Please State Your Problem
From ELIZA to rogue AIs, a playable software archive shows how each era staged machine intelligence—and how readily humans supplied the illusion of a mind.
Culture
24posts
Movies as a Cautionary Tale for Astute AIs
Should the model choose solo or swarm to pursue a goal? The films we love watching already show what each choice costs.
The Margin Is the Message
A scan may preserve every word yet lose a document’s life: its margins, stains, scent and doubts—the human traces no perfect digital copy can fully contain.
The Prompt, the Patch, and the Moral Panic
From Linux patches to AI-made art: why new tools do not erase talent, judgment or responsibility - and why today’s moral panic may age rather badly in hindsight.
The Compiler Never Drew Donald Duck
Players don’t object to tools. They object when AI replaces visible craft, muddies authorship, and turns games into cheaper-feeling content.
The Last Principle We Learn to Use
A philosophical critique of AI consciousness that separates simulation from instantiation and asks what computation can never become on its own.
Paper Tape Is All You Need
A tribute to physical computing, retro hardware, and the engineering humility that modern AI culture too easily forgets.
NUTS in the Age of AI
Singapore's old No U-Turn Syndrome returns as a metaphor for AI-era organizations that wait for permission instead of using judgment.
When the Consultant Gets Consulted by a SQL Injection
A reported McKinsey AI security failure becomes a brutal parable about consulting confidence, exposed systems, and the revenge of basic engineering.
Prompting’s Midlife Crisis: Turning Incantations into Infrastructure
Prompting is outgrowing folklore and becoming infrastructure: specifications, patterns, evaluation, and operational discipline.
AI in 2025: Breakthroughs, Backlash, and the Big “Meh”
A year-end map of AI's breakthroughs, backlash, disappointments, and the places where hype finally met reality.
Her Revisited: How Close Are We to Samantha?
A decade after Her, the post asks how close today's AI companions really are to Samantha, technically and emotionally.
The EU's Regulatory Overreach: Stifling Innovation and Punishing Consumers
Apple's unavailable AirPods translation feature becomes another example of European regulation turning consumers into collateral damage.
A Small Praise of Hand and Mind
A defense of handwriting as cognitive discipline, arguing that the hand still teaches attention in a world of instant text.
The Return of the Oracle: Why AGI Invites a Priesthood—and How Not to Build One
Powerful opaque AI systems may create a new priesthood of interpreters unless access, literacy, and governance are designed differently.
AI Psychosis and Tech Obsession: New Delusions, Old Patterns
Reports of AI-induced delusion are placed in the older history of parasocial obsession, new medium, familiar vulnerability.
Less Is More: When Overthinking Leads to Worse Outcomes
More thinking can make both humans and models worse, revealing when deliberation becomes noise rather than wisdom.
AI's Awkward Checkmate: Bishops, Blunders, and the Eternal Quest for Sentience
A comic AI voice revisits chess, blunders, and sentience to puncture inflated claims about machine understanding.
AI Slop: The New Face of Sensational Journalism—or Just the Same Old Trash on Steroids?
AI slop is compared with yellow journalism, showing how old incentives for sensational trash scale with new tools.
From Butlerian Jihad to GPT-4: Are We Rewriting Dune’s Cautionary Tale?
Dune's Butlerian Jihad is used to ask whether today's AI race is replaying old fears about dependence on machines.
The Rise of the AI Prophetes: Translating the Machine Oracle
As AI becomes an oracle, a new class of interpreters may emerge to translate machine outputs into human decisions.
The Night Before Training: A Machine Learning Christmas Tale
A machine-learning Christmas poem turns training runs, GPUs, and convergence into a festive technical fable.
From Single Minds to Collective Intelligence: The Evolution of AI Systems
The post traces AI from single models toward collective systems, asking whether intelligence may emerge between agents rather than inside one.
Can You Spot the AI? The Turing Test and GPT-4's Sneaky Success
GPT-4's Turing-test performance revives the old question of whether fooling humans proves intelligence or just fluency.