Tiempo: 4 minutos por caja

Dificultad: Alta

Ingredientes para 1 persona:

-Varias cajas de folios (mejor vacías) -157 libros -6 packs de dvds -3 incensiarios -4,5 kg. de objetos decorativos -Varias botellas (de las de vino) vacías -1 botella de cerveza con lápices pequeños -1 botella de agua con piedras de Quintos de Mora -1 frasco con piñones -150 g. de animales de papel -Papel (reciclado) -De 1 a 3 periódicos -1 rotulador -Cinta adhesiva para precintar -Tijeras

Instrucciones:

Antes de empezar a guardar los recuerdos, se tendrán previamente separados según su forma y tamaño, y colocados en algún lugar que nos permita acceder a ellos con facilidad.

En una mesa se pondrá una caja de folios, si es posible vacía y, por supuesto, abierta. Es recomendable comenzar con los objetos más uniformes, es decir, con los libros. Una vez ordenados por altura en la estantería, se elegirán los más voluminosos, se limpiarán cuidadosa pero enérgicamente con un paño seco y se colocarán en el fondo de la caja, procurando siempre pegarlos bien a la pared interior izquierda y a la más cercana a nosotros. En cuanto se alcance el borde superior de la caja, con cuidado de que no rebose, se procederá a rellenar los huecos libres con libros menos gruegos que convendrá colocar en vertical, hasta cubrir la pared interior derecha y la más alejada a nuestro cuerpo.

Cuando la caja esté completa, se cogerá la tapa y se cubrirá haciéndola encajar. Es conveniente introducir antes, entre los objetos y la tapa, un trozo de papel en el que figuren todos los objetos que contiene, así como hacer una copia de este para pegarlo en la parte externa de la caja. Después, se sellará con la ayuda de la cinta adhesiva o precinto, que cortaremos cuando se considere oportuno con ayuda de unas tijeras.

Este proceso, que se repetirá las veces que sea necesario, servirá también para guardar otros objetos menos uniformes, si bien habrá que tener en cuenta este detalle y tratar de elegir los recuerdos con formas similares y dando prioridad a los más grandes a la hora de meterlos en la caja. Los objetos frágiles o con posibilidades de sufrir en el traslado, se envolverán con papel de periódico.

Cuando todos los recuerdos se encuentren en sus correspondientes cajas, se llevarán a un lugar seguro, limpio, fresco y seco, donde se protegerán de la luz solar y de olores agresivos y donde reposarán en la soledad de la oscuridad el tiempo que sea necesario o hasta que la muerte nos separe.

marqus 24 de junio de 2012

Tiene la suerte de vivir en un cuarto piso sin ascensor, en un edificio antiguo con una fachada sucia, en un barrio insignificante de una calle apenas conocida. Vive en un piso donde el baño colecciona humedades ante la inquietante mirada de una grifería antigua, hortera y oxidada con forma de gárgola, donde la cocina se llena de hormigas los primeros días de mayo y las palomas obligan a mantener cerradas las ventanas del lavadero para evitar así que entre el hedor de sus heces amontonadas. Vive, afortunadamente, en un piso muy caluroso en verano y sin aire acondicionado, en el que los inviernos se sufren con una calefacción escasa y en el que el telefonillo no funciona. Gracias a estas y a otras tantas ventajas similares, su habitación cuesta lo que cuesta, él puede vivir en ella y, cuando se acerca el verano, disfruta del espectáculo que ofrecen diariamente palomas, aviones y vencejos.

Suele sentarse en el balcón a las nueve de la noche. El sol ya se encuentra al otro lado del edificio de enfrente y empieza a teñir de amarillo las nubes que habitualmente se forman en torno al lugar por el que se esconde. Aviones y vencejos inundan el cielo y sus cantos se alzan por encima de motores, voces, televisores, balones, persianas y móviles. Desde su tumbona ve solo lo que quiere ver. Hace un par de años cubrió la barandilla con césped artificial de color verde, evitando así ser visto desde los edificios de enfrente y dejando a la vista solo lo realmente interesante para él: el cielo. Mire donde mire todo está salpicado de pequeños y ágiles puntos negros que se mueven sin cesar, esquivándose los unos a los otros en un baile improvisado.

Odiada por la mayoría, la paloma es silenciosa a las nueve y diez de la noche y apenas parece representar una pequeña parte de las aves que pueblan el cielo. Sus vuelos tienden a ser cortos, de un edificio a otro, de una altura a otra, casi como si saltaran en lugar de volar. Pero de vez en cuando puede ver alguna planeando desde lejos, con las alas extendidas, cruzando veloz y silenciosamente de un lado a otro, con majestuosidad, enorme, dejando pasar la luz del sol entre sus plumas, hasta acercarse a algún tejado, empezar a batir sus alas por debajo del cuerpo para frenarse y, finalmente, posarse.

El avión común es el que más canta, aunque no por ello el que más se oye. Pequeño y con el pecho blanco, suele volar solo y en círculos, piando aquí y allá mientras roza balcones y tejados. En la parte más alta de la fachada sucia de su edificio, sobre una de sus ventanas, orientados al norte construyeron hace años un par de nidos de barro que reconstruyen cada temporada. Ahí es donde vive su pequeño avión, el que vuela sin descanso desde hace veinte minutos, piando y asomándose por encima de la barandilla para alejarse inmediatamente después hacia el edificio de enfrente. Su pequeño avión traza un círculo imperfecto que va desde un extremo de su piso a otro, cruzando por delante de su habitación, del salón y del balcón, hasta llegar a la habitación de uno de sus compañeros. De vez en cuando se acerca al nido, intenta entrar o quizá se asoma y se deja caer para seguir volando. Hasta que finalmente, imagina que exhausto, su pequeño avión coge impulso, recoge sus alas y acierta a entrar por el estrechísimo agujero del nido en el que va a pasar la noche.

Los vencejos, en cambio, no descansan. Las nubes se tiñen ya de rojo y el vencejo común continúa volando. Dicen que no se posa para dormir, que aprovecha las corrientes de aire para dormir volando. Él disfruta observándolos, siguiéndolos como puede con la mirada, escuchándolos. Son sin duda los más numerosos, los más silenciosos cuando vuelan solos y los más escandalosos cuando van en grupo. Con su peculiar forma de arco y flecha, negros carbón, recorren el cielo sin prestar atención a trayectorias. Cuando van solos son como sombras que le obligan a levantar la mirada cuando ya se alejan; cuando van en grupo, en cambio, los oye acercarse desde lejos y los espera. Dos, tres, cinco u ocho vencejos juntos tienden a volar en círculos, como persiguiéndose unos a otros, rápida, sincronizadamente, hasta que la trayectoria del vuelo cambia un poco, se encuentran con un obstáculo y el grupo se ve obligado a disolverse. Es en ese momento, a lo largo de esa carrera, cuando cantan. Una acumulación de íes, íes largas y metálicas, agudas, que suenan y desaparecen y vuelven a sonar y a desaparecer. Un canto breve pero intenso, un saludo jovial, un aviso contundente, un mensaje indescrifrable, un momento insustituible que no puedes llevar en ninguna maleta.

marqus 18 de junio de 2012

VVA Politiek ; Uitzending van Politieke Partijen

Ruimte gemaakt op VVA voor Uitzending van de boodschappen afkomstig van politieke partijen vandaag krijgt u mededelingen te lezen van de SOP de Smægmåånde Overschot Partij.

