AI Wingmen, Starship Troopers, and Capitalism's Successor
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four Wobbles into Town
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four, Issue 1
The media sells it and you live the role
Mental wounds still screaming
Driving me insane
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
The Sunday Reader, April 6, 2025
I have always been Sicily’s version of Eliza Doolittle. I’ve always listened very nicely, then gone out and done precisely what I want.
Somehow it’s always worked out for me. Mainly because I’m Sicilian; I just keep hammering obstacles with my concrete head until they clear out of my way.
So it’s no surprise, me being me, that Perfecting Equilibrium tends to be about whatever has currently caught my interest. And it’s also no surprise, me being me, that I worry that I’ve wandered completely off the reservation.
So imagine my concern when I started preparing for my annual Year In Review/Looking Ahead piece – the one you are reading at this very moment – and realized that not a single one of my Volume 3 articles had made it into my top 5 most read articles. Now there are mathematical reasons for that – Year One you go 5 for 5; later years, not so much...— but of course my mind invariably goes to darker places. But I am by nature not much or a worrier, and went back to hammering out a particularly insane piece on delivering military supplies by starship.
Which not only shot to Number One as the most read PE piece of all time, it actually quadrupled the traffic of the old Number One piece.
Crazy train has gotten us this far. Why disembark now?
All in all, it was a pretty good year for Perfecting Equilibrium on Substack. We started the year April 1, 2024, with 157 subscribers and 168 followers – subscribers get each post emailed to them immediately, while followers get the Notes that are posted summarizing each article immediately after it is posted. We finished up March 31st with 231 subscribers – up 47 percent – and 354 followers – an increase of 110 percent.
On the other hand, LinkedIn no longer seems to be worth the trouble. The tools have gotten actively worse – the new embed feature broke YouTube videos, for example, so I’ve had to drop the Easter Egg feature entirely. And article views suddenly dropped by half a few months ago, even though the number of subscribers has kept growing, albeit slowly. LinkedIn’s analytics say article views are down 15 percent, but the weekly reports have been worse than that. And subscribers have been relatively flat.
So I’m experimenting with just using LinkedIn for marketing Substack. Substack builds a pretty nice LinkedIn promo post; I’ve been generating one for my main feed, then copying it and sending it from the newsletter tool. It’s much less work than building a LinkedIn newsletter – it’s basically no work – gets the same number of total impressions, and hopefully drives traffic to Substack.
Coming Up In Perfect Equilibrium Volume Four
I’m working on a couple of major pieces that will publish as soon as they are done:
Capitalism is dying; what’s next? Newspaper people in the 90s used to joke that their business was invincible. After all, an Atex publishing system cost $5 million to $10 million, and even a basic printing press setup would run more than $100 million. Who had that kind of capital for a newspaper in a small city? Now it’s 2025. These days which business would you rather own: Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post? Or Bari Weiss’ Free Press?
Larry Coreia is a Hack, and so am I: And so was Hemingway: Hacks don’t get Writer’s Block. Because then they get Paying the Rent Block. And Buying Groceries Block.
AI Wingmen and Starship Troopers; the shape of 21st Century Warfare: Drones and AI and logistics by Starship are reshaping 21st Century warfare. Tanks and aircraft carriers are 21st Century relics. But we’re not jumping to The Terminator’s Skynet for the forseeable future. What’s next is the military version of the fax machine — a merger of the old and new technologies to manage through the transition.
The Screen Life: Is taking a photo a refusal to live in the present for the sake of a future memory? Does your smartphone separate you from real life? Focus you on real life? Or is all this fuss just more of the same Puritan scolds who screeched YOU ALWAYS HAVE YOUR NOSE IN A BOOK back in my antediluvian school days?
Virtual Grad Student/Newsroom
Next, an update on Virtual Newsroom. I’ll have an in-depth piece on this Sunday, but it looks like I may have finally cracked the code on this project. The idea is to build a toolset that makes one and two-reporter local newsrooms viable.
The vast majority of news is largely known in advance. We don’t know who will win the game or the election, or how the council will vote on an issue. But we do know in advance when the game is, and who is playing, and what their records are and how their seasons have gone so far, and who is playing and who is hurt and will miss the action. Elections are much the same; indeed, most of us are sick of hearing about the contestants by the time the actual voting rolls around. And councils and other government bodies all publish agendas in advance.
So there isn’t one story about the game; there’s an advance story about the teams, their records, the injury list and some analysis of what they’ll have to do to win. Then there’s another story about what actually happens in the game. The same is true about council and government meetings.
Each new story was built upon the last, because each story must be complete. This task is a perfect fit for a Large Language Model that is tuned with local news. Pulling together the earlier articles and then writing the background paragraphs would free reporters to focus on what’s new and therefore be more productive.
The problem with Virtual Newsroom has been cost versus accuracy. Using general-purpose AIs is useful, but fraught with inaccuracies – the so-called AI hallucinations. Training a Large Language Model from scratch takes months and millions of dollars. Tuning is less expensive, but not enough for small products. Even techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation cost too much and take too long to be available to one and two-journalist newsrooms.
But I’m now testing a method of engineering prompts that’s fast, easy and has much better results than using a generic AI. Much more on this next week.
Feola Elsewhere on the Internet
I’m a staff writer for Pentax Forums, doing a couple of pieces a month for that website. I also do the Best of Pentax Forums weekly newsletter, and a weekly video for the Pentax Forums YouTube channel. Feola say check ‘em out – subscriptions are free, and all are of general photography interest.