Music In, 2025, Q4

Following my Music In processing algorithm, I'm starting this post October 20, and will maintain it as the quarter progresses. I will be processing Q4 for a good bit longer. I'm back in KY & I don't get to listen to music near as much as I do in FL.

1. Ethel Lindsey, "Pretty Close", 2025, 8 tracks, BandCamp. Out of Paris. Who knew neo-Motown had moved from London to Paris? Very nice tunes. Ethel sure looks like a man in this video. There are references to she/her when you DuckDuckGo the name. Pictures have the same hairdo but no mustache & beard. Maybe somebody just goofing with "AI"? Regardless, good stuff, 4 stars. Here's "Together Again".

2. Werkha, "Unsung Irregular", 2025, 11 tracks, BandCamp. As usual, this is some good work by Tom Werkha, out of Manchester. 4 stars. This is definitely a catchy track, "Everyday (featuring Ríoghnach Connolly)".

3. Sudan Archive, "The BPM", 2025, 15 tracks, BandCamp. Out of LA. Violin. Some pretty compelling stuff. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "DEAD".

4. Magic Sam, "1957-1966 (West Side Guitar)", 1966, 21 tracks. Via my friend harpist Owen. Magic Sam died in 1969 of a sudden heart attack. OK blues. I will give "Roll Your Money Maker" 4 stars for an energetic call/answer with the band. 3 stars for the rest.

5. Magic Sam, "Black Magic", 1968, 18 tracks. OK blues. 3 stars for this as well.

6. Oscar Moore, "The 1945-1965 Years", 3 CDs, 28 + 28 + 25 tracks. Oscar Moore (1916-1981) was the main guitarist of the Nat King Cole Trio. He also played with several other people, and had his own trio. Here's the current overlaps with the Jaz Dumoz songbook:
   • A Foggy Day
   • Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You
   • The Christmas Song
   • Fine and Dandy
   • Too Marvelous For Words
   • The Nearness Of You
   • April In Paris
   • I Can't Give You Anything But Love

   So I'll give those 4 stars, to hear his leads on them, & the rest 3 stars.

   Here's "April in Paris".

7. The Weather Station, "Airport & Only The Truth", 2025, 2 tracks, BandCamp. Out of Toronto. Very tasty female harmonies. Too bad it's only 2 tracks. 4 stars. Here's "Airport".

8. Lucius, "At the End of the Day", 2025, 3 tracks, BandCamp. Lucius has been confusing me lately. 2 tracks here, 3 tracks there. Maybe just an issue of $$$. They continue to reliably produce good pop tunes. 4 stars. Here's the title track.

9. The Paul deLay Band, "Heavy Rotation", 2001, 14 tracks, from Owen. This is a hard-working, modern blues band. A lot of good variety in the tunes. 4 stars. Here's "I'll Quit You Tomorrow", with a catchy signature lick & groove.

10. Juana Molina, "DOGA", 2025, 11 tracks, BandCamp. From Argentina. Why does it take Argentina to remind me what it was to be a hippy? Hmmm, I think I was erroneously conflating Juana Molina with Os Mutantes, a 1970s Brazilian psychedelic band. Molina started recording in the mid-90's. She's 64 YO now.

    Assimilating this new music has obviously been taking a while - it's 4 months after the end of 2025, Q4. But, this is the album of all of these I am still enjoying listening to the most. Go figure. 4 stars.

    Here's the 1st 2 tracks off of the album.

11. Victoria Port, "Barefoot in the Garden", 2025, 5 tracks, BandCamp. I continue to like these chill R&B tracks. 4 stars. Here's "Don't Let Me Fall".

12. the Mountain Goats, "Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan", 2025, 12 tracks, BandCamp. This is like a rock opera. The opening track sounds overture-ish. It feels like a modern Broadway musical - mostly ugh. 3 stars.

13. Lucius, "New Old Tape", 2025, 2 tracks, BandCamp. More Lucius confusion. OK, the last 3 track EP had a song "Old Tape". This 2 track EP has a song "New Old Tape". Well, let's hear it. Hmmm, sounds the same as "Old Tape"????? 4 stars. There should be a deduction for confusion. Here's "New Old Tape".

14. Murder By Death, "The End (Egg & Dart Bonus Tracks)", 2025, 6 tracks, BandCamp. I have formed the impression that every song on this album is in a minor key. I mentioned before, I don't find slow songs sad, but minor key songs I sometimes do find sad. Not really so much here, but, still, it is a bunch of minor key songs. 3 stars.

