Dependence on computers

Posted on by
4

I started writing about something in the comment section, but I decided it’s relevant enough to make it an article.

The CrowdStrike event looks like a very mild example of something I’ve been worrying about for years, namely a widespread systemic persistent IT outage that puts payment systems worldwide out of commission.

Basically, everybody is using digital payment for everything these days, so what happens if it all goes out for some reason? Oh, you’ll use cash. You mean, the ATM is going to work? No it isn’t. You mean, you have cash and will just use it? You mean, the cash register computer will not be afflicted, and the cashier will be willing to take your money without the ability to print out the invoice and register the transaction? Or will all the stores close until this is dealt with? In which case you will have to rely on whatever food and hygienic/medical supplies you have at your place, because you’ve been prepping? Oh wait, you’ve been prepping but since nothing happened you just consumed all the stuff and there isn’t any now? Yeah, that.

I mean, the first level of preparing for an IT outage is to have an air-gapped spare laptop stashed in some drawer, with Linux/Windows dual boot in case one of those two is the cause of failure, but the next question is, what do you connect to, if the cause of the problem is general, so the telecoms are down, banks are down, online services are down, AWS/Azure can’t process your credit card so it locks you out of your servers, GoDaddy is down so you can’t transfer your domains somewhere out of the afflicted area, or DNS is down so you can’t reach anything, or the satellites are down so Starlink doesn’t work. And let’s say it’s something really major so the consequences take so long to clear, there’s serious breakdown of services everywhere.

The first answer everybody has to this is something along the lines of “it’s unlikely that all the computer systems will go out at once”. True, it’s unlikely, but it was also previously unseen that all the enterprise win10 machines go out at once and half the world gets instantly paralyzed. Those machines aren’t independent. Microsoft enforces push updates, and the big corporations have unified IT policies which means they all enforce updates to all their machines. Also, everybody seems to run Windows, which means it’s no longer necessary for an attack vector or a blunder to target billions of computers independently, because it’s a single failure that can propagate from a single point and instantly take down enough of the network that the rest have nothing to connect to.

Also, there have recently been revelations that OpenSSL had severe vulnerabilities. The vast majority of Internet infrastructure uses OpenSSL. A systemic vulnerability that can be targeted everywhere means… you tell me.

Someone will say that people would adapt, and my answer is, what does that even mean? Every single store I’ve been in for the last decade or so uses bar-code readers to scan items, and then the computer pulls out the item data, most notably the price, from the database, so that the cashier can charge you. More recently, all those computers are required to connect to the state tax service where every bill needs to be “fiscalised” for taxation purposes. If Internet fails, the cash register can’t “fiscalise” bills and that’s going to be a problem. If the cash register is out because it’s always a Windows machine and you saw what can happen to those, and it’s connected to the Internet or the “fiscalisation” won’t work, the cashier won’t be able to tell how much the item you want to purchase costs and thus won’t be able to charge you. They don’t have prices on items anymore, like they did in the ‘80s. Everything is in the database.

Some say, run Linux, or buy a Mac. Great, but it doesn’t actually solve anything, because if every Enterprise and most smaller companies run everything on Windows, and those computers all bluescreen, what are you going to connect to, with your Linux PC? How does your computer even matter if you go to a store and you can’t buy anything, and how does it matter if you try to go online and most of everything is down, because OpenSSL has been attacked by something that gets root permissions on your computer and encrypts its filesystem?

I’ve been recently thinking that Internet isn’t so much a framework for connecting computers, but really a separate plane of existence. When I’m using my computer, I’m not really on an island in Croatia, I’m on the Internet. Imagine all the beings that exist in the physical world, but without an Internet connection, like trees, birds, cats and so on. In order to interact with them or even perceive them, you need to switch planes of existence, between physical world and the Internet. However, some aspects of the physical world, like our civilization for instance, have been abstracted into the Internet to such a degree that you can’t even use them anymore if you don’t have access to all kinds of Internet-based infrastructure, which is not currently perceived as a problem, but might become one really fast if something fundamental breaks down with the Internet.

