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 Suggests

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 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.

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.

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From "The Algorithmic Bridge" blog of Alberto Romero:

OpenAI GPT-5.6: AI Could Do Anything, Then It Met ARC-AGI-3

GPT-5.6’s ARC-AGI-3 score is scandalously bad and scandalously good

ARC-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.

Alberto says he is a writer, not a technologist. He seems to be somewhat of a fanboy.

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From Malwarebytes:

Scammers are using AI to sell impossible flowers

We’ve had problems with deepfake celebrity scams, non-consensual deepfake sexual material, and deepfake politicians. Now we have to deal with… deepfake plants?

I 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.

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From 404 Media again:

AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds

ChatGPT uses too many dream sequences and Gemini won’t stop describing characters.

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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 costume

Claude Fable on the Jobless Apocalypse

O'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?!?!?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #135.

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.

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! Apparently some humans got involved, this book, & the 2 "Last Call" sequels are available for purchase. So I purchased them.

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.

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, Lesbian

#1085 in Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adventure

#2332 in Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy

So, 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.

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.

...

And you kissed me.

Your lips, slightly chapped, pressed against the chilled byronnicum. You kissed me, Wylla. If only I could faint.

Seriously? You don't want to faint, you want to swoon!

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.

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.

The book ends with a list of dozens of current anarchist groups in New Orleans. I'm going to posit that anarchists are de facto antifa, which means that all these groups are currently communists heading for a gulag! Land of the free! Home of the brave! My ass!!!

'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.

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1st, from 404 media:

Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning

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.

We're worsening global warming & hastening the climate crisis to make some more tech bro billionaires with tech that does much more harm than good.

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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":

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.

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?

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.

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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 shows

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.

I'm going to classify this as a bug rather than a feature. Thanks AI!

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #134.

Music In, 2026, Q1

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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":

4. 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.

5. 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 ...

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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".

10. 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.

11. 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".

That's 11 songs for Q1, 2026. I didn't get to listen to them as much as I like, some of them could use some more assimilation, but, it's time to move on.

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.

Kill All Wizards

"Kill All Wizards", by Jedediah Berry, 2026, 176 pages, 40k words, Book 1 of "The Barbaric Ledgers".

I really don't care for this cover much.

I have enjoyed Berry's previous work: both his novels, & his deck of playing cards.

This book, not so much. At 40k words, it is right at the borderline between novella & novel. This feels more like a novella.

Overall, I would describe the story as, "disjointed". It starts off with 1 character telling another character a narrative to get them caught up on the action. A couple more x in the book, action is paused for a character to tell a story, to provide more backstory.

I will buy the next of the series, but, still, "disjointed" seems to be by far the best description to me.

Eating Bullshit All The Way Down

A very good post from David Rosenthal's blog, covering model collapse and degenerative AI. I think we've seen most of this before. He also discusses our lighthouse keeper Elias Thorne, a persistent meme in GenAI output, which I described as Speciation in the Slopiverse.

Coprophagia Is Bad For You

Wikipedia defines Coprophagia as "the consumption of feces".

Rosenthal does a good job conveying the desperation of the AI companies to find new training data. They hire low-paid people to provide input - of course those people get bored with it & farm it out to a different AI. So AIs eating each other brains - semiotic zombies indeed.

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I started blogging in 2003 - I skipped 2009 - generally 20-50 posts/year. Inspired by the Bullshit Apocalypse, I did 123 posts in 2025 & today, at the 1/2-way point in 2026, I'm already at 87 posts! Currently 847 published posts.

I had not checked the stats for a while. Chugging along at ~1000 hits/day, trending up towards 2000 the last few days. 4000 hits on June 24. At least 99% of these hits are training bots - the # of humans reading this blog number in handfuls at best.

The website for my totally unsuccessful music act Jaz Dumoz normally has 0-10 hits/day. June 22 it had 89 hits - it's only a few years old, not much there for the bots to eat.

So I am providing a service - real live, original, human-generated content - to the GenAI industry, most of which I find kind of despicable.

1 other piece of weirdness. I got a link request on LinkedIn from a very attractive young asian woman "Senior Director/Semiconductor Design Ecosystem EDA and Strategic Programs". My profile clearly says "retired". I generally accept link requests to help people get their number up. I then get a DM request, answered politely, pointed them at the music site. They wouldn't go away, questions about music, big bands, man it felt like I was training an AI. I finally told them I thought they were a bot, please stop messaging, & they did.

