A Portrait of the Dumbass as an Old Man

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

"Solipsism All The Way Down" Doesn't Work

I finally invoked the "no starting any new book until you finish writing this" rule on my review/summary of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs - a Theory". Making great progress! Preface & 5 chapters done, only 2 chapters left!

I was hoping I could let Bullshit Apocalypse posts slide for just another couple of days & power through to the end, but, in only 2 days, 7 new posts to link to. On it.

1st up, as ever, Gary Marcus:

If enough other companies report the same, the bubble pops. 🫧
Breaking: “Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said he’s not seeing proportional productivity gains from increasing AI costs.”

Also reporting AI problems: Microsoft, Target, Starbucks.

Next, from Doc Searls, a very insightful preview of where the big web companies want to go with AI - it's not good.

From Losing the Web to Saving Us All
Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web.
With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which subverts and subordinates the Web.
Go to any of the Big AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta, whatever—and ask a question. If it pauses for a moment, there’s a good chance it’ll say “Searching the Web.”
But it’s not. It’s composing an answer synthesized from what it has harvested from the Web, plus a vast amount of other forms of ingested human expression. It may or may not point back to sources on the Web. And if it does, it’s only providing footnotes.

I've been blogging since 2003, I've always enjoyed including lots & lots of hyperlinks, to give readers avenues to explore & learn more. It really sucks that they are trying to kill that.

If they kill the web like this, it means the LLMs are stuck. No new brains to eat. A steady downward spiral into Degenerative AI. As I really liked from 1 of the links in my prior post, "A slow-motion car crash."

This is a really, really informative article. Definitely a must-read.

From Henry Farrell's blog, Programable Mutter:

AI Isn't Management. Try Explaining That to Matthew Prince
At last we have created the Corporation That Eliminates Middle Managers from classic management text Don't Eliminate the Middle Managers!
...
Last Saturday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare wrote a self-congratulatory op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting his company was the only one in recorded business history to grow by 30% while laying off more than 20% of its employees. His message was that everyone needed to follow his example, by using AI to implement the True Wisdom of Revered Management Guru Peter Drucker.

The long & the short of it, Drucker felt middle managers were a critical part of any company. He would want AI to support middle managers, to help them help everyone do their job better.

The aptly named asshole "Prince" thinks that the role of middle managers is to inform the CEO, so he can decide who to fire. Wow, now he can use AI for that, & fire all the middle managers!

I guess we'll see how that goes. I predict systems whose performance continuously worsen, with no one able to put their finger on why.

This is a long article, but it is worth the read.

From Kottke - 1 of many good reviews of the pope's encyclical on AI. The Bishop of Rome is getting universally rave reviews.

Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

From Doctorow. Billionaires seem to be almost avatars of capitalism. They both want to get rid of those pesky workers. Billionaires want to live in a world where their god-like visions of the future can be implemented without involving those annoying human workers - particularly those from other countries with, gasp, darker skin colors!

This is why AI is getting crammed down our throats.

The world really, really doesn't need billionaires.

AI and a world without migrants
It's solipsism all the way down.

LOL, there's where my title came from. I don't think "solipsism all the way down" works. Solipsism doesn't recurse.

Again from Kottke:

A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations
A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations, presumably hallucinated by AI. The fake citations “were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references.”

5.876%, if the slop is evenly distributed. Quoting Gary Marcus, "Slopacalypse Now".

From 404Media:

‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like
Ads everywhere. Usage limits. Frustrating guardrails. Less model choice. Users of the Character.AI chatbot app are revolting after a series of changes they say have made the app worse.

I'm not sure this is the standard enshittification cycle. None of the AI companies have a viable business model. They are being forced to start enshittifying way before they'd probably like to because the goddam GenAIs are just way, way too expensive for toy uses like Character.AI.

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #125.

Monday, May 25, 2026

Claude Sent Me

From slipstream author Robin Sloan's blog. This post is mostly a link to the next post, but there's also an anecdote that gave me the title of my post.

The new funnel
I can add, anecdotally, that in Q1 of this year, Fat Gold [an olive oil subscription product?] saw its first subscription referrals from LLMs. We don’t (can’t?) track these programmatically, but we do ask new annual subscribers where they heard about us, and, for the first time, the reply has come: Claude sent me.

Well, you know where they are coming from, at least.

Linked to by the prior post. Buttondown is a company with an (eponymous?) newsletter/email automation product. Justin (JM) Duke is the CEO. Their numbers appear to be soaring due to LLM referrals???

