Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Sounds Like The Missiles Will Have A Blast

2024-Mar-10

A turning point for the blog is already upon us. Some major dabbling has been done with the LLM libraries available for making a chatbot for the site that could not only answer questions pertaining to the site layout and codebase, but with some sort of Fred Lambuth flavor in the text responses. Effort had only got up to the place where the embeddings for the blog post data could be made. Looking around in those embeddings shows that the dual nature of the blog topics is messing with the similarity scores. There is no real text character delimiter between the site updates and the review section. Instead of devising some manner to split up existing posts in a data wrangling maneuver the decision has been made to push forward with a new structure for outputting blog posts.

From now on there is going to be blog ‘topics’ or ‘tags’. No more reviews bolted on to my big git commits. The changelog in git will have to get more verbose. From some minor field work surveying the fredlambuth.com/blog audience, it was found that the updates about the site were either skipped, or bewildered the tech savvy enough who dared to interpret my stilted writing style. The changelog will adhere to the guidelines I learned from a technical writing course I took at Blinn. The review topics will adhere to the standards I find among the works of the boozy, ribald, reprobates that make up the pantheon of my favorite writers. As of now I can think of a ‘review’ tag and subtags for the medium. The boys in the writer’s room will have to drum up some new categories besides that one.

Also there is going to have to be a lot more content. These pre-trained LLMs that I’m tuning with my own text data have been initially trained on TBs of data. More Fred Lambuth meat is needed to be thrown into the hopper of my model training. Maybe even the illustrations will get thrown in! They certainly offer a way to jump into an introduction of the review topic.

The illustration is some Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk holding steady over some desert town, likely in Morocco, while soldiers slide down onto the street. The Blackhawk is the focal point that I made the decision to capture The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson.

I remember the ‘hype’ on Discovery Channel shows at the time marveling at just how much hi-tech junk was stuffed into this ‘ personnel transport’ helicopter. At that age I was more impressed with the Apache or even the aging Cobra attack helicopters, despite the fact the Blackhawk was a more costly and more sophisticated example of what the Pentagon can produce.

When I was a kid, a very young one on the verge of learning to read, I had access to the book Hi-Tech Warfare by Doug Richardson. I only know the author’s name because I had just looked it up as I wrote this. At that age I thought of it more of a toy catalog without any one particular curator or ‘author’. The pages of that book are intimately familiar to me still; especially the images. Jet fighters with super sleek radar domes dropping bombs that themselves had their own laser guidance were the juiciest images in my memory, along with diagrams of each vehicle's full potential weapons payload. I remember wanting to draw correctly the bomb dropping mechanisms and jet air intakes. It was the start of an aesthetic taste I never did shake. I like to call it cold-war-punk; following the same algorithm as steam- or diesel- ‘punk’ to capture an era’s technology and then apply it to more advanced or fantasy settings.

This era in my childhood was a transition era for American foreign policy. The end of the Cold War, the raison d’etre for the USA’s defense policy and the bloated runaway military industrial complex that lavishly furnished the tools for national defense. That picture book represented the apex of what I think was the pinnacle design of that coldwarpunk aesthetic. As I grew up and delved more into books, I had come to be acquainted with DARPA. The name was rather innocuous when it showed up in the sci-fi or techno-thriller novels handed down from my dad. The organization and its innocuous name might have been overlooked until I played Metal Gear Solid in eighth grade. That PS1 game’s story has the undersecretary of DARPA kidnapped by the colorful crew of the equally colorfully named US military elite squad Fox-Hound. (Now that I think about it, Metal Gear Solid really is a prime example of coldwarpunk!) Following that scene of the game DARPA became imprinted in my head as one of the big players in the secret ways of global policy. The organization’s name became something I noticed as being the cause of whatever problem needs to be solved in several post-Cold War stories.

Beyond the name drop in movies, video games, or comics as a somewhat covert source of government money to fund super science projects aimed at military purposes, I had come to read actual non-fiction books about the workings of the US department of defense. The material Annie Jacobsen collected here in The Pentagon’s Brain is very familiar material for me, which gave me higher expectations of what to expect about a book chronicling the brain that sourced the ideas for the hi-tech way the USA fights a war. Ultimately I found this to be a documentary of the who, what, and when of the DARPA organization that did not bring forth a greater message to discern when all these facts were collated and demonstrated.

It’s an adequate book. My third of hers, with the others perhaps I found more amusing because I had less familiarity with their subjects; Area 51 and Operation Paperclip. Her name as an author came to my attention when she was interviewed on the Joe Rogan podcast a few years back during her media tour after her book about the institution of Special Forces within the military. Her journalist credentials made her a safe wholesome choice in my mind as an author worth reading. I enjoy peeking into the world of global conspiracies, even into the farcical, but the subject can pull in authors of less than rigorous journalistic integrity. I can definitely applaud Annie Jacobsen’s clear yet somewhat dull chronicling of DARPA through interviewing first and second hand sources. To ask for more pizazz or flirtation with more provocative subjects that could be explored in DARPA’s history would risk becoming tawdry, list most books dealing with shadowy government super science.

I also did come away with new stuff to ponder about just what is ‘super science’, a concept first manifested in my mind through Saturday morning cartoons and comic books but can be found in real life. I think of ‘super science’ as two leaps into a technological future. In order to do that, you have to theorize a direction in which you want to go; almost scientific risk management about what is doable now and what could be doable soon. Once this theoretical framework is built, something could be built very fast. It has to be built fast in order to outpace the technological efforts of enemy research efforts. That is why it is super and not just science. Wild and expensive leaps are needed so that the enemy (first the Soviets, later whoever can be found). The book does not address if these tales of initially catastrophically flawed plans that in the long run eventually bear incredible academic and engineering fruit, not just for warfighting. I’m rather certain the more colorful yet less professional writers on the subject would more likely show their moral opinions on the matter. I do appreciate here capturing a new ethical dilemma that comes with funding speculative leaps into defense subjects that could eventually become dangerously offensive.

There is no ‘one’ book I could recommend ahead of this one for the subject of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here is a fabulous start. Although Metal Gear Solid could work for a very very Hollywood introduction to seeing how far secret military super science can go if it can, with some really cool looking nuclear launching robots.