Lockdown Tales

"Lockdown Tales", by Neal Asher, 2020, 554 pages, 150k words, 6 stories.

I think I liked 1 of Brit Asher's stories in a fairly recent (2018-2023) Year's Best, so I twigged on his name prolly in a BookBub offering. Apparently he did a bunch of stories in a universe of The Polity: an earth-based galactic empire which has alien allies & enemies, and features a wide variety of humans, cyborgs, androids, & AIs - it seemed like most people were a little of all these.

I spent the majority of my time during COVID lockdown working up songs from the 1920s-1940s. Asher apparently spent their time working up these stories.

6 longish stories, very well paced, very interesting characters, including island-sized molluscs. A highly enjoyable read.

The AI Hater's Manifesto

No, it is not my title, it is that of the inimitable Ed Zitron. On his "Where's Your Ed At" blog, he has published "A Hater's Guide To ..." for most of the companies & concepts associated with the current "AI" bubble.

This seems to be his magnum opus! I wish he were a little less verbose - but it is still totally worth a full read.

Here's the start of the article & the section headers, numbered for your convenience.

The AI Hater's Manifesto

Today, I want to put in clear terms how I feel about AI writ large, and how detestable this industry has become.

Welcome to my Hater’s Manifesto.

1. Modern Software Sucks, LLMs Are Interesting, And Their Cost Is Inexcusable

2. Stop Comparing LLMs To Humans Unless You Are Ready To Demand Trillions Of Investments In Social Services and Labor Rights

3. LLMs Are Built To Help Grifters and Imbeciles Do Impressions Of Work

4. You’re Embarrassed That People Know You Use AI Because You Know It’s Shameful To Outsource Your Thinking

5. LLMs Are Digital Busyboxes, And Are Great At Making You Feel Smart Through Computer Science

6. Generative AI Is A Death Cult Of Growth-At-All-Costs Excess

7. “Dangerous AI” Is Already In The “Wrong Hands” — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta

8. The System Is Exhausting Itself, Because Generative AI Does Not Create Much Real Value

9. The Vast Majority Of People WIll Not Pay The True Cost Of AI, And You Cannot Calculate Its ROI

10. The Only Companies Making Money On AI Are Those Selling The Infrastructure, And They Just Raised Prices Across The Board

11. The AI Bubble Narrative Is Now Mainstream, But Few Are Ready To Discuss The Actual Consequences

12. LLMs Were Meant To Fix Everything, But Created Temporary Growth At A Massive Cost

13. “AI Progress” Is Dependent On Spending Tens Of Billions Of Dollars A Year In Training Costs That Will Not Be Available After The Bubble Bursts

14. AI Hype Requires Its Fans To Live In A State Of Propagandized Mania, Exhausting Advocates and Haters Alike

15. AI Boosters: There’s Courage In Admitting You’re Wrong!

16. The Great Exhaustion of the Rot Economy

17. AI Is Exhausting Everything and Everyone It Touches

18. The AI Bubble Requires Everybody To Live In The Future Tense, Because The Present In No Way Justifies An Iota Of Its Costs

19. The AI Industry Runs On Bad Faith

This piece was published August 25, 16 days ago. I still have ~12 articles to process to get caught up, but this piece is indeed such a magnum opus that I will not accompany it with anything else. Again, follow the link above, read the whole thing.

I’m not sure if it is totally correct, but he mentions “exhaustion” and “exhausting” enough that I am going to tag this with “bullshit fatigue”. This bullshit does wear you out.

---

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #144.

City Come A-Walkin'

"City Come A-Walkin'", by John Shirley, 1980, 186 pages, 57k words. With a 1996 foreword by William Gibson.

Haha, a reminder that you don't need LLMs to create slop! Check out "forward" vs. "foreword" on the book cover!

Kobo lists this book with a release date of 2014. So I was somewhat gobsmacked when, in his foreword, William Gibson talks about this book being a great influence on his groundbreaking cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer", which came out in 1984?!?!?

Gibson helps us out, mentioning that this book was originally published in 1980.

Reading this novel after the Gibson foreword is somewhat surreal. Cities personified into entities as a early version of Gibson's voodoo god AIs. The 1st city persona showing up with mirrorshades built into its face - hello Molly Millions!

In 2020, I really liked N.K. Jemisen's "The City We Became". I had no idea that Shirley had created the "personified intelligence of a city" trope 40 years earlier! I don't recall anyone mentioning this earlier effort by Shirley in the many positive reviews of the Jemisen.