15. Royce Wood Junior, "Penny Ballads", 2025, 5 tracks, BandCamp. How long has it been since Prince died? Oh fuck, April 21 was the 10th anniversary of his death. When he died, I was dumbfounded. He was clearly an immortal avatar of some kind, neh?

    It seems long overdue that somebody would try to fill that immense void. A few of these tracks definitely sound Prince-ish; others don't, but are also very good. Kind of sorry this is only 5 tracks. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Clean Up".

16. David Byrne feat. Ghost Train Orchestra, "Who is The Sky?", 2025, 12 tracks, BandCamp. This is a very David Byrne album. Solid songs, quirky topics & lyrics. But, it seems like just more of the same of his recent albums. No standout track. Shockingly, I quickly got tired of listening to it. ?!?!? I had heard it, or its equivalent, before. ?!?!? 3 stars.

17. William Tyler, "Behold The Spirit", 2010, 9 tracks, BandCamp. The 3rd of his albums I've acquired. Very listenable guitar rock. Similar to the others, which were rated 3 stars. So ...

18. Redeye, "Stacks, 2025, 26 tracks, BandCamp. Redeye is a producer out of Toulouse, France. His last effort was very laid back, maybe too laid back. This one is "A collection of Beats, Loops and Edits" - most (well) under 2 minutes. Ahh, music for people with a short attention span. I think I'm going to like it. Since the tracks were so short, I did not pay $1/track, I went for $0.50/track: €11 for the 26 tracks.

    I enjoy listening to this, but, nothing stands out. So, 3 stars.

19. Various Artists, "Two Syllables Volume 22", 2025, 11 tracks. A free sampler from London record label First Word Records. From this label, I'm already following: Kaidi Tatham, Victoria Port, Allysha Joy, Children of Zeus. Amanda Whiting I don't care for.

    New artists:

    • Georgie Sweet. I think worth listening to. I'll watch for her releases. First Word will help. 4 stars. Here's "I Swear To You".

    • Myele Manzanza. Violin. Strong rhythms & melodic lines, nice! 4 stars. Here's "Absent Fade". Oops, pretty damn jazzy.

    • Ruby Wood. Surprisingly white. Nice tune. 4 stars. Here's "Let Him Go".

    So 4 stars for these new artists, 2 stars for the artists I'm already following (because I already have the tracks on an album), 3 stars for the rest.

Phew! Did a little push to get this published, I'm happy to be pointing people at such good music. But, getting harder & harder to keep up. Old age? Surely not!

Ooh, just checked, only 12 albums in 2026, Q1! Yay! I'll be slacking!

The Faith of Beasts

"The Faith of Beasts", James S. A. Corey, 2025, 448 pages, 128k words. Book 2 of "The Captive's War".

I blogged on the 1st book in this series here. In the Expanse series, which was so successful for these guys, they covered a lot of ground over the course of the series. Several different sci-fi tropes were pulled up.

So I'm curious if that will happen with this new series. The 2nd book in this series pretty much stays in the same lane as the 1st book. We learn more about the alien empire & their enemies. There are some interesting ideas here.

The ending of this book was somewhat anticlimactic. Well, 2nd books do tend to be transitionary. I enjoyed the read, & a 448 page book was good after 632 & 624 pagers. I'll definitely read the next book.

Incompetence & Thievery

Hah! I wrote the post title yesterday, reflecting the latest generative AI articles. I came back today & thought "Is this a post about the Orange Turd's administration?" So, correlation or causation? This is definitely the Golden Age of Grifting.

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My wife used to watch "House" on TV. The ace diagnostician usually was able to get the right diagnosis in only 4-5 tries!

So maybe it's OK that genAI chatbots are wrong 1/2 the time on medical questions. From Gary Marcus:

Please don’t trust your chatbot for medical advice

Four separate studies all point in the same direction

...

All of this – the hallucinations, mistakes, and overconfidence – is entirely typical of LLMs, and entirely problematic in medicine. As the authors put it, in somewhat academic language, but entirely accurately, “continued deployment without public education and oversight risks amplifying misinformation.”

...

In a recurring theme, we see that LLMs don’t know what they don’t know; they work decently well with the information they’ve got but don’t know how to conduct clinical interviews, and in the hands of the lay public can easily give bad advice because the proper questions never get asked, either by the patient or the LLMs. (An expert doctor might use the LLM to better effect, by asking the right questions.)

Yves Smith of "naked capitalism" comments on the 1st study:

Half of AI Health Answers Are Wrong Even Though They Sound Convincing – New Study

It is telling that despite this article describing the abjectly awful performance of AI chatbots that it still gives a ritual defense of their use.

