https://signalthroughstatic.cc/casefiles/incident-response/Recent content in Incident-Response on Signal Through StaticHugoen© 2026 S. Caronia / J. Miller · <a href="https://github.com/josephusm/blog/blob/main/LICENSE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY-NC-SA 4.0</a> · <a href="https://github.com/josephusm/blog/blob/main/COPYRIGHT" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Copyright</a>Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://signalthroughstatic.cc/signals/the-second-hallucination/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://signalthroughstatic.cc/signals/the-second-hallucination/<p>When a language model invents a fact, the first question is obvious: what is true?</p> <p>The second arrives wearing a lab coat: why did the model do it?</p> <p>Ask the machine that just failed and it may provide a plausible, technical cause, neatly shaped like closure. It may also be a second hallucination.</p> <p>We distrust unsupported answers. We are less disciplined with unsupported post-mortems.</p> <h2 id="a-cause-is-another-claim">A cause is another claim</h2> <p>A model says that it confused two names because they appeared near each other in training. Or that a tool call failed because a rate limit was reached. Or that missing context caused it to infer the wrong event. Each explanation has the texture of mechanism.</p>