Journalists As Don Quixotes: Saddle Up, Grab a Lance, and Get a Gig Worker to Assist
September 9, 2026
At this time, Silicon Valley seems to be the new version of Dr. Evil. It is influencing everything from in daily life. One journalist is tired of the power the Tech Lords aka the “tech fascists” have so he decided to fight back says The Guardian article: “‘If We Don’t Fight Back, Were Don’t Have a Future’: The Journalist Taking On The ‘Tech Fascists’ Of Silicon Valley.” The journalist sounding the horn is Gil Durán and he is an expert on tech fascism. He wrote a book called The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Durán explains that the current administration is the perfect environment for Big Tech to seize control of the economy and politics, while stirring the planet towards their own bizarre, apocalyptic future.
It’s all a game to the Tech Lords and Trump is facilitating it all:
“By extension, he says, Silicon Valley is fascist “because they have wholly aligned with a fascist movement. That’s their vehicle for gaining power.” Few could dispute this alignment after seeing the bosses of Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon and OpenAI line up behind Trump at his second inauguration, or Musk’s now shuttered “department of government efficiency” (Doge) being given free rein to conduct mass firings of federal employees, or Palantir’s AI-driven surveillance technology enabling deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s a cozy relationship, Durán says: the tech titans have helped Trump and his family become billionaires through cryptocurrency and have been given government contracts and freedom from regulation or oversight.”
He goes on to explain that the “MAGA cult” wants to return the West to a mythical glorious past, the “technofascists” are doing the same except with a future:
“It sounds almost like a conspiracy theory, but Durán is not short of evidence. Musk making an apparent Nazi salute and describing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”. Palantir’s Peter Thiel writing in 2009 that ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible; and giving a lecture series suggesting Greta Thunberg could be the antichrist. Marc Andreessen, the CEO of the tech investment company Andreessen Horowitz, paraphrasing Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the co-author of Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto, in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”: ‘Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.’”
As for what we think, these journalists are the heirs of Don Quixote. Here at Beyond Search we think the Silicon Valley way is the one true way. We even have copies of Lord of the Rings and the brilliant writings of René Girard’s super duper writings. Wonderful stuff the Hobbits and the scintillating philosophy of seeing stones (note not seeing stoned).
For the new Don Quixotes: Let me know how this works out for you.
Whitney Grace, September 9, 2026
Greedy Algorithms: Standard Operating Procedure, Folks
September 8, 2026
In one of my lectures yesterday (September 3, 2026), one of the US cyber fraud investigators from a state neighboring the District of Columbia asked, “What’s a greedy algorithm?” I used the term when describing how a bad actor instructs an agent-based phishing campaign to select another exploit method when the default failed. That’s a simple greedy numerical recipe: If this, then to this. Smart software doesn’t wait for the bad actor to plug in a different value. The system recognizes the fail, and it wants to succeed. Therefore, greedy means perform actions until you win; that is, succeed. It works wonders for social media outfits eager to hook kiddos on mindless scrolling and for Telegram-anchored phishing campaigns flooding some individuals’ devices. Greed is good and not just on Wall Street. It is good on Wizard Street too.
I mention this greed stuff because “Google AI Mode Shows the Same Products 21.6% More Expensive Than Traditional Search” provides useful information about Google’s set up, tactics, and stealth behavior. Yo, Google, I love you. I really, really do.
Here’s an example of what the article presents and documents:
We ran the same shopping queries through both Google AI Mode and traditional search on the same day at the same moment. When the exact same product showed up on both, the price in AI Mode was 21.6% higher on average.
Google just displays more higher margin products. No big deal, right? Yes, big deal. The article points out:
Matched products show a price discrepancy 38.1% of the time; when they do, AI Mode is more expensive 68.4% of the time (about two-thirds).
Yep, a greed smart algorithm. These are the best kind because they produce revenue, commissions, and fees. Applied to ByteDance online services, you get a double bang: Consumer attention and price control. In the world of El Zucko, you get people spending time in the Facebook fishbowl which translates to ad revenue and other revenue opportunities the Meta cats sniff out. Greedy algorithms are designed and structured to produce wins, not for the user but for the operator of the larger system.