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Now for the thievery. From 404 media:

This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright

Malus, which is a piece of satire but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell software without crediting the original developers.

This is really shitty. Open source software has been responsible for so much advancement. Most projects are kept afloat by a very small number of dedicated individuals, working for the common good & for the love of code.

But Doctorow weighed in on this, saying that it's really not that big a deal, because this "new" software, being AI-produced, cannot be copyrighted.

The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software:

You can't add ANY license to a public domain work.

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This last is just sad. From 404 media:

Startups Brag They Spend More Money on AI Than Human Employees

A new class of AI startups say they are taking money that would normally be used to hire people and are spending it on AI compute instead.

...

Startup CEOs who are “tokenmaxxing” are bragging that they are spending more money on AI compute than it would cost to hire human workers. Astronomical AI bills are now, in a certain corner of the tech world, a supposed marker of growth and success.

...

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are losing tons of cash on their products; even though artificial intelligence compute is expensive, it is underpriced for what it actually costs, and it’s not clear how long investors in frontier AI companies are going to be willing to subsidize those losses. Meanwhile, we have reported endlessly on “workslop” and the human cleanup that is often needed when AI-written code, AI-generated work, and customer-facing AI products go awry. There are also numerous horror stories of AI getting caught in a loop and burning thousands of dollars worth of tokens on what end up being completely useless tasks. Regardless, there’s an entirely new class of entrepreneur who seems hell-bent on “hiring” AI employees, not human ones.

Of course there's a word for it: "tokenmaxxing". This sure does remind me of other tech bubbles. I still cringe when I hear the word "pivot".

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #118.

Navola

"Navola", by Paolo Bacigalupi, 2024, 632 pages, 196k words.

Paolo writes very well, and heretofore was IMO one of our best climate fiction authors. I lost track of this novel somehow, it has been on my iPad a while, I'm not sure why I didn't get to it sooner.

This novel is definitely a change of pace. It is a fantasy set in a world reminiscent of di Medici Italy & Europe - the names are Italianish.

This is Machiavelli on steroids. It definitely follows Game of Thrones character handling guidelines, and has the expected body counts.

In the Acknowledgements, Paolo says this story came about when someone requested a story about a dragon. There is indeed a dragon in the story, but a very different & abstract type of dragon.

The book is definitely a page turner. I'm guessing there will be a sequel. We'll see, fingers crossed, I think.

Empire in Black and Gold

"Empire in Black and Gold", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2008, 624 pages, 194k words. Book 1 of 10 in the "Shadows of the Apt" series.

I have repeatedly mentioned how much I enjoy Tchaikovsky's work. I'm not sure why I bought this book, I'm guessing BookBub offered it to me for $1.99 or so.

This is quite a tome - 624 pages. Plot synopsis:

The world is populated by humans who are divided into races based on insect species they assimilated DNA from? Or? Clearly fantasy.

Each has different superpowers - Art that they can practice. Many species can conjure wings & fly. Insect species include:

• Ants - they are great warriors, & telepathic;
• Beetles - the engineers & merchants;
• Flies - the fastest fliers, very popular as messengers;
• Moths - they ruled everything until 500 years ago, when beetles & others became Apt: tech-savvy. Some races are Apt, others not, they cannot deal with tech at all;
• Mantises - the ultimate warriors, enforcers for the Moths;
• Dragonflies - non-Apt species living to the north;
• Wasps - the bad guys, imperialists knocking off other races' cities 1 by 1. All males are soldiers, enslaved races are tasked with the normal work of keeping their civilization running. Their superpower is shooting energy bolts from their palms - their "sting";
• Scorpions - desert dwellers;
• Various other species, some legendary.

So we follow a group of 4 college students, members of a fencing team put together by a beetle spymaster trying to wake cities up to the danger of the ever-encroaching wasps:

1. the spymaster's plain, nerdy niece ward, a beetle (Velma);
2. the spymaster's non-niece ward, a gorgeous ant hybrid (Daphne);
3. a dragonfly exchange student (Fred);
4. a beetle hybrid engineering geek (Shaggy).

OK, I'm sorry, but I couldn't help but get this totally mapped to Scooby-Doo! KMN.

The plotting is great, the characters are great (even the Scooby-Doo ones), the action is non-stop. The conclusion is satisfying, even though, yes, 9 sequels are looming. Tchaikovsky wrote 2 in 2009, 2010, 2011; 1 in 2012, 2013, 2014.

But 1 thing bothered me the whole time I was reading this. The various insect-friend subspecies of humans were referred to as "races" repeatedly. Is this not racist?

Level 1 racism is discriminating for or against people based on their race. This is now universally reviled, yes?