Also, if a nefarious government or a corporation wants to lock you out of the Internet for “non-compliance”, you are really fucked, which makes it a really big sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, forcing everybody to be good and obedient slaves.

Incompetence or…?

Posted on by
14

Yesterday, a billion computers running Windows 10 bluescreened because Microsoft pushed an untested update by a company called CrowdStrike. Air travel, banks, payment systems, hospitals and who knows what else was affected. Interestingly, everybody affected belonged to a single user group: large entities with enterprise-level security systems installed.

The guy who tried to assassinate Trump once appeared in a 2022 Blackrock ad. I tried to test several possible conspiracy theories, and nothing really makes sense. The guy seems to be a stupid kid, but without any social network accounts, which is weird, because if that stuff was wiped in advance, that would be evidence of an actual conspiracy on very high levels that include intelligence agencies. Also, the guy was on a roof in what was supposed to be a protected area, and the experts say the only explanations are total incompetence or conspiracy.

So, we have two major events very close to each other, where almost inexplicable levels of incompetence are the only alternative explanation to conspiracy. So, let’s first go with the more parsimonic explanation: incompetence. This is actually very easy to believe, because America is literally rotting from top to bottom, and incompetence is absolutely widespread, and often dressed up in corporate and political newspeak to look good. Boeing literally can’t make airplanes anymore because they fired all their engineers. Microsoft no longer has a department that tests software, they basically fired it all and are now crowdsourcing product testing. Big startups that turn out to be based on outright fraud – basically just hype without a product – are no longer even news, it’s the way things are done there. The Secret Service head is a woke woman that has a goal of “diversity”, and Trump’s security detail included several obviously incompetent women who were running around aimlessly like headless chicken. The president of America is completely senile. Meritocracy is a bad word there, because it goes contrary to all the DEI neo-Marxist nonsense that’s the ruling policy of the country. No, incompetence cannot be ruled out as an explanation for anything there, because the entire West is a black hole of incompetence, idiocy and all sorts of fools who would save the world and CrowdStrike is an excellent metaphor: a security firm that created the greatest security threat and outage in history.

However, as tempting it is to say that Americans are obviously idiots and no level of incompetence can be put past them, I would still like to explore conspiracy as an explanation, just to be thorough. The problem here is that there’s no actual evidence, but if I was told that incompetence has to be ruled out as an explanation and that I have to promote the secondary explanation, no matter how poorly backed by evidence, to the no1 spot, I’d say that the circumstantial non-evidence points in the direction of someone trying to create chaos, or at least test the mechanisms they have in place for creating chaos, panic and erosion of normalcy. It would have to be someone in a high enough place to be able to control both Secret Service, Microsoft and whoever in the Wall St. billionaire crowd it is that owns big enough chunk of CrowdStrike, which seems to be a 80 billion company that sells security-themed nonsense to enterprise customers, who all wet their panties at the mention of security and control. If it’s AI controlling security, they are already working very hard to suppress a loud orgasm in public. CrowdStrike seems to sell just the right combination of buzzwords, but in reality, I have no reason to believe it’s not the new Theranos. I also have no reason to believe that it is. However, knowing how American business works, … In any case, the most likely explanation would be a conspiracy from those WEF people, or whoever sells them ideology and panders to their narcissism in order to control them. It’s actually possible that they take instructions from an AI, which for instance tells them that they need increased social anxiety in order to increase probability of success for whatever grand plan they are implementing, and they pulled the strings for several chaos-sowing events.

I don’t know. However plausible this sounds, the evidence is incredibly thin and I can’t give it a Bayesian match higher than 20%; incompetence is just so much more elegant explanation, but for some reason I’m not happy with it, because the other explanation fits into a wider situation very nicely, and once the news about the Trump assassination attempt started to circulate, the thing that crossed my mind was “whoever put this in motion must have a plan B”. Also, yes, Biden is completely senile, but someone is pulling the strings of that obvious puppet, and it’s in someone’s interest to have a figurehead “President” who gives them free rein. That someone might not want there to be an election. Furthermore, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, as a society riddled with profound and systemic incompetence is very easily influenced or outright taken over by malicious actors. I would therefore advise caution, and expect major disruptive events. Declaration of a state of emergency in America, resulting in closing the borders (for departures at least), lockdown and severe crackdown on what little there remains of freedom is likely in the short-term. I don’t know what excuse they will use this time, but something’s definitely in the air.

