This is sorta old news, but new to me as I don't pay much attention to restaurant technology.

This story is so wild I couldn't believe what I was reading and this is from 2018. One can only dream to ever be as badass as CFAs DevOps team. Chick-fil-A, my favorite defense contractor. Thread title is bit of sarcasm and will make more sense further at bottom of rabbit hole. Quoting whole article as it blew my mind.

Quote:Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

by Brian Chambers, Caleb Hurd, Sean Drucker, Alex Crane, Morgan McEntire, Jamie Roberts, and Laura Jauch (the Chick-fil-A IOT/Edge team)

In a recent post, we shared about how we do bare metal clustering for Kubernetes on-the-fly at the Edge in our restaurants. One of the most common (and best) questions we got was “but why?”. In the post we will answer that question. If you are interested in more or prefer video to text, you can also check out Brian and Caleb’s presentation at QConNY 2018.



Why K8s in a restaurant?

Why does a restaurant company like Chick-fil-A want to deploy Kubernetes at the Edge? What are the goals? That, we can answer.

• Low-latency, internet-independent applications that can reliably run our business
  
• High availability for these applications
  
• Platform that enables rapid innovation and that allows delivery of business functionality to production as quickly as possible
  
• Horizontal scale — infrastructure and application development teams
  

Capacity Pressures

Chick-fil-A is a very successful company in large part because of our fantastic food and customer service — both the result of the great people that operate and work in our restaurants. They are unmatched in the industry. The result is very busy restaurants. If you have been to a Chick-fil-A restaurant, this is not news to you. If you have not been, it’s time to go!

While we are very grateful for our successes, they have created a lot of capacity challenges for us as a business. To put it in perspective, we do more sales in six days a week than our competitors do in seven (we are closed on Sunday). Many of our restaurants are doing greater than three times the volume that they were initially designed for. These are great problems to have, but they create some extremely difficult challenges related to scale.

At Chick-fil-A, we believe the solutions to many of these capacity problems are technology solutions.

A new generation of workloads

One of our approaches to solving these problems is to invest in a smarter restaurant.

Our goal: simplify the restaurant experience for Owner/Operators and their teams and optimize for great, hot, tasty, food served quickly and with a personal touch, all while increasing the capacity of our existing footprint.

Our hypothesis: By making smarter kitchen equipment we can collect more data. By applying data to our restaurant, we can build more intelligent systems. By building more intelligent systems, we can better scale our business.

As a simple example, imagine a forecasting model that attempts to predict how many Waffle Fries (or replace with your favorite Chick-fil-A product) should be cooked over every minute of the day. The forecast is created by an analytics process running in the cloud that uses transaction-level sales data from many restaurants. This forecast can most certainly be produced with a little work. Unfortunately, it is not accurate enough to actually drive food production. Sales in Chick-fil-A restaurants are prone to many traffic spikes and are significantly affected by local events (traffic, sports, weather, etc.).

However, if we were to collect data from our point-of-sale system’s keystrokes in real-time to understand current demand, add data from the fryers about work in progress inventory, and then micro-adjust the initial forecast in-restaurant, we would be able to get a much more accurate picture of what we should cook at any given moment. This data can then be used to give a much more intelligent display to a restaurant team member that is responsible for cooking fries (for example), or perhaps to drive cooking automation in the future.

Goals like this led us to develop an Internet of Things (IOT) platform for our restaurants. To successfully scale our business we need the ability to 1) collect data and 2) use it to drive automation in the restaurant.

Rather than select many different vendor solutions that were silo’d and disconnected and therefore difficult to integrate, we wanted an open ecosystem that we own. This approach enables us to allow internal developers and/or external partners to develop connected “things” or applications for the Edge and leverage our platform for common needs like security, identity, and connectivity.

Put another way, the IOT/Edge team owns a small subset of the overall application base that is deployed on the edge, and is effectively a runtime platform team for the in-restaurant compute platform.