But, from what I have read - I think primarily David Graeber "Debt - the First 5000 Years" - race is not a scientific concept. It is a political concept, invented around the 17th century to justify the arbitrary enslavement of Africans.

In Rome, anyone could be a slave - it had nothing to do with "race". There were only a few ways one could become a slave: as a prisoner of war; being sold as a slave by one's parents; selling one's self into slavery.

So level 0 racism is believing that there is such a thing as race. It is not a concept in biology or genetics. There is only 1 race: the human race. All humans can interbreed & produce non-sterile offspring. It is mostly impossible to identify "race" analyzing human DNA. Science!

So in this book, by identifying different insect-aligned "races" - who can all appearently interbreed, meaning, by definition, that they are the same species - is racism being promoted?

If we go back to the wellspring of fantasy, Tolkien, he had "races": humans, elves, dwarves, wizards, orcs. They were the same species, yes, they could all interbreed? But, elves were immortal, humans not - halfbreeds not.

"Halfbreed" - what an offensive term. Humans breed with humans to produce more humans.

So I don't know what to make of this. We all want to oppose level 1 racism, but, somehow, we let level 0 racism slide? I'm not sure at all where I'm going with this? Maybe some bright young writer at tor.com or such will figure out what I am trying to say?

This book was very enjoyable, totally a page-turner. Tchaikovsky did not disappoint. But, I think I'm going to put the next 9 volumes on hold for the forseeable future. So I got that going for me now.

Are We Done?

I am so onboard with almost all of Cory Doctorow's analyses. This recent post of his touches on so many relevant points.

Last night I talked to a guy who was a huge AI cheerleader. I would rate him an intellectual lightweight - exactly the type that likes "AI". They can generate bullshit that makes them sound like a heavyweight!

Doctorow gives me moral support in opposing the Bullshit Apocalypse. Hmmm, I hadn't heard that Leon Skunk was proposing a Dyson sphere around our sun for the express purpose of powering "AI". Barf.

AGI isn't enough for the hardcore techbros, they want ASI - Artificial Super-Intelligence. The title of this post echoes Doctorow's question: when do you determine that you have wasted enough resources & energy on an unattainable goal?

I'm including a pretty big chunk here, it does not do justice to Doctorow's analysis. Go read it, please.

A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers

Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

In short, I worry that AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

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From NYT News Service/Syndicate Stories, via the Lexington Herald-Leader:

How Accurate are Google's AI Overviews?

A recent analysis of AI Overviews found that they were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times.

I don't think we can live with a 9% error rate. & I don't think that "autocomplete on steroids" is ever going to improve on that much.

Google search is now basically a front-end for Google's LLM, Gemini. All your queries are belong to us, to train our AI! I'm so glad I've switched to DuckDuckGo & Kagi!

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From the people formerly known as AI Snake Oil, a framework for evaluating AIs. It includes a review of current capabilities, a very mixed report.

Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities

Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #117.

Human Beings Are Weak

So, chatbots excel at blowing smoke up the ass of their users, &, guess what! Human beings love having smoke blown up their asses! Who would have guessed it? From Bruce Schneier:

AI Chatbots and Trust

All the leading AI chatbots are sycophantic, and that’s a problem:

Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically ­ they couldn’t tell the difference between sycophantic and objective responses. Both felt equally “neutral” to them.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Welcome to the Bullshit Apocalypse!

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #116.

We Have A Winner: "Just More Bullshit Hype"

Looking back at my last post "Mythos: Threat, Menace, or Just More Bullshit Hype?", we have a winner: "Just More Bullshit Hype". From Gary Marcus (as usual):

Three reasons to think that the Claude Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown

No need to panic just yet

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Next, from me, an anecdote. I flew up last Thursday to visit my son & his family in Cary, NC. There didn't used to be any non-stop flights - there may be now, on Breeze Airways - my return flight was non-stop, RDU to RSW (Fort Myers FL). I usually flew on American, changing planes in Charlotte, NC, but the layover was only 40 minutes, &, in my increasing aversion to any drama, I decided to fly Delta through Atlanta, w a 2.5 hr layover. I had lunch at a nice piano bar, really good player. Nice spinach salad.

Waiting to board in Fort Myers, they called for carry-on bags to be gate checked through to your final destination. I'm like, sure, I'm happy to not have to fool with my bag in Atlanta airport.

In Atlanta, after my very nice lunch, I'm waiting to board. I'm in zone 6. They're boarding zone 4 & they announce, "All overhead bins are full, all carry-on bags must be gate checked." So I'm glad I did it in Fort Myers.

