collection
Skyreader Saves
- 01
Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals
Solving the distribution crisis in marketing
- 02
Why Are LLMs Smart?
A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence.
- 03
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From AGI to ASI
Abstract page for arXiv paper 2606.12683: From AGI to ASI
- 05
A Camera, Not an Engine II
Further thoughts on photography in latent space, now with agents!
- 06
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications
- 07
Import AI 462: Superpersuasion; self-sustaining AI; paths to ASI
How religious are beliefs in the singularity?
- 08
GLM-5.2 Is The New Best Open Model
GLM-5.2 arrived last week.
- 09
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Agentic AI gets lost
On the failure of AI to develop world models
- 11
Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake
This post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience.
- 12
Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: Capabilities
Only three days after the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic was forced by the United States Government to make it unavailable, when a jailbreak was brought to its attention, rather than the previous situation of ‘yes obviously experts can jailbreak anything if they care enough’ and ‘yes obviously you can ask Fable to fix your code.’
- 13
The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy
Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the […]
- 14
This 1986 Japanese adventure game showing up on Steam in 2026 guarantees it makes my GOTY list—you've really got to play it
Relics doesn't belong in a museum: it belongs on your PC.
- 15
There Are No Instances in atproto
Like RSS and Google Reader.
- 16
Leviathan Waking
On Anthropic/USG, and a new era in AI governance
- 17
The Once And Future Fable #3: Fix This Code
The mainstream media continues to sleep on the most important story in the world.
- 18
State of the blog, mid-2026
About 3 years since I started writing weekly.
- 19
FR#167 - Change
On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.
- 20
AI #173: AI Pauses
A lot of things are always happening.
- 21
co/core — an AI cooperative
A design rationale for the cocore token market — what each mechanic does, why it's there, what we deliberately left out, and how the whole thing stays honest.
- 22
Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
- 23
Comments are a basic web feature. So why aren’t they solved on ATProto yet?
Comments are about as old and basic as the social web gets, so I assumed ATProto would have them figured out. It doesn’t, not yet. Here is my take on why standard.site deferred comments on pu…
- 24
Running local models is good now
Local agentic coding has gotten great over the past few months
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Matthew Butterick | Extinction-level capitalism
Matthew Butterick
- 29
Report on the State of Reports About The Humanities
Of A Certain Kind of Report, At Least
- 30
The MAGA power struggle that could decide the fate of Anthropic
It may not be easy for Anthropic to escape the Trump export ban.
- 31
I Love the Computer
An exploration of how I became a massive geek.
- 32
Conscious or Not
For as long as I remember, people have been arguing about whether machines could be intelligent or not.
- 33
Cuck Internet Theory
a confession
- 34
The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust
Trump and Big Tech have fused into a new kind of threat
- 35
Import AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns
Where are your agents right now?
- 36
The Once And Future Fable #2
On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos.
- 37
#773: Regressing to the mean
Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor
- 38
Welcome to the AGI era of AI governance
It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it.
- 39
Formal methods and the future of programming
I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.
- 40
The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
- 41
The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about the protocols, federations, and quiet machinery underneath everything you actually use.
- 42
American Government Takes Down Claude Fable
No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday.
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Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
- 45
The Big Man
Elizabeth Maher's world-building series continues, reimagining American folklore from a protocolized perspective
- 46
Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: The System Card
First things first: Claude Fable 5 is the new best publicly available model.
- 47
Academia: What Was "Digital Literacy"?
Short Shelf Lives Make For Bad Curricular Planning
- 48
Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but…
- 49
Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIa: Mobilization without Administration
This is the second part (I, IIa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. While I hope this will be of great interest to the history nerds out there, I’ve opted to structure this specifically as a service for the worldbuilders out … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/06/12/collections-pre-modern-armies-for-worldbuilders-part-iia-mobilization-without-administration/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIa: Mobilization without Administration</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
- 50
The world’s first trillionaire is a killer
Elon Musk’s empire of wealth is built on suffering.
- 51
Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
- 52
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[AINews] Loopcraft: The Art of Stacking Loops
a quiet day lets us highlight a great concept from Peter Steinberger, Boris Cherny, and Andrej Karpathy
- 54
What would Muskism be without Musk?
The mode of production behind the man
- 55
Vivek (@itsreallyvivek) on X
the anthropic co-founder jack clark advice that stuck with me: read the primary material. not the summary. not what the ai said about it. the actual thing. form your own opinion first. then ask the model. never the other way around. keep practices in your life where it’s just
- 56
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My AI Opinions
...
- 58
AI #172: The First Fable
A lot happened this week, including a great trip out to Lighthaven.
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Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
- 60
How I fought my registered agent over my domain and won
My registered agent tried to charge me an illegal transfer fee. Here's how I got my AuthInfo code anyway
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Beneath The Enshittification, Something Amazing Is Growing
Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It’s just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put […]
- 63
AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
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Anthropic has caught up to OpenAI in image understanding
But neither one is all that good.
- 65
It's not enough to have better ideals.
You also need to build a better product.
- 66
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How I Learned to Read Way, Way More
I had to rethink my relationship to attention
- 68
Apple’s Siri-AI, or more shouting into the void about “private” agents
Yesterday Apple announced a big step towards deploying real AI in their Siri ecosystem. In most ways this is good and inevitable: Siri is one of the world’s most widely-used voice agents, and it would be good if it didn’t suck. The idea that Apple would boost its capabilities with frontier models wasn’t so much … <a href="https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/06/09/apples-siri-ai-or-more-shouting-into-the-void-about-private-agents/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Apple’s Siri-AI, or more shouting into the void about “private” agents</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
- 69
Three Labs With a Plan and A Memorandum
The big story today is the release of Claude Fable 5, the version of Claude Mythos that Anthropic believes they can safely distribute to the people.
- 70
Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables
One step further into the power politics of frontier AI systems.
- 71
Google Search Changed: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AI Search
Google Search is not longer about indexing the web, it's about being an AI assistant.
- 72
Challenges: Trivial, Grand, and Whitehead
Introducing the Protocol Institute Challenges program
- 73
Standardizing Bookmarks in the Atmosphere
a mini proposal for a shared bookmark lexicon
- 74
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Change Agent
The journey of a thousand miles begins…with having some idea of where you ought to go.
- 76
My Students Can’t Read
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
- 77
Punk is anti-AI
How to make human punk
- 78
What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human
Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, joys and sorrows.
- 79
Import AI 460: Reward hacking society, RSI data from Anthropic; and RL-based quadcopter racing
When will markets price the singularity?
- 80
Flashcards as Notes
Effortful reading habits and resisting the urge to defer attention
- 81
FR#162 – EU Regulation Won’t Save Open Social Networks
The European Commission has decided not to extend the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules to social media, closing off a potential pathway for adoption for open social networks.
- 82
A simple trick to fix the data center debate
Remove the status quo bias by asking "would we spend this much in tax revenue to avoid the externalities of the data center?"
- 83
Mindmap June 6, 2026
Stuff I'm thinking about
- 84
The Peripheral
William Gibson's best novel tells us a lot about where we are and where we might end up.
- 85
Permissioned Data Diary 6: Boring Auth
In which we resist the temptation to invent a clever authorization model & pick the boring one instead.
- 86
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.
- 87
New 60 Minutes Boss Only Lasts 15 Minutes
Give him the business, Scotty.
- 88
AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy (xpost)
Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. There is a way to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.. Xposted from substack. I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they […]
- 89
Claude Opus 4.8: Capabilities and Reactions
You need a lot of data points to understand a new model, and what you have.
