Admit the story lacked that. JV The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced that neural network science pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024. The two researchers are cited for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The Nobel award is a capstone of sorts for two premier researchers in neural n...

 A rewrite My Secret Museum of Cybernetics i. Intellectual pretensions were welcome around my house growing up in Racine. I got a job at an after-school job at the library, and found  a book for every imagining I might have. At the point where Bob Dylan and Summer of Love mysticism was passing cars and rockets in my personal hit parade, I chanced upon the notion of feedback. It had a scientific aspect and a musical aspect [the latter in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and Canned Heat]. I was assigned to write a thesis that could serve as an essay for college admission. So I had a mind to study. With Bronski's Science and Human Values in hand I began a piece on The Humanization of Science, in part a Renaissance study. In part a look at the history of alchemy. I'd often begin at the beginning of things and hardly get any further. At the same time I found out about Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon - about cybernetics and information theory. Cybernetics, closely...

http://itsthedatatalking.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-man.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/  Does a 1970s Utopian technology effort offer useful guides for those trying to assess the progress of new technology today? In one case, at least, yes. It is the story of Salvador Allende's attempt to build a working Socialist government in Chile with computer cybernetics. The tale is told especially well, under the able hands of author and researcher Eden Medina. Medina rolls up the takeaways in a recent article in Jacobin magazine. It is a summary of some important lessons garnered during work on her 2013 book, The Cybernetic Revolutionaries. You see, before CIA influencers sponsored Augusto Pinochet and company's junta, Allende's democratically government was trying to bring a new form of ...

  I recently picked up for a summer read “The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. As I began to plow through the nearly 600-page book, it seemed to display the accidents and unforeseen circumstances that can track scientific research and technological innovation. ≠ The Gene begins with Gregor Mendel in the monastery in Brno, now a part of the Czech Republic. There the eventual founder of the science of genetics is perceived as slow, happy in the garden with his peas, not smart or articulate enough to be more than a substitute teacher. The friar abbots try and give him every chance to gain a useful education, and perhaps step up from substitute. And by some phenomenal luck, he’s sent to study in Vienna. Thus, to study under no less than Doppler. Yes, he comes to study under Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the mathematician and physicist who proposed that the perceived pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on the relative locations and velocities...

Technology companies make money “through the most sophisticated and secret content curation ever devised,” Tom Wheeler writes. Let’s take this to include Big Data, algorithms, collaborative filtering, portals, recommendation engines, personalization engines and a parade of machine learning models. Former FCC head and present Harvard Kennedy School visiting prof Wheeler writes a useful (if at times 'class-planish') book for background called “Techlash – Who makes the rules in the digital Gilded Age?” – that looks back at the telegraph and telephone and the regulation around those and brings us up to the present. Boston/Cambridge academics have worthile views on the menace that unbridled tech communication company dominance proffer. Their problem is they are wonky, and their rivals are cowboy libertarians that chorrle "Moohaa-haa" I am thinking of Musk and Andreeson for two.  With a next age of AI bubbling in a slew of Large Language Models, the secret curation model of...

Marvin Minsky on YouTube discusses the history of his work. Minsky [1927-2016] was the founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a key figure in Artificial Intelligence's early development. He was a central figure in highly nuanced [meaning I don't understand them] academic controversies around nerual nets and symbolic logic. He was initially inspired by reading a book on mathematical biophysics by Nicholas Rashevsky. This book provided mathematical decription of biological functions. [which would as described seem to foretell soon brewing cybernetic theories, I'd add].  He was also moved  by the science fiction of H.G. Wells. He liked sci-fi, he said, because the authors made guesses about the future, and that seems to map to what researchers do. He invited Ray Bradbury to his lab once to view the robotics. Bradbury demurred - he didn't want to see clunky real robots - it would cloud his imagination. Minsky more or less admitted these first-take MIT robots w...