I get on the plane, the overhead bins are 2/3 empty!!! I ask a flight crew member, "Why did they say these were full?". They replied, "A computer algorithm determines when we make that announcement."

Seriously, WTF! Somebody using AI? For something involving physical things in the physical world? LLMs aren't good at anything but words.

We are going to see more & more of this, systems that are completely crappy, that don't work as often as they do, or more often than they do. LLMs, FTL! I feel that there is maybe a 50% probability that LLM use will eventually shut down large parts of the economy. Time frame, 2-3 years.

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Another anecdote from me, on a more general bullshit topic. I made a little progress on my review/summary of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs". Spoiler alert: my current working conclusion is that "Bullshit Jobs" is bullshit - a monument to selection bias.

So I was chatting with an early 30 YO manager of a team of financial analysts working for a large insurance company. Graeber identified financial analysts as having a job that was usually bullshit. I asked them "Do you have a bullshit job?"

They replied (paraphasing):

No I don't think I have a bullshit job. I think we produce some useful results.

But, do I have to deal with tons of corporate bullshit? Of course I do! I work for a big corporation, the bigger the corporation, the more corporate bullshit you have to deal with.

So maybe "Bullshit Jobs" isn't a problem with jobs, it's a problem with corporations. Per Doctorow, corporations are "immortal colony organisms that treat human beings alternately as a source of nutrients or a form of inconvenient gut flora." Surprising that working in such an environment involves mass quantities of bullshit - NOT!

The young analyst also told me, they were under a lot of pressure to try & integrate LLMs into their workflows. Any pushback on this was treated as recidivism, & was severely career-limiting.

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Finally, more from Gary Marcus. Claude Code may implement old school AI! FTW!

The biggest advance in AI since the LLM

Why Claude Code changes everything

...

The source code leak proves it. Tucked away at its center is a 3,167 line kernel called print.ts.

print.ts is a pattern matching. And pattern matching is supposed to be the *strength* of LLMs.

But Anthropic figured out that if you really need to get your patterns right, you can’t trust a pure LLM. They are too probabilistic. And too erratic.

Instead, the way Anthropic built that kernel is straight out of classical symbolic AI. For example, it’s in large part a big IF-THEN conditional, with 486 branch points and 12 levels of nesting — all inside a deterministic, symbolic loop that the real godfathers of AI, people like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky and Herb Simon, would have instantly recognized.

Putting things differently, Anthropic, when push came to shove, went exactly where I have said for 25 years that the field needed to go: to Neurosymbolic AI.

That’s right, the biggest advance since the LLM is neurosymbolic. AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, AlphaProof, and AlphaGeometry are all neurosymbolic, too; so is Code Interpreter; when you are calling code, you are asking symbolic AI to do an important part of the work.

So, there is more to getting real, working AI than the statistical "autocomplete-on-steriods" LLMs? Well, DUH!

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Mythos: Threat, Menace, or Just More Bullshit Hype?

So Antropic has a new model named Mythos, which apparently is good at finding defects in code. They are delaying its release, & giving a prerelease to all the tech biggies, so they can attempt to get their codebases fixed up. In the hands of hackers, it is feared to be a major chaos agent. From Gary Marcus:

What should we take from Anthropic’s (possibly) terrifying new report on Mythos?

Everybody’s talking about Anthropic’s new but unreleased model Mythos (and the related Project Glasswing) and how it might undermine or even devastate cybersecurity.

The New York Times has a similar take. DuckDuckGo "Antropic Mythos", every tech outlet has a story.

Anthropic Claims Its New A.I. Model, Mythos, Is a Cybersecurity ‘Reckoning’

The company said on Tuesday that it was holding back on releasing the new technology but was working with 40 companies to explore how it could prevent cyberattacks.

I guess this is laudable of Antropic. But, on the other hand, the last couple of years have conditioned me to wonder, how much of this is just more bullshit marketing hype?

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No Man's Land

"No Man's Land", by Richard K. Morgan, 2026, 496 pages. Hmmm, 2 books in a row of 496 pages?!?!?

I have greatly enjoyed Morgan's prior work, I just wish there had been more of it. But, he has also done gaming & screenplay things, so fewer novels.

I think I had already read the start of this novel before. It is after WWI. The depravity & destruction of this war destroyed faith in scientific rationalism. In it's place, the old forests spring back into being overnight, populated by various kinds of fae, including totally bad-ass immortals, led by 6000 YO Queen Mab.

Our hero is a WWI veteran who has become a Woodsman. He rescues human children kidnapped by the fae & replaced by changelings. Kind of a good cheap detective noir feel, as he becomes embroiled in intrigue involving the highest levels of the British government & the fae.