Architecture Overview

Here is a look at the architecture we developed (and are using today) to meet these goals.



Cloud Control Plane

Today, we run our higher order control plane and core IoT services in the cloud. This includes services like:

• Authorization Server — device identity management
  
• Data ingest / routing — collect data and send it where it needs to go
  
• Operational time series data — logs, monitoring, alerting, tracing
  
• Deployment management — self-service deployment for our application teams using GitOps (kudos to our friends at Weaveworks for sharing the term). We plan to share our work and code soon.
  

These services also run in Kubernetes so that we have a common paradigm across all of our team’s deployments.

Edge

“Edge Computing” is the idea of putting compute resources close to the action to attain a higher level of availability and/or lower level of latency.

We think of our Edge Computing environment as a “micro private cloud”. By this, we mean that we provide developers with a series of helpful services and a place to deploy their applications on our infrastructure.
Does this make us the largest “cloud provider” in the world? You can be the judge of that.



In all seriousness, this approach gives us a unique kind of scale. Rather than a few large K8s clusters with tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands of containers, at full scale we will have more than 2000 clusters with tens of containers per cluster. And that number grows significantly as we open many new restaurants every year.

Our edge workloads include:

• platform services such as an authentication token service, pub/sub messaging (MQTT), log collection/exfiltration (FluentBit), monitoring (Prometheus), etc.
  
• applications that interact with “things” in the restaurant
  
• simple microservices that serve HTTP requests
  
• machine learning models that synthesize cloud-developed forecasts with real-time events from MQTT to make decisions at the edge and drive automation
  

Our physical edge environment obtains it’s connectivity from multiple in-restaurant switches (and two routers), so we operate on a very highly available LAN.

Today, nearly all of the data that is collected at the Edge is ephemeral and only needs to exist for a short time before being exfiltrated to the cloud. This could change in the future, but it has kept our early-stage deployments very simple and made them much easier to manage.

Since we have a highly available Kubernetes cluster with data replicated across all nodes, we can ensure that we can retain any data that is collected until a time when the internet is again available for data exfiltration. We can also aggregate, compress, or drop data dynamically at the Edge based on business need.

Given all of this, we still use the cloud first for our services whenever possible. Edge is the fallback deployment target when high-availability, low-latency, in-restaurant applications are a must.

Following in the footsteps of giants

We run our Edge infrastructure on commodity hardware that costs us, ballpark, $1000/restaurant. We wanted to keep our hardware investment low-cost and horizontally scalable. We have not found a way to make it dynamic/elastic yet, but maybe one day (order on Amazon w/ free 30-second shipping perhaps?).

With our architecture, we can add additional compute capacity as-needed by adding additional devices. We may upsize our hardware footprint in the future, but what we have makes sense for our workloads today. Google also got started scaling workloads on commodity hardware (written in 2003, where has the time gone?)… so we’re in good company!

We hope our approach to Edge infrastructure encourages creative thinking for anyone that is working with scarce resources (physical space, budget, or otherwise). I think that’s everyone.


Everything else

Finally, we have our connectivity layer and the IOT things. Many of our devices are fully-powered (no batteries) but still constrained on chipsets/processing power. Wi-Fi is the default method for connectivity. We have not committed to a low-power protocol yet, but are interested in LoRa and the WiFi Halo (802.11ah) project.

For things/physical devices, our team also provides developers with an SDK for executing on-boarding flows (all OAuth based) and for accessing services within the Edge environment such as MQTT. Brian talked about this more extensively at QConNY 2017 (note that we were using Docker Swarm vs. Kubernetes at the time).

Containers at the Edge

Why would you want to run containers at the Edge? For the same reason you would run them in the cloud (or anywhere else).

Dependency management becomes easier. Testing is easier. The developer experience is easier and better. Teams can move much faster and more autonomously, especially when reasonable points of abstraction (such as k8s namespaces) and resource limits (CPU/RAM) are applied.

