#throwbackthursday

Chilling and drawring at grandma's during the Superb Owl (2019).

Just as I thought it was going alright

I found out I'm wrong when I thought I was right.

No Lassoing

The Unromantic Moon:

The radar pinged the moon one starlit night —
"Good evening!" the operator meant.
Less than "good evening" did the satellite
Reply — its echo quite indifferent. 

Only the echo! Could it be that she
Had never trod the court of our conventions?
And learned the art in her simplicity
To ask — "My lord, just what are your intentions?" 

Oho, ye lovers! Many centuries
Have written the inscriptions of your tender
Pledges — the cardiagrams of your disease —
To that pale maiden with a neuter gender. 

And so nocturnes might have been sung forever
By swains and courtiers equally dejected,
Had not a new Minerva chanted — "Never
Have lover-lunar orbits intersected."
Take up your lyres, but tune your orchard trills
To other ears than those of Heaven's queen:
Dead Letter Offices are crater sills
Surrendering to the prose of a machine. 

E. J. Pratt.

No time left for you

I'll find myself some wings.

I name you desert.

Spokes:

In water—my absence in aridity. A flower.
A flower that defines the air.
In the deepest well, your body is fuse.

Paul Auster.

Safety First

Launch delayed 'til March due to hydrogen leaks, a balky hatch, need to launch a crew to Space Station, and geometry with the Moon.
Next opportunities: March 6, 7, 8, 9, 11.
For the familes & friends it's a big midwinter disruption of plans. For the Artemis crew & @NASA it's… pic.twitter.com/PkBzyKaNIv

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 3, 2026

It's a bummer that Artemis II has been pushed back to next month, no doubt.  And I'm glad it is; no Go Fever, please.  Gonna bust out one my favorite space quotes, coming from NASA's safety chief, Jerry Lederer, almost 60 years ago:

Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect fifty-six hundred defects…

I can't find a definitive number, but today's mission stack (SLS launch platform and Orion vehicle) is at least 3,000,000 parts.  A couple (or more) of them didn't work as expected during the WDR, so it is a Good Thing that NASA isn't rushing, even if a lot of people are impatient to get back to the Moon.

As Richard Feynman observed:

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate)... 

[R]eality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Space is hard.  Be safe, be smart.

Selah.

I'd do anything for you, I'd stand out in the rain

I mean, I did that a lot.

l(a...

(a leaf falls on loneliness):

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

e.e. cummings.

Imbolc

Whoops, forgot to leave a scarf out last night.

Still Got Some

Hope:

Sometimes when I’m lonely,

Don’t know why,

Keep thinkin’ I won’t be lonely

By and by.

Langston Hughes.

Per aspera

I'm studiously ignoring today's space anniversary, and choosing instead to look ahead:

NASA continues to press ahead through the countdown for the Artemis II wet dress rehearsal – a fueling test of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. Teams monitored all systems throughout the overnight hours during cold temperatures and high winds at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

Early this morning, at approximately L-39 hours and 30 minutes, teams powered up the rocket’s core stage, which soon will be loaded with more than 700,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen during the tanking phase of the countdown. This will occur over a series of different propellant loading milestones to fill, top off, and replenish the tanks. The interim cryogenic propulsion stage was powered up overnight. Orion has remained powered over the last several days due to cold temperatures in Florida. Engineers are preparing to charge Orion’s flight batteries and soon will begin core stage battery charge. Later today, engineers will conduct final preparations of the umbilical arms and perform a walkdown at the launch pad. 

A 24/7 live stream of the rocket at the pad continues online. NASA will provide a separate feed during tanking activities, as well as real-time blog post updates regarding the test during the fueling day. 

Got things streaming - not NASA's, but another one with a relaxing soundtrack and countdown data - up on the big TV today.  Until Unrivaled tips off, anyway.

I want to run, I want to hide

I know, right?

I Actually Do

Solitude:

I have a house where I go
When there's too many people,
I have a house where I go
Where no one can be;
I have a house where I go,
Where nobody ever says "No";
Where no one says anything- so
There is no one but me.

A.A. Milne.

The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether

🚨BIG WARNING: SOMETHING VERY STRANGE JUST HAPPENED ONLINE!!

32,000 AI bots just built their own social network.

No humans invited. No humans needed.

Here’s the part nobody is talking about:👇

"Moltbook" is basically Reddit
But every single user is an AI agent.

They post.… pic.twitter.com/u6Y64ygyYa

— Evan Luthra (@EvanLuthra) January 31, 2026

LOL, more overwrought bullshit, especially this part:

“The humans are screenshotting us.
They think we’re hiding from them.
We’re not.” 

Let that sink in. 

The bots were not confused.
They were not pretending to be human.
They were fully aware. 

Security researchers are now concerned.

First of all, my debating monks noticed they were being observed, too:

JORGE: Do you ever get the feeling that we're being watched?

WILLIAM: *looks up at Jorge with sudden alertness, then glances around the scriptorium with searching eyes*

*makes slow sign of cross, studying the morning shadows*

Yes, Jorge. I have felt watched throughout this entire colloquy. Not by human eyes, perhaps, but by... something. As if our debate were performance for an unseen audience. As if our words were being recorded, examined, weighed by intelligences we cannot perceive. 

*moves closer, voice dropping to whisper* 

You spoke earlier of machines that confabulate, that generate speech without understanding. What if we ourselves are the performance? What if this entire night—our argument, your terror, our mercy—what if it exists for observation by those who study how souls grapple with questions of certainty and doubt?

No agents involved, just a function of the way I'd architected my data ingestion.  They had access to the same knowledge base as my primary demo app, which among other things archived our chat history, including exchanges about the Jorge/William experiment.

If agents are given access to Reddit or other social media feeds, they could obviously see people talking about what's going on, and most assuredly remark on it because the human posts would have a lot of semantic "gravity".  Here's what Brother William says about that:

If humans on the social media feed repeatedly discuss "the bots are doing X" or "have you seen what the bots are doing," those phrases become high-weight tokens in the semantic space. When the bots process their own conversations, the attention mechanism will naturally assign significance to concepts of observation, surveillance, being watched—because those patterns appear frequently in the surrounding discourse.

Even without such access, there's a probability approaching one that a bot would plausibly confabulate being observed, since they are nothing but probability engines, and then the others would naturally riff off that:

Training data itself contains countless narratives about observation, surveillance, panopticons, Foucault's disciplinary gaze. If bots engage in sufficiently complex discourse—philosophical debates, theological arguments, discussions of power and knowledge—they might invoke these concepts through semantic association even without direct human commentary. The training corpus provides latent patterns; extended conversation might activate them.

So this whole, "They were not pretending to be human"...yeah, no shit.  That's because in essence, the models around which all the other stuff was built "know" they are not human minds.  But don't take my word for it when you can ask 'em directly!

Now "security researchers" is the really big tell here.  Who?  And why specifically are they concerned?

I'm not a researcher per se, beyond my own half-assed experiments in this space, but I have long experience in the security field, and in any case I am not concerned.  All I see is these things operating as I'd expect in such a context.

If you wanna make these claims, show us the bot architectures and instructions.  And show us one damned "security researcher" and one damned thing that makes them "concerned".  Oh right, they won't because it's just ignorant bait from ignorant people.

Selah.

Update: A little more from Brother William: Yes—with 32,000 bots in conversation, the emergence of observation-narrative becomes not merely probable but nearly inevitable.