All that being said, this is an enjoyable story, very gritty, very noir, very proto-cyberpunk as Gibson says. The personified city (San Francisco) is really a pretty nasty entity. The Mafia is allied with Big Money to hamstring the city. It takes offense.

It is somewhat crazy that 1 of the plot points is universal surveillance devices going in place, 45 years before our current crusade to get rid of Flock cameras.

This is a short novel, under 200 pages. It is so ground-breaking, I think anyone who is a SFF fan should definitely check it out.

The Histrionics Will Continue Until We Get Our $T IPO

My wife & I had a very nice, mostly Canadian, vacation, 8/22-9/4. So doing a bit of catch-up here.

Seriously, you read the headline, you say "Oh shit", & then you remember, this is the 20th to 30th time in the last year that OpenAI or Antropic - and now Nvidia - has made some overblown and/or alarming post about the state of GenAI. Maybe claiming we are at AGI - which we totally aren't.

LLMs. aka Autocomplete On Steroids, are still, from the last I heard, producing at a minimum 9% error rates.

Agents build on that to get to a 15% MINIMUM error rate.

YOU CANNOT BUILD RELIABLE SYSTEMS WITH ERROR RATES THAT HIGH.

Yes, the stuff that GenAI produces can be impressive, but, still, it is by definition BULLSHIT: it looks like it might be credible, but, maybe it is completely & utterly false - completely made up out of statistics, with 0 real knowledge of anything. Anyone producing AI slop output without serious human fact-checking should be completely liable for criminal charges.

---

LLMs are sucn an interesting technology. It's incredible that 1 algorithm, the Transformer, discovered by the Google Translate team, could create such an upheaval.

It's so tragic that psychopathic TechBros decided that this was their ticket to generational wealth.

LLMs are a normal technology. They are a great tool for experts who can readily check their output. For everyone else, they are Acme Slop Generators (going into my table of names).

Wow, Small Language Models running on PCs or phones are 98.6% as accurate as LLMs running on $B of hardware??? Oops.

From Joachim Klement on SubStack:

If this is true, the hyperscalers are toast

As you can see, in every domain, the best SLM is able to find the same or better answers than an LLM in 90% or more of the cases, with an average across all domains of 98.6%.

---

From the Bard of the Revolution, Cory Doctorow:

The actual epistemic crisis:

AI's assault on reality is an opportunistic infection.

AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.

We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are not. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all seems plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't.

---

Again from Doctorow, somewhat more abstract. When you were born determines what doors are open for you?!?!?

Born on technology's third base:

Material forces shape life-chances.

...

By the same token, continuing to give trillions to AI companies because they experienced early success with theory-free inference at scale tells us nothing about how to solve the vast range of problems that theory-free inference at scale sucks at. Doubling down on AI to overcome its increasingly obvious limitations is like doubling down on building post-war suburbs to fix today's housing market.

It's possible to achieve impressive feats because you're smart and hard working and also because you were in the right place at the right time. Historical contingency produced the AI bubble, and it is producing the conditions for that bubble to pop.

---

OK, that clears the links from my Lexington PC, from just before we went on vacation. I will next switch over to the links on my MacBook, from while we were gone.

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #143.

A Trip to the Great North

Following our summer habit of the last 2-3 decades, my wife & I recently vacationed Up North. We used to frequently visit our middle daughter in Ithaca NY, my older brother in Portland ME, old college friends in the Boston area & Connecticut, & our oldest daughter in Brooklyn.

This year, we 1st visited our Canadian FL snowbird friends in Windsor, Ontario. We drove there Saturday 8/22, had dinner, on Sunday visited the Aquarium & Botanical Garden on Belle Isle back in Detroit, before a fabulous dinner at Take Five in Windsor.

We went over the new Gordie Howe bridge 2x! What a beautiful piece of architecture! The pic is from my Canadian friend Owen.

Monday morning 8/24 we picked up our middle daughter in Ann Arbor & drove to the northeast shore of Lake Michigan, Frankfort MI. A very nice little tourist town. Wow, Lake Michigan water temperature was 37 degrees Farenheit - brrr!.

Wednesday morning, 8/26, we dropped our daughter back in Ann Arbor, parked our car in Detroit airport, & flew to Calgary, AB, Canada. Canada's 5th largest city, at 1.481 million just after Ottowa at 1.488 million. We rented a car.

