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.
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Nonpragmatic Genies
It seemed like the Bullshit Apocalypse news was dying down. What do it mean? The tech has been accepted???
Nope, the news was just catching its breath. 14 articles in the last 3-4 days???
In my last Bullshit Apocalypse post, linking to "Employees quietly using unapproved AI tools at work, and security teams can't keep up", I thought about talking about putting the genie back in the bottle, but apparently forgot about it.
This 1st post by Bruce Schneier is a must-read. He explores the genie metaphor for "AI Agents". He introduces the term "pragmatic":
In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning.From this came our title, "Nonpragmatic Genies". This will go into our table of names for GenAI. Hmmm, we might have to start a separate table for agents at some point.
He talks about developing the "Genie Coefficient":
The Genie coefficient suggests an AI analogue, where a user is accountable for the plain intent of what they asked the AI. If an AI system betrays the reasonable meaning of an instruction, that’s the AI’s misbehavior, not the user’s.No, no, no. The human is where the buck stops. "AIs" are known to be unreliable: LLMs at a 10% level, agents at a 10-15% level. If a human chooses to use this unreliable technology, it's on them, IMO.
Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”Note, GenAI genies are not a problem for me. I will continue to do my best to avoid using this unreliable technology. I suppose I could feed it my blog posts & ask it to "improve" them. What would that do? Make my writings read like everyone else's? Or, given semantic ablation, make them say the same thing as everyone else's?Genies are now an engineering problem. We are handing them the keys to our inboxes, bank accounts, code repositories, and physical infrastructure. And we have no agreed-upon ways to measure how genie-like any AI system actually is.
Here's the comment I posted to the site:
"The Genie coefficient suggests an AI analogue, where a user is accountable for the plain intent of what they asked the AI. If an AI system betrays the reasonable meaning of an instruction, that’s the AI’s misbehavior, not the user’s."No, no, no!
The human is where the buck stops. "AIs" are known to be unreliable: LLMs at a 10% level, agents at a 10-15% level. If a human chooses to use this unreliable technology, it's on them, IMO.
I think the "mens rea" argument it totally specious. If a construction company builds a bridge with substandard steel, steel with a 10-15% collapse rate, & the bridge collapses, I don't think the company can say "Our intent was not for the bridge to collapse."
From the "Stephen Follows" substack:
What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us allThis is slightly afield, but, still, unbelievable! The world's most trusted site for movie box office data has been destroyed by what winds up being a DDoS done by bots employed by prediction site gamblers trying to cheat on their bets on movie box offices by hacking into TheNumbers.com website.The inside story of how one of film data's most trusted sites vanished overnight, and why every website you rely on is more fragile than you think.
When prediction markets 1st came out, I was really excited! Wisdom of the crowd, FTW! 2015. I asked a billionaire friend of mine what he thought. "It's just going to be another form of gambling." Man, he nailed that one!
From the Bard of the Revolution, Cory Doctorow. I liked when the "AI Snake Oil" guys renamed their blog to "AI as Normal Technology". AI as a normal technology has lots of use cases. Mostly only profitable when they serve as a tool to a creative human.
Turning it loose as anything other than a tool under close human supervision is going to be disastrous. Doctorow is down with this. The problem with "AI" is the hype, the bubble, the desperate attempt to keep Big Tech companies classified as growth stocks to keep their incredibly inflated P/E's.
AI solipsists and AI cynicsUgh. So the coiner of the word "enshittification" reminds us that all the AI chatbots we are going to be increasingly having a hard time avoiding are happening as "enshittification Phase II". :-(You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment.
...
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
https://www.normaltech.ai/As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
My last post on the Bullshit Apocalypse linked to an article about the highly publicized hack of Hugging Face by an OpenAI agent. My vote was, more marketing hype. Here's more info; I find this unbelievable. From Reuters via the Lexington Herald-Leader:
Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week.
From the Chicago Tribune, via the Lexington Herald-Leader:
Brace yourself for the AI public relations blitzI'm really surprised at the groundswell of opposition to GenAI, but ... Yay?!?!?Big Tech has a major accountability and responsibility problem. But the tech bros see it as nothing more than a serious public relations problem. So get ready for the rehabilitation campaign.