Very gritty, very cheap detective noirish. Definitely a page turner. I think this will be a series, there's lots more ways he can go with this.

Children of Strife

"Children of Strife", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2026, 496 pages, 170k words. Book 4 of the Children of Time series.

I think I have mentioned a few times that Tchaikovsky is my fav new hard sci fi author of the last decade or so. The Children of Time series is my favorite of all he has done. Uplifted hunter spiders, octopuses, corvids, mantis shrimp, plus a sentient bacteria with atomic level storage. What's not to like?

That said, I think book 4 is my least favorite of the series. We don't get a new cool species to enjoy. We get a tale told across 3 eras, with 3 different groups of people. It's a fairly long book, I thought it dragged a bit in the middle. The conclusion is well done & satifying.

I would guess he will continue this series? Presumably it sells pretty well? There are lots of different directions he could head in. I guess we'll see.

Now That is Some Bullshit!

1st up, from John Kwarsick:

The Machine That Can't Explain Itself

Why AI adoption is outrunning accountability and what happens when the auditors arrive

From 2024 to 2025, the Foundation Model Transparency Index published by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI dropped from 58/100 to 40/100. Oops.

In my very 1st anti-LLM rant, I described LLMs as "indecipherable oracles" - I don't see how that's going to change.

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This next I find almost unbelievable. LLMs will tell you what's in an image without seeing the image?!?!? They just confabulate what's likely to be in the image?!?!? Holy crap, now that's some bullshit! From Gary Marcus:

The mirage of visual understanding in current frontier models

When a model achieves a “top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images” you know something is deeply wrong.

Marcus is reporting a research paper just released by Stanford:

MIRAGE: The Illusion of Visual Understanding

First, Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided; we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning. Second, without any image input, models also attain strikingly high scores across general and medical multimodal benchmarks, bringing into question their utility and design. In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images. Third, when models were explicitly instructed to guess answers without image access, rather than being implicitly prompted to assume images were present, performance declined markedly.

Another great new term in the dream world of LLM hallucinations: "mirage reasoning".

This tech is clearly NOT ready for prime time, but, $T invested, tough shit. You will take your bullshit sandwich & enjoy eating it, nom-nom!

I've downloaded the PDF from arxiv, reading through it, it's scary but also LOL. I shouldn't laugh, the Bullshit Apocalypse is not funny, but laughter has always been a part of what keeps me sane. So, laugh, dumbass, laugh!

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Yay! Wow, 2 Yays in a Row! The Tide Is Turning!

A big YAY yesterday, another big YAY today! The tide is turning (or not). From the most excellent 404 Media:

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content

“In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”

1 of the worst things? The worst thing? About AI slop is, it overwhelms human capabilities to fact check, edit, stave off the Bullshit Apocalypse. Wikipedia has totally done the right thing. Just shut the slop out completely. Kudos.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #112.

Yay! Disney Bails On OpenAI-Generated Slop Video

After only 3 months, Disney bails on a $1B investment in OpenAI to allow anyone to create slop videos using Disney characters. The concept was apparently a lead zeppelin. From 404 Media:

Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood

It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #111.

Notably Mixed Results

1st, a tale of woe, from The Leadership Lighthouse:

I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.

My all-in AI experiment cost me my confidence

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The company gets excited about AI. Leadership mandates AI adoption. Everyone starts using AI tools. Productivity metrics look great initially. Then something breaks, or needs modification, or requires actual judgment, and nobody knows what to do anymore.

The developers can’t debug code they didn’t write. Product managers can’t explain decisions they didn’t make. Leaders can’t defend strategies they didn’t develop.

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Next, a good review of the state of things. Interesting that he picks Yann LeCun as "the voice of sobriety about AI in today’s world". LeCun was a major "AGI soon" cheerleader until fairly recently. Ditto for Geoffrey Hinton, also profiled in the article, still a cheerleader to my knowledge. From PhD computer scientist David William Silva:

I'm Sorry to Burst Your Bubble: You Are Being Fooled About AI, and You Will Soon Feel Really Stupid

The overall inability to distinguish what is real from what is fake is fueling the frisson.

This I had not heard before, but it is very believable & a matter for concern:

And here is what I’ve found: every time I had an idea that was genuinely outside the box, AI discouraged me from pursuing it. When I persisted, it didn’t just push back, it practically begged me to stop. To not continue. To not insist.

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3rdly, from 404 Media, a link to a website dedicated to exposing hype:

Ridicule as Praxis (with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna)

Why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes us hopeful for the future.

