The grifters were prepare for the gov’s age verification, of the mark on the first day with fishing emails,

Current mood: Blues & Roots by Charles Mingus music.apple.com/au/album/blu...

(p.6, beside crypto/metaverse/LLMs) "Tech's grief cycle: Bitcoin (denial), Metaverse (bargaining), AI (acceptance + desperate hope)."

Shipping Containers: Malcom McLean’s Complicated Gift To Free Trade buff.ly/QM0zZHJ A creative angle on Malcolm McLean’s invention of containerized shipping, framing it through the lens of modern software development metaphors like Docker and containerization . Fun read!

Some of the (what looks like AI) animations of album covers in Apple Music is just a bit creepy. (Looking at you, The Pleasure Principle.)

The AGI panic is distracting us from present harms—Robodebt, UK Post Office Horizon, the algorithmic surveillance of warehouse workers—to focus on a science fiction future.

My latest Substack post, "The Three Grammars". The one in which I show the same pattern repeating: 1897 electrical code, 1925 auto loans, 1999 web standards. Each took 10-15 years. Now we need all three to converge simultaneously for heat pumps, EVs, and solar. That's the crisis.

Current mood: Heartattack and Vine by Tom Waits music.apple.com/au/album/hea...

What’s arguably most impressive about Zorn: he’s built a system for sustained creative output. The label, The Stone, the collaborative network—this removes friction that slows most artists down. Less ‘lone genius,’ more ‘genius at orchestrating creative ecosystems.’

New Knives (Wake Up Dead Man) out was fun. Worth going to the cinema for.

Current mood: Bone Machine by Tom Waits music.apple.com/au/album/bon...

We live in a state of epistemic anarchy. A return to elite gatekeeping won't work. Is the only hope to persuade the misinformed? www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/lets-not-b...

"only 20% of [customer service and support leaders ] leaders have reduced agent staffing due to AI" That's a bit of a change from the "mass layoffs due to automation" narrative and the "AI job apocalypse Gartner: buff.ly/1gz2X91

“I never practice. From time to time, I just open my case and throw in a piece of raw meat.” The late guitar ace who spurned the jazz world, climbed the pop charts and lived in terror of taking a solo | GuitarPlayer buff.ly/0iCv6Pt

(p.2, beside “Are you using AI to write this?”) “Turing test or tone-police?”

Steve Cropper, legendary guitarist for Booker T & the MGs, dies aged 84 | Soul | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2025/d...

If you’re interested in why some trades resist full automation, the B1M’s piece on bricklaying robots is a perfect case study. Mortar is a non-Newtonian, stateful material; engineered adhesive is what makes robotics possible. A neat example of how we change materials to fit machines, not vice versa.

Latest: "The Agent That Wasn't There"—explaining why agentic AI security is a category error. We're building stateful pattern matchers (LLMs) and securing them as goal-driven agents. That architectural gap? That's the vulnerability. Think platypus, but for AI security.

Generative AI had the fastest “try it once” adoption ever because it’s free & one click away, but three years in, it has delivered no big productivity surge, no widespread job displacement, no new life-changing product, and no deep societal shift—just a very good tool that got hyped as a revolution.

Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution - apenwarr buff.ly/ep6TBtL Lots of fun ;)


(in the gutter, sideways)
 “Numan’s ‘Cars’ = first time the uncanny valley got a radio edit.”

A mathematical ceiling limits generative AI to amateur-level creativity buff.ly/d79dny9 Solid and interesting take by someone with a long track record of work in creativity

My latest on Substack, 'The Platypus in the Server Room', the one in which I compare AI researchers to Victorian naturalists inspecting a platypus pelt for stitches, and somehow this analogy holds up for 1,200 words.

Current mood: Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam by The Comet Is Coming music.apple.com/au/album/hyp...

Do I have it right that AI 2027 is now 2030ish, the hard takeoff is more a gentle loft, and the sharp left turn is now a gentle glide to the left?

The future is unwritable, but the present is readable.

Coined a new phrase ‘epistemic humidity’. When the map won’t stay crisp, stop demanding it dry out.

Intellectuals experiencing the loss of narrative control and responding by… attempting to reassert narrative control, just with different content. “Liberalism failed, so here’s our grand story about civilizational revival.” The form stays identical even as the substance changes.

Karen Hao’s *Empire of AI*, for all its journalistic energy, falls into a familiar trap: taking a real problem (data centres use water and power; Global South labour is exploited) and inflating it into an epoch-defining moral drama.

The 2020s feel like stagnation amid miracles. AI makes workers 40% faster. Heat pumps are 3-5× more efficient. EVs have lower operating costs. But aggregate productivity? Still 1.3%—basically flat. We're stuck in 1886 AND 1919 simultaneously. Here's why: 🧵

Current mood: Going to Prague by Belle Jar music.apple.com/au/album/goi...

The 2020s productivity paradox explained: For the first time in industrial history, supply-side coordination (1886: making installation cheap) and demand-side coordination (1919: making purchase affordable) must solve simultaneously. Same purchase. Two grammars. 12-16 year clock.

1798: British naturalists receive a pelt from Australia: duck bill, otter fur, venom, lays eggs. 1st reaction: "Hoax!" 2nd reaction: "We need a new branch of life." 2024: LLM debugs code, writes poetry, fails basic logic, claims consciousness. Reaction: "Alien intelligence!"

Current mood: The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths music.apple.com/au/album/the...

Current mood: Monotheist by Celtic Frost music.apple.com/au/album/mon...

Current mood: Weejuns by Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns music.apple.com/au/album/wee...

Ideas don’t descend like light. They rise like steam—then get piped, metered, and billed.

Current mood: Misa Criolla - Misa Flamenca music.apple.com/au/album/mis...

Current mood: Bees In The Bonnet by Hedvig Mollestad Trio music.apple.com/au/album/bee...

We see faces in clouds, personalities in boats—and now, apparently, introspection in autocomplete. Here's what LLMs actually do (and don't do). A thread. 🧵

Silicon Valley: "We're building God and it will either save or destroy humanity" MIT Tech Review: "That's just a conspiracy theory with better funding" Finally.

My latest Substack post, 'Inside the Language Machine'. The one in which I argue that LLMs navigate the Tube map of human language—and explain why that changes everything about AI capabilities and limits.

Current mood: The Swinger From Rio by Sergio Mendes music.apple.com/au/album/the...

The AGI claim (Implicit): "The model learns abstract representations that enable reasoning" The burden of proof: "Show me the many-to-one mapping. Where's the compression?" The compression is real, but it's not abstract or symbolic. It's topological and distributed.

The parsimonious explanation: - LLMs map relationships, patterns - there's a 1:1 relationship between prompt & activation in latent space - 'injecting' perturbs latent space - pattern reformation sees the pattern drawn to nearby attractors No anthropomorphic voodoo required

Narrow (provable): "Current deployed LLMs are injective, therefore cannot abstract, therefore cannot reason." Broader (highly likely): "Any language-only training paradigm explores language structure, not reality. Architecture changes won't fix this. Different paradigm required"

Current mood: All We Have Is Now by Elephant Sessions music.apple.com/au/album/all...

Re the injective paper. We can connect some dots: Real Analytic -> Injective to Injective -> Cannot Abstract to Cannot Abstract -> Cannot Reason to Cannot Reason -> Governance is Based on a Fiction.

Phineas and Ferb S05 is the best yet

Individual authorship isn't dying—it was always a 300-year institutional arrangement we mistook for human nature. The knot in your stomach when you see a prompt-jockey outrank your essay? That's not about plagiarism. It's your body registering that a business model just dissolved. 🧵