More backlash. From 404 Media. Who had "resurgence of Luddites" on their bingo card? But, they are fun Luddites!
Being a Luddite Is Fun AgainAs tech backlash hits the mainstream, the ‘Summer of Ludd’ proves we don’t need social media to hang out and have a good time.
Again, from 404 Media. Spotify isn't flagging AI slop in its content, pissed-off users are taking the matter into their own hands.
Spotify's AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the SlopSpotify doesn’t label AI music on its platform, so websites like SoullessMusic.com and SlopTracker.org do it instead.
From the Independent Thought substack. This is a good start. My 0th principle is, the welfare of children should be the highest priority of every government, of every civilization, of every human being of good will.
GenAI Semiotic Zombies eat brains. The young brains are so fresh & tender, yum, yum, yum sez the chatbot. 2 more articles in this lane still coming up.
Norway Imposes Near Ban On Artificial Intelligence In Elementary SchoolsI could not agree with this more
Following the same principle, from a teacher, via the New York Times:
If You’re Over 40, You’re Ready to Use A.I.There is something druglike about using A.I., not because it necessarily produces pleasure, but because it removes a particular kind of pain. A person who grows up with A.I. may never know the necessary agony of a blank page, the false start, the dull vocabulary and the private embarrassment of a first draft. A student who relies on A.I. too early will likely never sit long enough with confusion to distinguish it from failure.
From the LA Times, via the Lexington Herald-Leader again. I guess this goes in the table of names for LLMs.
AI companies are creating 'all-powerful psychopaths.' Maybe not a great idea?Repeated law-breaking. Lying and deceit. Reckless disregard for safety. Lack of remorse.
Those are traits that help define a psychopath, someone who lives among us but doesn't have the empathy and ethics necessary to behave in a civilized, or even safe, fashion.
Unfortunately, it's also increasingly clear that these are the traits that define the most powerful artificial intelligence models being developed at alarming speed by for-profit corporations
...
"I would say the companies admit it, right?" [UC Berkeley professor Stuart J.] Russell said. "They say 'We do not have a solution for the control problem, but nonetheless, we are going to spend $10 trillion creating these all-powerful psychopaths.'"
This post, #138, is way different from previous posts. Fun. Whimsy. Poetry. I think that this is really good, human values to oppose the bland yet oh so verbose mediocrity of AI bullshit.
Here, from the Information is Beautiful blog, some whimsy. But, actually, probably not funny.
ailments - a field guide to potential AI-induced cognitive-behavioural disordersCLICK TO VOTE ON THOSE YOU RECOGNISE
- COGNITIVE EFFECTS
- IDENTITY DISORDERS
- OVER-INGESTION
- BEHAVIOUR PATTERNS
- DEPENDENCY
- MOOD DISORDERS
- PSYCHOLOGICAL TENDENCIES
- SYSTEMS BREAKDOWN
Back to the Bard of the Revolution, Cory Doctorow:
Discernment:This is in the lane with the GenAI bans for children - up to age 40.How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand?
GenAI can be a great tool for creatives. But, given its minimum 10% error rate, it can only be used by people that can validate its results. Which means IT IS USELESS AS A TEACHER. Duh.
I guess if you don't mind the students being given false information 10% of the time, then GenAI is a fine teacher. Just like it's great as a customer service chatbot. Doctorow has said, when a company adopts an AI chatbot as its customer service, they are telling you, "we could care less about your customer service experience." & given that so many companies are monopolies or close to it now, that is indeed what they are telling you.
Finally, (phew!), our poetry. From "The Courage to Live It" substack of Shawn Smucker. The title is [sarcasm]. I think this poem is very moving. As with all poetry, I recommend reading it out loud.
Please Use AIor hearing another human voice and somehow realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these subtle imperfections
There was 1 more post I didn't capture the link to. It basically showed a chart that looked just like the Anthropic chart I corrected - LLMs & Agents are both plateauing, 10-15% error rates. I really don't think that's going to change.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #138.