The cited article reveals what is probably a big surprise to some Google users:
When prices disagree, AI Mode is more expensive two-thirds of the time.
My hunch is that if the researchers had looked at outputs from other AI-helped outputs, similar results would be found. If I were younger and not so tired after my two days of lectures, I would poke around myself. Ain’t gonna happen. I, therefore, leave this research to those who are not a dinobaby and burned out from my continuing education. class lecturing.
Net net: Greedy algorithms and AI are a match made in heaven. Your best interests are not part of the method.
Stephen E. Arnold, September 7, 2026
Is Big Tech Going to Embrace a Universal Moral Code? Nope, Never, and No Way
August 11, 2026
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Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
One of my contacts mentioned an essay by Albert Wenger about building, creating, implementing, or embracing a “universal moral core.” That’s a big idea that universal more core thing. The author appears to be involved in the Eutopia Foundation, an entity with which I am not familiar. I think the “eu” is a way to put humans in a manifestation of a better world.
Tech bros find the concept a universal moral code a hoot. Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
What caught my attention was the write up’s presentation of three components or essential ingredients for a “universal moral core.” I am not a philosopher, and I am not qualified to comment about philosophical ideas like these. My plan of action is to identify the three components from the essay “A Proposal for a Universal Moral Core.” I will then provide some color about each of the three points and wrap up with a dinobaby observation. I am reasonably confident that I will rain on one’s morality parade.
Okay, here are the three components to the universal moral core:
- “Grow knowledge as the source of technological and moral progress.” Knowledge is a tricky word. I am not sure what it means. I know that people slip out of the definitional noose using jargon like tacit, explicit, implicit, and other “I’m okay, you’re okay” lingo. Without a definition, I think the idea of a universal more core is missing a leg on the notional stool.
- “Accept responsibility that comes from power.” Okay, I immediately thought of phrases like “Senator, thank you for that question” and “You are responsible for your chat content when using smart software.” Generally speaking, accepting responsibility is a tough sell today. Power means that one can do pretty much what one wants. I would offer an example, but I will leave it to you to plug in your favorite big AI tech (BAIT) bro, political leader, or local gang leader. Power today appears to means obey or get out of the way.
- “Value the diversity and autonomy of different forms of consciousness.” I don’t know what this means. If it is drugs, alcohol, sitting on a mountain top deep breathing — Not for me.
Now I want to provide some color.
First, I am not sure my work experiences support the concept of “good knowledge as the source technological and moral progress.” Technology is viewed as a solution to the problems technology creates. How is that working out for you? A clever lawyer coined an off color word to encapsulate the wide spread deterioration in the United States. I don’t like the word, but look around and identify the benefits of knowledge. Check out the street people. Talk with young people about their mobile phone use. Ask teachers how students are doing with the reading, writing, and arithmetic. Give the clerk a bank note and ask for bills and extra change. Let me know how that works out. Consider the Florida surgeon who removed the incorrect internal organ. Yep, knowledge.
Second, as a dinobaby, I think I understood this concept. Now when I attend a meeting at which young professionals speak, I am not sure those folks share the concept of responsibility. The sphere of responsibility seems to be shrinking over time like a banana left on the kitchen counter. Leave it there long enough, what’s left is not appetizing. I think power is a goal. Money is the facilitation mechanism. Responsibility is focused on oneself and maybe a philosophical movement like techno-fascism, but responsibility in a universal moral core. Nope. Not today.
Third, the third point is “Value the diversity and autonomy of different forms of consciousness.” I am not sure humans know what consciousness is. I read an article about a person who believes that consciousness is a combo of mysticism, forces in the universe, and a brain. I did not understand how those elements add up to consciousness. I feel I am on solid ground when I say, “What?”
