Skynet Progress Report

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I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

Kent Brockman in "Deep Space Homer", The Simpsons

In recent months Cyberdyne Systems Corporation and its many subsidiaries have made very encouraging progress towards removing some of the major road-blocks standing in the way of the initial deployment of Skynet. Below the fold I report on the most significant ones.

Tesla's Not-A-Robotaxi Service

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I have now seen the fabled CyberCab three times in real life. It has two seats, one of them fully equipped with human driver interface equipment. In each case a human was using them to drive the car, which is necessary in California because Fake Self-Driving is a Level 2 driver assistance system that requires a human behind the wheel at all times. A Robotaxi that requires a human driver and can carry at most one passenger isn't going to be a economic success.

Fred Lambert has two posts illustrating the distance between Musk's claims and reality. Below the fold I look at both of them:

The Kessler Syndrome

LEO in 2019 (NASA)

In 1978 Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais published Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt. Wikipedia notes that:

It describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions between these objects cascade, exponentially increasing the amount of space debris over time.

This became known as the Kessler Syndrome. Three decades later, shortly after Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collided at 11.6km/s, Kessler published The Kessler Syndrome, writing that the original paper:

predicted that around the year 2000 the population of catalogued debris in orbit around the Earth would become so dense that catalogued objects would begin breaking up as a result of random collisions with other catalogued objects and become an important source of future debris.

And that:

Modeling results supported by data from USAF tests, as well as by a number of independent scientists, have concluded that the current debris environment is “unstable”, or above a critical threshold, such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them.

Below the fold I look into the current situation.

Mind The GAAP Again

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A bit over three months ago I wrote Depreciation and started with this graph from my 2022 post Generally Accepted Accounting Principles about the way Bitcoin miners were inflating their profits through misleading depreciation of their rigs.

The key message of the graph is the contrast between the 5-year straight-line depreciation and the curves showing the value of the remaining Bitcoin that the rig will generate. I suggested that the same mismatch between straight-line depreciation and remaining value generation would apply to AI hardware. I don't claim to be the first to flag this issue; The Economist's The $4trn accounting puzzle at the heart of the AI cloud was about a month earlier.

About a month later I returned to AI economics with Mind The GAAP, but that was mostly focused on other parts of the puzzle.But now, thanks to Bryce Elder's Big tech’s $680bn buy-now-book-later problem it turns out that both Michael Burry of The Big Short and Morgan Stanley Research agree with me that there's a problem:

Below the fold I go into the details, with many thanks to Bryce Elder.

Funding Open Source?

$BLEEBZORX chart

Most of the world's software infrastructure is, or is based upon, open source. The developers and supporters of some of it, for example the Linux kernel, and the major compilers, are paid by technology companies because they are critical to their business. Other, less visible but similarly critical parts are supported by lone volunteers. Apart from the unfairness, this can lead to serious vulnerabilities. Back in 2018 I wrote about one such vulnerability, the event-stream hack, in Securing The Software Supply Chain

The attackers targeted a widely-used, fairly old package that was still being maintained by the original author, a volunteer. They offered to take over what had become a burdensome task, and the offer was accepted. Now, despite the fact that the attacker was just an e-mail address, they were the official maintainer of the package and could authorize changes.

The change they authorized included code to steal cryptocurrencies.

In 2020 I wrote a detailed post about this problem entitled Supporting Open Source Software. Recently the topic re-surfaced on an e-mail alias I read. But what triggered the post below the fold was that this coincided with yet another fascinating piece from Matt Levine and his laugh-out-loud follow-up the next day.

Internet Archive's Storage

Internet Archive Staff

Bruce Li introduces his The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting thus:

This report delves into the mechanics of the Internet Archive with the precision of a teardown. We will strip back the chassis to examine the custom-built PetaBox servers that heat the building without air conditioning. We will trace the evolution of the web crawlers—from the early tape-based dumps of Alexa Internet to the sophisticated browser-based bots of 2025. We will analyze the financial ledger of this non-profit giant, exploring how it survives on a budget that is a rounding error for its Silicon Valley neighbors. And finally, we will look to the future, where the "Decentralized Web" (DWeb) promises to fragment the Archive into a million pieces to ensure it can never be destroyed.

It is long, detailed, comprehensive and well worth reading in full. Below the fold I comment on the part about storage.

Good Questions

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On November 21^st Bryce Elder posed Five questions from an ignorant no-coiner about the crypto crash. Each of his five questions identified some interesting apparent anomalies.

Below the fold I look into each of his questions, asking how anomalous its anomalies really were and whether they have persisted into the New Year.

TL;DR none of them are really surprising but reaching that conclusion took a good deal of research.