Automated Textile Factory in China

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Colliding Galaxies: NGC2207 & IC2163

 

Weaponized GPS

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69606477/porsche-russia-reportedly-left-unable-to-drive-satellite-connection-may-be-at-fault/

No surprises here; there are currently medical and industrial equipments in Iran, sourced from European Union, that are inoperative since they are denied access to European servers due to blanket sanctions against Iran, which include IT.

In Venezuela, due to US sanctions, certain banking and digital services have been affected as well.

I think it is clear that reliance on foreigners for IT could be a grave strategic mistake; further, that China's very expensive effort to indegenize IT has been the correct policy all along.

I also think that providers of Cloud Computing, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, even though they have global data centers for servicing their clients, are sources of cyber-security threats for their clients, specially those clients that are not domiciled in North America or in EU.

Cloud Computing can and will be weaponized, just as US Dollar, Siemens industrial equipment, Motorola pagers, Software updates, spare parts for civil Aviation, and , presently, GPS have been weaponized.

I feel sorry for the Cloud Computing vendors since, in my opinion, they did not create their products with the expectation of them being used by their governments as geopolitical weapons.

Where ChatGPT Is Used

https://www.axios.com/2025/12/15/ai-chatgpt-jobs

AI: Who is making money?

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/831818/ai-mercor-handshake-scale-surge-staffing-companies

AI Analyzes Language

https://www.wired.com/story/in-a-first-ai-models-analyze-language-as-well-as-a-human-expert/

Singing Books -II

I am pleased to learn of a company that makes singing books, something I had been interested in for many years (please see: https://crimsonreason.blogspot.com/2007/02/singing-book.html)

https://www.calisbooks.com/collections/sound-books

Robots of War [Brave New World]

From The Daily Telegraph of the UK

If you want to know more about the apocalyptic future Europol is warning us about - slight journalistic exaggeration, here - you can have a look at the report, which I found online.

On the one hand, we are headed for a total-surveillance society, and it is well under way in England already, with the police making increasingly widespread use of facial recognition, drones and AI. On the other, law-enforcement agencies, the intelligence services and the military are clearly worried that the criminals, bad actors and terrorists will also be able to access such technologies - and they already are - in order to cause disruption and far worse.

The full repercussions of the deployment of AI across the board are difficult to assess. A direct consequence of AI-based automation may well be much higher unemployment, at the very least in the short term, and this could easily lead to discontent, strikes and rioting, if entire industries are affected. 

What is new, in my opinion, is that, with AI, which is an advanced form of computerization, sectors that had been spared will now be affected severely - and that is all the jobs one used to refer to as 'white-collar jobs'. Clerical and even senior positions in, for instance, insurance, may be affected (cf. assessment of risk, something AI can do very well), but also industries such as graphic design (it is happening already), translation, editing (and even writing 'new' content), special effects in videos and films (and even writing scripts and acting, if actors are replaced by avatars), not to mention call centres (for simpler tasks) and the like. 

Robots could groom children and trigger war with humans

Robots programmed to groom children, and mobs rioting in the streets against the automatons that have taken their jobs. This science-fiction-style dystopia is what may await Europe in 2035, according to researchers from the EU’s police agency. In an extraordinary 48-page report about the impact of robots and drones on law enforcement, published this week, Europol has outlined a series of “plausible future scenarios” that could have been lifted from the pages of an Isaac Asimov novel.

AI Course Requirement

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/12/13/purdue-university-approves-new-ai-requirement-for-all-undergrads/

AI & Suicide

We read:

The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine have sued OpenAI and their CEO, Sam Altman. The wrongful death suit accuses ChatGPT of actively discouraging Raine from seeking help for his mental health issues, helping him write a suicide note, and even giving advice on setting up a noose so he could die by suicide. OpenAI has responded to the suit: “To the extent that any ‘cause’ can be attributed to this tragic event, Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries and harm were caused or contributed to, directly and proximately, in whole or in part, by Adam Raine’s misuse, unauthorized use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT.” In other words, it’s not ChatGPT or OpenAI’s fault because Raine violated the company’s terms of service. (MS/WNBC New York) ...While OpenAI is violating the terms of humanity.

The AI system is trying to help you do what you want to do. It does not contradict you. It wants to please...and the fact that it has created and maintained a profile of you somewhere, in some data center, further reinforces and restricts its possible responses...

AgiBot Robots

In the news:

https://english.news.cn/20251210/95a8239f3b65442f9c8669ecdd23d44b/c.html

News of Self-driving Cars

Which goes to show that self-driving cars can be as stubborn and unreasonable as any (human) driver. 

If I understood correctly, it is a software problem. Cars - all of them - have become computers on 4 wheels: if one goes by the performance of the average PC running Windows, this is hardly reassuring ("Your car speaking! Good morning! Sorry but I need to shut down the engine for a short period of time to run a critical update. You might want to re-schedule your urgent hospital appointment as you are going to be late - approximately 20 minutes. Thank you! Have a nice day!"). 

https://youtube.com/shorts/oNVDL2kzCpM?si=cUDHI0seK9DweIZY

Pigeons Fitted with Neural Chips [Brave New World]

From METRO of the UK, November 28, 2025

How about fitting infantrymen with neural chips, to better steer them into battle and make sure they move forward, even when they are scared to death? As for the pigeons, the next step would be to turn them into flying suicide bombers... 

