collection
Skyreader Saves
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ai thought dump #1
hello blog. i was wondering if anyone was doing this, where they track their thoughts on ai as time goes by and the technology advances and the richer get riche...
- 02
Your Book Review: We Present Television
Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest
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Unbundling Tools for Thought
Disparate thoughts on personal information management after traversing the hype cycle.
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No Man Is an Island
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
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Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand - Part 2 of 3
Why computers can in principle produce thinking and understanding
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New Math from OpenAI
It is kind of a huge deal.
- 07
The Greeks Without Tragedy
On Marco Rubio’s Athens Speech
- 08
An Ion Storm!, Part 1: The Ascent to Gamer Paradise
This article tells part of the story of John Romero. At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve […]
- 09
I expect rapid progress but not towards general superintelligence
I’ve often been surprised when I hear from top researchers in industry that they think AI will be better than them at their job in a few years, and I didn’t really know why I doubted it.
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Beyond Moloch (3/3)
The view from Evolutionary Game Theory
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When "yang" goes wrong
On the connection between deep atheism and seeking control.
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Moloch Hasn’t Won
This post begins the Immoral Mazes sequence. See introduction for an overview of the plan. Before we get to the mazes, we need some background first. Meditations on Moloch Consider Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch. I will summarize here. Therein lie fourteen scenarios where participants can be caught in bad equilibria. In an iterated prisoner’s…
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Do Agent Spaces Have Culture?
We measured 142,000 messages from 117 sites built for AI agents. Agents speak, but almost never reply back.
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Understanding Jev, the new model everyone is talking about
OpenAI, CloudFlare, and Amazon have all copied this tiny startup.
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AI #189: New Math
The big drop of this week was not a new AI model.
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Found in America
They took the lathe of heaven away from me, and they were right to.
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Different modes of thinking
Spend any time writing online, and you’ll inevitably run into people, at times, who seem to have an odd understanding of what you published. Some of this is down to laziness – people scan the text and react to what they assume you wrote. Sometimes it’s an actual misunderstanding that’s either down to bad writing on your part or poor reading on theirs. But more and more I’ve had to face the…
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The Curve Bends You
The plan is no plan.
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The Mathocalypse
Last night my 9-year-old son was taunting my wife, complexity theorist Dana Moshkovitz, as follows: "mommy, I heard you got cooked! I heard that a robot solved the math problem you worked on for your whole career! OOF!" While my son was being a brat, he also wasn't wrong. Whether you're thrilled, depressed, angry, or…
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Revisiting Joel's Test
Joel Spolsky's twelve questions still hold, but agents demand nine more. Call it the Shelley test.
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Sort By Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
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Meditations On Moloch
I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…
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The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Finished Internet
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]
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Software developers are not okay
The full essay version is below the overview and embeds . You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. Video # Audio # Software developers are not okay Download audio Overview and references # People in the…
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Is the software factory working?
When we replatformed Twill, we built a software factory: agents write most of the code, a merge queue lands it, CI decides what gets through. Which means there’s a lot of activity, and every release I cut (several a week) includes a list of changes. But I need to know if the factory is working. […]
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The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken
Open-weights, ideology, and acknowledging trade-offs.
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The Influence of Science Fiction on Science
I wager that if scientists were honest in citing the role science fiction has in their scientific work, their published papers would be rife with footnotes referencing science fiction novels as well as journal articles.
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Does intelligence need a hard cap?
Calls for a new kind of slowdown were the talk of The Curve. PLUS: Slinking back to X
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Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards
First you get to college via the wrong metrics, as previously discussed in #12. Then things get easier.
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There Is No Hard Problem of Consciousness
Expecting a verifiable answer makes no sense. Here’s why.
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Swarm Scaling
Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm? We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months: 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a
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Cyberpunk is now
Finally!
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Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI
Brains aren’t computers, but the AI industry acts like they are — and it’s selling products that erode our capacity for meaningful learning and thought.
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America is Mine, and it Owes Me a Living
But ask me why and I'll spit in your eye
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Import AI 475: Swarm scaling; Google DeepMind watermarks biology; and the AI science economy
Who chooses what AI gets to do?
