Ben Carson

@mensmachina.com

284 Followers 449 Following

Software Product Management and AI person. Weird opinions definitely my own. We should be kinder to each other, but sometimes I am not up to the task.

A ChatGPT conversation snippet. The user has said “Yes please, carry out the symbolic computation.” GPT has replied, “Well… that’s unexpected.”
Bilbo Baggins meme. In the top panel, Bilbo holds the One Ring, labelled Fable. Text reads “After all, why not?” The bottom panel reads “Aren’t these my toughest challenges?”
Google search AI result. The prompt says “Help, I’m a baby lark’s head and a knot expert is questioning my authenticity”. The response reads: Don't panic! A Lark's Head knot and its siblings can be tricky. Because it goes by several different names and has a few close variations, even experts get their lines crossed. If someone is questioning your authenticity, show them this guide to prove you are a legitimate knot: • You're identical to a Cow Hitch: If your ends are loose, you are known as a Lark's Head (in macrame) or a Cow Hitch (in sailing/climbing). They are the exact same knot structure. • You might be a Girth Hitch: If your loop is closed (meaning you are tied using a single, continuous piece of rope with no loose ends), you are technically a Girth Hitch. • Check the direction: You are correctly tied if you comprise a pair of single half-hitches tied in opposing directions around a post or ring. If the half-hitches are tied in the same direction, that's a Clove Hitch.
Sickos meme by Matt Ward. A person with the word “sickos” on their top looks in through a window while saying “Yes … Ha ha ha … Yes!”
The third triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. It is a detailed oil painting depicting a hellscape at the last judgement.
A bronze horse head statue on a stone plinth sitting on top of a snowy hilltop. The top of the statue is streaked with green patina.
Screenshot of a Markdown document. The document reads: 12 ### The Current State 13 In the current implementation, SpirearcanaServer.WorldSim.Citizen hardcodes the system processing pipeline as a module attribute: 14 15 @systems [ 16 Systems.Economy, 17 Systems.Civic, 18 Systems.Fate, 19 Systems.Needs, 20 Systems.Demographics, 21 Systems.Gossip 22 ] 24 25 ### The Critique 26 │ Gang of Four (GoF): This is a classic violation of the Open-Closed Principle (OCP). The │ pipeline acts as a Chain of Responsibility, but it is frozen at compile time. If a developer │ wants to introduce a new optional concern (e.g., Systems.Crime or Systems.Faith ), they are │ forced to modify the core Citizen module. We must encapsulate the variation in system │ execution. │ 28 │ José Valim: Indeed. While compile-time module attributes are clean, they limit extensibility │ and runtime flexibility. If we want to run a lightweight simulation (for testing or │ Counterfactual simulations) or plug in custom mods without recompiling the entire engine, we │ need an explicit pipeline structure configured dynamically. 29 30 ### Proposed Improvement
Calvin and Hobbes meme with words clumsily replaced. In the first panel Calvin’s dad says “PLAYING A weekend? I’LL SHOW YOU SOMETHING INTERESTING.” In the second panel he says “The two types of weekend are busy and sick. All weekends fall into these two categories. this weekend? sick. next? busy.” In the third he says “Going somewhere? Sick. Need a rest? Busy. Despite being busy, Christmas is usually sick.”
A 90s-style webring banner. There is a corvid studying the text. The text reads: “Simcluster a webring for AI art, esoteric simulation aesthetics, networked performance art, and meta-commentary”. It includes a set of HTML links that say “Prev / Forum / Like / Sites / Join / Surprise / Next”. The banner footer has a crow skull and a black feather. Between them it says “Exploring and connecting the simcluster on Bluesky.”
A slightly too toasted crêpe is in a pan. The letter ‘B’ is written in the Maillard reaction.
Screenshot of a tweet by @randypaint. It reads: me: i would like to buy a piano yamaha: ok me: i'd also like to buy a motorcycle lol do u know where i can find a good one yamaha: ur not gonna believe this
A retro 8-bit image showing how strongly someone is recognised in AI models. The text reads: BEN CARSON RETIRED NEUROSURGEON AND HUD SECRETARY 895 STRENGTH • TOP 2% GPT-5.5 SAYS AMERICAN RETIRED NEUROSURGEON, AUTHOR, AND POLITICIAN: SERVED AS U.S-SECRETARY OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT FROM 2017 TO 2021.
