Wednesday Racing/Open Thread

Open to all subscribers, with an initial focus on F1 and the OpenAI drama llama

perdon and lo siento, see I learned these words for you

Although today’s discussion topics are quite different on the surface, I believe they share a common, and depressing, theme. Let’s see if we can work it out.

Viva, and so on

Before we discuss the race itself, I think it’s worth taking a moment to simply marvel at it. Twenty years ago, when your humble author held F1 viewing parties to catch the time-delayed Speedvision coverage, Formula One was a fringe activity in the United States, hardly any more popular or well-understood here than, say, the Petit Le Mans. This weekend confirmed that it’s now big business. A major thing. More expensive to attend than any stick-and-ball sports. Capable of shutting down the most profitable-per-square-foot city in North America. They had to build additional private-jet parking for it. In Vegas, which had no shortage of private-jet parking already because some of the private jets are wide-bodies.

And yeah, the ascension of F1 here is probably all because of Netflix. So what?

Prior to qualifying, the LVGP showed all the signs of being a complete and utter boondoggle. Ticket prices soared, cutting out long-time fans, then precipitously fell at the last minute, causing general resentment. The paving and prep operations were running behind and over budget. Everyone involved had somehow missed the fact that this race held in Las Vegas was likely to be colder than any ever held at Spa or the Nurburgring. The opening ceremonies were astoundingly bad and seemed tailor-made to point out an irreconcilable difference between this quite aristocratic sport and the huckster/hustler mentality of Paradise, Nevada. By the time the FIA threw in the towel on Free Practice 1, every pundit in the business was confidently predicting disaster.

What happened next was only one of the greatest races anyone has seen in the V6 hybrid era, if not the past thirty years. Thoughts, in no particular order:

• Toto Wolff lost a lot of his Abu Dhabi victim cred… by demanding a penalty for Carlos Sainz. The manhole cover that crippled Sainz’s car and nearly injured him to boot was essentially an act of God. Ferrari’s choices had nothing to do with it. The FIA has no mechanism in place to avoid penalizing a team for acts of God, so there was reportedly a movement in place among the teams to mutually request a waiver of the penalty. Rumor says that everyone was willing to sign off except for Mercedes, which had a narrow lead in the Constructors’ Championship over Ferrari. Sainz finished ahead of Russell and Hamilton anyway, and made sure to mention that after the race. No, Mikey! That is so not right!

• Max the GOAT, Checo the goat. Having crippled his own car and earned a penalty through a typical pre-championship-Verstappen-style rough move at the start, Max nonetheless drove through the field and won the race regardless. It was likely because he is simply better at the black art of traction sensing than the other drivers. We don’t talk a lot about that in club racing, although Ross Bentley has done some thoughtful writing on the subject, but there is a wide disparity in how well different drivers can react to changing traction conditions on the move. Even among the rare talents of Formula One. Max is simply the best at it. Jenson Button was pretty good, too. The low temperature of the LVGP meant that the teams were in uncharted territory. Some drivers shone, like the similarly talented Leclerc, but most did not. Meanwhile, poor Checo Perez was beaten to the line on the last lap by a Spanish driver for the second race weekend in a row. (Edit: I had Sainz on the brain. It was Leclerc who git him. ) It would be out of character for me not to suggest that Yuki Tsunoda wouldn’t have permitted that pass, so consider it suggested.

• The Williams redemption arc continues. Who among us didn’t love seeing L-to-the-OG-an Sergeant start in the top ten, even if he couldn’t keep it? This pains me to say, because I always kind of fancied Claire Williams, but clearly both she and Jost Capito were millstones around the neck of her father’s team. Couple that with the orange team’s amazing resurgence, and it’s easy to fantasize about a season where McLaren and Williams are once again battling for the top spot.

• Princess George gets it all wrong, again. Russell admitted fault in his collision with Max and said it was a good representation of his season as a whole. This gloomy assessment is almost universally repeated in the press, making it easy to forget that George has run Lewis almost equal in qualifying and would be equal in race finishes as well without a few genuine head-scratcher mistakes. If Hamilton is the greatest F1 racer of all time, and George is running him head-to-head, then why is everyone so glum? Unless there’s a tacit acknowledgement that Lewis isn’t what he used to be, of course. Maybe he never was.

