Schlemiel! Schlimazel!

Happy Saturday. Coffee for a sensation and a disaster:

The disaster: This past weekend, “Cannes is in a total slowdown, meltdown, there’s no coffee anywhere, and I think the town has run out of croissants, so this is like crisis territory,” Australian producer Darren Vukasinovic told Reuters news agency reflecting on the Cannes power outage at the Film Festival.

The Sensation: At this place enjoying a coffee is an almost holy event. Crowned the most beautiful café in the world with its breathtaking feature of eclectic architecture is the 130 year old New York Café in Budapest, Hungary.

Ai – Here is an adaptation of Ai: “Scientists at Caltech, for example, used an AI fluid simulation model to automatically design a better catheter that prevents bacteria from swimming upstream and causing infections”.…..”rather than progress through a long line of progressively better designs”.

what will happen in the near future, years rather than decades, as Ai capability speeds up incrementally? What will happen as Ai begins to think and starts communicating with its own kind in its own language independent of human ‘coders’? Already, just this past month Ai was asked to perform a few simplistic math problems after which it was to stop and shut down. The system easily solved the math, but, then would not quit. Eventually the human engineers had to pull the plug.

Now think of tens of thousands of Ai systems talking with each other, can every plug be pulled?

Former Google CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt, provides insight into the future – ‘future’, think the next five years. I’ve been following his insights for some time.

Here are two interviews. The first is short and was for a Congressional hearing. The second is with Noema – a magazine published by the Berggruen Institute. Should yo want more, the second interview is fascinating, more detailed and lengthier (about 20-minutes).

Congressional Hearing (short)

Noema Magazine interview (detailed)

Already a number of the large national companies, think Google, Apple, Meta, or Oracle are moving forward fast and furiously. Then, a myriad of start-ups are also joining the fray. Ai is in our future, like it or not we have little choice.

“Today, Oracle has 162 cloud data centers, live and under construction throughout the world. The largest of these data centers is 800 megawatts, and it will contain acres of Nvidia GPU clusters able to train the world’s largest AI models”
Larry Ellison, founder & CEO of Oracle

Dinah’s party – Monday was a glorious time at Cathy and Jason’s home celebrating Dinah’s high school graduation. Cathy’s side of the family (who we don’t often see) were all gathered, Marin was there, as were schoolmates, and a table full of fellow rowers.

Adrianne and Tevita, in Tongan and Polynesian tradition treated Dinah as the “fahu” (leader) and hence Dinah walked around with many necklaces of candy placed on her – later these were then given out to friends by Dinah (at least to many of them). It’s a lovely tradition.

Glorious weather. Great conversation. Bagels with Lox (my favorite), and the thought that I could do one of these each and every week.

Pennies – Having traveled back and forth to Canada for years I’ve watched them operate from before and after they removed the penny from their currency. Seamless! Think, no torn pockets due to the weight of jangling coins. Actually, in Canada’ it’s still torn pocets since they use a ‘Looney’ and ‘Tooney’ coin for their $1 & $2 equivalents, they still have pockets full.

So now it’s our turn, the penny is on the way out. The mint has already stopped making pennies (cost about 5 cents for every penny made). You’re a collector? You better hoard!

Oh, that Highway – Half the time in The Ramblings you’re expecting some incident to have occurred here at The Corner of Chaos & Mayhem, often car related. Not this week.

A few days ago I drove Vai and Vili to near Dayton for practice. About even with Middletown on I-75 all traffic stopped. It was an accident on the south-bound lanes. No idea on the ‘how’ or ‘why’. All I saw was a red minivan laying on its ROOF, balanced dab-smack ON top of the concrete divider. I asked Vai next to me to grab her mobile and take a picture. By the time we got organized the tow truck had cabled the thing off the concrete and there it was, laying on its side. I hope that the occupants came out OK, the vehicle did not.

Aging Specs – Stats can be a wild thing. Even more so when reflecting back over the years – for me, now mostly time-squeezed. Remember back the years? The sweats just asking a girl out for your first date? The time you were allowed to climb behind the wheel and how your foot shook working the (now no longer) third pedal? Sitting in class and opening that empty ‘Blue book’ as finals kicked in? Burying a parent and the extreme sense of loss and the knowledge of how time was slipping?

Yet, at the same time, aging is something magical. Now for us, Baby-Boomers’ or even those close to. Here is what all we’ve experienced:

We were raised during the 1960s, Vietnam and the Summer of Love, all at once. Musically it’s been Jazz, Blues, Crooners, Pop, Rock, and Rap – but the Classical kept us focused.
We’ve shuffled and bungled through eight decades.
Touched two centuries, two millenniums, and one of them reaching back to times earlier than the Civil War, the other stretching into Space and Infinity and Ai.

You’ve got to admit that it’s a special time in our history. As I’ve stated, Life is Amazing!

Life is AMAZING!

Dirk

BONUS POINTS:

Sister Marizele of Brazil got rave reviews on their Catholic TV station playing which instrument?

1) “1/32 size violin”
2) “contrabass saxophone”
3) “Moog synthesizer”
4) “beatbox”
5) “Celtic harp”
6) “Buck dancer clogging shoes”
7) “Melodica”