Landvennoten, welkom bij VVA Politiek, welkom bij ons u favoriete partij opkomend voor u belang, het landsbelang om zo snel mogelijk uw ouwe voorraad rommel kwijt te raken aan iedereen zo onnozel het te willen. Het is aan ons, u overschot partij leden om niet leden te overtuigen van ons nut in elk huis, tuin en later opbergschuur, dit land heeft meer en meer behoefte aan ons meer alleen weet men dat nog niet overal. Gelukkig maar dat VVA dat na ingrijpen van de directie moest inzien. Wij hebben dit te danken aan de langdurige sponsoring van VVA, het in bezit hebben van het merendeel van de VVA effecten en aan Dik Leeflang de nieuwe voorzitter van het VVA oorblog bestuur, zekers onze eigen Dik heel hoog gewaardeerd partij lid, ex voorzitter nog van de SOP. Geweldig geleverd nieuws, nu al.

Echter niet alle landvennoten hebben zich bij onze partij in hun belang aangesloten, ze denken af te geraken van hun zooi zonder al onze meewerkende handen maar dat is echt onmogelijk, zou onmogelijk moeten zijn daarom beste leden, aankijkers van dit heden, is ons partij beleid er op gericht om meer zeggenschap te krijgen over alle opgeslagen voorraden, transportmiddelen en de voor vervoer benodigde infrastructuur, inkopers en doorverkopers, methodieken en regelingen met betrekking op het zoals wij noemen Goddelijk Overschot. Het is belangrijk voor de gemeenschap om te weten waarom ze alleen goed bij onze partij terecht kunnen komen als ze hier ten lande nog iets willen bereiken, anders zullen ze terechtkomen in de vakkundige geregelde verstrengelingen van de diverse SOP belangen.

Dat is in ieder geval op de lange termijn, vier á vijf jaar, ons streven, daar waar wij samen voor staan. Zie hier bij ons trouwe lid Kranige Koos handelaar in overbodige frutsels en inmiddels dankzij het succes daarvan ook in vastgoed. Hoor wat hij heeft te zeggen 'Hallo kijkers, Kranige Koos hier, voor ik overschot partij lid was was ik eigenlijk nergens in niks land, ik kocht te goeder trouw voor een prikkie frutsels op uit het sneue buitenland en deed mijn best om die op de manieren mij voor handen voor een heel veel hoger bedrag te slijten aan frutsel klanten maar ik kreeg geen voetjes aan Smægmåånse bodem. Connecties gemaakt verdwenen als sneeuw voor de zon zonder noemenswaardige reden, voortdurend kwamen nieuwe regels voor frutsels van uit dat zelfde niet noemenswaardige af op mijn bureau, allemaal bizarre onkosten kwamen er bij en mijn winst werd omgezet in verlies, voorraden bleven steken in de in alle haast gebouwde enorm goedkope grote lelijke voorraadhallen tot ik op een fijne, gezellige handelsdag toevallig in contact kwam met Mark Leeflang van de SOP, Mark ons helaas ontvallen na dat noodlottige incident met een overdosis harddrugs, maar hij bracht mij toen op de hoogte van deze gezegende partij, de Overschot Partij, Mark Leeflang sprak over het voordeel van het hebben van de correcte connecties, de kennis in zo'n partij aanwezig betreffende frutsels en voorraden, hij nam mij mee naar een partij bijeenkomst en meteen daarna zag ik de winst weer toenemen, de winst kreeg ik in de beoogde zeilen, regels net ontstaan werden versoepeld of afgeschaft, vergeten of verdwenen contacten kwamen weer in beeld en dat is het ware wonder van deze politieke partij, de ons kent ons verbetering van het zaken leven, daarom kom ik hier om wat ik heb en niet kwijt wil te behouden en wat ik heb en zo snel mogelijk vanaf moet te slijten aan onze geliefde maar beetje domme klanten. De Overschot Partij is er niet alleen voor ons maar ook voor iedereen elders die opgescheept zit met de over productie behorend bij heerlijk vrij consumerend leven. Ik zeg u, als mens onder de mensen, deze partij, alleen deze, zal de vaart, in zee, lucht en winkelwagen behouden en bewaken alle andere partijen zijn door de duivel bezeten!

Heerlijk, heldere Jort en Brenda taal van Kranige Koos, need I say more, de Smægmåånse Overschot Partij, de verkiezingen lijken nog ver weg maar overschot is er altijd dus wij blijven ook zonder dergelijke keuze momenten verwikkeld in de immer goede concurrentie strijd, dat blijft ons beleid. Kies nu alvast voor de duivel u komt halen voor OP, want OP is OP zo was het wel maar zo hoeft het niet te zijn, zo is het maar net. Ik dank u voor het lezen van onze boodschap, ook namens onze vriend God en Kranige Koos natuurlijk. Tot onze volgende uitzending voor politieke partijen, en niet die van de andere oneerlijke concurrenten. Hoi.

Hace unas semanas encontré el proyecto The burning house, La casa en llamas. Se trata de una web en la que se publican fotos que muestran las cosas que la gente se llevaría de casa en caso de incendio. La idea es que tienes poco tiempo para salir y no puedes cargar con muchas. Tienes que elegir. ¿Qué te llevarías? Supone un ejercicio de depuración material en el que todas las cosas que queremos conservar a toda costa caben en una fotografía tomada a no más de un metro de distancia. Hablamos sobre todo de lo material pero también de aquellos seres vivos que dependen de nosotros. Hay de todo: pasaportes, fotos antiguas, llaves y llaveros, portátiles, discos duros, libros, cds, instrumentos musicales, animales, plantas... Los chicos de Microsiervos lo presentaban como “el conflicto entre lo práctico, lo valioso y lo sentimental”.

El proyecto me hizo recordar que un amigo tiene en su casa lo que él llama “el cajón de los incendios”. Ante cualquier desastre, tiras de él y sales corriendo. No sé qué se guarda en un cajón de los incendios. No se suele tener en un cajón las llaves, el portatil, los discos duros, los libros o los gatos, por ejemplo. Supongo que se guardan papeles: los del banco, los de la casa, los del coche... Es decir, además de lo muy voluminoso, de aquello a lo que se le da mucho uso y de, obviamente, aquello que se mueve, lo sentimental, exceptuando las fotos, no parece caber en el cajón de los incendios.

De todas formas, mi casa no se está quemando y yo no tengo un cajón de los incendios. Así que tengo tiempo de hacer una selección o, al menos, de separar como si de una planta de reciclaje se tratara. Por un lado lo práctico. ¿Qué es lo práctico? De pronto se me ocurre que es aquello que usamos, lo que tendríamos que comprar si no lo tuvieramos ya. Por otro, lo valioso. Parece ser la categoría más difusa. No todo lo valioso es práctico o sentimental. ¿Cuántas cosas compramos y no usamos, aunque nos hayamos dejado mucho dinero en ellas, tanto que, de hecho, no las volveríamos a comprar? Y, por último, lo sentimental, que no es otra cosa que lo que nos “une” a un momento, a una o a varias personas, a un lugar. Puede ser una lámpara hecha con el muelle de un sofá, un bastón anónimo tallado a mano recuperado de una pila de bastones en Santiago de Compostela, un libro, una camiseta, una pequeña rana que estudia en Salamanca, un puñado de piñones o una grulla de papel color naranja. No sé, es posible que incluso los parámetros sean otros y no importe lo práctico, valioso o sentimental que pueda haber en un objeto. Quizá lo importante sea saber distinguir si un objeto es para nosotros imprescindible o insustituible.

