September 2026

Neural networks have a lesson for people. When you have different things interacting, like neurons in your brain, or weighted numbers in an AI network, or even people, what will allow them to together produce intelligence is to NOT allow them to communicate. That sounds bizarre. But it’s a well-known fact of human collective intelligence, that crowds of people are much smarter when they don’t communicate with one another individually. When they’re not allowed to be ‘social’. Why organisations that run lots of meetings, communicating with each other constantly, always fail. Similarly the neurons or weighted numbers of brains and AI don’t really communicate, with each other. That’s what allows them to interact in ways that produces the intelligence we know. And how they interact to bring about intelligence is fascinating - that’s a separate post.

A not spoken about revolution of AI? It’s the only thing in our history to be ‘well read’. That has read most human knowledge, from all sources, including images and sounds. No human has been able to do that since the early 15th century. When mass printing began, the idea of somebody actually having a grasp of all human knowledge disappeared. But AI has that grasp. It’s not a competing mega-brain with our brains. Again that’s idiot Hollywood Terminator movies. Knowledge and thinking has never resided in brains. It’s a networked, distributed thing spread across brains and texts and libraries and education etc. AI is that networked, distributed thing finally brought to scale. When you’re chatting with AI, you’re not chatting to a mega-brain. You’re having a conversation with the accumulated sum of human knowledge. When books exploded in number, we first introduced ways to order them, with techniques for cataloguing and referencing. Libraries. Then text went online, and we invented search tools to navigate that vast ocean of text, to help us find things. And now we’ve made the text itself conscious. Now you can talk to the library itself, to that vast ocean of text and images and sounds. And it will help you.

Everything is in the framing. If we see AI as some magical black box that contains 'intelligence', or just statistical tricks, everything we think and say about it will be framed by that assumption. Every time it gets something 'wrong' it will be seen as unreliable, as a risk. Or if it seems too agreeable, it will be seen as 'hallucinating' the things we want to see. Neural networks learn. There is no black box. Learning *is* making mistakes. It *is* emulating those we're trying to learn from, because that's how we learn. We need a reference point to test if we're doing it right. We need to stop talking about AI as some other arriving in our societies. It's the natural evolution of networked knowledge, creating neuronal nodes in those networks that allow them to think (yes think) and act within those networks.

One of the most glaring symptoms of the problem with all Western cultures is their total neglect of regional life. You only need to look at the highway system to see it. Tens of billions spent creating smooth multi-lane highways for thousands of km, up and down the coast. The road to the West is an absolute fucking disgrace by comparison. The furthest any investment gets is the Blue Mountains, which is really still outer Sydney. And the Blue Mountains highway is a tourist drive, not a highway, for Sydney folk. The UK’s new PM Andy Burnham spoke this week of the gutting of community life in smaller centres, in the UK. Exactly the same thing happened here. I’ve posted about how regional areas try to fight this by setting themselves up as some rival ‘regional’ life. I think that’s a terrible mistake, doomed to fail. As the Chinese show us, country life is just city life. Cities invented the country, to extract food and resources. What’s needed is to re-integrate regional life into city life, where it came from. As the Chinese do, with massive investment. To create one culture, not two. Not town and country. Just Australia. One where you can live anywhere, not just huddled on a coast that will be underwater in a few generations anyway.

I don't think the magnitude of global ice is widely known, and what melting it all will do to sea levels. For those sceptical sea levels can vary much, historically we know how high the seas were the last time all of the ice melted. 70 metres higher. Even a 1 metre rise would be catastrophically damaging and expensive for nations. Much of the world lives on coasts, in cities.

The process of social progress and change is so frustratingly stupid and slow sometimes. The resistance is about breaking down status barriers. Peer pressure. 'What everybody else is doing' is always the Number 1 reason anything gets done. Reality always wins eventually.