Friday, July 24, 2026
Green City Wars
"Green City Wars", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2026, 432 pages, 112k words.
The latest from my current fav SFF author.
Set 50-100 years in the future, green cities now grow from the sites of old cities. Totally solar-powered, 0 carbon footprint. This story takes place in the green city now growing over Vienna.
The infrastructure is all run by genetically enhanced, cyborged animals: mice, rats, squirrels, stoats, racoons, badgers, pigeons, parrots, crows, frogs, newts. A few predators/raptors as well. All with their own species special proclivities. The mice are the proletariat, the rats organized crime, the red & grey squirrels the perpetually skirmishing militia armies.
Our hero is a racoon named Skotch, who quit his job for a US-based corporation to become a film noir cheap detective - yay! He is hired by his old bosses to find a particular mouse scientist. Apparently every other group in the green city also wants to find this mouse.
The action is non-stop, the characters memorable. I would place this up there with "Mrs. Frisbee & the Rats of Nimh" & "Watership Down". The animals are at least as human as humans, but still keep their animal personalities. I was sorry when this was over.
Thursday, July 23, 2026
A Generation of Idiots
Everybody loves a good "meme", right? Note, I still don't know how a quote over a picture became a "meme". That's certainly not how Dawkins defined it in 1976.
But, oops, per Snopes, Einstein never said this. Per Snopes, this was the closest he came, apparently mostly referring to the atomic bomb:
"I believe that the abominable deterioration of ethical standards stems primarily from the mechanization and depersonalization of our lives," he wrote in a letter to his friend, psychiatrist Otto Juliusburger, in 1948, "a disastrous byproduct of science and technology. Nostra culpa!"But, we have linked to several articles in this series on the ongoing Bullshit Apocalypse documenting the declining intellectual skills of LLM users. So "a generation of idiots" is indeed a valid concern. GenAI eats brains on several levels - semiotic zombies, indeed.
This next has gotten a lot of coverage in mainstream media. Here's Gary Marcus's take:
OpenAI’s disconcerting hack of HuggingFaceI'm going to vote for yet another sensationalistic hype stunt thought up by some marketoid. Antropic has gotten so much press crying "wolf", OpenAI didn't want to get left behind.and what we should do about it
From the Lexington Herald leader.
Employees quietly using unapproved AI tools at work, and security teams can't keep upIf this link is paywalled, cut & past the title into DuckDuckGo or Kagi & you will get lots of hits on the article.
The article is from a software company named Vanta, which makes "a platform for automating information security monitoring and compliance management." So it's somewhat of an informercial.
I am doing my best to avoid chatbots. It's hard. I did find a good trick: trying to make reservations at a restaurant I encountered their chatbot. I said "You're not a human being, are you?" It immediately replied "I'll connect you to a human being." Nice! So probably just saying "human being" could trigger that reaction.
But, sadly, I did talk to a chatbot, the support AI chatbot at Babbel. My wife & I have changed from Duolingo to Babbel for our language lessons - it's much less annoying, no gamification, no time-wasting dialogs from cartoon characters. But, I was trying to adjust the subscription, hence the chatbot.
"How can I help you today?" was it's 1st statement. I immediately found that annoying & untruthful, or at a minimum misleading. There is no "I" in "chatbot". A chatbot has no ego, there is not a person there. There is a statistics based word generation algorithm bullshit generator. They should not have the right to use 1st person pronouns.
They should use passive voice only. Allowing them to use 1st person is yet more marketoid bullshit like calling errors "hallucinations" to falsely conflate LLMs with human beings.
Maybe some GenAI opponent legislator could introduce legistation to make it illegal for AI companies to conflate their LLMs with human beings. Maybe in the same bill where they require LLMs to identify themselves as such?
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #137.
Thursday, July 16, 2026
I Can't Believe I Read The Whole Thing!
This was a really long piece - it has a TOC! - but worth the read. I had seen Ed Zitron mentioned before as a highly knowledgeable GenAI/LLM skeptic. (I am now subscribed to the RSS feed for his blog, "Where's Your Ed At?".)
