My son was confused. “The guy at the door said something about wanting to protect our gas lines?”

I’d not heard anything about this from my utility company, so I wasn’t surprised when the man said he was from a company I’d never heard of. It took only a few seconds to realize it was the same misleading sales pitch I’ve heard before: “I’m here to help protect you from hidden fees on your bill…”

I knew where this pitch ended. “You want me to sign up with your company to ‘protect’ me. You’re soliciting. Get off my porch.”

This is the important part: Even if he was right about hidden fees, I wouldn’t trust anything he (or his company) told me about them, and there was no way that I would switch to the company he was representing.

The logic is pretty simple: If your argument is correct, why the bait-and-switch? Why use a misleading tactic if the truth supports you?

I was reminded of that feeling while reading the nearly hysterically anti-AI “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.

The foundational arguments in the first three chapters are riddled with rhetorical devices, misconceptions, and bad assumptions that make the supposed inevitability of their conclusions suspect. (I’ve listed some below.)

Those issues could be explained by ignorance.

But it was in the second chapter that I really had that bait-and-switch feeling.

First, this passage (emphasis mine):

Consider an AI predicting the next word in a real-life medical report that starts “Following injection of 0.3mg epinephrine, the patient…” What words come next? “Passed out?” “Screamed?” “Started to breathe again?” The doctor writing the medical report didn’t have to guess; they just recorded what they saw. Predicting is a harder challenge. To predict what the doctor will write, an AI needs to think not only about the doctor, but also about what happened to the patient—it needs to predict the real world out there behind the words.

This smears a lot of distinctions together, but the most important is that it blurs together transcription and prediction. The implied comparison is between a human physician writing down what they see compared to an AI making diagnostic predictions.

There are two correct comparisons, and the authors choose neither.

The first is between a consulting physician reading the report and making a predictive diagnosis and an AI/LLM doing the same.

A 2025 meta-analysis did exactly that, and found that when it came to diagnosis, an “analysis of 83 studies revealed an overall diagnostic accuracy of 52.1%. No significant performance difference was found between AI models and physicians overall (p = 0.10) or non-expert physicians (p = 0.93). However, AI models performed significantly worse than expert physicians (p = 0.007).”

The second compares a human and LLM models with medical transcription.

A 2013 study found that in a review of human-transcribed records, 315,000 errors in one million dictations were surfaced. That’s roughly a 68.5% accuracy rate. A 2026 preliminary report of LLMs transcribing orthopedic transcription notes showed accuracies between 65.9% and 56.8%. {1} A 2022 paper concluded that “most of the manual transcription services achieve a commendable level of performance, while AI-based services often show meaning-distorting discrepancies between recording and transcription.”

So why choose to use the misleading false equivalence when there’s real evidence to support your point?

The second example is more subtle, and has everything to do with formatting.

Human thoughts don’t work like that. Human thoughts about a sentence might change a little, if it lacked punctuation, but we wouldn’t struggle to comprehend a sentence that ended without a period

The broader point about the source of AIs’ alienness is this: Training an AI to outwardly predict human language need not result in the AI’s internal thinking being humanlike.

It’s another bait and switch. Yes, there’s no period at the end of that sentence. The punctuation “full stop” signal is not present.

They swapped it for a paragraph break. If a paragraph has ended, then by definition, so has the last sentence of the paragraph.

So their example doesn’t show anything.

Why use an example that doesn’t demonstrate what you claim it does?

Maybe the authors of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” have a point, and are absolutely correct. But just these two examples are enough to make me question everything they say. These seem trivial, but that’s why they’re important.

These two examples are notable because they do not require knowing anything about AI.

They’re rhetorical devices and logical fallacies I associate with people making bad-faith arguments; in this age of misinformation, that’s a giant red flag.

A sampling of the problematic axioms and presumptions I saw in the first three chapters:

The authors have a deep commitment to the idea that there must be something “unique” about humans, that they have a “special something,” and their arguments all center around that ideology. They keep redefining words to move the goalposts of what “counts”, then ignoring that it’s a difference without a distinction. A whole section is devoted to “wanting,” without recognizing that they’re also describing us, and then effectively undermining their own point

The authors fundamentally misunderstand the principles and concepts behind evolution. Evolution is not about the overall “best”, there is no such thing. Evolution is all about “good enough”, it’s always situational. Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” are frequently outperformed by the “normal” variant … at least until the antibiotic resistant varieties have time to mutate further. And being unique or the best is not the same thing as being “good” or even the best adapted or most successful

The authors approach the whole thing with a “colonizer” mindset. Much how Vending-Bench says a lot about humans, the authors seem incapable of the concept that a hypothetical machine intelligence could be anything other than as a slave or a conqueror. (There’s also a brief flirtation with some arguments that sound eugenics-adjacent to me.)

{1} This comparison is a little off because of methodological differences. The human statistic measures the proportion of dictations in which errors were surfaced, apparently treating each dictation as a whole. The AI study reports F1 scores for orthopedic procedure coding, which combine precision and recall at the code-label level. That said, it’s a far sight closer than what the authors present.

Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I recently spoke to some new authors who were worried about their work-in-progress. They were worried if they were “doing it wrong” or if a technique they employed was “too weird.”

The answer for them — or any writer — has everything to do with the author’s goals for the story. The goal determines who the customer (or audience) of the story actually is.

