Some links: Rumble: rumble.com/user/DonPMitchell Github: github.com/DonPMitchell?tab=… Venus: mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.… Tesla: mentallandscape.com/Tesla.ht… Books: amazon.com/stores/Don-Mitche… Blog: donpmitchell.wordpress.com/

Star Trek computers. 200 years in the future, people have wisely rejected digital touch sensitive displays with bad user interfaces and returned to using mechanical switches and dials.

I tend to use MacCready as companion in Fallout 4. He equips Overseer's Guardian rifle with .308 large mag. Ballistic weave on his hat and coat.

変な遊星

Breaking News: Gene Shalit, who peppered his film reviews with puns and wry wit on NBC’s “Today” show for decades, has died at 100. nyti.ms/4otc38W

Who was the best Spiderman?

Anthropic has put out some thought pieces about AI safety and ethics, such as the Claude Constitution. But this alone cannot guard against the danger of a totalitarian AI surveillance state. The danger does not come from the AI, it comes from corruption and psychopathy in the halls of power. The danger is the political system going wrong.

I'm reminded that almost every version of my Venus Venera-14 image has my named cropped out. I don't mind image reuse, I don't monetize my stuff, but if you take the time to crop someone's name off a picture, you're kind of an asshole.

My feed on Instagram: 5% things my friends post. 55% why the f are you showing me this? 45% why the f are you showing me this, but generated with AI.

Grok, ChatGPT and Gemini asked to design and render an interesting building using Fallout 4 Barn construction kit. An experiment to see how much they can understand this task. Germini did the best job of making something that looks like it could be built in Fallout 4.

I liked Nolan's movie about Oppenheimer, but was disappointed in his recreation of the Trinity test explosion. Oddly, David Lynch did a nice job of this in Twin Peaks. It's gets a little trippy after the camera zooms into the mushroom cloud (in his story, this explosion opens a portal that allows evil entities to enter the world). vimeo.com/229621231

He makes some of the points I've made, that Nazi super science is a myth. The V-2 was technically interesting, but not something the US or Britain could not have built had they made the bad decision to pour resources into a nearly useless weapon. When the Soviet Union put Sputnik into orbit, a popular comment was "their German scientists were better than our German scientists", but that was really an urban myth. In the USA, Werner von Braun spent years developing Redstone, which ended up being considerably less powerful than contemporary Russian rockets like the R-5. By the time you reached the ICBMs, the American Atlas and the Soviet R-7, there was almost no recognizable German design elements. By then, the Russians had deported all their German V-2 engineers, and the Atlas was built by Convair aircraft company under the leadership of Charlie Bossart from Belgium. youtube.com/watch?v=cm91dLGQ…

Neurons in brain: Bee - 250 thousand Lizard - 3 million Cat - 700 million Raven - 2 billion Dog -3 billion Chimp - 30 billion Human - 90 billion

The Pope's encyclical on AI, a 7 minute summary.