Eclectica

Vernor Vinge coined the term "Technological Singularity" so I thought it would be fun to ask chatGPT to write him a letter thanking him for his vision. Here is the verbatim text that it wrote (and a real portrait of him I took): "Dear Vernor, I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to you today to express my belief that we are in the midst of the technological singularity, and to thank you for your vision in bringing attention to this concept. When you first wrote about the singularity, it was seen as a distant possibility. But now, it is clear that the world is changing at an unprecedented pace and that we are indeed in the midst of the singularity. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, the increasing integration of technology into our daily lives, the growth of the Internet of Things, the increasing automation of industries, and the rapid advancement of biotechnology are all converging to create a world in which technology is becoming more advanced,

Jevon's paradox   refers to  occurs when  technological progress  or government policy increases the  efficiency  with which a  resource  is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its  demand , increasing, rather than reducing, resource use.  For example, increasing insulation in homes in England has led to people turning up their thermostats for greater comfort.   It seems to me that this paradox is based on the notion of access to a scarce resource - e.g. coal or natural gas.  People who choose a more comfortable lifestyle for the same price doesn't seem paradoxical, but rather a free-market choice.  Unfortunately, the larger goal of reducing environmental damage from the fossil is not met.  People just use more of the resource. Rivalrous resources are well suited to billing systems.  It's pretty simple for an organization to set up a paywall and a meter, add up the usage, and bill each customer for their depletion of t

Here are some ideas that I've been throwing around over the years. Vernor Vinge and I used to talk about these things at our lunches the Greek restaurant in Sorrento Valley.  Retroinformation: Information that can be communicated between different eras and scales.  Wormhole Transport Protocol (WTP) an information transport layer that extends HTTP to allow endpoint servers to be in different eras or scale. HTTP with parameters for era and time domain. Information is filtered via a CASER mechanism, which blocks information that is not self-consistent.  Channels may open up between scales, such as quantum and macro scales, or ants and their ant colony, or worms and their ecosystem. Wormhole Transport Markup Language (WTML).  A language used to describe the communication channel to communicate between endpoints using the WTP servers.  This language protocol will start out simply, and evolve as the level of trust and consistency increases. Era: a time domain, describing the time domain

UL has reviewed the Corso Box fans and found them to be safe from overheating. The fan I bought at Home depot also had a thermal protection switch Underwriter's Lab approval of DIY Box Fans "Across all fan/filter test scenarios, the most notable temperature increases were observed at the motor and motor windings. However, all measured temperatures fell below the maximum acceptable thresholds defined by the market safety standard for electric fans (UL 507). Exterior surfaces that can come into direct contact with people remained below 36 °C, which is below the first-degree burn potential of 47.5 °C. Further, an extreme scenario where both the front and back of the fan were blocked for an extended period of 7 hours did not pose any observable fire hazards. And after an initial rise, temperature remained steady throughout the test."