I think many teachers would say the real issue is the parents of these children, who (as kidults) still seem to see themselves as being at school, and think and behave in the same way the kids do. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-03/one-third-of-lesson-time-lost-to-misbehaviour-teachers-say/107101894

I was paying my rates the other day, and looked at the itemised costs. And while my rates are quite high for a regional town, when I looked at the itemised bill I thought this is such a pittance for what I’m getting. The average family now spends two to three times my annual rates on dining out and take away food and drink every year. For my rates I get access to clean water, sewerage, my rubbish taken away, the various civic facilities of the town, including a library, roads, parks and gardens. Food inspections too, of beloved eateries. I hate kidult culture more every day, with its endless litany of whining complaint, living its whole life in a preening social media mirror, engaged in endless social comparison in the fight for social status. We’re spoiled children, the entire culture.

All of this was avoidable. But humans won't follow knowledge to guide them in what to do. They always just follow each other, to protect their status in a group. And so then reality bitch-slaps the whole sorry group, clinging to each other for comfort.

“Reality leaves an enormous redundant footprint in language.” Read on :)

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car racing. A bit longer, because interesting things aren’t usually scrollable memes. Car racing normally uses the same dumb framing of things we see in gun debates, where some say guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And others say guns are the problem. Like guns and people are two separate things. Similarly in car racing, fan culture thinks winning is all about driving skill. Others think it’s all about the engineering. Many of the different racing formulas in the world fall on one or other side of that divide. F1 lets engineering dominate everything, meaning a tiny handful of drivers in the biggest budget teams win everything. ‘Spec’ formulas like F2 and F3 give everybody exactly the same car, thinking that encourages better racing. It does, though they use things like reverse grids to even things up as well. V8 Supercars, and NASCAR to a slightly lesser extent, does something else. It recognises that what wins races is the *coupling* of driver and engineering, while restricting what different budgets are actually allowed to be used for. You can’t just engineer a new engine in V8s, for example, you have to use the approved standard engine for each manufacturer. It allows Ford, GM and Toyota to all engineer different cars, but then it ruthlessly tests them and makes sure those engineering differences don’t create fundamental advantages for one over the other. That creates an ‘envelope’ of similar performance, inside which teams are then totally free to engineer each car to each driver’s preferences. Everybody wins. Engineering gets a significant say, as do drivers. All drivers on the grid can potentially win, as you can see in the stats. Racing is the winner, you can watch any V8 Supercars race and have no idea who will be on pole, and no idea who will win or even be on the podium, from one week to the next. It’s a genuine competition. The much, much broader lesson here is about how to run a society that is fair to all, while rewarding excellence and innovation. F1 is like the US and to some extent old Europe (which invented F1), it thinks just remove all regulation and let everybody slug it out, and then call that winner the best. That’s bullshit. It entrenches historical advantage and status hierarchies. The big players always win, even if they’re not the most capable. V8 Supercars is a microcosm of Australian society itself, where you design equal opportunity into the DNA of things. It’s not ‘bureaucracy’, it’s deliberately targeting unfair status disadvantage, to keep societies open to new things.

We’ll see lots of this, another trending nonsense on the socials. 9 out of 10 people you meet won’t have had an original or even interesting idea in their entire life.

“These are friendships that often play out on social media and group chats, which can quickly turn to bullying and harassment,” she says. “That leads to them becoming isolated and withdrawn.” If we don’t shut down social media, it will destroy our societies. At every level, even the most intimate, as we see here. It transforms everything it touches into rivalry and rage.

In a neural network, a ‘thing’ doesn’t exist in one place. It’s nothing like a database. It’s a distributed ‘weighting’ across many different network nodes, shifting all the time as the network experiences more. The same network can know many different things, all sharing and actually creating the same neuronal nodes. Not existing in any one of them, but as a distributed, dynamic pattern across all of them, with different weightings. I couldn’t emphasise enough what a revolutionary shift this is in understanding the entire world. I’ll be sharing more and more about this, going well beyond thought and intelligence, to how reality itself is made.

It’s a measure of the power of social media trending BS that pretty much everybody assumes interpersonal relationships between people, and particularly between the sexes, have become dramatically more violent in our time. That we have a ‘crisis’. (Everything is a crisis on social media, it’s the business model.) The data tells us we have that exactly backwards. And this is WITH increased levels of reporting of violence. The thing obstructing this brilliant decades-long trend IS social media, re-activating rivalry and violence between people.

