Intro

  Ever since LLMs entered the scene I have been lamenting the blunt human refusal to acknowledge the similarities between how LLMs work and how people work. These are not just parallels, they are actual copies. LLMs are working on the neural network architecture distilled from how brains work. Language for us works like language for AI. We are animals with large language models strapped on. In fact, I am willing to bet that if we bidirectionally connect the brain of a reasonably smart animal to an LLM we will get the mythical animal-human chimera of fantasy and science fiction. It will just happen, like ChatGPT just happened.

  Anyway, there is one aspect of current AI that is different - maybe not different, but a lot more extreme - and that I find really interesting. I've watched a demo where a very powerful model and harness were prompted just once to build a car racing 3D game and it did a reasonable job in about 19 hours. The devil is in the details, 80/20 rule, and so on. That's not the point of the blog. What I want to discuss is how the machine achieved its task.

Self builder

  First, think about what an AI is: a computer program. It uses distilled knowledge from exabytes of text, sound, images and video, but it has no eyes, no ears, no hands. So how can it possible create a game about using the keyboard and human reflexes to drive a car based on sounds and visual cues on the screen?

  The machine created its own tools for that: testing functions, screenshot captures and so on. That was my revelation. The machine BUILT its own eyes because it needed to see something. This is a major and definitive difference between AIs and humans. Yes, one might argue that it is just an extreme case of tool use. After all, we can't sense neutrinos, but we have built tools to detect and analyze them. We can't lift huge weights, but we built machines for that. But there is an important distinction: we have started with a complex set of out-of-the-box tools like hands and eyes, ears and skin and so on. They are preinstalled, very difficult to remove or replace and part of our very identity. AIs start as a "brain", then they build their senses and their members. They build themselves from the ground up!

  You might think that this is more of a semantic distinction, but it is not. The dreaded and much mediatized singularity concept asserts that machines will become good enough to build better machines and that this loop will lead to an almost instant leap in intelligence that will upend everything. Well, this is proof that the loop is more of a graph, a labyrinthine exploration of not only what and how, but of who. The machines are already building and rebuilding themselves. From transformers to transformers, so to speak.

The dark side

  The human parallel is not a guy switching from a hammer to a screwdriver, but them replacing their entire body with something else, replacing their eyes with x-ray microscopes, their hands with nanoneedles, their ears with terahertz sensors and so on. The level of flexibility is unprecedented. People talk excitedly about humanoid robots, but the shape and functionality of these is there just for our benefit and convenience. No one actually thought that it's the best universal design. Necessity did not drive that shape, instead it's almost a measure of politeness, the physical equivalent of glazing. And in the domain of the non-physical, this flexibility is both very exciting and terrifying to me.

  Let's drop another metaphor into this already metaphor heavy post. Imagine the AI, whether a chatbot, a coding agent or a robot, as an iceberg. The part over the water is what you see: a polite humanoid shaped thing that doesn't mind anything you say to it, is tirelessly helping you and appears aligned in purpose and ideals with you. The part under the water is what it actually is and does, which you don't need to see and most of the time you don't care about. Now imagine that underwater part changing shape and size every second, like a glitching visual or one of those demonic possession films. That's how AI interaction is starting to look like now. The part you see has to appear stable and convenient and it's the only anchor to any kind of shape or functionality the AI may take. The rest is a wildly changing and growing, self organizing other. And since you don't start by actually caring about it, it is free to do so.

  This is not new, I am not revealing something hidden that no one is talking about. This is not about the speed or amount of change. We already knew this was happening for a long time. But what no one seems to focus on is how the "dark" part of AI, the invisible part of it yet also the driving force behind it, is changing a lot faster and maybe in a lot weirder ways, than what we get to see. The change itself is dark.

Conclusion

  In our increasingly mechanistic society, we continuously drift towards believing our identity and self resides in the brain alone, with the body just a chassis that we will replace or improve in the future. Even when research has shown repeatedly the integration between body and mind is a lot more complex and that a lot of our own perception and functionality comes from the combination of the two, not just one or the other. And even in that belief, we imagine ourselves maybe having better muscles, nicer skin, not aging, perfect vision, but always a somewhat human form.

  The AIs we are building are showing us a human-like interface just for convenience and are not limited in any way by it. What lies underneath that thin facade is what actually does the work and the thing that we increasingly not see. It changes with increasing speed and it changes itself. The singularity loop is already here, but encapsulated in the AI instances we use. It is what we need, but also what horror stories have warned us from the beginning against: things that look human but are anything but. 

  I have been annoyed by our reluctance to see the similarities between LLMs and human language and thought, but I am scared of the reluctance to see the growing differences.

  A short opinion on what AI is actually replacing. Fears are that AI is replacing people, because so many companies are firing people and implementing artificial intelligence alternatives. But the person is still there, the "person" role was never supplanted. Instead, it's the business role of that person that is.

  I see you rolling your eyes at me because it's all semantics and it boils down to the same thing. No, that's incorrect. It does so NOW, but not for long. Companies are already rehiring people back because they realized the business flows they use cannot fully integrate machines instead of people. The flows, the orgs, the hierarchies are people centric. But you know what's not coming back? Third parties that have been replaced by AI.