BlueSky, prolly 95% of the requests for DMs are from bots. But I hadn't seen that on LinkedIn. Anybody know if that is a thing? Creating a bot account & having them strike up conversations as a training technique?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #133.

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here

I've been taking somewhat of an in-place vacation.

I haven't been doing Spanish; I think I'm going to try to switch from DuoLingo to Babel. The gamification of DuoLingo I find annoying, its attempts to trick one into in-app purchases I find sleazy.

I haven't been playing near as much music as usual.

What I've been doing is watching World Cup games, yay! A good tournament to date, lots of scoring, great performances from some of the established stars like Messi, Mbappe, ...

Regardless, posts on the Bullshit Apocalypse seem to have slowed down for a while - knock on wood.

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1st, from Bruce Schneier:

Anthropic’s Fable and the State of AI

“Relentlessly proactive” is how AI researcher Simon Willison described it. Another descriptor might be “creative.”

Scnheier describes Anthropic's announcement as "self-serving"; we've seen their relentless hype machine before. But Schneier says it's not all bullshit, the the LLMs are getting more powerful & indeed are dangerous & require regulation. This is a good, thoughtful review.

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From Will Lockett's SubStack Newsletter:

The AI Boomerang Is About To Hit Hard

Reality vs speculation.

Lots of data from Forrester Research, Gartner, Robert Half, others: on a majority of GenAI projects where LLMs were supposed to replace humans, the humans are being rehired. The LLMs couldn't cut it. Duh. GenAI is a great tool for creative humans, a disaster pretty much everywhere else. 9-10% error rates cannot create robust systems.

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I defined the Bullshit Apocalypse June 28, 2024 - 2 years ago today!

Gary Marcus declared "Slopacalypse Now" August 4, 2025.

Now 404 Media gets in on the act as of June 24, 2026:

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI

Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides.

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From naked capitalism:

Coffee Break: Against AI, Stem Cells, Cancer Chemotherapy, A Note on Louis Pasteur

Part the First: More Cognitive Surrender Where It Just Won’t Do. Last week we considered an essay on AI that used the term “cognitive surrender.” That sums up the current state of that art and the term should gain a following. Last week Nature published Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they’re not good – Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers:

"Cognitive surrender" doesn't sound like a good idea to me ...

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Finally, just in today. From Paul Krugman. The body of the article may be behind a SubStack paywall.

I read everything from Paul Krugman & Cory Doctorow. Krugman has been much more productive since he quit the NYT based on editorial interference. He posts almost every day, even days he says he is "off".

But, my wife doesn't read him, she says he is too verbose. I also find him verbose at times, but I wade through it.

I think he could use an editor - & OMG, NOT A FUCKING AI. A writer as significant as Krugman does not want to submit his work to Semantic Ablation. I think his wife does some of this now?

Meanwhile, we've seen this several times already, Krugman weighs in in a comprehensive manner. GenAI use by students is leading to a generation of humans with 0 critical thinking skills.

What Will AI Do To Our Minds?

Cognitive damage, not productivity gains, may be the most important consequence.

...

Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. A brief history of outsourced cognition
2. The sharp deterioration in learning with the advent of smartphones
3. The AI cognitive crisis
4. Will cognitive losses due to AI lead to a new form of inequality?

LOL, some new terms. I try hard to capture new words for new phenomenon.

Consider, for example, the “Google effect,” also known as digital amnesia [My bold].

I definitely suffer from that. I remember, 20 years ago, just using the GPS in my car to get between our hotel, my sister's house, & my son's house, over a week's time I never developed the ability to get between any of these places without the GPS.

As in the post discussed before this, Krugman is worried about GenAI-facilitated brain damage. All the students who are growing up getting all their answers from LLMs are winding up as idiots with 0 critical thinking ability, 0 problem solving ability.

No worries, the tech bros are still all going to become trillionaires, just like Leon Skunk! Barf.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #132.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

"The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses", by Malka Older, 2025, 256 pages, 69k words. Book 3 of "The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti".

LOL! The prior book of this series, my review concluded:

Also, academia as portrayed by Doctora Older (an academic) totally convinces me I dodged a bullet when I decided in 1974 NOT to go into academia. I could never have done it.