LLMs and Buttondown
It feels weird to complain about this. So let me list some of the weird ways it has surfaced.

Churn. It is too early to really understand the statistical significance of this, but I'm faintly worried about churn being higher for these users than for our traditional cohort. A lot of our approach to onboarding and pricing hinges on a fairly high LTV; it's how we can justify outsized investment in support, for instance. Definitionally, lower LTV warps a lot of these decisions.

Support. While the absolute volume of support tickets coming from LLM-born users isn't significantly higher than the median, the shape of those tickets is off. To put it bluntly: a lot of the tickets we get are themselves LLM-generated. This is, frankly, extremely annoying — and demoralizing for me and the team to spend half an hour meticulously answering some complex question only to receive a machine-generated reply in return.

ICP. Buttondown has grown through word of mouth alone since its inception, which means that our customers all kind of have the same vibe — and, more importantly, know what our vibe is in return. LLM-born users, by virtue of having outsourced the research process, really don't. This materializes in every aspect of the conversion pipeline, from prospecting (I recently had a sales call with a user who was shocked to learn we don't support cold email) to volume.

They are rightly viewing the development very gingerly.

The whole UBI (Universal Basic Income) movement seems to be seeing GenAI as a possible savior? BIEN - the Basic Income Earth Network - is I think the strongest UBI promoting organization. I think Leon Skunk & the rest are selling them a bill of goods, to try to get someone other than corporate managers to like GenAI.

AI leaders see mass job loss coming. They want government’s help solving it.
Elon Musk has a plan for a future where jobs are wiped out by artificial intelligence: a benevolent government will provide.

This links to an article of the same title in the Washington Post. So Bezos is helping to dangle the carrot.

From Will Lockett's Newletter, which apparently I stumbled across on SubStack. Will Lockett is "A Climate & Politics Journalist who is pissed off that the world is burning, corrupt and broken, yet no one in power seems to care."

This is a really well thought out & informative post.

Our AI Fears Have Been Confirmed
A slow-motion car crash.

I really like the "slow-motion car crash" verbiage. I'm sure that was what lead me to read the article. I think it is a most excellent description of the Bullshit Apocalypse.

I think we'll see more & more systems seizing up, becoming unworkable, as the 10% error rate in the underlying GenAI tech compounds, leading to Degenerative AI. I think this author is seeing the same thing.

This post is a must-read, please check it out. A few excerpts. It's hard not to just copy the whole thing. There are several very well thought out themes.

You see, AI layoffs aren’t actually happening. As Oxford Economics found, companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and instead suggest that they are actually using the AI layoff narrative to cover up their own shortcomings. In other words, the massive Big Tech layoffs aren’t about AI automation, but to pay for bad performance and AI expenditure.
Why? Because AI doesn’t increase productivity on a business or economic scale. One of the best lines from the Oxford Economics report is when it directly asks, “If jobs are being replaced, where’s the productivity surge?” Everyone seems to have forgotten that productivity is something we measure, and if the AI rhetoric is true, that metric ought to be skyrocketing. But it isn’t; it is stagnating.

I also think that the layoffs "due to increased AI use" in the big tech companies are mostly marketing - "look, we're eating the dogfood! Nom, nom, nom!". It's getting harder & harder to keep the AI bubble inflated.

its use is deskilling us at a remarkable rate. We have known that overexposure to AI in the workplace damages expertise and skill for a while now, thanks to studies like those from JYX and Carnegie Mellon. Even Anthropic found that coders using its tools lost coding skills and comprehension. But researchers and professors are starting to notice a striking, consistent trend in recent findings: workers using AI at work are deskilling at disturbingly rapid rates.
Why is this a problem? Well, thanks to constant hallucinations (which aren’t going to stop any time soon, read more here) and shocking high costs, AI can’t replace workers. So, this deskilling will inevitably harm the economy.
...
AI is a massive threat to our economy. However, can we stop pretending that it is because these hollow plagiarism tools are themselves a threat because they are so capable? They aren’t; they cannot replace us, and it is moronic to suggest otherwise. The real threat is big tech grifting the stock and debt markets to turn their value into a perpetual-motion machine and, as a result, undermining the financial systems our economy is built on.

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #124.

Thursday, May 21, 2026

Flooding the Zone, Part 2

From David Rosenthal, Parts 2 & 3 of his "Flooding the Zone":

Flooded Zones Part 2
This is the promised follow-on to Flooded Zones Part 1, which discussed the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack being mounted by AI against the scholarly publication system. By reducing the cost of generating and submitting a paper or a review, AI has caused a massive increase in the quantity and a significant decrease in the quality of submissions to a system that was already vastly overloaded.
Below the fold I look at AI-enabled DDoS attacks against two other even more important areas; software security and political discourse.

