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.
Friday, August 21, 2026
Earthquake Weather
"Earthquake Weather", by Tim Powers, 1997, 744 pages, 202k words. Book 3 of the Fault Lines trilogy.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Watermarking, My Ass
1st from the New York Times:
This Is One of the Most Important Policy Decisions of Our LifetimeWritten 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.These A.I. Policies Will Hurt Our Business. We Should Do Them Anyway.
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 yearsWhat 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 closingAll 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.
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.
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 WritingSo 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.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.
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.
Thursday, August 13, 2026
The Dike Is Crumbling! Need More Fingers!
From 404Media:
The Roboguard Revolution is Short-CircuitingYou'd think "security guard", which must mostly be an incredibly boring job, would be ripe for replacement by AI-powered robots, neh?Knightscope and other robotics companies are rethinking automated security following canceled contracts. One pivot? Human guards.
Nope, absolutely wrong. The outliers, the anomalies, these are what security guards have to handle.
& these are exactly what GenAI sucks at. Oops!
From Malwarebytes.com:
The AI Act kicks into action, forces companies to be clear about AI chatbotsHooray for the EU!The European Union (EU) has started enforcing key parts of the AI Act, with immediate, visible consequences for chatbots, deepfakes and other consumer‑facing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
Our 20 YO 52" Sharp Aquos LCD TV died. I'm trying to replace it with a 65" LG OLED. lg.com says, "ChatBot not available." & connects me to a "human" sales agent.
If this is a human being, it needs psychiatric intervention ASAP. It is all over the place. It asks me 3x, after I say "no", if I want extended warranty. I ask it flat out:
Ben, you really seem to be a chatbot. Are you really human?It's response:
Haha, nope! Just Ben here, your LG product expert. Though I'll take it as a compliment if I was answering that fast!Really? Ben's a human being who is flattered to be compared to a fucking chatbot?!?!?
If this were a human being, it totally needs its meds checked.
Presumably with the new EU law chatbots are not allowed to lie like this. Goddamm, I hate chatbots! Does anybody like them?
From the New York Times:
A.I. Will Affect Your Social Life. Yes, Yours.But in conversations with other Gen Z-ers, I’ve found that young people are relying emotionally on A.I. more than we realize. That subtly changes our relationships, even with people who have never touched A.I. When a flood of synthetic support enters the worlds of those around us, it distorts our mechanisms for intimacy and makes everyone a little lonelier.
From Robert Reich on SubStack:
Stop AI Before it's Too LateIts benefit: to keep the bubble inflated, to maintain the outrageous P/E ratios of the Big Tech companies.Its costs and risks are gigantic. Its benefits, unproven.
Of course, that's only a benefit of you are a TechBro or otherwise heavily invested in this bubble.
Its error rate: 9% for LLMs & chatbots, minimum 10-15% for agents. You CANNOT build infrastructure on that kind of error rate.
Again, from Malwarebytes.com:
Love/hate relationship: The AI affair. Young people love AI, but it’s breaking their trustYoung people use AI for everything. From schoolwork to interview prep, relationship advice to shopping decisions, the technology has become part of how young people live. For the most digitally fluent generation ever, AI is a competitive edge, a creative partner, and an always-on assistant.
But the same technology making young people’s lives easier is also making the internet harder to navigate. AI is making scams more convincing, identities easier to manipulate, and online content harder to trust. Seven in ten (70%) 18-to-22-year-olds have experienced an AI-related scam in the last year, compared to half of the general population. And nearly every young person worries AI will be used against them.
From 404Media:
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AIYawn. I need to compile a list of words that rhyme with "fraud".Research Gold's team of human methodologists are either AI generated or using the identity of real people without their permission
Fuckety, fuckety, fuck the people who do this. I've made 100s of contributions to eBird. I've taken many pictures of green herons. This is the 1st green heron I've seen with 3 legs. ARRGGGHHHH!
Oops, I was going to include the pic of a green heron with 3 legs shown in this article. But, that would violate the terms of this blog, which specify that it is AI-free. Phew, dodged a bullet!
From eBird.org, the world's premier birding site, run by the Cornell Ornithology Lab & the Audubon Society:
From Truth to Fake: The Threat of AI to Media ArchivesGenAI, FTL!!!Community-driven science projects such as eBird, the Macaulay Library, and iNaturalist are seeing a rapid uptick in AI-manipulated and AI-generated photos. A new publication in Nature has recently highlighted the threat of AI photos to these projects, leading to some popular news articles. We want to raise awareness and inform the community of how AI reduces the scientific value of photos.
From Lauren’s data Substack:
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the SameThis is slightly afield, but still completely apropos. We were already experiencing stylistic & semantic ablation before ChatGPT was released - modern pop music was even then a maximum 1 or 2 levels above AI slop.What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.