Another key design goal was reliability for our critical applications, meaning no single points-of-failure in the architecture. There are many ways this type of goal can be achieved, but we decided having > 1 physical hosts at the Edge and a container-based orchestration layer was the best approach for the types of workloads we have and for the skillset of our teams.

We initially called our strategy “Redundant Restaurant Compute”, which really speaks to the goal behind our approach. Later, we transitioned to calling it “Edge Computing”.

The ability to orchestrate services effectively and to preserve a desired number of replicas quickly and consistently attracted us to Kubernetes.

Why Kubernetes?

At first, we planned to use Docker Swarm for container orchestration, but made the move to Kubernetes in early 2018 because we believe it’s core capabilities and surrounding ecosystem are (by far) the strongest. We are excited about taking advantage of some of the developments around Kubernetes like Istio and OpenFaaS.

Most importantly, we firmly believe…

Ideas, in and of themselves, have no value.

Code, in and of itself, has no value.

The only thing that has value is code that is running in production. Only then have you created value for users and had the opportunity to impact your business.



Therefore, at Chick-fil-A, we want to optimize for taking great ideas, turning them into code, and getting that code running in production as fast as possible.

Research says that using the latest and greatest technology (like Kubernetes) has no correlation to a team or organization’s success. None. The ability to turn ideas into code and get code into production rapidly does.

If you can accomplish this goal and meet your requirements with VMWare, a single machine, some other clustering tool or orchestration layer, or using just the cloud, we would not try and convince you to switch to Kubernetes and follow our lead. The simplest possible solution is usually the best solution.

At Chick-fil-A, we believe that the best way for us to achieve these goals is for us to embrace containerization, and to do so with Kubernetes. At the end of the day, its all there to help you “Eat More Chicken”.

Next

What are our next steps?

In the next 18-24 months, we expect to increase the number of smart/connected devices in our restaurants to > 100,000 and complete our chain-wide rollout of Kubernetes to the Edge. The number of use cases for “brain applications” that control the restaurant from the edge continue to grow, and we look forward to serving them and sharing more with the community about what we learn.

We will also take a close look at the Google GKE On-Prem service that was just announced since it might save us from building and managing clusters in the future. What we have done to-date is a sunk cost, and if we can re-focus resources on the differentiating rather than infrastructure, you can be certain we will.

If we failed to answer questions you have about what we’re doing, don’t hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn. If we can help you with any challenges with Kubernetes at the Edge, please let us know. At Chick-fil-A, it is always our please to share, and (kudos to Caleb for this) “our pleasure to server you”.

Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

Quote:Enterprise Restaurant Compute

by the CFA Enterprise Restaurant Compute Team

The last time we talked publicly about our Edge Kubernetes deployment was summer of 2018.

Since then, we have completed a chain-wide deployment and run it in production for almost 4 years. Every Chick-fil-A restaurant has an Edge Compute cluster running Kubernetes. We also run a large-scale cloud-deployed infrastructure to support our restaurant footprint.

We have integrated with several of our restaurant systems to assist with Kitchen Production processes or onboarding mobile payment terminals used in our Drive Thru. In total, there are tens-of-thousands of devices deployed across our restaurants that are actively providing telemetry data from a wide variety of smart equipment devices (fryers, grills, etc).

Our purpose today is to catch readers up to our current state and share what has changed over the past 4 years. There are still many exciting opportunities for the platform on the horizon, but we’ll leave that for another day…

[Much more at the headline link]

Quote:How the U.S. Air Force Deployed Kubernetes and Istio on an F-16 in 45 days

As hybrid cloud strategies go, the U.S. military certainly is taking a unique approach.



Just like almost everything else, military organizations increasingly depend on software, and they are turning to an array of open source cloud tools like Kubernetes and Istio to get the job done, according to a presentation delivered by Nicholas Chaillan, chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, at KubeCon 2019 in San Diego. Those tools have to be deployed in some very interesting places, from weapons systems to even fighter planes. Yes, F-16s are running Kubernetes on the legacy hardware built into those jets.