So, the prior book, I was thankful not to be an academic. This book, I am, sadly, also thankful not to be a (lesbian) woman. The emotional relationships are so immature, so juvenile. The word "histrionic" came to mind. Hmmm, who knew that "Histrionic personality disorder" was a thing?

This is a short read, I was relieved when it was over. It wrapped up its conclusion pretty succinctly.

But, this may just be me. A few years ago, after interviewing high school seniors for admission to MIT for 10 years or so, I decided to hang it up. It seemed like I used to get kids who wanted to help fix the world, increasingly the goals of the kids I was interviewing were so stupid & superficial. I decided it was my fault, not theirs. They just needed someone closer in age to them. So I quit interviewing.

This book may be the same thing. Maybe I'm just too old (just turned 75) & crusty for it.

The hardware framework for this book is still fascinating: loops built circling Jupiter, with cities at various locations, normally at loop intersections.

I've said many times, we should disqualify men from holding public office for 20-50 years, I'd bet the women could clean things up & save the planet in no time.

But, based on this book, in which almost all of the characters are women, if in charge they would spend most of their time having vapors, crying, & deciding what kind of tea to drink. & occasionally getting into fist-fights?!?!?

This is a Holmes & Watson deal. Mossa is the FBI-analog agent investigator, Pleiti is the academic helper. They renew their past sexual relationship in the 2nd book, my review here.

In that review, I talked about how I thought that Doctora Older had left Pleiti ungendered through the 1st 2 books. I didn't like the books enough to go back & do a reread & check. I thought that was an interesting thing for an author to do.

About when this latest book came out, Doctora Older was I think talking about it on BlueSky. I asked her, "Was Pleiti ungendered?". She replied (I can't find it on BlueSky), "12 references to gender or so, LOL", or some such.

Reading the book, on the 4th page or so of the Prologue, Mossa refers to Pleiti as "the woman".

There follow many references to Pleiti in the feminine gender. Then, in Chapter 15, we get from Pleiti:

it was the most distressing day of my menses (which might account for some of my crankiness)

I'm definitely all in on, Pleiti is a woman.

What happened? I thought it was an interesting literary effort, to have an ungendered character. Did Doctora Older get busted by LGBTQIAZ-P activists for being coy rather than embracing & promoting the "sapphic romance" that reviews of the 1st 2 novels mentioned?

Another thing that was different in this 3rd book was, I think many more neologisms, but, more than that, lots of Spanish words. I've been studying Spanish for ~18 months, I luv the spanish words, but, here too, did she get busted by latinx activists for not embracing her Hispanic heritage more fully? But, also, a few Dutch words???

Here is a list of all some of the non-English words in the book, with Spanish translations if I could find them. I think it would have been nice for Doctora Older to have provided this glossary at the end of the book, rather than making me do it.

• avergonzada - embarrassed
• pajeons - ???
• panda-de-dios - Panda of god ???
• panekoek - ???
• pourboire - tip (French)
• frunced - France ??? Gathered ???
• por ejemplo - for example
• pues - well (interjection)
• mueca - grimace
• fossick - rummage (English)
• comemierda - eat shit
• suvver - cork??? Applied to a person in a disparaging way.
• cuidadoso - careful
• congelada - frozen
• ráfagas - gusts
• resaca - hangover
• ronca - snore
• souprire - sigh (French)
• cabecidura - stubborn, pig-headed
• chevere - great (exclamation)
• chisme - gossip
• toch - anyway (Dutch)
• gezellig - sociable (Dutch)
• panza - belly
• recamara - bedroom
• fabricada - manufactured
• événement - event (French)
• aficion - love
• plezier - fun (Dutch)
• risueño - smiling
• enganched - hooked (Dutch)
• clandestinidad - secrecy
• festje - feast?
• subquerer - accidentally

Here's the neologisms:

• gradulent - presumably "grad student"
• namourade - maybe Dutch or German, inamorata?

Other:

• boîte - nightclub
• vale - ???
• blague - a joke or piece of nonsense
• brume - mist or fog

****** SPOILER ALERT ******

In the last chapter, Mossa tells Pleiti that she wants to quit the FBI & become a private investigator. & she wants Pleiti to be her assistant, & chronicler. So, moving forward, the series is explicitly Holmes & Watson.