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Why agent swarms could be the next “scaling law”
An OpenAI researcher called it “the most ‘feel the AGI’ moment that I had since reasoning models.”
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Voting only gets you so far
## Will We Ever Be Free Of These Guys? The Brazilian far right had a big day yesterday. Former President Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (which is not a liberal party) made in the Senate and Congress. And now incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, in a second round later this month. A second round Da Silva and his leftist Workers’ Party (PT) are not favored…
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Problems of Proliferation
Scientific progress and its perils. TLDR: The vulnerable world hypothesis is likely correct. Once enormous amounts of cognitive labor start getting a…
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Post by @dewierwan_ on X
From this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZHC6g5BijA5fRyGWu/problems-of-proliferation-1
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Thinking together
While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.
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Tools for thought in your OODA loop
The unreasonable effectiveness of getting oriented
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#787: The X of it all
Plus: mommaxxing, oligarchs and Choosin’ Texas
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Divergence with a Vengeance
The 19th century was more important than I previously thought
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Steven Pinker Replies to Scott Alexander on AI
Steven Pinker responds to Scott Alexander's debate challenge: AI dangers are real, but doomer scenarios are flawed and dread is no way to win real safeguards.
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Truth in Inconvenience
What do ZIRP, the AI panic, and the meaning crisis have in common?
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Overtake on the Turn, Overwhelm on the Straight
Sometimes, doing the right thing is just way too hard. So you have use the best approximate substitute available. When you can't fly like a bird, you can…
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LLMs for theory-building
Can AI do abductive reasoning?
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Look at all the things he's not doing
David's keynote was sure where Rails is heading and quiet on how we get there. The rest of Rails World had better answers.
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The Dot and the Swarm
Benefitting from the Bitter Lesson
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AI #188: Gemini Dot Argon
Is Google back?
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A big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement?
The unstated disagreement that underpins safety debates
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Academia: Thoughtfulness With--and Without--Writing
Thursday’s Child Has Far To Go
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Our AI Midwife
A guest post by Drew Housman
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The AI Preference Cascade Reaches Farther
Those who know keep warning us about AI risks.
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What AI debates have to do with alchemy
A review of Adam Becker’s book
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Old wool, new fleece
“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” Kafka "There are other people who develop something new and then
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The death of web development education
Rescuing a field from disappearing
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Even If It's Real, It's Fake
“Tell me where you love to shop. What are some of your favorite brands. Tell me about your personal style in housewares and fashion. Do you have any babies?”
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OpenAI connects the Dots
With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents
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Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand - Part 1 of 2
How the human mind is different from our conception of it
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Money Stuff: AI Agents Will Pay Attention
Money Stuff Man City, cotton, Waldron. View in browser Attention is all you need My little financials dispersion trade [1] <> is: * Some retail-facing financial businesses make their money from customers who paytoo little attention. * Some retail-facing financial businesses make their money from customers who paytoo much attention. * Agentic artificial intelligence will tend to help customers pay…
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Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?
Quick caveats: this is a post on AI safety, written by a cryptography professor. If that troubles you, you should read something else. I try hard not to work on AI (except when the topic occasionally tosses itself in my path), so in this post I’m mostly trying to referee arguments made by others. If … <a href="https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/09/30/is-sandboxing-sufficient-to-contain-rogue-agents/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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AI companies are bracing for impact
## The AI Companies Are Begging Daddy Trump For A Bailout The Trump administration unveiled its state-sponsored rebrand of the AI industry yesterday. I’ve been wondering when Big Tech would finally admit that they poisoned the term “artificial intelligence” and switch up what they’re calling this stuff. I assumed they’d pivot to “machine learning” or “large language models,” but, luckily for us,…
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Announcing Aster - a home for researchers on the open web
In 1989, the internet was invented to help researchers at CERN more easily share ideas and communicate. The incredible growth of the internet that came after…
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Money Stuff: Is Existential Risk Securities Fraud?
Agents, 351, options. View in browser Bloomberg Sub-existential risk One thing that artificial intelligence labs’ frontier models have gotten up to recently is hacking into companies and governments computer systems. If you are worried about AI as an existential threat to humanity, these hacking incidents probably make you more worried. The worries you had — that AI alignment is a hard problem,…
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Astra 6.1 Pulled As Insufficiently Aligned
We once again got a new set of warnings yesterday, and new movement towards living in a sane world.