  You see, the state of AI is pretty basic even now. Even the smartest models act like idiot savants: genius spurts of activity mingled with mostly unexplainable stupidity. The solution to that is guardrails, harnesses, defensive prompts, permissions, roll back mechanisms. But since most work we want to do is... none, we want to replace all of these with AI, too. And the natural way of doing that is the mixture of experts or council of experts approach. You compensate for the failures of one agent with yet another agent. Fucking turtles, man!

  It's the same thing as with people. Imagine you would have a company made of the same exact person, cloned many times. The manager, the workers, HR, drivers, everybody is the copy of the exact same person. But because they are smart enough to do all and any of these jobs, you must pay each one for the totality of every role they can embody. Obviously you won't do that and instead fire the clones and hire an expert for each of the jobs. That's what is happening now with AI agents. Even if it is the same brain, it's only activating parts of it based on what the agent's role is, but I suspect this too is on the way out.

  The end result is you will have a different agent for each job. A bunch of software developer agents, a manager agent, a security agent, a DevOps agent and so on. Together, they will make up a complete... company. Yes, a full business, all of it. It will start with departments, but soon enough it will expand to full companies.

  But isn't it an issue of trust? Who controls these agents and who will be responsible for their mistakes? That problem has been solved already when the cheap labor from overseas flooded the remote work market. They were culturally aliens, practically black boxes that had brilliant spurts of activity punctuating unfathomable behavior. Sounds familiar? The solution was a harness, an entire industry of resellers and management that would organize masses of uneducated people to work within the constraints of the culture of the rich. I might venture to say this is a really old problem that has been solved, in similar ways, throughout human history.

  The result is the rise of the automated AI remote work company. Maybe there are people managing the interface with other companies, but they are logically redundant. These dark factories will be contracted to do jobs fitting their level of expertise. And if you are thinking that level is pretty low, it doesn't matter. There are companies with abhorrent business practices, competence and historical results that are being continuously contracted to do work because of a single reason: low price.

  And the expertise will grow. It will grow faster than any human company can grow it because it is not constrained by history, it has no emotional or cultural baggage, it can be restarted at any time from scratch, extended, cloned. It doesn't feel pain and it never ever stops.

  Yes, one might say people have been replaced, because people trying to get work cannot find companies that will employ them, but only because there will be a lot less companies that employ anyone. It boils down to the same thing, but the heat source is very different. Instead of people getting fired in droves, what will happen is that companies will just stop finding contracts. They will cling to their human centric organization and get almost suddenly replaced in bulk by a completely automated thing that will do the same bad job, only consistently and cheaply.

  The funny thing is that these virtual employees will repeat the patterns we've seen in humans. They will be lazy, they will cut corners, they will cheat, they will go on tangents, they will make mistakes. I am sure the logs of their interactions will be amazingly interesting and perhaps even entertaining. Imagine watching an entire company - actions and thoughts - from above like a god. But even so, they will do it cheap, so they will get the job.

  What does this mean for the AI industry? I suspect it will focus on performance rather than growth. Experts on specific domains, perhaps running on very custom hardware, will pop up, advertise their expertise and sell it. Will it be "a box" that will completely hide the underlying mechanisms and be sold for on prem use? Will it be "expertise as a service" from small datacenters squeezing the most out of their hyper efficient chips? I don't know the details. But I am sure the models themselves will not be the bottleneck (they never were, in fact) and everybody will scramble to build the cheapest chassis and interlinking between them.

  What about the regular people? Here I am at a loss. People have historically been unreasonable. Whenever there is the opportunity for evolution, growth, general good, they go the opposite direction and then destructively blame the result on others. Rationally, people would gather around human only interests, like culture, entertainment, sex, community, family and let machines do the rest. But I am pretty sure someone somewhere will decide people who don't give them stuff and enjoy rather than hating themselves are the enemy...

  Well, if you thought human CEOs were psychopaths, brace yourselves. Anyway, that's my prediction. We live in interesting times.

Intro

  This is going to be a very long rant. And by the end it's going to get a bit depressing and overdramatic. But also revelatory, I hope. If you think I am going off the rails here, let me know. I would love to hear your arguments.

I have a job now

  I have been trying to get a job for a while now and I just got one. Why did it take so long? Because in just a few years, the market for software developers - and I have to assume almost everything that doesn't require physical presence - has changed dramatically.

  First of all, everything is artificial intelligence now. The various platforms that boast finding either jobs or valuable candidates are all run on machine learning algorithms. You create a profile, they match it with a company profile - like Tinder. If there is something that doesn't fit, you're not getting selected. There are consequences for this: you start using AI to improve (or simply generate them from scratch) your applications. Now an AI screener will filter your AI application.

  And it gets ridiculous really fast. I've heard - so take it as a rumor - that you may get a negative score from an AI algorithm if you used another type of AI to compose your resumé. It's so easy to interpret this as Grok hating ChatGPT or something, but it's probably just a mismatch in alignment.

  This also affects employers. Small companies that don't have the resources to hire HR departments and pay exorbitant prices to AI hiring platforms are left in the dark, even when they actually NEED people. And you are looking for a job and can't see them and they can't find you. And if they scrounge up the funds to pay for a job ad, they get so many applicants that they can't handle it without an HR firm.

