Engaging Articles of the Week
You know how last year you changed your passwords from 1-2-3-4-5-6 to 6-5-4-3-2-1 in order to update security protocols and thwart criminals; well, a lot of firms and governments have something that believe it or not is even more secure – message encryption. As Microsoft puts it, “Encrypting an email message means it’s converted from readable plain text into scrambled cipher text. Only the intended recipient can decipher the message for reading. Any recipient without the corresponding key sees indecipherable text.” So go ahead, say anything you want. No one except your bff will ever know. Oh wait, that was last year. We’re almost in 2026: AI is here, of course, and the barbarians are at the gate. AI is converging with quantum computing to create a beast that apparently will, if not now, soon, crack any encryption. To be honest, I have no idea what quantum computing is but apparently it is far, far faster than conventional computing, and it is improving all the time. Bless those little hackers, they are industrious little beavers. Anyway, not only are they getting smarter and more capable, digital thugs are, for now, busy gathering all those encrypted messages and saving them for when future quantum/AI computers have the necessary skills to go crack into that inventory of blackmail treasure. “Harvest now, decrypt later” attacks are becoming more prevalent. Our only hope is that, if the criminals are good at this game, that there will be such a flood of disgusting little secrets revealed that no one will care anymore. And if a decade down the road the world finds out all our sordid antics, no one will believe anything they hear anyway. So maybe who cares. Full story here.
Speaking of AI, and who isn’t, many people just can’t believe that this whole thing is real, that it’s not just a fad, that it is a boom that will surely bust. That could be true, who knows, but an excellent data analytics firm called Novi Labs put out a brief report that gives a good clue as to why people are hawking their own kidneys, in a corporate kind of way, to get into the data center game. There are two types of activity in AI processing that can generate revenue: Training tokens and inference tokens. Training tokens represent the smallest units of data an AI model processes, such as words, pixels, audio segments etc. These are used to train AI models; they are like the library that makes them smart. Then, once trained, the AI model starts answering even the wackiest of your questions, utilizing inference tokens. An AI prompt is an inference token, and models can process a finite amount of them. You guessed it, the more CPUs and the more power, the more a model can process. To give an example of the economics driving this, the Novi people calculated that Meta’s new 200 MW data center in Ohio will be able to generate about $32 billion in inference token revenue per year. Allocating that revenue over all the natural gas burned to produce it yields absolutely staggering numbers, particularly so for battle-scarred natural gas producers: the value of the inference tokens works out to $3,256 US per MMBTU of gas consumed, or a whopping $4,300 CAD per GJ. Consider that western Canadian producers are ecstatic to see AECO at $3.00/GJ. Of course, there are a lot of capital expenses and other op costs necessary to generate that revenue, but nevertheless, the value added to natural gas is mind blowing. If Alberta’s producers received even a tenth of that revenue, we would all own business jets and the province would be able to afford two teachers for every student. Novi’s article here.
In other happenings that for once probably don’t involve AI, there is big, weird news out of France. The French President Emannuel Macron and his, er, wife became so fed up with American whack-job Candace Owens’ obsession with Macron’s wife’s genitalia that they are suing the Clickbait Empress. (If you’re not familiar with Owens’ vapid take on reality, here’s a quote in which she doubts that some of the Holocaust atrocities attributed to “Dr.” Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death, actually happened because, “Why would you do that? Literally, even if you’re the most evil person in the world, that’s a tremendous waste of time and supplies.” That is the sort of mental processing power normally associated with willfully soiling one’s pants, but and yet she has millions of followers, so yes we are indeed doomed). Owens isn’t obsessed in any normal stalker kind or way, or even in the sort of name calling that her ilk finds great satisfaction in…no, the Macrons are suing to counter Owens’ eight-part series focused on the revelation that Brigitte Macron is actually a man. The whole situation is sort of a Fail Army compilation of emotional basket cases, and for the poor Ms. Macron it is about to get much worse, because as part of their lawsuit, the Macrons pledged to provide “photographic and scientific evidence” that Brigitte is indeed a woman. In a further layer of oddity, if you can even imagine such a thing, the whole controversy originated with a “petite, fifty-something French citizen” who thought Brigitte’s face looked weird, and that “Her strange physical appearance disturbed me from the outset.” So anyway never mind who shot JFK or whether there are actually aliens, what we really want to know is not just the status of poor Brigitte’s parts but also to see the First Lady of France standing on a table in a court room and hiking up her dress until justice is served. Full, bizarre, story here.
Here it is, the ideal non-denominational present. At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)