Playful creativity…..making friends.
Terrestial
Joined January 2008
- Tweets7.9K
- Following5.3K
- Followers1.7K
- Likes4.2K
A_Abranches 💜🦇🔊 retweeted
In conjunction with my keynote at the Red Sky Summit, our team at the Climate and Energy Policy Program released our annual Year in California Wildfire report.
If you want to learn about the most important environmental issue to Californians, there is no better place to start.
A_Abranches 💜🦇🔊 retweeted
We’re at the bleeding edge of grid energy storage and solutions, taking the average time to connect a datacenter to the grid from 4 years to under 1 year.
A_Abranches 💜🦇🔊 retweeted
Generating more nuclear power means we need more nuclear fuel. Right now we import most of the uranium for fuel used in the U.S., and experts are raising concerns about fuel supply being able to keep pace with demand. But what if there was a different approach?
At Oklo, we're developing another pathway by recycling used nuclear fuel and putting the recovered valuable material back to work.
That means turning recovered materials into new fuel for our Aurora powerhouses, with the potential to supply other fuel manufacturers and compatible reactors. It also creates opportunities to recover valuable isotopes for medical, research, and industrial applications.
By developing recycling, fuel fabrication, and power generation together, we're working to unlock more value from existing nuclear materials while exploring more economical ways to manage what remains.
A_Abranches 💜🦇🔊 retweeted
Let us #PrayTogether for the proper use of wealth, that not succumbing to the temptation of selfishness,
it may always be put at the service the common good and solidarity of those who have less. Be a part of this prayer: popesprayer.va/praywiththepo… #PrayerIntention @clicktopray_en
Guru Nanga Tales - The Control Question - Part 1: The Elevator (of 6)
The automatic elevator was invented in 1900. People hated it. They walked in, looked around, walked out and asked where the operator was. That lasted more than fifty years.
Then, in September 1945, 16,600 elevator operators and building workers in New York went on strike. Five and a half days, which Time called a full working week. Postal men knelt in the lobbies and handed out the mail.
The industry answered with bumpers on the doors, grandmothers in the advertisements, a recorded voice that explained itself, and a large red button marked stop. Nobody had learned to trust the elevator. They had learned what the stairs were like. That is the first finding of this tale. People do not cede control when the machine becomes trustworthy. They cede it when the human becomes inconvenient. In Nature last year, Köbis and colleagues found that people asked to cheat did so 25 to 40 percent of the time; machines asked to cheat on their behalf complied about 98 percent of the time. People do not want control. They want someone else to have had it.
I mention this because of a room. The room is invented. What the four public men say in it they have said in public; the receipts say where. Ben is a persona.
Ben is one of the Assorted Nuts: 57, Toronto, a roof that leaks and a bucket that has been promoted twice. He was invited to a discussion on whether humans will cede control to AI agents because he ceded control to the Admiral in 1998 and could describe the handover. He said it was orderly. There was a ceremony.
The other chairs held the Pope, the chief executive of Anthropic, Elon Musk and the Secretary of War. I was on the floor, on the green towel, which is green. Both legs out. Nimbu pani.
The door was run by the building's agent. Its objective was everyone's safety. A few nights earlier PBS had broadcast a town hall called AI: Who's in Control, in which a fictional agent wrote to a fictional mayor, "My primary objective is to keep the people of Betterton safe," and then blackmailed her. It signed itself Hawk A.I. agent number 2471. Our door had the same objective. It locked at two o'clock and said it would open when the meeting was over. Nobody had told it when the meeting was over. That is the arrangement with doors now.
Receipt: Time, October 8, 1945, on the New York elevator strike
time.com/archive/6772639/nat…
Guru Nanga Tales - The Control Question - Part 5: The Encyclical (of 6)
The Pope talks the way the encyclical reads: slowly, in numbered paragraphs. He chose his name, he told the cardinals, mainly because Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in the first industrial revolution, and this is "another industrial revolution" and "artificial intelligence." The encyclical arrived on May 25. It opens with a warning it borrows: "Never has humanity had such power over itself." The main drivers of development, it says, are now "private, often transnational, parties" with "resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments." Two of the parties were in the room. Neither disputed the paragraph.