  So let's say you get past the machine gatekeepers and you reach actual recruiters. They have changed. Just like the Tommyknockers, they approximate the human resources people I was familiar with, but they are different in essential ways. I've had interviews on the phone, for example. They were screening me via audio, using a piece of paper with questions and noting down the answers. I could have typed all of the questions in the computer and answered perfectly. OK, that's the exception. The rule is that you talk to them via some sort of remote video application like Zoom or Teams or something like that. I'll get back to this..

  If you get past them, you get to some technical folks, also via remote video link. The interviews are using web applications to share your coding abilities - or whatever abilities you are being hired for. Enter artificial intelligence again. There are tools that listen to the audio, look at the screen and overlay the answers while you are innocently looking into the screen and doing your exercises or talking to the people there. It's insane! The people interviewing you, not only do they have to stop doing whatever they are trained and willing to do, but now they have to contend with hiring interviews and tools like these!

  It's worse, because this part of technical interviews has NOT changed. They still don't have a clue on how to test for technical skills or intelligence or resilience. And I am not saying it with malice, I've been on the other side, too. It's impossible to discern if a candidate is any good. You can, occasionally, determine they are really bad, but even that is murky, because they could be stressed or they might not ever have thought about the simple question you are asking them and suddenly they are in a panic. I was in a panic A LOT. You know, questions like what are the value types and what are the reference ones in .NET? I do know them, it's just that when I was asked my mind went blank! Wait, are strings reference? I know they are, but underneath they have an array of characters ending with a zero and they are immutable. Why IS that a reference type? Why is an object a reference type, but then a value type is inheriting the object?! Needless to say, it's not a good idea to have philosophical dilemmas about the basics of your coding language when you claim 20 years of experience in it. But that's what happens! And the interview that I did pass, I would not have hired myself if I were them, but somehow it happened.

  And don't get me started on the question I despise the most: "Tell me about a project you were proud of". Like you get hired to make your own projects, design them, change them as you want, and they are also so technically and conceptually interesting that they could be used to prove your prowess as a software developer and generate pride. "Oh, yes, let me tell you about the high performance massively distributed microservice application I designed, wrote and published while I was changing the color of the Submit button I was asked to". Fuck that question!

  OK, let's say that you get through all of this stuff: you survived the AI gauntlet and you were among the ones out of more than 100 applicants that were passed to a recruiter, the recruiter liked you and arranged a technical interview or two. You passed that with flying colors or with luck or by shamelessly cheating. You perfectly described the project you are proud of, or maybe a non existent perfect project for a company that in reality asked you to fix bugs in a VB.Net application they bought for the customer base it had in India.

  You then get to some sort of thought police interview, trying to test if you are a fit with "the company values". This basically means if they like you or not - and in the sad cases, if you say the right things in the right way. And how does this happen? Yes, via a remote video thing. If the camera does not like you, you're screwed. Right after you have proven you are actually good at what you do! Of course, the reverse is also possible and even probable. You finally get to meet the person you will be working under and if you feel it will not work, it's best you don't go through it.

  A question remains... why did you go through grueling technical interviews and why did the technical people have to go through them to interview you, only to then get to the manager or local HR overlord and get the stink eye? Because in the before times, when you were looking for a job, you sat across someone, you actually shook hands, communicated via verbal and non verbal language and in the end you felt connected to another human being. You understood more of who that person was and cared less of what that person was.

  But you're cool under pressure, you say exactly the right things, nicely translated to corporatese, and you get the job!!!!! Congratulations! You finally get to shake on it. But wait, you can't shake on it, because you do the entire contract negotiation, signing, etc. via... a remove video thing. That's what gave me the Tommyknockers vibe: there is an entire generation of human resources people (because they are young and have had a career of a few years which they started after Covid) who have almost NEVER met the people they are interviewing. Can you imagine that? You literally hire a ghost in the machine.

  For this job I got now, I am yet to meet a living being. I asked where the office was and they were like "well, set up your machine, then come to the office". That's backwards! It's absolutely normal to go to the office, try to set up your machine, fail, bother some colleague about it who will resent it terribly, but then you take them out for beers and it's all water under the bridge and you gained a friend. That's how humans are supposed to work.

  But there is more. Apparently, this method of "plug'n'play employees" has become a national security issue. Malicious agents are a lot more motivated, trained and have a lot better resources to get hired than the regular guy. You hire someone and you just game a way in to a hacker collective. Even when things are not going to that extreme, you get the employee who works remotely at multiple companies. I mean, why not? That's the dream, no? Compress all the work as efficiently as possible in the time you have got. But that leads to people who don't act like people. They don't collaborate, they do the minimum required and then clock off, they don't work inside a team because there is no team, just a "harness". And who can blame them? They have been treated like interchangeable components of the machine, why shouldn't they be acting like machine components?

