I saw a headline today that many on the far right, politically, are suddenly fearing gun violence. I won’t cite the article or discuss the recent events that led to all of this. All I can say is, welcome to America my fellow citizens!

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say I left my home of several decades, where I raised my children, over fears of gun violence. I don’t live in the inner city and the people I feared weren’t people looking to rob me. They were my neighbors, many that I had known for decades. They were all fairly heavily armed and a few had grown increasingly belligerent, especially after COVID.

One night very late, just after the election, I heard a loud banging on the front door.  Bang! Bang! Bang! It occurred that my worst fears may be coming true.  You see, my family is Jewish.  I had imagined the possibility of Rwanda-style mob violence, where a few crazies on radio and TV declare Open Season on “the enemy within” and a slaughter ensues.  It seemed far-fetched, but maybe it was here.

I don’t own a gun so I figured the large kitchen knife was my best bet.  I looked out the window and didn’t see anyone.  I went down the stairs and saw no evidence of anyone outside.  Our front yard is large and exposed so I would be able to see anyone even if they were running away.  We also had a front door camera, so at least there would be some sort of evidence if the worst happened.

I went back upstairs and my wife was awake and had the bedroom light on. I said I didn’t see anything outside.  All of a sudden, the same Bang! Bang! Bang!  It sounded like banging on the front door but I knew that wasn’t possible.

It did sound like gunfire, but I’ve fired handguns and small rifles and I have never heard anything like this.  My wife texted the neighbors.  They also heard people banging on their windows.  It didn’t seem possible that people were running down the street in the middle of the night banging on doors and windows.  I still didn’t see anything outside.

One neighbor opined that maybe it was someone shooting feral pigs with an AK style rifle in the old quarry a block or two away. Seemed oddly specific. He was a hunter so I figured it was plausible. I had no idea those sorts of guns could be that loud.

As I said, I don’t own a gun.  Never have. Never intend to buy one. Mostly because they are just dangerous to have around.  But I also figured if I ever lived in a place where I thought I needed a gun, that it was time to move.

Clearly that time had come.  The house was already listed but we moved to sell it with a bit more urgency.  A few months later we live in a place one state over, in many ways quite similar to the place we left. Except without the crazy people and their guns.  I find I am much happier here.

The headline is a bit sensational, but a very good read. It’s technical but it’s a technical subject. The underlying theme is that the world is all about converting energy into stuff. How we do this defines the sort of world we live in. Today a new, cheaper, cleaner, quieter way is available. Will we keep propping up the old ways, even when it no longer makes any sense?

Shining The Light Of Truth On Fossil Fuel Madness

About a decade ago I was building GPU based grid computing for data centers. At the time NVIDIA had very little of the data center market. It was owned by Intel.

My group was using NVIDIA GPUs to speed up risk calculations for a large bank. It was about 5x cheaper than doing the same job with Intel CPUs. There was a risk, going with a small company like NVIDIA, but the savings were too good to ignore.

Intel made some moves in this direction, notably the Xeon Phi, but it was a “me too” solution, not much better or worse than NVIDIA. And since it was displacing 5x worth of Intel hardware, Intel had very little enthusiasm for the Phi.

Intel also had its own graphics accelerations (GPUs). Depending on how you counted it, Intel owned something like 99% of the GPU market. But these were on-chip GPUs, mostly in laptops.

There was an Intel GPU in a single datacenter part (this is all from memory) but it wasn’t exposed to programmers. It was only for Microsoft VDI remote windows desktops. I tried several times to get access from Intel but was rebuffed.

Long story short, Intel protected its lucrative data center CPUs, particularly from internal competition, and eventually lost to the external competition, NVIDIA. The old lesson: if you don’t cannibalize your own market, someone else will.

NVIDIA Leads GPU Market in Q1 2025 with 92% Share, AMD Drops to 8% and Intel at 0%

TL;DR: pecan groves are sucking all of the water out of the Rio Grande. They have been there for almost a century, but they seem to be a bad use of scarce water. The pecans are all exported and hire very few workers. Have seen similar stories in other places. From High Country News.

The Rio Grande’s pecan problem

Goldman Sachs on Solar. Upshot: too cheap, clean, quiet, scalable to not use it.

The Structural Solar Surge

The Middle Class isn’t optimistic. From A Wealth of Common Sense.

The Vibes are Broken

I saw something about this and thought it was far fetched, but it seems to be real. I imagine funding for this sort of thing is already being cut, at least in the US.

The Rare Mutation That Makes People Immune to Viruses