I think this will be a very successful & hopefully profitable series for Doctora Older. But, I'm done with it. I have currently 178 unread books on my iPad, I don't think I will finish them in my lifetime. So, books like these, which are well written & I kinda like but also kinda find annoying, as well as kinda boring, I will take a pass on.

My Post to the Lexington Data Center Online Forum

The LFUCG (Lexington Fayette Urban County Government) has created an online forum to discuss zoning for data centers. My post of 2026-06-26:

I think that the AI bubble which is driving data center development has already started to deflate. GenAI / LLMs / "AI" has a persistent 9-10% error rate that, given the statistical nature of the technology, appears to be unfixable. Several recent studies find that 95% or more of AI projects provided no ROI.

The real purpose of the AI bubble is to allow the tech industry giants to keep looking like they are growth stocks, to keep their incredibly high P/E ratios, to keep their stock prices at least an order of magnitude above what they should be.

Lots and lots of places are going to be stuck with white elephant data centers. Lexington doesn't need to be one of them.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #131.

I Fixed It!

My daughter the accomplished designer has written some complete systems with the help of Claude Code, & is a fan. So she has been playing devil's advocate with me as I tilt with the windmills of the Bullshit Apocalypse.

She sent me this article published by Anthropic:

When AI builds itself

Our progress towards recursive self-improvement, and its implications.

This was published June 4. Reading it, I realized this was the post Gary Marcus wrote about June 5. Here's Marcus's post:

No, Anthropic did not call for a pause on AI development

Not really

So many headlines like these.

I linked to that in this post June 7:

& The Winner of the Academy Award for Best AI Bullshit Hype is ...

Spoiler, the winner was Anthropic.

I don't know if Marcus didn't link to the Anthropic article, or I just didn't follow the link. Regardless, I hadn't read it before.

I gives a history of the phases of Generative AI development. Here's an interesting chart, showing programmer productivity (measured in Lines of Code (LOC)) increasing with Claude use.

I believe this chart. All the (experienced, senior) developers I'm still in touch with all use Claude Code & love it!

This next chart is titled "Claude Code session success rate". Wow, looks like they've about got it licked!

I don't think I would have noticed how bogus this chart is if I hadn't read (& reviewed) "Calling Bullshit" late last year. This book is about bullshit in science, including charts. Probably its main advice dealing with charts is: pay attention to the axes.

Look at the Y-axis on the left. Look at the top of the axis, 100%, all alone up in the left corner. And, whoa, the Claude phase headers are down in the body of the chart! That's not right! They should be out of the chart, up above the 100% line.

I decided to fix the chart. My friend GIMP-2 helped me. Here's the result:

I moved the phase labels out of the chart, & duplicated the Y-axis on the right side.

I look at this chart, I don't think:

Wow, looks like they've about got it licked!

I think:

Wow, they've totally plateaued since March. Looks like 85-90% success rate, aka, 10-15% failure rate. That agrees with the 9-10% error rates coming from other GenAI applications.

So the whole "recursive self-improvement" thing is bullshit! You turn this thing loose to improve itself with a 10-15% failure rate, you are going to immediately downward spiral into Degenerative AI.

I find it really sad. Anthropic seems to be leading the field, particularly with Claude Code. Why are they compelled to be so intellectually dishonest? Their version of this chart was clearly designed to be misleading.

Also, I noticed at the end of the article the following:

* Quotes from Anthropic employees throughout this article are drawn from internal discussions and used with permission. They reflect individual views as of May 2026, not official company positions.

That's a nice piece of weasel-speak. So their employees are making wild claims, but they are "not official company positions". Of course not.

Well, at least everyone seems to be recognizing their unending hype strategy, perpetually calling wolf & claiming their product is so powerful that is is unsafe. They may have shot themselves in the foot, tho, the Feds are acting like they believe them. LOL!

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #130.

Spiderlight

"Spiderlight", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2016, 303 pages, 82k words.

This novel is a nice size, & it is a standalone! Nice for a change, to just read a story.

The story starts out as a standard D&D quest, with a female cleric healer leading, a warrior, a female archer, a powerful magician, and a thief. They must fulfill a prophecy to defeat The Dark Lord. Apparently there have been several dark lords.

The characters are good, the action is pretty standard. The ending is most unexpected, & excellently so!

Definitely an enjoyable read.