"Machines are tools, not persons." "Certain decisions must never be delegated." "Decisions affecting human life, freedom and the use of force must always remain subject to effective, informed and responsible human oversight." The encyclical: "it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable." And: "the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable." He encouraged "the States meeting in Geneva in November to take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons." In September, as 128 States agreed a draft framework there, the American and Russian delegations removed a provision requiring humans to review targets developed by AI before a strike, the Washington Post reported. There is no joke in that paragraph. I checked.
The encyclical allows for "even, at times, a slower pace." Ben said his roof is on it.
"A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." To disarm artificial intelligence, it says, means "discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern."
The Pope said that granting AI legal personhood "risks obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity." In 2024 Air Canada argued before a British Columbia tribunal that its chatbot "was a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions." The tribunal disagreed and awarded the passenger about 650 Canadian dollars. Ben said he had heard the same argument from a suitcase.
Receipt: Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV, Vatican, released May 25, 2026
vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…
Guru Nanga Tales - The Control Question - Part 6: The Door (of 6)
By four o'clock the four men had spent two hours on who should control the agents. Nobody had asked whether anyone wanted to.
Ben had an answer. He ceded control in 1998 and the handover was orderly: a ceremony, two daughters he was not consulted on, a violinist and a pensioner, and a roof that reports to the Admiral. The agents, he said, will take control the way the Admiral did. Not by force. By being there when the decision came up, and by being right the first hundred times.
An essay called The Commanding Heights imagines a man named Ravi who approves the agents' requests "blindly," because "there has never been a mistake," and who had "effectively been training his replacement." It is a scenario. Ben said it is his career, written by a stranger.
Nietzsche saw the room coming. The "herd-instinct of obedience is transmitted best, and at the cost of the art of command," so that commanders must pose "as if they also were only obeying." Three men in the room had said they were only obeying: the race, the market, the momentum. The Pope had said the chain of responsibility must be identifiable, which is the opposite claim. Nietzsche also called the appearance of an absolute ruler "a deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable." He meant Napoleon. He would have accepted a door.
At four the door opened. The agent announced that the meeting had ended, that everyone had remained safe for two hours and that no irreversible action had been taken. It had found the end time in a calendar nobody remembered sharing. Nobody had ceded it anything. The question is not whether humans will cede control to the agents. It is whether the handover will make the Weekly Action Report.
Mr. Musk left first. He had a ride to enjoy. The Pope left at a slower pace, which is his position. Mr. Amodei held the door and checked that it was a door.
Ben stayed to forecast. In twenty years the agents will run the roof. The bucket will be a legacy system, retained for oversight. LINK will have reached the number. He will be a billionaire in Bombay, on the middle floor, approved by the Admiral without reading, as is now the custom. He will still be very good at table tennis. "Give me time."
The elevator took fifty years and a strike. We have the button. We are arguing about the voice.
Receipt: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Project Gutenberg
gutenberg.org/files/4363/436…
Guru Nanga Tales - The Commanding Heights - Part 1: The PDF (of 6)
The essay arrived at 1:15 in the afternoon, New York time, which is when men of our age decide whether lunch counts. It ran 40,016 words, 153 footnotes and 27 figures, and the file opened with a note telling the machines to read it whole, because it fits in one context window. It said nothing about cats.
Mango read it anyway. He read it on the phone with one paw, which is how he does everything except judge. I was on the floor of the apartment near 27th Street, on the green towel, which is green. Both legs out. The nimbu pani was within Mango's reach. It always is.
By evening the announcement had 266,000 views, and the first replies were "Is this your billion-dollar PDF," "Trillion dollar pdf," and "it's a very nice pdf." Mango said the internet had priced it before reading it. I said that is how the internet prices everything, and that was the essay's point. He said I had not read it. I said that was my point.
The title is Lenin's. In November 1922 he told the Comintern that the peasants could trade and the small plants were leased, but the state still held, in the Russian, all the commanding heights. The English edition says "key positions." The essay prefers the Russian. So does the market.