Yawn. We've seen this before. & my yawn shows the biggest meta-problem facing us: Bullshit Fatigue. The constant hype & bullshit of AI marketing, AND AI output, is wearing us all out.

From Kottke:

There’s No Earthly Way of Knowing Which Direction We Are Going…
Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.:
The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

Seriously??? 1 could possibly hope that GenAI could be used responsibly, if there weren't a quite sufficient # of humans who are rapacious, amoral, capitalist assholes. Or, more likely, just plain lazy.

All those AI notetakers? They're making lawyers very nervous.

Hmmm, lawyers don't like the 10% error rate & complete lack of common sense in GenAI notetaker systems? Since they might be legally left hanging by AI incompetence?

What are they? Commies! Luddites!

From the guys who, IMO, may be running the most reasonable discussion on GenAI issues.

Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
Let’s not skip the hard work of AI governance
In a recent essay, Derek Thompson engages with AI as Normal Technology (AINT). He agrees with our thesis about AI’s slow labor market impacts, relying on the fact that GDP growth has so far been average, unemployment is below 5%, and even jobs that seemed vulnerable to automation show rising employment and wages. He concludes that so far, the macroeconomic picture is consistent with what we would expect from a “normal” general-purpose technology.
But when it comes to AI risks, he is far more bearish. He points to examples of cyber- and bio-risks and expresses pessimism about AI quickly becoming dangerous across many new domains. He argues that AI’s emergent capabilities make it fundamentally different from previous technologies, and that this difference justifies “extraordinary” government responses including restrictions on what companies can release.

Hmmm. I think I've said "Technology this powerful needs to be licensed." I think this article agrees?

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #123.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees

"At the Mouth of the River of Bees", by Kij Johnson, 2012, 406 pages, 110k words, 16 stories.

I thought Johnson's story was the best in "The Coyote Road" collection, so I bought this short story collection, which appears to be Johnson's 1st. Johnson put another collection out in 2023, "The Privilege of the Happy Ending", which I have purchased.

Johnson looks to be more prolific with short stories than novels.

1 thing I like about this collection, there is a wide variety in the length of the stories. I can't guess page #s because I'm reading these on an iPad with the text size maxxed out, so I can read without reading glasses.

The best story is still the best 1 from "Coyote Roads": "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change". "The Change" is when most vertebrate species used to interacting with humans develop language.

The moral overtones of this story are ... hurtful. It reminds me of reading about slavery - odious.

We love our pets, but we really don't want to hear their opinions on how we've treated them for the last few 1000 years ...

So the dogs develop their own folk tales. The tales are all titled "One Dog ...". The 1st line of the tales always begin: "This is the same dog." Johnson gives us 11 of these tales, fascinating!

*** Spoiler/Trigger Alert ***
It is not unusual for the tales to end with the dog protagonist being killed, usually with a human involved.

This is the last story of the volume. Apparently it was 1st published in the "Coyote Roads" anthology in 2007?? My review of that sez, 2023???

OK, the original hardcover version of "Coyote Roads" was published Novemver 19, 2007. 2023 was then the eBook was published. I absolutely hate it when they do that.

The story is ~~prefigured~~ echoed by a longer story, "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles", 2009. Apparently cats have folks tales too? The names of which all start with "The Cat Who ...". A nice story about being a cat/murder machine of anything smaller than you are.

The longest story of the collection was "The Man Who Bridged the Mist", 2011. A story about the human drama/tragedy that always goes into a major engineering project.

A lot of variety. "Schrodinger's Cathouse", 1993, about a quantumly indeterminate house of ill repute - nice!

"The Horse Raiders", 2000, is an interesting story & morality tale.

"Wolf Trapping", 1989, is also a memorable story.

The title tale, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees", is an interesting concept, a river not of water. "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" also has this concept, of a river not of water.

I think I had read the somewhat disturbing story "Ponies", 2010, somewhere else.

Wow, this is much more detail on a collection than I normally provide. I think that this sez, check this collection out!

Monday, May 18, 2026

My Every Other Day Salad

After I retired in September, 2012, I would have a salad for lunch every day. After a few years, I got tired of that, & now alternate a salad for lunch with a sandwich (plus a pickle & a wicked okra) or a scramble.