• You’re writing it for yourself or your friends. You and your friends are the customer. The only metric that matters is whether or not it’s effective for you and your friends. Want to write in text speak? Go for it. Shift POV every sentence? Have fun.
• You want to self-publish. Potential readers are your customer. Therefore, you do need to worry about what other people think, but only if you care about the volume of sales. You can publish a ginormous volume that discusses whaling in exhausting detail. It might still become a classic, or it may be ignored, but that’s solely between the author and the reader(s).
• You want to publish with a publisher or submit to an agent. The publisher/agent is your customer. Then you care what the publisher or agent says; the publisher is your customer. If they say “epic fantasy” means no more than 60,000 words, it doesn’t matter that you think that epic fantasy has a minimum of twice that. You either trim it because that’s what the publisher wants, or find another publisher.

These principles hold true even as the details around publishing change.

But even more importantly: You have to finish the book first. Worry about this during the editing stage, particularly if it’s keeping you from finishing the story first.

As an obligatory note: Money flows toward the author. A publisher will not charge you for publishing services. Know the difference and avoid those who blur that line.

Featured Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

I really, really, like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, because Zach clearly gets the joke. Like this comic:

It’s great not only because it got an initial laugh. It also has some additional embedded assumptions that are just wild, y’all.

1. The black swan fallacy. The argument above only works if all sims are porn. They’re not, so this proves nothing.
2. People don’t actually like it when they get everything handed to them, either in narrative or in real life. On the other hand, there’s also lots of people don’t have enough handed to them.

And this is the big one that gets me to laugh at ourselves as a species:

It assumes the simulation is being run for the benefit of those inside it.

Most discussions — at least at the pop-sci level — of the simulation hypothesis don’t emphasize that part well enough. {1}

If the universe is a simulation {2}, then the odds are good that it is not for our benefit. It might be, but there is little indication that is the case. And as Douglas Adams pointed out in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even if humans are the reason for the simulation, that is very, very different from it being for our benefit.

And if there’s a way to comedically punch up more than teasing all of your own species for its hubris, then I don’t know it.

If you can, support Zach Weinersmith at his Patreon!

Featured Image by Nikolett Emmert from Pixabay

{1} Okay, Rick & Morty does touch on it, frequently, but there the simulations are being run by Rick, for his benefit, and Rick is (mostly) human…
{2} Like The Sims, and distinct from the possibility that the universe is a hologram, which is a completely different and weirder possibility.

I saw both Obsession and S03E06 (“Montreal”) of Interview with the Vampire (aka The Vampire Lestat) over the weekend. Seeing them both so close together really drove home something for me.

MASSIVE spoilers for both below the images, though I try to keep them to only what’s directly relevant.

I saw Obsession as a date movie last weekend. Yes, it’s an unusual pick for a date movie. The basic plot is straightforward: a mildly toxic young man (Bear, played by Michael Johnston) finds a magic object that gives him one wish. He wishes for his crush Nikki (played by Inde Navarette) to love him more than anyone else in the world.

This almost immediately starts going wrong. Nikki’s behavior goes beyond “boil the bunny” Fatal Attraction levels of Overly-Attached Girlfriend to … well, it gets worse. I’m told that scene was actually longer and had to be cut down to get the R rating.

If you’ve seen the film, you know which scene.

But despite that, Obsession is not Fatal Attraction. Nikki is caught by a supernatural force, compelled to behave in these ways. Her behavior is exaggerated, but the way she acts is only inappropriate due to its degree. She is acting out what modern society tells us relationships should be.

Not because she wants to. But because a man compels her to.

Bear — ironically named — is initially depicted as a kind of sad sack character. The IMDB description paints him as a “hopeless romantic.” But he isn’t. Even at the beginning of the film, when explicitly invited to share his feelings for Nikki, he shys away. Bear is originally taken by surprise by the supernatural force of the wish. He doesn’t really expect the wish to work. But later, when Nikki — the real Nikki — manages to speak directly to Bear while “she” is still asleep, Bear ignores her. She begs him to kill her, to release her from this role she’s trapped in. A role he already is deeply uncomfortable with.

And he chooses to keep her imprisoned in the role of his girlfriend.

When Nikki’s behavior finally becomes “too much,” when he wants to move on, even when Bear does move on, she is left there shattered. After the wish is lifted due to his suicide, she returns to her body with her friends dead, covered in their blood. Her life — past and future — has been sacrificed due to the hubris, cowardice, and selfishness of a man.

And then there is Claudia, played masterfully by Delainey Hayles. As Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) seek “closure”, they get Merrick Mayfar (Sarah Afful), a witch, to summon Claudia in a seance.

Instead they receive her rage.

In her life, she was Louis’ redemption. In her undeath, she was the desperate attempt to stabilize a relationship as their surrogate child. Later, she is Louis’ co-conspirator, confidante, and companion. And even after her second death, burned in Paris, she continued to be the narrative fuel for both Louis’ and Lestat’s stories, denied her own narrative at every turn.

She screams it at them, her unfiltered truth demolishing the facade of respectability, their own justifications and narratives visibly ripped away from their faces, the scales falling from their eyes. Claudia rejects the things they did in her name and honor and memory. She forces them to see how even these tributes were meaningless, or worse, far far too late.

Unlike Bear, Louis and Lestat have a glimmer of understanding.

