Every year my vacation consists of binging on the work of an author I hadn’t known of before. This year it’s Peter Grainger, a British mystery writer whose great creation is David C. “DC” Smith, an aging Norfolk police detective. Each book has a mystery, which Smith eventually solves. But that’s not the point, my […]
Amid all the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments among liberals about Biden’s debate performance, something is being ignored. Donald Trump told a non-stop string of lies last night and wasn’t called on it. The reason is there are two media in this country. There is a media of the right, created and […]
Big tech is headed for a crash, worse than the one that caused the dot-bomb a quarter century ago. The reason is Nvidia, which has been leading the boom. Nvidia AI chips are energy hogs. The Hopper H-100 takes 1,000 watts of power. That’s about as much as a high end microwave. But unlike the […]
King Day is a special holiday for my black neighbors. Celebrating the achievements of Civil Rights, rededicating themselves to the work left undone. It’s a big deal. Juneteenth needs to become just as big a day for my white neighbors. Unlike every other holiday on the calendar, Juneteenth celebrates being late. It doesn’t happen conveniently, […]
In 2009, when this site was still called a-clue.com, I rededicated this blog to “the war against oil.” At the time solar panels were inefficient, wind power seemingly non-existent. Nothing had been done to improve the grid. The hope was that renewable energy costs might equal those of coal by 2020. That happened, well ahead […]
Apple Intelligence rejects the assumptions of Big AI. It is a turning point for the industry. While analysts are all focused on Apple letting OpenAI’s ChatGPT answer questions for it, the headline should be how Apple managed to become an AI player based solely on data users already bring to its party. Siri will now […]
One point lost in our arguments about transportation is how electricity scales in ways that engines powered by fossil fuels can’t. We think of e-bikes or EVs because they’re analogues to the choices forced on us by fossil fuels. Anything powered by fossil fuels must have its fuel, an engine, and a transmission on it. […]
While researching an upcoming story on Nvidia, some facts came to light that made me realize we’re at the end of the Cloud Era. The Cloud Era began around 2010 and created enormous value around 5 companies. They used cash flow to build huge hyperscale data centers, filled with Intel CPUs. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook […]
What’s very clear, 18 months after the launch of ChatGPT, is that it wasn’t the revolution that was advertised. It’s “cool” to have software deliver output in different forms. It’s cool to ask a question with text and get an answer in code, or a drawing. That’s not human intelligence. All Machine Learning systems I’ve […]
The biggest tech story of the week flew under the radar. That was the collapse of enterprise software stocks. Salesforce.com fell 20% after earnings and other names like Adobe, ServiceNow, and Snowflake fell in sympathy. On Friday Dell followed. It wasn’t the numbers. It was the “guidance,” the story these companies were telling about future […]