Here is my current salad:

from Kroger or Publix, a plateful of mixed baby greens;
or, fresh from my garden, bibb lettuce, black seed simpson lettuce, spring lettuce mix, arugula. (Pictured)
3/4 stalk of celery, sliced;
1/4" slice of sweet onion, diced;
2 baby carrots, sliced;
1 large radish, sliced.
Today, leftovers, 3 slices of a tuna steak seared on the grill, sliced.
Default, 1 #2 slice of Boars Head Reduced Sodium Turkey, from the Kroger or Publix Deli, diced.
Occasionally left over ham.
1 small-medium roma/plum tomato, diced.
1/4 can black olives, chilled.
1 heart of palm, sliced, or 1/3 can salad cut heart of palm, chilled.
2-4 T shredded sharp cheddar cheese.
4 slices, medium large zucchini or cucumber. Cucumber goes bad much more quickly.
Asian sesame ginger salad dressing, 2-3 T.

Some other recipes will leave me with pieces of bell pepper, mushrooms, or other veggies. I will dice & add these if appropriate.

Sunday, May 17, 2026

Threatening, Flooding, Tricking, Drowning, Dying

All gerunds, all the time! Showing that the Bullshit Apocalypse is an ongoing process.

From Bruce Schneier:

How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?

I think this is more reinforcement for my original feel that Antropic's Mythos announcement was mostly hype:

While Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, so are other models. The UK’s AI Security Institute found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, already generally available, is comparable in capability. The company Aisle reproduced Anthropic’s published results with smaller, cheaper models.

So using AIs to find software vulnerabilities will become SOP, & hopefully developers find them before the software is released.

But Schneier then raises a very, very concerning point:

Even more interesting are the broader implications. The same searching, pattern-matching and reasoning capabilities that make these models so good at analyzing software almost certainly apply to similar systems. The tax code isn’t computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms with inputs and outputs. It has vulnerabilities; we call them tax loopholes. It has exploits; we call them tax avoidance strategies. And it has black hat hackers: attorneys and accountants.
...
As goes the tax code, so goes any other complex system of rules and strategies. These models could be tasked with finding loopholes in environmental rules, or food and safety rules—anywhere there are complex regulatory systems and powerful people who want to evade those rules.

You should need a license for technology this powerful. & your use should be carefully monitored. Just like dynamite & other explosives.

From David Rosenthal:

Flooded Zones Part 1

Wow, apparently Rosenthal was a very early harbinger of the Bullshit Apocalypse; the post he references came out May 11, 2023. 13 months before I cracked from the perpetual hype & called "Bullshit!"

Three years ago in Flooding The Zone With Shit, my first post on the AI bubble, I wrote:
My immediate reaction to the news of ChatGPT was to tell friends "at last, we have solved the Fermi Paradox". It wasn't that I feared being told "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it", but rather that I assumed that civilizations across the galaxy evolved to be able to implement ChatGPT-like systems, which proceeded to irretrievably pollute their information environment, preventing any further progress.
The post title was a notorious quote from Steve Bannon. Below the fold, I look into scholarly publication, the first of three areas whose zones are currently being flooded with AI output in what can be considered DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks

I had not made that connection: that the Bullshit Apocalypse, or Slopocalypse Now as Gary Marcus called it, it a form of a DDoS - on all systems based on words, i.e., on our civilization in general. Shudder.

I think there have been 2 links already in this blog on scholarly publications being overwhelmed by slop. The other 2 domains Rosenthal will cover in Parts 2 & 3 are "political discourse and software security".

From Leif Weatherby via the NYT:

Why We Keep Tricking Ourselves Into Thinking A.I. Is Conscious
A funny thing keeps happening on the internet. A prominent thinker chats with a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude for a while, and then decides that it might be conscious. The person reports this to the public, and a round of intense argument and speculation about artificial intelligence “minds” ensues. These little kerfuffles pass quickly. But they are persistent, and I’ve been thinking about why.

Weatherby examines in detail the interaction between Claude & Richard Dawkins, which I posted on here. A sad affair.

Note, I have run across Weatherby before. I kind of went off on him & semiotics here. I'm still stuck at having read 40% of his book because I'm still stuck on writing a review of "Bullshit Jobs". His book "Language Machines", is subtitled "Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism". "Remainder Humanism" I think is the belief that human beings can think better than LLMs. Can't have that, can we???