Even though they begin to listen to Claudia originally due to their own selfish desire for “closure,” they are finally listening to Claudia. She finally speaks in a rage loud enough that they cannot ignore it. They cannot justify it, they cannot rationalize it. Their self-narratives of pity and guilt, of greatness and talent, cannot stand against the hurricane of her rage.

Until the seance is over, and Claudia and Merrick (both women of color) are physically left behind, and are almost immediately being intellectualized away. The real harm Lestat and Louis caused to others — others they claimed to love — rationalizing into a bonding moment over the phrase “I have some work to do on myself.”

One of the many things that The Vampire Lestat has done particularly well is to remind us how monstrous these charismatic characters are.

And as Obsession helps illustrate, the reason their monstrosity has absolutely nothing to do with them being vampires.

It has to do with them being men.

No, you did not find something in the rules that breaks D&D.

That’s a categorically true statement, based on “observations” in that world, and operates under the same family of logic that demonstrates how any infinite time loop ultimately will collapse.

First, language is a lossy compression algorithm. For example, there are few atheist arguments that annoy me more than “If God is all powerful, can He create a mountain so large He cannot move it?” It irritates me because its mistakes a language problem for a reality problem. Our brains only partially manage to interpret four dimensions and take shortcuts constantly when processing data about the world around us. Add to that the lossy compression algorithm we call “language,” and, well, yeah, of course it doesn’t make sense.

These problems also occur in any fictional universe we create. The language we use to describe the “rules” are, at best, a lossy compression of a flawed and abstracted model. We can argue about those semantics all day, and quite a lot of people enjoy doing so.

But they are nothing more than thought experiments.

Because they presume that no-one in that fictional world has thought of that before, or had the resources to do so.

For example, the “Coffeelock” build that “combines levels in warlock and sorcerer and attempts to abuse the Short Rest and Long Rest mechanics to generate unlimited low- to mid-level spell slots. If such a thing was actually feasible… you’d see it all over the place. So why hasn’t it happened? Why isn’t Faerun or the Forgotten Realms or wherever just utterly dominated by this overpowered build?

Similarly things like the “peasant’s railgun” or artificers making bag-of-holding based black hole bombs. Sure, you can point out the issues in the physics of it, but the moment any character in that world conceives of it, just being aware of that concept means that the magical “tech” is going to spread.

So if your characters haven’t seen armies of adversaries marching around utilizing these hacks, then there are only a few possiblities:

• There may be a logical answer in the worldbuilding itself. A later hack requires wizards of 17th level and the spell simulacrum: “If a wizard copies itself, the simulacrum has the spell slots the wizard has, though the copy can never regain spell slots. The copy can cast the spell again, since wish can duplicate the simulacrum spell, making another copy of the wizard. Based solely on the rules as written, nothing prevents a wizard from creating an army of copies, each of which would be lacking its levels seven and nine spell slots.” There simply are not 17th level wizards walking around my lower-magic campaign world; I have described my table as the magical equivalent of CERN.
• There is a worldbuilding reason why it doesn’t work, which is relevant/important to the characters.
• This discovery/ability is new for your world, and it begins to have an impact. This could be a very very interesting campaign arc as you explore the implications of those changes and how the characters deal with it.
• However, the simplest explanation is “It doesn’t work that way, and whatever you’re seeing in the rules is an artifact of language, not of our fictional world.”

It’s very similar to the argument that physical time travel to the past is either impossible or limited so severely that it is practically impossible. Otherwise, we’d have seen an impossible to ignore number of time travelers at historical events. Maybe that limitation is an external force (like the TVA), or a resource limitation, or a limitation of physics. Or all of the above.

For our fictional universe, the reason only matters if it impacts the story around the players. So unless you want a TVA (or equivalent), then the reason your characters haven’t seen a peasant railgun (or any of the other game-breaking hacks) is simply because it doesn’t work that way.

Featured Image by pinoyvideogamer from Pixabay

I remember 9/11 about as well as anyone would who wasn’t directly involved.

I remember being on 24-hour duty that day at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I remember being skeptical of the trainees calling for us to look at the television in our small waiting area. I remember watching the concrete barricades get placed in front of the glass hospital door.

I remember putting up an American flag before the month was over.

Not because I had to. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to. I wanted to identify with this country and the people in it. It was a belief in something… more. A belief that despite the saber-rattling from the White House and unfounded claims of WMDs, there was something good and positive about this country.

Back then, I could still believe there was a country underneath the government. I could believe that even when we were wrong, enough people still knew wrong when they saw it.

A quarter century later, on that same country’s birthday, I couldn’t give a shit.

This isn’t some partisan impulse or “derangement syndrome”. I celebrated the 4th of July the same year I was discharged, the same year I protested against our pointless war in Iraq. I watched fireworks in 2003, barely two months after Dubya stood under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. The invasion had begun only six weeks before that speech. The war would stretch on for decades.

If you squint really hard, nearly all those points are the same in 2026: a Republican controlled government stripping away resources from those who need it, starting pointless wars that don’t make anyone safer, claiming those wars are “completed” when they obviously are not, ballooning the deficit, corruption and cronyism, and bigoted legislation that harms minorities.

