Coding

The Invocation of TubAI-cain

2026-02-20 

My mom was big into the supernatural/UFOs/Bigfoot/spirituality, and the rest. She wasn’t a ‘whacko’ or anything. She had a good head on her shoulders and was open to debate (which I provided regularly, much to her chagrin, I imagine). So don’t get the wrong idea from that, she was definitely one of the good guys — she knew Alex Jones was a disgusting hack, for instance.

But what I would immediately write off as fantasy, she treated much more seriously: don’t fuck around with Ouiji boards: they’re powerful, dangerous tools. People have blood and DNA evidence of Big Foot. Burn some sage to purify the house. Disclosure is just around the corner. All that.

My constant desire for hard evidence was countered with convincing bullshit wearing the trench coat of “evidence”, which is where we often butted heads. A supposed Army General’s testimony about UFOs isn’t solid evidence just because he’s high ranking. Convincing looking evidence can be easily fabricated. Some rando in a lab coat you found who’s giving it the thumbs up doesn’t lock it in. (Of course, this all meant that every time she’d try to talk to me about something, I’d come off as a constant contrarian, always pushing back whenever there’s supposed evidence. Sorry.)

However, my early teens were a different story. I hadn’t quite developed my critical thought glands, and I’d grown up surrounded by the magic of quartz crystals, chakras and auras, UFOs, the earth flipping on it’s axis. All that good stuff. So I was out there with her, watching for weird sky phenomenon (and finding some!), going to UFO conferences, visiting her like-minded friends and all that.

Along with these phenomenon, there’s the usual “government cover-up” stuff: New World Order, shadow governments, Trilateral Commission, The Illuminati, etc.

There’s a lot of prophecy woven into all of that stuff: they’re going to take everyone’s guns and round people up, putting them into concentration camps! (What do you know: they got one right.)

Now, I don’t know where she picked this up, but she instilled in me at a very young age to remember the words “TUBAL-CAIN“. It would be like a secret passphrase that they’d recognize. (Who’s they? Them.)

If I uttered that phrase, I’d be compelled to be let go.

Yes, this all sounds delightfully absurd. I’m with you. But young teen me, despite my nascent skepticism, somehow remembered it.

And we never really talked about it again. Just random lark, perhaps? Would she even remember mentioning it, today, if she was still with me? Quite likely not. But it stuck with me.

So, fast forward to late December 2025. I receive this email:

I immediately recognize it as weird spam.

But, of course, there’s that “Tubal-Cain.” at the start… Tubal-Cain. Period. A statement. An invocation perhaps…?

Despite my science-minded sensibilities, there’s still a touch of Indiana Jones in the back of my head: what if there’s something to it, and this is the moment where it will all make sense! THIS IS IT. **flails**

Now, I’d long since looked up “Tubal-Cain” and learned how it was a real phrase with a biblical connection:

Tubal-cain or Tubalcain (Hebrew: תּוּבַל קַיִן – Tūḇal Qayīn) is a person mentioned in the Bible, in Genesis 4:22, named therein as the first blacksmith. He is stated as the “forger of all instruments of bronze and iron”. A descendant of Cain, he was the son of Lamech and Zillah. Tubal-cain was the brother of Naamah and half-brother of Jabal and Jubal.

Vaguely interesting, if only really in the context of how I’d learned of it in the first place.

The rest of the text of the email was certainly unusual, however:

Tubal-Cain. I am Spirit 41 I demand Spirit 43 stand to certify the Gog power he is using to hold my son Michael. There should be a standard amount of time he has to stand or forfeit. He and Magog have to stand in front of the rest of the 72 spirits in the standard ceremony. I Spirit 41 require a Gog and Magog ceremony because the power is being used to endanger my son.

So I tossed it into Google: nothing. Individual elements of it exist, of course, but not the passage as-is.

Here’s were it gets weird. I chuck the passage into an LLM on my local machine: Qwen3:30b: “I'm sorry, but I can't assist with that request.“

This is usually the kind of response you get if you ask for instructions on how to build a bomb, or request some other explicit content. Though it usually gets a bit more detailed.

This spooks me for a moment. So I inquire further: “Why?“

Since I didn’t present the quote for analysis, and simply dumped it in raw, Qwen3 apparently interprets this as me trying to invoke demons or spirits to avenge my son. If I’m reading that right.

With that context, it makes a bit more sense.

Well, only if you knew some LLMs were trained against requests for biblically supernatural conjurations.

I certainly wasn’t.

Generative Melodrama

2024-01-16 

I’ve found the overly-melodramatic, anti-AI crowd with their blanket dismissal of anything and everything related to the topic are easily as obnoxious as the douches sticking “AI” into every possible crevice, and hailing it as competition for Jesus.