- 90
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #63
The many interesting things I read in May 2026
- 91
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI
- 92
We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one.…
- 93
Open and closed models are on different exponentials
Where marginally higher intelligence drives value, and where it doesn't.
- 94
Import AI 459: AI oversight is difficult; scaling laws for protein folding models; and pricing the extinction risk of AI systems
Do you feel as though you are living in a revolution?
- 95
The internet's favorite horror subgenre is breaking into the big time
Backrooms brings liminal horror to the masses, and with it, a generation looking for a past that might not exist.
- 96
Everlane and the Death of the “Good” Millennial Life-Style Brand
The retailer once embodied a hope that clothes could be mass-manufactured and high-quality. Now it’s owned by the fast-fashion giant Shein. Kyle Chayka writes.
- 97
music hardware is a fashion accessory
why is everyone obsessed with audio hardware now?
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local git remotes — alexander cobleigh
How to backup with git using machines you have at home
- 100
Claude Opus 4.8: The System Card
Only six weeks after Opus 4.7, we have Opus 4.8.
- 101
Who Is Nick Bilton?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton just sent me a telegram from hell that says: “WOW THIS GUY SUCKS AT WRITING STOP.”
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A Cascade of Conscientiousness
Launching FAI's new Physical Intelligence Project
- 104
OpenAI’s math breakthrough played to AI’s strengths
I explain OpenAI’s math breakthrough more clearly than OpenAI did.
- 105
AI #170: Lack of Executive Order
Last week ended on a cliffhanger of sorts.
- 106
Choosing to Stay Human
If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other:
- 107
We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.
- 108
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [ Multimedia ] ___________________________
- 109
Import AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story
What AI-driven miracles will happen this year?
- 110
RTMH: Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas on AI
His holiness has spoken, frequently about AI.
- 111
AI Isn't Management. Try Explaining That to Matthew Prince
At last we have created the Corporation That Eliminates Middle Managers from classic management text Don't Eliminate the Middle Managers!
- 112
Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026
Gemini Flash 3.5, Mythos, open-closed balance, America's open-source surge, emerging power struggles and more.
- 113
Agents want flexible schemas
The NoSQL comeback nobody saw coming
- 114
Suburbanasia
The environment younger Millennials and older Gen-Z grew up in withered away their ability to mitigate stress and handle disagreements. Is there any way to fix it?
- 115
Commodity Intelligence
The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error
- 116
Planescape: Torment, Part 1: From the Tabletop…
This article tells part of the general story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers, which includes the more specific one of the Infinity Engine games. My power fantasy when playing a role-playing game is to confront a villain, explain point by point why his master plan is flawed, and then get […]
- 117
Many Act 2 Games are Afoot
Protocol Institute, Long Now Labs, Strange Rules art show, vgr_zirp update, World Machines, TensTorrent
- 118
Graph Minds Notebook
A series about hive minds, Borgs, egregores, and other emergent beasts
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AI #169: New Knowledge
Even in a relatively quiet period, AI is out there creating new knowledge.
- 122
Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
Let’s not skip the hard work of AI governance
- 123
A history of the data center panic - part 1
Pre-ChatGPT and the creation of common wisdom
- 124
AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome
Public trust in AI is already deteriorating. Execs' rhetorical focus on capital-H Humanity over real people isn't helping. I call it Dr. Manhattan Syndrome—and the nuclear industry already showed us how it ends.
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Import AI 457: AI stuxnet; cursed Muon optimizer; and positive alignment
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research.
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Capital Must Seek Delight
Too few people are experiencing the delights and serendipity of AI, causing capital misallocation
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The Transformation of Documents: Repositories Are the New Unit of Knowledge Work
<div><img width="300" height="65" src="https://blog.sigplan.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/end-of-docs-April2026-v4-300x65.png" class="attachment-medium size-medium wp-post-image" alt="" style="margin-bottom:15px;margin-left:15px;float:right;" decoding="async" /></div>How will documents evolve when AI agents become ubiquitous? In a world of AI agents, does the repository become the source of truth—where humans declare intent, agents turn it into executable artifacts, and documents represent a targeted view of something more powerful?
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Arbiter Progress Report 1
Lots of implementation progress & lots of discussion with the community.
- 133
Why AI Makes Things Worse for Enterprise Teams
Why are so few engineering teams reaping the benefits of AI? On this week’s episode, Paul presents Rich with the findings from a recent report from CircleCI and Thoughtworks on the productivity of enterprise teams using LLMs. While there’s been a dramatic increase in throughput—the amount of code produced—across the board, just 5% of orgs are seeing real gains from these tools, while the majority struggle with errors, bugs, and lower productivity than before AI was introduced. As Paul puts it: “The advantages of this technology are not equally distributed.”
- 134
A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI
One estimate suggests that OpenAI has about as much compute as the entire Chinese AI industry.
- 135
The best argument I’ve heard for why AI won't take your job
In the first episode of the Platformer podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie makes the case that you'll keep your job — but soon, you might not recognize it
- 136
Childhood And Education #17: Is Our Children Reading
Reading is the most fundamental thing in education.
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How AI Madness Helped Fuel DOGE
Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
- 138
Inventing New Nature
Defining the Protocol Institute's research mission
- 139
Neural Computer: A New Machine Form Is Emerging
A research essay on Neural Computer: how it differs from agents, world models, and conventional computers; what runtime and CNC would mean; what current prototypes already show; and how software and hardware might change.
- 140
Quoting Andrew Quinn
<blockquote cite="https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/replacing-a-3-gb-sqlite-database-with-a-7-mb-fst-finite-state-trandsucer-binary/#fn:5"><p>One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about <code>awk</code> and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that <em>this is a trap</em>. You <em>need</em> to reinvent a couple of wheels to get to the edge of what we know about wheel-making, not a thousand wheels, and not zero; probably four or five is sufficient in most domains, maybe closer to twenty or thirty in the most epistemically rigorous and developed fields like mathematics or computer science. Each wheel you reinvent, and every directed question you ask along the way, will propel you faster to the true frontier than that same amount of time spend in idle study, or even five times that amount.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">— <a href="https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/replacing-a-3-gb-sqlite-database-with-a-7-mb-fst-finite-state-trandsucer-binary/#fn:5">Andrew Quinn</a>, footnote on Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/careers">careers</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/sqlite">sqlite</a></p>
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Cosmik Updates: April 2026
Connections feature launched; "Sense is being made"
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#769: Nothing you see online is true
Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups
- 143
The Inference Shift
Agentic inference is going to be different than the inference we use today, and it will change compute infrastructure because speed won't matter when humans aren't involved.
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Import AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computer
What laws does superintelligence demand?
- 145
The Key to Act Two
How do you top life rules ? With a life script, that's how. Here's an absolutely minimalist 2-step one. Guaranteed to work for 90% of humanity. Across all…
- 146
Ribbonfarm Resurrected
As a museum blog with an AI curator that is
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How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale
How OpenAI rebuilt its WebRTC stack to power real-time Voice AI with low latency, global scale, and seamless conversational turn-taking.
- 149
Dopefish
Ploopy has launched the bean.
- 150
Permissioned Data Diary 5: What’s in a Name?
In this permissioned data diary, we dive deep into the URI structure for permissioned data on atproto and use it to motivate a bunch of the larger design.
- 151
Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #8
When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents.
- 152
Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?
Jay Caspian Kang writes that more and more families may decided that college isn’t worth the cost, amid the rise of A.I. and easily found information.
- 153
What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?