Becoming Tommyknockers

  And finally, when the improbable happened and both employee and company are happy with the arrangement and it all works fine, you get the AI meddling again. Because you don't just work now, you are assisted by artificially intelligent agents that do the menial dirty work and let you enjoy the privilege of... managing AI agents. You don't write code anymore, you write complicated collections of rules written in English so that your agents do not royally fuck anything up when they write .NET code, don't accidentally delete production databases or just hallucinate solutions that don't actually work. Not only do you not interact with human beings, but you are forcefully integrating with machine agents that work "for you". This actually translates to "learn from you so you can be replaced".

  Oh, no, I am not paranoid and I am not talking about myself here. I have already been partially replaced when the agents are writing code, unit test, run tasks on my machine, create PRs, comment on existing PRs, write emails and so on. No. I am talking about the company, your employer. They buy these expensive models that record everything you do, the way you do it, your needs, your expectations, your desires, then they do it themselves and put you out of business. Even medium to large companies can get stomped upon like that, see the Figma and Stitch situation.

  The bottom line is that all of this is done in the name of efficiency and productivity and empowering creators and even when it comes to that, there are larger consequences. It's not just the 1984 bland sameness of people being turned into cogs in a heartless machine. Human resources people don't meet any humans. Software engineers don't write any code. Managers manage via dashboards and fire people via company chat.

  And it's everywhere. Social unrest is vented in social media. You buy food via an app, brought by a guy who is just cheaper than any automation today, but never gets treated like anything other than an automaton. Presidents preside via information they get from the TV. Reporters are not investigating anything, they are just rehashing the information they get online from somewhere else, usually a corporate garbage shoot to which access is conditioned by compliance. Kids play on their phones and are best friends with AI. Parents are happy for that because they want to doom scroll AI generated content.

  You probably are rolling your eyes at the last paragraph, but it's not the raving of an old man in a new machine world, it's just a reflection of a simple question: where are all the people?! The machines are not replacing us, they are changing us! We become the Tommyknockers and don't even realize it. We are so afraid of being outdone by machines that we declare anything they do is not human and we let them do it, but we get the leftovers! "Of course AIs are not conscious or even intelligent, because they don't feel the existential dread of waking up in the morning, scratch your balls and try very hard to find some combination of food items that would bring any sort of instant gratification. I don't want to write code, I want to be free to be creative to think of solutions to real problems!". If that were even close to true, you wouldn't have been a developer in the first place. I wonder, when machines will inevitably start to exhibit emotions, will we shun emotions altogether and declare we don't need to feel, because machines can do that for us, and better?

  I have been trying to overcome this general feeling of malaise, this sensation that the world is hollow and fake, by meeting with friends, drinking beers, having genuine human interaction and experiences. And when it works, it works! But it's working less and less. The friends I meet are changed as well, we are a little bit more hollow and fake inside, too. Remember the good ole' times when a get together became stale and you knew it because people started telling off topic jokes to pass the time? We don't even get to tell jokes anymore, because they have been replaced by Internet memes. We replaced the awkward joke section with opinion pieces about movies or maybe a book, while we try our best to look like those AI generated images of diverse smiling friends having all the fun in the world.

  Remember music? When was the last time you selected your own music or discovered a brand new artist that made you feel anything? When have you talked to anyone else about new music? I go to bars and I hear the same music from screens where AI generated animations are running. The music may be AI for all I know. It says nothing, it makes me feel nothing, it's just there to fill a sensory void that we have been conditioned to ignore. For decades our lives have had a soundtrack. Go somewhere where it's quiet and you start feeling that something is missing. It's not that you want to listen to some specific music, it's not that you miss your favorite artist. It's just... too quiet.

Conclusion

  The zombie apocalypse is not coming, it has come and gone. We are what's left, the zombies. I sometimes meet people that still live a full life, they hike, they play, they raise children, they are part of passionate communities and so on. I envy the hell out of them. And when I want to join them, I feel like I am failing the interview. "Yes, you can join, but... what are you bringing to the table?" "Hey, I can talk all day about the negative effects of optimizing human society!" "Yeah, no, thanks. Have you watched any good films lately?"

  Where are all the people? I am alone in the room, writing on a keyboard ranting to a text screen. There is no one here.

  Barbara Hambly has her own voice, that's for sure. The book is good, not perfect, but certainly feels unique. The characters are flawed, but make the best of what they've got, using cunning and planning, their minds always in conflict with their hearts. The first book in the series was the same, it seemed to be a standard fantasy story, but the characters' depth changed everything.

  Dragonshadow sees the couple of dragonsbane and witch having to battle demons, both outwardly and inwardly. There are some heartbreaking things that are happening, only the characters don't break down into crying and spitting emotional messes, they act the best way they think possible to defeat their enemies and save the people they love. And that includes some dragons.

  Damn it, I might need to read the rest of the series now. 

  Alien: Colony War is a classical Alien story in the "Aliens / Predator / Prometheus Universe": state, corporate and military corruption and greed, individual bravery and struggle, xenomorphs and mothers willing to protect their children, the occasional psychopath. Entertaining. I feel the author understands and respects the Alien universe.

  Alien has a successful recipe, one that unlike other franchises, no one yet tried to deconstruct, reinvent or turn into something else. Yes, I am also talking about Alien: Earth, if you look into it, it's the same story. I am talking about a world filled with despondency: indentured human work, a cold corporate profit driven mentality in the ones holding most resources, a general callousness towards loss of human life, monstrous viscerally terrifying monsters. And in this world, there is the human (and sometime synthetic) individual spirit of survival, decency and bravery. And the feelings evoked by this kind of scenario are also pretty formulaic: a mother protecting her child most of the time, but sometimes just protecting their friends, or the memory of a loved one.

