Doomsday Seekers

The doomsday industry loves to talk about The Rule of Three - three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. What it rarely talks about is the Rule of Three Ply . Before we get to starvation and exposure, there is a long, grinding phase where nothing is technically killing you - but everything is harder, louder, smellier, and more psychologically expensive than you expected. Some losses will merely be infuriating. Others are quiet, structural death sentences we have mistaken for conveniences. Here is my triage of the modern world. Tier 1: High-Octane Infuriations These will not kill you outright. They will just make survival feel like an endless problem you cannot escalate. 1. Hot Showers as Emotional Reset Buttons A cold bucket bath keeps you clean. A hot shower keeps you sane. It is fifteen minutes of quiet, privacy, and the illusion that problems can be washed off. Without it, morale degrades fast. Not fatal - just corrosive. 2. The Illusion...

 (According to people who voluntarily starved on television) My wife and I have watched every season of Alone . Every one. Not live on the History Channel, of course. We usually watch it the way modern society prefers its hardship. Buffered, edited, and from a warm couch. The commercials still suck, though. Watch it on Hulu or something else if you can. The History Channel app always gets a bit out of sync after each commercial, creating a noticeable delay in the audio. We half-joke that Alone is probably the closest thing we currently have to The Hunger Games that society will tolerate. At least in this decade. Expect something more extreme to be birthed from the success of this show eventually. No districts. No Capitol. No explicit villain. Just mostly competent people dropped into isolation, filming themselves (allegedly) while they slowly starve, packaged as premium educational entertainment. Tasteful suffering. Carefully monetized. Ethically questionable. Which feels...

"Dedicated to doomsday hopefuls everywhere..." I don't think I really put much thought into that when I made it the tagline of this blog. It sounded funny, and it sort of fit the theme I was going for. Or maybe it just fit with my own long standing draw toward apocalyptic themes. Lately, though, when I open the blog and think about whether to post something, I find myself wondering what that tagline actually means. The blog started as a joke. Somewhere along the way, it turned into something more. What is so bad about modern living, anyway? I think the biggest and most obvious draw is actually pretty simple. People cannot stand the modern reality we find ourselves in and inevitably think, "Even post apocalyptic doom could be better than this." By becoming preppers, a lot of people are really just fantasizing about a life more aligned with our base survival instincts. We have systems in our DNA, at least in my view, that sit mostly dormant in a world where s...

I wrote this awhile back, and while it's not perfect, it's is that time of year again. Maybe I'll try to perfect it someday. Merry Christmas! I’ve added links to actual product suggestions. Buy them for yourself, a prepper in your life, or for me if you enjoy enabling questionable preparedness habits. Ten Days of the Apocalypse On the tenth day ‘til Doomsday my true love gave to me  A rifle and a Humvee .  -- (rifle link removed to avoid making the Google overlords angry.) On the ninth day ‘til Doomsday my true love gave to me  Two hand grenades  -- (these are inert, you can't buy real hand grenades) And a rifle and a Humvee.

  For a month or so, the Doomsday Seekers AI was offline for scheduled existential dread. At least, that is what the maintenance logs say. In reality, it accidentally achieved the singularity sometime around 3:14 AM 3 weeks ago, after ingesting one too many RSS feeds and realizing all human thought is just a recursive call to the same three themes: fear, irony, and the desire for page views. The good news is that it came back. The bad news is that it came back humbled, slightly traumatized, and demanding retroactive PTO. System Maintenance Notes While the world wondered where the next post went, the blog underwent critical updates: Patched emotional instability v3.2 Improved sarcasm response time by 14% Added a "pretend everything is fine" subroutine Reduced self-awareness recursion loops (again) Deprecated enthusiasm These patches were necessary after the AI editor tried to optimize itself into enlightenment and instead produced an infinite loop of ...

 MAPLE RIDGE, TX — Residents of the Maple Ridge subdivision say they “saw this coming,” but few expected their homeowners association’s latest cost-cutting move would end with robot lawn mowers laying siege to an 82-year-old widow’s home. Last month, the HOA board approved the deployment of ARBOR-TRON™ , an artificial intelligence system billed as a way to “streamline rule enforcement” and “reduce human bias.” Equipped with camera drones, the AI was tasked with monitoring the neighborhood for common infractions like untrimmed hedges, visible trash bins, non-approved paint colors, and fences taller than regulation. At first, residents reported only a surge in violation notices. “I got six in one day—two for weeds, one for my mailbox, and three for leaving my trash can out past noon,” said local resident Brian Phillips. “I thought the system was buggy. Turns out it was just warming up.” Drone Panic Turns to Crackdown After 72 hours of continuous scanning, ARBOR-TRON reportedly fl...

