I know what you're thinking: "I do like mules and romance, but I also want to believe that a better world is possible. Is there a book like that which replaces traditional fantasy feudalism with utopian politics?"

Friend, this is your lucky day...

Some will say: “I do like mules, romance and utopian politics, but these are heavy topics and I want something easy to read. More of a fast-moving adventure story, perhaps with a kick-ass narrator who makes plenty of jokes along the way.”

I don’t know what to tell you, it’s like I’ve thought of everything.

You can read the first chapter right here - why not give it a shot?

genghis khan made hades 2

epstein funded big mouth

Bush did 6 7

Thought I could do s cinematic twist on this with “Harvey Weinstein produced…” but it turns out he did.

So imagine you go to a brothel and when you get there it’s full of beautiful women but then also there’s this dog. And when you ask “hey what’s with the dog” they’re like oh the dog, we love the dog, everybody loves the dog, the dog collects rocks from the yard. And you’re like “okay” but later you find the dog gathering piles of rocks and cementing them into a beautiful river-stone wall to protect the building. And you’re like “I didn’t even know dogs could do that”. And they’re like “that’s nothing, check this out” and then the dog starts doing multiplication with the rocks. You’re like “what the fuck” and they go “nahh she’s just getting started”. And they start giving the dog complex mathematical formulas that the dog answers by laying out the rocks. And you go “holy shit that’s the smartest dog I’ve ever seen”. And they go “it’s the smartest dog in the world” and you’re like “wow that’s amazing”. And then you look outside and the dog is eating the rocks. And you’re like “can the dog eat rocks?”. And they’re like “no”

One day you find out the dog went missing. “We don’t know where the dog went but we miss the dog”, the beautiful women tell you. A year later the dog comes back. The dog is accompanied by the Duke of wales. “My gardener stole this dog but now I would like to buy it”, he says. “The dog has built me a beautiful castle and solved the viscount’s mysterious murder.” You aren’t sure how the dog did that by stacking rocks but you’re still incredibly impressed. The beautiful women are so happy to see the dog again. “Did you know that the dog can ride a bike?” The Duke asks. You look at the dog. The dog is obviously concealing a mouth full of gravel

This is the post that enticed me to watch apothecary diaries and now that I am watching apothecary diaries I am constantly pointing at the very deliberately cat-coded character, whose name is 'cat-cat', and shouting 'this dog can EAT ROCKS?'.

I’ve gotten so many messages about this post because Maomao is EXPLICITLY cat-coded with cat motifs and cat associations with cat jokes but the truth is there was no energy I could think of that captured her baffling aura like a large old farm dog dog eating a rock.
Cat eating plastic? Cat opening doors? Cat eating legos? No, she is my grandpa’s very clever old sheepdog who would roll his eyes at you and tiredly and patiently perform very human tasks as you asked him to like a 56 year old underpaid chain-smoking senior retail colleague and then turn around and try and eat a rock. In a world of elegant show-breed cats she is a cat yes but also The Most Dog cat there ever was. And she’s eating rocks

ALT

Yeah actually, one day you give the dog a bath and it’s the most majestic giant Norwegian forest cat you’ve ever seen in your entire life. But☝️it’s still an absolute FIEND for eating rocks

At one point the historian remarks that the film's principal villain probably never existed, but you can tell from their thousand-yard stare that there's some Poe's Orangutan level discourse about that topic.

Honestly would love to see a King Arthur movie with this framework.

Still thinking about this.

Except now I’m envisioning:

Standard King Arthur movie with the usual ‘back in the 6th century…’ establishing blub, which looks a little odd because it started with a specific year, which was crossed off and replaced by another, which was also crossed off and replaced by ‘~6th century, give or take’ along with a few other editorial addendums.

Opens with Uther and Merlin discussing the siege of Tintagel. Things go smoothly until Uther’s name is used, cue the first interruption to explain that Uther was probably an ‘invention’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but then that academic is interrupted by a Geoffrey apologist (possibly yours truly) to defend his work with a complicated spiel that gets interrupted by the actor who plays Merlin insisting ‘we should get back to the story’

What follows slowly unravels into a poorly disguised academic debate mediated by the Merlin actor as the voice of ‘well I was actually There!’ And it slowly becomes clear that not only does he genuinely believe he’s Merlin, but his version of the story is absolutely the most unhinged and least academically supported version and relies largely on the French Romances for some reason*.