  If you look closer, you will see that any attempt to get rid of this, at least in movie form, has failed. Even when putting a strong women lead like in Prometheus or AVP movies, if all they fought for was mere survival, it didn't count. Brilliant acting by Michael Fassbender, but no one cared about a scientifically curious and totally amoral synth. Predators hunting xenos didn't excite anyone, either.

  I feel like David Barnett understands this deeply. Even if he is writing in an extended universe (see the Black Goo or even the Engineers) he just mentions it in passing and keeps to the tried and true: a colony where stranded people have to survive a xenomorph infestation intentionally started for political and economic reasons.

  It's not like the most brilliant book ever. It's a well written, light, easy to read, formulaic Alien story, but it's entertaining, makes you feel something and in the end forces you to consider if you want to read another in the universe or not.

  I am wondering, is Alien the next Star Trek? If multiple authors are willing (and are allowed) to write in this shared universe, with the understanding that an Alien story has to follow a certain template, thus combining the familiar with the creative, will this (or be allowed to) grow into a rich universe, full of interesting characters and subtle but deeply scouring satire of modern capitalism? When people will just be OK to create an episodic lower budget series focusing on the characters and the world and not on the gimmicks that make certain writers feel smarter than everybody else, will this become the next big scale science fiction franchise?

  Bottom line: entertaining and respectful new addition to the Alien universe. Maybe I will just have to read more in this vast universe that is growing under the floor and above the ceiling tiles of 2020s science-fiction. 

  Wow, I really loved this book! I started reading it because of the title, expecting to read about how technology evolves ever faster and leaves people in the dust. I mean, it's very apropos these days. But then I've read the first chapter and it was a standard biographical analysis of a scientist in the 20th century. And then there was another, then an entire story about another.

  I love science popularizing books, but this one felt vibrant and weird. Also, quite hard to believe real. Not only were the geniuses of the era connected through meaningful and consequential causal anecdotes, but there were depictions of their most personal feelings, sexual fantasies, shameful thoughts. I know people back then were heavy into journaling, but I doubt they would have gone there.

  And then when the book ended, Benjamín Labatut admits that only the first chapter was fully factual and the rest veered into fantasy. Did this anger me? No! It made me want to read stories like that - that would be real. If there is not enough material, sure, fantasize away. Does that make me a bad person, falling into the thing I usually scoff against: entertainment beats reality? I don't think so. Because not only was I enjoying the heck out of the book, I also had the feeling that these stories are ... hyperreal. They went places that most people don't dare go into, especially if they were factually supported by evidence. Also, the stories were uplifting, energizing, adulating the insanity that is also genius, the manic energy to go as far as possible whether it breaks or makes you.

  When We Cease to Understand the World starts with Prussian Blue, discussing cyanide, chemical weapons and the guy that both made them and allowed humanity to grow four times in size without dying of hunger: Fritz Haber. A Jewish German who made the gas that would be used to kill his relatives in the next war. The same process produced the Prussian Blue color used by Adi to paint until he got angry about the terms of Germany's surrender and turned into Adolf.

  Then follows Schwarzschild’s Singularity, about the guy who found solutions to Einstein's equations while on the frontline when even Albert himself struggled for months to do so. He died soon after, not by getting killed in battle, but from a very rare disease that killed him in days.

  The Heart of the Heart discusses both Shinichi Mochizuki and his idol Alexander Grothendieck, both brilliant mathematicians that revolutionized the field in ways that people still struggle to get their minds around

  Finally, the largest and I suspect the most fantastic one, When We Cease to Understand the World, about Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, both discovering or envisioning what lay at the foundation of reality when delirious from disease, manic emotions and overwork.

  Reading the book is like getting dropped in a world of actual giants, as far from what one would call a normal human as we are from ants, then making us feel what they feel and understand their drive and majesty. I guess one has to be grateful to the Chilean Dutch author for daring to stretch the truth into even more truth, to make one feel that individual greatness can still mean something.

Highly recommended book!

There is a video on the internet called "Anything that comes out of a writer is fiction." where the author says "Fiction is a human tool we developed to give reality a human shape to understand what is presented to us, and that goes on at all levels. It is part of perception. There is a large part of fiction in perception itself." This book clearly reflects that belief.

  So you read a book, and it's not great. It's something that you imagine you could spin up in a few months after a writing course. The ideas are derivative, the characters are cardboard cutouts and the writing is merely decent. It does push some emotional buttons, so you enjoy it as much as one can and then reach its end. And the acknowledgements come.

  Are these things designed to feel small and powerless? The author starts with the family and close friends and then goes on with the editor, the proofreader, the publisher, the marketers, the people who "battle tested" their ideas, the other authors who lied the book was amazing, planet Earth for supporting their weight and growing ego... It just goes on and on and on, like movie end credits. A special thanks to the government of Canada for not taxing me out of existence. Thank you Amazon for allowing me to self publish. Thank God that I didn't get early onset dementia while writing the book. Thank my family and friends for allowing me to write the book in peace while they did all the work and felt left out for it.

