I haven’t been able to do any substantial writing for a bit – I’m still foggy from this virus I’ve had (though I’m recovering now, it was a nasty bug, with fatigue and cognitive wooziness to rival the Wuhan Red Death itself). I also had to make around trip from Wellfleet to JFK on Monday (about twelve hours in the car) to pick up my Nina, who had been in Hong Kong for two weeks visiting our daughter and the grandsons.
I did watch the SOTU, but I had nothing to say that wasn’t obvious, i.e., that it was shockingly angry and strident, packed wall to wall with lies, and that Joe Biden was obviously seriously hopped up on some sort of speedy drug cocktail. The one time he told the plain truth — that the killer of poor Laken Riley (whose name he couldn’t even get right) was an “illegal” — got him in so much trouble with the Democrat Party’s Jacobin base that he had to spend the whole next day apologizing for it. (If he’d been smart about it, could could have used even more accurate language during the speech, such as “human cockroach” or “vile demon-spawn”, which might have picked him up a few votes from normal, decent, undecided Americans, and then walked it back to “illegal” the next day.)
I’ve been reading a really fantastic book:Seeing Like A State, by the Yale anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott. I’d heard for years that it was a must-read on a par with the work of, for example, Burnham and Higgs, and boy is it ever. I will have more to say about it when I’m done. I’ve also just read another really remarkable book, on the pathology of modernism, that I’ve only now got around to, though it’s been influential since its release (under unusual circumstances) in 1995. I’ll write a post about that as well, sometime soon.
There’s lots more going on that I’d normally be commenting on, but for now I’ll just leave this item from X, and ask you to imagine where all this will be in another five years:
With OpenAI, Figure 01 can now have full conversations with people
-OpenAI models provide high-level visual and language intelligence
-Figure neural networks deliver fast, low-level, dexterous robot actionsEverything in this video is a neural network: pic.twitter.com/OJzMjCv443
— Figure (@Figure_robot) March 13, 2024
Back soon.