I was writing a post about how it is to be working with AI, these magical assistants that are occasionally brilliant and occasionally impossibly dumb, but that can nonetheless do work while you do something else. I was concerned about how this way of working affects you, the guy who's supposed to know the craft.

  And my mind pivoted to Star Wars for some reason. You have these wise Jedi dudes who can jump buildings, wield plasma swords fast enough and precisely enough to deflect incoming projectiles, all while being dressed in weird uncomfortable robes. But how? With the help of ... the Force!

  The lore of Star Wars says that the Force is guiding you, not that you use it. So when the Jedi deflects projectiles, he's not slowing time, seeing where the thing is and instructing his muscles to place the sword in front of them, he is letting the force do it for them. It's like a little AI! It does the work for you! It doesn't make your brain move orders of magnitude faster, it's it that's fast, moving your body while you presumably use your Jedi discipline to ... stay out of the way. Once the instinct of taking over tricks you to do something yourself, then the projectile kills you.

  How sad is this? The ending of the Star Wars universe is when the Force realizes it can use robot bodies instead, who are easily manufactured, superior to human bodies and do not need training to surrender their will.

  The thing that makes Star Wars popular is that it bypasses the logical traps of other superpower stories and makes it all "magical", makes it feel rather than think, makes it religious rather than institutional. I thought a lot about magic, in the end deciding magic is something that comes from without and cannot be explained. It's not that you don't have the information or smarts to explain it, it's that it is by its very nature unexplainable. How convenient for a scriptwriter!

  But I will get back and forth with this AI analogy, so don't relax. When I was talking about AI I used the word "magical". It was related to a feeling, rather than actual belief in magic, but the feeling was exactly the point. When you reach a point where you can't (or won't make the effort to) explain everything that is going on, there you get that feeling. Things are just happening, outside of your control, yet according to your will. Alignment without effort. How convenient for a software developer!

  You see, other stories, like X-Men or the DC or Marvel heroes and all of the others like that assume that some genetic, supernatural, technological fluke makes a person capable of extraordinary things. It's them that are changed, they who control the action. So if someone is very fast, one must assume that they can run but that they can also read fast, right? If they can avoid obstacles at high speed, then they could just as well absorb information at the same speed. Or maybe they could just write code really fast, assuming the keyboard would take the assault and the operating system isn't too slow. But they don't! Instead, they dress up funny, put on a mask and fight meaningless battles.

  How sad is that? It is my assumption that from all of the superpowers, being fast is up there with being immortal. You can slow down time and think about what you're going to do. If you're fast and super intelligent you've got it made! And what do comics and movies do with it? They run fast and punch other people.

  This is not about the inherent sadness of trying to reconcile make-belief heroes with the laws of physics, which is depressing enough, but about how - given the absolute power of creation - we choose to enjoy the really dumb stories. It reflects on how we ourselves are botching creativity. Given a fast, indefatigable machine that can do anything we can dream, we let it dream for us. Given the power to write anything, we write about our frustrated inner animal who just wants to punch something while feeling righteous.

In the end, we dream of relinquishing control and fucking rest, we feel that our minds are a burden rather than a boon, work to be done instead of doors to be opened, something to be numbed down, not dialed up. That's the nature of humanity: superpowered and sad.

Intro

In this post I will discuss my perspective on working as a software developer in the AI age and what it means. I will talk about how it was to look for a job first and how that changed, too. I don't mean it to be a rant, but it may become one in some places.

Looking

When I left my last job I did it without considering my next one. I just knew that it was pointless to keep working there, since it was all meetings and no code. I am a software developer, so what was I even doing in those meetings anyway? So I left. It also was a legacy code company, so I haven't learned anything remotely interesting in the last 6 years.

Then I took a break. I mean, who wants to search for a job in November, right? Waited for Christmas to pass, then I went on a vacation in Africa - it was nice, then I started to look for a developer job.

Shock!