“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said.

Quote:A conversation with Southcom commander General Laura J. Richardson on security across the Americas (January 19, 2023)

US Southern Command plays a critical role in bolstering Latin American and Caribbean security, building national and international ties to advance US leadership. With a rich history of partnership, the combatant command has also contributed extensively to regional humanitarian efforts and recently celebrated twenty-five years of its Human Rights Initiative. What new strategies can US Southern Command deploy to promote security and prosperity within the Latin American and Caribbean theater? This event will explore General Richardson’s priorities to strengthen partnerships and counter threats and challenges impacting regional security.

Quote:Lithium extraction fields in South America have been captured by an aerial photographer in stunning high definition.

But while the images may be breathtaking to look at, they represent the dark side of our swiftly electrifying world.

Lithium represents a route out of our reliance on fossil fuel production. As the lightest known metal on the planet, it is now widely used in electric devices from mobile phones and laptops, to cars and aircraft.

Lithium-ion batteries are most famous for powering electric vehicles, which are set to account for up to 60 per cent of new car sales by 2030. The battery of a Tesla Model S, for example, uses around 12 kg of lithium.

These batteries are the key to lightweight, rechargeable power. As it stands, demand for lithium is unprecedented and many say it is crucial in order to transition to renewables.

However, this doesn't come without a cost - mining the chemical element can be harmful to the environment.

German aerial photographer Tom Hegen specialises in documenting the traces we leave on the earth's surface. His work provides an overview of places where we extract, refine and consume resources with his latest series exposing the “Lithium Triangle.”

In pictures: South America's 'lithium fields' reveal the dark side of our electric future

What Mexico’s planned geoengineering restrictions mean for the future of the field


Hold on, not so fast, only the American military-intelligence-industrial complex will carry out such geoengineering. Afterall, they have decades of experience & planning.

Quote:In 2025, US aerospace forces can "own the weather" by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weathermodification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical
road map.

Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects, at least on the local scale. Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability.

In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels. These levels could include unilateral actions, participation in a security framework such as NATO, membership in an international organization such as the UN, or participation in a coalition. Assuming that in 2025 our national security strategy includes weather-modification, its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow. Besides the significant benefits an operational capability would provide, another motivation to pursue weather-modification is to deter and counter potential adversaries.

In this paper we show that appropriate application of weather-modification can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined. In the future, such operations will enhance air and space superiority and provide new options for battlespace shaping and battlespace awareness.[1] "The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together;"[2] in 2025 we can "Own the Weather."

In extreme cases, it might involve the creation of completely new weather patterns, attenuation or control of severe storms, or even alteration of global climate on a far-reaching and/or long-lasting scale.

Weather as a Force Multiplier (36 pg PDF)

Here's an update to that "Dreamland Resort" guy and his ordeal with the federal "mob" that happened last November...



https://twitter.com/g_knapp/status/1590893322322968577

Quote:The Enduring Mystery of an Aggressive FBI Raid Near Area 51

When federal agents kicked in his door one icy morning last November, Joerg Arnu was still asleep. Roused by deafening bangs and shouts, the 60-year-old retired software developer stumbled out of bed to find a crowd of unfamiliar men in military gear standing in his foyer.

At least one of the half dozen men, he remembers, was visibly armed and pointing a gun in his direction. Another was holding a riot shield. “This is the FBI,” one yelled. “Put your hands against the wall!” Less than a minute later, Arnu was being handcuffed and led forcefully outside, dressed only in sweatpants and a T-shirt. His house, located in the remote town of Rachel, Nevada, had been swarmed by police vans. Shivering from a lightly falling snow, he was placed in the back of one of the vehicles, while over a dozen agents from the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—the Air Force’s secretive counterintelligence wing—poured into his home. Not long afterwards, agents started asking him questions. One of the first things they wanted to know was: “Are there any booby traps on the property?” To Arnu, it seemed like a pretty weird thing to ask. A retired software developer and self-admitted senior citizen? Did that really sound like somebody who would boobytrap his own house?
....