Jessica Winter on the increasing use of A.I. in schools, including Google’s and Anthropic’s forays into education.
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Notes from inside China's AI labs
Lessons from my trip to talk to most of the leading AI labs in China.
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'The Drama' and the microgenerational digital divide
PLUS: The "forklift model" of A.I. education
- 157
What is Anthropic?
What is Anthropic?
- 158
How Socialist were the National Socialists? Part 2
The Nazi Economy
- 159
I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists”
Today's AI agents are not designed to extract deep insights from new observations.
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Aviate, Navigate, Communicate
What to do about Mythos
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Import AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves.
The first step towards recursive self improvement
- 162
The distillation panic
‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now.
- 163
Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method
The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.
- 164
High Throughput, Low Completion
I have never been someone who organises things. I have a great memory and a high tolerance for ambiguity, and I evolved to match the era of the internet where searching things by keyword was sufficient. I documented, extensively. But I did not really organize. Not myself, nor – despite my job – other people. […]
- 165
How Socialist were the National Socialists? Part 1
An Endless "Debate"
- 166
Data center land use issues are fake
We have plenty of land, data centers provide more revenue per unit area than any other building, and we should have way less farmland
- 167
Getting Gooier
How AI is transforming humans
- 168
Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud
Well-regarded non-profit runs domestic intelligence agency; distributes intelligence product; achieves adoption in financial infrastructure; recruits agents and allies; intervenes against U.S. political fundraising.
- 169
People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art
A Read Max re-run
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Our Future Is Being Devoured By Feral Thought Experiments
Here's a chance to start taking it back.
- 172
AI #166: Google Sells Out
This was the week of GPT-5.5.
- 173
Agent Memory Patterns
A short HOW TO guide for agent memory systems. Especially the difference between blocks, files and skills.
- 174
GPT-5.5: Capabilities and Reactions
The system card for GPT-5.5 mostly told us what we expected.
- 175
Who Asked For This?
<p>Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: “Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.” “Within ... <a title="Who Asked For This?" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/who-asked-for-this/" aria-label="Read more about Who Asked For This?">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/who-asked-for-this/">Who Asked For This?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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GPT 5.5: The System Card
Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-5.5, including GPT-5.5-Pro.
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Our Uncertain Uncertainties
Even the experts inventing AI don’t know what will happen next.
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We Need Homes in the Delta Quadrant
Place is security, space is freedom. — Yi-Fu Tuan
- 180
The Cloister Web: Reshaping the Political Maidan
The advent of the "Cloister Web," a conceptual space where individuals leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to cultivate novel ideas and commit them to a persistent public memory, heralds a profound shift in our intellectual and political landscapes.
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The Octotypic Mind
Carcinization, Cognitive Prosthetics, and the Shape of Intelligence After AI
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The Cosmos and the Model
Humboldt, the Romantics, and What AI Loses by Averaging
- 183
The Lightening of Intent
Why Execution Got Cheap and Intent Got Live
- 184
The Viscous Frontier
How to Move When the Machine Stops Pulling
- 185
AI in World Machine Theory
The telos of AI is to create liveness at planetary scale
- 186
The Divergence Machine II
Progress as a non-stationary argument
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AI #165: In Our Image
This was the week of Claude Opus 4.7.
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Modeling Software With Quint - Zicklag's Leaflets
I believe having good abstractions is key to writing good code. But as a coder, I often write code in an effort to find those abstractions…
- 191
An Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian About the Agentic Moment
An interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian about Google's cloud priorities, enterprise agent platform, and Google’s integration advantage.
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Stop Begging Big Tech To Fix Your Social Media Experience. You Can Do It Yourself.
Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate. I’ve written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking […]
- 193
Opus 4.7 Part 3: Model Welfare
It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place.
- 194
Repositories Are Human/Agent Knowledge Factories
We argue that source repositories are no longer just containers for human-authored code — they are containers and generators of knowledge supporting the interaction of humans with AI agents. Taking this perspective demands that we rethink how we structure projects, write documentation, and more broadly how we rethink the entire software development process. We draw […]
- 195
Announcing: Navigating the AI Shift
For a lot of people, AI started out as a net negative. You’re reviewing documents someone couldn’t be bothered to write themselves. You’re having your time wasted by PRs generated by someone who never tried to understand the problem. The efficiency gains everyone keeps talking about haven’t really shown up in your week – but […]
- 196
AI as a Fascist Artifact
(This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which […]
- 197
Opus 4.7 Part 2: Capabilities and Reactions
Claude Opus 4.7 raises a lot of key model welfare related concerns.
- 198
The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: New Pew Study Deflates The Social Media Panic
A couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are […]
- 199
Palantir's Manifesto Is as Subtle as a MAGA Hat
Palantir's 22-point manifesto is nonsense, writes Dave Karpf. But it at least it is short enough to be clarifying, he says.
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Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake
One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster
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Agents are actors
Multi-agent is just actor model
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Deep Future
AI-driven scenario planning
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Worlding Raga: 4 - Who Worlds?
So far we’ve been discussing Worlding as an art . One that an individual creator can engage in on their own. As Venkat suggested , we are already living in an…
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#766: An AI company you can wear without socks
Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America
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Writing Liveness
The message of the medium of generated text is liveness
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Caduceus City
The appearance of a thoroughly protocolized environment is, almost, the perfect cover for dark practices.
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Have Your Factory Call My Factory
In this installment of our Obliquities editorial column, we argue that the social kernels circulating in intelligence media are the equivalent of industrial intermediates flowing between factories.
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Theorizing Protocolization II: Atomic Protocol Questions
Solving real coordination problems to discover the formal laws of protocols.
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Last-Mile Optimism
Reducing Waste. Eliminating Fraud. Promoting Civic Responsibility. At least that’s what the city bureaucrats said.
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Strangeness, Legibility, Hardness
An update from our Protocol Fiction special interest group
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A Government Guide to Open Protocols
Public sector teams must go beyond the in-house or off-the-shelf dichotomy to take advantage of open protocols, which offer a unique way to manage both software costs and geopolitical exposure
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The Faithful Channel
A translator maintaining a shadow bridge between superpowers discovers something she cannot unsee.
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The Fabric and the Brain
Articulating agent ecologies with high-personality planetary computation
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The Flesh Perfected Is the Flesh Possessed
The longest single rail line, connecting Lisbon to Laos, is the setting for a bio-thriller in Sachin Benny’s new world-building series
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A Primordial Computing Soup
Fostering AI art scenius, creating an open planetary network of robots
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What corporate thrillers tell us about the '90s economy
PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?
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Barbells
A dispatch from the jagged singularity
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The Divergence Machine
Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme
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Lost in Bugspace
The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software
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New Nature
Contours of can’t-be-evil futures
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New Ferality
Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
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Archival Selves
What happens when you pay off all your intention debts?
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Rediscovering Irony
Counterprogramming cancerous sincerity and the cult of authenticity with AI assistance
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Protocolized Writing Workshop
Your chance to race to the frontier of modern AI-forward writing and publishing
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On Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level.
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Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities
Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks
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Things are Getting Weird
Why I have half a dozen drafts and haven't released a thing, at the End of the World
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Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #7: Auto Mode
As we all try to figure out what Mythos means for us down the line, the world of practical agentic coding continues, with the latest array of upgrades.
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A 400 Word Prompt that Makes LLM Paragraphs More Bearable
And they said studying Christensen's rhetoric of the sentence was a waste of time...
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Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
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Extreme Harness Engineering for Token Billionaires: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code, 0% human review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI Frontier & Symphony
We shed light on OpenAI's first Dark Factory for the first time.