Intel SNAFU

Posted on by
4

Regarding the Intel CPU issues, I must say I expected that; I couldn’t tell which manufacturer will have the issue first, but with the arms race of who’ll be the first to make the 0 nm node dye that draws a megawatt of power and needs to be cooled with liquid Helium, it’s a perfectly logical outcome. If I had to guess, I’d say they made transistors out of too little material at some critical part of the dye, and with thermal migration within the material at operational temperatures the transistors basically stopped working properly.

So, basically, the real question is who actually needs a CPU of that power on a single-CPU client machine? We’re talking 24 cores, 32 threads, 5.8 GHz boost clock, 219W max. power at full turbo boost. This is sheer insanity, and it’s obvious that my ridiculous exaggeration about megawatts of power isn’t even that much more ridiculous than the actual specs of that thing. So, who even needs that? I certainly don’t. Gamers? They probably think they do, and they are likely the ones buying it. Developers? Video renderers? Graphics designers? I don’t know. But putting that many cores on one CPU, and clocking them this high, is sheer madness reminiscing of the Pentium IV era, where they clocked them so high, and with such dye layout, that a piece of malware appeared that deliberately iterated along the central path until it overheated so much the dye cracked, destroying the CPU.

I’m writing this on a Mac Studio M2 Max, which has more power than I realistically need, even for Lightroom, which is extremely demanding, and it’s idling at 38°C during the summer. It never makes a sound, it never overheats, and it’s absolutely and perfectly stable. I actually had the option of getting the model with twice the power for twice the money, which is an excellent deal, and I didn’t bother, because why would I? At some point, more power becomes a pointless exercise in dick-measuring. Sure, bigger is better, but is it, when it’s already half a meter long and as thick as a fire extinguisher? So this is the obvious consequence – Intel tried to win a dick measuring contest with AMD and made itself a meter long appendage, because bigger is better, and now it turned out it’s not fit for purpose? How surprising.

 

Crumbling

Posted on by
Reply

There’s been breaking news on the YouTube tech channels about high-end Intel CPUs of the latest generations showing serious instability.

Boeing is on public display as evidence of Jack Welch’s profitability-first policy’s final outcome.

Trump just barely survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally.

Joe Biden, the current president of the USA, is showing mental abilities unseen since the times of Brezhnev.

The assignment: find the common denominator.

Wielding

Posted on by
21

I actually had this article on my ToDo list for months, but decided against writing it because I thought it would not be of any use to anyone, but then Robin asked me a question along those lines which obviously means that at least one person would find it useful. Oh well, I might as well write it down so that I don’t have to think about it any further.

The standard theory on how kalapas work assumes aggregation of kalapas from all kinds of sources, mostly from karmic transfers and compassion, and compression into more dense structures, a process which is very similar to what a refrigerator is doing – it compresses gas, which extracts heat from it. The spiritual analogue of heat is chaotic energy of the spiritual particles, and to compress them and remove chaos from them implies suffering, because this chaotic energy needs to be experienced by your soul and released, and here’s where up-stream kriya, the inner space and resonance techniques do their thing. Basically, they give you the tools to deal with this and not die or go crazy from the intensity of spiritual trauma, but the essential mechanism of this release of chaotic disturbance from a mass of kalapas is suffering. During this process, the question of where to get enough kalapas for the process is not something you would normally ask, because, if anything, you get more stuff on your plate than you can safely deal with, and the question is how to survive the process and undergo it safely. Essentially, the question of yogic practice and the preparation for the initiation into vajra is not even something a soul would have if it didn’t have enough “mass” to actually go through it, and at that point it’s the condition of that spiritual mass that is the problem; essentially, you are a chaotic mess and this needs to be “defragmented”, compressed and transformed. So, essentially, the issue of getting enough astral kalapas in order to undergo transformation into vajra never arises, which is why I never talked about it, having literally no reason to, since the number of people who would benefit from such a treatise is zero.