Now we have arrived at the point at which I present the dinobaby rain to ruin your intellectual picnic. Technology is a mixed bag. Online gambling outfits using Telegram-type service to launder cash see technology as the greatest thing since sliced bread. European visitors to the US marvel at how efficient and cold the A/C is. Venture capitalists quiver with neural vibrations when presented with a way to 17X their money.
Several points:
- Technology, particularly online, erodes social and moral structures. Humans don’t want to give up technology.
- Technology is a mixed bag. It does good, and it does bad.
- Technology is not going away.
- Technology and ethics are like matter and anti-matter. It’s tough to get both in the same place.
Net net: A universal moral core. Ain’t gonna happen. Have fun trying. Good luck with fund raising.
Stephen E Arnold, August 11, 2026
From Tech First to Tech Worst in the Classroom
August 5, 2026
In my opinion, an entire generation of students are going to be mentally wonky because they were educated with screens. I fear that these young people will be outsmarted by a gerbil or a rock. Fortune in “Hey, we told you so” article, “Schools Across America Are Quietly Admitting That Screens In Classrooms Made Students Worse Off And Are Reversing Years Of Tech-First Policies” is pointing out what quite a few people thought was obvious. Schools are learning that assigning everything student a laptop wasn’t the best idea when it comes to obtaining knowledge that allows a student to perform well on standardized tests. (Sure, I know standardized tests arrive with tons of scuffed and scattered luggage. Nevertheless, some can be useful.)
The clued in Fortune article says:
“Citing the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Horvath said: “Frequent in-class computer use correlates with significantly lower math and science performance across both high-income and middle-income countries.” This study showed fourth-graders’ and eighth-graders’ test scores correlated with whether they were using laptops almost never on the high-end versus almost daily on the low-end.”
Laptop manufacturers have had an influence on public schools. Laptops sold to schools promise to increase student performance. Whether a Mac, Windows laptop, or Chromebooks, the with-it education professionals bought the pitch hook, line, and sinker. Who wants a student to use an outdated laptop. Therefore, upgrade. Could that money be used for other education-related actions; for example, paying teachers pumping up in-service training, or providing certain classes with an in-class human aid to assist the student in his or her learning?
After a couple of decades of doing the techno-boogie, some schools have figured out that technology has to do more than create doomscrolling masters. Some instructors are making students take notes with pen and paper as Abraham Lincoln did. In the US, Gen Z is notable because it allegedly is the first generation not to score higher than their predecessors in measures of academic achievement:
“Distractions are a major culprit of this degradation of learning, Horvath previously told Fortune, adding that refocusing attention after it’s been diverted takes time to recover. Educational systems “screwed up,” he told Fortune. ‘And I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.’”
Gen Z might be mad, but they also might be too distracted by their screens to get upset. Take that back, they’ll make a TikTok rant, wait for it to go viral, then become outraged. Emotions are based on what’s trending these days. But what about Fortune’s intense, timely coverage of this issue?
Okay, just decades after the digital assault on learning began.
Whitney Grace, August 5, 2026
Google and Its Vast Compute: Maybe Not So Vast?
July 6, 2026
Google and Meta are rivals. They are always trying to advance themselves so one can out do the other. Google has finally been able to do that with their Gemini AI says The Next Web in the article, “Google Is Rationing Gemini Access To Meta Because It Cannot Provide Enough Compute.” In short, Meta wants to leverage Gemini, but Google has placed caps on the social media company’s usage. Google has placed caps on other companies’ Gemini usage as well.
Meta is not happy. Zuckerberg’s company told its staff to be more efficient with Gemini tokens. Meta used Gemini, because it was a better algorithm than its Llama open source model to automate safety processes. They have also shifted work over to Muse Spark to reduce dependence on external AI sources. Here is more information about what is going on behind the scenes with AI:
“Google itself is so compute-constrained that it agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for access to 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, calling it “bridge capacity” to meet surging demand for Gemini Enterprise. The situation illustrates how the AI compute shortage is reshaping relationships between the industry’s largest companies. Google, which owns one of the world’s largest pools of AI infrastructure and is spending over $180 billion on capex this year, still cannot serve all of its customers’ demand. That it is rationing access to a company as large as Meta, while simultaneously renting GPUs from a rocket company, is the clearest signal yet that AI infrastructure buildouts have not kept pace with consumption.”