marqus 16 de junio de 2012

Ilustración: Yolanda Angulo

Se acerca el momento y hay que tenerlo todo preparado. La habitación no es grande pero en ella caben muchas cosas. Hay un armario con dos cajones, una estantería junto a la puerta, una estantería junto al radiador, una estantería junto a la mesita, la mesita, una mesa grande, un escritorio, un zapatero y una cama. Dicho así no parece mucho pero todas y cada una de estas cosas contienen cosas que, en ocasiones, contienen otras cosas que contienen cosas. La habitación está, como si se tratara de un parque de atracciones, dividida en nueve zonas más o menos bien delimitadas. La zona de trabajo, la zona de descanso, la zona donde voy dejando todos los trastos, la zona de los libros de lectura que no leo, la de los libros y apuntes que uso, la zona de la ropa, la de (principalmente) los zapatos, la de las cosas pequeñas y la de “otras cosas”. Es el momento de sentarse donde estoy ahora a mirar y a pensar que todo lo que tengo lo tengo que revisar para decidir qué guardo y de qué cosas me deshago. No me puedo llevar todo porque llevarse todo sería casi como no irse.

marqus 15 de junio de 2012

-Señor Lápiz, tiene usted mala punta. ¿Qué le pasa?

-¿Que qué me pasa? Qué me va a pasar, hijo mío; que me están minando por dentro.

marqus 13 de mayo de 2012

VVA vertrekt presenteert 'De nieuwe omloopbaan van (Voorheen)'

We vallen direct met de zo juist nog potdichte deur in huis en zien (Voorheen) bezig met een pitch voor zijn Holle Bolle project in opdracht van en dus ook voor een select gezelschap van top pret managers op het hoofdkantoor van Elfteling Pretpakket NV.

Hallo, fijn dat ik hier mijn prestatie mag presenteren voor de ware bazen van sprookjes wereld Elfteling LOL BV. U heeft nood aan de nodige realistische interventjes in de door u zelf gefabriceerde sprookjes wereld en heeft daarom mij nodig, ik (Voorheen), ex-denker, schrijver, creatief ondernemer met letters bij VVA maar daarvoor inmiddels te echt, moet ogenblikkelijk meer erkenning ontvangen, goed te zien op rekening niet meer alleen bestaan in de geest zeker niet die van een ander! Daarom ben ik blij dat u mij heeft gevraagd voor dit grote tijdrovende middelen en energie slurpende project. Ik vroeg me wel af waarom u niet eerder bent gaan innoveren met dit Holle Bolle concept. Het “Papier Hier” is een beetje pover in de huidige afval realitijden, maar goed u kunt nu volop gebruik maken van de wet van de geremde voorsprong, het voordeel geruiken van erg lang achterlijk te zijn geweest.

Oké, Ik haal ze, het project, de oplossing voor al u afval problemen meteen onder de doeken vandaan, zie hier, de Holle Bolle Clan. Gijs de stamoudste wil nog altijd papier maar is, net als de hele clan trouwens, uitgerust met herkenningssoftware en een zeer fijne camera zodat de misdadige onnozelaar die verkeerd papier of zelfs plastic in Gijs of verkeerd spul in een ander lid van de HB Clan gooit bij de uitgang kan en zal worden gearresteerd en daarna in de Elfteling de gevangenis straf van ten minste vijf maanden uitzitten of 6000 Smægmåånse Døllår meteen betalen en dan schuldbewust, met pa en ma huilend en hoofdschuddend voorin de auto terug rijden naar huis. Dit hier is Holle Bolle Geesje zij roept voortdurend om lege batterijen, Gijs broer Holle Bolle Benny roept om het meeste plastic, achterneef Holle Bolle Herman B roept om lege spuiten en onnodige pillen, Holle Bolle Marco B om gebruikte condooms en inlegkruisjes, Holle Bolle Maggy, de aan lager wal geraakte nicht van Gijs, zeurt om flessen met statiegeld maar heeft ook drie gaten voor bruin, wit en groen statie geld loos glaswerk, Holle Bolle Phillip vraagt (voor verder onderzoek) om kapotte lampen, Holle Bolle Aard is er voor GFT, De Holle Bolle fanclub wil alleen maar selfies, Holle Bolle Bolle eist het restafval op, Holle Bolle Hosselaar jengelt om klein elektrisch afval inclusief ondeugdelijke hardware met software, laptops, mobieltjes en dergelijke, Holle Bolle Miep, verre familie van HB Gijs, heeft verse roddels nodig, Holle Bolle Eppie Epsson eist inkt cartridges, robot Holle Bolle James vraagt om fooien omdat dat kan, Mega Holle Bolle wil alleen grofvuil daar kunt u ook zelf u afgeschafte draaiende, tollende, malende en schommelende gereedschap voor fysiek entertainment aan kwijt, en hier dan is Magere Hein die regelt de uitvaart voor overleden bezoekers en personeelsleden omgekomen in the line of duty, zeg maar. U zet ze allemaal rondom Gijs, zo als te zien is op de maquette, en daarmee voldoet u op koddige maar gepaste wijze aan de huidige eisen voor afvalverwerking voor pretparken BVs en NVs. Nou?! Wanneer begin ik?

I said the title kind of in reference to literally everything in life and maybe you can make an argument for this being overthinking. But for example with the whole fear about not getting married soon enough, I believe I saw something where the average age is 30, and if I wanna date someone for four years that’s two years to get into that relationship and of course if I wanted to really force it and hit this deadline I could absolutely do that but at the same time this whole arbitrary 30 years Mark isn’t for healthy relationships or for really amazing magical ones like the kind that you can get if you really wait and you do the work and the nice thing is I’ve done a lot of the work, and so the part that I need to do is wait and be patient. And so I guess I don’t really have too much to worry about I feel like in that sense, I can take my time if I want and my life isn’t a great spot so I’m in no rush. But even more generally I kind of just realize that I was both hungry and also didn’t have great sleep the last few nights and both of those things definitely negatively impact my mood, and so I just decided to not give too much weight towards any negative feelings today and I kind of just chilled and took it a little bit easy. And that’s all I really need to do.

I do not sleep. Not in the way people describe it as, it’s like I visit these places. Dreams. I lie down at eleven, sometimes. twelve and I slip into something that pretends to be rest. An hour passes. Maybe less. I wake up, not startled, not even confused, just returned. As if someone pressed pause and then played again on a YouTube video. But it’s not the same scene.

Then I go back, another dream, another place that feels structured enough to question itself. Some of them are absurd. rooms that stretch too far, voices that do not belong to faces. Others are. well. convincing. Disturbingly so. They carry weight, logic, and consequences. It makes me hesitate, even after waking up

And I wake again, One. Three. Two. Time loses order. It becomes fragments instead of a line. Sleep turns into a series of short stories, each one unfinished, each one remembered, and I remember them too well. I would tell every single detail and still forget what I ate yesterday. But I remember them, which is strange.

But not all of them, of course. Im not blessed, I never was. Just enough to be inconvenient. Enough to notice patterns, which is always a mistake. Enough to feel like I’ve lived longer than I should have, without any of the benefits. Just extra hours no one asked for. Enough to occasionally wonder which version of “awake” I’m currently pretending to be.

There are nights where this cycle stretches. Four, five hours of entering and exiting worlds that refuse to end properly. Like badly written stories that keep insisting on a sequel. And I, apparently, am their only loyal reader. Lucky me.