A Big Day in Crypto, on the 100th Anniversary of My Father's Birth

Today is the 100th anniversary of my father's birth.

Alfred Jacob Heinz, Jr. ("Don't call me Junie")

Born in Louisville, KY, June 15, 1926. I was born in June 1951, & my son was born in October 1976, also both in Louisville, KY. It was always easy to remember: 25 years/generation.

I was just going to watch the Iran-New Zealand world cup match with my wife - both of us cheering for Iran - but today's posts from "Web3 Is Going Just Great", a blog that chronicles DeFi/Crypto mishaps, was such an anomaly that I decided I had to capture it. 8 stories today!!!

My dad was in the Merchant Marine for the end of WWII, in the South Pacific, off the coasts of Iwo Jima & Okinawa. We weren't close growing up, but when I was older, he would talk about that, being 18 YO, a signalman on a ship in the South Pacific Ocean. Nothing in his life had the emotional impact on him which that did.

He met my mom in college after the war. They both dropped out, got married, had kids, my older brother in 1948. He had a good career in photoengraving (rotogravure), mostly as a union man. He had a stint in management & didn't like it. He made a good enough living to raise 7 kids, lower middle class. I was #2. 6/7 of us got college degrees. #7 #3 has published several novels.

My dad loved gambling. He was a good card player, but I don't think he played cards for money much. He loved to play the ponies. He usually had several bets/week going with his bookies.

"Bookies" - if there are any young people reading this, a bookie was a person who kept an illegal sports book. A bookie published odds & took bets & paid out winnings. Quite often these were associatiated with organized crime like the Mafia.

It's probably incomprensible to younger people, but, MOST GAMBLING USED TO BE ILLEGAL. I guess it was felt to be addictive & a moral peril for many people.

But now, in our more enlightened modern age, gambling is A-OK! 50% or so of all males 20-60 have an online gambling account?!?!? 30% of all adult citizens have an online gambling account?!?!? & who knows what % of people play the lottery, aka, "the stupidity tax"?

"The American Dream" used to be, work hard, get ahead, buy a house, send your kids to college.

In our late-stage, financialized capitalistic system, all productivity gains go to the top 0.0001%. There's nothing at all left over for any young people to get ahead on.

Most people haven't read Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", in which Piketty elucidates that the best way to get ahead now is the same as it was in the 19th century: marry into money.

So the modern, American "way to get ahead" in the 21st century is a mix of the following:

1. Sports gambling;
2. Playing the lottery;
3. Prediction market gambling; Gawd, what a disappointment prediction markets are!
4. Crypto gambling;
5. The Litigation Lottery; driving the interstates now, maybe 1/3 of the billboards are for "slip-and-fall" personal injury legal firms.

Man, oh man, oh man. Time for a revolution.

Here's the 8 posts today from the "Web3 Is Going Just Great" blog.

1. DxSale exploited for $7.3 million
2. Deprecated project Aztec Connect exploited for $2.1 million
3. Raydium users lose $1.34 million after legacy smart contract exploited
4. Humanity Protocol loses $36 million to employee laptop compromise
5. SquidRouterModule, unrelated to Squid Router, exploited for $3.2 million
6. Gravity Bridge drained of $5.4 million
7. Polymarket loses $700,000 to private key compromise
8. Pudgy Penguins shuts down Pudgy Party NFT game after losing millions in less than ten months

My dad died February 11, 2007, age 80.

Speciation in the Slopiverse

I think there are actually some signs of the AI Bubble deflating. I think that this bubble is more likely to deflate somewhat slowly rather than pop. The ultra-rich stockholders have gotten smart about this. We'll see ...

1st, from ... Gary Marcus!

Breaking: OpenAI is pondering “drastic” price cuts.

And that’s a sign of weakness

Marcus includes a link to an interesting site:

IS AI PROFITABLE YET?

Answer: NO.

The page is continuously updated.

Interesting, it currently shows $1.4T total industry spend vs. $613B total industry revenue. But, if you take out Nvidia, which is making lots of $$$ selling picks & shovels in this gold rush, the numbers are $1.175T spend vs $135B revenue. From a ratio of 2.28:1 to a ratio of 8.70:1. Oops.

---

Gary Marcus again:

Breaking news, and how the end might begin

A nice picture of dominos, & the identification of OpenAI as the 1st domino to fall.