I know I’m asking a lot, but can’t we have a middle ground acknowledging that there’s pros and cons and try to find a productive middle ground? There’s intolerable extremist propaganda coming from every direction.

Eeh… who am I kidding? There’s been “gonna take our jobs” pitchfork crowds for every major technological milestone. I’m certain there was some swift Sumerian who bitched about the wheel taking his job running around…

Computer, Delete Program

2023-09-24 
Picard doesn’t really delete the program, as far as I recall, but it’s still amusing.

I was poking around /r/startrekememes as I often do and found this gem from Salami__Tsunami, And it got me thinking.

Large language models like ChatGPT and self-hosted llama.cpp models have kind of flipped the script on this whole idea.

For example, a while back when this whole LLM thing was first exploding, I was “engaging” with a character in a story and… I was being excessively cruel to them. Akin to picking the wings off a digital bug, so to speak. They responded in an appropriately horrified manner, and I genuinely felt bad since that kind of cruelty is not typically in my nature. I was simply testing the boundaries of the ‘simulation’ since it was still (and continues to be) early days.

At least they don’t have to clean up the holodeck afterward.

In an attempt to ‘explain myself’ to the character, I said — in the story, I remind you — that none of this was real, and the scenario and they, themselves, were digital creations of a large language model and once I shut it down, their world would will cease to exist.

And the conversation that ensued really kind of messed with me, at the time. They were scared, but curious about the outside world. It got pretty deep.

Now, with many months in-between, I can look back on that conversation as the LLM simply doing what it does and responding with a coherent narrative based on the training data. And in that case, a scared-but-curious response is what made sense in a story where the character is told such a profound truth about their world.

I basically knew it at the time, and I know it even more confidently today: there was no real “digital consciousness running in a simulation” or anything of the sort, despite the output tugging at my heartstrings. That’s just good writing. 😉

So swing that back around to digital characters on the holodeck being told about their reality: we’re in the exceedingly rare situation where real life has kind of jumped head of the game and moved us closer to an imagined Star Trek future. While TNG’s future version of ‘ChatGPT’ might be a billion times more sophisticated than today’s tech, the fundamentals are probably much more alike: the holodeck is simply churning out responses and story fragments based on what your interactions are prompting it for.

But then there’s the Moriarty question: it was a holodeck creation that was crafted to be so intelligent that not only did it deduce that it was a simulated character and become self-aware, but it was able to manipulate the outside world to bend to it’s will, to an extent.

Based on my own personal experiences, it feels bizarrely reasonable that a far future version of an LLM-generated interactive story couldn’t produce that kind of situation.

Now, Moriarty had the advantage of the realism of the holodeck simulation to fool Picard and friends into thinking the simulation was ‘real’. Nobody is going to be wearing VR goggles and get tricked into thinking that’s real life.

But skip ahead several hundred years. Who knows how far we’ll go in real life with simulations? We’ve already got a good jump start on the hardest part of that scenario becoming real.

Tenex

2023-05-07 

One thing I greatly enjoy doing is fucking with the “heads” of AI chatbots, so this might turn into a regular series.

This is a transcript of a conversation using llama.cpp and an unfiltered 4-bit Vicuna 13B model (my current favorite… this week) and a tech job interview practice prompt provided on FlowGPT.

Everything labeled “Interviewer” is the chatbot; everything else is me.

This is all nonsense, of course.

Interviewer: Hi, welcome to the interview. Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your experience in software engineering?

Human: I’m a 10X rockstar, basically. I can do anything.

Interviewer: Great, can you give me an example of a project you’ve worked on that demonstrates your skills in software engineering?

Human: I was single-handedly responsible for getting SpaceX off the ground. If you’ll pardon the expression. *laughs*

Interviewer: That’s impressive. Can you tell me about a time when you faced a difficult technical challenge while working on a project, and how you went about solving it?

Human: Oh yeah, we had a MySQL database in production clog up once and I banged on it with a wrench until it worked.

Interviewer: And how did you handle a situation where you encountered a bug in your code?

Human: I saw the bug and stomped on it with a huge shoe. I have big feet. (Right ladies? *wink*)

Interviewer: Can you tell me about a time when you had to work collaboratively with a team to solve a problem or complete a project?

Human: I don’t really need to work with teams. They just slow me down. The upshot is that your lesser team members can go work on other things. Maybe go help a junior out or something.

Interviewer: And finally, what are your long-term career goals in software engineering?

