Reuse Before Recycle

I started wondering, out of the blue, which years had the same calendar as this year.

Huh! Do I have any calendars from any of those years, then? And more importantly, can I actually find any of them?

YES!!! YES!!!!!

And the Lynda Barry ‘n’ Matt Groening Funky World Fun Calendar 1987 was already made with re-use in mind: It says “also good for the years 1998 and 2009”, but they didn’t think far enough ahead.

So now I’m all set for this year.

Random Comics

I’ve barely read any comics lately (because, er, I’ve been reading comics), so I think these are the ones I’ve read over the last month or so? Unheard of!

Cathon’s Pineapples of Wrath is very amusing.

I love her cartooning — it’s just extremely appealing.

And the story is loopy in a satisfactory way. Class.

I’ve read most of this stuff before in a couple of small-press books from Adam Szym.

It’s still scary!

The new piece is the most complex one of them all, and it really works — it’s unnerving and mysterious and you don’t quite know where this all is going, even though it relies on common tropes as “nerdy put-upon boy spirals” and “lizard/corn people from space” with some Charles Burns-ey sexual ick dynamics. But that lizard/corn thing… Szym’s art chops aren’t quite up to doing what he wants to do — I found myself confused at points just because I didn’t know which character I was looking at, or whether Szym was trying to tell us that all these people were really made from corn. Or something.

But still, very entertaining.

I think this one landed on all of those Best of 2025 lists?

And I’ve enjoyed his previous books, so I thought I’d like this one, too. It’s quite traditional — we have a wise-ass main character who’s sent back in time to view historical events and Learn A Lesson. And I think those parts mostly work.

But it still comes off as relentlessly didactic, and I lost interest about one third through. Perhaps it’ll do great in high school history class, if there is such a thing still? The current US regime may have banned them for all I know…

I didn’t much care for Mimi Pond’s latest book (also on all the Best of 2025 lists), and for much the same reason. But this is from 2014. And I somehow missed it the first time around, but I definitely read the followup.

And it’s just great — it’s funny, it’s touching, and it really feels like you’re getting an insightful account of an interesting time and place.

I really like the artwork and the storytelling, too. I just smiled the entire time I was reading this.

Yes! I got caught up on about two or three months worth of serial comics.

I quite like The Mortal Thor, even though it seems to be getting lost in the weeds by issue four already — the series started off without much context, with this Norwegian guy with amnesia, but we’re starting to get infodump upon infodump of what’s been going on over 60 years of Thor continuity, and that shit’s deadly.

The Black Cat is pretty amusing, too, even though the artwork is so Marvel standard. It’s hard to work up all that much enthusiasm, because it’s Marvel, so of course it’s going to get cancelled in a couple issues. That’s it with Marvel: If they’ve got something good going, it’s either going to be cancelled or they’re going to run it into the ground with some lame crossover event or other. All these perfect jumping-off-points…

And I got the final batches of the Age of Revelation issues — that I bought by mistake because the web interface on G-Mart is so confusing.

But I continue to be surprised at how non-awful these books are. And they all have kinda-sorta proper endings, too.

But of course, there’s duds, too.

Finally, I got caught up on my Spirou abonnement. I’m trying to trick myself into learning French by having this weekly deadline of books that I have to read unless I want them to stack up.

This batch, though, has some really good pieces, like the Seccotine thing.

The biggest news is the Attila serial, which is just hilarious. It’s about Attila the Hun, but as he’s running a camp and taking care of various annoying things that happen there.

And also lots of other funny stuff.

And that’s it? That’s not a lot for a month. I must step up my comics reading!

C’mon, Jimmy: Yet another tale of LLM disappointment

Yesterday, there was an intriguing announcement about an inference card that’s, er, basically 100x faster than ChatGPT. As a hackernews said:

I often remind people two orders of quantitative change is a qualitative change.

Which is true — speed matters. So I went to check out chat Jimmy, and gave it my standard LLM question:

And started looking for those books… which mostly were hallucinated. Very 2023. When I finally scrolled down to ask “er, what?”, I saw:

Oh.

Oh.

OK, I get it — it’s llama 8B, and it has no particular knowledge of anything, so all it can do is output fantasies. You need to hook it up to something that knows something about the area you’re interested in to get it to do something useful. And it is indeed very fast:

So this is not really interesting in and of itself — this is the expected result, but it just lines up with, basically, every single time I’ve tried to use an LLM for something useful after reading some hype. My previous attempt was yesterday, when I hooked up an LLM to a RAG that had ingested 1 million fanzine pages about comics, and the results were pretty unimpressive — it’s no more than a really bad search engine that’s able to form English-sounding sentences.

It’s just… I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a disconnect between the relentless hype — not just on Twitter, but in the press, and from every CEO of every major company: LLMs aren’t just going to be transformative in the future, they’re absolutely essential to use now, right now, at this very minute… and then I try to use them for something, and what I end up with is basically an unreliable toy. And one that’s very expensive to use.

(I had one LLM success story I used to tell so that I wouldn’t sound like a luddite fighting against windmills: “I had a 200 line Javascript package that used jQuery, and I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it to use standard Javascript, and it worked on the first try!” But then, after being in production for some weeks, I noticed that I wasn’t getting one particular (rarer) event… and looked at the code, and saw that it mostly worked (for the main event) by accident, and not at all for the side case.)

(OK, OK, LLMs are really good for OCR, I’ll give them that…)

There is pushback like the above, but it’s still mind-blowing how people are letting hucksters like this set the agenda:

People are buying Mac Minis so that they can run something that queries the Anthropic API? Whyyye!? (And if they’re running local models, they need a beefier GPU.) But it makes total sense that it’s the people who lost their money on NFTs that are spearheading this revolution.

At least we get some comedy out of all of this.

It’s not unlikely that these technologies will be actually useful and more reliable at some point in the future. Q1 2026 is not that time, and there is still no hurry to jump on any bandwagon: Experimenting with it now is a waste of time and money.

There’s no hurry. You’re not missing out on anything. Relax.

If (or when) this technology matures, you can start using it then. Isn’t that the hook here? This stuff is going to be so intelligent that you don’t have to know anything about anything? Right? So you don’t have to start learning now.