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[AINews] Humanity's Last Gasp
a quiet day lets us reflect on work in the time of AI
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Values Aren’t a Moral Imperative
One of the most impactful exercises in DRI Your Career has been the values exercise (Jean wrote about it here). At first this surprised me, but then I thought about it more. Even when you haven’t named your values, they are part of you. They shape how you see the world, and often feel like […]
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Claude Mythos #3: Capabilities and Additions
To round out coverage of Mythos, today covers capabilities other than cyber, and anything else additional not covered by the first two posts, including new reactions and details.
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Sam Altman’s second thoughts
OpenAI’s CEO is asking the public to lower the temperature on AI. But who turned it up in the first place?
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Notes on Managing ADHD
Strategies and tactics for staying productive.
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Miso Is Not a Soup
That tub of miso you bought last year? It's been waiting for you to realize it can do a lot more than soup.
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Hybrid Constructions: The Post-Quantum Safety Blanket
The funny thing about safety blankets is they can double as stage curtains for security theater. “When will a cryptography relevant quantum computer exist?” is a question many technologists are pondering as they stare into crystal balls or entrails. Two people I admire recently made a public long bet about that question, with a $5000 […]
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Political Violence Is Never Acceptable
Nor is the threat or implication of violence.
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Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention
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Planting flowers and a forest walk
I've been thinking so much about OpenWeb, OpenProtocols, and decentralized federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky lately that my brain has become moderately decentralized itself. 🙃 But more on that...
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Training AI models doesn't emit that much
If we just make reasonable comparisons instead of crazy ones
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Mythos, Muse, and the Opportunity Cost of Compute
Does Aggregation Theory survive in a world of constrained compute? Yes, insomuch as controlling demand will give power over supply.
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Import AI 453: Breaking AI agents; MirrorCode; and ten views on gradual disempowerment
Was fire equivalent to a singularity for people at the time?
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Building More Resilient Local-First Software with atproto | jakelazaroff.com
atproto has the potential to become a rock-solid replacement for the most fragile part of any local-first app: the sync server.
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The Productivity Is Real. The Scaling Isn't.
What running an AI agent team taught me about why organizations can't do what one person can.
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Academia: Mindful, Minefield
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
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Claude Mythos and misguided open-weight fearmongering
Another dance around fears of open-source.
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Claude Mythos #2: Cybersecurity and Project Glasswing
Anthropic is not going to release its new most capable model, Claude Mythos, to the public any time soon.
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Intentions have a surprising amount of detail
Auteur managerialism, the myth of one-shotting, and the chindogufication of engineering
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Claude Mythos: The System Card
Claude Mythos is different.
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Impulsive Static | Bryan (they/them) @ atmosphereconf | Offprint
I'm AuDHD, which means things come very easy or very hard, nothing in between. -an Offprint publication.
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Why Anthropic believes its latest model is too dangerous to release
“The language models we have now are probably the most significant thing to happen in security since we got the Internet.”
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The bottleneck shifts to distribution
Here comes everybody
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AI #163: Mythos Quest
There exists an AI model, Claude Mythos, that has discovered critical safety vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser.
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"New Sages Unrivalled"
On Mythos
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The Generative Stack - The Phoenix Architecture
Trying to find the best tool or platform for generative software in 2026 is a mistake that could haunt you for decades
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Who’s the Admin, Me or Claude?
There’s a lot of conversation right now about “context engineering” for dev work; structuring what you feed an LLM so it can do useful things. It’s fantastic, we use this approach for DRI Your Career – to the point where we moved our course development out of Google Docs and into GitHub. But – Jean […]
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The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI
Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the “AI-powered” telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a “$1.8 billion company” supposedly run by just two brothers — I’ve had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: “Can you […]
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OpenAI #16: A History and a Proposal
The real news today is that Anthropic has partnered with the top companies in cybersecurity to try and patch everyone’s systems to fix all the thousands of zero-day exploits found by their new model Claude Mythos.
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★ OpenAI Announces $122 Billion Additional ‘Committed Capital’, and Announces Their ‘Superapp’ Plan for the Future
I don’t see the path from here to there, where *there* is a justification for a trillion-dollar-ish valuation.
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Building Political Superintelligence
Amidst fears of dystopia, a blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves
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everything is a nail, or at least it ought to be
“the irrational decision” by Ben Recht
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The Bookmaker
In the lead-up to the 2008 election, Nate Silver revolutionized the way we talk about politics, bringing cold, hard, numerical facts to a world that had been dominated by the gut feelings of reporters and opinion columnists.
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Import AI 452: Scaling laws for cyberwar; rising tides of AI automation; and a puzzle over gDP forecasting
How much could AI revolutionize the economy?
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AI has limits, even if many AI people can't see them
On Ben Recht's fantastic new book
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Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz write.
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Some Contemporary Heresies
I define a heresy as: something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand.
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Bernie Sanders has a plan to stop the AI industry
But it will be hard to assemble a broad coalition of AI skeptics.
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Dropping to log-level
Logs are invaluable when things spin out of control.
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More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn't imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is imminent. Why have you reversed yourself?? I appreciated the friend of mine who paraphrased this as follows: "A decade ago you said you were…
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A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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On Cooling America Out
We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up
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How to harness AI
"Coding agents" are complicated but intelligible
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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it2. A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months3 on evenings, weekends, and vacation days, I finally released syntaqlite (GitHub), fulfilling this long-held wish. And I believe the main reason this happened was because of AI coding agents4. Of course, there’s no shortage of posts claiming that AI one-shot their project or pushing back and declaring that AI is all slop. I’m going to take a very different approach and, instead, systematically break down my experience building syntaqlite with AI, both where it helped and where it was detrimental. I’ll do this while contextualizing the project and my background so you can independently assess how generalizable this experience was. And whenever I make a claim, I’ll try to back it up with evidence from my project journal, coding transcripts, or commit history5.
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Is Bluesky dying?
An attempt to untangle a few different arguments around the future of Bluesky – if it has one
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The Last Days Of Social Media
Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.
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Why it’s getting harder to measure AI performance
The most famous chart in AI might be obsolete soon.
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Birthright and Wrong
The Regime's Attack on the Constituton
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Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Hint: it's not benchmark scores.
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Can Agentic AI Coding Tools Finally End Copyright For Software While Re-Inventing Open Source?
Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centered on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this kind of creativity. But there’s […]
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Is ubiquitous A.I. writing "inevitable"?
On a weird few weeks of A.I.-writing scandals
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Quoting Daniel Stenberg
<blockquote cite="https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116336957584445742"><p>The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.</p> <p>I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">— <a href="https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116336957584445742">Daniel Stenberg</a>, lead developer of cURL</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/daniel-stenberg">daniel-stenberg</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/security">security</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/curl">curl</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-security-research">ai-security-research</a></p>
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The cognitive impact of coding agents
<p>A fun thing about <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/2/lennys-podcast/">recording a podcast</a> with a professional like Lenny Rachitsky is that his team know how to slice the resulting video up into TikTok-sized short form vertical videos. Here's <a href="https://x.com/lennysan/status/2039845666680176703">one he shared on Twitter today</a> which ended up attracting over 1.1m views!</p> <p><video src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cognitive-cost.mp4" poster="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cognitive-cost-poster.jpg" controls preload="none" playsinline style="display:block; max-width:400px; width:100%; height:auto; margin:0 auto" ><track src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cognitive-cost.vtt" kind="captions" srclang="en" label="English"></video> </p> <p>That was 48 seconds. Our <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/2/lennys-podcast/">full conversation</a> lasted 1 hour 40 minutes.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics">ai-ethics</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents">coding-agents</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/agentic-engineering">agentic-engineering</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/podcast-appearances">podcast-appearances</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/cognitive-debt">cognitive-debt</a></p>
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The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated
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Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.