He mentions the death of tokenmaxxing, whose brief life I commented on a couple of posts back.

The more significant news is that the finance firm SoftBank tried to get $10B in margin loans on its OpenAI holdings - no takers. They lowered it to $6B - still no takers.

As Cory Doctorow emphasizes in his latest book, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", most of all the activity in the the AI space is not really directed at consumers or businesses - it is directed at investors, to keep the companies involved with AI labeled as "growth stocks". This is the target of the unending AI bullshit hype machine.

If the investors are no longer buying this bullshit, that is indeed bad news for the AI bubble.

---

Again, Gary Marcus. This is huge.

Breaking: Google liable for hallucinations

Marcus references this post by Matthias Bastian at the decoder:

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

• A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews.
• In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.
• The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.

The article also mentions that the search overview accuracy rate is 91% - so 9% error rate, as we have seen before. Way, way too high. Per the article, "millions of wrong answers".

---

Boy, we didn't see this coming at all [sarcasm]. From The Atlantic, via Kottke:

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized

How companies are gaming the chatbot internet

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

& based on the above, all of the LLMs will tell you that the #1 e-commerce platform is Shopify. Shocker!

This is a direct derivative of this post from March, about how anything you make up & publish to the net is taken as gospel by the LLMs.

I am so proud to have coined the word "Slopiverse" in this post. Having "Sloptimized" also in the post is so synergistic. &, dare I say, synchronistic!!!

---

From AI as Normal Technology, formerly AI Snake Oil, IMO a very reliable site for responsible reporting on the Slopiverse:

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Coding agents as normal technology

They make the point that cannot be made enough: GenAI is a great tool for creative humans to use; but trying to use GenAI to replace humans will mostly be disastrous.

Plus, maybe you could hire a few less senior software developers if they are using GenAI, but, if you don't hire junior software developers, you are eating the seed corn.

I'm going to reproduce this elucidating pic of theirs.

---

Finally! From 404 media. This is beyond weird. Well, I guess that this is a complex enough ecosystem that evolution is going to occur.

I love the definition of evolution - a complete science in 5 words:

Imperfect replication with differential survivability

Well, we definitely have "imperfect replication" - 9-10% LLM error rate.

So, we shouldn't be surprised that persistent memes/organisms are developing/speciating in the Slopiverse.

Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why

LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon books. Researchers are trying to discover why.

The article seems to say that this has happened because of guardrails installed telling the chatbots to tell "safe" stories. Apparently "Elias Thorne", lighthouse keepers, & clockmakers are "safe". Who knew?

What complete & utter bullshit! But, life?!?!?

I realized after I posted this, it is a text book case of Semantic Ablation, which we discovered in February. Generating slop not only homogenizes the style of the writing, it also homogenizes the content.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #129.

Radiant Star

"Radiant Star", by Ann Leckie, 2026, 368 pages, 99k words.

This novel is set in the universe of the Imperial Radch of Leckie's award-winning Ancillary novels.

This novel happens simultaneously with the Radch civil war covered in other of Leckie's novels.

This story occurs on a planet Aaa that has no sun. They have 1 city underground, on a world with oceans (heated by the planet's radioactivity?)

Their religion worships the sun that used to live in the middle of the city, but disappeared? But still watches over them? With, of course, 3 sects all of whom consider the other sects heretics.

Leckie mentions the 7 genders of Radchaai civilization. The top gender, which takes most of the leadership positions, is of course females (she/her).

The story is compelling, with maybe 6 or so major characters who are followed. My fav character is prolly the AI of the ship Justice of Albis, whose peripheral bodies (Ancillaries) are used to police the city.

With maybe 3 chapters to go, I started to fear that this would be a "to be continued" ending. But, no, it all wraps up nicely! Phew!

A nice length, not at all too long. Definitely worth a read.

& The Winner of the Academy Award for Best AI Bullshit Hype is ...

Yawn. From the Naples Daily News:

Your lawyer might be filing 'hallucinating' AI information on your case

Generative AI-generated fictions are growing like weeds in court filings throughout the country. The Florida Supreme Court is the latest to address the over-use of this tool in pleadings.

...

Generative AI for legal research can produce up to 33% falsehoods, study found

33% falsehoods?!?!? But, it produces these results really, really fast!

