Odds and ends.

A bit of a grab bag post today, I have a few things to talk about, a little something for everyone (I hope).

The Guitars and Gear sub-newsletter

I originally started the Sweatyspice blog/newsletter early in the Covid era. It was a place that I wrote about my re-entry into computer gaming (after a long hiatus) and a rekindling of my love for playing guitar.

I wrote over and over about those topics, but back then I had about 0 readers, basically it was me talking into the ether to myself.

I liked it, and it was cathartic.

Later, when I moved to Substack, and I began building an audience, I noticed that whenever I posted about my musical journey, I lost readers. The un-subscription notifications would fly in.

Fair enough. Most people are here for my other posting.

So, I have created a sub-newsletter, and so far only a couple of people have subscribed to. I created it but did not opt in the entire list of subscribers.

If you want to check it out, and if it tickles your fancy, go to the web page, to your account settings, and opt in on the emails.

https://sweatyspice.com/welcome-to-the-guitars-and-gear-newsletter/

My latest post is about a pilgrimage to a killer music store where I almost spent $3K on an acoustic guitar.

Great Restraint: Martin 0-18

A trip to a great music store, and some fantasizing about taking a beautiful piece of wood and steel home. Le sigh.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

6 weeks in, how is the Ghost experience?

So far, it has been pretty smooth. I am running two of my properties on this instance, and that required a slightly more powerful VM on my service. That is costing about $22 a month. Still well within the budget.

My posting has been pretty consistent. I am mostly getting a single post a day out, and this is translating to about 60K emails a month:

Not too bad. Note that I check the failed emails, and almost all of them are people with full mailboxes... And I thought I was bad at email hygiene!

My mail carriage bill is about $50 a month at this posting rate, again, within my expected budget.

I am adding a few subscribers a week, and I haven't yet had someone unsubscribe. I call that a win!

I still need to write a longer post on my migration. It isn't for someone who is squeamish around tech.

The insanity of RFKjr

I am taking this week off of work, and I have been trying to moderate my news consumption, but the insanity of Junior being combative with Senators of both parties in his testimony yesterday.

I didn't watch, but what I've read is about what I expected.

From HCR's daily post:

During his testimony, Kennedy insisted his purges are designed to restore faith in the CDC after it “failed miserably” during the coronavirus pandemic. He called the CDC “the most corrupt agency at HHS, and maybe the government.” He denied the official tally that more than 1.2 million Americans have died from covid-19, and denied that new government guidelines for the covid vaccine mean that people cannot get them. He was combative and seemed angry that he was being questioned. He repeatedly suggested Democratic senators were lying when they quoted facts or data that didn’t fit his narrative.

Yep, about what I expected.

I still curse Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana for being the deciding vote that got Kennedy over the line.

I am glad that I live in California, and today I will get both the seasonal Flu vaccine, and the updated Covid vaccine. So much of the country is going to not have that access, and that is no bueno

AI Fuckery

I work in creating certifications for IT professionals. And I am not shocked by this, but OpenAI is launching a job board, and a series of "certifications" for workers to use to prove that they are capable of using AI in their work.

Look, certifications are really targeted at hiring managers, as an easy way to qualify candidates to open jobs, and less to the actual certified individuals.

But, from my experience in trying to get approval to open a job requisition to replace myself, corporate leadership is not looking so much to hire "AI Certified" people, but instead to not hire anybody, and force remaining staff to use insufficient AI to do the job when someone leaves or is laid off.

That is the trend.

My read on this is that Sammy Altman realizes that the $1B that OpenAI spent in the two training runs of their latest release ChatGPT5 produced merely a "meh" improvement, and not a meaningful jump towards the holy grail of AGI, that pivoting to making the current crop of Generative AI more essential in business workflows.

But, while it has its uses, it is not really a replacement for a flesh and blood brain that can reason, and extrapolate. AI remains just an awesome autocomplete, and not really a thinking system.

This video by Chris Norlund captures it well:

The segment of the meeting at the White House with all the tech leaders with Sam Altman lavishing Trump's wrinkly nut-sack is particularly revulsive.

The juicy part of that WH meeting? Elon Musk was not invited. I seem to recall that Musk went full MAGA when the Biden administration failed to include Musk in a tech summit.

How's that working out for you Musk?

Speaking of Musk, their Roadmap to Nowhere

One of my favorite political commentators, Dave Karpf, is also a chronicler of the futurism. He's famous for his dives through science and tech rags from the 1990's.

But he also is a Tesla sceptic. I saw him tease on Bluesky that he was going to have to write about the Tesla Master Plan update.

I was giddy with anticipation. It was not misplaced.

Tesla’s Roadmap to Nowhere

I’ll give him this: Elon Musk has a solid grasp of futurity-as-PR.

The Future, Now and ThenDave Karpf

The lead in is classic Karpf:

Earlier this week, Tesla tweeted the latest update on the company’s “Master Plan.” It’s… bad. Sloppy. Ludicrously vague. The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins summed it up well: “Tesla’s new ‘Master Plan’ sounds like AI slop.”

It’s significantly less coherent than the previous three master plans (from 2006, 2016, and 2023 respectively). Also, you can only find it on X.com. Tesla’s website still only lists the first three master plans.

Hoo boy, this is gon' be fun.

First, Musk has long made bold claims that he never met, collected money for vaporware, and in general being a tech-wanker.

Dave nails it here.

Dave then goes on to the grand-daddy of the predictive Tech seer:

It’s a stark contrast to, for instance, Moore’s Law. In 1965, when Gordon Moore predicted that the semiconductor industry would double transistor capacity every year for the next decade, he was speaking as Fairchild Semiconductor’s Research Director. Moore wasn’t making some cosmic forecast; he was announcing an ambitious production schedule that he believed his company could meet. This came to be a phenomenally important coordination point for the nascent computer industry, because other manufacturers could plan their capital expenditures around Moore’s roadmap. If Fairchild (and, later, Intel) failed to live up to the expectations of Moore’s Law, then that would be real consequences for the industry.

I lived through a part of the Moore's Law era, in the late 1990's I was in the semiconductor equipment industry, and it was a heady time.

But Moore's law wasn't like the Ideal Gas Law, or the second law of thermodynamics, or that angular momentum is conserved, it was an observation, and the fact that it was largely true for 4+ decades is amazing.

Getting to Dave's commentary on the 4th installment of the master plan:

Now we have Master Plan Part IV.

In this latest installment, Tesla is barely a car company anymore, and Elon no longer cares about the climate crisis. Sustainable energy is out. “Sustainable Abundance” is in. (Thanks, Ezra and Derek.) Now Tesla “make[s] physical products at scale and at a low cost with the goal of making life better for everyone.” It “build[s] the products and services that bring AI into the physical world.” Sure.

None of this tells us anything about the actual future of Tesla as a trillion-dollar producer of material objects. The point of these master plans is to make the stock number go up, or at least to prevent the number from trending down. And that’s because we judge publicly traded companies based on their stock performance, which is practically untethered from their net revenues.

The most noteworthy part of Master Plan IV isn’t the rosy Optimus/AI predictions. It’s the date. Elon went a decade between the first two plans, seven years between the second and third plans, and just two years between the third and fourth.

If Tesla’s underlying business was going well, Elon Musk wouldn’t need to ring this particular bell so frequently. By 2031, I estimate he will be releasing a new Master Plan every eleven hours. It’s the beginning of an exponential curve! Imagine a future of unlimited PR jargon.

Just awesome. Read the whole thing.

I think I will wrap it up here