My Introduction To Computer Graphics

Boeing's PDP-7/340

Most of my career has been involved in various ways with computer graphics. Below the fold I recount the story of how I got started in the field just as it was getting started. To give you some idea of just how early my introduction was the Mother of all Demos had been the year before. The displays I got to work with drew lines in monochrome, not rasters in color. You created the image by writing a loop of instructions in the "display processor" instruction set. These told it the lines to draw at each refresh cycle. There was no mouse.

Coprophagia Is Bad For You

Divine, Pink Flamingos

Wikipedia defines Coprophagia as "the consumption of feces".

Since brevity is the soul of wit", my favorite science fiction includes the 254 words of Fredric Brown's Answer from 1954. It describes a galactic civilization holding a ceremony to mark the final connection of all their computers. What happened was:

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

This may have inspired Douglas Adams' similar but much longer scenario in which the answer turned out to be 42.

Below the fold I trace the connection between these two ideas.

AI's Affordability Crisis

A year ago in The Back Of The AI Envelope I pointed out that the AI platforms were running the drug-dealer's algorithm, "the first one's free". By massively subsidizing the use of their products, they were generating overwhelming demand for them. They used this demand to justify massive investments, in the hope that, by the time they had to show a return on these invetment, the users would be so addicted that they would pay the vastly higher prices needed to generate a return.

David Cahn, Sept '23

I have to confess that I was late to the party. The earliest skepticism I've been able to find was from Sequoia Capital's David Cahn in September 2023, entitled AI’s $200B Question. Only nine months later Cahn re-ran the same analysis in AI’s $600B Question. His estimate of the revenue gap had tripled. Cahn wasn't alone. Independent journalists such as Ed Zitron were flagging this problem long before I was.

I started to write this post a couple of months ago when the maiinstream business press began to notice companies complaining about the cost of the tokens their employees were burning. Since then the trickle has turned into a flood, which made finishing the post hard. Below the fold I throw up my hands and dump out a small sample from the flood.

Chatbots vs. Ozone

Source

Back in February I posted The Kessler Syndrome, which also included a brief section mentioning the impacts of the proposed megaconstellations on the environment, specifically global warming from CO2 and black carbon, and depletion of the ozone layer. Three months earlier Anton Petrov had examined the last of these in Risk of Ozone Layer Destruction from Internet Satellite Swarms and Rocket Fuel. He has now followed up with SpaceX Is Conducting a Giant Chemical Experiment on Our Atmosphere Without Realizing. Below the fold I survey the papers Petrov cited and a few others.

Library of Congress Storage Architecture Meeting 2026

Once again I attended most of the library of Congress' Designing Storage Architectures workshop remotely. I apologize for the delay in posting this; domestic duties have kept me very busy recently. Below the fold notes on the talks that caught my attention, based on my now somewhat memory and the slide decks for the talks from the Library of Congress website.

AI's PR Problem (Updated)

J.P. Morgan hits photographer with cane

This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss, Eric Schmidt, why he and his ilk are getting booed at college commencements, and why laws against data centers are getting passed. The explanation is below the fold.

Wrench Attacks

XKCD #538

A year ago I wrote The Risks Of HODL-ing sparked by Mitch Moxley's They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month. Moxley recounts the kidnapping of Veer Chetal's parents to persuade him to hand over his share of the loot:

the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. According to a criminal complaint filed after the incident, a group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car, dragging them toward the van’s open side door.

Below the fold I look at Bloomberg updates from last week on why the crypto-bros are having to spend vast sums on defending against the threat of HODL-ing.