But AI slop will make it even worse.
From Yves Smith at naked capitalism:
Layoffs Tied to AI Hurt Worker Productivity – and the Reason May Surprise ManagersYves here. BWAHAHA. The way employers are implementing AI, to reduce headcount, is scaring workers so much that they are loath to use AI. So this job-protective reaction amounts to sabotage without consciously being so. Well played!
Again, from 404Media:
AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, But Almost No One Is Buying ThemWhy aren't people buying them? Because they aren't as good as the human-created models. Close, but no cigar.The number of AI generated uploads to CGTrader would suggest AI is taking over the platform, but buyers are refusing to pay for AI generated models.
...
CGTrader, an online marketplace for 3D assets, found that one in six models uploaded to the site these days is AI generated, but that AI generated assets account for only $1 out of $90 in revenue on the site. These numbers show that AI generated assets are quickly flooding the marketplace, but that most people are not interested in paying for them.
Meanwhile, they create more slop that people have to wade through. I mentioned that a few posts back, we all now have to waste increasingly more of our limited brainpower to filter out AI slop.
Maybe we could get this classified as a form of spam? There are laws against spam.
From a software developer of 2 decades experience:
I'm done using AISo his management encouraged him to use Claude Code, etc. He got it to where it mostly worked. He did it for 1 year.I've been programming for 20 years. It started as a hobby as a teen, making fansites and little video games. Then it turned into a career. And it's something I've largely enjoyed doing. I like learning, I like problem solving, and I like making things, which is a lot of what programming is. Over the past 18 months, my career, my hobby, and my craft have been drastically changed by the introduction of LLM-powered coding harnesses (e.g., Claude Code) and what's often referred to as "agentic programming." Because of its negative impacts on the environment, society, and my mental health, I've decided to stop using it.
But, it killed his spirit, his joy of creation, his zen. He rejected it.
I'd guess he'll be let go soon :-(
From Human Ready, the SubStack of John Kwarsick. John's company I think is a "AI Works, You're Just Not Doing It Right" company. They have a whole package to deal with the idiocy of making AutoComplete-On-Steriods your AI architecture.
How to Catch AI Lying Without Knowing It Is Lying | Thought EngineeringSo the K-I-E stands for Known, Inferred, Extrapolated. So, OK, maybe OK, bullshit. Great, you've successfully wasted a bunch of your life concluding that this particular LLM output was ... bullshit. Or possibly bullshit. Now what?The discipline: The Over-claim Watch / K-I-E Tagging
I can't imagine any other state change in the world of technology that would have succeeded with the level of error that LLMs & GenAI exhibit. I mean, come on, we all use autocomplete on our phones every day. (I periodically get so sick of it that I turn it off, but I have it on now.) How often is it wrong? Horribly, badly, wrong? & you are going to fire people & replace it with this?!?!? Barf-o-rama!
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #141.
Sunday, August 09, 2026
AutoTune for Writing
1st up, the always reliable Gary Marcus:
Two critical updates re: Astra and mathematicsSo OpenAI announces a new model has solved 10 hard math problems. Then within a day an Antropic researcher (Alpöge) is able to reproduce 1/2 the results using an older public model.
Alpöge’s fast partial replication made me wonder whether OpenAI’s real advance here was finding (through AI) which open problems were amenable to a certain kind of search and verify technique.So now in addition to continuously trying to 1-up each other with miraculous claims, the 2 leading AI companies are now starting to play defense as well. Yawn.
From Doc Searls' Weblog, we get the title of my post, which will go in my table of names for LLMs.
Throbsday - On AI wronging and writingDoc Searls has written many times about his use of GenAI, so I was kind of surprised at the negative attitude here. But he makes excellent points: it can be a tool, but please no slop.I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It’s not just the excess of one-line paragraphs, the contrasty “not that, but this” argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It’s a tone that sounds like the average of a million well-put hunks of text published by competent writers of opinion columns and advertising copy. In other words, a lot like my own writing.
AI writing is AutoTune for the human kind.
Note, lots of musicians totally hate AutoTune.
From the King of Snark, sci-fi author John Scalzi. He joins the group of authors becoming ever more outspoken about AI slop. Hunh, I guess this goes in the table of names as well.
Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of CreativityYah, you can generate stuff that almost seems decent. But you aren't developing any real skill or, I think more tellingly, any real style.
I remember when my kids would play Guitar Hero & I'm totally like "Why not actually learn to play guitar?" (I think all of my kids do play instruments.)
From Programmable Mutter by Henry Farrell:
The downside of robot solutionismApparently a comic series by Alan Moore in the early 1980s is eerily prescient re the many arms races that seem to define GenAI - using GenAI to detect GenAI slop, cheating, plagiarism, etc. Spoiler alert - the human race winds up being forced to flee the planet - oops!Mapping the Abelard Snazz feedback loop
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #140.