IMO, never trust a semiotician. Still, it's an interesting read. Here's Weatherby's conclusion:

Adapting our reading practices to large language model output is a shift just like that one, where we change what we normally expect from our surroundings. We don’t expect meaningful and rhetorically powerful prose to come from anything but a conscious mind. But now it does. We cannot afford to believe the marketing message from A.I. companies that we may be dealing with some spiritual essence. In the age of cultural A.I., technical expertise alone won’t save us. We’ll have to add a new form of reading to make sense of our new world.

So maybe this "new form of reading" is what was mentioned in the 3rd reference in this post from last Wednesday, which talks about all the brain/CPU cycles we are all starting to waste detecting AI slop. I'm sure it's all for a greater good? Or, NOT!!!

From economist Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey via the NYT:

This Is Why You’re Drowning in Busywork

I keep seeing the phrase "LLMs democratize ...". What that means: something we used to have someone else do, we now can do ourself. But, increasingly, it means we now HAVE to do it ourselves.

& I guarantee there are lots of cases where an LLM is not going to do as good a job as a human expert. Estimates of the error rates of LLMs seem to be converging on 10%. Way too high IMO.

Cory Doctorow recently posted:

Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire

The post is mostly an analysis of this post by Icelandic "writer, web developer and consultant" Baldur Bjarnason. Bjarnason seems to be in the business of helping people figure out why their software projects fail (& presumably, how they can make them succeed?)

The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

This is a long post but well worth the read. Bjarnason posits that the US tech hegemony is possible only because of the US political hegemony, I think? Most of the world hates our fucking software. I mean, a perpetual subscription to Office 365 or whatever? OpenOffice for me!

LLMs & the datacenter glut is just the latest phase in extending the tech hegemony.

But, oops, Orange Turd & Bebe's Epstein/Iran War has just destroyed the old world order! Midair disassembly indeed! Time for something new!

Here is Bjarnason I think succinctly discussing GenAI. I just really didn't get how everyone could be ignoring the glaring flaws in LLM-based GenAI. This explains a lot.

Even my writing on “AI” has centred on how things work, not on politics, social impact, education, or culture:

How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise, provided nobody else uses LLMs. The results are catastrophic when everybody is using them.)

How do LLMs affect the thinking of those that use them? (Quite a bit, mostly for the worse, but the exact causes and effects are tough to assess.)

Does it work for business or not? (Mostly not. The inherent variability of a generative model means that the benefits will always be mostly hypothetical while the harms are widespread and long-lasting and substantially outweigh the benefits that can be realised.)

But “AI”, even more so than any other tech, is contingent on political clout. It’s what forces through data centres, lets companies infringe on copyright and violate software licences, renders them at least temporarily immune to all kinds of consumer protections and wrongful death suits, and results in the political collaboration where “AI” systems provide authoritarian states with “accountability sinks” and algorithmic cover for institutional racism. It’s this political partnership more than anything inherent in the technology that has let the “AI” bubble get this far and change so much.

I concur with Doctorow, this article is definitely "must read".

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #122.

Saturday, May 16, 2026

The Secret City

"The Secret City", by Carol Emshwiller, 2007, 164 pages, 50k words.

I liked Emshwiller's story in the "Coyote Road" short story collection. So, I impulse bought what appears to be her last novel.

A simple story. Only 164 pages, 50k words. Alien tourists, who resemble Neanderthals, are stranded on earth for decades - enough for a new generation to be born. Most of the parents are dedicated to brainwashing their offspring into worship of the home they came from.

After decades, retrieval teams (dressed as tourists in Hawaiian shirts) show up, & attempt to repatriate their missing countrymen. But, the new generation doesn't want to go? Conflict!

A simple story, an easy read. 4 stars I guess. Emshwiller died in 2019, 97 YO.

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Semiotic Zombies, Marinating Brains, Yum!

I 1st identified LLMs as "Semiotic Zombies" here.

I backed up my contentions here.

They feed on the output of human brains.

"More Training Data" === "More Brains".

Gary Marcus shows us graphs, all of which are complete bullshit, completely meaningless metrics. Gawd, I retired September, 2012, the corporate programming in my brain continues to evaporate away. Yes!

Misplaced panic over AI progress
Breaking down what METR’s latest “time horizon” graph does and does not show

From SubStack, The Crux, Andrei Savine:

The last mile is where enterprise AI actually dies
McKinsey’s 10,000‑leader survey and HBR’s ‘last mile’ diagnosis show that 30 years of consulting have built organizations that cannot turn AI into real value.

