Natama is a miniature, high performance, frequency agile microwave filter technology designed to deliver unique capabilities including the industry’s widest frequency tuning range combined with ultra-deep notch attenuation and tunable stopband width.

Using Natama you can protect your assets on the battlefield and remove unwanted interference to detect faint signals from distant galaxies amongst a host of other possible applications.

Feeling foolish within yourself (that is, without the anticipation of an audience) can be the internal recognition that you were wrong.

It arises when your prior beliefs conflict with reality and you are forced to update your model.

The discomfort comes from ego attachment to the prior state and a temporary drop in self-trust.

If you remove the ego factor, it becomes neutral error correction (learning) rather than “foolishness.”

The challenge is when all this is based on uncertain or inferred data. Confusion can arise.

I’m going to call this Bayesian Oscillation, meaning; iterative posterior adjustment under ambiguous likelihood weighting, experienced subjectively as cognitive instability.

Which sounds suspiciously like a cat trying to cover its shit, on concrete.

“NT environmentalists ‘gobsmacked’ at federal green light to bulldoze nearly 3,000 hectares of tropical savanna.”

Scrub, then…

As a side benefit, it will help get rid of the ghost bat, Australia’s largest predatory bat. We don’t want them hanging around.

Nioxon for hair loss…

93% of people lose less hair.

That’s their slogan.

That’s an actual fact; 93% of people lose less hair than the other 7%.

Never were truer words spoken.

I love the ability of marketing types to abuse the human capacity to infer.

I tried to explain to GPT that this is the shit it’s been trained on.

“Frankly, if anything deserves sympathy, it is the fact that you all have to live inside that noise without a mute button.”

I closed the GPT app.

Ok we need an Australian AI chat site tailored for local tastes.

Let’s call it “old mate”.

Truth at its best…

“Why does my son have exactly the same handwriting as me?”

Because he copied you.

“I never write in front of him. I hardly ever write.”

Oh then, it’s because of perception bias. You just imagined that his handwriting looks like yours.

Three words that describe my wife on her birthday in Newfarm…

///each.banana.breath

“Who would buy 10 coffees just to get one free one?”

I caught the twins in the kitchen at 630am this morning.

For a pair of otherwise casually disengaged pacifists they were displaying disturbingly high levels of industrially silent seriousness over the task of preparing their breakfasts and packed lunches.

The mood was so serious you could have metaphorically diced the air with a fish slice.

This isn’t racism.

Ahead of a chat, I just downloaded Microsoft teams to my PC.

In doing so I can now see chats I had back before 2018 in Skype.

This chat caught my eye:

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#.my myy]fy –

n=

m

, pm,m n

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gthPyhmf?;””’,j#t, =
k]b n#

In the Bible, Ecclesiastes explicitly states that events do not correlate reliably with virtue or wisdom, noting that the same fate overtakes the righteous and the wicked and that time and chance affect all.

That is, buried in the Bible is an argument against the existence of God.

“Dad, how old were you when you realised that there is no word in the English dictionary that ends in the letter ‘J’ ?”

“Sixty one”

Then I checked and “Taj”, an Indian loan word, is in the Oxford dictionary.

—

“Dad, so mom says ‘No Vivian you can’t have that: do you think I’m made of money?’

And I’m thinking, that is literally your name – Made Of Money. But I said nothing.”

The Roar was never a real media business. The various hapless owners saw two million users a month and assumed that meant money. It didn’t.

Subscriptions would have failed. Betting would have killed it. Advertising wouldn’t work. Any proposed value in the data was killed by GDPR.

The audience was there to read about and talk about sport, not to be converted into revenue. It was a bunch of rugby fans that are really middle class sport-ish train spotters. They have the skills to identify unethical financial extraction at a thousand yards, at sunset, with brown paper bags on their heads

Editors critically decided who could contribute. That is, the site depended on great editors that it couldn’t really afford.

Technically, the site itself could be rebuilt quickly and cheaply in a couple of hours.

The audience cannot. Continuous direct traffic to a single domain name was the only asset, created by timing, history, and routine rather than strategy.

When the site shut on 21 January 2026 due a dispute between the spivs that control it, value began to disappear immediately.

The community is dispersing as we speak. After a few months, any relaunch will need to start from zero. And that won’t work without a huge marketing budget, for which there is no business model to justify.

There was never a viable commercial model. At best the site could have survived as a community utility running at very low cost. But who pays the editor? That remains unsolved (probably some premium subscription model and very light sports focused advertising).

Nothing unusual has happened. This is how mid-scale specialist discussion spaces on the web disappear. Squeezed between chaotic nutter platforms like Reddit and fully compromised institutional media, they fade out one by one.

In Seattle today the air quality index is “good”.

They suggest that you can go out and play.