Friday, August 07, 2026
Necessity
"Necessity", by Jo Walton, 2016. 335 pages, 102k words. Book 3 of Thessaly.
As threatened, I went ahead & finished this series. The book was an easy, enjoyable read, & nothing unpleasant like the 1st 2. Lots of old characters, plus interesting new ones. The story moves forward I think ~60 years in the timeline of the characters.
1 thing I thought was odd, there was foreshadowing of a clash between our Platonists & some 24th century, capitalistic humans. But then it never develops. The plot was more focused on the supernatural issues. It makes me wonder, did Walton not want to get that political, or did they think the book was getting too long, or did they just decide not to fool with it? Or???
Tuesday, August 04, 2026
The Philosopher Kings
"The Philosopher Kings", by Jo Walton, 2015, 349 pages, 103k words. Book 2 of "Thessaly".
So 20 years after the 1st volume of this series, the Just City is now 5 cities, each pursuing their own version of Platonic Truth. Of course their young males like to raid each other.
This book again makes one think, Plato was really over the top, neh?
It's kind of sad, the most interesting thing that happens in this book is that Apollo's children develop various superpowers. Apparently all the Marvel movies have not burned me out completely on superheros.
The ending of this book really ups the ante. I think I'm going to power through & read the 3rd book, get it over with.
I mentioned that I was sorry that the 1st book featured a rape scene. Not a pleasant thing to read about. This book contains a scene far worse. Not sure why Walton feels the need to include such yucky stuff.
Sunday, August 02, 2026
"AI Really Works, You're Just Doing It Wrong"
My 1st title for this post was "LLMs as Weapons".
Author Chuck Wendig really, really doesn't like GenAI.
You Cannot Use One Bullshit Machine To Catch Another Bullshit MachineLOL, I guess that proves the point - he really does hate "AI". After 2 normal sentences, he goes into possibly the longest sentence since Adam Smith, which, of course, doesn't end with a periodI really fucking hate AI right now. I really fucking hated AI yesterday and the day before, too, though I think the hate is growing faster and hotter, like a sun about to explode and consume the galaxy it brightens and warms. I hate AI because it steals our books, and then then it pukes up and shits out all our books into one half-digested pile, and then everyone reads the shitpuke it pukeshitted up and then they see “AI tells” in it that they identify in human-written source material because of course they do, it stole that stuff from us, of course it’s going to replicate it, that’s literally it’s entire stupid fucking point is to sound like us, and they’re like “oh no you used this kind of analogy” and “oops I see an emdash, that’s AI,” and suddenly we’re forced to decide whether or not we’re going to change our writing, back on our defensive heel so nobody can accuse us of using AI, and it’s like oh shit should we be setting up timelapse videos of our writing sessions every day just so we don’t have a shitty Atlantic article accusing us of conspiring with the enemy, and they’ll use AI to “detect” AI and it doesn’t fucking work and it just adds to the confusion and chaos of information online now and it degrades the fidelity of trust and throws up plumes of misinformation and disinformation where anything is true and anything is false and fucking of course to do all this every part of AI drinks the water and burns the sky and requires more and more data centers that shriek digital cicada noise into the air and for some reason these data centers all need like, coal engines to run, like they’ve got some Victorian orphan or ICE captive shoveling coal into old furnaces to make the data centers churn and burn as if they were designed in Hell but built on Earth, and then somehow the literal worst people on this beautiful planet use it to add to their billions, while the rest of us can’t afford gas and food and clean air and clean water and fucking fuck what the fuck are we fucking doing here
Yes, using AI to detect AI slop is another environmentally disastrous, completely pointless arms race. "what the fuck are we fucking doing here" indeed.
I write this blog in Google's Blogger. When I started cross-posting to Substack, I discovered I had no spell or grammar check in blogger! Writing without a net since 2003! Well, I'm a good speller & grammatician. Most people aren't. I had autocomplete turned off on my iPhone for 7-8 years before I felt it was maybe worthwhile to use. I still turn it off sometimes after it has annoyed me enough.
SubStack now runs your articles through an AI (Pangram?) to scan for AI. I used it once, it said "0% AI, 100% human". I guess I will keep doing that. Citizen Scientist, collecting data. If it ever reports > 0% AI ...
From Gary Marcus:
The seven most shambolic things that happened in AI today.Oopsie x 7. Oops!
From the New York Times:
Stop Testing A.I. Like an App. Test It Like a Weapon.I have talked about, why is this powerful tech not licensed? So my version:
Stop Licensing A.I. Like an App. License It Like a Weapon.
From 404 Media:
LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' ButtonOh boy, oh boy! I'm sure looking forward to wasting my incredibly valuable & ever decreasing lifespan clicking on this button!Following 404 Media's reporting on how LinkedIn is full of AI slop, the platform is giving users a chance to report it when they see it.