As of this week, it’s been more than two months since the government raided both of Arnu’s properties, but he still hasn’t been charged with a crime. He was served with a search warrant that was missing dozens of pages and gave no reason for the raid; the case records related to the warrant have been sealed, so there’s no way of telling what the point of the search was. He also hasn’t been able to get in touch with the FBI, aside from a letter from the agency’s legal department denying reimbursement for the damage caused during the raids, he said. And, it goes without saying, he never got his stuff back.

“I believe the search, executed with completely unnecessary force by overzealous government agents, was meant as a message to silence the Area 51 research community,” Arnu recently wrote on his website.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who has been critical of the bureau since leaving it, called Arnu’s case “troubling.” German, who now works as a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, told Gizmodo that it wasn’t unusual for the FBI to conduct an operation like this to “send a message,” and to cow a specific individual or community. That’s particularly disturbing given Arnu’s role as a person involved in media, he added.

“Certainly it [an operation like this] could intimidate other journalists who were writing about these secret government programs. That chilling effect seems to be part of why they would be so aggressive in a case where the level of dangerousness is not clear,” he said. On top of this, German notes that the targeting of Joerg’s computer equipment “raises concerns that the intent may have been to impede his ability to exercise his First Amendment rights.”
...
While Arnu waits for answers, he’s trying to get on with his life. In addition to a slew of interviews with the press, the blogger has launched a GoFundMe to help pay for the damages inflicted by the raids and to finance his legal expenses (he has now hired a lawyer). He’s also trying to make up for the thousands of dollars of computer equipment that have vanished into government evidence lockers.

“I was treated like a drug dealer or some hardened criminal,” Arnu said during one of our interviews. “I was manhandled. I’m a sixty-year-old guy. There was no reason to bang me against the wall and drag me out of my own home in handcuffs...I just don’t see any reason to treat an unarmed senior citizen that way.”

For those who hate autocomplete, read on.

Quote:It was early last summer. My wife was at an airport. The weather was hot and her shuttle bus was late. She was texting with a family member who had come down with a cough. The family member had taken a COVID test and reported to my wife that it was negative. My wife, returning to the topic of her stressful day, typed the words “I need a,” intending to write “I need a drink.” But the autocomplete feature on her phone, interceding at the speed of thought – of artificial, digital thought -- offered another suggestion: “I need a booster.”

The nightmare is all right there, if you unpack it: The unsought programming of human behavior by pervasive, everyday technologies controlled by deceptive, obscure external actors. They’re deceptive, in this case, because autocomplete is sold as a kind of extension of your will, frontrunning your most probable verbal choices in order to save you time and ease your writing. The feature is not sold, so far as I’m aware, as a life coach, a public health aide, or a physician. But it had behaved like one that day, and my wife, who notices everything, had caught it – she even took a screenshot. When she told me of the incident, it confirmed an emerging feeling that my own texts were often interrupted by digital guides less interested in finishing my thoughts than in foisting on me their own. Strangely, the unusual suggestions were of a sexual cast sometimes – “orgasm” seemed to have popped up several times; not a word I tend to use in texts – which is why I remembered the occasions. Still, I couldn’t cite one in detail. Going with the eerie flow of life in a mediated, moderated age, I’d chosen to ignore them. I’d let them pass.

It’s choice we face constantly these days, particularly in our dealings with technology and the information flooding through it: Should we indulge our suspicions about the machine and the whole murky power complex it represents, or should we dismiss them, in some cases or all?

