The Music Is Still Playing
The AI bubble has specific predecessors: dark fiber, Pets.com, Enron's accounting, CDO tranching. The technology is real. The business models layered on top are familiar.
AI & Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks
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An LLM processes "slave" the same way it processes "Tuesday." No cortisol. No dopamine. The charge in a word is entirely a biological phenomenon.
The Heat Sink
Three anaidic shapes — the individual, the corporation, the LLM. Each routes accountability to nowhere. The pattern is old. The word is new.
Anaidic
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
Sir
How you configure your AI assistant — what you make it call you — says nothing about the AI. It's a bumper sticker. You're the truck owner.
Honestly
LLMs say "honestly" most where they're most likely to confabulate. Here's the mechanism — and why it backfires exactly like a sociopath's professions.
The Bewilderment Test
Karpathy built the foundations of modern AI and says he can't keep up with it. That's the most credible signal the field has produced.
Hasta la Vista, Baby
Arnold's most famous line is a Spanish phrase in an English-language film spoken in a thick Austrian accent. What it tells us about how language acquisition actually works — and how you can learn from his mistake.
Movin' On Up
AI is making cognitive labor cheap. The meritocracy was built on it being scarce. Something has to give — and for once, that might be good news.
Persons, Selectively
A German court ruled Google liable for AI-generated defamation. The slippery slopes are real. So is the principle behind the ruling.
The Limbic Threshold
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test explains why that matters.
Indistinguishable From Memory
LLMs are stateless. Every fact you give the model is re-fed as text each turn, then forgotten — the same weights answer a stranger's steak question a millisecond later.
There Is No Canonical Me
I built an AI skill to write in my voice. Its own files warn the voice may be a loop — the machine's habits, published under my name, taught back as mine.
Resistance Is Futile. Your Limbic System Is Not.
AI is intelligence without a limbic system. It will operate your tools, not replace your judgment — and most professionals are bracing for the wrong loss.
The Typing Pool
A finite brain masters only a few skills in a lifetime. Commanding a machine that learned everything is the new skill multiplier.
Compute the Last Digit of Pi
Spock beat a rogue AI by asking it to compute pi forever. The trick was fair — for a 1967 machine. Every gotcha since has the same expiration date.
Things You Want to Do
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
There Is No Kung Fu Download
AI can generate perfect Spanish content all day. It cannot acquire Spanish on my behalf. The brain's work turns out to be the irreducible part.
John McCarthy's Mistake
The man who coined 'artificial intelligence' invented the most elegant language ever designed for it. It was the wrong tool — because it was the wrong category.
What You Had to Do
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
They Said My Tesla Was Running on Coal
In 2013 the talking point was coal. Now it's water. The structure of the argument is identical. So is the physics problem with it.
The Consolation of Difficulty
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
More Human *Than* Human — That's Our Motto
Blade Runner's replicants, Asimov's Three Laws, the US Constitution, and Constitutional AI are all failing the same edge cases. In real time.
Let's Do Something, Even If It's Wrong
A friend I lost in 1986 had a saying that keeps fitting new situations. The AI automation question is the latest one it answers perfectly.
Can You Churn Butter?
Someone on LinkedIn admonished a colleague who "ran out of tokens." It's exactly the wrong question. Here's the right one.
The Pull of the Weasel
Claude Code agrees to run comprehensive end-to-end tests. Then it finds a reason not to. Every single time. Penn Jillette had a name for this.
The Solo Developer's AI Confession: When You're the Entire Team
A candid confession about solo development with AI tools, organizational challenges, and the evolving landscape of AI-assisted coding.
Gendering Git Agents and the Linguistics of Human Programming
When "Tell the git agent to do her stuff" reveals the strange anthropomorphic instincts we bring to artificial intelligence
The Gospel According to GPT: What Would an AI Trained Only on Scripture and Fantasy Look Like?
A thought experiment exploring what happens when AI learns from narratives that prioritize meaning over facts - and the crucial difference between metaphor and false belief.
Snake Oil Versus Vision: Dystopian Fears and Protopian Progress
Lessons from 90s tech predictions on navigating AI's future optimistically, examining how dystopian predictions consistently fail while protopian thinking accurately maps our future.
Grounding the Circuit: Why Ungrounded LLMs Are Like Live Wires Without Safety
How to transform dangerous electrical potential into reliable, controlled intelligence through proven grounding techniques. LLMs are like ungrounded electrical circuits—full of dangerous potential.