Here's the website:

The Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast

“deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call ‘artificial intelligence’.”

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Finally, some good news! Generative AI problems solved! A guest article from the AWS blog:

Overcoming LLM hallucinations in regulated industries: Artificial Genius’s deterministic models on Amazon Nova

Artificial Genius uses SageMaker AI to perform a specific form of instruction tuning on Amazon Nova base models.

This patented method effectively removes the output probabilities. While standard solutions attempt to ensure determinism by lowering the temperature to zero (which often fails to address the core hallucination issue), Artificial Genius post-trains the model to tilt log-probabilities of next-token predictions toward absolute ones or zeros. This fine-tuning forces the model to follow a single system instruction: don’t make up answers that don’t exist.

This creates a mathematical loophole where the model retains its genius-level understanding of data but operates with the safety profile required for finance and healthcare.

The authors state that this approach is much better than RAG, which was already supposed to fix hallucinations. I guess we'll see. Like RAG, it looks like after-the-fact bubble gum & duct tape to me.

The primary author is Paul Burchard, PhD, "Founder and Partner of Artificial Genius". He has an interesting resume.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #110.

Wendig Triples Down

I think that most excellent sci-fi author Chuck Wendig has an attitude towards generative AI at least as negative as mine. In fact, his attitude is probably much more negative than mine because, as a professional author, he has serious skin in the game. He doubled down on AI-bashing in December, he now triples down.

Shy Girl, AI In Writing, And A New Perniciousness

I am against AI because it steals our work, which it then uses to steal our jobs, which it further uses to steal our water and our electricity.

Which is to say, it is here to steal our future.

So, I’m against it! It sucks moist open ass.

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And don’t use the AI slop-shitting artbarf techbro bullshit.

Wendig's post talks about "The Terminator" movie & includes a pic, which I have copied. Who doesn't like a pic of a terminator walking through fire?

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From The Register, which appears to now be a part of MSN?

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Codestrap founders say we need to dial down the hype and sort through the mess

Note, most of the content of this article comes from an interview with "Dorian Smiley, co-founder and CTO of AI advisory service Codestrap", who I'm gonna guess is selling something. The content is decent. But still, capitalism FTL or FTW, you decide.

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From MindPrison:

How Verifier Loops Made AI Coding Useful | The Rise of Vibeware, Abandonware and Technical Debt as Consequence

How did unintelligent, hallucinating AI progress from nearly useless to writing entire, complex applications and at what cost?

This is a long article, lots of good news, bad news. Despite the positive headline, I'm going to posit that the bad news outweighs the good news. For example:

“Vibe Coding makes you 10x faster at making 10x more technical debt.” — Franziska Hinkelmann, PhD

From the 80s on, we called it "maintenance debt", not technical debt. Same thing. Writing the software is not the hard part, handing it off & maintaining it is.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #109.

Now That's Some Bullshit!

From Cory Doctorow, the Bard of the Revolution & creator of the term "enshittification", some ruminations on the nature of words & bullshit, particularly corporate bullshit. Not particularly AI related for a change. Includes a very good definition of bullshit.

Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network.

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Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug.

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Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it.

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Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."

Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).

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From Rolling Stone:

The Military Is Ramping Up AI. Experts Say It’s Putting Civilians — and Troops — At Risk

A new report raises serious concerns with how few guardrails there are for advanced weaponry, as the Department of Defense demands billions for these systems.

Of course our current kakistrocacy is going all-in for Generative AI. From my recent title "Who wants AI?", how do the categories listed apply to the Orange Turd's administration?

• The Greedy - check;
• the Gullible - having a whole administration who believes our liar-in-chief unquestioningly goes beyond gullible;
• the Ignorant - yes;
• the Incompetent - definitely;
• the Lazy - of course. They follow the lead of their leader, who won't read briefings, or anything for that matter.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #108.

Say It Ain't So, Rick!

I stumbled across Rick Beato on YouTube I think a few years ago. He provides so much informative stuff about music, the music industry, & modernish music in general. His series, "What Makes This Song Great" was what I 1st ran into.

The 1st 1 I watched was on Steely Dan, "Kid Charlemagne". He deconstructs the Larry Carlton guitar solo in detail. So, if I ever wanted to play that solo, I could go to his video, & there is enough info there that I could learn to play that amazing solo note-for-note. (Not anytime soon.)

Given the highly negative effect of Generative AI on music, i.e., slop, Beato has been pretty negative on LLMs.

So I was completely shocked by his March 11 post. He makes a good point, but, I will not link to it. He enables LLM use, which is verboten to me.

The post was titled "How AI Will Fail Like The Music Industry".