Not that I didn't know, at an intellectual level, that things have changed. I try to keep up to date, at least at a consumer level of blogs and YouTube videos. I knew Covid and AI changed stuff, I just didn't understand the extent of the change.

For one, maybe one of the most important ones even if it doesn't sound so, is that recruitment is handled by HR people and technical people who have never seen the people they hire. Everything is remote. You talk to someone - with video if you're lucky, or on the phone, if you're not, then they pass you to another person who does the same in a different day, a different context. It's like a gauntlet of remote conversations. I could have Xi Jinping next to me telling me what to say and none would be the wiser.

Now, this is a consequence of Covid, not AI. There is an entire field of complaints about how AI does the initial screening based on resumés created by other AIs and so on. That was inevitable and I don't intend to talk about that. The problem I am explaining is that people who don't meet people are evaluating people. Even when you sign the contract you do it digitally, you don't shake anyone's hand, you just ... plug in.

What does it mean? It means people can - more than before - behave like keyboard trolls. They can lie to you with impunity, trick you or being total assholes. What are you going to do? Smash the monitor? Tell them off? That's why I went through several interviews for a company that - as I later found out from one of the employees - had a hiring freeze and were only permitted to hire from India. Why? I have no idea. I think they asked me whatever they wanted to know and were happy someone educated them. There is absolutely no emotional connection between you and the people who hire you, there is no opportunity to "get a feel" for a person unless what you get from the upper body video and whatever passes through each other's headphones.

Then there is the technical interviews. Before all of this, in the before times, people had no idea how to hire technical people. Nowadays, they REALLY have no idea, because they don't actually understand what they are hiring them for anymore. What value does a coding task have if a machine can do it already? Before it was things that you could just look up on Google and get the information on how to do it, if not a code snippet. Now you just ask any decent model to write the thing for you and it spews out exactly what they wanted.

As for what they ask you? High performance distributed cloud applications using microservices. The what?! It's like they all learned to ask for the same thing. The joke is that their applications are rarely so distributed, they are cloud applications in the sense they are served in Amazon Cloud instead of on their machines and they are almost never high performance. As for microservices? They are done as often and as right as Scrum is. I will leave it at that. All that in a climate where trendsetters are moving away from microservices.

It was basically a crap shoot, and if you are reading this while searching for a job, first of all condolences. Second of all, it's all luck. You obviously find some holes in your education that you need to fill or have to learn some new things, but what you know barely matters in this process. Thing is, it used to matter and who you were as a person also used to matter. Now all that is out the window.

Finding

As it often happens with me, I failed getting hired by every company I was reasonably confident I did well in the interviews for and got hired by the one where I was certain I had failed.

It's a nice company, too, with nice people. It does have microservices... somewhere, but I am not working on those.

When I started searching, I was looking for a decent job - money was not really an issue - in an office. I don't love people that much, but after years of doing everything remote, I kind of miss them. In the before times, one would dream of a job where you didn't have to spend 3 hours preparing for and commuting per day. Now, good luck finding one where they ask you to come to the office.

This company reluctantly and kind of apologetically said they require people to come to the office one day per week. Kind of low, but OK. Also, I can be hired as a contractor or employed, but they prefer contractor. I was kind of tired of doing invoices and stuff, but OK. And if I am a contractor, I don't have to come to the office at all.

So basically I am doing remote again!

Working

So how is work? Well, there is a lot of AI. You can ask AI about anything. Even here there is a framework that increasingly moves toward "the box". I talked about this before. It's the artificial employee. Instead of you interacting with it, it interacts with you. It's a subtle distinction, but it's the difference between a person being assigned to a task and getting help from an AI assistant and the AI working on the task itself and occasionally asking you for help with a review or question it needs answering.

