Day at the Ranch

Today was Ranch day. They've got some kind of water leak I think, or drainage from half the county. The result is boggy ground and mud in places where I want to walk or at least cross with the dogs. It is really annoying and I guess they are not finding out the source. I hope it is nature based and will dry up eventually. Not like we're in a wetlands here.

Today the weather was better. Not as cold. So the dogs and I were fine and happy and we had good walks.

Then I walked Zoe on my return. So it is noonish and I'm ready to rest. I've got PB tonight 6-8 so I need some downtime. I don't love playing at night but I like the group and the level of play is a little higher than the morning group so it is OK.

Dana will be home, if I understand correctly, tomorrow. She sent a confusing text about how she wasn't going to make it for another day but would be leaving after 1 tomorrow. Which is what I thought she had planned all along. It doesn't change much for me regardless. Zoe will be happy for the increase in entertainment. She's bored with just me. I read an entry on some blog about how having two dogs increases the life span and enhances the life style of both of them. We've always tried to have two just for that reason. Zoe is ready for Toby's return.

Meanwhile, I'm always amazed at how good the camera on my Pixel is. This is an untouched photo of Scout, one of the ranch huskies:



You can zoom and see the individual hairs on him. Amazing.  I think he got the Christmas tree collar over the Thanksgiving weekend.  All the dogs got new collars and accoutrements.

They are gathering money from the volunteers to buy the Ranch staff Christmas presents.  I gave immediately.  The staff has such a hard job and they do it so well.  

Flying cars

I really do not like Elon Musk. BUT it is like saying I don't like the wind or nuclear power or gravity. He is a force and a visionary and I'll never admire him but I seem to be always seeing something he has done and saying WOW. Here is a little geeky one.

Tesla just fired up a Nvidia H100 GPU cluster to push its self-driving car development. The new cluster of 10,000 GPUs is aimed at processing the massive data from Tesla's fleet to speed up the creation of fully autonomous vehicles.

OK. They are using graphic processing units that, at a lower end, run gaming graphics instead of central processing units that run PCs and MACs for a number of reasons most of which are over my head.  But the reasons mostly have to do with parallel processing, solving multiple linear algebraic problems at once and so are more capable than the general purpose cpus that computers run on.

Here is what is amazing that I CAN understand. The access to artificial intelligence we already take for granted (ChatGPT, for instance) didn't exist last October. And this month Musk is throwing a billion dollars or so at an array of processing units intending to figure out how autonomous vehicles will work next year using the access to that AI.  Something that has never been done and will be a model for future civilization development.

1 - It is an avalanche of progress. For good or ill, it is already taking down the mountain.

2 - Talk about being in the right place at the right time. NVIDIA (AKA, the company that makes all those GPUs) stock is doing pretty well.

3 - Autonomous cars will be commonplace way sooner than I thought.  As will a lot of other things I haven't thought of yet.

4 - Gracie does not care but would like her ear scratched, please.





The above information (not having to do with Gracie) is mostly gleaned from Daniel Miessler's 'Unsupervised Learning' email. He is way smarter than me and does understand it.