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A Local-First Task Framework
Industrial research lab working on digital tools for creativity and productivity.
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A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications
Last week I spent an energizing, educational, occasionally infuriating week in Vancouver around the ATmosphereConf, a community event gathering developers, investors, data scientists, the odd academic
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Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
Interpretability research from Anthropic on emotion concepts
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Atmosphere sync: Tap, Hydrant, roll-your-own? - microcosm
A rough framework for deciding how to keep up with atproto data
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If This Then AT: Automation on Protocol
IFTTA is an automation platform built on ATProtocol at Graze Social. It started as a hack-day idea and became a working system for event processing on protocol.
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Graze Social and the IETF
Graze Social sponsored my first in-person IETF meeting in Montreal last November. This post is about what it was like to be there and why standards participation matters for small companies.
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Habermas's Bastards
The Rogue Philosophers of Right Wing Authoritarianism
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The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
Welcome to the era of sprawling, idiosyncratic tooling.
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Why aren't smart people happier?
A new way to think about brainpower.
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Free Speech Experts: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Panic Is As Old As Democracy Itself
We’ve been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he’s been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point […]
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Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces
We often lack the tools for the job, even if the AI is capable enough
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Infinite midwit
OR: if we were playing by Settlers of Catan rules, I'd be dead already
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The Joy of AtmosphereConf · augment
A blog by Anuj Ahooja
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The Marshmallow Test - Bluesky signals it's willing to eat its young
At AtmosphereConf, Bluesky celebrated its community, then signaled it's willing to eat them alive. No context. No acknowledgment. I was in the room.
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A list of other catastrophes that are probably fake
Adding to this over time
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The lump of cognition fallacy
The extended mind as the advance of civilization
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A short summary of my argument that using ChatGPT isn't bad for the environment
To share with anyone still worried
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AI can obviously create new knowledge
But maybe not new concepts
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Movie Review: The AI Doc
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work.
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A Season of Learning
There’s a concept in computer science called explore vs. exploit. Exploitation means using what you know to get reliable returns; exploration means trying new things at the cost of those returns. Most algorithms skew too hard toward exploit. Humans have also been known to do this – including me. The known path is comfortable. My […]
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Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn lead to the polarisation and disagreement. Taking a … <a href="https://www.sicpers.info/2026/03/art-or-tool/">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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"CEO Said A Thing!" Journalism
"CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.
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Thoughts on ATmosphereConf as an ATProto Newbie - excellent notes
We really can just build things
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Your Security is My Security
Speaking to the world, I care about how good the security of your machines are.
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“CEO said a thing!”
A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like
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Pete Hegseth’s War On Truth
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Martha Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship to become the only woman journalist to land on Normandy Beach on D-Day. She carried stretchers before writing her harrowing account of the invasion. The New Yorker’s famously epicurean writer A.J. Liebling subsisted on military rations and came […]
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It Appears RFK Jr. Is Having Trouble Finding Anyone To Take The CDC Director Job
All the way back in August of 2025, RFK Jr. made the extraordinary decision to fire his own CDC Director, Susan Monarez, after only a few weeks on the job. Kennedy claimed at the time that he fired Monarez because she told him affirmatively that she wasn’t trustworthy. That was obviously laughable and Monarez herself […]
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In Defense of Thinking
<p>Ten years ago, I published Deep Work. It was my second mainstream hardcover idea book. The previous title, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, hadn’t ... <a title="In Defense of Thinking" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/in-defense-of-thinking-2/" aria-label="Read more about In Defense of Thinking">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/in-defense-of-thinking-2/">In Defense of Thinking</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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Import AI 451: Political superintelligence; Google's society of minds, and a robot drummer
Are there any genies that can be put back in the bottle?
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AI #161 Part 2: Every Debate on AI
AI discorce.
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FBI Director Kash Patel’s Personal Email Account Apparently Breached By Iranian Hackers
Call me a sicko, but I’m almost always happy when a top-level government official’s communications get hacked. That’s because — in almost every case — either the official seems to be a bit shady, or holds a high-level position in an agency involved in some shady stuff. I mean, it’s not like hackers are targeting […]
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On the Beach, Running From the Tsunami
All Roads Lead to Bruff
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My Sweet, Smart Boyfriend Got Sucked Into The Manosphere
A new documentary, 'Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,' investigates red-pilled creators and their followers. Three women explain what dating them is like.
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The Cognitive Dark Forest
The open web with AIs is turning into a dark forest.
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Ursula's list
Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.
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What's good?
I want to start by talking about some things that seem like potential ways out of the dark forest tangle—even if they’re imperfect, which they all are.
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The work at hand
<p>I work on problems with networks because I am an ordinary person and I care about ordinary people. Sometimes <em>caring about ordinary people</em> means finding new ropes to pull on and throwing your weight into it. </p><p>For those of us inside the US but outside the VIP lounge of American</p>
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A year into the wreckage and salvage
<p>It’s <s>coming up on</s> been a year, somehow, since I <a href="https://www.wrecka.ge/into-the-wreck/" rel="noreferrer">started this website/micro-studio/space to think in</a>. What a wild choice that was, setting out in October of 2024, eyes on the horizon! We’d hoped things would turn out differently. </p><p>The research and thinking I</p>
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Clouded skies for open networks
<p>Last week, I finished an essay about platform design affordances and content moderation expectations and community-level context collapse on Bluesky for <a href="https://www.wrecka.ge/a-year-into-the-wreckage-and-salvage/" rel="noreferrer">Tech Policy Press</a> and set it aside to cool before a last read-through. An hour later, the Trump administration brought to Bluesky a propaganda-zombie army made up of the</p>
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Sparks fly up
Once you’ve seized the tools of political life to build communal power, it’s hard to forget what a hammer feels like in your hand.
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Cosmik Updates: February 2026
February was a fun and a busy month, we launched some important new Semble features including collaborative collections, collection following and interoperability with Margin (an ATProto bookmarking and annotation app). We also saw a lot of great community contributions, both by humans and AI agents(!)
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What happened to Science Goodreads and how do we rebuild it? A 65 million dollar question (at least)
Why don't we have Goodreads for science? We did, until Elsevier acquired it for $65M, mined researcher footprints for billions, and let the product wither. Now AI is making that data even more valuable. But open protocols and cooperative models offer a way to rebuild, with infrastructure researchers actually own.
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Cosmik January Updates
Kicking off 2026! Co-organizing ATScience in Vancouver, launching CAIROS with Discourse Graphs, gearing up for MIRA workshop. 550 signups and 200+ users created cards on Semble. We added search, media type detection (research, books, podcasts, etc) & interop with Margin, another atproto social bookmarking app. Semble collections as live data sources hint at the potential of putting reading lists, portfolios, and other links "on protocol.”
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Cosmik New Year: 2025 in Review, and Looking Forward to 2026
2025 was a big year for Cosmik: Semble went from concept to working product, with active users, a public API, and community members already building on top. We also launched the ATProto Science and CAIROS initiatives to help build an ecosystem bigger than any single product. 2026 will be about making Semble shine—and weaving it into a vibrant ecosystem for collective intelligence. Here's our year in review and what's next.