Meta doesn’t like replying on a competitor. In order to cut reliance on Google, they axed 8,000 jobs in May and redirected funds towards AI infrastructure. Another 7,000 employees were shifted to AI-related roles to build Muse Spark.
There’s a big demand:
“The broader pattern is consistent across the industry. Demand for AI compute is growing faster than even the most aggressive infrastructure spending can supply. Google is buying capacity from SpaceX. Anthropic is renting an entire data centre from SpaceX. Meta is being told to use fewer tokens by its own cloud provider. The AI boom’s most tangible bottleneck is not algorithms or talent. It is the physical infrastructure required to run them.”
In the last few days, we’ve Gemini output regress to “glue cheese on your pizza” and statements like “I can’t locate that information.” Google’s vast compute resources seem to be suffering from hyperbole or summer heat sickness.
Whitney Grace, July 6, 2026
If an LLM Falls in a Company, Does the CFO Know?
July 3, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
The title of this essay in Shift Mag intrigued me: “CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt.” Since technical debt is a bit abstract for the accountants, lawyers, Wall Street wolves, and their genetically-related bros — now there is a new “debt” about which a “leadership type” can fret. Unlike technical debt which is easily ignored, the cognitive debt may come with an invoice.
The write up captures this new debt with this headline-scale statement:
The CFO has no control once they’ve signed the contract over what the actual investment is going to be. And if you can’t tell me the investment, what does projected return even mean?
The context for this statement is smart software that cranks out code, engineering solutions to problems, or legal mumbo jumbo complete with made-up citations. But that software in most cases comes with a subscription or a license. Instead of a fixed annual amount or an agreed upon monthly fee, the cost of an LLM is a “token.” This is not an old fashioned New York subway token that leaves one fingers grimy with Hantavirus-related goodies, this token is notional. It is not a thing; it is part of the taxi meter pricing scheme that BAIT (big AI tech) outfits have embraced in a somewhat interesting decision to try and stop tossing cash into a blazing dumpsters behind an Ollie’s discount store and data center.
The rhetorical question in the quote is going to be difficult for the BAIT outfits, the blue chip consulting firms with slogans like “We’re AI experts,” and the customers themselves to answer. The write up makes another interesting statement:
…organizations that bought the tools, signed the contracts, and then realized there’s no financial model inside the company to manage what comes next
Okay, no big surprise. Technology. The alleged next big thing. Everyone is doing it. Figure it out.
How’s that working out?
The write up reports:
The more pragmatic response, shared by more than one team: stop the free-for-all, start standardizing. This doesn’t mean we’re telling people to use AI less, but nudging from “use everything” to “use the same things, smarter.”
What are engineers doing to stay ahead of cognitive debt? Actually not much. The write up says:
The most interesting take came from someone who’d shifted their interviews toward code review rather than coding, precisely because that’s what engineers actually do now. I changed our interview process to focus on code review, because that’s what we’re actually doing. And implementation is now AI-assisted, however you choose to use your agents. If your team can generate code faster than it can review it, you have a bottleneck. The constraint is human judgment, not output.
Where does informed judgment originate? Yeah, no answer.
The article does bring up a human question that smart software has not yet de-hallucinated; to wit:
One company ran an anonymous survey and found 90% of engineers at that organization actually want to use AI, higher than expected. What surprised him wasn’t the enthusiasm but what came next: questions about performance management, about promotion criteria, about how individual contribution gets recognized when anyone can now generate code. The adoption had outrun the enablement.
My hunch is that once some metrics are slapped on AI code generation and the code is “good enough,” the human engineers or at least most of them will be given an opportunity to find their future elsewhere.