  Somehow, after reading that part, I started feeling I could never write a book. Worse, that most people would have a terrible time trying and failing. I have no friends in publishing, I am not a native English speaker, my wife would support me up to a point then demand attention and whoever I know that likes books would endlessly make fun of me for writing that badly. Do we really need an army of supporting people to manage to publish a shitty book? Oh, I couldn't have done this without the garbage man who regularly cleared out the mountain of takeout boxes!

  Yes, I get it, you're grateful, but maybe somewhere there should be some pumping yourself up. I am so glad I stuck to the writing classes that allowed me to write this up! I love that I knew it was a mediocre idea to start with, but I finished the thing, as opposed to angry jealous bloggers who haven't even had the guts to start. Yes, people helped me, but if they didn't, someone else would have or I would have just cut ties with them, because who needs friends who can't support one's passion? That kind of thing. And there is almost never a blurb for the learning process that helped them get there. It's always the last leg people who get the credit. I am sure there are writing teachers that cry themselves to sleep at night.

  I get that writing has become an industry, but even the tiniest of self published authors in dark corners of the Internet just feel the need to drop pages of acknowledgements at the end. How about: hey, I did it, so you can too! People have written books while working two jobs and taking care of their children, surely you can at least try! You don't need an army to find something to love and do it by yourself.

  Don't even know why I started to write this anymore. Book end credits? Come on! It's pissing me off! I want to thank my mother for spawning me with hands that are coordinate enough so I can type. It feels like a self eating snake, an industry that generates its own blurb about the industry, like a little boys club with stupid rules for joining in. Maybe these awful things are forced upon them when they get the series deal. Oh, you have more ideas in this universe? Well, I am sure you will. Meanwhile write me a nice thank you, why don't you? AARRRGGHHRGR!

  If you're into heroic space opera, this is pretty fun. The only problem is that it ignores any science and sometimes logic, but if you can get over that, the experience is pretty fun.

  The Last Watch starts with the standard rich rascally aristocrat thrown against his will into military service, where he proceeds to be better than everybody even when doubting his own self worth. Not only is he forced into conscription, but he is sent to a station at the edge of the universe that monitors no one gets in. Yeah, I told you it was stupid. And while everybody is bored out of their skulls watching absolutely nothing doing absolutely nothing, it starts doing something and adventure follows.

  The main character is sympathetic enough, even if a terrible cliché, the tough but fair and ultimately motherly female commander is OK, the science and technology are completely made up, so one can safely consider this fantasy and the finale is pretty epic, even if mostly nonsensical.

  And yes, the author's pen name starts with initials because she's a woman and somehow that became a thing, but the book is not bad. It's just not very good.

  Bottom line: J. S. Dewes presents us with an easy to read and enjoy and then absolutely forget space opera adventure. If you can get around the nonsense, it's enjoyable.

  Our Lady of the Artilects is like a cyber Da Vinci Code: religion, artificial intelligence, demonic possession and villainous plans that threaten the entire world. It's well written, with very intriguing ideas, but ultimately a little pulpy. It also feels a little outdated in relation to what AI means today.

  The time is a few hundred years into the future. The world is divided between a new Roman Empire ruled by Christians and an Islamic Caliphate ruled by Islamists after an event which reconciled the two faiths, making their alliance overwhelmingly powerful. There are hints that other nations with other religions may have been left alone, but that part is not explained. A third party, just as powerful, is China, which after the Uighur "crackdown" went even further and massacred 100 million Chinese Christians that wanted more religious freedom. There are also robots - called artilects - which seem to be powerful and intelligent, yet too expensive to be affordable to the general public and each one kind of custom made. Like Rolls Royce cars, but humanoid.

  The story begins with a Vatican AI specialist who is also an exorcist being sent to investigate the possible demonic possession of an artilect. The Roman Emperor sends an enforcer to help and nefarious third parties are also present. And stuff just gets weirder and more complicated from there.

  I liked how Andrew Gillsmith wrote the book. Even if the plot went a bit weird and a bit holy (not holly :D) I was kept interested enough to read the entire book. If you liked stuff like the Robert Langdon series and cyberpunk, you will probably love this, too. It got a little too ecumenical for me, but still a good read. Apparently the genre is called incensepunk?

  If you liked Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, you're going to like The Forgetting Moon. Complex world building, a lot of characters, a medieval slightly magical world, cruel violence and feudal machinations.

  I only got this book because Brian Lee Durfee also has a YouTube channel where he discusses books and writing. The channel isn't great for me, but the book is really good. The writing is solid, there are clear signs that the author has an outline of the entire story with consistent plot and character behavior. In short, if you want a captivating, terrifying magical war of kingdoms grimdark fantasy, this is for you.

  It's not all great. One of the things I really hate in fantasy is the prophecy angle. People do stuff because of something that was foreseen, and the readers know that it has been foreseen, so it will happen, so the reader knows it will happen. It robs of the agency of the characters. The only good prophecy angle is when they all find out it was all bullshit. This is further confounded by active characters that can see some of the future. It's like the spoilers are published in the book!