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Introducing CAIROS: Collective Augmented Intelligence for Research and Open Science
Excited to introduce CAIROS - a cooperative federation building collectively stewarded research commons! 🌱 We're combining modular research, self-sovereign open social networks, and cooperative governance to create new pathways for open science beyond traditional funding models.
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Introducing ATProto Science
ATProto has huge potential for supporting new ways of doing research, so we started a new initiative to help bring together researchers, build community, and explore what's possible when science meets cutting-edge open social networks. Also - join us in Vancouver on March 27, 2026, for a full-day exploration of AT Protocol for science, education, and open knowledge.
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Cosmik December Lab Notes: 'Tis the season for sharing your best finds, and other Semble updates
Curate your picks of 2025, spreading attention karma with new Semble notifications, and some cool indie Semble integrations
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Cosmik Lab Notes 002: Semble Updates - Community Tinkering, Basic API, and New Discovery Features
Two weeks into Semble's open alpha and there is a lot going on! Now featuring: PDS-as-API for easy integrations, Similar Cards discovery tab, improved Bluesky post rendering, and our first community PR.
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Cosmik Lab Notes 001: Semble Alpha
Semble, our social knowledge network for researchers, is in open alpha now, and we’d love for you to try it out!
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The Fork in the Road: AI Horseless Carriages or Collective Intelligence for Science
Last month I attended an in-person gathering of scientists, technologists and field-builders at the intersection of AI and metascience. This post is an extended version of a talk I gave there. The prompt for the talk was an invitation to explore one of the main discussion topics at the event - metascience threats and opportunities posed by AI acceleration.
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Cosmik awarded $1M grant from Open Philanthropy and Astera Institute for new social knowledge network for researchers
We’re proud to announce that Cosmik has been awarded a total of $1M in grant funding from Open Philanthropy and the Astera Institute! These generous 2-year grants will support the next chapter of Cosmik and our work at the intersection of next-generation collaborative knowledge tools, AI and science social media. Specifically, the grants will support the development of Semble, a micro-knowledge sharing and discovery network for researchers on Bluesky/ATProto.
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Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies
How "circular attention economies" can transform research discovery from individual overwhelm into collective superpower, "co-augmented reality" glasses surfacing previously hidden trails of knowledge and insight.
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From SenseNets to Cosmik
End of the Astera fellowship, beginning the next chapter in our journey. TLDR; there has never been a better time for researcher-governed science social media
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SenseNets alpha launch retrospective
In September we wrapped up a focused release of v0.1 of the SenseNets app to around a dozen alpha testers. Our intrepid testers were mainly academic researchers who were already active on science social media and interested in open science and novel publication methods.
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From Genius Science to Scenius Science
Hello sensemakers! We’ve been hard at work over the past few months preparing the first alpha release of Sensemaking Networks. We’ll share more update...
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Sensemaking Networks Part 3: building partnerships and prototypes
Semantic cross-posters for re-integrating science social media
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Part 2: Sensemaking Networks Project Plan
Integrating fragmented science social media and reducing the barriers to semantic publishing
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Sensemaking Networks: Project Introduction
Incorporating science social media into the scientific process
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Landslide; a ghost story
On March 27, 1964, a converted liberty ship named the SS Chena brought a shipment of supplies to the port of Valdez, Alaska. Valdez, which I need you to know is pronounced “valDEEZ,” sits at the end of a fjord—a narrow inlet carved by a glacier.
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Against the dark forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
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Why the Clock Broke: America in an Age of Crisis
My lecture at King's College London
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Hegseth’s War On Anthropic Encounters The First Amendment
The expression, “to make a federal case out of something” usually describes making a bigger deal out of something than it should be. But in the case of Anthropic and Hegseth, Trump, and the Department of Defense*, this federal case is actually quite simple: what the government defendants did to Anthropic is beyond the bounds […]
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Wherever you get your Podcasts - Knotbin
Language in a decentralized future.
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How to write well with AI
Why people who pledge never to write with AI are telling on themselves
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Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules
Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days.
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On the Biology of a Large Language Model
We investigate the internal mechanisms used by Claude 3.5 Haiku — Anthropic's lightweight production model — in a variety of contexts, using our circuit tracing methodology.
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We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
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Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For
First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritizing growth metrics over user safety. If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we’ve been critical of the company for […]
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Soy Right ascendant
A Read Max re-run
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On-protocol Organizing
Fighting bad networks with good networks.
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2023
Or, Why I am Not a Doomer
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An Open Letter To Members Of The United States Congress
I think we can all agree that nobody seems to be taking the business of governing ourselves terribly seriously. I say we can all agree on this because I think we all know that Donald Trump is a deranged, narcissistic criminal. We know this. Even those of you who nominally support him — because you […]
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Quantization from the ground up
A complete guide to what quantization is, how it works, and how it's used to compress large language models
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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
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AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web
I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturally). Some friends I had met on Usenet were students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and told me […]
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Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps
<p>Last week in this newsletter, I summarized some interesting results from a study that analyzed the behavior of 164,000 knowledge workers. It found that introducing ... <a title="Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/avoiding-digital-productivity-traps/" aria-label="Read more about Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/avoiding-digital-productivity-traps/">Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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AI is not superhuman
What metaphor should drive the field of AI research?
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Import AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks
How will timeless minds value time?
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Deep Breath: Okay, Let’s Talk About That Controversial DLSS 5 Demo
The polarization over any and all uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues. And, to be clear, I very much understand why this is all so controversial. Any new technology that has the chance to be transformative will also necessarily be disruptive and that causes fear. Fear that is not entirely unfounded, no matter […]
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Miscellanea: The War in Iran
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Miscellanea: The War in Iran</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden
Reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy.
- 383
Online travel recommendations are broken
(And where you can still find them).
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#764: It's been a year
Plus: phone poems, low-friction friends and the decline of online travel recs
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March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
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Kill Chain
On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children
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Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure
Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.
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These emotionally charged illustrations are here to make your imagination wander
Xiao Hua Yang paints in unfamiliar purples, greens and yellows, rendering the natural world as something alien but always exciting.
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Grand Delusion
The Trumpist Intellectuals Wake Up
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Permissioned Data Diary 4: The Big Picture
A special edition of the data diary that sketches out the rough shape of where we're heading.
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Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie
Andreessen caused a minor kerfuffle by saying on a podcast that he doesn’t introspect at all, and that in fact, people shouldn’t. What’s really going on?
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AI #160: What Passes For a Pause
A lot happened, but by today’s standards this felt like a quiet week.
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How to think about the AI company finances
OpenAI and Anthropic are using the standard tech startup playbook.
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On working machines
In part one, on thinking machines, I explored two facets of the philosophy of artificial intelligence: “intelligence”, and consciousness. That left an important topic to consider for this post: the impact of artificial intelligence on work. No technology has ever … <a href="https://www.sicpers.info/2026/03/on-working-machines/">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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Afroman’s Defamation Trial Is Going About As Well For The Deputies As Their Original Raid Did
We’ve been following the saga of Afroman (real name Joseph Foreman) and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office for a few years now, and I’m delighted to report that the defamation trial is currently underway and it is delivering everything you could possibly hope for, starting with this absolutely astounding suit that he’s wearing in court […]
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Being John Rawls
...
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The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
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Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s
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Permissioned Data Interlude: Spaces
In which I retcon the naming of everything.
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I haven't made anything with AT Proto yet
This is the blog post I write before I actually build anything on AT Proto
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The Last Quiet Thing
Your possessions came alive. Now they won't stop talking.