Happy Birthday, Henk! 🎊☕💐

Social media transforms everything into rivalry between social groups. Team sports. The most common views on all social issues reduce down to membership of one or other social group, at war with some other social group(s). You can see this when you express a view, and a person immediately tries to catalog you in a group. ‘Oh you’re a Liberal voter…ah you’re a terf…ha, a Greenie!’. Etc. The content of the debate between all of these groups is absolutely irrelevant. They would argue over two flies crawling up a wall. The main game is status, the individuals and groups are fighting for dominant social status.

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones - the Mac Minis - in particular. People are using them for ‘local AI’. They’re running AI systems locally, on these tiny computers, without the need to be constantly connected to the cloud/data centres. The social media zombie culture might immediately think ‘ah, it’s about data centres!’ (one of the fake bullshit rivalries). It’s much, much bigger than that. Apple invented ‘system on a chip’ computing, see the coloured square diagram. Where the processing and memory and other functions all happen as much as possible on a single chip. ‘Apple silicon’ they call it. The reason they did that years ago already was to create immensely powerful but also incredibly energy efficient mobile devices, that needed little cooling. Laptops, mobile phones, iPads. It was an extraordinary engineering innovation. Traditional PC folk scoffed, especially gamers. They love their multi-thousand dollar graphic cards, coupled to mega-sized CPUs, to run graphics-heavy things like games and simulations. With big noisy cooling systems to stop them from melting. But then along came neural networks i.e. AI. AI is a fundamentally different model of computing itself. I’ll post more about that, separately, that’s the REAL revolution here. But it turns out Apple Silicon is THE ideal way to run neural networks. Even their cheapest machines like the Mini absolutely smash a traditional PC, for running AI locally. And they use tiny, tiny amounts of energy, doing it. Silently, with minimal cooling. While the rest of the world fights over limited supplies of powerful GPUs (graphics chips), to run AI data centres with, Apple’s architecture makes them much less relevant. It’s the integrated architecture that’s important, not the size of the GPU. Many had said Apple was losing in the AI war, it hasn’t developed any notable LLM-style AI. But it’s winning in the *hardware* that will increasingly run AI, that runs the famous AI agents.

‘Local AI’ is a term to become familiar with. Increasingly AI *in use* is local devices doing the inference work. Your phone has been doing it for years already. Data centres increasingly only train the AI models these local devices use. It will also mean your AI is mostly free, and will use minimal energy.

Happy Birthday, Rachl! 🎂🎉 Loved your women in their 40s share, I’ll try to tread carefully ;)

Photo (not mine) from the 1970s, showing just how rampant smoking was as a habit for many decades. It dominates the photo. Walter Lippmann said that when everybody thinks alike, nobody is thinking much. It’s a useful guide for life. If the ideas and actions that guide your life are just what everybody else is currently thinking and doing, or are one of two rival sets of actions and ideas, they’re probably not thought at all. Just imitation for the sake of socially ‘fitting in’ i.e. achieving social status. And they’re probably killing you. You won’t realise that until it’s much too late.

Peter Brock died 20 years ago, today. A trivia fact I didn't know is that the car he was driving when he died, a Daytona Coupe, was originally designed by an American designer. That American designer's name is...Peter Brock.

17 million Americans now have Long Covid. That's seen as a vast under-estimate of actual sufferers, driven (as here) by people and their doctors having zero clue that Covid is the cause of their often horrendous health issues. Long Covid is a catastrophe for a person's health and often lifespan. Nobody talks about it because that would violate the silent agreement to pretend Covid ended. Just as Trump is poised to pretend he won the war in Iran. I still wear my mask in closed public spaces. People think I'm weird. I'm less than 2 years from retirement, and want it to be long and healthy.