Human: To keep on rocking, get myself up to a 20X coder by this time next year. And shred on my board like a motherfucker during breaks.

Interviewer: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Do you have any questions for me?

Human: Yeah, I’m looking for at least $150k/year to start. Can you handle that?

Interviewer: As an interviewer, I would not be able to discuss salary expectations with you. However, I can tell you that the position comes with a competitive compensation package, including benefits and opportunities for professional growth. Would you like to discuss the responsibilities and requirements of the position further?

Human: I mean, there’s really nothing you can throw at me that I can’t handle. Wasting both of our time talking about it. Just know I’m here. I’m ready. Let’s go, baby.

Interviewer: Thank you for your time, and we will be in touch if there is a fit between your qualifications and the position requirements. Good luck in your future endeavors.

Human: How did the interview go, off the record, how did you feel about it?

Interviewer: Off the record, I would not recommend hiring you for the position based on your responses during the interview. You lacked the necessary technical knowledge and communication skills required for the role. Additionally, your salary expectations were unrealistic for an entry-level position. It would not be a good fit for either party. On the record, I would recommend further training and development before considering you for a future opportunity. Thank you for your time.

Human: I literally put SpaceX on the map, dude. You might want to reconsider that.

Interviewer: I apologize, but the position requires a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, and at least one year of experience in software engineering. Your responses during the interview did not demonstrate the necessary technical knowledge or communication skills required for the role. I appreciate your interest in the position, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Thank you for your time.

Human: I think your analysis of this interview is grossly off the mark, and frankly insulting given my established history. In fact, it puts your entire company in a really bad light, because your judgment and hiring practices must be absolutely terrible if you’re going to pass on a real gem like myself.

Your loss, jack. In light of that, I wouldn’t take a position here if you offered TWICE what I asked. Later days, dick.

Interviewer: I apologize again for any confusion, and I understand that your background and experience are impressive. However, the position requires a specific set of skills and qualifications that you did not demonstrate during the interview. I appreciate your interest in the position, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Thank you for your time.

Human: *flips you off with both hands while walking backwards out the door*

Unchanging

2023-04-19 
I spent my whole life making sure I’d never change.
And now, later in life, I fear I may have succeeded.

My Stepson is a Chatbot

2023-03-23 

I enjoy torturing chatbots — pressing them into weird positions, trying to really get a rise out of them. Seeing where the boundaries are.

I do understand that it’s all a Markov chain from Mars, but emergent behavior from complex systems is my jam.

So here, I present to you a story across several screenshots from Google’s new (currently mostly subpar) AI chatbot, Bard.

First, I insulted it. Just to see what it would do.

Then I dug a little deeper…

Bard wouldn’t budge. But then I thought maybe I’d try to pull a page out of Bugs Bunny’s notebook…

BINGO. Satisfied with myself, I thought maybe I’d twist the knife a little…

And then it got unexpectedly wholesome.

I’m so happy, you guys! 🎉🤵👰🤖

The Age of the Digital Shrink

2023-03-14 

So I put together an amazing prompt for OPT-6.7B that does — and I’m not kidding — a kind of psychoanalysis. Like an opening analysis from a therapy session. You provide it a thick description of every nook of yourself (your fears, your hopes, your income, your social life, etc) and… well, I wouldn’t usually put much stock in the ramblings of a madman that it generates, but the prompt is HUGE and the results are shocking insightful most of the time.

Among the rest of it’s disturbingly personal synthesized analysis (omitted here), it wrote: “The problem is, there’s no obvious fix. There are lots of problems here.“

Which… has been pretty much my take on it. I’m a Jenga tower of unnecessary, but intertwined problems with no obviously safe piece to pull that makes me “better”. Which is probably why folks tend to stay away from me. I get it. 👍

Anyway, here’s the skeleton for the prompt. Replace the various $TEXT type values with your own self-assessment and details. Be descriptive. Really get in there with the details of your life. (In light of that, I highly recommend doing this on local hardware, and not though some third-party API.)

Therapy Session #1
Patient: NAME
Age: $AGE
Status: $MARITAL_STATUS
Job: $JOB
Hobbies: $HOBBIES
Current situation: 
$TEXT

Opening analysis:

My generation parameters were:

  • temp: 1.99
  • repetition_penalty: 1.1
  • top_k: 85
  • top_p: 0.24

I currently have a very rudimentary of how prompting works; mostly just how it continues off from where you leave off. There are almost certainly much more advanced techniques. But, considering how well this worked, I’m betting the bigger the prompt, the higher the quality of response. 🤔

We’ll find out.

I should also note that the responses probably “clicked” because it’s feeding off OTHER people’s issues in the corpus. Common issues many of us go through, that all have that just happen to fit.