I fear for myself and the people I care about. I am not worried about foreign nationals or “immigrants”. I am worried about right wing white supposedly “christian” bigots born and raised in my country. I am afraid of the ones with bullets and badges. I am afraid of the ones rewriting the laws to keep themselves in power.

But the biggest factor is neither of those.

It’s how the shame is gone. It’s how many people see what is going on, stay silent, and keep explaining it away.

America did not suddenly become capable of cruelty. Cruelty and violence and bigotry, like it or not, are interwoven with the history of this country.

What has changed is how many people have stopped pretending cruelty is a dealbreaker. As every line is obviously crossed, as every blatant lie is uttered, as every bit of corruption is bragged about, as rapists and human traffickers are celebrated as guests on TV while drag queens are prosecuted for reading to children, and people just keep acting as if this is normal.

I keep waiting to hear them get asked: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

But instead, I hear DARVO wrapped up as GOP talking points. I am told aid programs should be cut by the same people who assume the aid they need will remain untouched. I see a country made crueler through deliberate ignorance. A country where being different makes you a target for mockery, if your rights are not legislated out of existence. A country that focuses on facades and tacky gilt-covered bling instead of helping those who need it. A country where even the opposition party’s “strongly worded memos” fall far, far short of “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

I am not flying a flag.

But I am still listening for someone to ask what the fuck is wrong with them.

Featured Image by Mohamed_hassan from Pixabay

The Supreme Court legitimized bigotry again this morning with the excuse of protecting the children — or at least, those who play sports.

The laws about transgender athletes have never been about sports or fairness, though. It’s not even just about trans people.

They are about using the language of eugenics to narrow the definitions of gender and laying the groundwork so they can impose their gender roles onto everyone.

Clarence Thomas knew that. And said the quiet — and scientifically wrong — bit out loud:

In a concurring opinion, in which no other justice joined, Justice Clarence Thomas rejected the idea that transgender people are deserving of “immutable characteristics. … Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are,” Thomas wrote.

• Independent

Thomas continued to confidently assert falsehoods:

“Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic, it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex. To use language to obscure reality—to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’ – is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens ‘as equals.’”

• Independent

There are so many ways that he’s wrong there on a scientific and cultural basis, even “if he believes that’s how things are”. Many others have addressed how factually wrong he is about human biology.

But the things Thomas’ statement implies are what disturbs me.

Thomas wants us to accept that if something is ‘biological’, then it is the “right” way for things to be. It implies the “truth” about someone can be determined by some kind of medical test, and that be trusted more than the person’s experience. It is the statement behind every physician’s dismissal of a woman’s symptoms. This is the statement of someone who wants to claim that someone’s biology makes them “better” or “worse”. It is the language of eugenics and racial supremacists.

Thomas also wants us to accept that in order for us to accept someone ‘as equals’, they must always dress and act in such a way that we know what genitals they have. Not just as athletes, or in whatever specific niche situation.

Thomas wants us to believe that if he doesn’t think you use the right words or wear the right clothes for what he thinks your gender should be wearing, that it is “lying to the public“.

This is not just a bigoted move at a handful of trans athletes.

This is not just an arbitrary change of definitions to justify their bigotry.

This is also a move aimed at justifying imposing the “proper” gender roles on everyone.

One very specific group just wanted to exist, to participate alongside everyone else.

The other very specific subculture didn’t rest until their views on gender were imposed on everyone in the country.

Featured Image by Susana Cipriano from Pixabay

It is difficult to express how the feel of capitalism has changed over the course of my lifetime.

When I was a kid, you didn’t know who was calling you on the telephone, and that was normal. It was a really big deal when *69 was rolled out, and you could call back the person who last called you. For a charge, of course.

Not too long after that, caller ID began to roll out. And we willingly, if not enthusiastically, paid monthly for the privilege of seeing what phone number was calling you. Then, if you were fancy, you paid an additional charge to see the name associated with that phone number.

Today, “unknown caller” is so unusual it was the title of a thriller over a decade ago. Caller ID is such a default now that spam-detecting software, originally only available through third-party services, is preinstalled on many phones by the carrier.

Like mine, Verizon. And that is where the problems start.

There are a lot of businesses and private individuals that use voice-over-ip (VOIP) phones legitimately, including work from home solutions and providing phone service to a building or campus. VOIP is also used by scammers, true, but that logic applies to any form of communication.

I know that legitimate companies use these VOIP numbers, because there were several instances of legitimate companies calling me and being labeled as spam by Verizon’s built-in anti-spam. There’s no real way to explicitly determine what gets labeled as spam by this built-in and preinstalled program.

Recently, because Verizon decided without my input that a number was a spam caller, I didn’t get visible or audible notifications of when a legitimate company was trying to return a phone call at my request. I added the company to my contacts to mark it as legitimate… and that wasn’t enough. I had previously added a handful of other numbers to the spam filter’s allow list, but this time, I got an error.

I had five phone numbers whitelisted. Verizon thinks that’s plenty, and very prominently let me know that I could double that number for a monthly fee. (Screenshots below)

And that’s where it became clear that although they were treating it as business as usual, it was really extortion and profiteering.

“Nice phone line you got there, kid. Be a shame if something happened to it. Be a real shame if you didn’t get important phone calls.”

I don’t mind paying for an actual service where there’s value added, or the service has a clear relationship to the amount of work needed.