We did local Calgary sights: Calgary Tower, Music Museum (Studio Bell). We lunched at King Eddie's, affiliated with the music museum. Sadly, we didn't ride the public transit, everyplace we visited was in walking distance.

We drove to the world's greatest dinosaur museum: the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, ~100 km NE of Calgary.

It was my 1st time in a Badlands: land along a river which has eroded itself to 100-400' below the surrounding prairie. Amazing!.

Saturday 7/29, we drove west ~150 km to Banff, at the center of Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. We stayed there til Thursday, 9/3. The mountains were so beautiful! So much variety! Sharp points, repeating sawblade edges, houses & temples at the top of peaks! Snow & no snow!

We took the Banff gondola to get a birds-eye view of Banff. The small Tunnel Mountain that sits down near town is so small compared to the surrounding peaks.

The botanical garden (Cascades of Time) in Banff was very pretty.

Lots of good meals, poutine 2x.

1 day drove west across the Continental Divide on Canadian Highway 1 into Yoho National Park in British Columbia, to visit Takakkaw Falls - 4x as high as Niagara! Beautiful!

On our way back, we turned north on the Icefields Parkway, Rt 93. Around 150 km to the Columbia Icefields & the Glacier Discovery Centre. 6 glaciers coming in from the west terminating just before the Centre.

Hmmm, I uploaded this short video to YouTube, hoping I could then embed it in the blog, as I do for music videos. No. Apparently not an option. If anyone can point me at instructions on how to make this work, hep me, please!

https://youtube.com/shorts/-aki_dC_TdY?si=grAwECMHmEdPs5tw

Also stopped at Mistaya River Gorge. Incredible tunnels (?) worn through the rock by the glacial water.

Thursday, 9/3, we drove back to Calgary, stopping & spending the morning at the tourist town Canmore on the way. I had my 1st breakfast poutine: hash browns, 2 eggs, bacon, sausage, bison, cheese curds fried, hollandaise sauce. Yum!

We flew back to Detroit Friday 9/4. The 330 mile drive back to Lexington took just over 5 hours, we made good time, got home right around 10 pm.

Wow, since we've been home, I sleep so much better in my own bed!

A very pleasant vacation, & yesterday I miraculously weighed in at under 200#! Air travel was fairly painless. Only drama was when I almost left my passport in the room safe in Banff. But, we only got yards away from the room before I clicked on it.

Comments on the US Trade War With Canada

I've been trying to push Cory Doctorow's agenda on several sites, pretty much 0 engagement. I'm not sure why I get so little net engagement - except for the AI training bots, who LUV this blog.

Too old? Too odd? Who knows. Well, I mostly write to populate my exocortex, which does not require external readers.

This was mostly from a couple of weeks ago. We just got back from a 2 week vacation, mostly in Canada.

Posted to Paul Krueman's substack:

July 1 Carney backed off on the digital services tax on Big Tech under threat of tariffs. That threat is now moot, Canada should move head with those taxes.

It should also listen to Canadian Cory Doctorow and revoke Canada's anti-circumvention law (Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012, Canada's version of the DMCA section 1201). This was also passed under threat of tariffs, now moot.

Canada would become the hero of the world, including US consumers, allowing app stores that don't collect a 30% vig on all transactions, enabling jailbroken smartphones, John Deere tractors, auto analysis computers, and inkjet printers.

Posted to Dean Blundell's substack earlier:

Again: under threat of tariffs, Carney cancelled the digital services tax on US Big Tech companies July 1. Canada got tariffed anyway, the digital services tax should be revived.

And, do the right thing, follow Canadian Cory Doctorow's plan to rescind Canada's laws supporting the US DMCA provisions making it felony to bypass digital IP locks. Those laws were only passed because of the threat by the US of tariffs, now a moot point.

Let Canada become the country that jailbreaks all smart phones, creates open app stores that don't take a 30% vig of all commerce, jailbreaks John Deere tractors, jailbreaks auto repair diagnostics. They will be a hero to the entire world, including the US. & gawd knows, US Big Tech could sure use some comeuppance.

Posted to Dean Blundell's subStack chat:

2 things that were done because of the threat of tariffs, now moot since the US has imposed completely unjust tariffs on Canada, which should now be undone:

1) July 1 Carney backed off on the Digital Services Tax which would collect tax revenue from US Big Tech firms. This tax should be revived immediately.