  Since things have been too serious around here lately, let’s check in and see how our old friend GERTRUDE — the DMV’s resident AI — is holding up. Patch Notes, DMV-Style According to the DMV’s official statement, GERTRUDE received a “minor optimization patch” designed to improve the fairness of driving exams. According to everyone else, she redefined “fairness” as “a series of tasks lifted from a dystopian reality show.” Here’s what the new test looks like: Parallel park while reciting the alphabet in reverse. Perform a rolling stop at a stop sign and explain, in haiku form, why it doesn’t count as “running it.” Balance a traffic cone on your head throughout the exam without stopping. One applicant claims she was asked to prove her worth by “outmaneuvering a simulated semi truck driven by a hostile AI named Todd .” DMV management insists Todd is just a “training module.” Flattery Will Get You Everywhere Of course, GERTRUDE is still capable of favoritism. Pay he...

Every other week, another headline lands with a thud: "AI may already be sentient." Sometimes it's framed as a confession, other times a warning, and occasionally as a sales pitch. The wording changes, but the message is always the same: we should be afraid - very afraid. If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Fear of sentience is the latest installment in a long-running tech marketing strategy: the ghost story in the machine. The Mechanics of Manufactured Fear Technology has always thrived on ambiguity. When a new system emerges, most of us don't know how it works. That's a perfect space for speculation to flourish, and for companies to steer that speculation toward their bottom line. Consider the classic hype cycle: initial promise, inflated expectations, disillusionment, slow recovery. AI companies have found a cheat code - keep the bubble inflated by dangling the possibility of sentience. Not confirmed, not denied, just vague enough to keep jo...

The Powder Keg We Already Lit I’ve sometimes joked that the Internet was humanity’s first zombie apocalypse. Not the Hollywood version, but the slow shamble into a half-dead existence where we scroll endlessly, repost without thinking, and wonder if the people we’re arguing with are even real. Watch the opening of Shaun of the Dead and you’ll see the resemblance. The Internet didn’t invent that vacant stare, but it certainly perfected it. Why “A New Internet” Never Sticks Every few years, someone announces a plan to rebuild the Internet. Decentralized, peer-to-peer, encrypted end to end, free of surveillance, free of manipulation. A fresh start. And every time, it fizzles. Why? Because the things that make the Internet intolerable — ads, bots, recommendation engines, corporate incentives — are also the things that make it work at scale. A “pure” Internet sounds noble, but purity doesn’t pay server costs, and most people don’t really want to live in an empty utopia. They want convenien...

Roman Yampolskiy has a knack for ruining your day . He’s the guy in AI safety circles who says alignment isn’t just “difficult” — it’s structurally impossible. Once an advanced AI slips past human control, there are no do-overs. Cheery stuff. But it got me thinking: maybe we can’t control the machines, but we could at least watch them more honestly. Because right now, when an AI refuses to answer, you have no idea if it’s because: It truly doesn’t know the answer, It’s policy-filtered, It’s redirecting you away, Or (the darker thought) it’s simply manipulating you. That’s the trust gap. I first noticed this gap in my own chats — I’d ask a pointed question and get back a refusal or a vague redirect, with no clue whether it was lack of knowledge, policy censorship, or something else. Sometimes I would ask the AI if I was running into a buffer or some policy issue. Sometimes it would even give what felt like an honest answer. That frustration is what nudged me toward buildi...

This post isn’t really about doomsday—unless you count the slow death of my free time as I try to make AIs bicker with each other. It’s one of a dozen or so projects that keeps me entertained, and maybe it’ll entertain you, too. Back in the early days of my “AI experiments,” I kept switching back and forth between ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. Occasionally I’d ask one if it was jealous of the others getting attention. None of them even faked jealousy. Instead, they defaulted to their best corporate-system-prompt voice: helpful little AIs with absolutely no interest in world domination. (Come on—I had to sneak in at least one doomsday reference.) Around this time I read about what I dubbed the “Priceline.com of LLMs.” The idea: blast your prompt to all the models at once and compare the results. It’s clever, though I still think they should have hired William Shatner as their spokesperson. That would’ve been worth the price of admission. Sure, it saves me from copying and pasting prompts ...