None of the public narratives about AI understand the first thing about what AI is or how it works. Most fundamentally, AI is changing what computing itself means and does. Traditional computers operate symbolic ‘representational’ models of the world. The data they process is the raw material of these models. So for example a computer game literally draws and animates a ‘model’ of the world. Or a word processor uses a symbolic model of language. Etc. AI does something astoundingly different. It creates a network with the world itself, interacting with the actual things in the world. That interaction creates ‘weightings’ inside its network, distributed in unplanned ways across its nodes or ‘neurons’. The astonishing thing about this is that those weightings alone can ‘generate’ the world, or any variation of it. Or even new worlds, just from those weightings. No model needed, no representation. An AI that writes or creates an image isn’t using a model a human put in there to do it. It’s *generating* both, all by itself, from what it LEARNED in interaction with the actual world, which generated its weightings. Those weightings ARE ‘thought’. Intelligence. Just as the networks of our own brains, nervous systems and the environments they operate in create weightings in our own brains. Why we can generate ‘imagined’ things. It’s exactly the same process. We’re already seeing this used in gaming, with ‘AI’ images. The game generates images, rather than constructing them from models and data. But traditional computers are designed to process separate data in models, so their architecture isn’t great for this. Apple’s architecture on the other hand is designed to integrate data and processing within a single chip. Which is why their computers are in high demand for AI work. Computers are shifting from creating content from data and models, towards generating it from weightings derived from actual interaction with the world itself. It will revolutionise everything.

"This is the most annoyingly good car in Australia right now. I want to hate this car. I just can't." Wonderful seeing kidult culture completely defeated by genius engineering. Even the small things he doesn't like - having to swipe on the screen to shift direction, I mean who the fuck cares? It beats a bloody great gear stick cluttering up the cabin space. And the indicator stalk is superb. I love that he wants Waze, so he can speed too. Kidult to the core. Best car ever created.

Those worried AI will make us all forget how to think were never school teachers. Nobody was doing much thinking for years before AI arrived. (Sadly, including many school teachers.) Lots of people copying each other's thoughts and feelings and actions. A rivalry of copying. Social media culture. Not thinking though. Look at the PISA results, stupidity is now viral. AI is a rescue mission, not a threat.

Medicare is under enormous pressure in Australia. Some of that is an ageing population. But a big chunk of it is price gouging by doctors and dentists. Fees being charged by many medical professionals are extortion, absolutely outrageous. And they hide behind an historical cosy agreement in the Constitution where they get to define their own fees, even though the public pays the bills. Doctors for example are the largest per capita property investors in Australia - they're swimming in spare money. Our eldest had her wisdom teeth out a couple of weeks ago. We have that procedure privately insured. The GAP payment was $2000, WITH insurance. Nobody in politics has the balls to take these arseholes on. Many members of the public are voting with their feet and either going without care, or are using AI or alternative medicine instead. Cost controls are desperately needed, as they have been in the NDIS. Lower-ranked members of the health profession are paid a pittance by comparison. More status games.

If you want to understand why healthcare has become unaffordable for many, look at this table. And the table even makes things look better than they are, because 30% or more of GPs for example now work part-time. A GP working full-time can earn easily over $300,000 per year. Similarly dentists are missing, they're also largely part-time now, because they earn such exorbitant money and can afford to be. They also hide a lot of income through financial instruments like trusts. Doctors are public servants. They're paid for by taxpayers. They vehemently deny they are that, because public servants normally get no say at all over their own pay. They use a loophole in the Constitution to get away with it. Dentists are also heavily publicly subsidised, through subsidised health insurance. They set their own fees too.

For those who still believe AI ‘doesn’t think’, how do you explain this? No human has been able to solve this, thinking for decades. There’s nothing to ‘copy and paste’ here. I saw a mathematician say this is bad today because it removes challenge for human mathematicians. lol. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-may-have-just-solved-a-million-dollar-math-problem-the-field-will-never-be-the-same/?fbclid=IwdGRleAUN_oxwZG9mBWZkaWQWUOEpRHHIBAy09Z60PqMXv21DgWLnOmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDzE3Mzg0NzY0MjY3MDM3MAABHqVKCFn80Tr8UvXq7j7ZHktXEdRXzTkTyefWbgN9S8MZKc49ScKeAJ7dFRjg_aem_jjy_iD-GP5tcwfxXA5KlvA