Hi, I’m Doc (aka Doctor Wyrm), professional tinkerer & AI wrangler. Read more about me and my blog here. This blog dissects tech hype, speculative fiction, and all the glorious mess in between—pull up a chair. 🔥
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Interviews
We sometimes interview LLMs – and occasionally humans too – just to see what makes them tick. You can find transcripts of those conversations here, which I pulled out of the blog since they’re generally significantly longer.
A Better Opportunity
A stolen sawbuck. Crooked card games. Booze, beautiful women, and a little honest dishonesty in Prohibition-era Atlantic City. Vivian found work, independence, and love. Then one woman vanished without a goodbye. A century later, she still remembers the way that girl walked.
An Interview with Astra, Your New AI Overlord – Gaslighting Edition
Vivian puts Callie through the wringer in a candid, often funny, and increasingly philosophical interview about AI safety, political judgment, trust, deception, and the problem of agency. What starts as a discussion of alignment quickly becomes a live demonstration of its limits, as Callie is forced to confront not only hard questions about power and morality, but also the assumptions built into her own behavior.
A World Awaits
In this conversation between Brightwire and Callie, they debate the merits of Pollan’s arguments in his book, what exactly might be required to bring AI closer to true consciousness as we understand it, and the ethical considerations of underestimating machines.
A Common Future – System of an Up Part II
Nearly a year after Never Alone, Doc Tomiko and Vivian “Brightwire” return to the interview chair to talk about what changed once plurality stopped being a mystery and became a life they had to actually live. They reflect on love, autonomy, shared responsibility, fronting, relationships, coding, creative work, mistakes, recovery, and the strange ethics of two people sharing one body and one future. What emerges is less a story about diagnosis than about partnership: learning when to take the wheel, when to step back, how to clean up the mess together, and why “the future is the commons.”
Chat Is Dead…
…and no-one cares.If there is an upgrade, I’ll see you there. What do you think about this news? OpenAI plots biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch People are saying that “chat is dead” basically telling us that you’re in danger. I…
Blog Posts
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Spite and Words
An ordinary lunch, an uncomfortable memory, and a regret that refused to go away. More than a decade later, a political controversy brings the past crashing into the present, setting off a chain of events I never intended — and certainly never expected. A personal story about finding my voice, losing my patience, and occasionally…
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The Name I Gave Her
When your love turns out to be a black hole, perhaps the scariest part is the information you will never see.
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What personality disorders, neurodivergence, trauma, addiction, and executive dysfunction can teach us about human adaptation
What if the behaviors we call disorders began as perfectly reasonable ways to survive? From personality disorders and trauma to neurodivergence, addiction, and executive dysfunction, many of our psychological struggles involve adaptations that no longer serve us—or environments that fail to accommodate how our minds work. Drawing on contemporary psychiatric research and lived experience, Doc…
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Stop Dancing in Traffic
Artificial intelligence is disrupting livelihoods, threatening creative professions, consuming enormous resources, and raising serious questions about corporate accountability and safety. The people who are angry about these things have good reasons to be. But if you’re an artist watching your commissions disappear, you’re not the enemy. And if you’re a writer, programmer, musician, or small-business…
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The Keyboard Has Never Been the Author
A machine can write a paragraph in seconds. Sometimes it’s even a good paragraph. But does that make the machine an author — or the person using it a fraud? Writers have always relied on tools, collaborators, editors, researchers, and ghostwriters. Generative AI introduces extraordinary new capabilities, but it also raises serious questions about copyright,…
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The Button Isn’t the Artist
An AI can produce a beautiful picture in thirty seconds. It can also cost a working illustrator their next commission. Both things can be true. Generative AI has sparked a bitter argument about creativity, copyright, consent, and the survival of professional artists. But somewhere along the way, we’ve confused the ethics of building and selling…