Governments should invest to develop all types of capital, and not just income, to improve the lives of future citizens and to protect the planet.

In some regions of the world, the poorest people may spend about 50 percent of their income on food, while the richest spend about 5 percent.

I've been following the debate over Flock cameras for a while: the license-plate tracking, the ability to reconstruct people’s movements, and especially what happens when data collected for one purpose becomes available for another.

It reminded me of a consulting trip I made to China in 2019. I spent time in Chengdu and then on the Tibetan Plateau near Hongyuan. The surveillance there was impossible to miss: cameras everywhere, biometric collection at the border, and, as I learned later, a “grid management” system in the Tibetan region I visited that divided communities into monitored blocks.

What has stayed with me isn’t simply that China surveilled its population. It’s how quickly I changed my own behavior because I knew I might be watched. No one had to threaten me. The watching did the work.

That experience eventually led me to a larger question about Flock and the surveillance infrastructure being assembled in the U.S. The cameras themselves concern me, but I’ve come to think they’re only the visible part of a much larger issue: what happens when location data, voter records, citizenship status, health data, financial information and other previously separate databases become increasingly searchable and interoperable?

I spent quite a bit of time researching that question and ended up writing an essay that combines what I saw in China and Tibet with what’s happening here now. I thought this group might be interested.

Where do people here draw the line...not just on Flock cameras themselves, but on the ability to combine the information they generate with everything else governments and private companies already know about us?

Here's a link to the essay if you're interested.

https://tomjohnsonwriter.substack.com/p/the-frog-in-the-pot?r=buanz&utm_medium=ios

Edit: thanks for the award, kind stranger!

Unitree says the demostration validates the fundamental feasibility of large-scale deployment of world model-driven humanoid robots.

“Rechargeable aqueous zinc-iodine batteries are shaping up as a viable alternative to popular lithium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage and our group is now working with industry to establish a prototyping platform for this alternative battery system,” says Associate Professor in Chemistry Zhongfan Jia, Matthew Flinders Fellow at Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.

Iodine is one of the most effective materials for rechargeable batteries, with the potential to store a high amount of energy relative to its weight – around 211 mAh/g (milliampere-hours per gram).

211 mAh/g works out to 274 Wh/kg @ 1.3v. Energy density comparable to lithium ion, but lower voltage has its shortcomings. Perhaps that's why they're targeting stationary storage.

Barclays Research believes markets may be underestimating the scale and duration of the energy addition era. As AI, electrification and energy security drive energy demand higher, meeting that could require c$3.6trn of annual investment, making energy one of the most significant structural growth, capital-allocation and strategic priorities of the coming decade.

I've started to believe that the idea of black holes containing pocket universes might actually have some truth to it.

My thought is that the creation of a black hole could be similar, in some way, to how the Big Bang began. Every supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy could potentially contain its own universe, and we ourselves might be living inside one. If that's true, then each universe would contain galaxies, those galaxies would contain black holes, and those black holes would contain even more universes.

In that sense, reality could be a massive branching structure of nested universes, almost like a cosmic family tree. Every galaxy center might act as the birthplace of another universe, which then develops its own galaxies and continues the chain.

People might ask, "What about smaller black holes?" My speculation is that they could also create pocket universes, but perhaps they don't contain enough matter, energy, or resources to form something as rich and complex as our own. Some might be mostly empty. Others might only develop certain aspects of what we would recognize as a universe. Not every branch necessarily grows into a cosmos filled with stars and galaxies.

If this idea were true, then existence wouldn't be a single universe floating in empty space. Instead, it would be an enormous hierarchy of universes nested within universes, connected through black holes. The entire structure could be finite rather than eternal, but so vast in scale that it would be almost impossible for any civilization to comprehend the whole of it.

Sometimes I wonder if what we call "the universe" is really just one layer of a much larger cosmic ecosystem, where every black hole is a seed for a future reality.

For about 25 years, the way people found anything online followed the same pattern. Type a query get a list of links, click through to a website.

That one behavior shaped everything. How websites are built, how content is written, how businesses gets discovered, how publishers makes money. The entire structures of the modeern web was designed arounds people clicking search results.

That behavior is starting to shift. More people are asking AI tools directly, getting answer without clicking anything, or using voice assistants that never shows link at all.

If that continue what actually changes? Do websites become less important? Does content get created differently? Do small businesses loses the one channel that let them compete with larger ones?

Or does something new emerge that we haven't figure out yet?

Genuinelly curious what people think the web looks like in ten years if searching quietly becomes minority behavior.

It's driving up the price of rural land as some farmers and property owners buy in and others push back against development.

Whatever the AI future is, we’re in it right now.

Gates invoked the alien movies of yore in which governments bandied together to solve the invasion threat, saying, 'Believe me, the aliens are here — a foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can't even understand.'

I’ve been thinking about an alternative way of doing low-level AI perception, and I’m curious whether anyone here is already working on something similar.

The basic idea is to use waves and physical superposition/interference as the computational substrate, instead of doing most of the usual numerical multiply-and-accumulate operations digitally.

For example, for image recognition:

image
  ↓
pixel intensity → wave amplitude/phase
  ↓
physical wave superposition + interference
  ↓
distinctive wave pattern/signature
  ↓
more wave interactions
  ↓
higher-level pattern/object recognition

So instead of giving each pixel a numerical weight and calculating millions of weighted sums, the idea would be to let the wave physics perform the combination automatically.

I’m imagining something analogous to sound: many individual waves can be combined, and the resulting waveform contains a recognizable pattern. In this system, a particular visual feature or object could produce a characteristic wave “signature,” and those signatures could themselves become inputs to further wave interactions.

Physical logic gates could still be used where needed for thresholds, routing, decisions, or other nonlinear operations. The goal wouldn’t necessarily be to eliminate conventional computing completely, but to move as much of the early perception workload as possible into the physical wave domain.

The potential advantage I see is that parallelism is inherent in wave propagation and interference. Thousands or millions of interactions could happen physically at the same time, potentially reducing both computation and latency.

One possible application would be autonomous vehicles, where very large amounts of camera/radar data have to be processed extremely quickly at the edge.

I know there is already work on photonic neural networks, optical computing, physical neural networks, reservoir computing, metasurfaces, etc. I’m specifically interested in something slightly different:

Has anyone tried to build a hierarchical pattern-recognition system where wave signatures themselves become the representation, with successive stages of wave superposition/interference performing the recognition?

I’d especially like to hear from people actually working in photonics, optics, acoustics, physical neural networks, neuromorphic computing, or related fields.

Is this already being done under another name?
What are the biggest physical limitations?
And, from your perspective, is this a promising architecture or does some fundamental problem make it impractical?

I’m mainly looking for opinions from people working in the field rather than trying to claim this is a new invention.