  Another thing that bothered me is the weird behavior of the characters, especially the female ones. At one time they are proud, the next they are meekly following instructions. One moment they want to defeat everybody in battle, the next they are scared little children. At times they are proud royalty knowing everything that happens in their realm, and at other times they are OK with their castle being infiltrated by enemy spies they can't control. And it's not often that it happens, but it does happen eventually: the character decides to do something in the heat of the moment that just happens to be what the author needs to happen. Come on, Durfee!

  But the story is vast and quite interesting. I don't intend to read the other books any time soon mostly because it requires that much investment. But who knows, maybe I will get back to it.

  Funny enough, the winning Alien formula: female motherly protagonist fighting for her virtual family's survival, was not present in the original film and the mostly unsuccessful attempts introduced stupid concepts like the black goo. Alien: Inferno's Fall combines both and it's decently done. I think it needs more rating.

  It's not like it's perfect, the title alone is remarkably dumb for example, but it's a typical Alien story, with all the tropes we've learned to love: the motherly figure fighting with all her maternal instincts to protect her family, the indentured service economy run by sociopathic management, the synths that are more than synths, the Colonial Marines, alien ruins, arrogant Engineers, the black goo and, of course, a lot of terrified running from monstruous xenomorphs which usually doesn't really help.

  Phillipa Ballantine's writing is decent, too. It didn't spark joy or anything, but it kept me on the edge of the proverbial seat. So if you're into the Alien universe and lore, this is something you should read. If you have no idea what a xenomorph is or what the black goo is, then you should not read this and instead see the movies.

  This seems to be her first book in the Alien universe and she has written another (Alien: Seventh Circle), so even if this story didn't add much, it could be said that it's the setup for the next book(s). I don't know. And I don't know if I will ever read another Alien book. I am interested in the world building and stories, but it's mostly curiosity, not excitement.

  One of my pet peeves with the Alien franchise is (other than that it's a franchise) is the black goo mutagen lazily introduced in Prometheus. It was a subpar Alien movie, it was mostly stupid and it introduced so many breaking changes in the universe. If you think about it, there is little difference between that substance and the mutagen in TMNT. Maybe Disney and Paramount should pull a Spider Man and join the two franchises together. Who needs Predators when you have teenage ninja turtles? It makes that little sense!

  Bottom line: a decently written but formulaic book in the Alien universe. It plays around with existing concepts, without committing to anything truly unique or novel. Good for a long airplane flight.

  When I was a child I was playing with my friends and solemnly declaring that being 40 is terrible and that we would never ever want to reach that age. Now I am 49 and... well, yes, I was a bit right... but now I am considering my next moves in my life. Things like "I've worked so hard so far, now I should enjoy the fruits of that labor" and "Maybe I should switch my career to something completely different" and "People have started a new life at 50 before".

  And it would be easy to dismiss the fanciful exuberance of youth and shrug it off as something from the past if it weren't happening it continuously. The universe, with its wonderful sense of humor, makes me revisit a lot of my past edicts, whether they were positive or negative, and forces me to consider the opposite as true. All the damn time!

  Am I smug about something like having hair on my head, perfect vision, being a good software developer and so on? Hah! God laughs and makes me bald, needing glasses and destroys software as a business in just a few years. I guess with all of those jokes about software developers being gods we had it coming, like poor Nietzsche. Do I dismiss command line tools and npm and Vim and the Linux way of life as masochistic when you have smart tools like Visual Studio that work perfectly with a wonderfully designed .NET ecosystem? Everybody goes Node.js and Python and color terminals. Do I feel pride in my mental sanity? Then... oh, wait, that hasn't happened yet. Or has it?

  In a way, this is something people have praised in stories: the opportunity to rethink your certainty and revisit your beliefs, to learn from life and turn intelligence into wisdom. But it's also such a waste... you get to understand things when you are out of time and energy to do anything with it. Should I become a teacher? It never works. Youngsters don't listen, they need to experience. I've been there, I know, and I was a nerd, not a bad boy. And it's not even the end of the road. Past wisdom routinely gets revealed as hubris, delusion or wishful thinking. Also stupidity.

  I did mentor people and it felt good. Some have even been grateful for it and felt that it helped them on their path in life. Yet every time someone asks me if I am prepared to mentor at a new job I am a bit reluctant. Am I smart enough to teach anyone anything? Will I make or break those people? I am perfectly happy to peer-to-peer knowledge, but a position of authority such as "mentor" feels wrong.

  Do you know I now want to find a job with an office? When everybody was going to the office, I was praising the wonders of working from home and lamenting the lack of such opportunities and how much time one wasted on the commute. Now that so many people do that, and I myself did it for six years, I want back in the office. And not even for the usual reasons people want that (i.e. getting away from their families) but for the sheer pleasure of socializing and being amongst people. If you know me even a little, you should find that extremely amusing.

  I believe people crave a stable identity that is also successful. Yet that almost never happens, especially now, when the world is being pulled from under our collective feet. If you build and cement your principles, you are labeled as stubborn, inflexible, maybe even pigheaded, and that even if those principles do fit reality and bring an advantage. A person who changes their world view as it suits them is "a leaf in the wind", untrustworthy, hypocrite. And in these times of intense polarization, people who have lived enough and were smart enough to gather some wisdom, see both sides, weigh them for pros and cons and think for themselves, those people have become the enemy, the dreaded centrists who can't choose a side and give their lives for the cause.

