Going Out With A Bang

In 1.5C Here We Come I criticized people like Eric Schmidt who said that:

the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.

Schmidt, somewhat fatalistically, said that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,”

Salomé Balthus
Uwe Hauth, CC BY-SA 4.0

In January for a Daily Mail article, Miriam Kuepper interviewed Salomé Balthus a "high-end escort and author from Berlin" who works the World Economic Forum. Balthus reported attitudes that clarify why "3C Here We Come" is more likely. The article's full title is:

What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang'

Below the fold I look into a wide range of evidence that Balthus' clients were telling her the truth.

Cliff Lynch RIP

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Last Tuesday Cliff Lynch delivered an abbreviated version of his traditional closing summary and bon voyage to CNI's 2025 Spring Membership Meeting via Zoom from his sick-bed. Last Thursday night he died, still serving as Executive Director. CNI has posted In Memoriam: Clifford Lynch.

Cliff impacted a wide range of areas. The best overview is Mike Ashenfelder's 2013 profile of Cliff Lynch in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Pioneer series, which starts:

Clifford Lynch is widely regarded as an oracle in the culture of networked information. Lynch monitors the global information ecosystem for cultural trends and technological developments. He ponders their variables, interdependencies and influencing factors. He confers with colleagues and draws conclusions. Then he reports his observations through lectures, conference presentations and writings. People who know about Lynch pay close attention to what he has to say.

Lynch is a soft-spoken man whose work, for more than thirty years, has had an impact — directly or indirectly — on the computer, information and library science communities.

Below the fold are some additional personal notes on Cliff's contributions.

Cliff Lynch's festschrift

Vicky and I were invited to contribute to a festschrift celebrating Cliff Lynch's retirement from the Coalition for Networked Information. We decided to focus on his role in the long-running controversy over how digital information was to be preserved for the long haul.

Below the fold is our contribution, before it was copy-edited for portal: Libraries and the Academy.

Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture

At the Spring 2025 Membership Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, Vicky and I received the Paul Evan Peters Award.

You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Part of the award is the opportunity to make an extended presentation to open the meeting. Our talk was entitled Lessons From LOCKSS, and the abstract was:

Vicky and David will look back over their two decades with the LOCKSS Program. Vicky will focus on the Program's initial goals and how they evolved as the landscape of academic communication changed. David will focus on the Program's technology, how it evolved, and how this history reveals a set of seductive, persistent but impractical ideas.

CNI has posted the video of the entire opening plenary to YouTube. Don Waters' generous introduction starts at 14:28 and Vicky starts talking at 20:00.

Below the fold is the text with links to the sources, information that appeared on slides but was not spoken, and much additional information in footnotes.

Elon Musk: Threat Or Menace? Part 6

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Mark Rober's video Can You Fool A Self Driving Car? demonstrating why self-driving cars need LIDAR not just cameras was extremely well done, and deserved its 16M views, but it was easily the least bad recent news for Tesla. When your sales figures and your stock price look this bad, desperation tends to set in. And trotting out the co-President and the Commerce Secretary to make sales pitches for you is a clear sign that it has.

Below the fold I look at the flood of bad news for Tesla.

Software Supply Chain Attack

Joel Wallenberg interviewed me on 14^th February for his article in the 28^th February edition of Grant's Interest Rate Observer entitled Memo to the bitcoiners. Alas, it is paywalled, but among the many quotes from me Wallenberg used was that blockchain-based systems "are very vulnerable to supply-chain attacks".

Exactly a week after the interview and a week before the article went to press, we got an example, the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history. Below the fold I discuss the details.

Bitcoin's Fee Spikes

I've written several times, for example in Fixed Supply, Variable Demand, about the mechanism that causes the cost of transacting on a blockchain like Bitcoin's to suffer massive spikes at intervals. When no-one wants to transact, fees are low. When everyone does, they are high. Below the fold I look in detail at a typical Bitcoin fee spike.