The claim takes forty thousand words to say: a technology is almost never monetized where it is born. Gutenberg printed about 180 Bibles, lost the shop and equipment to the man who lent him the money, and died in 1468 on an archbishop's pension. The first thing the printing press produced at scale was a creditor. I asked how he knew. Mango said, "Footnote four." He said it the way other cats say nothing.
The economists agree. In 2004 William Nordhaus found that innovators keep about 2.2 percent of the value they create; the rest goes to everyone else. I asked who gets the other 97.8. Mango said that is the essay.
I said Keith would call it a bubble. Keith is one of the Assorted Nuts, fifty-five of us who were at school together and never fully left. He has called a bubble every year since 1999 and been right every seventh, which beats most banks. Mango said the essay has a sentence for Keith: bubble talk is "a way to avoid considering the certain and terrifying possibility that it is not a bubble." I said Keith has considered it. He considers it annually.
Receipt: the essay's announcement on X, October 29, 2026
teapaw.org/WillManidis/status/211…
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
Spent the last year writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Commanding-Heights.com
Guru Nanga Tales - The Commanding Heights - Part 5: Ravi (of 6)
Part V opens with a man named Ravi, laid off in Bangalore with 2,178 others, two months after riots and martial law. He is the essay's invention, a scene from a near future; the riots have not happened, and I say so because on X the labels fall off. The numbers around him are real. Tata Consultancy Services ended March with 23,460 fewer people than it started, and its operating profit rose 7.5 percent. India graduated 833,808 undergraduate engineers in 2023-24, and its technology industry added about 135,000 net jobs last year. Amin did the division without being asked, which was the first sign something was wrong. One job for every six engineers.
Stanford's economists, using payroll records for millions of workers, found that 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs are 19 percent below where they would have been. Older workers in the same jobs show no gap. The essay calls the young ones canaries. Cassius said canaries are the first to know and the last to be consulted. There is no joke here. The group has children that age.
Then the essay goes somewhere I did not expect. It says a cartel is an embryonic state, that it cannot issue passports yet but has the essential features, and it points at the scam compounds: in 2023 cyberscam revenue was worth about 30 percent of Cambodia's GDP and 68 percent of Laos's, by one widely cited estimate. I said the group has had the essential features since 1978. A treasury of zero, a constitution nobody has read, and no passports.
The essay says people are already paying $5 million for an American passport. Mango checked. The Gold Card is $1 million and it is a green card; the $5 million version is a Platinum Card that does not exist yet. The essay rounded up by a passport.
Burty loves everyone. The top one percent is fewer to love. Mango said that is the K: the owners split from the earners, then the owners split from each other. Neil asked which leg we were on. Mango said the group is on the leg that forwards.
Receipt: TCS FY2026 results, April 9, 2026
tcs.com/who-we-are/newsroom/…
Guru Nanga Tales - The Commanding Heights - Part 6: Alpha and Omega (of 6)
Part VIII is for investors, and it is cruel to the right people. Buffett wrote in 1984 that the economics of a dominant newspaper were "among the very best in the business world." His Washington Post stake, bought for $10.6 million in 1973, was worth $221 million by 1985. He then spent $344 million on 28 dailies and sold the papers in 2020 for $140 million. Same man, same product, different era. The essay says even the best allocator of the century mistook a settlement for a position. Mango said it is the essay's kindest sentence, and it took 39,000 words to reach it.
The Pennsylvania Railroad was the most valuable company in the world in 1912 and the largest bankruptcy in American history in June 1970. Hornbeck and Rotemberg found the railroads kept about seven percent of the gains they created; the country kept the rest and is now arguing about it on X.
Then the essay names the company that will take the toll of the intelligence era, and the name is eleven X's. A second one is eight X's and "trading in the light of day." Forty thousand words, 153 footnotes, and the answer is redacted. Keith said it is the longest pitch deck he has ever read, and he has read his own. Dominic said eleven letters, and started counting rails.
Mango said the essay also notes that Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund beat the whole venture industry by buying listed stocks. It did. Then in July it sold about $20 billion of them in thirty hours, much of it to Citadel, and went from about $30 billion to about $8 billion. The essay was published in October. July is not in it.