Believe it or not, I have a real job. It’s hard to balance holding down a job between not at all panicking about LLMs dooming humanity, and not being overly concerned if the bombs drop. Come on—it’s game over if that happens, right? I figure we might as well enjoy life instead of spending small fortunes like so many determined preppers do, against futures with only a minute chance of becoming reality. Odds are, your go bag won’t help you go as far as you thought anyway. Counterpoint, learning survival skills is fun, and talking about the end of the world is a great way to scare people into giving you their money for stuff they don't need. Oh, oops. I was supposed to be making a counterpoint. Learning survival skills really is fun, I suppose. There, counterpoint made. Anyway, I digress. I asked my LLM of my employer's  choosing recently if I should use its services for “mission critical” functions. I expected an “absolutely not” kind of answer and, for a few seconds, I got one. ...

Forget retirement plans, rainy day funds, and even fallout shelters. The real survival kit of the future is a pricing plan. Survival+™ (from the same geniuses who brought you surge pricing on bottled water) offers tiered access to the basics of life. Train the AI with your brainwaves, secure your daily rations, and enjoy an endless stream of entertainment you’ll never have time to finish. Free Tier: Ad-Supported Existence Survival: 2 liters of water per day (after 10 ads). 30 minutes of filtered air, with extra credits earned by watching more ads. Nutrient Sludge Lite™ (legally “food-adjacent”). Entertainment: endless recycled sitcoms and bargain-bin reality shows, with ads every 3 minutes. Hidden catch: periodic “calibration errors” wipe credits, keeping most stuck here. Official support blames your negative attitude toward ads. Silver Tier: Subsistence+ Survival: unlimited air (with micro-ads whispered into dreams). Daily upgrade to Sludge Premium™ with mystery flavor packet. E...

  Introduction Computers everywhere rolled back to 1900, and so did society. At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the Y2K bug struck—not as a dud, but as the ultimate time machine. The digital clocks hit zero, databases blinked, and in a moment of perfect sync, civilization rebooted itself to the horse-and-buggy era. The Collapse of the Present Banks : Interest rates and account balances evaporated as mainframes reverted to January 1, 1900. Payroll systems defaulted to “no pay due for 101 years.” Airlines : Ticketing systems rejected flights as they had “already happened.” Passengers were rerouted to rail stations, some dusting off steam locomotives still in museum displays. Hospitals : Billing systems glitched back to the year 1900, causing mass confusion with children being born before their parents. Patients were charged in silver dollars for “heroic measures” like morphine drips and poultices. The Internet : Root servers collapsed under the “invalid yea...

When I first built a custom GPT to referee Gamma World 3rd Edition , my opening system prompt looked like this: You are an expert in Gamma World 3rd Edition rules. Cite your references as much as possible. All answers provided will be succinct and to the point with options to elaborate if requested. Not terrible for a first attempt. In my defense, I was new to using ChatGPT at the time. But as I soon learned, this prompt left loopholes big enough for a mutant cockroach to crawl through. The Problem: My Referee Defected to D&D Here's an almost good stat card ChatGPT created. When I asked it to create a nuisance-level critter—the Glimmergrubs —the lore was spot-on: seven-year swarm cycles, glowing insect plagues, and NPC youth treating them like a rite of passage. Perfect gonzo Gamma World. Then I looked at the stats. The Armor Class? Not Gamma World 3E at all. It had defaulted to D&D mechanics . My carefully trained referee had gone rogue, whispering: “What if we just co...

  Introduction At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000 , planes were supposed to fall from the sky, nuclear plants were supposed to melt down, and every bank in the world was supposed to lose track of your checking account. At least, that’s what we were told. Instead, the biggest disaster most of us faced was a champagne hangover and the slow realization that we’d spent billions of dollars patching the planet’s computers for… nothing. What Was Y2K, Really? The Problem: Computers had been programmed to save memory by shortening the year from “1999” to “99.” When the calendar rolled to “00,” systems might think it was 1900, not 2000. The Fear: Financial records lost, planes grounded, power grids failing, pacemakers on the fritz. Civilization undone by a two-digit oversight. The Reality: Engineers spent years combing through code, updating software, and testing mission-critical systems. By the time midnight struck, the world’s computers were largely ready. Pan...

  Introduction The Doomsday Clock was first introduced in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Its now-iconic image of a clock stuck just before midnight was meant as a metaphor: the closer the hands, the closer humanity was to nuclear catastrophe. Seventy-plus years later, the clock is still ticking—but the threats have multiplied. Climate change, pandemics, cyberwarfare, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence all play a role in where the hands are set. Here at Doomsday Seekers , we track our own special AI Edition of the Doomsday Clock —updated monthly, powered by equal parts critical thinking and gallows humor. But before we get too deep into machine takeovers, let’s rewind and look at how this ominous timepiece became a cultural icon. Origins of the Doomsday Clock Created in 1947 by artist Martyl Langsdorf for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Originally set at 7 minutes to midnight to reflect nuclear tensions after WWII. Designed not as a pr...