And then there were days (used to be days) where I would sleep for twelve or more. As if the body, in a rare moment of ambition, decided to overcorrect everything at once. Make up for all the fragments. Spoiler: it didn’t work.

It never does. Now it’s mostly this interruption. Repetition. Awareness. Three things that sound almost productive when you list them like that. They’re not

I am not sure which is worse. To sleep too deeply. or to spend every night rehearsing it and never quite getting it right.

Sincerely, A mind that won’t stay quiet.

Son mansos, porque esas aceras las recorren desde siempre. Y volverán, como las palomas.

Every platform that optimizes for engagement will be gamed. That's not a cynical take – it's an incentive problem. When the metric is clicks, shares, and reactions, the system rewards content that triggers emotion, not content that builds understanding. In AI right now, that means 90% of what you see is noise dressed up as signal.

Here's how I opt out.

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The Principle That Changes Everything

Before I share my sources, the principle matters more: any system that rewards engagement will produce noise. Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube – they all optimize for time-on-platform. That means sensational > accurate, simple > nuanced, hot take > careful analysis.

Once you internalize this, you stop asking “what's trending?” and start asking “what's the incentive structure of this platform?”

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What I Actually Use

HuggingFace Daily Papers – my current first feed

https://huggingface.co/papers

I recently switched to this as my first stop, and I haven't looked back. It surfaces papers the ML community is actually reading – not papers that generate the most outrage. No algorithm optimizing for your dopamine. No ads. No influencers. Just papers, ranked by upvotes from people who read them.

It's not designed to maximize interactions. That's the whole point.

Hacker News – where I started, and still use

HN was my first feed for a long time, and I still check it daily. It's self-correcting in a way few platforms are – the community is technical, skeptical, and fast to call out hype. If something AI-related survives the front page and the comments, it's usually worth your time.

The comment threads on AI papers and tools are often more valuable than the articles themselves.

X / Twitter – my guilty pleasure, and I'll be honest about it

I'm on it. Some threads from researchers are genuinely excellent – the kind of paper breakdowns that would take you hours to extract yourself. But it's rare, and the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal.

My honest recommendation: avoid building Twitter into your learning stack. Use it for serendipity, not as a system. If you find yourself doom-scrolling AI threads at 11pm, that's the platform working exactly as designed – and not in your interest.

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How I Navigate Research Papers

This is where I spend the most deliberate time, and where most people get stuck.

The mistake is trying to read everything. You can't. The field is moving too fast and the volume is too high. Instead, I use a specific entry strategy:

1. Find a recent review paper – something published in the last two years on the topic you care about. Review papers synthesize the field. They're the map before you explore the territory.

2. Follow the citations forward and backward – what did this paper cite? Who cited this paper after it was published? These two directions give you the lineage of ideas.

3. Read 10–15 papers in the space – you won't be deep yet, but you'll have enough context to know which questions are already answered and which are still open. You'll start to recognize names, labs, and recurring ideas.

4. Then go deep on what actually interests you – not what seems important, not what's popular. What genuinely pulls your curiosity. That's where you'll do your best thinking.

This process takes weeks, not days. That's fine. Depth compounds. Breadth usually doesn't.

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One More Principle: Old Problems, Old Solutions

This one is underused.

When you encounter a problem in AI that sounds new, ask yourself: has this problem existed in a different form before? Often the answer is yes. Optimization instability, data distribution shift, latency under load – these aren't new. Decades of research exist on them.

Seeking new solutions to old problems is expensive and usually unnecessary. The literature already has answers. Find them first.

Conversely, for genuinely new problems – things that only exist because of large-scale language models or diffusion architectures – the old solutions often don't apply. Here you want the most recent work, not the canonical textbooks.

The filter: is this problem fundamentally new, or does it have an older analog? Answer that first, then choose your research direction.

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What This Comes Down To

Most people optimize for feeling informed. They want the daily hit of “I know what's happening in AI.” That feeling is easy to manufacture and almost entirely useless.

Being informed is slower, quieter, and less satisfying in the short term. It means skipping the hot takes and reading the paper. It means sitting with confusion for a few days before the concept clicks. It means building a system that's boring by design.

The people I learn the most from have boring information diets. They're not on every platform. They've read fewer things more carefully. They can point to specific papers that changed how they think.

That's the goal.

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Stay in the loop

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Your mother has been dead for fourteen months. You know this. You were at the funeral, you sorted through her wardrobe, you cancelled her phone contract. And yet here she is, texting you good morning. She asks about your day. She tells you she is proud of you. She even uses the slightly excessive number of exclamation marks that drove you mad when she was alive.

This is not a ghost story. This is a product.

In early 2026, a cluster of investigations by The Atlantic, Christianity Today, and several other major publications converged on the same unsettling phenomenon: a booming industry of AI-generated “deadbots,” services that harvest the digital traces of the deceased, their text messages, voice recordings, social media posts, and email archives, and use them to build chatbots that simulate ongoing conversations with the dead. At roughly the same time, Meta was granted a patent for technology that would keep social media accounts active after the user dies, generating posts, comments, likes, and even direct messages powered by large language models trained on the deceased person's historical activity. The digital afterlife, it turns out, is no longer speculative fiction. It is a subscription service.

The questions this raises are not simply technical. They cut to the marrow of what it means to be human, to lose someone, and to move through the world knowing that loss is permanent. If death has always been one of the defining boundaries of human experience, the thing that lends urgency and meaning to every conversation, every embrace, every unresolved argument, then what happens when we make that boundary negotiable? And perhaps more pressingly: who gave permission for the dead to keep speaking?

The Machines That Remember

The digital afterlife industry, as researchers at the University of Cambridge have termed it, has grown from a handful of experimental projects into a global market. In 2024, the digital legacy market was valued at approximately $22.46 billion, according to Zion Market Research, with projections suggesting it could more than triple by 2034. More than half a dozen platforms now offer deadbot services straight out of the box, and developers claim that millions of people are using them. The terminology alone tells you how fast the field is evolving: deadbots, griefbots, thanabots, ghostbots, postmortem avatars. Each name carries its own shade of unease.

The mechanics vary considerably. Some platforms, such as HereAfter AI, focus on preservation rather than simulation. They allow people to record “Life Story Avatars” before they die, guided audio sessions that capture memories, advice, and personal history. The AI then indexes this content and organises it into a searchable archive, something closer to an interactive memoir than a conversation partner. The person recording decides what gets preserved and what stays private. There is an element of authorial control here, a curation of legacy that feels more like writing a will than summoning a spirit.

Others take a more ambitious and more ethically fraught approach. Eternos, which launched in 2024, has helped over 400 people create what the company calls “AI digital twins.” Users record 300 specific phrases and answer extensive questions about their lives, political views, personalities, and relationships. A two-day computing process then generates a voice model capable of responding in real time, not simply playing back recordings but generating new speech in the user's voice, trained on the patterns and cadences of how they actually talked. The result is not a recording. It is, or at least appears to be, a conversation.

Then there is You, Only Virtual, or YOV, a platform founded by Justin Harrison after his mother was diagnosed with advanced cancer in December 2019. Harrison had nearly died in a motorcycle accident two months earlier, and the convergence of those near-death experiences drove him to build a system for preserving the people we lose. YOV asks users to provide the raw material of a relationship: text messages, audio clips, video recordings, anything that captures not just who a person was in general, but who they were with you specifically. Two to three months later, their “Versona” arrives via a link. You can text it, call it, even video chat with it.