However, there’s the issue of “wielding” spiritual matter. Essentially, you can wield spiritual substance that is of a lower qualitative order than what your soul is made of. This would assume that your soul is more-less coherent, meaning that it doesn’t contain inclusions of lower energies, but let’s for the sake of argument assume a “clean” situation, and we can deal with the exceptions and complications later.

So, let’s assume your soul is made of astral matter. This means you can “wield” prana, or “work with energy” as it is usually called. If you tried to wield astral, that would end badly, because your soul would merge with the astral substance you tried to control and this would fall under the category of karmic transfer at best, if the amount you “touched” was small enough, and in the worst case your soul would lose its integrity and disperse in the larger chunk of astral substance, at which point your spiritual existence would end, at least as you know yourself.

If your soul is made of vajra, however, you can wield astral matter quite safely. You can create astral beings, you can destroy them, you can create complex astral structures, but you can’t wield vajra; basically, you can’t create a vajra object unless you somehow split your soul in two, which is something you would want to avoid at all cost, and I don’t know how that could even be done. However, at some point you evolve enough to be able to wield vajra, which means your soul substance is of an even higher order. Normally, one would be able to wield blue vajra if they attained core-density of Shivaratri, the black vajra, or the black night of Shiva, the black aspect of the “atmic level”, as this is known in some literature. I am pretty sure that the beings who evolved into the other, “white” polarity of the atmic level can also wield blue vajra, since their power level is the same, but different in a male-female way. I’m also not sure that the female Gods actually perceive this as “wielding vajra”, because from their perspective they might just exist on that level and witness blue vajra conform to their will. As I said, it’s similar to a male-female difference, and at that level you will simply recognize what’s natural for you and what feels good, and you’re also not going to be doing the same things the same way in all situations, because creating things of beauty might have different requirements than fighting evil, in a sense that one would strive to attract things to oneself, and the other will concentrate willpower in order to overcome and transform the present state.

So, let’s summarize. In order to wield a substance, you need to be initiated into a qualitative level above it, and by “initiated into” I mean “made of”. However, wielding prana and astral (citta) is pretty easy to imagine, since there’s prana and astral everywhere around us. It’s easy to imagine a compressor pulling in the air from the environment and filling a metal container. However, it’s not like there’s an abundance of vajra-matter floating around so that you can just reach out for it and will it into action, and that’s where we come to the actual point of this article. When you wield a substance, you call it into existence, ex nihilo, or ex brahman, if you will. Those kalapas were not there previously, because if so you’d have to do a karmic transfer/purification to integrate them and conform them to your will, which is a different process, one you would go through in order to grow your soul. No; if you wanted to wield vajra, vajra would manifest from the creative potential of God, which you tapped into. Basically, aspects of the Absolute would manifest in the Relative, existing at the energetic level you are able to invoke and wield.

This, of course, implies that in order to wield Shivaratri, or the white equivalent of the Goddess, you need to be made of a substance at least one qualitative level higher.

I don’t know if I can even describe what the order of magnitude of these things is, since there are no human words for any of this; I’m basically making up the language and ideas as I go. However, imagine a very big cloud of gas. That’s citta, the astral substance. Now imagine it compressed to the point where the nuclei of the gas particles touch, and the protons beta-decay into neutrons, and the entire star of normal matter is compressed into an object few meters across made of “neutronium”, where the stuff itself is actually a giant vortex of quark-gluon plasma, essentially one big neutron, only made of many quarks and gluons, and not just neutrons tightly packed together. Let’s say this is a good analogue for vajra; blue vajra specifically. That thing is already unimaginably dense and powerful, like liquid lightning with the density so great that lead and gold feel like gas in comparison, and so hard that diamond feels like air. Now imagine millions of such neutron stars compressed into a huge supermassive galactic black hole, where you need a lot of blue vajra to get even a tiny particle of Shivaratri. OK, now imagine “that something” which wields Shivaratri like it’s smoke.

Yeah. It’s not something that relates to the practical experience of many beings, which is why this is probably the most useless article I ever wrote.