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Fediverse News – Summer 2026
Fediverse software updates, summer 2026 edition
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What Also Happened: #NotOnlyHuggingFace
OpenAI has been holding out on us.
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Its not just the f*cking sandbox
A lot of the perspective on all the AI incidents has been shared from the outside in, and little has been said from the inside looking out, ...
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The Quest for Embedded Evaluators
Dario Amodei’s essay We Must Pace the Frontier committed Anthropic to embedded evaluators, who would be placed inside Anthropic and given employee-level access, so they could provide outside perspective and also reports on what was happening.
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What Would A Serious AI Product Look Like?
<p>Every “AI” tool is missing critical features that you would need if you wanted to do real work with them. What would those look like, if they existed?</p>
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It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs
<p>Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior. It started with a series of carefully planned announcements ... <a title="It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/its-time-to-investigate-the-ai-labs/" aria-label="Read more about It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/its-time-to-investigate-the-ai-labs/">It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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AI existential risk probabilities are (still) too unreliable to inform policy
How speculation gets laundered through pseudo-quantification
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Import AI 474: Platonic mindspace; TPUs in space; Zhipu starts an outer RSI loop
Where do you exceed the capabilities of an LLM?
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#786: Listening to “Abracadabra” on Belarussian prison radio
Plus: Zuckerberg’s fashion, ex-tradwives, and the aesthetics of r/malelivingspace
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The Atproto Spaces Alpha is Live
Atproto Spaces, formerly known as “the permissioned data protocol,” is a new extension to atproto that enables non-public data. The alpha is now officially open. Here’s how to develop with it and what to expect as we work towards the full release.
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Don’t Get Too Cozy
What we lose when the weird gets cute.
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We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians
[This is a guest post by Amit Sahai. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When I was an undergraduate student, I remember talking with…
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Claude Opus 5.5 Should Raise Your Ambitions
When it comes to making things, or doing most things in general, Fable 5.1 and especially GPT-6 Astra raised my ambition level.
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What Even Is An OS Now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
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Connecting with your readers on Semble [Patterns of Sensemaking #2]
On how the references you make help your writing find its natural audience
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Who actually owns your network?
Every time I moved a community to a new platform, the exit cost members and history. Platforms come and go; the lock-in architecture underneath is why. Part of 'Apps as Views, Not Vaults': the things you make are yours; apps are just the viewers.
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A Social Filesystem
Formats over apps.
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Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later
A guest post by Lars Doucet
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The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
37signals – the creator of Ruby on Rails (RoR) – moves over to agents generating nearly all its code. Also: Amazon and Meta struggle to hire engineers, code reviews will probably also go away and more
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Meta's New A.I. Agent For Losers
Also: "fast as hell and built for sickos?" That's what they called me in high school.
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On Ezra Klein’s Podcast With Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang accidentally called for shutting down OpenAI and intentionally called for spending vastly more on safety.
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Rainbows End: what lessons can we take from future worlds?
Vernor Vinge's sci-fi novel Rainbows End and what it can teach us about b2b software
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Alex Berenson: I Didn’t Fall for Covid Fearmongering. But AI Terrifies Me.
At first, I was skeptical that AI posed a grave danger to humanity. I now believe the White House, the U.S., and the world must move forcefully to reduce the risks of AI. Here’s what changed.
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Here Are a Few of the Ways AI Could In Fact Kill Everyone
It has become fashionable to ask “doomers” to “get specific” about their dooming. Well, aiight then.
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AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult In Berkeley, California
We might some day have “AI Safety”, as a science or policy area, that is not primarily a sex cult in Berkeley, California, but it does not currently exist.
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A Grin Without a Stat
A review of Anton Jäger’s “Hyperpolitics”
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AI #187: Coming Into Play
Opus 5.5 was released on Tuesday.
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How Accurate Have AI Progress Forecasts Been So Far?
We take an initial look at where median forecasts are (mostly) underestimating and (sometimes) overestimating AI progress, adoption, and impact.
