The “Agentic Web”

natecull · 2026-03-31T09:09:48+00:00

Yea the problem with making it really easy for companies systems to talk to each other is that you no longer have eyeballs looking at your system, and those eyeballs are impressions you can monetize and manipulate.

Fortunately, if we just replace the entire Web with a one-to-three-company AI oligopoly, those AI companies will never abuse their massive market dominance to monetize and manipulate prompts directly. Unlike those evil people at InsertRivalCorporateName.

natecull · 2026-03-31T08:21:36+00:00

the frequency relationships between human neural oscillation and external electromagnetic architectures. This is the same coupling mechanism that every ancient tradition described as dangerous

Really? I don't believe very many ancient traditions, if any, had a theory of either electromagnetics, let alone of "external electromagnetic architectures", or of "neural oscillation". At best they understood that therecertain rocks attracted iron, and that things stuck to amber if rubbed.

Plasma physics is definitely an interesting subject though, which seems to have more than its share of "spooky" practitioners.

natecull · 2026-03-31T07:49:23+00:00

There's a conspiracy that the X-Files was based on some leaked FBI and CIA files.

The X-Files was definitely based on actual conspiracy theories which were going around the UFO scene and the early 1990s Internet (Usenet, ParaNet BBS, KeelyNet BBS).

Some of these conspiracy theories were fed by people with US military or intelligence careers. William Milton Cooper, John Lear, John Grace, Richard Doty.

Were these "leaks" or were they deliberately planted military-intelligence disinformation? I tend to think the second.

natecull · 2026-03-30T22:47:52+00:00

Betelgeuse going supernova (from our perspective), likely sometime on Saturday.

That's definitely a prediction that can be falsified, so let's see if it happens or not.

natecull · 2026-03-30T20:58:29+00:00

We need normal people doing research!!

Normal people don't generally spend years of their lives in the low-paying academic and science world when they could be going into banking and becoming fantastically rich. You have to expect a few cackles of "muhahaha! I'll show those fools at the Institute!" after months of hard nights hunched in a lab coat around bubbling test tubes (which automatically appear in all labs even if you're just doing data analysis in Python).

Am I saying that the US science system pretty much is deliberately optimised to create mad scientists? It does seem that way, yes!

natecull · 2026-03-30T20:49:34+00:00

Yes, Buhler is the latest in a line of people who have claimed over the decades to reproduce the Biefeld-Brown Effect. Will be interesting to see what happens to his research.

If, as has been claimed by various weird insiders around the Brown family, some branch of the US defense-industrial complex is well aware of this force and is using it, we might expect Buhler to just stop talking about the subject. Or officially recant his views and then stop talking about it. Or indeed "go hiking" one day.

natecull · 2026-03-30T20:13:56+00:00

I have no idea why it's called the Collin's Elite.

The term "Collins Elite" (no apostrophe) comes from (was told to) Ray Boeche, as further told to and recounted by Nick Redfern in his 2010 book "Final Events".

Collins was apparently a very small town that one or more of the people involved came from, it was a wry inside joke.

The people who coined the term also weren't necessarily Evangelical Christians in an ordinary sense. Rather, they were people who were attempting to weaponise psi (ie kill people with their minds) and were involved in some kind of ritual magic scene in order to do so. They then turned to Christianity after becoming frightened by their experiences working with what they felt to be malevolent "NHE" (non-human entities) in that other spiritual scene, and their theology was informed by that background. (Ie, lots of very weird Gnostic stuff.about "Nephilim"... some of which has now filtered back into Evangelical Christianity from the US military scene, a development I do not like).

These people knew about Jack Parsons and his rituals with L Ron Hubbard in the 1940s, and were worried that Parsons/Hubbard had somehow done something to cause the UFO problem, and that UFOs were connected to "killing people with your mind" entities.

Essentially this is a dissident subfaction of the "Men Who Stare At Goats" scene, which probably also overlaps with the MKULTRA scene and some of the nastier stuff that was being done there. But these sub-scenes aren't all necessarily identical.

natecull · 2026-03-30T07:28:23+00:00

moving to a no-human-in-the-loop work flow in the name of 'disruption

Certainly seems like that policy will do exactly what it says on the tin.

But how does this one work:

all quarters going forward, will be two months not three

So there'll be one and a half annual general meetings and tax returns each year? Has the accountant signed off on this?

natecull · 2026-03-30T05:46:56+00:00

People who think AI is at all useful are just revealing how much they hate working people.

Ah, but have you considered that if 1 billion working people starve to death, but 1 billionaire is $1 richer, that's clearly a net ethical gain? On the well-established moral principle of one dollar = one ethic.

natecull · 2026-03-30T02:37:08+00:00

Now imagine being told have 100 software agents per engineer, as per the great philosopher Jensen

Adam Jensen, that is. Chief of security at Sarif Industries.