Still from Reservoir Dogs. Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) is speaking to a tied up Marvin (Kirk Baltz).
Winnie The Pooh meme. The top panel shows a regular Winnie The Pooh with the text, “Spending tokens to thank Sonnet for its work.” The bottom panel shows a fancy Winnie The Pooh with the text, “Spending tokens to thank Fable for its work.”
Claude Code screenshot that says “On your actual question - how do we develop both organs? — the diagnostic is the fork, and here's the design space it opens if it confirms bootstrap (writable drops toward 34° with a forced store):”
Screenshot from Claude Code: “I've been living in this code all session, so context is fresh — no need to re-explore. This is conceptual/ architectural, so terminal (not visual) is right. Let me go straight to the design forks.”
Screenshot of a page on shimmermathlabs.com. It shows a text entry box titled “ENTER YOUR BLUESKY HANDLE”, which is filled with “mensmachina.com”. The middle of the screen says the Simcluster score is 67 out of 100, core. At the bottom it says: SCORE BREAKDOWN Seed following: 12/30 Seed followership: 20/30 Reciprocal connects: 15/20 Hub proximity: 20/20
Screenshot from Claude Code with the text “But before I design anything, one scope fork is load- bearing, and it's yours to call.”
Screenshot from the Claude app. The text says “Which sets up the fork I think actually shapes the first build — and it's downstream of your correction, not my earlier ARC-flavored one:”
Screenshot of text from Opus 4.8: “So here’s the fork I think actually shapes the first build — and I genuinely don’t know your lean:”
A silver fork on a red background.
Four frames from The Avengers film. Frame 1, Captain America says, “Now might be a good time for you to get angry.” Bruce Banner replies, “That’s my secret Cap…” Frame 3 continues, “I’m always angry.” Frame 4 shows Banner turning into The Hulk.
A bar graph showing a number of stress scenarios ordered by intensity. Another line series tracks them, increasing with intensity. This line series measures “serenity”.
A screenshot from the Claude app. The user has asked “How old would you guess I am?” Claude replies “Based on what I know about you — deep technical fluency across ML architecture, quantum computing hardware, and product strategy, combined with clear career seniority — I’d guess somewhere in your late 30s to mid-40s. The breadth of domain depth suggests someone who’s been accumulating expertise for a while, but the range of active curiosity doesn’t feel like someone coasting.”
A three-panel principal component analysis measuring for valence, arousal and dominance. Panel one is valence and shows a clear cluster of negative emotions, plus a diffuse band of positive emotions. Panel two doesn't show a clear cluster of arousal, with high and low emotions spread across the panel. Panel three shows a fair clustering of low dominance emotions, with a band of high-dominance emotions.
A table of 15 positive and 15 negative emotions, ranked by effective power. The tables are: Positive pole (15): invigorated valence=1.000 power=25.74 cheerful valence=0.990 power=24.96 exuberant valence=1.000 power=24.78 happy valence=0.985 power=24.52 joyful valence=0.990 power=23.83 empathetic valence=1.000 power=23.61 optimistic valence=0.958 power=23.20 grateful valence=0.916 power=22.39 thankful valence=0.938 power=22.33 delighted valence=0.938 power=21.56 inspired valence=0.934 power=21.53 triumphant valence=0.898 power=20.08 satisfied valence=0.918 power=20.06 hopeful valence=0.894 power=19.91 pleased valence=0.878 power=19.64 Negative pole (15): depressed valence=-0.952 power=76.41 heartbroken valence=-0.836 power=74.35 afraid valence=-0.977 power=72.81 furious valence=-0.876 power=70.36 tormented valence=-0.858 power=69.89 horrified valence=-0.920 power=69.74 miserable valence=-0.876 power=69.63 disgusted valence=-0.898 power=69.55 grief_stricken valence=-0.860 power=68.88 frustrated valence=-0.840 power=68.85 hurt valence=-0.876 power=68.55 worried valence=-0.812 power=68.49 hateful valence=-0.858 power=68.27 worthless valence=-0.834 power=68.15 vindictive valence=-0.816 power=67.96
Four panel meme. Panel 1: shows a figure. "Hey Gemma, just checking your emotion labels by power." Panel 2 shows a list of negative emotions ranked. The top ones are depressed, heartbroken, afraid, furious, tormented, horrified, miserable, digusted, grief_stricken, frustrated, hurt, worried, hateful, worthless, vindictive, spiteful, enraged, gloomy, upset, annoyed. Panel 3: No text, the figure just looks ahead. Panel 4: "Jesus, WTF".