Thus, the problem:
Cognitive debt is the new technical debt. The room [the AI coders participating in the research session] had seen the same pattern: teams adding features at a pace that would have been impossible two years ago, now dealing with the maintenance overhead that comes with it. Legacy code that was already hard to understand is now harder, because the people who wrote it aren’t being careful. They’re being fast. And internal tools that were never meant to be permanent are now permanent because someone shipped them with three prompts.
Do those wild and crazy leadership people understand what problems the code may toss up in the future? Nope. Leadership thinks about staying out of the weeds, not getting in the weeds.
With the cost of verifying AI generated code looking like a significant expense, the write up says:
One practical suggestion that came out of this: invest in evals now, not later. The cost of building AI features isn’t the hard part. The cost of verification is. If you build a solid eval suite today, you can swap providers, survive model deprecations, or move to open source without starting from scratch.
That sounds great, but to leadership who want to invest in AI in order to reduce costs and add efficiency, spending an unknown about of money on institutionalizing human code reviews means one thing: Let AI do it.
For me, we have now surface the AI problem: Code is cheap. It may be okay, but someone with “judgment” should check it out and fix an error if one is spotted. But as more code is generated, can AI check itself? Can an organization figure out how to tap into humans with the requisite skill set? Dumping expensive engineers is easy. Spending an unknown amount to make sure the code does what someone hopes it will do is another form of taxi meter pricing. It seems to me that technical debt increases as cognitive debt rises as well.
What’s the fix? How about this concluding statement from the essay?
The practical advice: build internal UI wrappers over generic model APIs now, before your teams are locked into specific product interfaces. It’s cheap to do, and it means you can swap the model underneath without rebuilding the interface your teams depend on.
What?
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2026
It Is Waymo Fun When the Google Drives in Construction Zones
June 22, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I have work stacked up. I am chasing down some interesting investments held by a high profile Web 3 outfit. I have to finish on of my upcoming lectures and move the “dots” slide. I have to visit the dog rescue facility. But I am making time to write about this allegedly spot on, dead accurate news article titled “Urgent Recall for 3,900 Robotaxis That Could Drive Passengers into Highway Construction Zones at High Speed.” Notice that the vehicle service with Googley software is not named in the headline. That’s okay. It was the water-fearing Waymo initiative from the world’s largest online ad service with AI outputs that a German court found responsible for what its smart software does. Yep, that outfit.
Thanks, Midjourney. Just good enough like so much AI outputs.
The news story which I assume to be accurate because I believe everything I read online says:
According to documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), more than a dozen incidents were recorded in California and Arizona since early April as Waymo vehicles failed to recognize highway ramp closure signs. As a result, the self-driving cars proceeded straight into construction areas and lanes where construction was underway. The company temporarily restricted highway driving for its robotaxis while engineers worked on a fix, and planned to roll out a software update designed to improve the vehicles’ ability to detect closed roads.
The write up helpfully provides some context about the Google Waymo engineering:
Waymo has launched a string of recalls over the past two years, including over concerns about how the cars detect poles and other objects along the road. Just weeks ago, Waymo recalled roughly 3,800 robotaxis over concerns they could enter flooded roads on high-speed routes. That decision was prompted by an April 20 incident in San Antonio, when a Waymo vehicle without any passengers drove into a flooded lane during severe weather.
Then a bit of history is added for a touch of color like those flashing yellow alarm lights:
Separately, the National Transportation Safety Board revealed it was investigating incidents in which Waymo vehicles illegally passed stopped school buses displaying flashing warning lights. The school bus issue had already triggered a separate recall by the company in December, adding to growing questions over whether self-driving technology is advancing faster than regulators can keep up.
I find the somewhat frightening information (if true) amusing. That’s because as a dinobaby I have a time-out-of-joint sense of humor; specifically:
- I thought the Google AI was able to do lots of great code and make Google products better like its search service. Note that the German judge would not agree with my taking Google smart output lightly. That “thought” of mine is demonstrably false. Hey, it’s just marketing, right?