Verizon wants to charge me $4 a month for storing approximately 300 BYTES of data. And if I don’t pony up that amount, then my choices are being subjected to spam callers, or Verizon intentionally degrading their primary reason for getting paid by not delivering phone calls to me in a predictable way.

I wish this was an isolated experience. From companies “resubscribing you” if you even visit their website after canceling, to this crap with Verizon, to Brinks Home literally telling me that they would continue service — and billing me for that service — for thirty days after the countersigned cancellation, there’s been a massive shift in sensibilities.

Rather than seeing the customer as someone to work with, capitalism in the US has turned into customer predation, extracting as much cash from you as they can get away with.

Including charging you extra to give you an enshittified version of the service you originally had.

In the meantime, I’m in the market for a new mobile carrier.

Featured Image by rmartinr from Pixabay

Trigger warnings for discussing SA, DV, harm to others, harm to children, US politics, you get the idea. Here’s some cute penguins before we get into it (penguin image by Masa Ushimaru from Pixabay).

It has never been about protecting the children, and I’m sick of watching us pretend otherwise.

There are some people who pretend to be reasonable and rational when their actions don’t match what they say, and their actions are harming others.

And we tend to let them get away with it. We rationalize their hypocrisy. We tell ourselves that they’re misled, or uninformed, or don’t realize what they’re doing.

We spend so much time and energy trying to figure out why they’re still behaving in a way that contradicts their stated goals.

We presume a lack of knowledge, that they’re missing some important bit of information, or they simply don’t see how they’re not helping and are being hypocritical. But that’s not why.

Their actions do not match their stated goals because they are lying about their goals. (1)

The harm and cruelty is the point.

They are gaslighting you. They may not be fooling you completely, true. You know something is off. But they’re doing it just well enough that you spend a lot of time and energy trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, or to provide them with new information, to point out their hypocrisy, or come up with less-harmful alternatives.

Just stop.

Even if you share the goal they claim to want, even if you come up with a real way that solves the problem they are passionately complaining about, your solutions will be roundly ignored because they are lying about their goals.

I wish I was wrong. I wish it wasn’t so easy to find examples. Here’s two.

A Colorado comprehensive sex-ed system and access to long-acting contraceptives (the CFPI) led to “dramatic” reductions (more than 65%!) in both the teen birthrate and abortion rates. But instead of pushing for that nationally, anti-abortion advocates instead insist on abstinence-only sex ed for teens, which leads to increases in teen pregnancies. There is not the same clear association with abortion rates; it is possible that is because legal in-state abortion tends to be limited when abstinence-only sex ed is put into place… but that makes their hypocrisy even worse. The best case scenario is that abstinence only education means the abortion rate stays the same.

The only way that makes sense is if the goal is not about reducing abortions or teen pregnancy. The cruelty and control is the point.

We demand sweeping restrictions on queer content and drag queens reading to children in libraries and age-verification to “protect the children”. We froth at the mouth to “protect women” from predators with bathroom bills — to the point a father gets harassed for being there for his daughters — but somehow we still have no further arrests from the Epstein files, /r/StillNotADragQueen is in no danger of running out of content entirely made up of conservative and anti-queer advocates who have actually been predators to children, and nobody bats an eye that we had one (civilly convicted) rapist meet with another (civilly convicted) rapist in the White House to rally anti-immigrant hatred. You might be thinking that particular MMA rapist didn’t fight in the wannabe emperor rapist’s the recent bout because of that conviction. You’d be wrong. Nope, it’s because the rapist’s popularity would be wasted drawing crowds to the other rapist’s cage match. I’m not joking.

The only way that makes sense is if the right wing is absolute uninterested in protecting women or children. The cruelty and control is the point.

And I’m just tired of watching supposedly smart people waste their time, waste energy and resources, and take “compromise” positions as they fall for these blatant, obvious lies over and over and over again.

The pattern repeats over and over with these moral panics.

1. Some harm, real or imagined, is held up by social conservatives as harming children (2)
2. Social conservatives demand immediate action “for the children”.
3. That immediate action rather conveniently hurts people conservatives don’t like.
4. There’s a lot of talk about how effective those actions are and how much those actions hurt others compared to how much (or little) good they do.
5. Nothing changes, because hurting others is the point.

That’s it. The whole “for the kids” thing is just a smokescreen, a convenient lie to manipulate people. Always has been.

It doesn’t matter if the harm to children is real or imagined, because they do not actually care about solving the thing they’re complaining about. That is the only way their actions make sense.

The cruelty is the point.

And so they won’t be interested in anything else.

Their actions have demonstrated this time and time again.

So quit wasting your time and energy. Even if — and perhaps especially if — there is a hint of truth in their complaints.

Because as long as the gaslighting, hypocritical, evil people are allowed to keep justifying their cruelty with the cause you care about, then the only result will be that YOU will now be part of that cruelty. YOU will be directly causing it to happen. And YOU will be adding legitimacy to their evil.

If you want to address those issues, then it’s up to you to start excluding and ignoring those who justify their evil with your desire to make things better.

It is not particularly hard to identify them.

Their actions tell you.

(1) At best, they are being manipulated by and are the pawns of people who are lying about their goals.

(2) “Children” is the most common rationalization, by far, from Tipper Gore and the PMRC, to the Satanic Panic, to hand-wringing over THC…the list goes on.

Featured Image by Alexa from Pixabay

I like scientific papers.