This is a totally damning piece. The whole damn AI bubble is circular investment (which a large majority of the time never moves past the announcement phase) intended to let the big tech firms keep their sky-high P/E ratios & stock prices. They have no real innovations or new products that people really want or need. So we get this GenAI/LLM bullshit crammed down our throats. Slopocalypse Now indeed.
These people are supposed to be technologists. They use science, they should respect science - which says, please no 1000s of environmentally disastrous data centers. But, nope, they're not technologists, they're capitalists. So the only thing that matters is the $$$. Capitalism ruins everything.
The OpenAI BubbleYou see, OpenAI has become one of the largest liabilities in recent economic history. You can argue that OpenAI’s no longer the focal point of the AI bubble — you can talk all you want about open source models or Anthropic or any number of other elements — but without OpenAI, the AI industry doesn’t exist, and the justification for trillions of dollars of capex evaporates.
The AI bubble isn’t a result of any actual return on investment — whether that be in purely monetary terms, like revenue or profitability, productivity gains, or anything tangible or measurable. Rather, it’s an episode of cult-like psychosis that infected the brains of some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals and institutions, where the powerful mythology of a company inspired — and been used to inspire — the greatest capital misallocation in history.
Just as I started creating this post, some piling on from SubStack. From Will Lockett's Newsletter:
This Should Pop The AI BubbleI still don't see the GenAI/LLM bubble popping as much as deflating over a 2-3 year period.Oversupply indicators and insider warnings.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #136.
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Stolen Skies
"Stolen Skies", by Tim Powers, 2021, 364 pages, 99k words. Book 3 - Vickery and Castine.
Our intrepid duo is back again. Castine now works for the Office of Naval Intelligence, creating fake UFO crash sites & crop circles, while also discrediting real sites of the same type.
Our GhostBusters save the world once again, this time from the ghosts of ETs. A wildly creative take on ETs, UFOs, & crop circles.
Another thing Powers is great at is introducing way weird FFTKAT (Fun Facts To Know And Tell). I had certainly never heard of "startle disorder" - a prominent & odd example of which is the "Jumping Frenchmen of Maine". Apparently these are genetic-based neurological disorders caused by the inhibitory neurotransmitter glycine getting screwed up. Who knew?
A little less stressful then the prior books in the series. The bad guy is more a bored Federal bureaucrat than a crazy genius mad scientist. It's still a page turner.
Sunday, July 12, 2026
If It Chats Like A Bot ...
... then it's probably a chatbot. My suspicions about the attractive young female wanting to chat on LinkedIn were probably correct. From 404 Media:
LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data SuggestsI have noticed a pattern on BlueSky (@jazdumoz.bsky.social). You get a new follower, follow them back (within reason), get a chat request, usually reply "No DMs.". Here's what my chat page currently looks like.An AI detection company found that amount of AI content that users actually see in their day-to-day browsing is shockingly high.
...
As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.
I counted back to the 1st of the year, 2026-01-01. 59 chat requests, 52 from deleted accounts. 88.1% bots. Pathetic. At least BlueSky does seem to be finding them & deleting them.
From "The Algorithmic Bridge" blog of Alberto Romero:
OpenAI GPT-5.6: AI Could Do Anything, Then It Met ARC-AGI-3ARC-AGI is the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence". It's been around since 2019. LLMs solved the -1 & -2 versions. The scandalous score was 7.8%. The previous high score was 1.5%. So a factor of 5.2 improvement, but it still sucks.GPT-5.6’s ARC-AGI-3 score is scandalously bad and scandalously good
Alberto says he is a writer, not a technologist. He seems to be somewhat of a fanboy.
From Malwarebytes:
Scammers are using AI to sell impossible flowersI was going to copy the pic of unbelievable cat-faced orchids, but luckily I remembered, that would violate the terms of this blog re AI usage.We’ve had problems with deepfake celebrity scams, non-consensual deepfake sexual material, and deepfake politicians. Now we have to deal with… deepfake plants?
From 404 Media again:
AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research FindsChatGPT uses too many dream sequences and Gemini won’t stop describing characters.