Oh, come on! Surely not! LOOZERS! From 404Media:

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy.
...
A few years ago, while I was covering the rise of AI slop on Facebook, I asked my friends and family if they were getting AI spam fed into their timelines and if they could send me examples. A handful of them responded, sending me obviously AI-generated science fiction scenescapes, shrimp Jesus, and forlorn, starving children begging for sympathy. But a few of my friends sent me images that they thought were AI but were not. Their mental guard was up to the point where they were looking at human-made art and photos and thought it safer to dismiss them as AI rather than be fooled by it.
To browse the internet today, to consume any sort of content at all, is to be bombarded with AI of all sorts. People think things that are fake are real, things that are real are fake. Much has been written about “AI psychosis,” the nonspecific, nonscientific diagnosis given to people who have lost themselves to AI. Less has been said about the cognitive load of what other people’s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it’s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?

Is someone going to reimburse me for the CPU (brain) cycles I am burning to detect AI slop? I'm guessing, NO! You will eat this slop & like it, yum, yum, yum. :-(

From 404Media:

Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains
“It's making me dumber for sure.”

Wow, is this click-bait, alarmist journalism, or what?

AI is not rotting their brains. It is marinating their brains, so that, being the semiotic zombie that it is, it can ingest their brains later, marinated in many delicious flavors! Yum, yum, yum!

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #121.

Saturday, May 09, 2026

The Coyote Road

"The Coyote Road", subtitled "Trickster Tales", edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, 2023, 544 pages, 149k words. 26 pieces.

Grrr, the 2023 date is apparently the eBook. The original hardcopy collection was published July 19, 2007. I hate it when they do that shit. &, with AI, it will be happening more & more often. Because AI don't care if shit is correct, just that it's plausible. Here's the original hardcopy cover:

I think this was probably a $1.99 BookBub purchase. Of course, I love the trickster! My fav archetype!

Datlow & Windling edited several "Year's Best Fantasy & Horror" which I have copies of.

Overall, I'd say the collection was disappointing. Generally well written tales, but maybe not quite trickster enough for me. Not nasty enough. & not a single story featuring Loki!

There were 2-3 poems in the collection, I think I did not follow my "read aloud" prescription for poetry.

I think the 1st story that stood out was the Charles de Lint, "Crow Roads". I read some of his stuff 20-30 years ago. Any story involving corvids of course gets a boost.

I must have liked the Carol Emshwiller story, "God Clown", as I purchased her 2007 sci-fi novel "The Secret City". She died in 2019, age 97!

I really like Jedediah Berry's writing, his story "The Other Labyrinth" was good.

The head & shoulders above the rest, best story of the collection was the last, "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park after The Change", by Kij Johnson. "The Change" is most vertebrates acquiring the power of speech. As in Jablokov's "A Deeper Sea", where dolphins start talking, it doesn't go well. Way, way TMI. I bought a 2012 collection of Johnson's short stories, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees".

There still seems to be no sign of a "Year's Best" collection from Clarke. Reading a "Year's Best" collection every year has been part of my system for decades. Anybody got any suggestions or info on what's up with Clarke?

All Gary, All The Time!

I've been back in Lexington KY for 9 days now. I'm much less productive here, for various reasons. My latest Bullshit Apocalypse post was May 1. Since then, 5 posts have piled up to be shared - all by Gary Marcus!

As much as I appreciate the great work that Gary is doing, I think that this is a bad thing. It shows that the other people who post about the Bullshit Apocalypse, the horrible flaws of LLMs that are being completely ignored by the hype machine, are suffering from Bullshit Fatigue. They are worn out by the constant bullshit emitted by the AI hype machine. Bullshit Fatigue was in the title of my latest Bullshit Apocalypse post, I'm feeling it too.

Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion
The great skeptic gets taken in
This is one of the sadder essays I have ever had to write.

Wow, I so agree. This is heart-breaking.

I remember reading "The Selfish Gene" (1976) in the early 1980s. Dawkins invented the term "meme", & the science of memetics! So amazing!

Now, he spends 3 days talking to Claude, & "failed to convince myself that it is not conscious".

He's now 85 YO. Clearly his game is declining. Presumably it happens to us all.

From Gary's post:

The fundamental problem here is that Dawkins doesn’t reflect on how these outputs have been generated. Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.
Consciousness is about internal states; the mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little. Dawkins seems to imagine that since LLMs say things people do, they must be like people, and that simply does not follow.

Revisiting a theme we've touched on before.