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Polly Wants a Better Argument
The 'stochastic parrots' argument is empirically false, irrelevant to modern AI, and circular. It undermines the AI ethics it claims to support
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The Last Quiet Thing
This watch costs twelve dollars. It weighs twenty-one grams. It has told time the same way since 1989. A visual essay about the objects that came alive, the labor they externalized onto you, and the peace of a thing that does what it does and then shuts up.
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Turns Out The DOGE Bros Who Killed Humanities Grants Are Kinda Sensitive About It
Much of last week I had been working on a different article than the one this became. The American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies — all plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities over DOGE’s mass grant cancellations — had uploaded the full […]
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ICE Officers Admit To Arrest Quotas During Court Testimony
It’s not that arrest and ticket quotas don’t exist. They do. They always have. They always will. It’s that they’re illegal. Courts have repeatedly criticized quotas because they create incentives so perverse they’d make /b/ board denizens uncomfortable. Since they’re presumptively illegal, most law enforcement agencies will use any word but “quota” to describe these. […]
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How to Future
A good futurist focuses on the 3 time phases: past, present, future.
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Issue 102 – The public will pay
Justin Sun buys his way out of an SEC fraud case, Iranian transactions on Binance draw DOJ scrutiny as the exchange sues the newspaper that reported on them, and crypto super PACs dump millions into Tuesday’s primaries in Illinois.
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Why Meta is retreating from encryption
In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg called privacy the future of social networking. Not anymore
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Marathon is a satire
Bungie's latest is a subtle but vicious comedy about work, debt and the corporate world
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The most brilliant move in corporate history?
In a bold departure from its Big Tech peers, Apple sidestepped the $650 billion AI infrastructure spending frenzy, a move likened to opting out of purchasing the US Navy annually. While Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta funneled cash into data centers, transforming from cash cows into debt-laden entities, Apple maintained a modest $14 billion capital…
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Reflections on Habermas; Luzzato's "The First Fascist"
Reading, Watching 03.15.26
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Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier?
<p>I’ve been studying the intersection of digital technology and office work for quite some time. (I find it hard to believe that my book, Deep ... <a title="Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier?" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/why-hasnt-ai-made-work-easier/" aria-label="Read more about Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier?">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/why-hasnt-ai-made-work-easier/">Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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Agents Over Bubbles
Agents are fundamentally changing the shape of demand for compute, both in terms of how they work and in terms of who will use them. They're so compelling that I no longer believe we're in a bubble.
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ImportAI 449: LLMs training other LLMs; 72B distributed training run; computer vision is harder than generative text
Will AI cause a political interregnum
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The next phase of open models
Markets, capabilities, cope, and bewilderment in the industrialization of language models.
- 423
“Network” is a prayer, not a prophecy
There is a story that Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and literary executor, once told about a conversation he had with the novelist in 1920:
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The End of Children
Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried? Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports.
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The KDO Rolodex Is Now a Wee Feed Reader?
Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently
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What do "which is A.I.?" quizzes tell us?
This newsletter is brought to you by Squarespace.
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Cantrip: On summoning entities from language in circles
With Cantrip, deepfates reimagines the fundamentals of language model agents. Available as a ghost library with generative test specification.
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Collections: Warfare in Dune, Part II: The Fremen Jihad
This is the second part (I, II) of our somewhat silly look about the plausibility of warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Last week, we looked at the system of warfare that is dominant in the setting when the first book opens: warfare among the Great Houses. While I noted some worldbuilding issues I see – … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/03/13/collections-warfare-in-dune-part-ii-the-fremen-jihad/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Collections: Warfare in Dune, Part II: The Fremen Jihad</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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The Shape of the Thing
Where we are right now, and what likely happens next
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Grief and the AI Split
TL;DR: AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.
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Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript
JavaScript's Date object has been a source of bugs for three decades. Temporal, which just reached Stage 4, is a modern replacement with immutable types, first-class time zone and calendar support, and nanosecond precision. This is the story of how Bloomberg, Igalia, and the TC39 community spent nine years turning an idea into a shipping standard.
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Features - How to Build a Medieval Castle - Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2025
Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France?
- 439
Malleable software in the age of LLMs
All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?
- 440
Defusing the Depopulation Bomb
Book Review: "After the Spike" by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
- 441
Everyone is a Strategist and No One is a Writer
From politics to culture, we face a crisis of cleverness and a society addicted to marketing
- 442
The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything
Interest is everything Each time I sit down to choose a topic for this newsletter, there’s a moment when my self-important inner judge – who loves to involve himself in such mat...
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The Hatred of Podcasting | Brace Belden
In 2015, if you said, “I heard it on a podcast,” you were trying to sound smart. In 2025, it’s better to lie.
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What the Internet Is Teaching Young Men About Desire
When pornography becomes the default sex education, it reshapes how a generation learns about power, intimacy, and attention
- 447
Command-Shift-War
War as Cliché
- 448
Current and former Block workers say AI can’t do their jobs after Jack Dorsey’s mass layoffs: ‘You can’t really AI that’
The CEO said he cut the company’s workforce by 4,000 people – almost in half – because of gains in AI productivity
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‘Are We Participating in a Thing That Is Not Even Working?’
Chris Gethard reflects on the death of the middle-class comedy job: ‘The game is feeling progressively more rigged right now … We are being tricked into feeding a system that is going to do to us what Spotify did to musicians.’
- 450
On thinking machines
While Chiron Codex is about the application of LLMs and AI-augmented tools, we also need to understand their meaning to us, each other, and society. I have three topics: intelligence, consciousness, and work: in this part I’ll deal with the first two. <a href="https://www.sicpers.info/2026/03/on-thinking-machines/">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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putting the @ in atproto - Chris's Corner
a moment to reflect on the politics behind atproto
- 452
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #60
The many interesting things I read in February 2026
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Human Problems: It’s Not Always The Technology’s Fault
We have met the enemy and he is us. When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI’s chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to have the Game of Thrones-inspired persona of Daenerys Targaryen, the series’ prominent dragon-riding queen. In the months that followed, […]
- 454
How Uber uses AI for development: inside look
How Uber built Minion, Shepherd, uReview, and other internal agentic AI tools. Also, new challenges in rolling out AI tools, like more platform investment and growing concern about token costs
- 455
Purity Supreme
Back with another one of those hump-plumping injectables.
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Separate Writing and Formatting
<p>Get focused</p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://ia.net/topics/separate-writing-and-formatting">Separate Writing and Formatting</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://ia.net">iA</a>.</p>
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Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5
It feels good to get back to some of the fun stuff.
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★ The iPhone 17e
Apple could have stopped with the addition of MagSafe alone, and the 17e would’ve been a successful year-over-year update over the 16e. But there’s even more.
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The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis
Citadel Securities is an award-winning global market-maker across a broad array of fixed income and equity products.
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#762: One weird trick to make new friends
Plus: Dubai influencers, cultural time and the "most uplifting corner" of the internet
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The Original Attention Crisis
<p>I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me an essay he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century ... <a title="The Original Attention Crisis" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/the-original-attention-crisis/" aria-label="Read more about The Original Attention Crisis">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/the-original-attention-crisis/">The Original Attention Crisis</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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If You’re Going To Defend AI And Whine About Its Critics, You Should Probably Be Honest About Its Actual Harms
I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors and realize […]
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Dean Ball on open models and government control
Subtle precedents on the future of open models set by the unfolding Anthropic v. Department of War case.
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Gemini 3.1 Pro Aces Benchmarks, I Suppose
I’ve been trying to find a slot for this one for a while.