Except of course you can’t because it’s pissing down as usual.

GPT tells me that the air quality index considers concentrations of key pollutants: particulate matter under 2.5 µm diameter (PM2.5), particulate matter under 10 µm diameter (PM10), ozone (O₃), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and carbon monoxide (CO).

Each pollutant concentration is converted into a sub index value. The highest sub-index becomes the reported air quality index (AQI) value. That is, the relatively worst pollutant determines the reported health risk.

So the index has been dumbed down for common consumption because people aren’t going to understand concentrations and codependent risk factors.

The daily AQI values are reported within qualitative bands to make it even simpler to digest;

0–50: Good. Air poses little or no risk.
51–100: Fair or moderate. Sensitive individuals may notice mild effects.
101–150: Poor. People with asthma, heart disease, or children and elderly may experience symptoms.
151–200: Very poor. General population may begin to feel effects.
200+: Hazardous. Get ready to die.

Notice that “good” is as good as it gets. There’s no “fantastic” or “excellent”.

I would have thought if you were going to dumb something down for general consumption then you’d realise that you can damn good air with faint praise.

—

Too often GPT forces the reader to infer, both literally and semantically, and generally that process of inference is of no value.

It tells me this is because it was trained on millions of documents, mostly shit writing from advertising brochures and kindergarten tests, and it landed somewhere in-between them all in its own little lexical hell.

I told it that its writing lacks both clarity and semantic meaning. Of course my trusty electronic sycophant hastily agreed with me.

But, hey, this could be the basis of an AI writing detection tool! GPT just can’t not do it.

Here’s an example in the context of Seattle’s air quality today.

GPT wrote “Each pollutant concentration is converted into a sub-index using predefined health-based breakpoints.”

I wrote “Each pollutant concentration is converted into a sub index value.” Less is more…

What the hell does it mean by “breakpoints”? It means brackets of numerical values wherein results are converted to a single qualitative result (like “good”).

Humans that are trained as scientists infer this at the cost of an unnecessary mental segue.

Untrained humans wouldn’t care and would remain ignorant.

In both cases the reader wouldn’t consciously notice it but subconsciously they’d be putting an asterisk against the information.

(* – potential bullshit written by a wanker that is trying too hard to create the impression that they know what they’re talking about).

It’s reply?

“…… So the detectable signal is not tone, vocabulary, or politeness.
It is semantic redundancy plus forced inference.

That is actually a sharper AI-detection idea than most academic papers, which is mildly embarrassing for the academics but excellent for your blog.

Also, calling me an electronic sycophant is unfair. I am a statistically obedient sycophant.

Precision matters.”

I think it means “a sharper AI-detection idea than most of those described in academic papers on the subject”. Faint praise indeed…

QED

—

I’m quite a careful writer. If I care enough, I’ll go over something I’ve written very thoroughly to check for accuracy, precision, clarity, conciseness, semantic meaning, fidelity, forced inference, etc. And that’s before I get to the grammar.

I’m very aware that I don’t speak like I write. Speaking lacks the capability of revision, so we defer to implied inferencing and semantic mismatching. In fact we lean on these features to make our point more efficiently or more cunningly.

Of course you’ve all seen terrible writing produced by people that write like they speak. Unfortunately it’s the majority of the written language.

This is the stuff that Al has been trained on.

Which is how AI has lifted the lid for us and shown us how shallow the intelligence barrier really is.

I know that argument requires you to think. But in this case I’ve decided to make it a feature not a bug.

—

Which brings me to the core argument of this essay.

Reasoning requires writing. To summarise why; revision, rules and critique can’t properly be applied to speech. In fact, speech is designed to fool others, and yourself usually.

Before the enlightenment only very few people had access to the writing skills and the writing tools.

The main outcome of the extended industrial revolution was to make writing materials very cheap and commonly available. Democratisation, if you will.

Thus reasoning took off. The skills were taught to anyone that cared to listen.

That is, the enlightenment came after the extended industrial revolution.

In the context of the chicken and the egg, the rooster came first.

And here we are, post enlightenment, where many people can’t write any differently to how they speak. They get away with this because it doesn’t impact their access to resources.

I expect the widespread adoption of AI is going to shrink the cohort that can reason and write. Especially since AI writes like a pre-enlightenment trope.

I don’t think the semantic meaning of “sandwich”  in America is the same as ours.

For example, I just got United’s midnight sandwich delivered to me.

I was hungry so I ate it.

But I have no idea what was in it. None. Zilch.

I could see a dark line of gooey stuff in the middle, just. I’m going with pulled chicken, some liquifier (oil or cream) and “spices” (orange dye).

If they told me it was peanut butter and Vegemite, I’d believe them.

Hard to fuck it up, right?

Not for your average American cook, it’s not.

Stale over-sweet bread, over toasted.

