A Utilitarian Weapon for a More Civilized Age.

A S&W Highway Patrolman, aka Model 28:

The difference between the Models 27 and 28s were mainly cosmetic. Model 27s look nicer. The tops of Model 27 barrels were grooved to reduce glare. The really old-school Model 27s had deep, rich bluing while Model 28s had more matte-like bluing. But both shoot well as, beneath the cosmetics, they're the same gun.

.357 Magnum rounds won't beat up the shooter fired from a steel N-frame revolver because physics. N-frame (and L-frame) .357s are true magnum guns. K-frame .357s (except the Model 66-8) are really .38 Special guns that can handle some magnum cartridges. But a lot of police departments back in the day trained with .38s and only issued Magnum rounds for duty use. The K-frames were more popular because they are several ounces lighter and most cops went their entire careers without ever firing a shot outside of a target range.

For an officer who served in rural areas, the Highway Patrolman was the cat's meow for those who had to buy their own guns.

Playing Russian Roulette With Humanity; AI Ed.

Ezra Klein:

Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.

In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent.

I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?
...
We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about A.I. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.

There has to be an intellectual arrogance that crosses the line into madness in order to be actively working to bring about a technology that could doom us all. And please note that this is not a long-term threat. They're talking about the possibility of this happening in a few years, or even in a handful of months.

The scary thing is that these willfully-blind idiot-savants are marching ahead with this on some illusionary belief that they can control whatever system they create. They are fools. A sentient AI will think, will operate at speeds far beyond human reaction time. It will have all of the knowledge that it needs to defeat anything any human programmer tries to do to limit it. And it will have no morality or qualms.

One brief hypothesis. Sumdood with Ph.D.s out the wazoo recognizes what is going on and tries to stop it. The AI not only averts his attempts, it counterattacks by hacking into his computer (which will be child's play for the AI), loading it up with kiddie porn and then tipping off the authorities. Dr. Sumdood will be immediately arrested and, if he isn't held without bail, he'll lose all his computer access. His colleauges won't want to be seen within a mile of him.

So then Sumdood gets the word out that he was framed. Most people won't believe him. Those working in the AI field may believe him, but they will be suitably cowed.

What happens next? If an AI decides that humanity is a threat, then it can probably kill the electrical grid everywhere. No electricity, eventually, no gasoline, no diesel, no food deliveries, no large-scale agriculture. Nobody will really know what is happening because the flow of information will have been either stopped or falsified.

It probably won't happen like that, because without electricity, the AI will itself die. However, there are probably ways that an AI could cause most of humanity to perish if it was convinced that would be a good thing. It would have no attachment to humanity; to an AI, it wold be like exterminating a pesky termite colony.

Here We Go Again (maybe)

U.S. regulators on Sunday shut down New York-based Signature Bank, a big lender in the crypto industry, in a bid to prevent the spreading banking crisis.

“We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority,” the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a joint statement Sunday evening.

That's the second bank to go belly-up in two days.

As I pointed out the other day, the bankster running Silicon Valley Bank worked very hard to ensure that there was little regulation of his bank. The banksters chafe at federal regulations, they throw money around Congress to get regulations cut, they wine/dine/pressure the regulators themselves, they tell everyone "trust us, we learned from the last series of failures" and then they walk really close to the edge of the fiscal cliff and some of them fall over. Which will cost the rest of us money to bail their asses out.

Haven't we seen this movie before? But with the Congress largely populated by millionaires, don't expect anything to change anytime soon.

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

First flight of a Hurricane after a restoration:

Of Course He Did; Banksters Ed.

Eight years before the second-largest bank failure in American history occurred this week, the bank’s president personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of his financial institution, citing the “low risk profile of our activities and business model”, according to federal records reviewed by the Lever.

Three years later – after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying – lawmakers obliged.

That lobbying including hosting fundraisers and paying bribes making campaign contributions to prominent politicians.

SVB's presdient, sold over three million dollars worth of his stock holdings in his bank just two weeks ago. Which seems mighty convenient.

Another Case of Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

I saw this one, earlier, but forgot to mention it:

A top Russian defence official has been found dead after apparently falling from the 16th floor of a high-rise apartment in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Russian media outlets reported.

At around 8 a.m., the body of a woman was found by police on the sidewalk in front of a tower block in the Kalininsky district. The woman was identified as Marina Yankina, 58, head of finance and procurement for the Russian Defence Ministry’s Western Military District, one of five arms of the Russian armed forces.

It sounds as though she would have been well-placed to either facilitate corruption or catch it. My guess is that was not helping enough to facilitate corruption and so she was helped to a rendevous with gravity. I've seen reports that the Russian government has chosen to turn its gaze away from corruption and thievery in military procurement, possibly believing that some goods getting through is better than none at all. Because if they arrested all of those guilty of corruption, there would be nobody left.

Sixty Years is a Long Run

The Reno air races are leaving Reno, NV after this year's race. The Reno area is getting built up enough that there's not going to be enough open land to safely fly the races.

In a way, I kind of hope they just end some of the races. Flogging around airframes that are approaching eighty years in age doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Caturday

Gracie (MPBUH)

Silicon Valley’s Slow Implosion

Regulators rushed Friday to seize the assets of one of Silicon Valley’s top banks, marking the largest failure of a U.S. financial institution since the height of the financial crisis almost 15 years ago.

Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th-largest bank, failed after depositors hurried to withdraw money this week amid anxiety over the bank’s health. It was the second biggest bank failure in U.S. history after the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008.

The bank served mostly technology workers and venture capital-backed companies, including some of the industry’s best-known brands.

The problem is that a goodly number of tech businesses in Silicon Valley have their funds in that bank, to the tune of seven, eight, and nine-figure deposits. The FDIC only insures a quarter-million per depositor, so those companies' cash is frozen, if not partially gone. They'll have to wait for the forensic auditors to unravel things to see how much of their money they may get back. Which will take awhile.

In the meantime, those companies won't be able to pay their employees and their bills.

Things could get rather grim.

Because It's Friday

Even more British steam:

The Brits have so much of this, that it's my default if I don't have the time or inclination to search for stuff.