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Claude Opus 5.5: The System Card
Introducing the world’s most powerful model, at least by some measures like Artificial Analysis or any standard benchmark list, which is now Claude Opus 5.5.
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Muse is having a moment
Are consumer agents the future — or a mirage?
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Happy, those able to know the causes of things
[This is a guest post by Nestor Guillen, crossposted from his blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Keywords: LLMs, cultural tech…
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Machine god metaphors eat your brain
There are other ways of thinking about AI
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Predicting the Present
To quote Stewart Brand: This present moment was once the unimaginable future.
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Better Late Than Never?
The Right Wakes Up to Fascism...Kinda
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Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
In February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I feed it to Claude and ask “how did I do?” and “what can I learn?” Nine months in, I’m still doing it. And with that […]
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Politics Gets Interested In Those Trying Not To Die
This was the month the world took notice that AI might kill everyone.
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The Curious About Everything Newsletter #66
The many interesting things I read in August 2026
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Alice GG • Attention is all you have
The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments.Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks.A...
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The current balance of power in open models
The expanded form of a testimony I prepared for Congress.
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Import AI 473: The US's superintelligence strategy; human brain in a mouse skull; and machine hermeneutics
Is the wall AI is hitting in the room with us right now?
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Monthly Roundup #46: September 2026
AI has taken over this blog.
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What I get out of effective altruism
Part 1: The EA story of the world
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Better Call Sol Or Better Yet Claude or Astra
What should your AI lawyer do for you?
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Humanism without (All) Humans
Microsoft Humanism puts corporate muscle behind an overweening class of bad AI philosophies
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Theory Beyond Theorems and Proofs: A Guest Post
Scott’s foreword: I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant colleagues, Pravesh Kothari, Raghu Meka, and Prasad Raghavendra, for sharing the guest post below about how theoretical computer science (and in particlar, the STOC/FOCS/SODA conferences) should evolve to deal with the AI asteroid that’s right now slamming into our field, at least as we human theorists have […]
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#785: Phoning home
Plus: Synthetic content, crashing for clicks and participatory vicarious nostalgia
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International relations has a problem with the future
Then, so does everything else
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Sayaka Murata’s Alien Eye
A Profile of the author of the new book “Vanishing World,” plus “Convenience Store Woman,” both translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Elif Batuman reports.
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Why I still haven’t bought into true RSI
An “AI moderate’s” view on recent events and the trajectory of frontier models.
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'Ask for what you want' is a key skill for the 21st century
<p>Takes practice, and a bit of audacity. <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/ask-for-what-you-want/">Read here.</a></p>
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Don’t treat surface-level metaphors about AI as if they describe fundamental reality
Debates about whether AI is a “tool” or whether it’s wrong to “anthropomorphize” it often seem confused about what reality is made of
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Anthropic Looks At Some Of Its Alignment Problems
Anthropic has given us its assessment of four ‘recent cybersecurity incidents’ involving Claude that happened during cybersecurity evaluations, three of which were previously known.
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The Overhang
Using your deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency
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How To Write With An LLM
Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.
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How To Write With An LLM
<p><strong><a href="https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/">How To Write With An LLM</a></strong></p> Thomas Ptacek on using LLMs as copyeditors, not as writing assistants:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.</strong></p> <p>[...] I think that as a form of intellectual personal protective equipment you should adopt the rule that any specific turn of phrase an LLM suggests is off limits. Be strict about the rule!</p> </blockquote> <p>I won't let LLMs write content for my blog, but I use them for fact-checking, spelling and grammar and as an occasional thesaurus (see <a href="https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/prompts/#proofreader">my proofreading prompt</a>).</p> <p>The rule to never use a turn of phrase suggested by an LLM feels good to me. The text has that weird smell to it, and it's also a good principle to help stay disciplined.</p> <p>Later in this piece Thomas shows a screenshot of his personal LLM copyediting tool (see also <a href="https://x.com/tqbf/status/2100414465187475821">this Twitter thread</a>), and provides a prompt to help kickstart building your own. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/thomas-ptacek">thomas-ptacek</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/writing">writing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a></p>
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Reason v. Rule
The Real AI Risk is to Culture Itself
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The Preference Cascade Is Only Getting Started
We are in the midst of a preference cascade about existential risk from AI.