  The day Microsoft added AutoSummarizer to Word, I stopped off at Egghead after work. There was no one else in line ahead of me. Not like John Wesley Harding. There were two other cats ahead at Soulville in Racine Wi when that was released. pic.twitter.com/A6LYhualS8 — Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) February 15, 2024

  - Pin on hand-carved backdrop by CJEVaughan- - Julie Newmar played Robot on 1964 sitcom My Living Doll- I got to go to the robotics conf in Boston this week. This was a different experience for someone who hasn’t been to a show with much real hardware for ages. The first technical conference I ever covered was IEEE Electro in Boston. And the memories rushed back. My hopes to succeed in this business were somewhat dashed at the start of Electro – it was a crush of imagery undeciphered. The impression remains: I was at a medieval bazar in a Star Wars universe. And without words. In those days they had well-built women [the derogatory term pocket protector men used was ‘booth bunnies’] along with [what I know now could be] shabbily built printed circuit boards (jerry rigged to make the show deadline with jumper cables here and there]. I remember looking at a pile of colorful metal shapes, wondering what was what [they were heat sinks of wide variety]....

Did a breaking story Sunday-Monday on a bank run. A first for me! Was still catching my breath on Wednesday. Members of the high-tech and venture capital communities — as well as many in the world beyond — braced today in the immediate aftermath of last week’s Silicon Valley Bank failure. The regulators also said they had taken control of New York-based Signature Bank, which had also faltered, after becoming a major banking service provider to companies in crypto markets. The regulators announced “systemic risk exceptions” for both banks. This exception allows the regulators to take extraordinary action that goes beyond what they are are minimally required to do, and is used in rare circumstances when inaction may lead to a snowballing of investor fear. On Friday, the Silicon Valley Bank was closed by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, and the FDIC was named as receiver. That came as the bank struggled to meet customers’ often-frantic requests for withdra...

  La Brea -  Today, The Land of Grade School Field Trips Noting here the passing at 91 last month of Frederick Brooks, director of some of IBM’s most important mainframe-era programming projects. He was a key figure in establishing the idea that software projects should be intelligently engineered and organized. He helped as much as anyone to move the mysterious art of tinkering with computer code toward a profession capable of repeatable results. “The Mythical Man-Month,” his 1975 distillation of years of development management, became a common reference work in many a developer’s desk library. He had a sense of humor too, for example, choosing the above pic of animals sinking into the La Brea Tar Pits, to illustrate this epic of software project management. Working at IBM in the 1950s and 1960s, and spearheading development of the vaunted IBM/360, Brooks gave a lie to notions that were bedrock in hardware-software projects, and came up with a few notable inventions as well.....

"I'm perfectly willing to concede that I've been too nice in thinking that if you had a thousand parameters maybe you'll get somewhere. maybe you won't. but my concern is different. if the system doesn't distinguish what's the actual World from non-actual world it's not telling us any thing. just as in the case [that] the souped-up periodic table the [deep learning?] systems and others like them can find superficial regularities in astronomical amounts of data and produce something that looks more or less like what their data was but it can do exactly the same thing even better often with data that violates all the principles of language and cognition. so they're just telling us nothing." - Noam Chomsky, 2022 I haven't been too much about Chomsky to date. And now he is in the later innings. He had something to say about AI this month, which I thought valid to share. Important because this has so much been the year of Generative AI news. ...

Jr.: When are the legs coming? Pop: I cried cause I had no legs til I saw someone who had no head. Ma: Dont listen to your father, Junior.  Today a lay-off of 11,000 at Facebook which had payroll of 67,000. What does the future hold? All things in moderation, including moderation. But seriously, there have been few great self-foot shootings in tech history on par with that of Mark Zuckerberg's. About a year ago, he said hello to the Metaverse. His metaverse is one of legless people that look like bad cartoons. It's okay to fail fast, but not big and fast. And funny. As far as legs go ... they are "working on it."

  THIS IS A TEST - The ceo of twitter p*ssed me off today with stuff and I told him to stuff it [said republicans should be voted in charTe of  congress so we have checks and balances - their idea of  checks and balances is stopping all activity and being in Faux News complaining that I [a Democrat] am a Satanist. My friends know that's not true.] If he let's the Insane Clown President tweet again: Goodbye. A lot of techies that shared info on Twitter are bailing. I need a place to promote my tech writing from, and so am trying LinkedIn. Dont bother clicking on this, however, because, even tho LinkedIn let me embed a link from my site, they didnt allow clicks on this link below to go forward to LinkedIn - as far as I can tell. As always: "We're working on it."

