Farewell Gruntle

A post to immortalise a furry friend; Gruntle another stray that I had adopted several years (along with his buddy Fruntle), spoilt, noisy (meeps) and full of character. Gruntle suddenly took a turn for the worst (chest/lung cancer) although he likely hid it until he couldn’t and was put to rest on 17-04-2026.

Farewell Fruntle

A post to immortalise a furry friend; Fruntle a stray that I had adopted several years ago took a turn for the worst (GDV: Gastric Dilatation Volvulus) and was put to rest on 05-02-2026 (this post is a bit late; as I couldn’t bring myself to write about him).

The model is too powerful: A software engineer’s perspective

Agency vs Inference: LLMs, or AI as some like to call them, are token generators. For a model to “break containment“, “send an email” or perform any other action outside of generating a token, it needs a functional bridge (APIs, tool-calling, or a shell environment) to perform these actions. If it “escaped“, that means a human either misconfigured or deliberately enabled it to perform said task.

The model might be conscious

When a CEO says “The model might be conscious“, what they actually mean is “Our valuation needs another zero.“.

As engineers, we know the “ghost in the shell” is just complex algorithms and a very expensive GPU bill. There is no soul in the transformer; there’s just a Softmax function guessing the next word. Calling a next-token predictor “sentient” is like calling a calculator “mathematically gifted“. It’s not thinking; it’s just incredibly fast at being a parrot.

Farewell Scruntle

A post to immortalise a furry friend; a stray that I had adopted back in February diagnosed with a terminal illness was given a few more months to enjoy plenty of food and treats along with help from Greasby Vets4Pets (CH49 3AT) he had managed to gain a little weight. Full of character, extremely chirpy, always curious and very friendly.