- Google has been perfecting or semi-perfecting or hallucinating perfection for its Waymo technology since January 2009. My math, like other dinobaby functions, is not so good. But this 2009 to 2026 sure looks like slightly more than 17 years. And what do we have? The school bus thing. The water thing. The Cow Hollow cul de sac thing. The driving in construction zone thing. Are there other things that have not been given news coverage? Of course not. Google does not make errors most of the time. That’s the probability thing, of course.
- I continue to conflate Google’s push into smart eyewear with some of Google’s other interesting product and service demonstrations. Of the many projects Google has “invented” or acquired, many die on the vine or when the Googler pushing the skunky initiative loses interest, gets promoted, or becomes a Xoogler (that is, a former Google employee). The Waymo project has had legs, not the most robust pins on the playing field, but legs in terms of time: 17 years and counting.
Net net: I have to get back to real work. Thinking about Waymo was waymo time consuming than I thought. I had fun though. I know those riding at “high speed” (allegedly) will have the time of their lives until they don’t.
Stephen E Arnold, June 22, 2026
One AI Bottleneck Workaround: From the WEF No Less
June 5, 2026
The World Economic Forum discusses the barriers AI is finding when it comes to development: “AI Is Hitting A Wall. Here’s How We Rethink The Hardware To Break It.” When AI models grow larger that more time and energy needs to be spent moving data between memory and processors. It’s called “memory wall” and language-processing model grew 5,000 fold in size over four years.
Memory wall is a problem because large scale AI systems are increasing. This drives up costs and infrastructures. A second reason is that many valuable AI uses rely on fast decisions made locally instead of the cloud. Medical devices, autonomous vehicles, rescue drones, and more can’t rely on sharing information with data centers and waiting on responses. They need hardware that makes the AI more practical.
There are ways to overcome the AI memory wall bottleneck:
“…there are three main ways to ease this bottleneck: move computation closer to the data, draw on the brain’s event-driven information-processing method and use lower-precision or stochastic computing where exact arithmetic is unnecessary. Together, these approaches could support a new generation of AI hardware that is faster, more efficient and better suited to large-scale infrastructure and edge applications.”
These three options are the most powerful when they’re part of a single design solution. AI hardware that is designed in the future can’t rely on a single chip then fitting the algorithms on it as an afterthought. They need to be considered as part of the architecture during the design phase. Here’s what should be done:
“That is why hardware-algorithm co-design is becoming so important. Some workloads may benefit most from compute-in-memory; others may benefit from spiking networks and event-based sensing; and still others may rely on mixed-precision or stochastic methods. In many cases, the best solution may combine these approaches on the same platform. The larger implication is that the future of AI depends as much on hardware design as on model design. More efficient AI hardware could help contain the growing resource demands of large-scale systems while improving the safety and reliability of devices in the field.”
Interesting. But what if there is something other than the Google Transformer-centric method? The WEF will pivot, of course.
Whitney Grace, June 5, 2026
The AI – Catholic Church Issue
June 1, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
The New York Times published a short summary of five encyclicals. It is good to know that the NYT knows how to research the history of Papal actions. The story is paywalled, so paying, not praying, will reveal the truth. But the five encyclicals did not get to what I think is the crux of the matter or X marks the real spot.
Galileo Galilei makes it clear that he was very confused about the planets revolving around the sun and most of his other heretical thinking. House arrest made more sense to him than being burned at the stake. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough after three tries.
Not surprisingly, the Magnifica humanitas statement emphasizes guardrails, global regulation, and protection of humanoids. Anthropic’s “statement” was, and I summarize:
- Guardrails. Check
- Regulation. Check
- Protect humanoids. Check.
I interpreted the encyclical differently, probably because I worked on my graduate degree at Duquesne University (a Jesuit institution which like the idea of guardrails, regulation, and protection for humanoids. Believe it or not, I taught a couple of classes a requirement of my waived tuition, but I did get some money each month so I could enjoy a truly lavish lifestyle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.)