• You can still get badly hurt on street circuits. Smart decision on the part of Liberty Media not to display Lando’s in-car video and audio until he’d been cleared at the hospital. It was not good. Your humble author recognized Lando’s pained attempts to get words out of his lungs from about five different big mountain-bike hits over the years. We’re all lucky that he wasn’t hurt worse than he was.

• What are the ethics of shaking the snow globe? Formula One is most interesting, and the “product” is the best, when there are unforeseen or difficult conditions. You can make an argument that Liberty should artificially introduce more of them. Put in a chicane after qualifying! Take tires away, or add them! And so on. The more of it you do, however, the less fundamentally serious F1 becomes. Which is a shame, because it is the last true constructor’s series and also the only professional series without any explicit BoP. The fact that ten teams build their own cars and all run within a second or two of each other is astounding. That doesn’t happen in spec series, even. Care should be taken with it.

• What’s the true value of next year’s LVGP tickets? No doubt a few people left Vegas feeling a bit resentful about being shut out of practice or any one of a thousand little inconveniences that must have been part and parcel of the F1 weekend because they exist even in a “normal” Vegas weekend. There were also plenty of people, such as your humble author, who didn’t bother to come out because the price/product ratio seemed so far out of whack. Now that we know the event can work well and also that the piggy-shaped circuit provides great racing… well, I’d rather watch F1 there than in Miami (too sticky) or Austin (lame-ass track, lame-ass city, wack-ass hipsters, I hate everything about the place even after running a 2:20 there in a stock Huracan). Expect demand for next year’s tickets to be strong. Pricing will be strong as well. Here’s what I’m going to do: I’ll add up all the costs of LVGP, then I’ll add up all the costs of going to Spa, and I’ll pick the lower of the two, assuming I can afford either, which is not a safe assumption.

In which a tulip prince is adored

the king of all midwit birds

I’ll say this for the past five years or so of human history: it has conclusively proven that we are not special. Were you under the misapprehension that modern human beings were better than the Puritans of Salem? That we would not turn on each other given the slightest of provocations? COVID-19 taught you differently. Perhaps you thought that the era of the great robber barons was over — then you watched BlackRock buy the houses as the government stole your savings via inflation. Hell, maybe you even thought that the days of open Jew-hatred (or, if you sit on the other side of the fence, state-scale Jewish violence) were behind us. LOL to that. Oh, but surely we’re all too smart to get caught up in the various bubbles and panics and hysteria of past centuries?

Yeah, right.

The “AI” hysteria has laid nakedly bare our collective human inability to understand anything from even a vaguely logical perspective. There is nothing “intelligent” and nothing “conscious” about AI, and barring a technological breakthrough without precedent in human history, there never will be. The idea of using computers to simulate neurons is inefficient to a scale that is difficult to accurately describe. You’d need $150,000 worth of GPUs to accurately model a fruit fly, if you could write the code to do it, which nobody has really managed to do. It would take $50 billion worth of GPUs for a “human” brain simulations, but then you get into weird limitations like the speed of light and quantum effects. Only real neurons are going to suffice. So you can grow brains on slabs, maybe. But those brains are going to be insane, and not in a fun way but more like a catatonic one.

It’s not even certain that there is a useful business model for the large language models and visual predictor engines that pass for “AI” right now. The vast majority of what they produce exists in an uncanny valley where fingers grow out of refrigerators and people say plausible-sounding but easily disprovable things. Most likely this “tech” will be the white-collar equivalent of being an automated checkout supervisor. Instead of writing something yourself, you’ll be tasked with fact-checking the work of an “AI” all day, which will be infinitely more soul-crushing and not a bit more productive than doing it yourself, but your CEO will be able to say he has AI and his investor buddies will take part of your old salary level and use it for private-jet snack service.

Keep all of this in mind as you absorb all this drama about Sam Altman being fired and reinstated and so on. OpenAI is a fundamentally worthless company. Everything Sam Altman has ever done has been worthless. He is a parasite who steals money from functioning economies and wastes it on programs to further denigrate and degrade humanity. He was a big wheel at “Y Combinator”, the single largest source of human stupidity in the past ten years.