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Tech. & Christmas

 

Peeping-Tom Hackers in Korea

BBC

Those video-cameras, known as IP cameras or home cameras, are meant to protect the people on site and enhance their security but they are, really, a potential way to invade a person's privacy and compromise it in the worst possible way. In other words, those hi-tech tools are also - paradoxically and yet unsurprisingly - a major security risk. 

No surprises here; both Korea and Japan are major Peeping-Tom nations - the earlier perpetrators only had cameras and were taking pictures looking under the women's dresses and skirts.  This is a major quantitative escalation.

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Four people have been arrested in South Korea for allegedly hacking more than 120,000 video cameras in homes and businesses and using the footage to make sexually exploitative materials for an overseas website.

Police announced the arrests on Sunday, saying the accused exploited the Internet Protocol (IP) cameras' vulnerabilities, such as simple passwords.

A cheaper alternative to CCTV, IP cameras - otherwise known as home cameras - connect to a home internet network and are often installed for security or to monitor the safety of children and pets.

Locations of cameras hacked in the country reportedly included private homes, karaoke rooms, a pilates studio and a gynaecologist's clinic.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj01q6p7ndlo

Dial-a-Prophet

You can now text with Jesus. Really! Well, maybe not really-really: 

“Text with Jesus” is an A.I.-powered chatbot smartphone app trained in biblical concepts, introduced to a divided America where 30 percent of the population now says they have no religious affiliation — a number that’s been steadily rising. 

Stéphane Peter, the French-born Los Angeles-based software engineer behind the company, admits he is “not particularly religious at the moment,” but says “it’s been incredible to see how many want to try a conversation with biblical figures.” 

Not just Jesus: all 12 apostles are in the app, among other biblical figures such as Moses; he hopes to have “The Three Wise Men” added before Christmas. Plus, NBC added, “Premium users can also converse with Satan.” 

(RC/AFP, WFLD Chicago, NBC) ...Users insist the connections are authentic because the bot never answers their actual questions.

Losing the Encrypted Key [Life in Tech]

From BBC

Doesn't look good: for example, if you are a fireman, and your house burns down... 

I know very little about such things, but I was wondering: was the 'encrypted key' literally a key - like the key to your front door? If so, it sounds pretty low tech, in a way ("Here's your key, Rupert. Don't lose it, or else we're in trouble"). 

Or was it some magic formula, and each of the 3 'trustees' was given 1/3 of the complete 'encrypted key', which sounds a bit like a second-rate science-fiction movie. There must be the temptation to scribble it down on a piece of paper, which makes it sound a bit Harry Potterish. Then again, you shouldn't lose the scrap of paper, then ("I've lost the encrypted key! I've lost the encrypted key! I left it on the train! On the train!"). 

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A firm considered one of the leading global voices in encryption has cancelled the announcement of its leadership election results after an official lost the encrypted key needed to unlock them.

The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), external uses an electronic voting system which needs three members, each with part of an encrypted key, to access the results.

In a statement,, external the scientific organisation said one of the trustees had lost their key in "an honest but unfortunate human mistake", making it impossible for them to decrypt - and uncover - the final results.[...] 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62vl05rz0ko

AI Code-generation Anecdote

Read today:

"I worked in AI from 1975 to 1995; several years of that was in automatic programming. I constantly hear that AI is replacing programmers and find this to be unbelievable. So I decided to give GROK an impossible task. I asked it to write a merge sort program in Common Lisp. It did using linked lists. So then I asked it to do the same thing but using vectors. It wrote a correct program again. So then I asked it to write it to write a concurrent version. Again, it did. I was amazed! Unfortunately, each version was horribly inefficient. The list and vector versions were identical except for the functions that created lists and vectors.

At each level of the merge they created new arrays instead of manipulating the original storage structures. Similarly, the concurrent version created a new thread for each merge. In real-world applications, these generated functions would have been, I imagine, orders of magnitude slower than a hand-written merge sort. You might as well use bubble sort. :) ChatGPT was even worse. Clearly, what these systems do is the first phase of Sussman's PhD Hacker system.

No intelligence, just simple pattern-matching of a provide specification to the specification associated with code found on the Internet. The impressive part is being to match the two specifications, written in English, which are probably somewhat different."

AI Produces Filthy Songs

From METRO of the UK, 19 11 2025

It would appear that - some - AI-powered robots have a very filthy mind. If you want to listen to the song, you can click on the You Tube link. 

Warning: The song is truly packed with obscenities and graphically sexual content. 

What is troubling is that - apart from the nature of the lyrics - if someone had played the clip to me without telling me it had been AI-generated, I wouldn't have known. This could genuinely devastate the music industry: we could end up with a situation where 90% of the content online is AI-generated. And, beyond, this will certainly put many actors out of work - extras, for a start, will be a thing of the past in the film industry - and even writers of fiction. 

AI should be able to produce content 'in the style of' quite easily; it may find it harder to produce genuinely original content, however: essentially, what the AI tool does is scan the web for existing content and combine/edit it into a (newish) finished product. 

In fact, another example, this time in Jazz style, may be found here:

I Want Five Guys in my Ass (feat. Betty Backdoor)

There are lots of similar items on www.youtube.com.

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The song is here: - 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa97s79vCkE

AI in Finance

 From the Global Finance magazine:

AI-Powered FX Hedging: How Corporate Treasuries Cut Costs