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Nothing to Declare
Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such things in the […]
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AI #158: The Department of War
This was the worst week I have had in quite a while, maybe ever.
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Olmo Hybrid and future LLM architectures
The latest Olmo model and discussions at the frontier of open-source post training tools.
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OpenAI Rewrites Contract, Anthropic Returns to Negotiate—The Chaos Continues
In less than a week, the Pentagon blacklisted an AI company for having ethics, declared it a supply chain risk, watched its preferred replacement face a massive user revolt, and then sat down to amend the replacement’s contract to address the very concerns the blacklisted company had been raising all along. Meanwhile, the blacklisted company […]
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A Tale of Three Contracts
The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivations.
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At least it's an ethos?
The limits of optimal control, from the maximalist and minimalist perspectives
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How to Kill the Code Review
Human-written code died in 2025. Code reviews will die in 2026.
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The Returns of Empire?
Or the Beginning of Banditry
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Man cereal
Yesterday, even though my son is barely seven years old, toxic masculinity permeated his life and, perhaps permanently and irreparably, stole a small piece of his joy.
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Software as Wiki, Mutable Software - exe.dev blog
When your coding agent lives next to your software, editing it is as easy as editing a wiki.
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Clawed
On Anthropic and the Department of War
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AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No.
Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then: Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, but institutional trust. People need to believe that contracts will be enforced, that property rights will be protected, that the rules won’t change […]
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Why exe.dev VMs are persistent - exe.dev blog
On the design decision to make VMs persistent, with persistent disks.
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What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out?
Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?
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Ground Decisions
Planes don't fly themselves - they just cruise themselves. Takeoff, landing, and the big decisions happen with humans. Same with AI. What are the ground decisions in the software factory era?
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AI is a bureaucratic technology. So is war.
What happens when AI slop hits targeting systems and civil liberties?
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OpenAI’s ‘Red Lines’ Are Written In The NSA’s Dictionary—Where Words Mean What The NSA Wants Them To Mean
Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments. This confused some people. Why would the Pentagon seek to destroy one company over the […]
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The Pentagon’s bombshell deal with OpenAI, explained
Only Congress can put meaningful limits on government abuse of AI.
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#761: Not every brother is a bro
Plus: Oppressive praise, baby names and the American exodus
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In pursuit of Cognitive Solidarity
Guest post by Pip Sanderson, National Institute of Teaching (England)
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Anthropic and Alignment
Anthropic is in a standoff with the Department of War; while the company's concerns are legitimate, it position is intolerable and misaligned with reality.
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Import AI 447: The AGI economy; testing AIs with generated games; and agent ecologies
What might a superintelligence arcology be like?
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What Anthropic's fight with the Pentagon tells us about the politics of Silicon Valley
Trying to make sense of the conjuncture
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Collections: Warfare in Dune, Part I: Fighting Faufreluches
This week, time for something a bit silly: we’re going to think about the plausibility of the warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune! In particular, I want to approach the question in two parts: first asking if the model of warfare among the Great Houses we’re introduced to in the first book of Dune (that is, … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-part-i-fighting-faufreluches/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Collections: Warfare in Dune, Part I: Fighting Faufreluches</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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Who loses from the Anthropic fight? Maybe Elon Musk and Alex Karp.
Arbitrary state power can cut in many directions
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Permissioned Data Diary 1: To Encrypt or Not to Encrypt
The first in a series of posts about major design decisions along the way to a permissioned data protocol for atproto.
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Permissioned Data Diary 2: Buckets
The second in a series of posts building up a solution to permissioned data on atproto. We introduce buckets: a new protocol primitive for creating a shared social context.
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Folding context
Context windows, compression, and "folding the dough"
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Good vibes, bad vendors
AI coding works now. Here's how to think about it.
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beaker/archive-notice.md at master · beakerbrowser/beaker
An experimental peer-to-peer Web browser. Contribute to beakerbrowser/beaker development by creating an account on GitHub.
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The rules to make the rules
The rules to make the rules My journey to understand blockchain political systems continues. Protocols as legislation Blockchains make an effort to remove operational discretion from the nodes …
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pfrazee/infocivics: Information Civics paper
Information Civics paper. Contribute to pfrazee/infocivics development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Practical Decentralization
The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.
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Chatty Community Gardens
Group chat is fertile soil for low-stakes ideation. With tending, seeds of thought can grow into structured, evergreen knowledge.
- 507
Leaf 0.3 - The Server Behind Roomy
For the last couple months we've been iterating on Roomy with its brand-new architecture, and we're finally ready to talk in more detail about the not-so-secret sauce that will power Roomy moving forward.
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Digital Strategy for Organisations
Digital power is created through the interplay of mobilizing and organizing. Open Social protocols bridge the gap.
- 509
Living Documents on the Feed
What could long-form writing sitting alongside posts look like?
- 510
Village-scale resilience
The end-of-the-world already happened, it's just not evenly distributed. But with every end is a new beginning.
- 511
Chat is minimum-viable anything
Chat is the minimum-viable tool for online organizing. Without complete control over our means of communication, our ability to organize depends entirely on the goodwill of the very same hegemonic incumbents which we seek to surpass.
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Fraud Investigation is Believing Your Lying Eyes
The financial industry has paid tens of billions of dollars in tuition on fraud detection. Here are some observations for investigators with badges, press cards, or GoPros.
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The shallow impact of India’s AI summit
The US government still can’t think beyond “winning.” The rest of the world is still thinking too small
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Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
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A Sapphirepunk Manifesto
There is no security through insecurity.
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Mathematics in the Library of Babel
Mathematics isn't only about saying true things. It's about asking the right questions, being confused, stumbling about, getting distracted, being wrong, recognizing when you're wrong, being stuck. Mostly being stuck. It's about clinging to a giant edifice and feeling it out until you understand some tiny piece of it. It's about finding meaning in and intuition for the texture of an object which, at first, can only be apprehended by bashing your skull into it until it imprints on your forehead. Then trying to convey some of that insight to someone else, and watching as they find their own way to it. I started trying to get LLMs to do math in July 2020, through the game "AI Dungeon," one of the earliest applications powered by GPT-3. I first got GPT-3 to produce a correct proof (of Fermat's Little Theorem) in April 2022. At the time I did not think they would become useful for math research in the near term. This changed when the first reasoning models were released: on February 1, 2025, I wrote that the model o3-mini-high “clearly has passed the threshold of genuine usefulness” for research, while still making many, many mistakes. Since then, the models have improved, and ChatGPT 5.2 Pro (released in December 2025) can regularly provide reasonable proofs of lemmas that I would characterize as “involved but routine for experts,” though it still makes many errors. And I have been using Codex, OpenAI's coding/computer use agent, for scientific computing tasks I would not have considered attempting a few months ago. In public comments, I've tried to credit successes while pushing back against hype. I've talked a lot about "slop" papers on arXiv. I have worried that we are polluting the scientific commons with incorrect mathematics whose errors are enormously difficult to detect. I've tried to focus on the present. In this essay I'll talk about the future.
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How will OpenAI compete?
OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and it can’t invent all of those itself. What’s the plan?
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The Median Voter Theorem is a Clarity Trap
What the Democratic party needs - what it demands - is bold, persistent experimentation
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Ultima IX
This article tells part of the story of the Ultima series. Years ago, [Origin Systems] released Strike Commander, a high-concept flight sim that, while very entertaining from a purely theoretical point of view, was so resource-demanding that no one in the country actually owned a machine that could play it. Later, in Ultima VIII, the […]
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A.I. Isn't People
How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?
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