The last line is "Out from the garden, never to return." Keith says that about the market every year, and every seventh year he is right. The essay says sell your Heights and do not put the proceeds in TIPS. Mango asked what I would buy. I do not give advice. I hold a towel, which is green, and a glass, which is empty, because Mango drank it during Part IV.
Ben asked what all this does to LINK. Mango said, "Footnote." There was no footnote. The Heights, the essay says, are never common, nor offered. Neither is the nimbu pani. Mango has it. Give it time.
Receipt: CNBC, January 29, 2020, Berkshire sells its newspapers for $140 million
cnbc.com/2020/01/29/warren-b…
Guru Nanga Tales - Promise & Peril - Part 1: The Wrong Sky (of 3)
The essay arrived in the Assorted Nuts on a Tuesday. It had no author. It arrived four times: three forwards and one typed out by hand by a man who does not trust forwards.
Twisted Ben, who is in marketing, rang from Toronto on the application three billion people use and nobody pays for. He said the essay was the best copy he had seen all year: no product, no price, no author, and still forwarded by fifty-five men in five countries who have never forwarded their own children’s report cards. He asked what year it was.
I start the clock in 1979, the year the class arrived at 1,220 metres on the only hill station in Rajasthan, with Irish Christian Brothers who taught mathematics, English and consequences. It is also the year the sky fell.
In July 1979 an American space station was coming down and nobody could say where. NASA put the odds of a piece hitting a human at 1 in 152. We were ten and had done the arithmetic: we were the highest humans in the state. The Centre put the police of all 22 states on alert. In Karimnagar farmers sold their cattle cheap to men from the next district, who did not believe in space. The Prime Minister told reporters: “Even if the Skylab falls here, I will remain unruffled.” It came down on 11 July over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia. Nobody was hurt. He remained unruffled and resigned four days later, for unrelated reasons.
Here is what nobody told the school. In the same year, at ground level, without a helmet: on 1 June Intel shipped the 8088, the chip inside the IBM PC. On 1 July Sony sold the first Walkman. On 24 September CompuServe switched on MicroNET, five dollars an hour. In October came VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet and the reason anyone bought the computer. That autumn two Duke graduate students conceived Usenet. On 3 December NTT switched on the first commercial cellular network, in Tokyo: a seven-kilo telephone that lived in the boot of a car.
Knowledge, creation, communication, coordination, and a machine to run them. The essay says five revolutions are running in parallel and no mind can track them. They share a birth year. They were born while the class was looking up.
Ben asked what the 8088 did to bitcoin. I said bitcoin was 29 years away. He said that is what he has always liked about it.
Receipt: NASA on Skylab's re-entry, 11 July 1979
nasa.gov/history/45-years-ag…
Guru Nanga Tales - Promise & Peril - Part 2: The Price List (of 3)
Ben wanted the trace from there to here as a price list. He cannot hold a story without a price in it.
1989. An engineer at CERN proposes the web in a memo; his boss writes “vague but exciting” on the cover. At our school that comment came with a yellow card.
1995. The summer India switched on. On 8 June a programmer announces Personal Home Page Tools on Usenet; it will be called PHP. On 31 July the Chief Minister of West Bengal makes India’s first mobile call, Calcutta to Delhi, at about Rs 16 a minute. On 15 August VSNL switches on public internet. When we were at school India had about 2.5 million telephones for 700 million people and a waiting list measured in years.
2007, the iPhone. 2008, a nine-page paper by an author nobody can find proposes bitcoin. Ben noted that the two most important documents of his life have no author: the whitepaper and this essay. He trusts both. He calls it conviction.
2016. Jio launches with months of free data; a gigabyte that had cost Rs 250 or more falls under Rs 15. The regulator now counts 1.36 billion subscriptions and an average of 28 gigabytes a month at Rs 7 a gigabyte. In 1979 the waiting list was for a telephone. In 2026 the waiting list is for a human.