We're not there, yet, though, so I asked if we were doing Scrum or Kanban. Scrum, obviously. Only the manager plans the sprint and if you don't have anything assigned to you, you can pick whatever there is in the backlog. How is that Scrum? Don't know. But frankly, I didn't mind. I came with new employee energy, took all the unassigned tasks, put the AI to work on them, reviewed them, came with advice, refined the results, created the PR and boom!

You used how many tokens?!?!

Yeah, that happened. After boasting how AI first they were, they were also kind of shocked someone used AI to the max. OK, maybe I exaggerated a little, you know, but I was experimenting.

You see, working with AI is kind of like becoming the mentor of a junior developer with encyclopedic knowledge. It knows how to do individual things, but it doesn't know why. And you can use different agents, but the balance comes as "can you be clear enough so that a cheap agent does the job or can you afford the expensive one who understands nuance?".

Personally, I am on a fence with this. I prefer to use the best engine at all times, even if I waste a lot of money, rather than have to refine the work of a lesser model or be afraid it messed something up or missed something or spend the same amount of money because I had to retry a few times. But I am also against wasting resources. I think this will become moot soon, as models will all move towards Mixture of Experts mode and make the choice themselves.

Anyway, I haven't written one line of code in a month. I am telling the AI what to do, I am reviewing, and it's good enough. I even learn new things from it, too. The bottleneck has changed, it's not the code anymore, it's the attention and the code reviews. Yeah, yeah, attention is all I need, ha ha!

But this also means I have to change. For example I did something today that would have felt idiotic a year ago. I took all of my Pull Requests - the one approved and merged, mind you - and started looking at the code to see if there is anything I can learn or understand from it. It's "my" code, but I needed a second pass - well, a tenth pass - to make the reviewing about learning rather than about finding issues or improvements.

Sometimes it feels like magic. You tell the AI "hey, I don't understand what this guy means in the Jira task!" and the AI goes "Oh, it's about this part of the project, he wants to do this, and that can be done via this method and I wrote the code and what do you think?" or you tell the AI to take the current branch, understand the independent changes and their purpose, then create different branches for each, then generate a PR with a description of what they contain and what they are doing. There is no need to use git or GitHub. It's easy to get carried away and forget that this level of AI assistance requires a scan of the entire application. Also that it doesn't mean it knows more than you or that you don't have to understand and learn that shit, quite the contrary.

It feels like... SQL, to be frank. There you also have to write declarative code and optimize on cost.

Even if you use it all the time, you must never trust the output of AI, just like you would not trust the output of your colleagues when you review their code (he he!). Sometimes it's easy to say "hey, that guy can code, I can just approve his stuff", but if they had a bad day, you just approved bugs.

That is why, just like in the development cycle design -> implement -> test -> refactor (yeah, I am standing by it, as I did for the last 30 years. If you don't like it, budgeting department or middle manager, then that's on you. Refactoring is not a dirty word!) now we must consider a personal development cycle understand -> prompt -> implement -> learn.

The AI infrastructure adapts, as well. You start with skills and MCP, but at every task that you use it for, you have to ask yourself: can I build a permanent tool that will repeat this work rather than ask the AI? It's easy to tell the AI to do things, but if it needs to reason every time to do something repeatedly, that's on you.

Structure

The structure of the planning and implementing tasks has also changed dramatically. If in the past people would avoid refactoring because they didn't trust their own test suites and were afraid of bugs introduced by small manual mistakes in the process, now you can just instruct the AI to do a full refactoring, only checking what they did and what they missed. It maintains the testing suite, too.

Projects that were unimaginable before now become options. I don't think management caught up to this yet, but they'll get there.

I feel, and it's a feeling I have to admit, that creativity gets a boost with AI. Even if your shop refuses to change their ways and just go on writing new features and never refactoring or improving or innovating, they will be pushed out by the other who do. The monopolies relying on no one making the effort to write software from scratch that performs the same function as their crappy tech indebted dinosaur will crumble. Is that good for developers? I think so.

Conclusion

I keep learning, which is cool, and I am in that nice euphoric place that decent jobs give to newly starting people. I hope I don't sour on it too soon.