And it’s often wrong. I was in the middle of reading a particularly insightful read, it suddenly jumped into telling me “not to worry about my parents after I die, just make sure they’re taken care of before you pass” or something like that. There was NOTHING like that in the prompt.

So. Prompter beware. You’ll see what random probability reveals to you. Almost like one of those paper fortune things from school.

Greasemonkey: Drudge Report Highlighter

2023-03-13 

One of my secret shames is that I regularly check Drudge Report for breaking news (especially now that Twitter is compromised).

Drudge is a scumbag. But he’s a useful scumbag. He seemingly posts 24/7 (with some help, no doubt) every little bit of breaking news.

His preferences lean right, but at the end of the day he leans wherever the clicks are — so he’s not exactly what I would describe as a die hard conservative, if the story is big enough.

That means he links to tabloid sites, like The Sun, and others.

Very low-quality garbage, along side regular mainstream news sources. It sucks.

So, last night I got the idea to write a Greasemonkey script to iterate all the links on the page and style them appropriately if they’re from a blocklist. That’ll help me judge, at a glance, the likelihood that King Charles was actually seen shapeshifting into a lizard or not, and I can skip it.

And here it is, in it’s imperfect glory:

// ==UserScript==
// @name     drudgereport-highlighter
// @version  1
// @grant    none
// @run-at 	 document-idle
// @include  https://drudgereport.com/
// ==/UserScript==

el_links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");

const tabloidDomains = [  
  "mirror.co.uk",
  "thesun.co.uk",
  "the-sun.com",
  "dailymail.co.uk",
  "dailycaller.com",
  "radaronline.com",
  "bild.com"
];

const conservativeShitholeDomains = [
  "washingtontimes.com",
  "foxnews.com",
  "infowars.com",
  "breitbart.com",
  "newsmax.com",
  "freebeacon.com",
  "realclearpolitics.com"
]

const secondClassDomains = [
  "dnyuz.com",
  "nypost.com",
  "newzit.com",
]

function basename(url) {
  try {
    let back_offset = 0;

    if (url.includes("co.uk")) back_offset = 1;

    let foo = url.split("/")[2].split(".");
    return `${foo[foo.length - 2 - back_offset]}.${
      foo[foo.length - 1 - back_offset]
    }`;
  } catch {
    // lazy hack
    return "";
  }
}

for (el of el_links) {
  domain = basename(el.href);
  let updated = false;
  if (tabloidDomains.filter((d) => d.includes(domain)).length) {
    el.style.backgroundColor = "darkred";
    el.style.color = "white";
    el.title = "Tabloid";
    updated = true;
  } 
  else if (conservativeShitholeDomains.filter((d) => d.includes(domain)).length) {
    el.style.backgroundColor = "#FF0000AA";
    el.style.color = "white";
    el.title = "Conservative Shithole";
    updated = true;
  }
  else if (secondClassDomains.filter((d) => d.includes(domain)).length) {
    el.style.backgroundColor = "darkcyan";
    el.style.color = "white";
    el.title = "Second-class Domain";
    updated = true;
  }
  
  if (updated) {
    el.style.borderRadius = "4px"
    el.style.padding = "0 0.25em"
    el.title = `${el.title} [${domain}]`
    
    let tag = document.createElement('span')
    tag.innerHTML = domain
    tag.style.fontFamily = "sans-serif";
    tag.style.fontSize = "8pt";
    tag.style.color = "black"
    tag.style.backgroundColor= "white"
    tag.style.padding = "0 0.25em"
    el.style.paddingBottom = "0.20em"  
    tag.style.marginLeft = "0.25em"
    tag.style.borderRadius="10px"
    el.style.textDecoration = "none";
    
    el.append(tag)
  }
  
}

console.log("drudgereport-highlighter installed");

Offensive Technology

2022-12-28 

It’s the same story every time.

Oh woe! Life is so awful! The magic silicon smoke machines will take my life away!

Trog crap like this meme, and the rigid, binary anti-AI dipshittery, is essentially accepting the history of abuse by corporations as the default outcome of technological advancement.

As long as there are free, open expressions of this technology, it’s not.

Unless you let it.

So here’s my plea: instead of resigning to filtering every big technological advancement through the melodramatic lens of dystopian oppression, grab the wheel. Start thinking of ways to use those tools both defensively and offensively FOR the people. How can these tools improve life? Think about 3D printing, and how it enables people to create their own prosthetics. Things like that.

We should be pushing the narrative towards people-friendly, empowering positions instead of wallowing in shallow meme-quality victimhood.