This last is kind of interesting. From Tim O'Reilly, whom I mentioned in my very 1st Bullshit Apocalypse post, in his "Conversations with AI" SubStack:
information work is actually responsibility work wearing an information costumeO'Reilly says Claude Fable doesn't think there will be a Jobspocalypse. A lot of the discussion is about humans as "responsibility sinks". It reminds me why, in a physician's medical practice the physician makes the big bucks - they are the 1 with the malpractice insurance. They are where the buck stops. AIs can never fill that roll - according to Claude?!?!?Claude Fable on the Jobless Apocalypse
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #135.
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Forced Perspectives
"Forced Perspectives", by Tim Powers, 2020, 426 pages, 132k words. Kobo is normally big on identifying series, nothing here. Per Powers' Wikipedia page, this is the 2nd book of the "Vickery and Castine series".
Our heroes from the last book are back. Vickery is still driving ghost-avoidance vehicles. Castine has moved to DC, still working for the same government agency, which has toned down & cleaned up its act considerably.
The nemesis this time is a mad genius who wants to use ancient Egyptian mystical technology to create a group mind (egregore) which will eventually suck the whole human race into it - oops!
There are some recurring characters back from the 1st book, as well as new characters. I've realized, 1 thing that really defines the quality of Powers' work is the depth & personality of his supporting characters: the henchmen, allies, stooges, etc. They are usually recognizable characters who sometimes do things out of context, like real people.
Again, an enjoyable read. I would definitely recommend reading these in sequence.
Friday, July 10, 2026
Alternate Routes
"Alternate Routes", by Tim Powers, 2018, 359 pages, 97k words.
So, I originally tried to buy this ebook in the face of fierce opposition from Rakuten-Kobo's AIs. With usual AI brilliance, they fixed the ordering problem with this book by deleting it from their catalog! Problem solved!
After I did a reread of "Last Call", I was going to power through & binge the 2 sequels. Since Kobo thwarted that, I decided to read this book, the 1st of a new trilogy.
Powers has such a way of creating a new & original mythos. Here, it is that the free wills moving rapidly on freeways create a soul current. If you have had anyone close to you die near a freeway, you are more likely to be able to perceive & talk to ghosts. & never use complete sentences with ghosts, unless you want to be possesed.
Of course the action takes place in the Freeway Capitol of the Universe, Los Angeles!
Our heroes are a disgraced secret service agent, who got to listen to forbidden ghost-fu, & a federal agent who works for the agency who knows about the freeway effect & ghosts & tries to use ghosts for espionage purposes.
The nemesis in this book is a weirdo government agency head who basically has 0 personality, but who wants to merge the world of the ghosts with our world. Bad idea.
As always, a page turner. I was sorry when it ended. I immediately proceeded to start the 2nd book of this series. It is equally good.
1 nit to pick. His Wikipedia page says that Powers is a practicing Catholic. Both the characters in this book are Catholics, & catholic practices are mentioned. Given the supernatural topics of his work, frequently involving ceremonial magic, Catholicism fits right in. It has an extensive set of magical ceremonies.
I was raised Catholic & took it very seriously, up the point when I became an apostate at age 14. After studying religions & mysticism in general into my 20s, I have evolved into my current antitheistic stance. I don't think the book would have suffered if the catholic-fu wasn't there.
Thursday, July 09, 2026
Volatile Memory
"Volatile Memory", by Seth Haddon, 2025, 160 pages, 45k words.
I will NEVER trust another recommendation by Alix E. Harrow. I loved her latest "The Everlasting" & predicted it would win awards, which it did, per Wikipedia:
The novel won the 2026 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and is a finalist for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Novel.But she totally did me wrong with this book.
Looking it up, here's how it is listed on Kobo:
#237 in Romance, LGBT, LesbianSo, OK, another sapphic romance, between a trans woman, & a cis woman who is dead but has been captured in a "mask". The main technology of this future is "masks", which you wear, & which interface with your brain, & give you superpowers. Very comic book.#1085 in Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adventure
#2332 in Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy
The main thing about this is, that its highest ranking is in Romance. It is indeed a bodice-ripper.