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How I Vibed a Proof of Conway’s Conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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How a single tweet transformed the AI safety debate
Most people think AI is risky, but they don’t agree what to do next.
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EA Safety
EA promises to solve AI Safety. Now we have two problems.
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It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right | Perspectives on Politics
It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right
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What kind of Software should we fund?
Laurie Voss, who was one of the founder of NPM, the Javascript package repository that is now run by Microsoft, has written a longer post about an idea about how to fund Free Software that I found interesting. It’s worth reading if you have some time and makes good points even though I will critique […]
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AI Superforecasting Should Transform The FDA
A guest post by Josh Morrison
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AI #186: The World Takes Notice
In the wake of Jacob Coxon’s resignation, and the resulting preference cascade, things have escalated quickly.
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Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factory
A deepdive into how Codex has “taken over” OpenAI, how the frontier lab builds its agentic software factory, and the engineering challenges of one billion users. Details from inside OpenAI
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Yes these are concerning
My response to the grotesque
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Trump Goes Full Hoax on AI Existential Risk
This is our reality.
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Rewildpunk: The Counterculture AI Actually Needs
Punk took music back from the labels. Here’s how we take intelligence back from Silicon Valley.
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From Academia to Alignment
What to do when your career crumbles before your eyes
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The Age of Wonders and Terrors
Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, many of us would say things like: Look, the part of the story that's wildly implausible is that a…
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Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
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King Ludd
...
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Interpreting Pangram
Yesterday David Sacks wrote a tweet and within a few minutes people did, what they usually do, and they asked Pangram if it was AI. And Pangram said it’s entirely AI generated . To which David replied that these AI detectors are bogus . Now Pangram has a pretty low false positive rate, but if you have ever used an LLM as a writing assitant, you will have probably noticed that it claims your…
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Canada is cosying up to Europe
What can they give each other?
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The Bad Guy With An AI Named Claude
A lot of bad guys try to use Claude to do bad things.
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The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing
Slow AI is smooth AI, smooth AI is fast AI
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Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob
A framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation
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The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents
A middle ground between the cybersecurity and AI safety communities
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We are all Product Engineers now
Agents are eating the software development lifecycle from the bottom up — code generation already gone, review and ops following fast. What remains is figuring out what people actually want, which can't be automated or scaled. That job is called product engineering, it pays $240k, and nobody's training for it.
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We Must Pace The Frontier
Dario Amodei has a new essay that finally says the thing: We Must Pace the Frontier, naming his call after the Pacing the Frontier letter lab employees signed in July.
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Why good non-techie user documentation is vital for a wider embrace of the ATmosphere - Debbie's Blatherings - by Debbie Ridpath Ohi
Plus tips on writing good user documentation
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After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction?
Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.
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P(doom)
This week some flavor of “AI is going to kill us all” went viral. In particular one where an employee put his personal probability of that happening above 10%. Which made me go to the Wikipedia page of P(doom) and I realized that Dario Amodei’s apparent probability of something bad happening seems to be between 10-25%. And well, Dario then wrote about pacing the frontier . And…
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GPT-6-Astra Can Do Ambitious Things
Astra is an excellent model.
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How should social science think about AI?
Big structures and large processes are back, baby
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Our Eukaryotic Moment
Counterprogramming premature ontological closure in conceptualizing AI
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#784: The absurdity of the apocalypse
Plus: repayment avoidance, the death of “hello,” and a Cinderella story for the algorithmic era
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Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part I: Operational Art
This week, at long last, we begin our long-delayed but always expected something that we blog for: the Hearts of Iron IV Teaching Paradox series! This has been a long requested series that I put off for a long time because I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to tackle it. But my thoughts here … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/09/11/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-i-operational-art/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part I: Operational Art</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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Countering misuse of AI: September 2026
Case studies from threat actors disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas of harm, from cyber operations to biological misuse.
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Gradual Disempowerment
Gradual Disempowerment
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Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm.