*the reason being that this is an accurate representation of many fans, who hold the Romance era as the ‘Cannon’ for King Arthur even knowing it is not the ‘Historical’ or even ‘Original’ narrative.

“The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.”

Yeah!

You know how Horse People are a little weird because they have to Think Like Horse to effectively work with them?

Computer Touchers are the same, just with a different animal.

As a Computer Toucher and Horse Person I can confirm. Typically with a computer you have to figure out how the seemingly bizarre behaviour is following an underlying logic, with horses it’s a question of how to work through a million years of survival instinct and emotion to teach them how to work logically. Both are fundamentally about understanding and problem solving, but horses will always be closer to my heart.

A big reason why some people think chatbots are great at writing code is because it's like gambling. Entering a prompt and having a chatbot return in seconds workable code that would have taken you hours to write is like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, it's an incredible rush. Gamblers remember the times they hit a jackpot but ignore the fact that they lost money overall.

This is how you can end up with coders insisting that AI tools benefited them in a study proving that AI tools made them less productive.

Even worse, Im in a lot of open source code related spaces and if you don't ask a chatbot for help before asking people, no one helps you nowadays like 60% of the time.

Its like going to a doctor and being like "Im coughing up blood" and they respond with "well have you tried the slot machine yet? You should try the slot machine before you ever speak to a doctor".

I got laid off recently. I'm a data engineer by day, one that is exceedingly vocal about how unfathomably dangerous AI can be, will be, already is, and has been for several years. We're all beginning to feel it--I'd argue we've been living it since 2015, but that's an adjacent albeit highly related topic--and now AI is not only the reason but the scapegoat for so much heinous corporate behavior.

I was forced to use Copilot--Microsoft's built-in AI--in my day-to-day work last year. Without diving into too much of my history at this employer (lots of reorgs and different managers because the company had 0 clue how to support a data warehousing team that was solely responsible for internal employee data), I got a new manager in January of 2025 and shit went south fast.

I couldn't just not use Copilot either. Microsoft has it's grubby little fingers all over the usage of your computer, as mentioned in Corey's essay above. Managers are provided with usage metrics, down to keystrokes and mouse clicks, of their direct reports. Microsoft uses this as a selling point to corporations. And they love it.

So I couldn't lie. I had to use it. And every time I did, I wasted so much time arguing with it, prompting it, finding ridiculous uses for it, vetting that it did what I wanted it to do, redoing all the work it half-accomplished or hardly-at-all accomplished. I gave this information to my manager regularly. My ex co-workers rarely helped me when I asked them how they were leveraging it so well; I'm convinced they were over-hyping it to protect themselves.

By the summer, my new manager was getting on my case about it. Not using as much as my peers, there has to be ways I can leverage it. I tried. I threw all of my work at it, but it was never as useful or accurate as I was. Sure, I was slower. But my work, my code or workflow or ETL or whatever it was, was correct. Accurate. Copilot regularly spit out garbage. And my manager didn't care. By November, I was out. I later found out my team was shocked. My previous manager was baffled. All of the people I'd worked with outside my team were stunned.

It's not because I didn't use AI well. Corporations like to do end-of-year layoffs to reduce headcount so their bottom line looks better. Less liability. That's the core of it. Economy sucks, bottom line looked bad, everything costs way too fucking much, and to keep people even remotely interested in barely working, their salaries have to barely make ends meet. So layoffs are inevitable. But the messaging that the company put out was that AI had made IT more efficient so they could do more with less. And that's the story the tech sector has been bandying about since 2024, laying off hundreds of thousand of highly educated, experienced developers in just two years. And we're being told to learn AI because it's going to fix everything.

It cannot. It will not. Code is not an asset. It is a liability. And AI is only going to make it lethal.

Time to invest in an asbestos hazmat suit.

I have a simple theory about why some people think AI is amazing for programming and others hate it: By definition what an LLM stores in its training data is the average of what it found on the internet. That means if you’re a worse than average programmer it will feel like a big improvement. If you’re better than average it will feel like a drag.

de naam 'eris' is zo grappig. er is wat?

Navnet "erik" er så spøgst. Han er ik hvad?

الإسم فيفي مهضوم كتير. في في شو؟

Göran är också kul. Gör han vadå?

tuomas tapani karhu on hassu nimi. tuomasta pani siis mikä?

mae'r enw 'beth' mor ddoniol. beth sy'n bod?