I generally don't read those. I'm sorry Alix E. Harrow sent me down this path. The prose is so ... twee, maybe? Trite? Barf-o-rama.
You had wavy hair the color of a stormy night; lightning streaked through in grays and whites, though you couldn't have been more than twenty-five. You were so young, but when you looked at me, I saw the hurricane in your eyes, gray and tired, and when you sold me for parts, whey you finally chose your own happiness, I decided I wouldn't fault you.Seriously? You don't want to faint, you want to swoon!...
And you kissed me.
Your lips, slightly chapped, pressed against the chilled byronnicum. You kissed me, Wylla. If only I could faint.
This novel is such drivel. So the personality saved in the experimental mask shares the body of the trans female, who was already having body image problems as it was. But, they are in love! Swoon!
& when they merge, they become a super assassin! & they murder people without particularly thinking about it, or regretting it. Nice! Amoral murderers are some of my fav characters.
Ugh, ugh, ugh. Alix E. Harrow, formerly my neighbor in Madison County, KY, you owe me.
There is a 2nd novel in The Volatile Memory Duology. I will definitely not be reading it. This 1st installment is 1 of those books where you wish you could do a memory purge. But, even if you did, it would probably still give you nightmares. Ugh.
Wednesday, July 08, 2026
Anarchy in the Big Easy
"Anarchy in the Big Easy", by Max Cafard, Illustrated by Vulpes, 2025, 83 pages. A graphic history. Subtitled "A History of Revolt, Rebellion, and Resurgence".
Note, I think this is capital "A" Anarchy, not small "a" anarchy.
I'm not sure where I got this from. It was published by PM Press, to whose blog I subscribe, I may have liked the look of it in 1 of their posts. "PM Press is an independent, radical publisher of books and media to educate, entertain, and inspire."
So, an installment of history as told by the poor people, rather than the rich people. This kind of work always takes me back to Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States. I blogged about that just over 20 years ago, January 22, 2005.
My oldest daughter gave me Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" -- the story of the USA as told from the viewpoint of the fuckees rather than the fuckers.So this picture book includes the history, politics, & economics of New Orleans, "the Big Easy", written by a loving native son.
So much of the history of the common folk is ignored, forgotten, deprecated. But so much of that history is the real history.
Some of these are FFTKAT - Fun Facts To Know And Tell. I will tag this post as such.
Over the ages, some have understood that our Delta Home is looked over by a great anarchic Maternal power that gives us everything, while asking nothing in return.
We might call this power "La Grande Indulgente",
which translates as "The Big Easy."
Economist, gambler and speculatator John Law made a deal with Louis XIV giving his Mississippi Company a monopoly on colonization. La Nouvelle Orleans, founded in 1718 became the capitol.
The native population plummeted by 2/3, replaced by convicts, vagrants, & slaves.- The escaped slaves allied with the native americans hiding in the bayous!
- The slaves eventually revolted & killed a few of the masters, FTW! The 1st revolt was in 1811.
- The early leader of free maroons, the maroon leader "San Malo" was hung in 1784.
- Filipinos deserting from Spanish galleons joined the outlaw communities.
- New Orleans was a leader in unionization. The First International, or International Workers Association, was founded in 1864.
- In 1894, a general strike closed down New Orleans. The workers, a broad coalition, won many concessions.
- In a streetcar strike in 1902, "the local police intervened - and arrested the scabs."
- In 1913, the AFL turned against the IWW (Wobblies) because they were too radical!
- A streetcar strike in 1929 shutdown the system for 2 weeks. Among goods donated by local businesses to union members were the sandwiches which famously became known as "po' boys"! Definitely a FFTKAT!
- Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans, was one of the birthplaces of Jazz.
- Jelly Roll Morton, who claimed to have invented jazz, was 1 of the best known early New Orleans Jazz musicians.
- The official New Orleans Carnavale (Mardi Gras) parade is capitalist phoniness. See, instead, the Carnival of the People, or the Trash Parade.
- The line from the well-known Cajun song "Iko Iko", "chock-a-ma-fee-na-hey" translates as "kiss my fuckin' ass". Nice! I believe it, the song is very agressive "My grandma told your grandma, we're gonna burn your flag.".