---

From Gary Marcus, the Academy Award goes to: Antropic!!! Yay!!! BOO!!! Yay!!!

No, Anthropic did not call for a pause on AI development

Not really

So many headlines like these.

So, We Have A Winner! Antropic! This is the 3rd, 4th x they have announced some complete bullshit concerns about GenAI which are just, completely, totally, 100% bullshit hype. Just trying to keep the bubble inflated. Fuck these assholes.

---

From Cory Doctorow:

Criticizing the everything machine

It slices, it dices, it even makes paperclips!

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic)

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Flooding the zone with bullshit. That is totally all that the right-wing fascists, including the current executive branch of our government, are trying to do. Just commit outrage after outrage after outrage. Who can keep up?

---

From Ben Horne:

The Token Bill Cometh Due: My Official AI Prediction

The AI industry is indeed a massive bubble, and OpenAI, Anthropic and others are going to start unraveling soon. Here's where I think the AI ecosystem & economy will be ~1 year from now.

---

Finally, from Gary Marcus again:

Slop, productivity, and why the AI-fueled world is going nowhere mighty fast

Agentic Ai spurred a boom in mobile app releases, but there is no sign of these apps gaining traction.

Similarly, tons of new AI-generated eBooks & songs, also gaining no traction. Look, you want to be a writer, or a songwriter, do the work, write stories, write songs. Don't fucking use GenAI! Incredibly, I'm guessing > 80% of human beings recognize AI slop & reject it. If you want to be a content creator, do the work. hone your skills, fuck AI.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #128.

The Slow Motion Car Crash Continues

Finally got my review/summary of "Bullshit Jobs: a Theory" published! Yay!

Meanwhile, 11 links & 1 anecdote have piled up! I apologize for not doing better keeping up.

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From 404Media (1st of a few):

New Study Reveals the Manipulative ‘Dark Patterns’ of AI Chatbots

A new study by the Center for Democracy & Technology shows how chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Replika and more can lead users down paths they didn't intend.

What, you thought chatbots were your friend? Their only purpose is to turn you into an addict, aka, a revenue stream for their masters.

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From Gary Marcus (1st of a few):

What happens next, after the decline of tokenmaxxing?

Two very different sets of predictions

Wow, "tokenmaxxing" didn't last long, did it? We 1st encountered it April 26. All it took to make it go away was 1 AI company starting to charge for its services. Oops!

---

Gary Marcus again:

The Pope appears to understand AI better than Geoffrey Hinton does.

What a thing says doesn’t tell you how it came to say it

Hinton was identified here as a bad guy.

---

404Media again:

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI.

---

Again, 404Media:

Nvidia and Microsoft Researchers Say AI Agents Don't Care About Safety or Reliability

The researchers compared AI to the near-sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo, who can’t see he’s stumbling through dangerous situations.

---

Gary Marcus again:

Why things will eventually fall apart

The math, and the psychology

Man, the #s just don't even vaguely work. How long can the industry continue to be propped up?

---

From DSHR's (David Rosenthal) Blog:

AI's PR Problem

This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss, Eric Schmidt, why he and his ilk are getting booed at college commencements, and why laws against data centers are getting passed.

...

On average, for more than the students' entire lives, stock-owners like Schmidt and (to a much lesser extent) I have stolen every last drop of the productivity increase of US workers at every age and education level. ...

Now, the perpetrators of this theft are telling their victims, the students and the public at large, that whether they like it or not they will be subjected to AI because that will make the perpetrators even richer.

---

404Media again:

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

Hmmm, addiction seems to be a recurring theme ...

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From The Steward's Role blog, by Dean (@deanwbates):

I’m Good at AI. I Use AI. And I Gotta Tell You: Something Is Really Fucking Wrong Here.

Fuck where do I even start?

I'll start by answering his question. My answer: QUIT USING FUCKING AI IN YOUR WRITING!

He talks about how, GenAI is a great tool (true), & he is controlling AI, it is not controlling him. His guard is always up. But, still, using AI is changing his writing style. Duh. We discovered Semantic Ablation in February.

Is this actually a parody? This whole article, with interminable lists, reeks of AI. The majority of the comments declare the piece to be AI written.

It reminds me of using cocaine. I haven't done that for > 50 years, but, for a while I tried it. It quickly became evident, I wasn't in control - the cocaine was. So I completely gave it up, 1973 or so.

