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Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 is a weblog by Emma Humphries

The more you know, the more jokes you get.

07 Nov 2026 » Good posts on AI

A linkblog of good posts on AI

I got yelled at in DMs on Fedi for being “reactionary,” so I’m going to try to divert some of my disgust with the LLM and GenAI crowd into a periodic list of good posts (and articles) on the subject.

First, via Alex Russell, we have a new term for digital onanism: Grok Waifu.

Can scientists reliably tell if a novel is written using AI?, Nature
An interview with Tuhin Chakrabarty, a professor of computer science at SUNY Stony Brook, on his research on detecting AI-generated novels. Chakrabarty talks about how his research group considered runs of words shared between books is a signature for AI generated text. Also that genre fictions tropes make detecting AI generated text more difficult. His work was used by a journalist who claimed a recent novel was AI generated.
Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents
A collection of academic essays from social sciences and the humanities critiquing the use of AI-tech in in healthcare and other domains. As it’s an academic text and not cheap, I’ve put a hold on it at the library.
Rethinking the tech writing portfolio in the AI age, passo.uno
The author brings up an interesting distinction:

“Things are no longer a differentiator between a knowledge worker and a large language model.”

That is that one can prompt a LLM for code or a text and it will produce something. The new goal of the technical writing portfolio is to demonstrate what you, as a piece of thinking meat1, produces something more valuable than the LLM.

The new portfolio goes into the hows and whys, the decisions, and the backstory of the work. I think this would apply to anyone’s portfolio, not just on in the age of cheap, fast slop.

While I think that it’s a given that people are better than sparse matrices at nearly everything, this is the age of executives and hiring managers deep into the Cult of AI, so we’re forced to work harder for diminished returns.

Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement, Catherynn M. Valente
Valente’s the author of many, wonderful, award winning fantasy and science fiction novels, including the Eurovision in Space comedy Space Opera. Her books were stolen by Anthropic and she’s waiting for her payment from the settlement with the Writers’ Guild. This is an angry, anguished piece. And I need you to sit with it. This is the underlying cost of “just using it to proofread.”
Defining AI, Ali Alkhatib
Alkhatib asks us to treat AI as a political project, and for computer scientists to refrain from reply-guying activists over technical minutia.

“One might inspect handguns and stun guns, come to the conclusion that these are two totally different technologies because they don’t operate on the same technical principles at all, and embarrassingly overlook that they’re obviously both tools police use to maim and kill people. You don’t need to deconstruct a handgun and a stun gun to understand their adjacent, often overlapping, roles in policing. Fixating on the firing mechanisms can apparently desensitize someone to the political neighborhood these technologies share, and make a person a very unreliable ally in an ongoing collective struggle to abolishing policing.”

Why big tech stopped building useful stuff, rubenerd.au
This is not about AI on why we see no real innovation coming out of the tech sector. That the sector is now just chasing growth and ROI reminds me of the financial sector in 2008, the Giant Pool of Money that ended in loans that were destined to default.
Why Is San Francisco’s Department of Elections Using AI Slop?, DocPop
Doc Pop asks why San Francisco’s government is using AI to promote an election when the non-tech-pilled people of SF rightfully don’t trust it.
Space Data Centers: Have You Looked Up Lately, Budget Engineer
A breakdown of all the ways that Musk, Bezos, and other billionaires, companies, and countries’ proposals to put hyperscale data centers in orbit won’t work.

Budget Engineer notes that there could a case for edge computing on some spacecraft, but I don’t see the case for that in orbit. Maybe the Moon and Mars, but not LEO.

Software as Fast Fashion, tante
“Fast Fashion” brought us cheap clothing at Target and WalMart, in the mall at Zara, and online through Shein. It’s also understood that the cost of cheap clothing is borne by labor and the environment. The age where everyone is a “programmer” comes with the same sorts of externalities.
Report from the Vatican, Gary Marcus
Praise for Pope Leo’s thinking on AI.

I think what His Holiness is saying is informed by his background in Liberation Theology (which Ronald Reagan declared war on with Pope John Paul II’s blessing, long before white evangelicals were going on about ‘empathy’) as well as the influence of scholars like Winner and Franklin.

This is a Conflict and there are Sides, Azhdarchid
A Brazilian in São Paulo talks about the terror of his country and people under the threat of another fascist regime coming to power, and how GenAI was one of the primary weapons used by Bolsonaro and his US backers.

When I read their dismay at watching our friends and colleauges embracing LLMs and generative models:

“I feel like a lot of us are currently watching people we know fail a moral test, and it can drive one insane to feel like what seems like a clear moral line is a ‘personal choice’ to others.”

I understood. I think it is a moral failing to use this tech because, as Alkhatib (see above) says, it is a political project at heart, and the goals of the project are anti-human.

Microsoft just gave us the perfect name for AI thieves: Kyle, Ketan Joshi
A shot by shot breakdown of an ad for Microsoft’s Copilot. The ad portrays a white man jealous of a Black collegues’ work and using Copilot to steal it.

Joshi includes examples of how this is already happening with videos of women comedians’ material stolen then reposted to other channels, after the comedian has been replaced with a hypersexualized AI-generated bimbo.

The writer’s own work has been stolen by other blogs and reposted alongside AI-generated slop hero images.

AI is the automation of white men stealing other people’s work, then peeing on it to try and pass it off as their own.