His point was, before MacBooks & ProTools, GarageBand, etc., musicians had to use recording studios, which had $M of expensive gear to do recording, & charged artists $1000s/day to use this expensive gear.

After PCs/Macs got capable enough, everyone could do the same thing in their bedroom. & the recording studios pretty much went out of business.

He compares that to the current state of Generative AI. The big boys want you to use their online models, & of course, they will harvest everything you enter, to further train their models.

Meanwhile, Rick provides a place where you can download on your MacBook a piece of software that will run LLMs. & he provides a site where there are over 1M LLMs ready for you to download. So you can have your own, local, offline LLM. No sharing your life with OpenAI, Antropic, etc.

So he downloads an LLM. Then, look at the cool things you can do, on your completely local PC with no net connection:

1. You can say "here are the ingredients I have, what can I make for supper?"

2. You need to tell your boss that you need a day off, for an out-of-town dental procedure. So have AI generate an email.

Seriously? Seriously? Fuck this bullshit! I commented on the post in micro, I did not express my complete disappointment in Rick's implicit recommendation of Generative AI to do such stupid bullshit. Here's my comment:

1. Recipes is not the worst application for "autocomplete on steroids", but I certainly wouldn't trust it. Like when a chatbot recommended library paste as a substitution for mozzarella on pizza.

2. People are rapidly developing "written by AI" radar: the verbosity, the obsequience, the glibness, the bullshit make it easy to spot. I hate getting stuff written by AI. It is a waste of my time. If I were the guys' boss, I'd be pissed & tell him so.

I recently saw an estimate that LLMs generate "hallucinations" - aka wrong answers - about 10% of the time. You want to be stupidly wrong 10% of the time, go for it. No LLMs for me, thanks.

& don't get me started on a world smothered in AI-generated slop.

1 of the comments on his post sez that the environmentally catastrophic data centers will still be necessary, as that is where the LLMs are trained. & given that LLMs suck at extrapolating about anything outside of their training data, they are continously being retrained.

Crap, I see this in this blog again. Currently getting 7k hits/day, & I can guarantee you, that ain't people. It's training bots. Hunh, Singapore & Hong Kong down, now US & Brazil??? What do it mean?

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Duh, & again, duh. Fuck LLMs. From 404 Media:

Texting a Random Stranger Better for Loneliness Than Talking to a Chatbot, Study Shows

A newly published study of how college students interact with chatbots and human strangers showed talking to a random person offers more connection than an LLM.

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Again, from 404 Media:

AI Job Loss Research Ignores How AI Is Utterly Destroying the Internet

Widely cited AI labor research ignores the most important thing AI is doing: Killing the human internet.

So this serious research paper is from the completely trustable company Antropic, owner of the chatbot Claude, who continuously publishes marketoid hype bullshit, like "We don't know if Clause is conscious" -

oh, come on, please, spare us!

The Antropic article appears to be pretty lame. Shocker.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #107.

The Mills of the Gods

"The Mills of the Gods", by Tim Powers, 2025, 343 pages, 106k words.

This novel just came out late last year. It is vintage Powers: a pivotal time & place in history and well-known literary figures become involved in supernatural shenanigans. The time & place is 1920s Paris, the literary figures include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, & Pablo Picasso. The supernatural shenanigans involve 2 rival cults worshipping Roman empire-era pagan gods.

The characters are likeable, and as always, Powers has such a deft touch with the details & technologies of the supernatural foo. This was a great read, a definite page-turner.

AI Stands For "Actually Indians"

AI as "Actually Indians" was the AI in Amazon's Just Walk Out stores a couple of years ago. We now have another version. From 404 Media:

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

Yet another case where "AI" systems are actually underpaid & generally otherwise abused 3rd world workers. Again, we are living in the golden age of grifting.

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From Rolling Stone:

The Black Crowes Have No Time for AI Songwriting: ‘It’s Lazy Bullshit’

“Who the fuck are you, that you would walk around like you did something? You didn’t do shit,” singer Chris Robinson says on Nashville Now podcast.

I am a horribly frustrated songwriter (I am a decent arranger IMO). I can't imagine using Generative AI to make up for my lack of talent in that area. What would be the point of that?

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From the Bard of the Revolution, Cory Doctorow:

Three more AI psychoses

Everybody calm down.

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It's [chatbot] fully automated luxury QAnon – a self-baking conspiracy that harnesses an AI in service to driving you deeper and deeper into madness:

This is a highly nuanced look at the AI bubble. Definitely worth a read.

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I have now caught up on Bullshit Apocalypse articles!

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #106.