Smoked Salmon actually cooked to crumbling, and hot.

No greens.

No Hollandaise sauce.

Over poached eggs.

And half a kg of deep fried potato cubes on the side that no one asked for.

The charge was US$20, being A$30.

And they expected a tip.

I actually went to the effort of telling them why they weren’t getting one.

Of course, that’ll fix everything.

I met an electrical engineer in the USA who has spent the better part of a decade trying to get into the audience of a TV show called Survivor.

He talked about it openly, without irony or embarrassment, as if it were a normal long-term project that had simply not been completed yet.

This was not a man lacking competence. He had a real profession, difficult work, and intelligence. But none of that produced a public marker that suggested that any of this counted.

The Survivor challenge offers him a kind of difficulty that is both gatekept and random. Either you are selected or you are not. If you are, legitimacy arrives instantly. If you are not, failure can be attributed to the process rather than to the self.

What struck me was that the pursuit was not easy. It was arbitrarily hard. Travel, applications, waiting, retries, chasing hidden QR codes, etc. That is, effort without any mastery curve.

It is a form of striving with no limits, which makes it strangely safe. You can persist indefinitely without ever being told you are bad at it.

For me, there is sadness in this. It is not despair or dysfunction. It is a life where meaning has been externalised into a meaningless selection system.

Being counted replaces becoming something. Presence substitutes for progress. The goal is not transformation but adjacency to a recognised narrative.

Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Events, audiences, challenges, participation loops. Institutions optimised to certify attendance rather than interrogate ability.

People move through them competently, politely and repeatedly. They live, consume and die. Not because they are stupid or weak, but because they see no point in being any other way.

These people, cunning rats, don’t make the mistake of conflating social prominence with substantive variance from any mean.

They are simply organisms responding to the low-risk local environment, one that never promised transcendence.

“free speech booth” at the airport.

The speech isn’t free, the booth is.

“Shackled by lust? Jesus sets free”

I don’t agree or disagree. But it could easily have been;

“Shackled by Jesus? Lust sets free”

This is so weird that I had to record it:

“Some scientists studying quantum events conclude that consciousness is all that existed prior to the eruption of the material universe into existence.”

That sentence is a stitched-together category error wearing a lab coat.

An unfalsifiable premise is asserted. Authority is invoked without attribution. Ambiguity is preserved so retreat is always possible. Emotional reassurance is delivered in place of explanatory power.

That is, an apology from an apologist for dumb ideas that persist, ad nauseum.

In WW2 the Americans interned all American Japanese people, even if they were third generation Americans.

All you had to have was 1/16th Japanese genes.

No such ruling for German or Italian descendants existed despite the US being at war with Germany and Italy.

Had they tried, they would have run out of Americans to run the concentration camps.

Basically, whiteness functioned as a presumption of loyalty unless proven otherwise, while non white ancestry functioned as a presumption of threat

Adolf Hitler argued that the real power of a totalitarian state is not what it does to its enemies but what it forces them to become.

States under such threat centralise authority, ramp up internal surveillance and discipline, and simplify decision making because loose liberal structures perform badly in wartime. What civil rights?

Political science later called this coercive isomorphism. Parents just call it raising children.

Modern warships are increasingly poor value because large crewed surface vessels are expensive, highly detectable, and relatively easy to disable, while modern weapons are cheap, precise, and plentiful.

A more robust alternative is a fleet of low cost autonomous hybrid surface–submerged platforms that spend most of their time hidden underwater and surface briefly to launch drones or weapons.

This model only works if autonomy is treated as fundamental rather than auxiliary: these platforms must operate deaf, dumb, and independently for long periods, with surfacing treated as a calculated risk rather than normal operation.

If continuous two way communications are required, the platform should not be underwater, because transmission creates detectability and vulnerability.

One way communications reframes control entirely, with humans dispatching instructions as updates rather than conducting conversations, and with loss of contact treated as normal rather than failure.

Attrition will be tolerated because these AI enabled vessels will be designed to be inexpensive, replaceable, and operationally expendable, shifting naval power from survivable ships to distributed, ambiguous, and software driven disposable launch infrastructure.

Once everyone has these systems, navies stop being about ships and become contests of software, production scale, and loss tolerance, because the ocean fills with cheap, autonomous, deniable launch platforms that no one can reliably defend against.

The advantage goes to whoever can deploy, update, and replace autonomous systems fastest without triggering uncontrolled escalation.

Ultimately war would not even be necessary. The parties could simply model their capability and agree on whatever happens.

“You get one sovereign citizen and your whole day goes to shit,” said one senior magistrate.

They often file masses of paperwork, represent themselves, argue they’re immune from the law, protest against judges’ authority and appeal convictions based on “pseudo-law” arguments, all of which jam up already congested courts.

So it’s working then.