About Alexandria burns
A lot of people are worried about AI because the branding worked and they think artificial intelligence is intelligent. LOL, HAL will not be cutting off our air supply because our AIs are probability machines. They do so many associations, it looks like thinking. It used to be that this kind of thinking brought us natural language search where we could be humanly sloppy and still find what we were looking for. Now we can do the same associations in the opposite direction, generating Herman Melville’s lost (and imaginary works) and people with the wrong number of fingers.
There are SO many ethical problems with AI and the business douches who stole intellectual property to make it happen. This site is not about that. Alexandria burns is a bit bigger than AI. It is about the degradation of working technology out of corruption and greed. It is about intentionally tanking the systems for the ill of mankind. It is about jerks unchecked by any systems.
About the name: Alexandria was the biggest library in the world once upon a time. It was fashioned after Alexander the Great in Egypt after his death and in the town named for him. Exactly when in the Ptolemaic dynasty the library was built is shrouded outside our known history. When I learned about this library as a kid, I was in awe. I wanted to learn everything there was to learn in the world.
In the popular mind, the burning of Alexandria happened at the height of its power. The vision of it falling from the highest height is so tragic, but ultimately wrong. Alexandria has been in decay for at least a century. Imagine that, being so mighty as to withstand a decade of decay. It started when Ptolemy VIII expelled all the foreign scholars from the city. The first alleged historical case of brain drain was the Huguenots from France, but I disagree. Xenophobia feels so good, but it burns so bad. With the expulsion went prestige, and with prestige went funding, and with funding went scholars. By the time Julius Caesar came along with a torch (the fucking dick), there was no original work coming out of the library. It was just a dusty place with scrolls capturing centuries of learnings. It hurts my heart to think about it.
About Boccaleone
Boccaleone is an 8-bit whore in a 3-piece suit. I work at a Fortune 500 company. My current job is to try to figure out how to eliminate all the developer jobs with AI tooling. Of course they didn’t say that, but that’s what they are asking. As such, I have access to the full gamut of AI tools and they all suck. There are lots of places on the internet where you can find the latest snake-oil advice on how to use AI “effectively”. This is a different place entirely. I am going to tell you about the ways that agents of every flavor are entirely broken. They are broken because they were created for demos/sales, not for production usage. I want better agentic tools. You should too.