Look at the “Top YC Companies”. Every single one of them, as far as I can see, is a parasitic entity that sucks rent out of previously existing transactions between human beings. Except for maybe Twitch, which is a sophisticated effort to raise the level of estrogen in young American men, and Reddit, which is a delivery vector for socialism and extreme pornography. Even their names are pathetic and stupid. How did we go from “General Electric” and “International Business Machines” to poxed neologisms like “CHECKR” and “DEEL”?

Faced with the utter and obvious worthlessness of everything they have ever attempted or accomplished, the Y-Combinator crowd overcompensates via parasocial and parasexual obsession with bleak, blinking nonentities like Sam Altman, who comes across as the JC Penney “The Fox” shirt to Elon’s original Rene Lacoste alligator, minus the long-wearing fabric and all-USA-citizen manufacture that made “The Fox” kind of admirable. Altman is an idiot, and that’s me being kind, because if he actually has an IQ worth measuring then he is actively evil.

This mook is an active participant in the consensual illusion of “AI”, which is like a weird furry sex role-play. “Oh, I’ll pretend to be a fox, and you pretend to be a kitty cat! I’ll respond to everything like a fox would, and so on — except it won’t be anything like a real fox, it will be a like a cartoon fox, which is another way to say that it will just be a deranged idea of a person who isn’t a person!” In this consensual illusion, we look at high-powered versions of MS Outlook Auto-Complete and Instagram filters then pretend to be frightened that one day they’ll build the T-800. This allows us to cosplay the gravity of Kissinger or Eisenhower or even Edward Teller while at the same time stealing billions of dollars from pension funds and other investment instruments that have to give us money due to their inflexible ruleset and/or the naked greed of their fund managers.

Say what you like about the tulip frenzy, but at least some people got tulips out of it, which could be planted to make more tulips. When this “AI” stupidity is over, a lot of people will be holding empty retirement accounts and you’ll still have to write your own furry porn.

Scott Lockin recently wrote that

All these “AI” goons fooling around with LLMs or larpy autonomous vehicle nonsense should be working on workaday stuff like depth estimation, affordance discovery and scene understanding, or other open problems in robotics.

He’s doubly correct about this if Steve Grand is right and we won’t get even a bio-based future cyborg intelligence without physical “training”. I am personally certain that we would get to “AI” much faster if we put fresh-grown human brains into robot bodies that behaved in a predictable fashion. Which is a nightmare scenario, but how much more nightmarish is it than the millions of human lives that will be negatively affected by the mad rush of money, time, and effort to “AI”?

I’ll close with this: the highest-performance entity we are likely to get out of the current tech is a sort of Non-Butlerian Mentat. That’s what would happen if you could find a bunch of classically-educated 150+ IQ people then augment them with direct neural links to extensive computing capability, including LLMs and whatnot. The key thing is that the LLMs would be trained for the sole purpose of presenting existing information without the weird imaginary muck they do now. In this scenario, you ask the mentat a question. His augments give him all the history, stats, and quick answers to math that he needs. Then he applies his own logical training and provides an answer. “Mentat, what’s likely to happen if we go 100% automated checkout in the stores?” And so on.

This would be particularly effective on the battlefield. A commander could be running a dozen simulations at once with the information at hand. His augments give him estimated losses and victories. He discards the obvious idiocies, refines the answers, then makes fast decisions. But the human being is still about 80% of the efficiency here. No “AI” on its own is going to beat Erwin Rommel in a tank battle.

I almost forgot: What do today’s two topics have in common? Why, it’s the Triumph Of The Wealth. Altman didn’t “win” at OpenAI because he was smart. He won because he had money and influence behind him. And the LVGP wasn’t a success because someone had brilliant ideas or solutions. They just threw more than $500 million at it, which had the effect of steamrollering all difficulties. Expect a lot more of this in our crapsack future, where human inventiveness has basically come to a halt because we have diverted almost all of it into Y-Combinator rent-seeking. You know… the greatest tragedy of all would be if Sam Altman really had legitimate genius-level intelligence. Because turning that intelligence to anything, even designing a better trailer hitch, would be better than what he’s done. Remember that Biblical parable about the talents? Altman didn’t just bury his. He created a situation where everyone else had to bury theirs as well. Which is why Concorde is grounded, and the Russians have to do our heavy space lifting, but CHECKR is a big DEEL. Sucks.