Have LLMs improved patient outcomes?
A new review suggests otherwise

Breaking: Autonomous Agents are a Shitshow
Brace for chaos

I was somewhat disappointed that the article focuses on how easily hackable the agents are, via several avenues, and does not comment on their efficacy.

Breaking news: “they hadn’t figured out how OpenAI would pay for it”
Sign of things to come?

So OpenAI & Broadcom announce a Big Deal: 10GW of custom chips made together! But, who's paying? Oops!

Great diagrams of the "AI Circular Economy". As Doctorow says:

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.

Agents and ROI
Remember that MIT study that showed that the ROI for generative AI wasn’t really there for most businesses? Or any of the six or seven studies from other teams that followed, showing basically the same?
The situation for agents thus far looks to be similar: lots of hype; not so much ROI:

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #120.

Sunday, May 03, 2026

Using a Looper

This post originally appeared in Jaz Dumoz Music Blog.

I bought my looper maybe 15 years ago. It is a Boss LoopStation RC-20XL Phrase Recorder. Here's what it looks like:

I 1st used it actively in Steve & Chris, 2017-2019. with me & most excellent harpist Steve Konopka (Fuzzy). I don't think you can buy them anymore.

I also used a Digitech LiveStation 3 harmony box. I haven't used that in years. It works great with Eagles, not at all w Louis Armstrong.

What Boss is offering now has buttons rather than pedals. I far prefer pedals, much easier to hit when you are playing standing up, in an unfamiliar configuration.

To start recording a loop, or to start playing it back, you press the left pedal. To stop the loop(s), you hit the right pedal. To erase the loop(s), you press & hold the right pedal.

Playing with a looper, over the years I learned 3 main principles. I added a less important 4th.

Per excellent looper user Jairaj Schwann: always start the looper on the 1.
Jairaj was a serious musician, degree from UMass Amherst, ab fab bass player, moved to Atlanta. I had mostly found people using loopers to get pretty stale quickly. At a “guitarists” show, Jairaj was playing a 6 string bass. He would lay down a bass track on the looper on the bottom strings. Then add a rhythm track on the middle strings. Then play lead on the top strings. Incredible! & when he got tired of it, he'd wipe the whole thing & start over.
Jairaj told me, “Always start the looper on the 1". I thought I knew better, I tried starting the looper on the 4 a few times. It never worked out. Always start the looper on the 1.
Given that the looper & the looper playback start on the 1, realize that sometimes you start a solo before you kick the looper in with the rhythm track. You may play 2-5 notes of the solo before you kick the background loop on. See example below.
This is a more minor point. Realize that, based on what you want to play a solo over, sometimes you will skip a verse or 2 before you kick the looper on to start recording. See example below.
When I 1st started the looper, I tried to use it as I would pedals on an electric guitar: I would start the looper replay, & then use the (awkward) volume knobs on my guitar to turn the volume of the solo up.
At some point I realized, no! The looper has a knob (upper left of pic) that contols the output level of the recorded loop. I back it down from 12pm to 11pm. So the replayed loop is softer, the solo is at the original louder level. No playing with a volume knob, or overdrive pedal!
I mentioned this to the sound man at an Open Mic I have been playing in Naples. I suggested him hitting the “Solo” button on the guitar channel, to put the rhythm guitar back to the volume it had been at & make the solo louder. He said he thought that the way it sounded now was perfect for the room we were in. He thought what I was doing was the proper thing to do, & wished others used the same technique - although I'm the only one using a looper there?!?!?

Normally I record a rhythm guitar part, then play lead guitar over it - so only 1 loop. You tap the left pedal to start recording, tap a 2nd time to replay the loop. You tap the right pedal to stop the loop.

I decided to try a Rickie Lee Jones song, “young blood” (1979), with 3 loops; a bass line, emphasis chords on the 1 & the 3, & a syncopated riff. I don't know if all loopers work this way, but on the Boss, you have to record the 1st loop, then play it back; record the 2nd loop, then play it back; record the 3rd loop, then play it back & play a solo line over the top of all 3 of them. So you hit the left pedal a total of 6 times to get the 3 loops in place.

Note. this is my older musical alter ego, Jim Dumas. Jim plays music >~+ Elvis. Jaz is <~= Elvis. Note also, I use the harmony box at the end, on “Something happenin' there”.

Here's the song:

Here's a song demonstrating points 2 & 3 above: the Hoagy Carmichael classic “stardust”. I think this is pretty much Willie Nelson's version. You start the recording late. You start & stop the loop to solo over it 2x.

I (or rather Jim Dumas) have been thinking I'll go back & try some modern (> Elvis) songs with the looper. Some Hendrix maybe?