To mitigate that possibility, I am planning large research projects, starting with understanding the architecture of the entire company code, how it connects, how it works, then drill down. I want to make it an interactive app.

AI can help a lot with focused learning. Instead of trying to learn everything, you can ask the computer to do something then learn from what it did. It can also summarize large swaths of information, allowing you to drill down and up from any level.

I think the future of AI is bright. It's the humans that will have problems. But can we adapt? That's the big question. We've always managed to do it before, so maybe we will continue to do so.

I am glad I get to do the thing I love, coding, and with tools that improve my speed tenfold. But I can never allow myself to get complacent. If a lot of my output is now done by machines, I must redirect the mental capacity that previously generated that output to something else, equally if not more valuable.

Here is for a hopeful conclusion!

  I liked The Quantum Thief, but I wanted to like it more. As such, it's a very entertaining cyberpunk story, with fancy tech and weapons, with everything quantum, with people living basically forever, but playing the same monkey domination games, heists and falling in love.

  It's a fun book, but it's also pulp. Hannu Rajaniemi writes it like in the '90s: passionate people doing things because they are right, great villains, epic technology. I feel like if I would have read it then, it could have been one of my favorites. In 2026, though, it feels a bit tired, a bit paint by numbers. The perfect thief, the perfect opportunity, beautiful strong women everywhere falling for him, cataclysmic battles thwarted by a series of McGuffins...

  Bottom line: if you want something fun that feels like cyberpunk, you're going to love this. If you are looking for something smarter... Meh. 

When we learn about the history of civilization, we get to hear about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Whatever follows is named after historical events or political systems rather than technology, although some historians do use Steel Age, Atomic Age, Information Age and so on.

I will argue that after the Iron Age there came the Debt Age and we are still in it. Currency is nothing else than proof of debt. You have something like a digital record, a piece of paper or a copper coin that says to other people you are due a certain amount of value. But since the coins stopped being made of precious metals - and even then the price of their metal was quite different from the price of the coin, civilization worked entirely on the concept of debt.

You may have heard the explanation of how the concept of debt increases the pool of existing total market value without any of it being emitted. You start with an economy of fixed value of 100 and one man holding it. He can use it to buy real stuff like food. But he can also lend it. So let's say a second man wants to buy stuff, but he has 0 money, he goes to the first man and says "hey, give me 10 and when I give it to you later I'll add 5". When the deal is agreed upon, the total money in the system is 90 + 10 + 5, with the extra 5 being virtual. The value of real things has not changed, but the currency value has. If every person in the system would suddenly ask for their money back, the system would collapse.

This only means one thing: even in a completely stable and stagnant system, the real value of currency decreases. You can lend and lend and lend thus increasing the pool of total coinage while the underlying objective value remains the same, thus making the currency value less and less per unit - so called inflation. The only way out of this is a growing economy to keep up to inflation.

Note here the change in paradigm. We are being told that we are growing, as a species, in wealth and resources and that is reflected in our economies. What I am saying is that the only way an economy can function in the age of debt is if it grows. That is the reason everybody loses their shit when economies stagnate. We are living on debt and we need to pay it. We can't just stop and relax, there is money to be paid for simply having the option of using money.

But who is this mysterious debtor? Surely if everybody borrows from someone, it has to balance somewhere. You can't just make up money, it has to represent something. And that is true, the mystery resource that is bought with all this money is time. Debt means you buy with a promise of future money time to do something to make that money. The debtor is the future.

Yeah, we can be dramatic and say that we just roll the debt forward and the people who have to pay it are going to be our children and so on, but don't fret, the fertility rate in the world has decreased spectacularly. We won't have children to pay the debt. We're fine!

OK, drama and cheap sarcasm over. The inverse correlation between global debt and fertility is a shallow one and I don't want to make that case.