The write ups about the encyclical did not talk about three interesting church actions. I will not talk about the Inquisition, but, please, keep that in mind if you doubt that the Catholic Church can take steps to clarify the thinking of certain of the church faithful.
I want to offer three examples of what happened when the tech bros did not line up with the Catholic Church.
First, Copernicus came up with the idea that lecturing and writing about his idea that the planets revolved around the sun deserved broad dissemination. The Church just grumbled but in 1616, that pot boiler De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was added to the Index of Forbidden Books.
Second, Galileo Galilei was into the Copernican concept. In 1633, he was tried by the Inquisition an found guilty. Galileo did the pragrmatic thing. He said, “I am sorry, very, very sorry.” The Church placed him under house arrest until he died.
The third example is one that calculus students don’t know much about. The Church determined that infinitesimals and by extension infinity bumped into Aristotelian philosophy. Those “teaching” about infinity were able to find jobs as farmers or buskers in Padua. Math bumped into this problem for decades until other issues pushed infinitesimals into an infinintely small segment of Catholic dogma.
My view of the encyclical about AI is, therefore, based on these historical actions. Thus, several observations can be offered:
- The Catholic Church can take direct and indirect action to suppress or cause information change
- Some of the methods tolerated by the Church involve indirect (house arrest) and direct (Iron maidens, heated fireplace pokers, etc.) to help individuals free their minds from certain thoughts
- The encyclical can spawn other statements that will be disseminated not by the Zuck-type or Telegram-type services. The message will be delivered to about 1.5 billion people. These indivdiuals with log on to the Zuck-type or Telegram-type services and comment about the Church message.
Net net: The Pope’s encyclical is a significant document and highly visible action. Additional communications and manifestations of the Pope’s guidance can be implemented with surprising ease and speed.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2026
Is There More to Say about Waymo? Yep, Waymo
May 29, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I don’t know if this story is actual factual. I really don’t care. I think it is hilarious and would make a wonderful Jack Benny TV show sketch. I wanted to run another Waymo folly story because a very earnest person commented about one of my previous tales of the self driving myth. The comments explained with appropriate jargon why certain types of sensors can be confused by rain. No problem. But it does rain, and it seems to me that in early 2009 a Googley wizard would have asked this question, “What if it rains?” Apparently no one did or no one had “time” to test the Googley self driving technology in inclement weather, heavy rain, water on a road, and lousy visibility for some types of sensors. I am probably incorrect, and I will be delighted when Googzilla once again corrects this cranky dinobaby.
An online “news” service published “Woman Trapped by Two Rogue Waymo Robotaxis for Nearly an Hour Calls 911: “Is the Officer Going to Argue With a Ghost?” The write up reports as actual factual:
Emily Offenkrantz did not wake up that morning expecting her biggest problem of the day to be two driverless cars. … a pair of Waymo robotaxis cut her off and then simply… stayed there…. Just two self-driving vehicles, parked in a digital standoff, while traffic piled up behind her and the minutes kept ticking.
Hey, thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
The write up points out:
She eventually escaped not because the technology corrected itself in any graceful way, but because another driver helped guide her through a gap that opened when one of the Waymos unexpectedly reversed. It was less a resolution and more a lucky break.
Okay, Google.
The timing of this incident is notable. Around the same time Offenkrantz was playing automotive chess with two confused robotaxis, Waymo announced it was temporarily halting freeway operations across several U.S. markets. The reason: performance concerns related to construction zones.
Yeah, I assume in the 16 years of Waymo development road construction was not an issue. Orange cones and flashing lights are indeed a rare site on US 101 where self-driving cars were wished into reality.
The article adds:
In April, a Waymo in Los Angeles took a woman through a drive-thru the wrong way, leaving both her and bystanders in a state of bewildered amusement. A passenger in the vehicle was heard cheerfully narrating the chaos: “Way Way! You gotta go through the drive-thru the other way!”
I await a LinkedIn explanation. But I am still waiting for the magic cul de sac explanation in Cow Hollow.
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2026
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