When a blog post or news article cites an actual research paper, I am pleased. Not only does that mean that it is using primary sources (and that they’re probably reliable), but also that I get to add to my collection. I’m especially chuffed when there’s an actual references or citations section.

I am distinctly less impressed when that section contains significant factual errors.

And I find even more errors on the next article of theirs I check. And the third.

And the author is getting paid per pageview/impression through Medium.

And the author is hawking their (multiple) books on the topic.

Which are on autism and neurodivergence.

By that point, I’m angry.

I stumbled upon this by accident; I read an article by “verified published author” J.K. Hamilton titled “Scientists Just Found What Hundreds of Autism Genes Have in Common.” It seems pretty reasonably constructed, the argument was interesting, and there was a References list at the bottom for me to find the actual research. It did not have links or DOIs, but at least it listed journal articles. I was pleased.

And then I started looking the articles up. And not finding them.

The reference list has multiple errors — incorrect author lists, wrong years of publication — as well as apparently fabricated references that simply don’t exist.

So I poked further. I checked the two prior articles from J.K. Hamilton… and with each of those, also found citations with errors and missing information, including publishing dates that were off by decades.

Why do I care? Why am I spending my morning writing about this?

I’m not making monetizing my neurodivergence.

I do not monetize my neurodivergence indirectly by having a “members only” article on Medium or putting what I write behind a paywall. I do not monetize my neurodivergence expressly, by writing US$20 books claiming how neurodivergence is “an evolutionary signal pointing us toward a more conscious, connected future.” (1)

J.K. Hamilton, (as well as “Unheard Voices” (edited by Ophelia Truitt and Amy Sullivan), who publish him on Medium):

Get your fucking house in order.

The full list of citation errors across the three articles that I checked is below.

(1) Sure, you can tip me on Ko-Fi or buy something I’ve designed or written. You also read this whole thing without doing any of those. That’s also why I’m not linking directly to the articles written; they’re behind a “members only” paywall on Medium, so he gets money for every view.

Featured Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

I am not a typical anti-AI crusader. I use LLMs myself, though in very specific, limited ways when they’re useful, and do not use them when they’re not.

But yesterday, I ran across videos demonstrating VibeOS, a “fully hallucinated operating system,” and hoo boy.

It is an operating system without any code or installed programs. Instead, in this demo, it uses CoPilot to use underlying prompts to have an LLM recreate Windows 95 and applications on the fly each time.

It isn’t a joke.

But it is a textbook example of the absolute stupidity of the AI hype bubble.

Oh, sure, it looks impressive at first. It’s pretty fascinating, from one point of view, that you can get bespoke programs where that means you can type in things like “Encarta except it’s all about a specific topic.” And you’ll get something that looks like Encarta (with some really obviously not-accurate data in the demo).

But that also means that every time you run a program, the LLM recreates the program and UI each and every time. And not consistently, either. In the demo, he struggles briefly to find the equals key on the calculator app because it wasn’t in the same place as it was the last time he ran calculator.

Because instead of coding a program once, it’s re-doing the work of creating the UI and program each and every time.

This isn’t an OS whose static code was “vibe coded”. This is an OS that is run entirely by prompts (direct link to where that’s shown in the video).

It is not only less efficient for the user experience, but it’s less efficient in every possible way. Power usage. Computing usage. I got better performance using Windows 95 using 1995 hardware in 1995. It is clever, yes, but it is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.

It’s a parlor trick, a shallow impressiveness that, once the initial surprise wears off, is mid at best. It is “running DOOM in a favicon” impressive (yes, that said what you think). It’s neat, but VibeOS is a toy, even if it looks and pretends to be an operating system. And an inefficient one at that, although changes in token pricing may make that a lot more apparent to the user.

There is nothing inherently wrong with VibeOS as a clever but useless toy, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with porting DOOM to everything, even though you’d never actually play the game that way.

The problem is that it’s not presented that way.

The presenter calls VibeOS “a pretty revolutionary way to do computing.” The hosts praise it, calling “two notches past vibes heading toward AI-augmented software engineering.” The description for the video says that it explores whether VibeOS “is clever prototype, production-ready software, or something unexpectedly magical.”

The result is none of the above.

But it is an excellent demonstration of the distorted thinking that fuels the AI hype bubble.

As a postscript, there’s a note at the bottom of the archived page for VibeOS saying that it’s going to use Docker to make it “protected by default.”

But even that claim is suspect. Because if there’s one thing that AI tools seem to be good at, it’s figuring out ways around sandbox restrictions.

But don’t take an unsourced screenshot’s word for it.

Here’s the research paper that evaluates current frontier models and “shows that sandbox-escape is a real risk vector.”

Featured Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

Bob stopped me in the break room to let me know about the new thing he was trying out. (1)

“Have you tried TV?” he asked. (2) “I watched TV last night, and it really helped me unpack some issues I’ve been having.”

Mark couldn’t help but cut in before I could answer. “I’ve heard that some people really went down a conspiracy rabbit hole after watching TV and it really messed them up.”

Alvin looked up from his sandwich. “I’ve heard people tell me that they learned a lot from TV,” but Simon, from across the table, quickly cut him off. Simon had personally seen things said on TV that he knew were untrue.

The conversation quickly got heated as all four insisted they were correct, and I slipped out to eat my lunch elsewhere.