The argument for repeatedly dismissing them – because they are aroused repeatedly – seems to me to grow weaker by the day, if it is even an argument at all. To return to my wife’s “I need a booster” experience, which may seem minor in isolation but is enormous if treated as one instance of something that very likely happens countless times a day and for an unfathomable range of motives, not many people I know would advocate for phones which plant hypnotic prompts in users’ heads during their innocent conversations with relatives, under the cover of helping the user type. The partisans of covert mind control are still quite few, I like to think, even when the cause in question is popular. The party of thoughtless quiescence in such matters is vast, however, and it rarely defends its inaction. It’s rarely asked to.

Maybe it should be held to higher standards. Just last week, two troubling stories circulated about the secret workings of social media. Facebook, we learned, has been compiling posts which it deems “anti-government” and forwarding them to the FBI. To judge by press reports, these allegedly subversive posts included ones which questioned the results of the 2020 election, but they weren’t limited to such. How the posts were identified remains a mystery – algorithmically, through key words, or in some other way? – but the facts the operation occurred and that ideological filtering of posts is deemed so reliable by Facebook’s managers that they treat it as a form of legal evidence, is startling enough. Meanwhile, over at Twitter, we were told by an in-house whistle blower testifying before the senate, at least one Chinese spy was on the payroll. Other security lapses were also alleged. “It’s not farfetched,” the whistle blower asserted, “to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators inside this room.”

Old news, I hear readers thinking. But it is new news – new news which explicitly confirms long-held suspicions of a general kind. And, for other observers, of a definite kind. They thought ahead, saw patterns, warned us of them, and urged on us a host of actions, from denouncing these services to cancelling them to calling for them to be to public account. Which is starting, however feebly, to happen. Not because of the quite people but the loud ones.

These excitable thinkers would be the “paranoid,” or so they’re often designated by those whose habit is to watch another amusing video when it’s shown that Tik-Tok, for example, logs its users’ every keystroke, collecting passwords and heaven knows what else and passing them along to hostile powers. They would be those who, on reading of my wife’s text, would leap to speculate on the implications of an AI-driven program to mold the thoughts, and ultimately the actions, of the human race. The entire race, I say, no less than that, because it is the nature of “paranoia” that its reach exceeds its grasp. Not content to dwell on individual cases, it strives to explore, to extrapolate, to guess, usually in the negative. It entertains the possibility that the anonymous lords of auto-complete might someday trade spooky nudges for bold directives, overriding or even supplanting our weakened wills. By then, we may not possess wills, nor desire them. Too disruptive to the training process.

To voluntarily run such bleak scenarios inside one’s busy little brain is thought to be unhealthy by the experts. Therapists call it “catastrophizing.” They are given to writing prescriptions for the condition. In extreme cases, they view such thinking as evidence of schizophrenia, for which an oft-used medication is a pill with the trade name Abilify. Last week, on my Twitter feed, I saw an ad for it – for a special version of the pill which contains, get this, a tiny transmitter which relays physical data to smart phone apps. The transmitter not only tells the phone (or several phones, if the patient “authorizes” them) if the pill has been swallowed, it also discloses how long the patient has “rested” recently and how many steps they’ve taken. Fascinating. Fascinating that big pharma should seek to implant tiny monitors in people whose illness is often marked the delusion that they have tiny monitors inside them.

But I digressed. Or did I? The topic was paranoia, its pros and cons, and the question I was driving toward is whether it’s tantamount to a duty now, at least for those who pretend to think at all. To learn about a psychoactive drug that broadcasts Bluetooth signals to nearby phones, and then to remember we live in a society of medical mandates with penalties attached, and to further recall that the data on one’s phones is subject to scrutiny by spies and cops, should require of an even an amateur intellectual a measure of cautionary creative inference. What’s the alternative, really? Deep sedation? How much more unconsciousness can you take, and how much more of it should we take, who don’t wish to wake up shuffling along in surveilled, entranced submission to whoever’s doing our thinking for us?