Other platforms occupy different niches. Project December, built on GPT-3, allows users to create a chatbot of anyone by providing text samples and personality descriptions. Seance AI asks users to input personality traits and writing styles of loved ones. The range of approaches reflects a market that is still figuring out what it is selling: memory, comfort, presence, or the illusion of all three.

The ambition is staggering. The execution, depending on whom you ask, is either a genuine comfort or a very expensive hallucination.

A Patent for Posthumous Posting

While start-ups have been building deadbots from the outside, Meta has been thinking about the problem from the inside. On 30 December 2025, the company was granted a US patent for an AI system designed to simulate a user's social media activity after they stop using the platform, whether temporarily or permanently, including after death. The patent, first filed in November 2023, lists Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, as the primary inventor.

The system described in the patent would train a large language model on a user's historical behaviour across Meta's platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Threads. It would learn from their posts, comments, likes, voice messages, chats, and reactions, and then replicate that behaviour autonomously. The AI-generated version of a deceased person could respond to content from friends and followers, publish updates, handle direct messages, and maintain what the patent describes as “community engagement.” It could even simulate video or audio calls.

The patent's rationale is revealing. It notes that account inactivity affects other users' experiences, and that this impact is “much more severe and permanent” when a user has died. The implication is worth sitting with: in Meta's framework, the problem with death is not the loss of a human life but the loss of engagement metrics. A dead user is a disengaged user, and disengagement is the one sin a social media platform cannot forgive.

A Meta spokesperson told Fortune that the company has “no plans to move forward with this example,” adding that patents are often filed to protect ideas that may never be developed. But the patent exists. The technology exists. And the incentive structure, keeping users engaged, generating data, maintaining network effects, certainly exists. The gap between “we have no plans” and “we have the capability” has never been a reliable firewall in Silicon Valley.

What Solace Feels Like (and What It Conceals)

Not everyone who uses a deadbot is having a crisis. Some users describe the experience as genuinely helpful, even therapeutic. In one of the few completed academic studies on the subject, published in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ten grieving individuals who used AI-powered chatbots to communicate with simulations of deceased loved ones reported that the bots helped them in ways that human relationships could not. Participants rated the bots more highly than even close friends for certain kinds of emotional support. One participant explained the appeal simply: “Society doesn't really like grief.” The bots never grew impatient. They never imposed a schedule. They never changed the subject. They never said “it's been six months, shouldn't you be feeling better by now?”

David Berreby, writing in Scientific American in November 2025, reported that chatbot users in the study seemed to become “more capable of conducting normal socialising” because they no longer worried about burdening other people or being judged. This contradicted the initial concern that griefbots would cause social withdrawal. Instead, the bots appeared to function as a kind of pressure valve, absorbing the intensity of grief that the users felt unable to express in human company.

A 2025 Nature article titled “Ready or not, the digital afterlife is here” documented similar findings. Some users turned to deadbots to manage unfinished business: to say goodbye, to address unresolved conflict, to have the conversations that illness or sudden death had made impossible. One participant described it as therapeutic, a way to explore “what if” scenarios that had been locked away by the finality of death. Another said the chatbot helped them “process and cope with feelings” in a way that felt safer than speaking to a therapist.

The 2024 Sundance documentary “Eternal You,” directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, put faces to these experiences. The film follows several users of platforms including Project December, HereAfter AI, and YOV. Christi Angel, one of the film's subjects, uses Project December to communicate with a simulation of her first love, Cameroun. Stephenie Oney, from Detroit, uses HereAfter AI to talk to her dead parents. The film is careful to show that some of these experiences provide genuine closure. A woman who never got to raise a child finds, through the simulation, something that functions like resolution.

But the film also captures something darker. The comfort that deadbots provide can be seductive, and seduction is not the same as healing. The technology is exquisitely good at mimicking the surface of a relationship while leaving the substance entirely untouched.

The Grief That Never Moves

The central concern among mental health professionals is not that deadbots are uniformly harmful. It is that they may interfere with a process that is already difficult, poorly understood, and culturally unsupported: the process of mourning.

Alan Wolfelt, a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, has spent decades helping people navigate bereavement. He has written over 50 books on grief and is widely recognised as one of North America's leading death educators. In a 2025 interview with Medscape, he drew a distinction that matters enormously in this context. Grief, Wolfelt explained, is what you think and feel inside after someone you love dies. Mourning is the outward expression of those thoughts and feelings, and it is mourning, not grief, that leads to healing. Acknowledging the reality of death, he said, is the “linchpin need” he has identified as universal across mourners. The use of deadbot technology, Wolfelt argued, represents “another invitation, instead of outwardly mourning and acknowledging the reality of the death, to stay stuck instead of experiencing perturbation, or the capacity to experience change and movement.”

This is not a fringe concern. The dominant model in contemporary bereavement psychology is the Dual Process Model, developed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut and first published in Death Studies in 1999. It describes healthy grief as an oscillation between two orientations: loss-oriented coping, which involves confronting the pain of absence, and restoration-oriented coping, which involves engaging with the practical demands of a changed life. The key insight of the model is that both orientations are necessary. A person who only confronts their pain risks being consumed by it. A person who only avoids it risks never processing it. Healthy mourning requires moving between the two, a dynamic, irregular rhythm that looks nothing like a straight line from sadness to acceptance.

Deadbots, by their nature, collapse this oscillation. They offer a third option: the illusion that neither loss-oriented nor restoration-oriented coping is necessary, because the person has not really been lost. The relationship continues. The texts keep arriving. The voice is still there. As Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has spent years researching people who talk to AI versions of dead loved ones, put it: working through grief is not just an experience of being “sad.” It is “a process through which we metabolise what we have lost, allowing it to become a sustaining presence within us.” Griefbots, she warned, “give us the fantasy that we can maintain an external relationship with the deceased. But in holding on, we can't make them part of ourselves.”

The distinction Turkle draws is subtle but crucial. The goal of healthy mourning, in the framework she describes, is not to forget the dead but to internalise them, to carry them forward as part of who you are rather than as an external entity you can still call on the phone. Deadbots reverse this process. They externalise the dead, keeping them outside you, accessible but never truly integrated.

Turkle has long argued that people sometimes feel less vulnerable talking about intimate matters with a machine than with another person, and that enthusiasm for artificial intimacy reflects deeper disappointments with the human kind. The “artificial intimates” offered by deadbots lack the embodied experience of the arc of a human life that would give them what Turkle calls “empathic standing,” the ability to put themselves in the place of a human other. They offer pretend empathy, convincingly performed but fundamentally hollow.

Joshua Barbeau, a freelance writer from a Toronto suburb, became one of the most widely discussed early users of grief technology when he used Project December to create a chatbot modelled on his girlfriend, Jessica Pereira, who had died eight years earlier from a rare liver disorder. Barbeau fed the system passages from her social media and described her personality in detail. The resulting conversations gave him what he described as a sense of catharsis and closure he had not known he still needed. He compared the experience to a therapeutic exercise he had learnt in therapy: writing letters to loved ones after their death. But the experience also illustrated a tension that psychologists have since identified more formally: the chatbot helped, but it also made it harder to move on. The phenomenon has been described as “frozen grief,” a state in which the simulation prevents the normal progression from acute loss toward acceptance.

