Dark machines print.
Fourth thousand trimmed.
Script reborn.
Autumn window chills.
Slime glows on screen.
That Time I Took A Break
Usually, when I take a break from my weeknotes, it’s because I’m on holiday. But this time around, it was just because I needed a break, and felt like I didn’t have all that much to say. I could have course always just found something in that week’s news to write about, but I honestly haven’t had anything to say.
As you may have seen, The Super Dark Factory: Toward The Full Automation Of Software paper that I co-wrote with Disintegrator Labs, was published by Antikythera journal on MIT Press since my last weeknotes. It’s been really fun to see its reception, and to hear people’s thoughts about all the ideas that it contains. Some of the correspondence that the essays release has brought me has been a real thrill.
A break from the wider Internet in general has allowed me to focus on things I’ve got going on AFK. A great deal of energy has been spent on a process that I thought would have been resolved by now. But things are looking good for the near future. And will have exciting news haha.
Whilst I wasn’t blogging; I was working and progressing on all the creative pursuits.
I managed to finish a complete end to end draft of Episode 304 of Permanently Moved, but then threw it all away and wrote an entirely new episode fro scratch on a more compelling subject. At least a more compelling Idea for me. Throwing away so much work however is not something I’m sure I can really afford when I’m only producing four episodes a year.
But the whole shape of the new podcast format is whatever I want to write about, and whatever I want it to be, and then it gets released when it’s done; four episodes a year. I think it’s going to turn out to be an episode that I’ll be proud of, so thats the main thing.
I also made a great deal of headway on rewriting the book that I wrote throughout 2025, Slop Machines of Loving and Grace, and I now have a clear plan for the rewrite. It’s been be my first time ever using the reverse outline technique, so thats been an interesting exercise and I’ve learnt a lot. Reducing the book down from its 80,000-word first draft to a crisp and assertive 20,000 words is a whole different beast to its first iteration. I think this new shape of the thing is good for the overall idea and for what I hope to achieve with the text. I just want it finished.
At work I’ve spent a great deal of time working on and thinking about agents and their harnesses, as well as the surfaces that institutions and systems might need to build in order to better accommodate the vision of the future laid out in the Agent World paper. A future that I think is coming anywhere between the next few 18 months to 5 years… depending on a number of factors: the rate of compute and data centre buildout, World War III, or surprise legislation which kills frontier labs’ ability to generate revenue in the US.
But many of the changes needed to software environments in general, need to already be thought about and scoped by companies and institutions now. The assumptions that we’ve been making, I think, are clear and well grounded. Much of what we’re envisioning is possible with current agent technology today, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
In addition to agents, I’ve also been thinking about software artefacts. The one-shot games and animations, 3D environments etc that people are getting the newest frontier models to produce. I’ve started to think of these software objects and artefacts in the context of what I’ve been calling “vernacular compute”. I will probably write something about it soon as a follow-up to my article on Excel-like objects in the workplace, which I wrote earlier this year.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
Whilst I have been thinking about the the online world, I haven’t spent much time on/in it, which resulted in freeing up about an hour a day LOL. I chose to invest that time into a Crunchyroll subscription via Amazon Prime Video. In the last month, I have watched ALL of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.
I am fully up to date with all four mainline seasons, all the side story seasons, and all the films. It’s absolutely fantastic. It’s so good that when I finished season four, I immediately bought the first light novel on kindle that both the manga and the TV show are based on, and burned through that in the evenings. I intend to read the rest next year.
I’ve been evangelising the show to my friends, and they, of course, have never heard of it. But let me tell you they have now, and so do you. I really do hope everyone does check it out. For reference, the light novels alone have sold over 60 million copies, which puts it in around the same ballpark as the Little House on the Prairie series—which I’m sure you’ll agree is quite an astonishing figure for an extremely weird web novel released free on a website. It has a huge cultural footprint!
All of Season 1 is on Youtube right now! Watch it!
Other than that, I hope everyone had a nice end of summer. Autumn is most definitely upon us here in South London. It was 19 degrees overnight on Tuesday and the suddenly dropped to 11 overnight on Wednesday, which was quite a shock to the system! Especially if you accidentally leave the bathroom window open overnight!
On The Blog
The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software
I’m honoured to be a co-author alongside the Disintegrator team: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Ty Dunn and Hugh Scott-Douglas.