Do your duty, I say. Be responsible. Be paranoid. The future intends to complete itself without you, and if you don’t like it, you may need a pill – which you may be unable to refuse. Go crazy now, on your own terms, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have some say over how crazy you’ll be driven then.

My personal belief is all planets are but eggs for a species to develop, "the species hatches and moves out into the universe or ceases to be." Plenty of species have become extinct and anyone who thinks it can not happen to the human race then they have not looked at the history of Earth.

The Nevada Triangle and 2000 crashed aircraft

Tucker connects the dots on much of our history and IMO is worth a listen and your time.

Well, it's only taken me a few decades!! LOL but I am now officially a recording artiste.

Long Story Short - I was invited into the recording studio just before Christmas, to record "Something Unsaid" an old original song that I co-wrote with a friend of mine at least 25yrs ago!

That song has now been recorded and mixed, and I've just finished making the music video (myself) on a budget of.... zero! LOL

The music video Premiere is taking place at 19:30 (7.30pm) GMT tomorrow (Fri 20th Jan) on Youtubby!



So, if you're around and you'd like to be a part of music history!!! ROFLMAO Grab a drink and Join me there for the big launch Party.

Cheers!

G

Quote:CONFIRMATION: LISTENING TO A PROGRAM CALLED SENTIENT WORLD...

It has been almost ten years since I have blogged about this subject, namely, "Sentient World Simulation."  In case you missed that blog and that subject, here is the link

In that blog, I indulged in a bit of high octane speculation about what such a computer program simulation of the entire world might be capable of doing interesting, intriguing and perhaps even unusual data correlations between unusual things:

Quote:But behind it all, there is another possibility that lurks, one I suggested in Babylon's Banksters: the ability to figure out the relationships between celestial geometry and human behavior.  Recall, for a moment, that both ancient Egyptian and Babylonian sources indicate that their astrological observations were taken over tens of thousands of years... in other words, if taken at their word, they were suggesting that an enormous stastistical database was compiled. Astrology was the result, which, without that database, was merely a "pseudoscience," with the "results" being passed down to become the qualitative "science" it is today, sans the data that had been compiled.

Since we like to indulge in high octane speculation here, then suppose for a moment that these various hidden programs were also being used to find and collate such correlations. It would mean, quite literally, that "econophysics" would be given a component from celestial mechanics... it would become a real though obviously deeply hidden "astrology".  Now let's extend our speculations a bit further. Suppose, in compiling such correlations, that another set of correlations were examined, namely, those between celestial mechanics and actual astrological texts, beginning, of course, with the various Egyptian and Mesopotamian records that are still extant.  In such a case, the program would perhaps provide insights into the original basis of the origins of astrology, of human history, and of those civilizations' claims for having been compiled over thousands of years. It would be, in other words, a way of verifying their own statements that they were legacy civilizations, declined civilizations, from something far more ancient and advanced.

But now with the following two articles, shared by V.T., we're in a position to expand that speculation of ten years ago rather dramatically, because the idea of a world computer simulation, in which every person becomes a "node" in a database, is back, and with a vengeance. And with its reemergence, comes a confirmation of a speculation I've voiced many times in the past few years. The articles, while somewhat dated, are important, because they confirm a wider and deeper high octane suspicion I've advanced in the years since my original blog about the subject appeared in 2013 :

Quote:Sentient World Simulation and NSA Surveillance – Exploiting Privacy to Predict the Future?

Quote:Understanding and Countering Sentient World Simulation

Why are these two articles significant?

As I said above, it's because they can be taken as confirmation of a wider speculation I've advanced over many interviews and appearances on various podcasts and radio shows; I've advanced the hypothesis that with computers running more and more programs affecting daily life - consider only their presence in equities or commodities markets, or an even more glaring example, the recent failure of the FAA's flight computer system that literally grounded all flights in the USA - that the possibility arises that the "elites" running western civilization lemming-like off the cliff are perhaps doing so in response to what a very sophisticated and complex A.I. program might be telling them to do. Being the fundamentally stupid, immoral, and godless people that they are, they are only too happy to follow the dictates of their real God: computer code, and "science," and a false "omniscience" that it gives them, all of which is of course programmed by humans.