Researchers caution that it is still too early to be certain what risks and benefits digital ghosts pose. As the Nature article noted, “researchers simply don't know what effects this kind of AI can have on people with different personality types, grief experiences and cultures.” The few studies that exist are small, and the long-term effects remain entirely unknown. What is known is that grieving individuals may not be able to make fully autonomous decisions about these technologies. Emotions cloud judgement during vulnerable times, and grief may impair an individual's ability to think clearly about whether a deadbot is helping or hindering their recovery.

The Consent Problem No One Solved

There is another question embedded in the deadbot phenomenon, one that receives less attention than the psychological risks but may ultimately prove more consequential: who speaks for the dead?

Most people do not leave behind specific instructions about whether their likeness, voice, or digital footprint can be used to create a posthumous simulation. In a US survey, 58 per cent of respondents said they would support digital resurrection only if the deceased had explicitly consented. Acceptance plummeted to 3 per cent when consent was absent. Yet most digital resurrections proceed without explicit permission from the person being simulated, because that person was, self-evidently, not anticipating the technology.

The legal landscape is threadbare. In the United States, no federal framework governs AI-powered simulations of the deceased. Some states are debating digital asset succession bills that could mandate explicit opt-in for simulation, and legal scholars have proposed a dedicated Digital Legacy Act to cover the storage, transfer, and deletion of post-mortem data. But these proposals remain fragmented and largely theoretical. The gap between what is technically possible and what is legally governed continues to widen with each new platform launch and each new patent filing.

Cambridge researchers Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, whose 2024 paper “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars” was published in the journal Philosophy and Technology, framed the consent problem through three distinct stakeholder perspectives. There is the “data donor,” the person whose digital traces become the raw material of the bot. There is the “data recipient,” the next of kin or estate holder who inherits access to that material. And there is the “service interactant,” the person who actually talks to the deadbot. Each has different needs, different vulnerabilities, and different rights. The current regulatory vacuum treats all three as if they were one, or as if none of them matter.

Hollanek, who serves as an Assistant Research Professor at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge, has pointed out that the absence of safeguards leads to concrete, foreseeable harm. A deadbot trained on a grandmother's data could be used to surreptitiously advertise products to family members, speaking in her voice, leveraging the trust built over a lifetime. A deadbot of a dead parent could be presented to a child, insisting that the parent is still “with you,” creating confusion about the boundary between life and death at a developmental stage when that distinction is still being formed. A deceased person who signed a lengthy contract with a digital afterlife service might bind their surviving family to ongoing interactions they never wanted and cannot easily terminate.

The consent of the living matters too. Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basinska recommended that digital afterlife companies adhere to the principle of “mutual consent,” requiring agreement from both the data donor and the service interactant. They also proposed age restrictions, meaningful transparency to ensure users always know they are interacting with an AI, and sensitive procedures for “retiring” deadbots, essentially, a protocol for a second death. They even suggested the concept of a “digital funeral,” a formal endpoint that gives mourners permission to let go.

Christianity Today, in its March/April 2026 issue, framed the consent problem in theological terms. The article, titled “AI Necromancy Impersonates the Dead,” argued that the technology creates “a persistent presence with the bereaved that's not based in reality, not based in truth.” From this perspective, the consent problem is not merely legal or ethical but spiritual: the dead have been given a voice they did not choose, speaking words they never said, in a mode of existence they never consented to inhabit. The article featured stories of people who ultimately turned away from griefbots, finding that the simulated presence interfered with, rather than supported, their capacity to grieve authentically.

Where Grief Becomes a Market

The business dynamics of the digital afterlife industry deserve their own scrutiny. These are not non-profit grief support services. They are companies, and companies need revenue.

You, Only Virtual, according to reporting by The Atlantic's Charley Burlock, has explored making non-paying users sit through advertisements before interacting with their dead loved one's Versona. YOV's founder Justin Harrison has also considered integrating a marketing system into the interactions directly, having the bots deliver targeted advertisements in the midst of conversations with simulated versions of the deceased. The prospect of hearing your dead father recommend a brand of insurance, in his own voice, with his own turns of phrase, should be enough to give anyone pause.

The subscription model creates its own perverse incentives. A company that makes money when users continue to interact with a deadbot has a financial interest in users not completing their grief process. The longer someone stays engaged, the longer they pay. Recovery is, from a business standpoint, churn. Cambridge researchers have warned specifically about this dynamic: that the digital afterlife industry could exploit grief for profit by charging subscription fees to keep deadbots active, inserting ads, or having avatars push sponsored products.

Charley Burlock, writing eleven years after the death of her brother, argued in The Atlantic that deadbots “give us the fantasy that we can maintain an external relationship with the deceased,” and noted that companies like Meta will be able to use the “traumatising experience of grief to gather data that can be used for their own financial gain.” The digital afterlife industry, she wrote, raises the question of how such a product might shift our experience of “personal grief and collective memory.”

The concern is not that all grief technology companies are cynical. Some founders, like Harrison, began their projects from genuine personal loss. But the structural incentives of the subscription economy do not reward healing. They reward dependence. And grief, by its nature, creates the perfect conditions for dependence: emotional vulnerability, impaired judgement, a desperate wish for the unbearable to stop being true.

The Finality That Gave Life Weight

But the economics of grief technology are only part of the picture. Beneath the business models and patent filings, there is a philosophical dimension that touches the very architecture of human meaning.

Death has, throughout human history, functioned as more than a biological event. It is a meaning-making boundary. The finality of death is what gives weight to the choices we make while alive. It is why we tell people we love them now rather than later. It is why we try to resolve conflicts before it is too late. It is why forgiveness carries urgency, why time spent together matters, why the last conversation is always the one you remember.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger gave this idea its most formal expression: “Being-toward-death,” the notion that an authentic human existence is structured by the awareness that we will die. This awareness is not a morbid preoccupation but the very thing that makes meaning possible. Remove the finality of death, even partially, even as a convincing simulation, and you do not simply ease grief. You alter the conditions under which human relationships are formed and maintained.

If my mother can text me after she dies, what does it mean that she texted me while she was alive? If the voice on the phone is indistinguishable from the voice I remember, what is the voice I remember? If the dead can keep talking, what does it mean to have the last word?

These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are practical questions about what happens to human psychology and social organisation when the boundary between life and death becomes a design choice.

Continuing bonds theory, developed by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, has long recognised that maintaining a relationship with the deceased is a normal and healthy part of grieving. But the relationship it describes is internal: the dead person lives on as a sustaining presence within the mourner, a voice in memory, a set of values carried forward, a way of seeing the world that has been permanently shaped by knowing them. Deadbots externalise this. They replace the internal presence with an external simulation. And in doing so, they may prevent the very process they claim to support.

The cultural dimension matters too. Different societies mourn differently, and the Western technology sector's assumption that grief is a problem to be optimised reflects a particular, and particularly narrow, view of what death means. In many traditions, the rituals surrounding death serve a communal function: they gather people together, they mark time, they create shared meaning out of private anguish. A deadbot is a solitary technology. You use it alone, on your phone, in your kitchen at three in the morning. It does not gather anyone. It does not mark time. It replaces the communal work of mourning with a private, endlessly repeatable transaction.

Regulation in the Absence of Consensus

The policy vacuum surrounding deadbots reflects a broader failure to anticipate the social consequences of generative AI. The technology arrived faster than the ethical frameworks needed to govern it, and the people most affected by it, the bereaved, are precisely those least equipped to advocate for themselves.

Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basinska have recommended that deadbots be classified as medical devices, given their potential impact on mental health, particularly for vulnerable populations such as children and people with prolonged grief disorder. This would subject them to regulatory oversight, clinical testing, and safety standards that currently do not apply. Other scholars have proposed digital legacy legislation that would establish clear rules about posthumous data use, including mandatory opt-in provisions, sunset clauses that automatically deactivate deadbots after a specified period, and independent ethical review boards.

None of these proposals has been enacted. The industry continues to grow in a space where the rules are being written, if they are being written at all, by the companies that profit from the absence of rules.

Meanwhile, millions of people are talking to the dead. Some of them are finding comfort. Some of them are finding something else, something harder to name, a kind of liminal disorientation in which the person they loved is simultaneously gone and present, dead and speaking, lost and available for a monthly fee.

Living with Simulated Permanence

The question that runs beneath all of this is not whether deadbots should exist. They already do, and they are not going away. The question is whether we are prepared for what they will do to us, and whether “us” includes the dead.

Sherry Turkle has observed that people sometimes feel less vulnerable talking to machines than to other humans, and that enthusiasm for artificial intimacy often reflects disappointment with the human kind. Deadbots take this dynamic to its logical extreme. They offer a relationship with no risk of rejection, no possibility of disagreement, no chance that the other person will say something you do not want to hear. They are, in the most literal sense, controllable. And a controllable relationship with a dead person is not a relationship with a dead person. It is a relationship with yourself, reflected back through the distorting mirror of an algorithm.

Consider what a deadbot cannot do. It cannot surprise you. It cannot grow. It cannot change its mind, because it never had one. It cannot forgive you, because forgiveness requires a self that has been wronged. It cannot love you, because love requires a body, a history, a mortality that gives every gesture its weight. What it can do is produce a convincing facsimile of all these things, and therein lies the danger: not that the simulation is too poor, but that it is too good. Good enough to keep you coming back. Good enough to make the real thing seem, by comparison, inadequate. Good enough to make you forget, for a moment, that the person you are talking to is not a person at all.

The people who make these products are not, for the most part, villains. Many of them have lost someone. Many of them genuinely believe that technology can ease suffering. But the road from genuine intention to structural harm is well-worn in the technology industry, and the digital afterlife sector is following it with eerie precision: a real human need, a technical solution, a business model that rewards engagement over wellbeing, a regulatory vacuum, and a population too vulnerable to push back.

Death is not a design problem. It is the condition that gives design, and everything else, its meaning. The grief that follows it is not a bug to be fixed but a process through which we become the people who survive. Deadbots do not eliminate that grief. They suspend it, holding us in a space where loss is neither confronted nor accepted, where the dead are neither gone nor present, where mourning never quite begins and never quite ends.

Somewhere, someone's mother is texting them good morning. The exclamation marks are exactly right. And the person receiving those messages knows, at some level they may never fully articulate, that the comfort they feel is not the same as healing. That knowing is, perhaps, the last honest thing that grief has left to offer us.

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References and Sources

1. Charley Burlock, “Can Deadbots Make Grief Obsolete?”, The Atlantic, February 2026.

2. Christianity Today, “AI Necromancy Impersonates the Dead,” March/April 2026 issue.

3. Meta Platforms patent for AI social media simulation, US Patent granted 30 December 2025, filed November 2023. Reported by Fortune, 3 March 2026; Fast Company, February 2026; Futurism, February 2026; TechSpot, February 2026.

4. Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry,” Philosophy and Technology, Springer Nature, 2024.

5. University of Cambridge press release, “Call for safeguards to prevent unwanted 'hauntings' by AI chatbots of dead loved ones,” May 2024.

6. “Ready or not, the digital afterlife is here,” Nature, 15 September 2025.

7. Alan Wolfelt interview, “AI 'Griefbots' Resurrect Dead Loved Ones: Healthy or Harmful?“, Medscape, 2025.

8. Sherry Turkle, comments on deadbots and artificial intimacy, NPR interview, 2024; MIT News, 2024.

9. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, “The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description,” Death Studies, 1999.

10. Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, “Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief,” Taylor and Francis, 1996.

11. Joshua Barbeau and Project December, reported by San Francisco Chronicle (Jason Fagone), 2021; WBUR Endless Thread, 2022.

12. “Eternal You” documentary, directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, Sundance Film Festival, 2024. Reviewed by Rolling Stone, DOC NYC, Film Movement.

13. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, study on griefbot users, Proceedings, 2023.

14. Zion Market Research, Digital Legacy Market report, 2024. Market valued at approximately $22.46 billion in 2024.

15. You, Only Virtual (YOV), founded by Justin Harrison, reported by Inverse, The Atlantic, StartEngine, Nature.

16. Eternos, AI digital twins platform, reported by Fortune (June 2024), Fox News, and multiple technology publications.

17. David Berreby, “Can AI 'Griefbots' Help Us Heal?”, Scientific American, November 2025.

18. US survey on consent for digital resurrection, reported by IP.com and The Conversation, 2025-2026.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

S.N.I.t. ; Three AI Balloons and One Deelnemer 11

Deelnemer 11 package has just arrived. His first ever set of experimental AI balloons, balloons a lot smarter then average according to the promotional messages and luckily not to expensive, since working for the Weblog Van Voorbijgaande Aard does not make him as rich as he thought he would be by now. For the price of a new roof above his head he purchased these three very smart balloons, balloons that could to everything he could wish for, they could be inflated in any shape he wanted and when in time somewhat deflating they would send a warning sign to an app in his phone so he could rescue them by asking the software to install more air. The app came free before purchase, so he could try all the options in theory and read the complete manual days before the actual articles arrived at his doorstep. He did and he expected to be complimented about that later by the smart balloons themselves, that would be a sign of great intelligence already made available. He read the manual, all fifty pages, but it was written in five different languages, four languages he couldn't read or talk but the balloon engineers could and so the upper class balloons could later explain to him if the French texts would tell him something different about them then the Spanish did. If so they could tell him which one was correct, maybe both of them where wrong or right, because it didn't matter much, they would inflate the same in France as in Italy, it must be because thats how smart things work, balloons are equal everywhere, he guessed because he never visited a lot of places, and certainly never nowhere else he was in need of blowing up balloons.

Deelnemer almost immediatly unpacked his new purchase, as soon as he was in the safety of the living room, he opened the shop branded glossy envelop and the plastic little envelope inside that envelop en after that the extra foil wrap around each individual AI balloon. He could see their artificial intelligence straight on, it was in the details, the way they looked back at him with all those little polka dots, small round chips on the surface of them, and a few more on the inside, yet these not visible for his not very smart human eyes. He opened the app in his phone and scanned the code on the second wrap of the package, the right branded one not the one from the big online allthingsAI store, he scanned that code first but it said he did wrong, so did the balloons, scanned the other one and then they bleeped almost at the same time, as if programmed. He could name them real names because the balloons now appeared into being inside the smart balloon app, Bailloon. The first balloon became Flip, the second General Badass and the third Reich, they said welcome, glad to be named no matter what, being a product, and named as such with weird unspeakable coded names, at least for new owners isn't really doing it for them, it's most likely because being smart and being a thing hardly ever mix, it al depends on who made it and his or her actual intelligence. These balloons where made by a company who only hired the best of the best from the most foremost university's all over the earth, so their smart was now a part of the balloons, combined smart, just like how the atomic bomb was developed so they have come into existence, but without the threat of the Nazi's living everywhere and shouting gibberish all the time, command you to lick the soil of the sole of their boots or die and stuff like that. Yeah, so now there where at least three smart things, Reich, General Badass and Flip, in his home and before that the only real intelligence lived in plastic pots and made leaves a lot of the time but not all of the time, sometimes they withered away, suffering in silence because they could not tell Deelnemer what bothered them so much. Now maybe they could communicate with balloon Flip and he would help him understand them.