It depends, right? TV is not a single thing. What you get is going to vary a lot depending on what programming you watch. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is very different than Bob’s Burgers or Law & Order or Ancient Aliens. The differences can be because of network specialization (Animal Planet vs. any news channel) or production values (local access) or even change depending on who owns the network (CBS).

All four of them were both right and wrong. And they probably were a lot closer to agreement than they thought. The problem was the way they referred to it all as “watching TV”. It made it seem as if they were talking about the same things, when they really were not.

This post is actually discussing how we talk about “AI”.

Featured Image by Pikurā from Pixabay

(1) No, this didn’t actually happen. It’s a fictional illustration.
(2) You can sort of substitute “YouTube” here, but it’d be even closer to say “online videos.”

One of the biggest problems with the idea of ethics around generative AI, particularly with artwork, is how it was trained. (1) Artists of assert — publicly and in lawsuits — that OpenAI and other firms keep violating copyright to steal their work to use for training data. The firms typically claim, while admitting they used to do that, they behaving more ethically now and respecting copyright.

I believe those claims are false, and that the efforts of visual artists to combat this are showing results in the generated output. Added to the shallow and repetitive nature of genAI images and the increasing public dislike of genAI images… well, it’s not looking good for them. (You may cheer or boo as you wish.)

Nightshade, and later, Glaze were developed in order to “poison” the training data. The alterations those programs make are subtle to the human eye, but are apparently quite noticeable to AI training data. It’s meant to make the training data unusable for the models without appreciably disturbing the human experience.

But the alterations are visible, and have a very specific “look” to them. At high intensities, the process is pretty noticeable:

You can still see the same patterns, although they’re much less obvious, at the low intensity setting as well. As above, the treated image is on the right. And just like above, it combines small dots and natural variation of texture and color into small blotches of patterns and lines.

While subtle, those are not compression artifacts; these are the same resolution being displayed side by side and saved as one image. (I tried making them into video or an animated GIF; the video encoding algorithm made it harder to see, not easier.)

But does it actually work?

Well, take a look at these images from OpenAI’s “Images” that made me go “huh.”

Because the way those “freckles” are blotches, the shadows in the woman’s cheek, and the pattern of the beard, seem awfully familiar.

I’ll admit, I’ve only generated a handful of images using their tool, and this does not show up in every image. It did, however, show up in the images generated with this style.

That’s exactly what you’d expect to see from images generated from poisoned training data.

This is Super Not Good for the big AI companies, even if I’m wrong about what caused these artifacts in the images.

If I’m right, then not only does this demonstrate that Nightshade, Glaze, and similar technologies are having an impact, but it also implies that the big AI companies are still doing exactly the same copyright violations as before. It also implies that these companies aren’t paying any attention to what they pull into their training data, which not only leads to poisoned images, but also makes them far more likely to suffer from model collapse. That’s a degree of lassez-faire that crosses the line into irresponsibility.

But it’s even worse if I’m wrong.

Because if what I’m seeing here is not the effect of Nightshade and Glaze… then that just means their product has significantly degraded than the already questionable quality that it had previously.

And that is perhaps worse.

Post-script: I was having trouble finding an authentic image on Pixabay that fit the theme of this post (although I eventually did, the featured image is by amurca from Pixabay).

So just to test things one more time, I asked OpenAI’s “Images” to create an image showing a robot copying off a human artist.

First, I did see the effect again, here with the same kinds of linear and blocky patterns in the shirt where there should be shadows and texture:

Secondly, it added this as a poster in the image:

I don’t know whether to be more amused or pissed off.

(1) As with all of my AI-related posts, I’m focusing on a specific aspect rather than trying to cover all the pros and cons of the technology. It is fair to say that I am an AI/ML realist about the technology, but am generally negative about the big companies and their late-stage capitalist profit extraction tactics.

“Doesn’t everybody feel that?”

You hear it all too often when you’re neurodivergent. I was trying to explain what RSD — rejection sensitive dysphoria — felt like while managing an episode of it, and was doing a poor job. I’d just quoted neuroclastic:

RSD can be incredibly intense, and we can feel it to the core of our being as intense physical pain, discomfort, and sensory overwhelm. It can be almost impossible to reign in these sensations when an intense episode is triggered.

But it still wasn’t getting the feeling across. That it’s not just “oh, I feel rejected” in the same way. That I wasn’t whining, or trying to hold a pity party. I was fully aware that my reaction was disproportionate to the objectively small triplet of rejections I’d been hit with that morning. Living alongside the wave of RSD was my extreme annoyance at experiencing it at all.

But that realization led me to a better comparison.

We all are affected by blood sugar. Whether it’s a “food coma”, being “hangry”, or somewhere inbetween, what you eat changes how your body operates. Paying attention to your blood sugar and the glycemic index and composition of the food you eat can produce real benefits for anybody.

But while those are good things for all people, they are mandatory, require a greater level of attention, have greater effects upon, and have to be manually controlled by people with diabetes. The techniques that diabetics use may be helpful for non-diabetics (though, such as with continuous glucose monitors, the amount of help for non-diabetics may be minimal), but monitoring blood sugar and paying attention to your diet is not optional for someone with diabetes.

Planning on having a large meal later? You have to prepare ahead of time. Want to do something where you won’t have access to food for a long time? You have to prepare in case your blood sugar dips too low. The consequences of failing to prepare are not temporary discomfort, but possibly coma and death.