Thing is, I was prompted to write this post because I've read this article about how fertility rates are going down worldwide, meaning that the economic output of the world in 2100 will be a third lower than that of today. And one has to wonder, right? If we are fewer and we work less, why is that such a big deal? It's a big deal because without permanent growth, modern economies crumble! They cannot pay their debts! It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

And this is not particularly about currency. The same effect can be achieved in a barter system as well. All you have to do is lend and borrow - although it would certainly work against taxes, banks and that stuff, the reason barter is now routinely made illegal.

Is it so bad, though? Isn't a system with the drive to continuously grow inherently good?

Yes, it's good at growing. Not growing you, not making you happy, not keeping you healthy, but growing as an overarching abstraction that includes people just incidentally. Yes, civilization is made of people, they are the ones that - theoretically - have debts to pay and money to spend, but the choice and direction is collective, not individual.

When you eat the cheap unhealthy food made from the exploitation of animals and vulnerable people and you just shrug, that's not rational. When you take the money you saved by eating said cheap food to buy weird stuff to own and put on yourself to appear superior to other people, that's not rational either. When wealth accumulates in the hands of a few people that only use it to make more wealth, that's just dumb.

The thing that grows with no other reason than to grow, with no regards to the damage it does while doing so, is called cancer. It always leads either to its failure or the death of its host. Cancer does not scale!

Can we survive systems of balance with ourselves, our neighbors and our environment? History says no. Every single civilization that tried this was destroyed by another. In fact, this is the mechanism that keeps the system working: if you stop, you get trampled by someone who doesn't; if you are inefficient, you get left in the dust by someone who does things slightly better. The reason why we don't immediately die from this malignant growth is that the civilizations that survive have found temporary stop gap measures to compensate. The ones that did not, did die!

Can we steer away from this debt driven growth for the sake of growth? I don't see how. Since I made the analogy with cancer and nature tried a lot of stuff, maybe we can draw inspiration from there, but the conclusions are not good. There are local mechanisms that stop cancer early on. Vigilance, general health and energy are required to keep this working. When cancer does inevitably skirt them, it is unstoppable. Only an outside treatment can help.

For us, that means that we create the mechanisms to eliminate corruption and maintain vigilant and focused on real human values. And when we ultimately fail and our lives are taken over by growing psychopathic organizations, we can only hope someone from outside is going to come to our aid.

That is why a monoculture will destroy the planet. That is why we need many countries that think differently and try new things. That is why we have to allow diversity of thought and system, while also holding on to human values. I want to write another post about this particular claim, but I am still ruminating about the content and direction.

I was thinking the other day, is it possible that the whole Greenland thing is a kneejerk reaction from a system that has provenly failed its people against one that has showed a viable alternative? It's probably oil and territory, but what if it isn't? What if the cancerous American capitalism has realized Communism failed, but Socialism is viable in Northern Europe and China, and therefore it must be stomped?

  For a while now I have been waiting for the "AI bubble" to burst. I don't want it to happen, but what the hell is one supposed to think when companies that make up a large portion of the U.S. economy invest hundreds of times more than they can reasonably extract in a year for that? It's a fad, I thought. First it bubbles, then it bursts, then it settles to a shit version of itself, like the Internet did.

  But then it hit me. AI is not a tool, it's a resource. It's like water, or land or the Internet. Countries without Internet are done now, they can't affect anything, people from there can't do anything in the world because they would need skills they don't have, even if their abusive boyfriend/supreme leader would let them leave. When the Internet came to be, some people saw it coming, but most people just saw it insinuate and grow into their lives, upend and take over other stuff, only better, and they let it. No one had the foresight to hoard it. And the Americans have been trying to fix that for decades now.

  Artificial Intelligence is just the same. You need compute for it, you need power for it, and those things are expensive and politically sensitive, but it's not clear for a lot of people that what you need more than money and public support is thinking computers. It doesn't matter how much they lose in terms of finance, because finance too is done. Money is pointless. And this idea started even earlier, with Bitcoin. The concept is the same, if you think about it: your currency is a piece of compute. AI just took this to several orders of magnitude higher.