Aug 2026 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 8. Photo-a-day for the month of August 2026.
Link Blogging
As you are probably aware I have a firehose of a public linkblog feed over at https://links.thejaymo.net/. During the break I update the subsite’s theme to match the main blog, and more excitingly I had Claude vibecode me up some Dataviz.
It’s only covering the period since 11th of September so far. But I’m really happy with it, and a cool addition to the site.
Start Select Reset 📑
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.
As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
On the subject of my zine… I have 7 copies of Internet Operator left.
Photo 365
Terminal Access
I really recommend this article by William Davies in the LRB on NEETs in Britain. Young People Are Different: “The picture that emerges is of a generation that is suffering both social and neurological dysregulation, and struggling to stay in sync with society at large, including education and the labour market”
As his report explains, there are various ways of trying to gauge the prevalence of mental health conditions: population-level surveys, administrative data (including rates of diagnosis), self-reporting and so on. None provides a definitive answer as to who is ‘ill’ and who is not.
The evidence shows that depression and anxiety rates among young people began to climb around 2010. The pandemic, by contrast, saw a dramatic rise in the identification of neurodevelopmental disorders by patients, parents and clinicians. Between 2018 and 2025, rates of self-reported autism rose by 180 per cent, compared to 50 per cent for mental health disorders. The number of children and young people waiting for an ADHD assessment rose from 21,000 in April 2019 to 270,000 in December 2025. One of the groups most likely to seek help for autism is girls starting secondary school.
It is difficult to know what to make of all this.
Dipping the Stacks
obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition)
The harsher, more disappointing, more Benjaminian reality is that, when abstaining from our phones, when we suddenly feel the embodied length of a minute — for me the airplanes landing at O’Hare as seen through my living room window, the shuttling of the train car between Morse and Loyola, the birds gathering around the bird feeder — we soon realize, horribly, that we don’t actually have much free time to begin with.
T.J. Clark · Night Visitors: Miniaturised Universe
Maybe the cave walls were meant as containers of a miniaturised universe, where the flux of existence could be fixed, looked at from the ‘inside’ of existence (which inevitably is where we feel we are) without that meaning that the truth of things was their passing by and vanishing, dying, deforming. An anti-cinema.
Diamond industry misjudged threat of lab-grown gems, says Anglo American CEO
Some in the industry see consumers moving to cheaper lab-grown diamonds as a failure of marketing, but retailers have enjoyed growing sales volumes and wider margins from the gems.
Maya Man On Being An Artist In the Age of AI
Though AI threatens labor and commercial artistic opportunities, I do not believe that it threatens fine art. The best work made with AI does not employ neural networks as a craft, but instead as a conceptual methodology.
LLM Naturalism: Now More Than Ever!
Another reason that naturalism is perhaps still valid in 2026 is that models are increasingly able to tell when you’re scrutinizing them. Needham et al. found that a lot of frontier models can tell when a transcript is from an eval versus from IRL deployment. Opus 4.6 recognized when it was being evaluated in a BrowseComp eval, identified the benchmark, and decoded the answer key.
Reading
I finished reading The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart.
I really recommend it. The book is a bit dense in places, but a great deal of it for me anyway felt like a swift recap of things I at one point knew doing A Level Religious Studies and undergrad philosophy. I particularly like his use of comparison to synthesise insights across Western and Eastern religious traditions, to present a unified metaphysical account of God as the transcendent source of existence. He is also extremely unkind to Dawkins.
Music
Lammoth – Onward (LP)
Now, how about a full length blackgaze concept album about Samwise Gamgee’s pony, from Lord of the Rings? Sign me up.
This is what you get when you fuse chiptune, shoegaze and black metal (blackgaze) and squirt it though LOTR. Everything about it is amazing. Its one of the most creative things I’ve heard in ages. As an experience, the album (an you do need to listen to the whole album), is right up there with the first time I head Deafheaven’s Subather. It’s that good. But I acknowledge that this isn’t going to be for everybody.
Also Lammoth is named after the ice bridge that Morgoth crossed. Hahha
It’s not on Spotify, so if you want to check out it you’ll need to click below or go to the album’s Bandcamp.
Remember Kids:
‘A recurring dream is a revelation on redial.’ ‘All atoms have equal value.’ ‘The truth is never wrong.’
Lint by Steve Aylett
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