Chart for the VIX “Fear Index” showing the last three “once in a lifetime” financial crisis’

I learned this yesterday:  Bonapartism is the term is more generally used for political movements that advocate for an authoritarian centralised state, with a strongman and charismatic leader, support for the military, and conservatism.

The reality, reported or otherwise, is that large language models are no longer living up to expectations, and its purveyors appear to be making dodgy choices to keep that fact from becoming obvious.

P33

• Add a description of explore/exploit, and how it is a dilemma for every living thing. Kauffman and Martindale describe the strategies that human beings have developed to apply explore/exploit to culture
• Add something to the end that the role of good government is to take the best from explore and exploit, without causing convulsive, destructive change if possible.

SBIRs

• Helped Ron get his papers
• Tried to clean up all the ESDT paper cruft.
• 11:00 RTAT prep meeting – done
• 11:30 Meeting with John. Fixed all the basic bugs, I think?
• AI TTRP meeting. Just some preliminary stuff Maybe take a course from MORS?
• Sizing and timing?
• KA Book while waiting – good progress

Went to the Hands Off rally in DC yesterday. It was huge. Maybe 100,000 people? Here’s my favorite picture:

Echoes of the hidden: Uncovering coordination beyond network structure

• The study of connectivity and coordination has drawn increasing attention in recent decades due to their central role in driving markets, shaping societal dynamics, and influencing biological systems. Traditionally, observable connections, such as phone calls, financial transactions, or social media connections, have been used to infer coordination and connectivity. However, incomplete, encrypted, or fragmented data, alongside the ubiquity of communication platforms and deliberate obfuscation, often leave many real-world connections hidden. In this study, we demonstrate that coordinating individuals exhibit shared bursty activity patterns, enabling their detection even when observable links between them are sparse or entirely absent. We further propose a generative model based on the network of networks formalism to account for the mechanisms driving this collaborative burstiness, attributing it to shock propagation across networks rather than isolated individual behavior. Model simulations demonstrate that when observable connection density is below 70\%, burstiness significantly improves coordination detection compared to state-of-the-art temporal and structural methods. This work provides a new perspective on community and coordination dynamics, advancing both theoretical understanding and practical detection. By laying the foundation for identifying hidden connections beyond observable network structures, it enables detection across different platforms, alongside enhancing system behavior understanding, informed decision-making, and risk mitigation.
• There is something in this for P33 – how simulation and legislation can support each other.

Tasks

• TRP – done
• SS – done
• Fix vacuum – tried, but no good way to get to the AC cable.

This is a wild thing:

• Bills – done
• Pay Tim – done
• Book landscaping -done
• AC Service – done
• Groceries – done
• Dishes
• Chores – done
• Drop off truck – done
• SS – need to collect info
• VFS – created an account

SBIRs

• Fixed the bugs that John found
• MCWL meeting that went nowhere
• The CoA SBIR didn’t make it past the second gate
• USNA meeting – Well, we’ve had better.
• RTAT follow-up meeting next Thursday, so the dumb slides did something!
• Working on KA – finished the Shadow IT section

Dinner with Bob!

SBIRs

• Finished the dumb slide deck
• Working on KA
• Maybe sizing and timing? Nope
• There are some bugs with trajectories that I need to work on tomorrow