That thesis, I suggest, has been confirmed in spades by the two articles. Consider this statement from the beginning of the second one:

Quote:The Pentagon is running an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program to test how people react to propaganda and strategy of tension. The program is called Sentient World Simulation[/url] (SWS). Defense, intelligence and homeland security officials are constructing a parallel world on a computer that agencies will use to test propaganda messages and military strategies.

With this “God Tier” technology, if the user wants to bring about a certain event, he would already know how the masses would likely behave. It features an avatar for each person in the real world that’s based upon data collected about us from records and the internet.

The core of the data collection is the smart phone, which will be ramped up with 5G technology. Avoid both.

The first article, while concentrating initially on Edward Snowden's claims, also comes to more or less the same conclusion:

Quote:Amidst all of the publicity surrounding the leaks, journalist Christopher Ketcham (who previously won acclaim by covering the tragic events on 9/11) released a relevant new article discussing the secretive exploits of a governmental unit which gathers boundless amounts of information on Americans. Ketcham details programs by the government designed to fight crime by predicting criminal behavior before it is committed and to predict behavioral responses to propaganda and government-inflicted terror.

Both programs rely on keeping tabs on citizens and gathering data by tracking phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks, GPS tracks, Internet searches, Amazon purchases and E-Z pass records.

The program based out of Purdue University’s Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation Laboratory is titled Sentient World Simulation (SWS). This 9-page PDF released by Purdue itself describes the project in adequate detail.

The simulator has taken the spying that Snowden publicized, one step further. The program has amassed databases so profound they can now look so deep into a person’s life they can predict their thoughts and future actions with relative certainty. Although this system is incredibly intrusive and raises many moral concerns, it provides valuable insight into questions which could be extremely beneficial. It’s unclear as to weather all the private-sector efforts towards transparency (including some noteworthy AI projects at Microsoft) will have any effect on the direction and intensity of public-sector surveillance.

By gathering enough intelligence SWS is capable of producing realistic simulations of various different scenarios such as natural disasters, foreign and domestic attacks, resource shortages, and hazardous economic trends. The program, once finished will utilize the information from its colossal database to create these hypothetical situations, predict possible outcomes, and test the effectiveness of various responses. Researchers hope the system will be able to provide effective answers to complex questions which baffle the most skilled thinkers and will create more efficient methods of responding to catastrophes.  (Emphasis added)

So there you have it. Not only is Fedgov@corruption.com spying on everyone, it is doing so to compile massive databases to make generalized predictions, and from these, to formulate specific courses of action under particular circumstances, and more general policy.

There's a dire implication in all this, an "extrapolation" that confirms my suspicions about Mr. Globalooney actually "listening" to A.I.s and computers: if you're wondering why the leadership of the west - the Baal Gateses and Hochklaus von Blohschwabs and the whole viper's nest at Davos - looks and sounds completely nuts, advocating inhuman and - let's call them by what they are - ultimately nihilistic policies, this is why.

Before we leave this subject, V.T. shared one more article, which itself contains further links to articles on this precise topic:

The DoD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth

Post article: The Giza Death Star

Quote:Menticide: Don’t Fall Victim to Mind Control Technologies & Techniques

We come full circle with Sentient World Simulation (SWS), a programme that pools all the intelligence collected about you. SWS uses that information to simulate and predict how you would behave under certain social conditions, such as civil unrest, economic shocks or environmental catastrophe.

But it goes much deeper. The SWS was developed with military money at Purdue University. It creates a digital mirror-image of the real world, including you and me: our streets, towns and even the weather. In order to anticipate how we would react in real life, programmers do things to the digital us: cut our power supplies, simulate weather disasters, crash the economy, etc. This is useful for counterinsurgency planning and market prediction.