OK, for the next few sessions worth of blog posts on sessions of Valery and The Other Two, I want to confess what the blog posts are going to consist of. When we started playing this second Tales of the Valiant adventure my oldest, Scarlett, asked if we could record ourselves playing. She had been having trouble remembering from session to session what was going on. We did so and it was fun for a time, but then a few things happened:

There’s a lot about the current AI situation to be upset about.

• Data center buildup is insane and, certainly at a higher rate than we will need when the market settles. While they’re running now they’re causing issues with loud noise, electricity usage, and water usage. The ones that are extra when all is said and done might end up being blights on the towns without any other potential uses.
• The AI stock trade is sucking lots of capital out of the market that could be going to other uses. And when the bubble bursts it is almost certainly plunging the US (and maybe world) into a recession
• Some companies are forcing AI usage on employees (see Doctorow’s Reverse Centaur book) and/or firing people without understanding how much work can actually be automated.
• Many (all?) of the AI models were trained on copyrighted material without compensation and now they want to charge for access to the models
• There’s lots of creative work (slop) like books and songs that are flooding the market with non-human created work.

However, I don’t think there’s any way this toothpaste is going to be put back in the tube. Even if we somehow got all of the world to agree that we would not do anymore AI training (getting rid of lots of the bad stuff above related to data centers, the environment, and the stock market), AI at its current level is here to stay. After all, there is not crazy innovation going on in the word processor space or spreadsheet space, but they didn’t go away.

A little less than six years ago, I started looking at moving from Doggcatcher to Podcast Republic. 24 Hours later I was pretty happy with my choice. Time and technology march on and, while looking at some software on Flathub, I discovered there was a not-quite-1.0 bit of podcasting software out there called Pinepods. It seems to bring together a few things that could lead it to becoming my new way to listen to podcasts. However, it isn’t currently without issues.

I can’t say for certain that this will be my last AI post for a bit, but last night just before bed Stella asked me to ask the AIs about boba tea. I decided to indulge her and was surprised to see that, after doing such a horrible job on summarizing the Percy Jackson book or Snow Crash, it did a great job with boba tea. Based on what I know the models got little-to-none of the answer wrong. ALSO, I actually got an answer from Qwen! Now, I don’t know how long it took because after it was running for an hour I had to go to bed myself and didn’t check the output until the next day, but not only did it get past its reasoning phase, but it gave an answer!

After spending 2 posts talking about how badly these local AI models are doing on my machine (here and here ), I did want to show a example of the model performing surprisingly well. Using qwen 3.5 I asked it to describe the following image:

Here is the description that qwen wrote after about a few minutes:

A few days ago I mentioned playing around with local AI models, despite having low strength hardware for the task. Yesterday I was trying our some new models - tinyllama and smollm2 - and I asked each model the same question to compare the answers. After doing this for a few questions, I had the same feeling I always have when I’m doing a repetitious task: computers would excel at this!

As an 80s kid, I recently got a couple dice sets that spoke to my childhood. First up is this set from 1985 games:

I saw this set one or two years ago on the 1985 Games site. I put it on my wishlist for a while because I loved the item for nostalgia, but I already have a lot of dice so I was hoping someone would get it for me. When it was recently on sale for half off, it was a no-brainer to get them. When I was a kid I remember the blank VHS tapes that we would buy to tape stuff off of TV would come in cases exactly like this one (and the other ones in their collection). I even associate some of the colors with Walgreens and others with Circuit City. But these dice aren’t only a nostalgia buy - they are also very sparkly and VERY sharp.

This pair of short stories by Dragonsteel employees Dan Wells (who is also an author in his own right) and Isaac Stewart (the illustrator of many Cosmere books and head of art at Dragonsteel) was originally created for the Sanderson convention. (Nexus? I think) The first story is about Jasnah and fills us in on what happened to her between when she was on the ship with Shallan and when we see her next in the main books. While it does have some character growth for Jasnah, it was not my favorite short story. A lot of action happens off screen (which is played for laughs), but almost achieves the platonic ideal of journey over destination. It’s so much about the journey that we mostly only see her while journeying after having done some cool stuff in some city (which we hear snippets of). It left me with the feeling of seeing a scene that was cut from a movie after which I would say, “Yeah…that didn’t need to be in the movie.”

I used to love the Pocast Go Time, especially when they would venture into general tech topics. A couple years ago, the podcast ended and some of the hosts formed a new podcast called Fallthrough. They have covered AI extensively over the past few months in a very logical, thought-out manner. These episodes have been transformative in my understanding of how those of us in the tech world should be thinking about AI. The hosts themselves have changed their opinion from completely dismissing AI in programming to using it extensively in their careers. Each host and/or guest on the show has been very thoughtful in the way they use the technology, recognizing its benefits and pitfalls. I highly recommend the episode with Bill Kennedy as one of the most influential episodes in changing how I understand how to use AI when programming. Combining what I’ve heard in those episodes with what I learned in a class I took on TalkPython Training, I’ve been trying to think through how I can make use of AI to make my life better - the same way I solve problems in my life through writing my own programs, bash scripts, etc. (This is not to ignore the issues with AI, including data center power/space/cooling/water issues, but there are many things I use in the world that have problematic issues - such as technology or clothing that is probably at least somewhere in the supply chain involving slave labor or other unsavory practices or environmental issues)

It’s pretty rare for me to find an anthology in which I love every story, but this one really hit it out of the park! Here are my per-story reviews:

Intro: Getting Martha Wells to write the intro is an amazing get! She also does a great job pointing out what we are saying about ourselves (humanity) with our AI/robot stories. (Mostly related to slavery) It reminds me A LOT about recent discourse about alien invasion narratives and what that says about collective guilt about colonialism. Brilliant intro and it resonates even more in 2026.