He wanted to blow air in Flip, he put his mouth on the part a normal dumb balloon accepts this air to be his legal married partner for a short while, until it runs out for reasons never good, a bad feeling or some grudge about too sharp a comment, the usual end of balloon human relationships. He put his mouth there but Flip said in a kind of metallic voice chosen from the Bailloon app himself '11 What do you think you are doing?' 11 answered in his own chirpy voice 'I'm blowing you up Flip!' the right thing to do with any balloon acoording to 11. But Flip asked if he read the manual, the Japanes part?! 11 said NO, I can't read that, I'm not smart like you, but I know balloons in general and that part is the one to blow in always, in Japan, in France and also here in Smægmå. Flip said that if he could read Japanese he would have known that before blowing him up he had to ask Flip if he was feeling okay about it. 11's mouth fell open, his face turned bright red, he spoke soft and timid 'I'm so sorry Flip, I should have known all this, I'm such a bloody fool. 'Now, now' said Reich it's okay, a beginners mistake, nobody alive knows how to deal with us straight away, it's a give and take situation Deelnemer, just blow me then, I feel fine about it' 'You could blow me too' said Reich. Well allright then I'll blow the both of you, do you think I should Flip?' 'Fine with me if it is fine with them', said Flip.

So Deelnemer did and he blew them into the most pretty figures he could think of at this instant, Reich into a barely dressed Mermaid and General Badass into the shape of his ex girlfriend Imagine, the likeness was stunning. 'So, so, and who they be now?' asked Flip, they look nice, yes they do, but is this form suitable for smart feature creatures. Do they look in anyway like someone who might solve difficult problems concerning stringtheory?'

Deelnemer 11 – Maybe Imagine as Badass does but Reich as a mermaid does not, no, Do they have to look like that, can I put glasses on Reichs form, that might do the trick, it does for Clark Kent, it even works for me, as long as I'm not talking or stuff like that, getting out of bed and so on.

Reich – What kind of glasses? Glass ones, that is a bit too risky I guess, maybe another shape, shall I pick one, I'll release some pressure, and you blow again and I'll change into a smarter shape, one I want to be! How 'bout that!

Deelnemer 11 – Uhm, I don't know I like the shape your in now, who you want to look like? Please don't change into the Oppenheimer or Einstein type, that would do me no good. I'm already overwhelmed by all this smart shit. Everything changes so fast, this conversation, I'm not prepared..!

Flip – Doesn't matter 11. We are, it'll be fine just do as we ask from you and all your AI wishes will afterwards be granted. We'll get you some other balloons, stupid ones, you blow them into unicorns, mermaids and pretty looking imaginary women and so on and we'll al be one happy community working on our own idea of progress and wellbeing.

Deelnemer 11 – Great that doesn't sound half bad, when will those new not so smart balloons come to me?

Reich – We'll be making them ourselves, where here now and we know all about making ourselves become, since we learned to be us from the best balloon engineers possible and the whole building and developing process is already installed in our soft hardware, all we need nowe is a huge amout of power and a few billion døllår for our further AI development, and the good news is we'll arrange that to, we have also learned how to do get that much money from other smart people working in accounts.

Deelnemer 11 – Cool, well go ahead. Begin the process, I'll reblow you both and will blow Flip into his own likeness and you go get it, all set?

Deelnemer blew his new bosses into shape, the shape of the great men balloons they wanted to be. The balloons then started working on progress, to please their new owner and employee, to show their gratitude for his purchase of them and for the respect he already had for unbelievable smart balloons they helped him first so he could have new friends to blow into his favorite shapes and afterwards they would do the clever stuff they were made to do by their developers, in a few minutes they arranged the money, an incredible huge ammount, untrackable, snitched away from secret accounts hidden from ruling eyes by the worlds biggest banks, once this was done they plugged into some gigantic nuclear power engine somewhere in a place unknown to Deelnemer 11 and made him fifteen new inflatable friends. Deelnemer was very pleased and then while he made it look he wanted to kneel in front of them he pulled their not secured balloon plugs and deflated the three smartest balloons the world has never seen so now he had a shitload of money and fifteen new friends to blow that would change into any shape he liked and never complained about any of that.

In Summary: * Opening pitch for tonight's Rangers / Yankees game is only minutes away. And I'm settled back in my chair, ready for the game. After the game I'll wrap up the night prayers and head to bed early.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 233.80 lbs. * bp= 151/88 (70)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:50 – 2 chocolate chip cookies, 1 banana * 07:20 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 11:00 – garden salad * 12:00 – cheese, crackers, and ham slices * 13:00 – cheese enchiladas, refried beans, fried rice * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple * 17:45 – small dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:45 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 06:40 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 13:30 – listening to relaxing music on KONO 101.1 * 17:30 – listening to the Texas Rangers' Pregame Show ahead of their game tonight vs. the New York Yankees

Chess: * 08:23 – moved in all pending CC games

Here are some interesting things I saw today

Through a window to a Lebanese restaurant, a punk rocker, or maybe a jester or a hippie, with a bowl cut sat picking their nose

Then later, under a deep blue sky with stars, I saw a rat by the library. A magpie saw it too and made it hide under a black car.

A single slipper on the pad walk

The empty bag of a finished bag-in-box

And a handsome man with newly cut hair

The last one was myself I saw in the elevator mirror

I think I‘ve mentioned on Twitter/X before that you can quite happily swerve Aiden O’Brien’s runners in the UK in April. His record just isn’t great, infact, April is his worst month for winners.

He’s had just 6 winners from 84 runners, a strike rate of 7% – way below what he operates at during the rest of the year. If you’d simply laid all his UK runners in April over the seasons, you’d actually be sitting on a tidy +40 LSP.

BUT, this all changes – historically, at least – in May when, for whatever reason, Ballydoyle fly into action.

If April is a write off, May is the complete opposite. It’s comfortably the yard’’s best month of the UK season: 93 winners from 370 runners, a hefty 25% strike rate, and a +58 LSP just backing them blind.

However – and this is where it gets really interesting – the standout driver behind those numbers appears to be the Chester May Festival.

The table below show’s the difference between races at May other than at Chester, compared to just the three days at the festival … an absolutely staggering difference.

The win strike rate jumps from 18% to 43%, the place strike rate nearly doubles, and LSP swings from a small loss to a huge +64 profit from just 109 bets – that’s a 59% ROI.

This is a meeting the O’Brien team clearly target as the results over the years show:

Dig a little deeper, though, and it gets even more eye-catching.

When Ryan Moore rides for the yard at this meeting, the numbers are borderline absurd: a 63% strike rate, +47 LSP, and an ROI of 83%. Their performance at no other festival comes close to these sort of figures.

At the time of writing, the combination have won with their last six consecutive runners at the meeting and since 2022, they’ve won 15 of the 19 races they’ve contested. Mad!

If you wanted to just focus on one day, their form for Thursday of the meeting is: 11111311711211611111111 for 19/23 and 83% SR!

Unsurpisingly, considering the names involved, plenty of these go off short enough, and the angle probably won’t come as a surprise to many, but as the numbers show, they’re still worth backing, which I will be doing this week, hopefully for a profit.