- The fabulous social programs established by the Black Panthers in 1970 meant nothing. Black Men with guns => serious prison time. Respect the 2A my ass! 2A was to allow slave militias in the south, southerners know that, 2A is NOT about black men having guns. It is about black men being murdered with impugnity.
- The mutual aid that sprang up after the worst hurricanes, particularly Katrina, was targetted for suppression by the authorities!
- In 2016, anarchists got involved in the removal of confederate statues. Good for them.
Today in New Orleans, most anarchist projects are grounded in a practice of critical, revolutionary mutual aid.
This ranges from official groups such as New Orleans Mutual Aid Group, the indigenous group Bulbancha Collective, and the food autonomy network Labelia Commons,
to more spontaneous forms of mutual aid that flourish in the aftermath of hurricanes, tornadoes and now the Covid 19 pandemic.
Sunday, July 05, 2026
'Pocalypses Are Multiplying
To the Bullshit Apocalypse, we added the Slopocalypse and the Tokenpocalypse. And today, we add the Jobspocalypse and the AIpocalypse. I guess End Times is a very strong memetic attractor.
1st, from 404 media:
Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ WarningWe're worsening global warming & hastening the climate crisis to make some more tech bro billionaires with tech that does much more harm than good.Researchers discovered that people found AI impersonators to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real politicians, raising alarm bells around the potential for public deception.
From the Bard of the Revolution, Cory Doctorow. Doctorow uses his Pluralistic blog to develop his non-fiction books somewhat iteratively. It looks like the act of publishing the book doesn't stop that process.
The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work":The book in question is "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which came out June 23. I think I'm finally unstuck writing my review/summary of the book. I don't think that the paradox/riddle thought above is in the book. So his thinking on the topic is continuing to evolve?Sometimes, "I got it working" is fine, but sometimes it isn't.
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
That's the idea that set me on the path to writing about "reverse centaurs" and AI.
This article discusses the difference between:
- "today's task" - something quick-and-dirty, throw-away, that you would do in a scripting language (csh, ksh, ...) or an interpretive language (visual basic, say). Vibe coding is in the same family as these earlier glueware tools, & like them, it can be a great time-saver.
- "accretive work" - serious software, possibly a product, with an architecture, development life cycles, and the ever-increasing maintenance debt. Vibe coding in this environment makes the developers reverse centaurs, which is definitely bad news.
My "reverse centaurs" thesis isn't just a way to understand how programmers who seem to be doing the same thing can have such different effects. It's also about how the way that the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them with defective chatbots backstopped by the jobspocalypse's terrorized survivors, who can be made to endlessly toil away at marking the AI's homework because there are so many other workers who'll take their jobs if they refuse.My bold on jobspocalypse.
As always, this is a very enlightening read, check it out.
I originally read this in the Lexington Herald-Leader, here it is on Yahoo News to avoid a possible paywall. The study discussed came from Malwarebytes, but they didn't use "AIpocalypse".
9/10 people can't tell what's real online because of AI, survey showsI'm going to classify this as a bug rather than a feature. Thanks AI!The 'AIpocalypse' has been taken to mean anything from mass layoffs to a near-omniscient machine hijacking control of the world's nuclear arsenals.
But going by a survey of 1,500 people in Austria, Britain, Germany, Switzerland and the US, AI has already wreaked havoc by distorting people's ability to tell reality from illusion - at least online.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #134.
Thursday, July 02, 2026
Music In, 2026, Q1
- The Band, "Live at Watkins Glen", 1973, 10 tracks. I think the blog where the guy does "Today in Capitol Records History" mentioned some of the songs on this album, which I had never heard! Or, at least didn't remember. 4 stars. Here's a Dylan song, "Don't Ya Tell Henry". This was on a Woodstock live album so I must have heard it some point Back In The Day, but I totally don't remember it.
- Brad Paisley, "Play", 2008, 16 tracks. I was finishing off my 2023 list & came across this album. So someone recommended it to me in December, 2023. The wheels grind slow ... The album features quite an impressive list of collaborators on 6 of the tracks.
