John Wise

There you are one day, sitting in front of a screen reading the latest on 1-bit LLMs, specifically Microsoft’s implementation of BitNet b1.58 for the creation of Local LLMs, and wouldn’t you know it: the proverbial one thing leading to another, an article about the processing speeds required by Microsoft to run a lower power LLM on a mobile device, shows up. While it was Intel in the story identifying the software giant’s requirements of 40 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) of calculation ability to run on the next-gen of NPUs (Neural Processing Units), it appears that Qualcomm and their X Elite chips with 45 TOPS of performance will be first to market this year, not Intel.

While I’m enjoying the luxuries of search using Claude Opus/Sonnet, Mistral’s Le Chat, CoPilot, occasionally ChatGPT, and very rarely Google’s Gemini, I’d like to think that having AI running locally on my smartphone might have some kind of advantage. I can’t help but wonder about the rise of 1-bit weighted models that utilize 1-bit strings of observational analysis of the user in a file smaller than the average cookie. What would appear to us as random 1s and 0s are data points that possibly allow companies to build a better psychological profile of a user without violating data privacy.

With AI-assisted voice, email, search, and the myriad of other transactions that could be filtered through such tools, a much more specific and accurate profile could be structured from the data.

Taylorism was first created in the late 19th century as a scientific management solution for measuring the effectiveness and productivity of people involved in physical labor. By the 2010s, Digital Taylorism was moving into the vernacular as software performance monitoring tools were spreading. Here we are today in the mid 2020s, and it would appear that we are on the cusp of witnessing the advent of Algorithmic Taylorism. This development would no longer be an outside observer or installed piece of software designed for a specific industry; it will be the operating system, the machine, able to monitor any individual for better management and observation by the algocratic state.

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Watching the solo selfie crowd preen and pose in public while snapping three to five images of themselves has become my spectator sport. Tilt the head down or up? Do you add a pout or cock the head a bit off-center so your eyes look up from under the eyebrow? Slight smile or a toothy grin? Cup in the hand in the shot, or maybe shift the perspective to focus on a better background? These people/models are not taking these self-portraits for others; they are part of the portfolio of presenting themselves as a manufactured image of themselves that is most appealing to them. In effect, they are dating themselves.

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Late last year, I found myself updating some old travel posts and verifying links I had included, only to find them leading nowhere. Many of the businesses that made an impact on us a dozen years ago have ceased operations as they must have been unsustainable. People die, tastes change, and the world evolves. I get all that, and I’ve typically embraced change, but something else is at work here in the United States, as many mom-and-pop operations haven’t weathered the times.

While particular destinations grow more and more popular to the point that Caroline and I no longer feel the same attraction, the traditional mom-and-pop businesses that serviced travelers are falling by the wayside.

After enough posts have been checked, when I’m looking for the same thing in Europe, I find that there’s a judicious number left. I’m verifying again and again that the majority of businesses we’ve visited in the past ten years are still open.

Disappointed that so many services that we’ve enjoyed here in the States are gone. I suppose it’s indicative of our form of capitalism that everything must churn and, ultimately, die.

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