Friday, May 01, 2026

Reusing a Title? Bullshit Fatigue.

This bullshit is wearing me out. Hard to keep up.

From Project Syndicate:

AI Productivity Growth Won’t Match the Computer Revolution
Those promoting AI would be lucky to see the technology’s impact on output per hour match even the short-lived burst of the 1990s and 2000s. Productivity growth will underwhelm, not because the technology is weak, but because it creates a bottleneck that earlier digital tools largely avoided.

From Gary Marcus:

Dario Amodei, hype, AI safety, and the explosion of vibe-coded AI disasters
What the AI cheerleaders don’t tell you

LLMs are a great tool for professionals who know what they are doing. For the normal idiot, vibe coding is a coin toss, in a dark room.

I should probably have come up with a tag for this, it appears so often: LLM bullshit/slop overwhelms "{$domain}". From 404 media:

People Using AI to Represent Themselves in Court Are Clogging the System
More people having access to the courts is potentially good, but it’s not clear how the system can handle this increase in cases.

Introduced by Yves Smith at naked capitalism, a post by "Servaas Storm, a Dutch economist and author who works on macroeconomics, technological progress, income distribution & economic growth, finance, development and structural change, and climate change."

Russell’s Teapot: Dispatches From the Final Stage of the AI Bubble
Servaas systematically (and often wryly) takes apart the key claims of AI touts. One of my faves: “No, AI will create a lot of bullshit jobs.”

It is a good, thoughtful review of the current shape of things. The title references Bertrand Russell’s (1952) Tea Pot Analogy, which I had never heard of.

Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.

He lists 8 claims made by the genAI hype machine, & then explains why they are "teapots". The reference to David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" [the review/summary of which book I am still bogged down on] is in Claim #6.

Pointed at by Kottke, a very thoughtful article. The Bullshit Apocalypse is indeed apocalyptic - actually the author uses the word "catastrophic".

The Social Edge of Intelligence
AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.

The author mentions "Degenerative AI", which we have seen before. AIs trained eating their own slop downward spiral into complete unintelligibility almost immediately. They need to be trained on ~~tokens~~ words produced by actually intelligent entities.

The more people use genAI, the less original training data there will be for our ever-hungry LLMs. The hundreds of daily hits I get on my blogs are certainly 99% AI training bots. So I am performing a service for the AI companies - for free, just like everyone else.

The author:

Bright Simons is a researcher, activist, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of global value chains, technology strategy, and institutional governance & design. He is the founder of the mPedigree Network, and affiliated with IMANI and ODI Global, both think tanks.

His theory of how to make genAI work is:

The Social Edge Framework outlined here is a direct counterpoint to Amodei, Aschenbrenner, and Altman. It is a program of action to counter the human redundancy fantasy. It challenges the self-fulfilling doom-spirals created by the premature reallocation of material resources to a vision of AI. I speak of the philosophy that underestimates the sheer amount of human priming needed to support the Great Recode of legacy infrastructure before our current civilization can even benefit substantially from AI advances.

Finally, today, another post from Gary Marcus:

“A model that produces code which compiles and passes the tests it was given is not the same as a model that produces correct, secure, maintainable, well-architected software”
A lot of code is being written by AI, but what does it mean?
...
Realism re AI coding is knowing that next-word prediction gets us a surprisingly long way in writing code, but less far in making sure that code is robust. Coders (especially vibe coders with little experience) beware.
And all you OpenClaw devotees, that goes 10x, if not 100x, for you.

That Gary Marcus article reminded me of some WOW (Words of Wisdom) I have printed & taped up on the bookshelves in my home office, for decades now. I have always thought these really conveyed the gist of coding & software development/architecture.

Computer Programming:

Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.
Software Engineering:

Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.

Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #119.

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

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.

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".
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)".
Sudan Archive, "The BPM", 2025, 15 tracks, BandCamp. Out of LA. Violin. Some pretty compelling stuff. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "DEAD".
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.
Magic Sam, "Black Magic", 1968, 18 tracks. OK blues. 3 stars for this as well.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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".
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.
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".
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.
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 ...
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.
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!

Monday, April 27, 2026

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.

Sunday, April 26, 2026

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Monday, April 20, 2026

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:

the spymaster's plain, nerdy niece ward, a beetle (Velma);
the spymaster's non-niece ward, a gorgeous ant hybrid (Daphne);
a dragonfly exchange student (Fred);
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.

Friday, April 17, 2026

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

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!

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

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