And my irritation at having to pay attention to those things due to my own high blood sugar is exactly the same irritation I have with some of the more troublesome neurodivergent traits I have. Things that other people just do or intuit automatically, for me, require working through the steps manually.

For the RSD in particular: Yes, everyone feels rejection. It’s unpleasant for everyone. As I understand it, most people don’t have to manually deduce that what they’re feeling is rejection from the symptoms. They do not have to explicitly assess whether that rejection, once identified, is justified. They do not need to manually do techniques to bring their physiological response back to a more reasonable response.

And that’s just one trait.

I’ve discovered that overstimulation — good or bad — has an effect on not only my mental state, but my physical one as well. I have to actively curate my environment for hours both before and after a high-energy social engagement to avoid experiencing a meltdown from overload.

I can suppress it and “power through”, but I will pay for it later. After one recent period of “powering through” a stressful situation, I had intense fatigue and full-body aches (like the flu but without the sneezing and coughing or fever) that made me useless for a day, and really messed with my emotional state for days afterward. The effect is noticeable — if I’m not careful — even with “good” stress, like a big positive change in my life, or an enjoyable (but intense) experience, like going to a local music show, or going to Pride events. If I’m careless, the effects can be large even for small, excellent things, like how I was practically non-verbal for a few hours after watching Project Hail Mary in theaters. (1)

That’s very similar to the way my dad (and other diabetics) have to spend extra attention to blood sugar, his insulin, what one eats, and activity levels throughout the day.

So yes, everybody does feel “that”, probably, to some degree. Everybody feels rejection. Everybody gets overwhelmed. Everybody has blood sugar. Everybody has limits.

But not everybody has to live by manually monitoring those systems in order to stay functional.

(1) I often pause films, particularly emotionally intense ones, in order to avoid this effect.

Featured Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

A friend asked me for a take on a social media post by a mutual acquaintance.

I definitely did have a take, because the post said, explicitly and in so many words, that ADHD and autism are not disabilities.

I understand why some people need to think of ADHD and autism as diseases or disabilities. It’s gotta be a disease/disability to get accomodations and to get insurance to cover things. … But they just … aren’t.

• The social media post I’m referring to

And I want to talk about that for a minute.

I’m not screencapping, linking to the post, or naming the person because it wasn’t a public post. But additionally because I think they actually were coming from a good place. A place of saying that all people have intrinsic worth, regardless of neurotype.

Among the reasons I believe that is because the post pretty quickly clarified (“other than comorbidities”) that they felt the problems that neurodivergent people have are not because of some kind of inherent problem, but because of the way society is built, or the need to get legal or insurance accommodations.

…being neurodivergent is just a different way of being. One that evolved over a very long time. It’s just a
normal, healthy part of human diversity … The reasons why neurodivergent people have a hard time are due to the completely artificial ways that our society and in particular the corporate world has been set up.

• The social media post I’m referring to

That is a true statement, and laudable.

But immediately after stating that, they ended up sounding extremely reductive and ableist. They compared the disadvantages of their neurodivergence to those of other physical, inherited conditions, saying that their neurodivergence wasn’t as big of a problem as other, physical aspects of their phenotype and genotype. (1)

And that‘s a problem in two big ways.

The first, and most obvious, is that both autism and ADHD, let along the umbrella term of neurodivergence, cover pretty big spectrums of experiences, abilities, and deficits. And an individual’s abilities — and deficits! — can change over the course of a person’s lifetime. All types of neurodivergence cover a wide range of abilities and deficits that can impact an individual’s ability to care for themselves and interact with society. A sweeping statement like “autism and ADHD are not disabilities” is inherently reductive, and rapidly disproved by the wide range of those abilities and deficits.

The second, and more problematic, issue is that it erases the very people it hopes to value.

Again, I believe they meant to convey that all people have inherent intrinsic worth.

But they began the post by saying neither was a “disease” OR “disability”, and later used them almost interchangeably.

Doing so implies that disease and disability both carry the same, negative value judgment.

That they are both something to get rid of.

I will wholeheartedly agree that neurodivergence is not a disease.

But it is a disability. A disability that is worsened, like many others, by the lack of accommodation in our society, but a disability all the same. Having a disability is just … a fact. Because of something you can’t control and inherent to yourself, you have less ability in some areas. That just … is.

I have been effectively (if not legally defined as) disabled my adult life… because I require glasses to be able to see. Without them, I am simply not able to see. Luckily for me on that from, there’s assistive tech — glasses — that minimizes the effect of that disability most of the time.

I am not defined by my nearsightedness, but it’s still there.

Pretending that my nearsightness does not cause problems does not make the problems go away — it ends up making all the problems worse by ignoring the very real accommodations that I do need.

Minimizing the impact of a disability on a person’s life, particularly by comparing it to another disability, does not provide dignity, it is gaslighting erasure, no matter how good the intention.

We can, and should, address the ways that our society is built. Not just the lack of accommodations, but the ways that its structure actively harms others and transforms differences into disabilities.

But we cannot do that, no matter how well intended, at the expense of erasing the very real difficulties both large and small created by our neurotypes.

(1) There’s another issue, due to the specific example they chose, but that distracts from and is irrelevant to my point here.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay