The summer heat had settled over Blue Blossom like a damp, sticky blanket. It pressed on the gravel paths until they seemed to shimmer, and it made the air in the wooded stretches thick enough to taste: warm bark, sun-baked moss. The Terran had been walking through it for the better part of an hour with a roll of survey ribbon looped over one wrist and a leather satchel bumping against his hip.

“Here,” he said, stopping at the edge of the clearing below the Temple of Ala. “I think the benches should go here.”

Tula stopped a half step behind him. She did not so much halt as cease moving, drifting to a standstill the way a thread of smoke does when the wind dies. The other maids called her shvivenivien, the ghostly one, and Henry had never found a better word for it. She walked as if the ground were merely a suggestion, and her feet barely disturbed the gravel. Her violet twin tails hung still in the heavy air. The ribbons wound around her long legs, a deeper violet than her hair, stirred only when she shifted her weight, and she shifted it often enough that Henry suspected she liked being looked at. Her amethyst eyes had irises like cut crystal, and when she looked at you they seemed to go straight through. Maevin had sent her along that morning with the day’s weather report and a look that said do not let him wander off.

“This is an excellent choice, my master,” Tula observed, peering at the grass. “The temple is in view. It is also close enough to the path that visitors can enjoy the view and the shade.”

“I’d like people to sit and look at the temple. It feels wrong that something so old is so empty.” He knelt, tied a strip of bright ribbon around a stake, and pressed it into the soft earth. “Four benches, maybe five. A path from the north gate, so nobody has to climb the hill.”

He glanced at her. She was silent, but her eyes were watching and seemed to approve. She glided to the far side of the spot, so lightly that not a blade of grass bent.

The sky was a polished blue bowl without a single cloud in it. He looked at it a little longer than he needed to. Tula, standing quietly beside him, noticed.

He worked for a while. The sun climbed, and the red truffets that nested in the temple eaves sang their bright, looping song over and over. Henry tied ribbon, measured out paces, and argued softly with himself about whether five benches was too many. Tula held the far end of the measuring cord and did not complain once, though a bead of sweat slid down her temple and the heat bent the air above the grass.

It was the light that changed first. Henry noticed it as a strange stillness, a quiet that fell over the clearing like a hand over a mouth. The truffets stopped mid-note. The sunlight, which had been gold and cheerful, drained to a flat, queasy green. Somewhere beyond the trees the wind began to gather itself with a long, low sound, like a crowd drawing breath.

“Tula?”

She had already turned toward the horizon. Her eyes had gone wide, and her face wore the stricken look of someone watching her own reflection betray her. “That is not possible,” she whispered. “I checked. I checked twice.”

The first gust hit, hard enough to snap the survey ribbons straight out like flags. Branches tossed. Leaves flipped to show their pale undersides. And with a roar that rolled across the treetops like thunder, the rain arrived.

One moment the air was dry, and the next it was a gray wall of water drumming on the stones of the temple, hissing in the grass, and beginning to get them wet.

“My master, the kiosk!” She was already pointing back down the path, a good two hundred paces away. “We must run, I will—”

She stopped, because Henry had not moved.

He was unbuckling the satchel at his hip with the calm, slightly sheepish air of a man doing something he’d been looking forward to all morning. He drew out a long black bundle, tightly wrapped, with a polished wooden handle at one end. He thumbed a catch.

Fwump.

A black silk dome bloomed above his head. Its ribs ran out from the center like the veins of a leaf, and the rain struck it with a sound like quick fingertips on a drum. The drops beaded along the edge and fell in a neat, glittering ring around his boots. Tula stared at him in astonishment her twin tails collapsed against her neck from the rain that was steadily getting heavier.

“It's a roof?” she said at last.

“Portable one.” Henry grinned.

“You knew about the weather?”

“I didn’t know. I just, um.” He cleared his throat. “Terran weather forecasts are terrible. I got used to carrying one, missed mine so I ordered one.”

He held the umbrella out a bit. “Come here before you drown, Tula.”

She hesitated. A gust slapped her wet braid against her cheek, and her ribbons dripped small violet tears onto the grass. Then she drifted in under the dome and stood there both confused and fascinated. She tipped her head back and studied the ribs, one by one, her lips moving as she counted. Then she raised a single finger and touched the underside of the silk, so lightly that the fabric hardly noticed. She tapped it. The rain answered from the other side.

“It does not leak,” she murmured. “Not at the seams. Not anywhere.” She turned her crystal eyes on him, full of the purest fascination he had ever seen on her face. “How is it folded?”

“Hinges, mostly. And a spring.” Henry watched her trace a rib down to the handle and back. “Don’t you have umbrellas here? I thought something like this would’ve been invented a hundreds of years ago.”

“Um-brel-la,” she repeated, tasting the word. “No. Not as you mean it. We have roofs.” She said it as if the distinction were obvious. “The rain on Victory in summer is warm, my master. A maid in her work dress is not made miserable by it. Our hair dries before we reach the kitchens. And the paths are not left bare.” She nodded back down the trail. “There is a kiosk or an awning along every route in the estate. Stone, and older than any of us. When the sky turns, one walks to the nearest and waits. The rain does not last.”

“Unless the forecast is wrong.”

“Then one is wet,” Tula said with great dignity, “and the rain bays are not so different. Half the household would call this a bath that arrived early.”

“So nobody carries their own.”

“A roof is something a House gives to those who walk its paths. To carry one’s own would say the House had failed to provide.” She considered the silk again. “Or that one did not trust the forecast. And wood is for building. It would be thought wasteful to spend it, and silk besides, on something that is used for an hour.”

“Huh.” Henry looked up at the little black sky he had carried across half the galaxy. “So I’ve been insulting everyone.”

“Not really. Probably just confusion like I was,” Tula said and then she gestured. “Since you have this portable roof, shall we continue?”

Why not? Henry smiled and the two began to work again.

Look at me sitting down to write again so soon as if celebrating the luxury of my hyperactive mind. (That's a wee bit of snarky humor for those who happen upon this and have not had the misfortune of learning just how endearingly sarcastic I am with myself. Sarcasm really is a love language everyone should learn. Like subtlety and nuance. So much can be said without saying a thing. I revel in such exchanges more than should be legal. It could be said that it's downright naughty! I'm going to resist the next line I want to write. It is so damn tempting. I will behave just this once. I don't want to. How hilarious that I'm breaking what I sat down to write about.)

As it were, I wanted to document how happy I am with myself for stating my mind this month in situations that could make me uncomfortable or have fallout I'd not be pleased with. But then I had to go get parenthetical with it. Is that even a word or does it just sound similar to the correct word? Close enough!

It was not easy to begin with, and there was definitely discomfort, but then it cleared up. In one area, it's going great. (Did I just jinx myself? No!) In another area I have no idea how it's turned out. That does give me anxiety, but it does feel good to no longer be tiptoeing. Let's see how that holds up. In another important area, I've made my decisions known and I feel relief with the awareness that I will be standing by them. In another, I still have some major obstacles to navigate, but I've chosen to do so as bluntly as possible and then let it fall wherever it may fall.

There are, of course, plenty of smaller examples, but I am most content with the continual shedding of my diplomatic skin. That's probably not the correct word to use. I strongly believe in diplomacy, but there is just something about today's world that beckons to a confidence of... self? No. Choice? Not exactly. Awareness? Hmmm, still not quite right. Self...self...self...acceptance. Maybe. It could be. Curse language and its limitations! Hmmm, it is definitely not “diplomatic skin.” Perhaps a skin that is compulsively accommodating. Yes. That's far more accurate.

Whatever it is, I am spilling it unapologetically (Though I still apologize far too often. I'm working on it. 😹) and I am loving how that feels — Bumps, bruises, and all.

It's important to document this to myself, because there is inevitably going to come a time when I don't like it. For now, I feel much more me. My doing so actually brought an amused smile today on a topic that would not have done so before. On multiple subjects actually. A smile! That lifts me up from the anxiety pool in a most intriguing manner. A most intriguing manner indeed. Sincere smiles are eeeevvveeerrryyyyttthhhiiinnnggg. The energy they produce... I should write an entry on that.

I'm going to add a song that has nothing at all to do with what I just wrote. Well, at least not in my situation. I mean, it could in another. The chorus popped up in my head as I finished writing this. I think it adds such a fun pep to the step. Plus, since I'm literally tap-tapping the garbage in my mind out onto this mostly invisible screen, it kind of has to be done.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not edited nor proofed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cy1LdAaGASw&is=7g_uQW9OA6ybzteG

Je me souviens rarement des détails d’un livre. Sauf si je l’ai lu à plusieurs reprises.

Mais du coup, pourquoi lire ?

Pourquoi créer un univers qu’on oubliera quelques semaines après ?

Aujourd’hui par exemple, je ne me souviens plus des détails de « Martin Eden » mais j’ai encore comme une empreinte de l’impression que ce livre m’a laissé.

Une dignité du personnage. Une volonté à toute épreuve. Une désillusion qui le mène à la mort.

Mais j’aimerais mieux lire.

Que les mots s’impriment davantage en moi. Que j’arrive à discerner ce que l’auteur a voulu retranscrire.

Un peu comme lorsque j’apprécie la photographie de telle scène de film. Particulièrement ceux de Terrence Malick.

La culture forge l’accessibilité.

Plus cette culture est développée, plus notre vision de l’œuvre est fournie, dense, pleine de sens.

C’est à ça que j’aimerais arriver.

Que les mots prennent la première place dans les impressions qui forgent ma personne. Parce que, quelque part, j’ai le sentiment que rien d’autre n’aura une telle force.

On last Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite, Mercedes Moné dangled the AEW Women’s Championship belt between her legs like a flaccid penis, apparently as a way to intidmidate Marina Shafir, who had entered the ring to proclaim her desire to take Mercedes’ title away.

Thekla has also done the “This Championship Belt is My Dong” move, and while I am a big fan of both wrestlers, I’m not a fan of this move. Not because it’s crude, but because of what it says about women’s wrestling.

Because what this giant floppy dick move shows is that the way for a woman wrestler to assert her power and dominance is to be more like a man. “Look how much stronger I am than other women! Why, I’m practically a man!”

This would be more innocuous if women were treated like men in professional wrestling, but they’re not. Women typically get one match on every AEW Dynamite or Collision. (This despite AEW having a deep roster of talented women wrestlers.) I don’t know if the same is true of WWE shows, because ew, WWE, but it’s certainly also true for MLW, and even at local shows I’ve attended, there are always just a lot more men wrestling than women.

Of course this could be due to the amount of harassment that women have historically had to put up with in professional wrestling at the hands of…you know what, it’s too long a list for this post. Let’s just say that professional wrestling’s record on the treatment of women is pretty shameful.

But women can wrestle. In fact, I believe they can and should wrestle against men, as they did in Lucha Underground and as they do in Chaotic Wrestling. Wrestling is ultimately theater, and people of all gender expressions should be allowed to share the stage, by which I mean the squared circle.

Women need to be treated better by professional wrestling, and they need to be booked more and recognized for their talents. Thekla is matchless on the mic. Kris Statlander and Marina Shafir both present as tough, dangerous competitors. Willow Nightengale is literally impossible to root against. They, and the rest of the women, should be getting more recognition not as the best women in wrestling, but as the best performers in wrestling.

And having the best and most prominent women wrestlers perform dominance by asserting maleness undermines this.

On smarter models and the work of understanding what they produce

A business can now ask an AI system to undertake work that once needed the time of several colleagues. If a developer uses it to build a backend, there are ways to test whether the system does what it should. In knowledge work, a sound result also leaves a further question: who understands how the team arrived there?

A plan can look convincing when it is presented. Months later, a customer may challenge one of its assumptions, or events may show that the plan needs to change. The people responsible will need to explain the choices behind it and know where to look again. If that understanding has remained with the system, where does the company's own knowledge reside?

The thought that would not stay put

At Octaflow, our head developer can now build an application for the app store in a week that previously might have taken a team of developers three months, with fewer mistakes along the way. Browser-based tools can help us find contacts for businesses in days, where the same work might once have taken months of effort.

Then there is the experience of working through a basic written argument with Claude or ChatGPT. A point slips out of the agents’ view. The same evidence has to be examined again, only for the answers to change. Time returns to the process in a different form: trying to understand why a thought that was clear at the beginning has become so difficult to hold together.

The world inside the score

The unevenness deserves attention. The decisions that go into training a model can improve some capabilities more than others. There are also serious efforts to measure what models can do with knowledge work. OpenAI’s GDPval, for example, draws on tasks created by experienced professionals across 44 occupations. Its first version asks a model to complete each task in a single attempt, with a defined brief and reference material.[1]

A winner in whose hands?

Researchers in Japan approached the question from inside an insurance business. Using the company’s own data, they compared three models on two tasks: answering questions about documents and turning image content into text. One model led on the first task; another led on the second. The researchers found that their results differed from those of general-purpose benchmarks.[2]

If you work in insurance, or in any business with its own particular body of knowledge, this gives you a more useful question to ask of a model’s score: what did it have to do to earn it, and how close is that to the work in front of you? Even within one company, the answer may depend on the task.

The work before the question

The way a task is presented can make an enormous difference. In Argentina, researchers gave 1,174 adults a business problem, with text, charts and tables to examine. Participants had to identify the cause of a difficulty and write a practical response. Those given access to GPT-4.1 performed better across both educational groups in the study; the gap between the groups narrowed substantially.[3]

That result complicates the frustration at Octaflow. People used AI to reason through information and write a better response. The problem and the material had been selected for them. In a company, somebody may first need to decide which problem deserves attention, which documents belong in the enquiry, and whose knowledge is missing. Those choices shape what the system has an opportunity to find.

When confidence does the thinking

In a study of 319 knowledge workers, researchers found that greater confidence in AI was associated with less self-reported critical-thinking effort on the tasks people described. The study captures how people reported working, rather than measuring a lasting loss of ability.[4]

That distinction matters. A system may produce an answer so coherent that the wrong turn becomes harder to see. As the models improve, the person using them may need to become sharper too: able to recognise which detail deserves a second look, and clear enough about the intended outcome to notice when the work is drifting away from it.

The mistake that keeps its company

A finance case in DAYJOB, an experimental benchmark for professional work, illustrates another difficulty. An agent identified two pricing exceptions in a set of reports and recommended holding them. It missed a separate error: a share price had been entered in the wrong currency unit, making a position appear much larger than it was.[5]

The agent had found genuine reasons for caution. The missed unit changed the apparent size of the exposure. This single benchmark case cannot tell us how often such errors occur at work. It shows how an enquiry can catch something important while another detail needed for the decision remains overlooked. As systems become better at finding mistakes, how will we know which mistakes we have stopped looking for?

Agreement can share a blind spot

Imagine separate agents investigating a new market: one examines demand, another the financial case, a third the risks. If all three were given the same estimate of the market, however, their agreement could leave the most consequential number untouched. The person directing them might ask another agent to trace that estimate to its source, or to look for evidence that would make the opportunity appear smaller.

The amount of information we can give these systems keeps growing. The harder work is choosing what matters, recognising when the person supplying it has become the bottleneck, and noticing when an agent is carrying the work around in circles. A better prompt may help; so may changing the order of the work, bringing in a different source, or stopping to reconsider the outcome altogether. How do we learn to make those choices well, while the systems we are learning to direct keep changing?

Rajan Anand
Co-founder, Octaflow Labs

Sources

1. OpenAI, Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks. The first version of GDPval is a one-shot assessment spanning 44 occupations.
2. Tamao Shimizu, Hibiki Bannai and Yoshiaki Onishi, Performance Evaluation of Multimodal LLM with Life Insurance Business Data, 2025. Findings described from the accessible abstract.
3. Guillermo Cruces and colleagues, ¿La IA iguala o amplía las brechas de productividad entre trabajadores?, Sur Futuro, 2026.
4. Hao-Ping Lee and colleagues, The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, CHI 2025.
5. Stephanie Finley and colleagues, DAYJOB: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Professional Work, preprint, 1 October 2026, section 6.

#AI #KnowledgeWork #CriticalThinking

“Where does your mind go?”

Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere at all. I'm not entirely sure it actually exists. I may not exist. What is existence anyway? How long will it take before this written language is no more? Before it ceases to be legible? Before... before... will we even make it to before?

Recently I watched a video that spoke of a college professor creating an entire swimming pool of a room as a time capsule not to be opened until 6,000 years after it was sealed. I don't remember his name, nor the university it is stored in. I think it's called the “Vault of Civilization” or something like that. I could look it up, but why bother? If you're interested, dig and have a peep yourself. Getting one's curiosity phalanges dirty is half the fun. Who am I kidding? It is quite possibly more than half the fun! (Yes, I'm reminding myself to stay on topic. It's hard! The difficulty is disassembling pathways as I poke! Step. Step. Uggghhh! Well, consider this a changed chain as much as I try to tug it back, for my mind is already frolicking in a dozen different directions than when I originally started documenting a momentary wander.)

Where was I? Right! The archeology professor. Or was it anthropology? An A of a professor! An A of a professor with a noble idea to which I wonder how much has already been corrupted by time. I have so many questions regarding that alone, but must remind myself that this place was created before I was born. Before my parents were born. Before before, but not yet 100 years ago. Certainly far from 6,000. Yet so much has changed already.

Can you imagine 6,000 years into the future? Can I? Probably, most likely, absolutely not with any reliable accuracy. I can imagine the erosion within and outside of, and I'm fairly certain that without human intervention, considering the location, its barrier of “protection” will easily crack by the 1,000 year mark strictly speaking from a geological and chemical standpoint. That says nothing of what's inside, though I think it was supposed to have been vacuumed and filled with nitrogen or something.

It's a time capsule, but there's so much to ponder merely due to its existence. It's challenging to even know where to begin. Perhaps that is why my mind drifts back towards language and the written word. He did leave a pathway to understanding English of the time if it remains in tact. Even if it remains intact and humans, or whatever future species discovers it, could they actually understand the words and language for what it was meant to be? I mean, Modern English began what? Around 500 years ago or so? Just think about that for a moment. Think about how bad we are at understanding translations. Think about how we consistently redefine meaning to fit our own inept perspective of life.

Are you having fun tumbling around with those thoughts yet? Pluto knows I am! Now expand them out! What a bold, ingenious, short-sighted, curiosity-provoking conundrum he created! 6,000 years!!! Personally, I think we will no longer exist. Not as we currently know ourselves anyway. And if we do exist, will we even care?

Do humans today care? If the educational institution faltered, would local government fund to keep the project protected? Would Georgia esteem it to be untouchable? Would they dig it up with little thought to make way for some multi-billion dollar project? Would humans choose to open it 100 years from its closing just for a wee celebrational peek to add things to it? Would someone in the current administration do so to ensure it doesn't contradict the history said bafoons wish to establish? Is the history recorded inside even correct?

So many questions! I love allowing my mind to travel such pathways because they inevitably branch off and wrap around to interconnect and branch again. It is an impossibility equation because I have no way of understanding where our civilization will be 100 years from now, much less 6,000. To contemplate how our communication might evolve is equally mind-shattering. Just look at how fast it's evolving since the invention of the World Wide Web. Or worse, since LLM's...