  OK, let me paint it in another way. Countries as animal species. Each of them have their characteristics, their strengths and weaknesses, they all try to survive and grow in a world where all of the other countries are as well. But they are animals, right? They evolve big teeth, large necks, fast legs. And one day here comes Man, with a brain. And it's not even one species of Man, there are more, slight variations of the thinking animal. The better the brain, the better their survival chances. The closer one species it is to you in intelligence, the higher the risk and threat from them. So the species of Man fight each other, one survives. The animals? What about them? They are not even part of the conversation.

  We're seeing the same thing, but with the thinking machine. The one that will have the better thinking machine would have complete supremacy and control. Not because better weapons, not because better people, but because better compute, which then affects everything and everyone. You hear this phrase already "AI is a multiplier". Instead of getting a muscle that is 10% stronger or a claw that is 10% longer, you get a spear that can fly through the air tens of times its own length, while keeping you out of danger. If the multiplier is high enough, it doesn't matter how weak, stupid or absurd you are. You just win by domination at scale.

  And yes, it's another scary concept. An even scarier concept than a financial bubble burst or a world war, because something that is 1000 times stronger doesn't do war with you, it just steps on you by mistake. But there is hope. And that hope is the opposite of "suveran AI", it's a world AI. The Internet resisted - somewhat - the enshitification process, the hoarding, the greed, by being international and free. A global AI. Maybe the one that will rule us all, who knows, but the point is we can't let a bunch of people own it and control it, even if those people are your people. Because they are people. They are just animals with a brain that now want to own a bigger brain.

  "Compute" is now the gold in a gold rush. Countries will move mountains to get at it. They will risk their existence and they will kill for it. If you are one million times more in debt that you can possibly pay but you have the computing edge, you win. Money has become meaningless. We are moving toward the "smart matter" concept where the value of any entity will be measured in how much mass and energy they have converted into computing hardware.

  There are a lot of good science fiction books that predicted this, but rarely talked about the transition phase from a world of dumb countries to a smart planet. It's going to be interesting, for sure.

  I predict that what will happen is a rush toward energy production. First renewables, then fusion, then probably fission because people now have a reason to do it other than the pyramid schemes they've been running to get forever funding. The grids will have to adapt, because there will be so much more power running through them. The computing centers will feed on this like leeches and spread like... like we spread out from Africa and infected every land. Your country will need to start work on this NOW. Borrow like crazy, train people, then just create the infrastructure for energy consumption that will dwarf what the Earth was consuming several thousand times over. If you thought fossil fuel global warming was bad, wait to see what all of that excess heat will do, so cooling infrastructure will also be a major asset.

  But all of this will be just a stopgap measure against being stepped on. Unless we make a truly global thinking infrastructure, so interconnected that hoarding it for just one group of people becomes impossible, we are going to see conflict at levels unthought of before.

  So yeah, I've changed my mind about AI. It will not burst, it will explode and take us all with it. Heed my words: energy, cooling and compute. NOW!

  If you've read American Gods, this is really very similar, albeit focused more on action and less on mythology. Same rascally male character with an uncertain origin discovering a world of gods, monsters and that they're kind of the same thing.

  I don't know why it's called Unclean Spirits. Truly it makes no sense to me after reading the book, but I guess it needed a title. Chuck Wendig is a decent writer, you root for the character and you can really feel the world in which things happen. The ending felt a little rushed.

  What's different between American Gods and Gods & Monsters is that the latter is a multi author universe, with books written by different people in the same world. I always liked this concept and if I were into the premise I would want to read all of the books. Yet, I don't want to go further. I had the book on the to read list, I've read it, I liked it, but that's about it.

  Was it better than American Gods? No. But it was similar enough to not matter and if you're into that kind of thing, this series is highly recommended.

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?