david meissner

May Reading List

Date: [9th May 2026]
Categories: [Blog]
Tags: [Links]

We’re living in a time of insanity among technologists, politicians and business leaders, not to mention a good part of our population. Insanity, as in delusional thinking and disassociation from reality.

It’s depressing to read Dario Amodei’s and Richard Dawkins’ thoughts on the consciousness of Claude:

• The people building AI think it might be conscious

• Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious

Although the LLM technology is impressive, and it could be put to good use if it weren’t being controlled by evil billionaires, the ELIZA Effect is getting out of hand. I’m currently reading The AI Con, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, a good antidote to all this delusional thinking.

This link found on Hacker News is good guide to How LLMs Actually Work.

Anil Dash offers some hope in (One) Good AI is Here. As with the community of hobbyists building an alternative web, I’d like to believe that we can create independent, non-evil “AI” applications.

In other news, Google is installing AI software without consent. I’ve never understood why Chrome is so popular, 68% usage according to Wikipedia. I realize that the number is inflated by Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Vivaldi, but I’m still surprised. People were warning years ago that Chrome was essentially spyware¹. It’s time to de-Google.

For something completely different, I like The Catacombs, a compendium of information on the 1975 TV show, Space:1999:. The site title might be a reference to one of the episodes, “Catacombs of the Moon”. In my “10 Pointless Facts” post, I mentioned that Space:1999 was the worst show I could think of that I like despite its flaws. I like the trippy special effects, the sets and models, and there are some good stories. The Catacombs site has a lot of interesting information about the production.

I've seen a quote from Martin Landau, wondering why viewers didn’t give Space:1999 the same suspension of disbelief as Star Trek or other science fiction shows. I’ve wondered about that myself; what was the show missing? It’s a topic for a different post, but as much as I like the actors, I suspect it comes down to the characters; the writers weren't able to give them enough life.