“Let's get into it.” Shall we? I loathe that phrase in ways I cannot begin to express.

Hmm, I think I will end this entry on that note of disgust because “Let's get into it.” pretty much sums up so many directions in which my thoughts carry me on the subject.

(On a side note: This is why I adore free-form writing beyond measure. I never know where my mind is going to take me. I just know that my subconscious will have reasons to guide me along its intended path, and that every bumbling step of the way keeps my thoughts alive, invigorated, and stretching towards new internal discoveries. I may, and do often, circle the same subjects over again. But such is the evolution of self! It utterly delights me that my subconscious threw something that immediately annoys me as a branch in this path. Would it trip me up? Would I step over and ignore it? Or would I pause and digest it from a different perspective?

Damn you mind and your wily ways!

I still loathe that phrase, but now when I hear it, I shall think of that box and many an other unopened box. How beautiful is it that something dumbing down thought and corrupting creativity has unexpectedly opened up an infinity of thought? To see into, around, and beyond the intention of initial meaning...

My smile lines have deepened this morning.)

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not proofread nor edited.

From my recent Just One Sentence: The 100 Sentence Challenge Workbook which is currently available on my Gumroad page.

1 of 100: Write a sentence about the last thing you saw before you woke up today.

If you have trouble writing, one sentence is all you need to get started. This workbook can help.

For all 100 prompts, it’s $7 for the PDF and it’s ready for you to print. Click on the link below.

https://ernestortizwritesnow.gumroad.com/l/justonesentence100

Update: I’m waiting for my physical proof copy from Lulu before approving it for sale. I’ll let you know once it’s public.

#writing #book #Gumroad #Lulu #prompts

The rise of generative Large Language Models has made me write less, as the friction to write has reduced and also the large scale LLM generated slop across the internet made it less appealing to indulge in the hobby. Everywhere I look now are Claude-coded websites with all too perfect writing that takes away the joy of both reading and writing. I didn't think much about the loss of this creative faculty for me, until someone reached out to me after reading this website and their words were “I wondered if anyone maintaining a blog like this could be bad” and then it clicked. In an era of cookie cutter websites and content, being authentic has its own currency. Artisanal typos, unstructured thoughts and unclear human thought looping, things that an LLMs can't do without sounding fake which I can do without much effort.

Maintaining one's own website, curating thoughts and ideas as they come by and being intentional in purpose are all the things missing from an LLM generated website, which are by default stolen words gambled through a predictive model. As the peak times of LLMs use come near with every passing day, the one tool the ordinary pleb has in their hands is to communicate more without the help of LLMs tools and be more unapologetically themselves, authenticity in the end is what breaks the computer, as its one space where it cannot be human.

In a future after we've all come to terms with the rise and fall of LLMs, we will look back at the voices that remained untainted by this mass scale of machined perfection. In all that noise, you will hear me saying hello.

Note: I refrained from saying AI and used LLM instead because I didn't want to fall for the marketing hype. There is no AI, the machine is not intelligent, yet.

#AI #writing #authenticity

In Serbia, a leaderless student party just toppled the fascist. Way underreported, as student protests leading to a truly democratic process of engaging with issues challenges ruling classes everywhere.

On the other hand, one should not idealise the situation. The list comprises ideologically opposed blocs, from rightwing adherents to leftwingers and liberals. Most of those elected have never before held political office, and the parliamentary system will require them to nominate a prime minister and, in future presidential elections, a presidential candidate. 

Yes, but the achievement of just getting to that state where the real work can even start should also not be understated.

College Football from Conference USA.

Today's game of choice has the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers from Conference USA hosting the Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens in a college football game scheduled to start at 6:00 PM CT. Both teams bring identical (3-4) records into tonight. If the game starts on time I may be able to listen to the full four quarters before heading to bed. That will be nice.

And the adventure continues.