Hobson Lane

Like my Mom, Owen Meany, and perhaps you, I don’t believe in coincidences. I’m late to the Ray Bradbury party, but he concluded with a home assistant caught in a loop saying:

“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …”

That story seems to foreshadow this past Tues & Wed when powerful people threatened each other with the weapons Bradbury warned us about. I’m glad Bradbury was wrong.

short-stories.co/@raybradb…

Gripping and humane throughout. The coup_de_grâce for me was the Acknowledgements at the end. She inspired me with her humility and courage, taking on the writing of an epic space opera + hard scifi novel after her diagnosis with cancer “and everything terrifying that has happened in the world…”

I finished Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock a year ago, and I still can’t get it out of my head. As an aspiring writer I was searching it for some pattern of plot or character development that I could steal for my own writing. But it was so masterfully written, nearly every paragraph had some meaningful turn of phrase or new word or idea I haven’t thought about since college. That the words of that book refuse to let go of my brain, a year later tells you how captivating it is. I only just now understood how the title applies to the story of nearly every character in the book. All of the leading characters, and there are many, have suffered one or more traumas of termination in their lives that connected them in their struggle against the termination of the planet. And these termination shocks shaped them and their view of the hazards of a global climate engineering project being terminated.

I won’t spoil it for you by even hinting at these traumas suffered by the main characters, but I will end the post with a simple mood-setting quote that Stephenson used to drag the reader into a car-camping scene along side a creek in the heart of Texas:

“a nimbus of insects orbiting a flickering light bulb”.

I meander and sink into wonder How did we lose all this time This feels like a love song But you’ll never be mine

You fill me with wonder Your struggle, trudging through mire Your pushing and thinking Your tending the fire

Enduring wallowing regression Convergence senseless mean Despite looming depression Immune to zhombie meme

Tech toxins and circular math Cloud dreams with droll No mind who’s in charge Out of control

Stars bring back moments Your warmth in the night Qwelled ‘lone in my bed, No more all truistic spite

I rage at the world Hot phone and spite, Untempered words erupt in my mind You shrink, become tight

You sadden your ease To stop nurture for hate But no nature for peace No confidence, no fate

In my quest to find reasonable AI’s I’ve been researching how data scientists and engineers compensate for all the failings of The Illusion of Thinking (Shojaee et al) machines:

• Logic – helping me simply the growing tangle of redundant slop in my open source projects
• Arithmetic – counting errors and doing statistics on my students' programming assignments
• Spatial reasoning – solving simple and trunk-packing problems problems
• Temporal reasoning – helping me schedule my day or research AI and teaching approaches
• Abstraction – helping me design a competitive ARC Prize bot
• Planning – helping my mentees plan job searches in a world crowded with slop jockeys
• Game theory – strategizing with me in the game of students deep-faking themselves out of an education
• Security – not clobbering my databases or exposing my secrets while writing a python script

I’m particularly interested in graph search approaches that give token-predicting transformers a reproducible, verifiable reasoning algorithm for making more accurate and reasonable planning decisions. Drug molecule synthesis pathway planning is one such domain where graph search approaches shine. Drug synthesis can be modeled as a decision tree or graph search problem in the same way that even the most advanced AI still does when navigating a self-driving car from turn to turn. And drug discovery is where both of my recent consulting customers have gone all in on AI, against the advice of researchers, chemists and data scientists, including me. Some of those researchers have even demonstrated approaches that achieve SoTA performance without leaning on LLM for their unjustified and unexplainable reasoning ability:

• Variational graph encoders … for drug design – A VAE on chemical molecule graphs (instead of SMILES)
• AI ZynthFinder – an MCTS on reaction SMILES strings
• Retrosynformer – a decision transformer approach to SMILES retrosynthesis

My favorite AI philosopher and the world’s favorite AI naysayer, together again one last time in a blog post: We Urgently Need a Federal Law Forbidding