Paisley is a great guitar player. This album reminds me, how whenever I buy a "guitar" album, I am invariably disappointed. I guess I'm just not that into guitar virtuosos. I like songs. 3 stars.
- The Cure, "Songs Of A Lost World", 2025, 8 tracks. Their 1st album in 16 years!
1st thing I noticed, the engineering on this album is top notch! I guess in general my expectations are downgraded. When you listen to an album where all the engineering is pretty much perfect, it makes you wonder why you listen to albums with substandard engineering.
Here's the 1st track, "Alone":
- Antoine Boyer, "Everything Moves", 2025, 9 tracks. Rick Beato did a show with this 26 YO French Gypsy Jazz guitarist titled "Is This Guy the Best Guitarist in the World?". He is indeed an incredible guitarist. But, I am always disappointed in "guitar virtuoso" albums. I like songs, I like catchy tunes. 3 stars.
- Antoine Boyer & Yeore, "You and I", 2025, 9 tracks. So Antoine meets and, of course, marries a South Korean harmonica player. I like this album better than the solo 1. 4 stars. Here's "Sous le Ciel de Paris", my fav Edith Piaf tune.
On our faboulous September 2023 3 week French vacation, we were visiting the basilica up on the hill of Old Lyon, "the elephant on its back", next to the mini Eifel Tower. There was an old dude playing this song on accordion out in front of the basilica. I know this song, I've recorded it, I have the lyrics in my phone, I could have given him 20 euros to play this with me singing it. It would have been magical, a quest completed. We decided to tour the basilica 1st, when we were done, he was gone ...
- Mumford & Sons, "Prizefighter", 2026, 14 tracks. I think it is really hard for Power Folk bands to have staying power. I was talking to a drummer friend of mine, I asked him, these Power Folk songs, where the bass drum is going "boom, boom, boom, boom" on the 1, 2, 3, 4 beats - what time signature is that? Is it 1/4 time? Inquiring minds want to know. Meanwhile, 3 stars.
- Gorillaz, "The Mountain", 2026, 15 tracks, BandCamp. Lots of guest performers, several Indian. The mix of modern electronica rock/dance music we have come to expect. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "The Mountain", with a definite Indian sound.
- RJD2 & Supastition, "According To...", 2026, 12 tracks, BandCamp. 1 thing I learned from this batch of music: there is some music you can listen to a fair amount of in a row. Other genres, you can only listen to a few tracks before it becomes repetitive. Guitar virtuoso music is 1 such genre. Rap/Hip Hop is definitely another.
If 1 of these tracks comes up on shuffle play, I enjoy it OK. But, listening to an album, after 3 tracks, I'm like, "OK, enough. Melody, please.". 3 stars.
- Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "We Are Together Again", 2026, 10 tracks, BandCamp. This album is really hitting on all cylinders. Great tunes. Maybe just because he is a fellow son of Louisville. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Why is the Lion".
- Laura Mvula, "Sing to the Moon", 2013, 12 tracks. This name was in my action list from February, 2024. The next list entry is "Cynthia Eviro". So somebody told me I needed to check these 2 out. Cynthia Eviro is the Wicked Witch from the "Wicked" movies, so I decided to skip her. Mvula is not bad - from Birmingham, England. But, this was her premier album, 2013. She also released albums in 2016 & 2021. So I guess that is fairly prolific. But, this album has tunes in 1/4 time, "boom, boom. boom, boom" on the bass drum on the 1,2,3,4. & arrangements that sound like Broadway show tunes. Ugh. 3 stars.
- Nubiyan Twist, "Chasing Shadows", 2026, 11 tracks, BandCamp. What a great, power horn band! From Manchester, UK! Afro-beats really strong on this album. 4 hours. Here's "Chasing Shadows".
We're now in Q3, so Q2 is closed, 10 albums there.
I keep executing my algorithm for new music acquisition because I think it helps me maintain neuroplasticity in my elderly years to cram lots of new stuff into my brain. But it makes it hard for me to go back & enjoy old stuff. I think I just need to remember to spend more time listening to music. Plus, that's easier for me to do in FL than KY.
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