This guy is an addict who cannot recognize that the drug, GenAI, is in control, not him. Only thing for him is to quit cold turkey - quit deluding himself. If this is not just some sort of parody.

I'm not a great writer, but I think I'm OK. I think I have a recognizable (human) style: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), the Bill & Ted movies, & MST3K. Why would I possibly want to use GenAI? Why would I want my rough edges sanded off (Semantic Ablation)? Why would I want my writing to sound like everyone else's?

---

Again, 404Media:

Watch These Judges Rip Into Lawyers For Citing Cases That Don't Exist

“It's striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening to think that members of the bar would forward cases to a court that don't exist, and to think that the lawyers on the other side of that didn’t read it for whatever reason, didn’t check it.”

I actually watched the videos, the judges vaguely chide the lawyers, but nothing too bad IMO. They could have done a 5-10x stronger job of raking these dumbass lawyers over the coals. No mention of GenAI culpability.

---

404Media yet again:

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Google’s CEO says 75% of the company’s code is AI-generated. The people who write that code say the AI they’re using is overhyped.

---

Finally our anecdote. Wednesday I lunched with an former (2 decades ago) coworker, now in his early 40s. He was always 1 of our best UI guys. Over the years he has come to have a good feel for backend processing & database design as well.

He was management for a while, didn't like it, preferred to be a developer. His manager got promoted upstairs, he got a new manager he didn't like much. Shortly after that, he got another new manager, whom he liked even less. This 1 announced "Everyone should use AI as much as possible. you will be rated on your token usage."

But, business was down, my friend got a minimal raise & a minimal bonus, but had a decent bank account balance, so he decided to quit & take a hiatus.

He's incorporated an LLC to do consulting work. He loves GenAI - "I can give it detailed enough instructions that it will generally do a pretty good job. So I can be a 1-man-show developing complete systems."

I have agreed GenAI is a powerful tool for creatives. Particularly, as in this case, a creative with 2 decades of experience, on several complex systems.

Hmmm, I searched & got nothing, then actually manually reviewed the 125 posts I have done on the Bullshit Apocalypse. This is a thing I love about having 23 years of blogging, that I can go back & review, in depth, my thoughts. I was looking for a reference to someone more reputable than myself (i.e., anyone) espousing the following:

Companies seem to be following a strategy of replacing entry-level positions with GenAI.

But, is this not eating the seed corn?

I believe my friend, with 20 years experience, (or my designer daughter, the same age), can use that experience to instruct Claude Code to build a working system.

But, if the entry-level positions go away, replaced by GenAI, where does the next generation of experienced developers come from?

This is the road to the downward spiral, to Degenerative AI. No more brains to eat, oops!

I lunched today with another developer friend of decades. He uses Claude Code everyday & loves it. He just yesterday, for the 1st time, exceeded the tokens his $100/month subscription gave him - oops!

But, again, he's a developer with 20 years or more experience. He's not vibe coding. He's using a tool, &, I'm sure, reviewing every line of code Claude is giving him. Can vibe coders do that? I doubt it.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #127.

Palaces of the Crow

"Palaces of the Crow", by Ray Nayler, 2026, 384 pages, 81k words.

After giving us a novel about an intelligent species of octopus, Nayler gives us a a novel about an intelligent species of crows. Yay corvids! Probably my 2 most favorite non-human intelligent species.

The story is set from the 1930s to the 1970s. The main characters are 4 young people trying to survive World War II & its aftermath in southern Lithuania. A Jewish girl, daughter of doctors; a Roma girl; a Polish boy who had been sent to Siberia & then drafted into the Russian army; and a young mute boy. They form a deep relationship with each other, but also with the huge murder of intelligent crows, who help them to survive.

One subtext running through this story I found quite timely: they talk often about the senses & non-verbal communications - gestures, sighs, touches, screams - which are shared by humans & other animal species. 1 of the characters later in life publishes a book "The Unnamed Senses".

I find this timely because meanwhile, as the Bullshit Apocalypse proceeds, we have literature professor types proclaiming the victory of Semiotics & Literary Theory in the form of the Semiotic Zombie LLMs. These are creatures of nothing but words. Forget any other senses, unnammed or not. I think this book takes issue with that.

This book was a nice length, I finished it the day after I started it.