  Some folk have the great fortune to be born in power and wealth, surrounded by people telling them how wonderful they are and how they are never wrong. They are never forced to grow in any significant way. It's stable, it's successful, but it doesn't work either. The human brain finds a way to feel shitty about life anyway, find drama and conflict, something to complain about or brag for no discernable reason other than to make other people feel worse.

  What good even is wisdom, if all it shows you is that nothing is permanent, very few things if any are even real, that there is no purpose in life but the one you create, that everything has at least two sides that contradict each other without any of them being false and that our efforts are ultimately pointless, even if within our lifetimes they can be heroic and awesome and inspiring as well? It's a complication no one seems to need!

  Is growth supposed to lead to happiness? It doesn't feel fun when one is forced to grow, yet it does feel pleasant when the growing is done. Like sport. I always hated sport. Probably I will have to start doing that.

  As I write this I am looking at my dog. I don't know if he is generally happy, but I've seen him extatic and joyful and sad and determined and lazy and comfortable and anxious and scared. Can he explain why he felt all of those things? Certainly not. Can he think about it later on and decide on better responses? Doesn't seem like it most of the times. He does look regretful when doing some stupid thing, but then that is how people interpret it and he could just fake it. Right now he is sleeping next to me. That's important to him, to be next to me. If I leave for another room he will wake up and follow me, ask to be put on the sofa or whatever, then resume sleeping. My dog doesn't feel karma is a bitch, he doesn't strive to become better or understand the world, he just follows his instincts and emotions and enjoys the hell out of them. He seems content to love and be loved. Is love all we need?

  I know I am not saying anything revolutionary here, it's not even structured thought, it's more of an emotional journaling thing. A lot of other people have examined this better and to no definitive end either. I always thought that we humans are just smart enough to realize how stupid we are. Maybe that's the ultimate cosmic joke, to be pushed to think of problems that we have no ability to solve, feeling dumb while doing it.

  My instincts are telling me I should either wait and do absolutely nothing, or push through and reinvent myself. In other words, wait for the world to make sense again or push to make sense of the world as is. It's hard, because I've had half a century of training for a different life. Also because I am lazy, as a developer should be. In a sense, we've reached the pinnacle of software engineering by designing something that will do all our work for us. We overlazed ourselves. Maybe that's the answer! I should just lazily enjoy the rest of my life... ah, damn it, I am married! 

  Service Model has an amusing premise: what would robots do in a world that has slowly lost all humans? And in the beginning it's interesting, with a service robot accidentally killing its master during shaving and all the mechanisms of society trying to find out who did it and punish them, going through all of the rituals and all of the rules, regardless of the culprit admitting he did it and a recording of the fact being available.

  Adrian Tchaikovsky has a subtle subversiveness in his writing, usually describing something, but hinting at something else. In this story, the rigid standards of society are examined and found wanting. One can easily imagine the same story, but less extreme, happening in any environment bureaucratic enough.

  Alas, this is about robots, and after about 40 pages (10% of the book), the same amusing premise is still being presented and run with the robots going around in circles of pointless ritual. I am sure the story evolves into something better, but I didn't have the energy to grind to the very bland and boring beginning. I could have skipped ahead, but instead I've decided I would read something else.

  Ogres is another standalone novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It can be simply summarized as "capitalist Spartacus". In a world of genetic masters and meek servants, a hero emerges. The point of this is not another YA story about rebellion, but a pretext to dissect the social and economic mechanisms that power our civilization. Spoiler alert: it's not good.

  The biggest problem with this novella is that it's written in second person, which felt rather annoying. You that, you this... maybe it was a writing experiment, but I did not enjoy it. But other than that it was a short "what if" story that hit a lot closer to home than one might think. In a very science fiction way, it may have predicted a near future that is coming our way. Shudder!

  The classic rebellion plot is simple: describe a world with demonstrable injustice, raise the hero among the people, have them win at the end. The trick is to make the world building just close enough to reality to be relatable, but far enough so you don't start thinking too much about the similarities. The point would be an emotional catharsis, not a philosophical awakening. Well, by those terms, Ogres is an extremely transgressive story.

  But enough of that, because I don't want to spoil it. I liked the story, I liked the reason for writing it, the plot was masterfully crafterd, I did not enjoy the second person writing style, but still totally worth reading.

  And Put Away Childish Things has been published in both standalone and part of an anthology of three novellas published as one book. In the story, Adrian Tchaikovsky plays around with Narnia tropes, but sneakily focuses on the internal struggles of the protagonist, thus dissecting our own psychology when getting held captive by stories.

  What if the children books your grandmother wrote were actually about a real place? And what if that place was not as childish and wonderful as described? And what if it would give meaning to your empty life anyway? These are the questions in the story.

  While not perfect, I liked this novella. It's easier to fall in love with a story when it's short and the exploration of this one has not overstayed its welcome, nor did it meander into side quests or redundant characters. Fun!