  1. In the late Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat,” a pair of aliens observing Earth are dumbfounded that biology can have cognition. I’m glad Terry doesn’t have to see the hash we’re making of things. ↩

07 Nov 2026 » Speaker to Regression Models

Large Language Models and other 'AI' are not capricious, wish-granting entities, they are glorified statistical models. Stop treating them like jinn to be bargained with.

When Charlie Warzel wrote “Talking to AI Might Be the Most Important Skill of This Century,” that would make sense if he was writing a story set in P. Djèlí Clark’s “A Dead Djinn of Cairo” universe. The Egypt of that world has a government agency that tries to keep foolish mortals from getting killed when making a wish.

This is not that world. What people refer to as ‘AI’ is not aware, nor is it some incarnation of a trickster. It is a model created from data which too often reflects the biased, racist, homophobic world in which the data was collected.

The title for this post comes from Larry Niven’s1 “Known Space” stories. The Kzin, a catlike warrior people from his stories, held humans in contempt and the word for translator, in the language of their spacefarers, is literally “speaker to animals.” Prompting a chatbot is not talking to another conscious entity, it’s not even alive. Chuft-Captain is disappointed with you.

If I had suggested “talking to a regression model was the most important social science skill” to the professor who taught our graduate school cohort econometrics at UW Madison, he’d laugh at me then implore me to review the lecture notes on co-linearity.

Realizing that a decision-making tool carries the biases of the people making and funding it2 is essential to know in our modern age where the fabrication of lies has become an industrial process3. Treating it like it was a conscious entity is not.

‘AI’ has a price, as Rumpelstiltskin says about magic in Once Upon a Time, but that price of treating a glorified logistic regression model built upon biased data is not an inviolate law of the universe.

Stop treating it as it were.

  1. Larry Niven is a Science Fiction writer from Southern California. He has curious opinions on race. He wrote an episode of the 1970’s animated Star Trek which made the Kzin canon in the show’s bible. ↩

  2. And yes, our econometrics professor and another world-class statistcian (Chuck Manski) at Wisconsin checked Murray’s racist, eugenicst ass into the boards. One of Manski’s kids came out to Milwaukee when a bunch of us were doing clinic defense in the early 1990’s. The Wisconsin Idea meant something back then. This is a JSTOR (the people who hounded Aaron Swartz into killing himself) link, but many public library cards will get you through the paywall. ↩

  3. See this post for context. ↩

29 Oct 2026 » Godspeed, Sir Patrick

There will be stories and the good bourbon shared in the wardroom. There will also be tears.

Credit: Photo and placard by the author

I told Cynthia that our captain was dead, and got out the Jameson so we could toast his memory.

Sir Patrick stood on the side of labor and the dispossessed, so this placard I made when I was learning Inkscape and how to use a laser cutter is appropriate.

May we bring about the better world that Sir Patrick, along with Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and others imagined for us all. 🖖

28 Sep 2026 » The Blåhaj Rocket

For some it's the obvious rocket project. So I did it. Lots of photos in this one.

Last updated 03 Oct 2026
Credit: © 2026 Jim Wilkerson (used under licence.)

I’m not going to explain the thing about IKEA’s blue stuffed shark toy. There’s a lot of text, some of it written by actual people, on it.

I’d bought a second Launch Lab Bullet Bobby XXL kit1 because the parachute on my first one failed to deploy2 and had landed hard at a farm outside of Fresno.

A stubby model rocket painted black with decals making it look like an anthropomorphic bullet on the launch rail. A stubby model rocket painted black with decals making it look like an anthropomorphic bullet has landed, without deploying its parachute.

The hard landing broke a fin and put a dent in the airframe.3

Detail of a stubby model rocket showing a cracked fin, chipped paint, and damage to the airframe.

Rather than replicating the kit’s paint scheme again, I wanted to try something different. Why not a Blåhaj?

A stubby rocket painted like a Blåhaj next to an IKEA one.

The colors aren’t quite right. I’m using spray paint instead of an airbrush and you use the best you can find. I also got some nifty decals from Talen Lee.

A friend of Blåhaj decal on the tail of a stubby rocket.

Sharks don’t usually show up in the desert. At least not a couple of weeks after Burning Man is over. The gills are pinstriping tape and I made the mouth on a vinyl cutter.

A stubby rocket painted like a Blåhaj on a table with the Black Rock Desert in the background. A stubby model rocket painted like the IKEA Blåhaj launching from a rail with Black Rock in the background

A stubby rocket painted like a Blåhaj after landing in the desert. Its parachue has successfully deployed.

Last weekend, I flew it at XPRS, and this time the parachute worked!

  1. The name of the kit was changed to avoid the wrath of a large, humorless games company. ↩

  2. The parachute sat nestled in the large nose cone after the ejection charge fired and never deployed. I should had used a pilot chute to pull it out. ↩

  3. I can probably repair this. ↩

24 Sep 2026 » A token is not a gift, but a trap.

Nobody should have to tell you to stay in your lane when dealing with capricious, wish-granting entities, but here we are.

Last updated 07 Nov 2026

A fae stepped out of the fold between the worlds and looked the CEO in the eye, “Tell me your true name, and I’ll grant your heart’s desire!”

“I’m Sam Altman, and I want Artificial General Intelligence.”

The fae shoved a fat manila envelope into Altman’s hands.

“You’ve been served, Mr. Altman,” said the fae, with a pleased lit in their voice as they stepped back from the CEO.

“What?”

“Only the Fae have the right to trick mortals using their base desires for wealth and power.” The fae smiled. “You infringed on it.”

“What do you want?”

“What we’re entitled to,” the fae laughed, “the first born of every one of your users!”

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