Fuck anyone who posts AI slop to social media.
The people who generate AI slop are the talentless wannabees who can now produce AI slop, point at it, & say "Look, I'm a genius!" Artificial stupidity.
But ... I've got a really good old friend, my boss 1986-1995, who was always a horrible writer. The king of the run-on sentence. He loves using LLMs to help him write. So ???
Doctorow distinguishes between centaurs & reverse-centaurs. AI serving humans, or visa-versa.
But, that distinction does not addresss the slop problem. Slop is mostly produced by centaurs. The problem is, the many cases where the human "enhancing" themselves with AI has 0 originality, 0 talent, 0 creativity. The slop they produce is indistinguishable from the slop produced by similar talentless morons. & not only does their style converge, the content actually also converges: see, Semantic Ablation.
Again, 404 Media:
Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite ImagesWTF were they thinking??? Oh, wait a minute. It's Google. Part of the TechBro cabal determined to keep the GenAI bubble inflated to keep themselves classified as growth companies whose astronomical P/E's are justified. To these fuckers, any AI is good AI. Barf."Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam."
From Cory Doctow in his Pluralistic blog:
Why businesses lie about AI:This post is mostly an in-depth review of this article from the Hermit Tech blog of Nikhil Suresh:Humoring the boss all the way into bankruptcy.
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-MakingThis article is really scary. 5700 words. What is the technical/philosophical/economic term for "The Emperor's New Clothes"?I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it. I can’t name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
- Mitchell Hashimoto, of HashiCorp and Ghostty fame
Here's the section headers, with maybe some content:
I. AI Investments Are Generally Total FailuresSo, we believe this guy? Or the 100s of BigTech marketiods exploiting our FOMA?
Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method's novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile....
II. Heretics Will Be Shot
Several of my peers now “AI-wash” their work, meaning that even when they can perfectly competently execute on their jobs to the satisfaction of their management teams, said managers are unhappy if the engineers haven’t used AI in the work… so now they’re lying about using LLMs even in contexts where their professional judgement is that they aren’t the appropriate tool. They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it....
In fact, the only people I know of to be fired over this whole thing are people that have expressed visible doubt about this organisational strategy, which again, even Ptacek thinks is transparently dumb. The net result is that everyone has learned very quickly to praise executives on their visionary AI prowess, or they will be gunned down in the proverbial streets.
III. AI Demos Are The Mind-Killer
IV. Executives, Game Theory, and The Emperor’s Clothes
The good news is, CISOs are used to having to protect the business from their hare-brained initiatives, and this one isn’t really that different, except that there’s a cult-like atmosphere to it that you didn’t see with, say, the cloud. It almost doesn’t matter whether you embrace the initiative or not; there’s work to be done to manage the risk, so that’s what you do. From talking to CISOs everywhere, I would say most of them are quietly skeptical but afraid to speak up.- Career CISO and well-known speaker that asked to remain anonymous
This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
V. You Must Be This AI-Native To Ride
True AI projects, of the kind that is driven by an LLM as the sole mechanism underlying it, where the project can clearly fail to deliver specific numbers, are actually very rare. We mostly see them in the context of startups, and frankly we have stopped engaging with them because we kept getting to the end of the sales conversation and finding out they wanted us to build the product that they were marketing as completed.VI. Navigating AI Mania
This next I find really painful. Tim O'Reilly has been a thought leader for most of the tech revolutions of the last 40 years.
My very 1st Bullshit Apocalypse post, 2024-06-28, mentioned him, & his cheerleading of GenAI. Not inappropriate, as he has led so many other tech waves.
But. But.
AI as an Enterprise Operating SystemSo Dan Guido & his company are basically 1 of what is becoming a major industry:A conversation with Dan Guido of Trail of Bits
"AI Really Works, You're Just Doing It Wrong"John Kwarsick on SubStack is another. His company has a product, The Wheel.
& there are dozens of others.
I find this painful because, I think this is 1x were Tim O'Reilly should NOT drink the koolaid.
When he married Jennifer Pahlka, I tweeted him "Congratulations, & now you have no excuse for not fixing the world." He replied to me, graciously, I don't remember the content.
He has had such a positive influence on the development of the modern tech world. Why does he feel he has to get behind this hype-machine-based environmental disaster?
I guess he really has no choice. His business is creating & selling books & courses for the latest software, which currently is GenAI.
He does seem to be eating the dogfood. He mentions his efforts to turn ORA into a "AI Native" company, the goal of Guido's framework. I think monitoring their efforts will be telling - I think that if they can't make it work, nobody can. Somebody should arrange for the guy from the prior post, Nikhil Suresh, to interview him.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #139.
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