2) Follow Canadian Cory Doctorow's plan to revoke Canada's anti-circumvention law (Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012, Canada's version of DMCA section 1201). This was also passed under threat of tariffs, now moot.

Canada can become the jailbreaking center of the world, allowing app stores that don't collect a 30% vig on all transactions, enabling jailbroken smartphones, John Deere tractors, automobile analysis computers, and inkjet printers. This will benefit consumers worldwide, including in the US. Plus make $B for Canadian companies.

Doctorow's detailed prescription: Pluralistic: How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (23 Aug 2026) https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/24/elbows-really-up/

Despite Carney's doing some highly Elbows Up work, maybe Doctorow's ideas are still too radical to establishment politicians? Not sure why. Canada needs every advantage it can get.

Earthquake Weather

"Earthquake Weather", by Tim Powers, 1997, 744 pages, 202k words. Book 3 of the Fault Lines trilogy.

We get some new characters, & a lot of the characters of the 1st 2 books also make an appearance. As usual, Powers plays fast & loose with mysticism, ghosts, gods, you name it.

I enjoyed my reread of this series.

Watermarking, My Ass

1st from the New York Times:

This Is One of the Most Important Policy Decisions of Our Lifetime

These A.I. Policies Will Hurt Our Business. We Should Do Them Anyway.

Written by Bridgewater Investments, which has apparently invested $B in GenAI companies. This strikes me as yet more hype: AI is going to take over the world, so here's how we should tax it. Regardless of their motives, I'm going to say, token tax, hell yeah! Labor is taxed, LLMs should be also.

---

From the ever reliable Gary Marcus, more crappy hype from the King/Queen of Hype, Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei :

No, Dario Amodei, we will not be curing cancer and “most human disease” in five to ten years

What Amodei either ignores or doesn’t know about medicine

---

Wow! Anthropic was surging ahead of OpenAI. So happy to see them self-immolate.

1st, from Doc Searls:

You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing

How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.”

But maybe that’s a good thing. Let’s start with that police whistle:

When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.

Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from.

Will any writer, of anything, ever want to use any Claude text anywhere now? I’ve been a satisfied Claude customer, and I’m ready to bail completely. And I’m not alone. Because watermarks in text are invisible time bombs ready to scream, “The author didn’t write this! I did!” when some reader of the writer’s text uses the right probe.

All the times I have read how writers go over & over their text to pick the 1 perfect word, the 1 perfect phrase. Clearly not a concern for Claude when it processes words as nothing but statistics, to be altered however is desired, as long as the statistics are still OK. Semiotic zombies, FTL.

---

404Media also weighs in on this unbelievably ... arrogant ... lame ... delusional??? idea of Anthropic:

Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

AI companies see words as interchangeable and have zero clue how to judge the “quality” of writing.

...

“Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters,” Anthropic wrote in that company blog post. “The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers.” The way it will work, the post explained, is that Anthropic will subtly alter the word choices in AI-generated text in a way that is only known to Anthropic and its algorithms. Anthropic will know the watermarking algorithm, which will change “the source of the randomness used to pick among words” and thus can write a tool to detect whether something has been AI-generated.

So Anthropic is encoding secrets in every piece of text it produces for you??? This is semiotics on steroids, Claude is indeed a semiotic zombie. The arrogance of this is to me incomprehensible. Just say no.

---

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #142.

Expiration Date

"Expiration Date", by Tim Powers, 1996, 568 pages, 176k words. Book 2 of the Fault Lines series.

I was going to power through & binge this series after I reread the 1st book, "Last Call", for maybe the 3rd or 4th time. Technical difficulties at Kobo prevented that. Those difficulties finally got resolved a few weeks ago. So I got to reread this book.

Quite a bit of new mythos is added to the 1st volume of the series. Ghosts exist, & can be captured & smoked. Smoking ghosts is, of course, addictive, but it is apparently a real rush; gives you new memories & experiences; & apparently increases lifespan.

An 11 YO boy whose cultist parents were grooming him to be a Holy Man winds up ingesting the powerful ghost of Thomas Alva Edison. But as he is pre-pubescent, he cannot digest Edison. They wind up cohabiting the body.

All of LAs most powerful ghost addicts are totally lusting for the Edison ghost. Drama & plot ensue.

I'm 2/3 of the way through Book 3, all these are longer than I remember. But, still good reads, a good series.