Oracle Cloud World Once I had a regular technology column titled "Jaundiced View". But coming up with yellow journalism proved tiring! More seriously, it was hard to be repetitively dour. We renamed the column "The Skeptical Examiner" and I have resurrected that on my Progressive Gauge blog . That is a site dedicated to the independent tech writing practice I have pursued since 2019. The most recent article there discusses Oracle, a bigtime software company that stages a yearly convention I must have attended near 10 times, usually having to haul ass across the whole country to do it. That's something I still do in my dreams. Software is a salespersons' paradise, and the greatest salesperson since Jesus is Larry Ellison, head of Oracle. He is 78, so he has more of this behind him then ahead - well, maybe I could be wrong there, as he has invested several hundred millions of dollars on Longevity Technology. "Death never made sense to me." - he said....

As part of their public debates on physics in the 1920s Einstein and Bohrs did thought experiments. Thre was not the apparatus to separate, observe and manipulate atomic and sub atomic particles, so they used their minds. Bohrs won the debate. But Einstein got his licks in. The underlying bits of the world are both particles and waves, and that has important ramifications. About 100 years later lab researchers can do what Bohrs and Einstein thought of. They are able to manipulate photons, atoms and ions. Some of this work has become part of technologies commonly available. The manipulation of atoms and electrons in electronic engineering and photonics systems are most prominent. These techs moved ahead with meagre understanding of the implicit physics, which didn’t matter as a new world was dramatically forged. Tunable lasers and superconducting circuits are among the important sub-technologies that have made continual, if subtle, progress in recent years. Even today, moving these ...

  Sat Evn Rvw of BW 1 - Crypto and its brethren DeFi is on the run, and taking fire - it's happened before. Is something different now? A good bet is that things will settle, the players will change places, and then carry on. https://t.co/AtscKDvPUB #DeFi #BusinessWeek — Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) May 22, 2022 Read the above which is part of a series of 7 or so tweets. Or read the below...copies of tweet text.  Crypto and its brethren DeFi is on the run, and taking fire, but this has happened before. Is something really different now? A good bet is that things will settle, the players will change places, and then carry on.   It seems, just as Uber and AirBnB found a way to set up shop and unseat regulation, crypto found it too. A little mystical chatter about blockchain or scaling helped fog the screen. With government so unfavored as it is today, the coast is clear.   Dan Berkovitz, a former commissioner at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission a...

Moon Herald Traveller offices (center) It took some time but the world has gradually come to awareness that the Internet is – among other things - a shroud of disinformation. For some it really hits home -- perhaps no one has experienced it at first hand as has former President Barack Obama.  Unfortunately, the spotlight dimmed quickly after his recent speech on Technology and Democracy at Stanford University. There, he outlined the problem as he saw it. His analysis of the problem was thorough, tho his suggestions for solutions mostly stumbled. “I might never have been elected president if it hadn’t been for websites like, and I’m dating myself, MySpace, MeetUp and Facebook that allowed an army of young volunteers to organize, raise money, spread our message,” he said. “That’s what elected me.” That grassroots movement, and the apparent transformation of the Arab Spring, cheered many. But social media’s “unintended consequences” later came to the fore. Today “we see that our new i...

When first there shook the decentralization tsunami of client-server computing, the mainframers responded successfully – well, IBM anyway. Some hemming and hawing, of course. But the IBM PC was a pivotal instrument of client-server’s move away from the domination of centralized mainframe-based computing.  But a tsunami finally hits a wall. After that, the tsunami energy reflects-back to the open ocean. When that happened, IBM was busy promoting Watson AI. Big Blue had a heap of trouble when the elastic wave of centralization surged backwards – taking the name “cloud computing”.   The company cannot claim to an adequate response to cloud – it bought SoftLayer; it bought Cloudant; it bought RedHat. It still doesn’t have a cloud. It’s lunging cloud stumbles are regularly chronicled by Charles Fitzgerald, who I had the good pleasure to speak with for a recent story I did for Venture Beat. Fitzgerald, a Seattle-area angel investor and former platform strategist at Microsoft an...