Venus looms large

Venus looked enormous in the night sky on Monday night.  Bigger than I can ever recall seeing it.

If you've got a clear night in your area this week, try to take a moment to look west after sunset.  The planet is pretty magnificent.

The AI arms race

It really does sort of feel like that, doesn't it?  It feels like the AI sector has become an arms race.  You've got all the Silicon Valley versions of AI, and now you've also got the Chinese DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.  Now that AI competition is international and multi-polar, it's only a matter of time before it's militarized.

I'm not even trying to keep up with all the latest news in this industry, by the way, because it's all just moving way too fast for me.  Which supports my theory of it being a new arms race.

The good news is that competition drives down prices for consumers.  Also, the open-source nature of DeepSeek allows enterprising folks to play around with it and see what they can invent, so the human spirit actually has a chance to flourish here in ways it couldn't before.

The bad news is that there's the possibility of some real nightmare scenarios resulting from AI.  I don't mean movie-type stuff like Skynet or HAL-9000.  I mean like some vengeful person using AI to invent a virus that specifically targets an ethnic group.  I did something similar to this in Auxiliary's Revenge, and I'm frankly getting tired of seeing some of the things I write about come to fruition here in the real world.  And when I say "tired," I actually mean horrified.

I don't think AI will destroy us all, but it will probably destroy a lot of us before it's all said and done.

Two more months

Yeah, I'm already sick of winter.  It's cold and dry, and the furnace just drives the indoor humidity down even more, and I've been guzzling water like a nomad lost in the desert because I'll turn to dust otherwise, and I couldn't even build a proper snowman the other day because the snow wasn't wet enough to stick together.

If I could afford a winter home, I'd have one in a place that has humid winters.  Lots of fog, ideally.  The temperature wouldn't matter so much as long as it's humid.  Like maybe Germany.  It's currently more humid in Berlin than it is here and it's slightly warmer.

In the meantime, I'll just keep wearing my boots indoors all the time because it's the only way to keep my feet from turning into blocks of ice.

Could have been worse

I thought the storm would produce more freezing rain than anything else.  I was wrong.  It actually snowed.  Not much, but enough to cover the ground and make everything look nice and pretty.

On Saturday, the power went out and didn't come back until about six hours later.  It got a little cool in the house, but not dangerously cold, so it wasn't a big deal.  Just an inconvenience.

I'm thankful that all the bad things that could have happened didn't.

Echoes of past events

It's widely know that sensual stimuli can bring old memories to the forefront of the mind.  The sense of smell, for example, is strongly connected to memory.

Another stimulus, or so it seems for me, is weather forecasting.  The forecast for Friday has both the high and the low in the thirties, and we're also supposed to get some frozen precipitation of some kind.  Seeing this forecast at this time on the calendar reminded me of the ice storm of 2000.

That one was notable because the Super Bowl was being held in the Georgia Dome the same weekend.  There was freezing rain on Saturday, and it went on for hours and just steadily built up on everything.  Lots of limbs came down at that time, especially pine limbs due to the higher surface area (per unit volume) of pine needles.  The air in my neighborhood was tinged with the sharp scent of pine sap.  It was quite a storm.

Maybe something similar will happen this weekend.  Or maybe it'll fizzle out as forecasts often do.  But it's interesting how something as innocuous as a weather forecast can dredge up an old memory.

Thanks to you, too

My book Clouds of Venus was promoted again on Tuesday.  Again, I don't know who, but I got a nice spike in downloads.

Thanks, whoever you are.  I really appreciate it.  :)

Thanks, unknown benefactor

Someone promoted Clouds of Venus today.  Don't know who.  Nice spike in free downloads, though.

Whoever's responsible, thanks.  I really appreciate it.  :)