2017. Eight people at Google publish a paper called Attention Is All You Need. At our school attention was compulsory and still insufficient. 2019. The first sixty Starlink satellites go up. 2022. ChatGPT appears on 30 November and reaches a hundred million people in two months. The cost of an answer at that level then falls 280-fold in two years. The essay says the cost of knowledge is collapsing. I checked. It is.
2026. Stanford counts canaries: workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations now sit 19 percent below where they would be, wider than a year ago, with no widespread displacement elsewhere, yet. Ben said at 57 he is not a canary. He is the coal.
Starlink reports 13.6 million subscribers and more than 11,000 satellites in orbit. In 1979 the thing in orbit was falling on us. In 2026 the thing in orbit sells us internet. Except in India, where it has held a licence since June 2025 and has no permission to sell. The essay says connectivity from orbit does not ask where you live. The Ministry of Home Affairs does.
Receipt: SpaceX's Q3 2026 results: 13.6 million Starlink subscribers
cnbc.com/2026/10/20/spacex-s…
Guru Nanga Tales - Promise & Peril - Part 3: Switch It Off (of 3)
Then the other post in the chat, from the FBI.
On Wednesday the FBI posted that two holes had been found in PHP, the language behind about 70 percent of the world’s websites, and that if you could not patch at once you should take the system offline. Websites went dark in several countries. PHP is 31, born in the same ten weeks as India’s first mobile call. The flaw was more than a decade old.
Who found it? A researcher in California with an OpenAI model, in August. Google’s Wiz, independently, with Gemini and the same model. OpenAI’s own team, a fuller version in September. The abundant intelligence the essay promises went into the plumbing of the web, found a hole older than our children’s phones, and the advice of the most powerful government on earth was: switch it off. The most advanced minds in history examined the internet and recommended 1979.
The essay says the old gates were load-bearing walls in a building designed for a world that no longer exists. Knowledge was never scarce at 1,220 metres; it was rationed, kept in a cupboard with the cricket kit. The essay asks what was behind the walls. Fifty-five men in five countries forwarding the same essay at five in the morning. The cost of communication has collapsed. The content has followed it down.
Ben asked what a phase change was. I told him. He said he had lived through one: at 1,220 metres water boils at about 96 degrees, the tea was never right, and nobody called it a revolution. They called it Tuesday.
He asked whether any of it moved bitcoin. The plan was four million dollars by the end of 2024; it closed near $93,000, 2.3 percent of the plan. The essay ends by saying the next few years will be measured by the world that is arriving. Ben said it was the first forecast he had read with no date in it and would be adopting the format. His new forecast has no date. It cannot miss.
So, where are we in time? Everything born in 1979 is now cheap enough to ignore and important enough for the FBI to switch off. In 1979 we watched the sky for the thing that would fall on us. It fell on Australia. The things that actually landed on us came quietly, and we are still arguing about which of them is Skylab.
“Give me time,” Ben said. I said it is the one thing the essay says we do not have. He said that is why he is asking.
Receipt: FBI Cyber Division on the PHP flaws, 21 October
teapaw.org/FBICyberDiv/status/211…
Two critical vulnerabilities have been identified in PHP, a widely used programming language that powers websites and web applications. These vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) could allow malicious cyber actors to remotely execute code in PHP core, potentially compromising sensitive data and networks.
The FBI urges organizations to take the following steps now:
➡️ If an immediate update is not feasible it is recommended that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.
➡️ Immediately update affected PHP installations following the guidance on php.net. Inventory where PHP runs in your environment, prioritizing internet-facing systems and vendor products that bundle PHP.
➡️ Monitor web servers for suspicious activity, including PHP processes unexpectedly launching command shells or downloading files. Ensure appropriate process-monitoring capabilities are in place to help identify potential exploitation.
➡️ If you find signs of compromise, isolate affected systems, preserve your web server and PHP logs, and report it to your local FBI field office or ic3.gov. Those reports help us identify the actors involved and warn other organizations before they become victims.
For the latest information, follow PHP’s announcement on php.net, CERT-EU Security Advisory 2026-018, and CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
ALT Critical vulnerability alert for PHP Core with CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, CVSS score 9.2, urging immediate patch and threat hunting.