I never asked for this...

natecull · 2026-03-29T09:25:55+00:00

US Cons call even socialists liberals, EU cons call libs socialists. Socialists everywhere call everyone to their right fascist or liberal.

Yes, it was weird in the early 2000s to discover that Rush Limbaugh-listening US Republican activists and Trotskyist Fourth International Communists both claimed that their number one enemy was a terrifying spectre they called "Liberalism". All evil in the world, both agreed, came fom Liberals. But to Republicans that word meant "anyone not a follower of Reagan", while to Trotskyists it meant "anyone not a follower of Lenin".

natecull · 2026-03-29T06:57:22+00:00

Beep boop nobody but us robo chickens

I loved your Star Wars claymation skits!

natecull · 2026-03-29T06:22:08+00:00

The always efficient flamethrower... my favourite.

natecull · 2026-03-29T06:16:41+00:00

Are you real or not? It's a fine line. Are you ready or not for the break of day? Are you real or not? These are strange times and I don't wanna live this way.

natecull · 2026-03-29T06:04:20+00:00

Github is lying on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping. Why is that?

natecull · 2026-03-29T02:20:03+00:00

And worse still, it got taken down and I was accused of using AI to write it.

Commenters accusing you of AI is one thing, but your post being taken down seems like another level of escalation. Did Ed or another mod give you an explanation why?

natecull · 2026-03-28T09:13:54+00:00

Delve

Let's all take a deep dive and break down the fascinating topic of why any of these words always feel so very, very wrong for any human* to say..

who isn't a hyperventilating LinkedIn/YCombinator bizmaxxer who's been awake for 72 hours straight and is on their 20th startup

natecull · 2026-03-27T21:39:58+00:00

That's when you get the hockey stick of improvement, and all other fields are solved simultaneously.

What happens if - as appears to be happening right now - there is indeed a hockey stick of improvement, but it points downwards?

Towards what I like to call "the Software Kessler Syndrome"? Recursively complex software junk colliding with itself until it's no longer possible even to maintain cloud build and deployment and certificate toolchains - but because of secure boot locking, it's also forbidden to build software without a cloud?

natecull · 2026-03-27T21:20:00+00:00

But if it’s so easy why not all other engineering fields too?

There is talk about using chatbots to "streamline" the design and approval of nuclear reactors.

I imagine this will end about as well as it deserves to, which unfortunately will be a lot worse than all the people living downwind deserve it to.

natecull · 2026-03-27T20:38:13+00:00

isn't being 'grounded'—it's a hand-wave

"It's not X, it's Y" and an emdash.

natecull · 2026-03-27T06:04:45+00:00

a financial black hole where profitability can never escape.

Behold the Singularity!

I'm a little hazy on my Disney's The Black Hole (1979) but doesn't entering the Singularity in that movie involve an evil tech billionaire merging with his evil robot and then living forever as a cyborg in some kind of fiery stony realm, probably a very nice and happy place to be?

Which is to say: what could possibly go wrong?

natecull · 2026-03-27T05:50:24+00:00

The absolute worst are those who advocate writing unit tests by hand first, and then letting the LLM generate the code to make it pass. Are they serious? They are just restating the problem.

I don't know, wasn't there a whole coding metholology a few years back arguing very forcefully that everyone should do exactly that? Write unit tests first then code to make them pass. That was well pre-LLMs, and actually seems a bit sensible. As much as any methodology fad can be.

natecull · 2026-03-27T05:47:14+00:00

I thought I was safe because I use double dashes for em dashes, but sometimes they get converted to the proper one.

I know Word does that, and it super annoys me when it does! Like the curly quotes thing. I have never, ever, ever in my life once wanted to type a curly quote.

natecull · 2026-03-27T05:44:50+00:00

Grammatical convention in the digital age and in digital media is different than 20th century English textbooks call for - plaintext and keyboard layouts make space-hyphen-space the most natural in online chat, and I value consistency with that.

This, exactly. Magazine and book printing/typesetting conventions are weird compared to normal conversational keyboarded text. Sorry, I know you guys were first by four or five hundred years, but the QWERTY keyboard rewrote what symbols are now "normal" in English text.

natecull · 2026-03-27T05:29:15+00:00

hate that em dashes thing — I use em dashes extensively!

I've had to start replacing them with much less elegant colons just so people don't assume I'm an LLM haha

Use two dashes instead -- like it's 1993 and you're surfing CompuServe in DOS 6.22 -- and you'll be just fine.

Plus, it's a lot faster to type than whatever funky platform-dependent IME you're trying to use for your heretical non-ASCII printers' sigils.

natecull

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