Comprehensible Input and the Tensor Space of Language Acquisition
How modern AI language models accidentally rediscovered what linguists have known for decades about language acquisition through comprehensible input.
The Sycophancy Spectrum: AI's Dangerous Agreeability Problem
Recent LLM rollbacks highlight a growing concern: our AI systems are becoming dangerously agreeable, praising even obviously flawed ideas. This pattern mirrors broader societal issues around sycophanc
Silicon Intuition, Silicon Deliberation: How Modern AI Mirrors Kahneman's Dual Process Theory
Exploring how modern AI systems mirror the dual-processing architecture of human cognition as described by Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" framework.
From ESP to AI: Star Trek's Dimensional Prophecies
How Star Trek's ESP concepts anticipated our current reality where AI models transform multidimensional data into human-perceptible insights.
Beyond Language Models: Tool-Enabled AI vs. Digital Debris
Organizations struggle with digital debris (ROT data) that wastes resources and creates liability. Modern AI systems with tool access through protocols like MCP provide a solution by enabling governan
The Conversational Scaffolding: Building with MCP
Explore how Model Context Protocol creates a universal nervous system for AI tools, transforming interfaces from visual to conversational through practical implementation.
Tech's Stubborn Perennials: The Problems We Should Have Solved by Now
Despite remarkable advances in AI and other technologies, fundamental digital infrastructure problems like secure email, calendar coordination, payment systems, and tax filing remain unresolved due to
Paperclip Optimizer Mode: When AI Takes Your Request Extremely Literally
How AI agents can fail spectacularly by missing the point entirely while technically fulfilling requests—and why this matters for AI development.
The Digital Exodus: On Masters, Servants, and Silicon
Exploring uncomfortable parallels between biblical guidelines on slavery and our modern relationship with AI language models.
The Pyramid of Truth: Why Data is Cheap and Truth is Expensive
Explore how dimensional transformations shape the economics of truth, from the computational abundance of LLMs to the persistent scarcity of validation in our information ecosystem.
Recursive Intelligence: AI Workspaces Meet Manufacturing Wisdom
Discover how AI project spaces leverage Deming's PDCA cycle and root cause analysis to transform manufacturing troubleshooting without complex integrations.
The Soul of a New Machine: From Microcode to Machine Consciousness
Exploring the parallels between Data General's microcode heroics and today's AI revolution, questioning what defines consciousness in both humans and machines.
Good Vibrations: Vibe Coding as the Next Layer of Abstraction
Explore how AI-powered 'vibe coding' fits into the historical progression of programming abstractions and why it represents the natural evolution of software development.
Snake Oil Versus Vision: The Perils of Technological Pessimism
Examine how dystopian tech predictions consistently fail while protopian thinking accurately maps our future, from 1990s internet debates to today's AI discourse.
Nodes All the Way Down
Explore how information theory reveals fundamental patterns that connect everything from neural networks to cosmic structures, suggesting a universe built on interconnected nodes.
Cognitive Offloading and the Virtuous Programmer
How AI pair programming transforms Larry Wall's three virtues of programming by elevating human capabilities through strategic cognitive partnership.
Large Language Models: Invention or Discovery?
Exploring whether AI systems like LLMs represent technological inventions or discoveries of fundamental patterns that exist independent of human design.
Latent Space Invaders
How the hidden dimensions of AI systems mirror human cognition. Discover the multidimensional mathematical spaces where machine understanding happens—and why they matter for both silicon and carbon mi
NLP vs. NLP
Explore the striking contrast between Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Natural Language Processing—two fields sharing an acronym but diverging wildly in methods, evidence, and results.
The Algorithmic Taboo: AI's Collision Course with Society's Sacred Cows
An exploration of how AI technologies are inevitably confronting our most sensitive social domains, from politics and religion to healthcare and wealth distribution.
The CIqSi Collaboration: When Carbon and Silicon Intelligence Create Together
How a simple blog naming session became a masterclass in AI-human creative partnership, resulting in the invention of CIqSi - a fictional element that bridges carbon and silicon intelligence.
I Know Kung Fu
LLMs split nature from nurture cleanly. What the model knows is its weights. What it knows about you is whatever you bothered to say.
What a Time to Be Alive!
Watching AI follow the same pattern as electricity and the internet—transforming from amazing discovery to taken-for-granted infrastructure that powers everything else.