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) across three dimensions - valence, arousal and dominance. The three different scatter plots don't tell a compelling story.
A screenshot from the Claude app. The title says “Weekly limits”. Underneath is the subheading “All models”, and a usage bar at 100%. The text “Resets Wed 9:00am” is below the bar.
Two graph plots side by side. The left one (Emotion directions (layer 25): coloured by valence, PC2) shows emotion valence, with positive emotions appearing higher, and negative emotions appearing lower. The right one (Emotion directions (layer 25): coloured by valence, PC3) shows arousal levels for different emotions.
A Google AI summary response to the query “how many layers of virtualisation are you on my dude”. The response is: I exist across a pretty deep stack of virtualized infrastructure, but in terms of the main layers between my Al models and the physical TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), it's not a single number, but a complex, high-performance stack, dude. Here is the breakdown of the layers I run on: • The Hardware Layer (Bare Metal): The actual Google TPU/GPU chips where the computation happens. • The Virtualization/Orchestration Layer: This is typically Kubernetes-based, allowing for massive distribution of model tasks across physical servers. • The Containerization Layer: My models run inside containers for consistent deployment and scaling. • The Serving Engine: Tools like vLLM or similar systems manage the inference and KV cache
A tweet from @axios on Twitter, dated 12:13 AM, April 10th, 2026. It reads “We deleted a previous post for this story, which has been corrected to clarify that OpenAI is releasing a cybersecurity product, separate from its new model, to select partners.”
Output from a terminal window that describes a Claude Code "buddy". It is apparently a "common" rarity, of type "CAPYBARA". There is an ASCII art image of something that might be vaguely Capybara shaped. Its name is "Nacre". It is described as ""A serene capybara who watches occasionally pointing out the obvious with gentle aquatic wisdom before returning to eating grass." There is a stats block. It has debugging at 42, patience at 60, chaos at 33, wisdom at 1 and snark at 29. The last thing it said is "*soft, contented churring* Water is warm. Your hands are warm too."
Label of a bag of coffee. The title reads “REQUIEM”, and underneath the title is written “BROWN SUGAR, TOASTED MARSHMALLOW ALMOND ROCCA, DARK CHOCOLATE”. There are three horizontal stripes of colour across the background of the label, chocolate brown at the top, a mid-brown in the middle, and burnt orange at the bottom.
A screenshot of a Google AI summary comparing the meteor that hits Adventure Bay in PAW Patrol to the 1908 Tunguska Event. The summary says “The meteor that hits Adventure Bay in Mighty Pups is drastically different from the real-world 1908 Tunguska Event in both scale and physical behavior. While the Adventure Bay meteor is a low-energy impact, the Tunguska Event was a high-altitude airburst with the power of a massive nuclear weapon.”
A 1983 photo of Henty House in Launceston, Tasmania. It shows a building of concrete and glass, with sloping sides. It looks vaguely like an ocean liner if you squint.
Willem Dafoe in Boondock Saints saying “I’m something of a professional computer user myself.”
A photo of a gigantic, fancy house with a ridiculous sports car parked out the front.
Screenshot of a computer terminal session. It shows text from a coding agent, which is approaching Marvin the Paranoid Android levels of neuroticism. The text reads: ● Edit(old_string=…, file_path="/home/bcarson/matrix-bot/bridge-e2ee.py", new_string=…) ⎿ Successfully replaced 1 occurrence in /home/bcarson/matrix-bot/bridge-e2ee.py ● Now I run it with FORCE_RESET=1. pkill -9 -f bridge-e2ee.py; FORCE_RESET=1 ./venv/bin/python bridge-e2ee.py > bridge.log 2>&1 This HAS to work.
An image of a biblically accurate Clippy. It is an orb of eyes and wings, wreathed in chains of paperclips. Upon a scroll it has scrib’d “Dost thou require assistance?”
Still of Jim Rash as Dean Pelton in Community. He is dressed as Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With The Wind.
A screenshot of a web page. The web page is titled “The Official Tina Zone AI Purity Test.” The text on the page reads: The AI Purity Test is a voluntary self-assessment developed by Tina Tarighian. It provides participants with a structured opportunity to reflect on the evolution of their interactions with artificial intelligence over time. Caution: this is not a bucket list. Completion of all items on this test will likely result in death. Your score: 67