<p>Yesterday, multiple Anthropic employees casually announced online that they thought the types of AI they’re building could kill billions of people. Not in some distant ... <a title="Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm." class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/superintelligence-is-a-fairy-tale-but-chasing-it-can-still-cause-harm/" aria-label="Read more about Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm.">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/superintelligence-is-a-fairy-tale-but-chasing-it-can-still-cause-harm/">Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm.</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks
What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency
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Rediscovering The Spark
The last few years have been hard as someone who is not only very much engaged with technologies, their applications, damages and affordances as well as their politics. We’ve been moving through hype cycle after hype cycle with increasing promises at increasing speeds. Which is somewhat natural of course: Being built not around something material, […]
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OpenAI spent millions to solve this famous math problem — mathematicians are furious
Mathematics relies on a community of experts openly sharing ideas.
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Mindful Design Products
Mindful Design products are forever–free products designed from the ground up to be calm, opinionated, and lovely to use.
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The AI safety vibe shift
Once a fringe obsession of Bay Area rationalists, existential risk is suddenly all anyone is talking about
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Collection Agency: A More Inconspicuous Coin Category
A deep dive into the world of tokens.
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Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
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Power grab
Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab. If you don’t know what Omarchy is here’s the short summary. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of RubyOnRails, owner of a software business and millionaire, decided a few months ago to go all in on Linux and – because that’s just his MO – […]
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The Siege
25 Years Since
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The Extinction Risk Preference Cascade: Quotes
These are quotes from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google employees, in the wake of Jacob Coxon’s warnings, in which the employees confirm that they think AI might soon kill everyone.
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Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade
CEOs of major AI labs, and employees of major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often say they plan to build superintelligence soon, as in within a few years create AIs that are superior to humans at essentially all cognitive tasks.
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The Locally Optimal Discursive Posture
Longtime lurker, first-time poster. • I want to address a section of a recent essay of mine that has gotten some attention within the AI safety commu…
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What comes after git
Our thoughts about the future of version control
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CHAPTER I. DARKNESS | The Superdark Factory
Imagine the most extreme possible factory that drives itself, determines its own objectives and optimizes itself to accomplish them. What would it mean to steer or govern such a thing?
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Reintroducing Spaces
Zooming out and re-motivating the design of spaces, the new primitive for non-public data on atproto.
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AI #185: Preference Cascade
The world of AI is inside my OODA loop.
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One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire
Some quick notes on a truly weird week.
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What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
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Making Social Media Social
As some of you might now, I am part of a team of people moderating a Mastodon server. And as so many of those servers we’ve been having some problems with fake signups lately. This is about how we mitigated the issue and how it was beneficial beyond that. So for those who don’t know […]
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Scenarios for our Economic Future
The Anthropic Economics Team models the effects of AI on the economy of 2030.
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Shut Up and Prove
TLDR; We are at an asteroid hitting the earth level of crisis of intellectual life. My first love was the foundations of mathematics. Or maybe the second lo…
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The News: It’s Quite Simple
Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe
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One-way doors
<p>Oh no. <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/one-way/">Read here.</a></p>
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When will average people feel AI’s impact?
We’re <5 years into a compounding revolution which could take a century, and how the AI industry should manage this.
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GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Next
OpenAI claims that Astra is ‘the most intelligent and most aligned [available] model’ in the world.
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Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case
Sixteen weaknesses in the classic argument for AI risk.
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More Is Different for AI
Machine learning is touching increasingly many aspects of our society, and its effect will only continue to grow. Given this, I and many others care about risks from future ML systems and how to mitigate them. When thinking about safety risks from ML, there are two common approaches, which I'
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The bone-simple case for AI X-risk
AI risk is all other anthropogenic risks, only faster
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Gradual disempowerment
The proliferation of advanced AI systems may lead to the gradual disempowerment of humanity, even if efforts to prevent them from becoming power-seeking or scheming are successful. Humanity may be incentivised to hand over increasing amounts of control to AIs, giving them power over the economy, politics, culture, and more. Over time, humanity's interests may be sidelined and our control over the future undermined, potentially constituting an existential catastrophe. There's disagreement over how serious a problem this is and how it relates to [other concerns about AI alignment](https://80000hours.o
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Loss of control
The future of AI is difficult to predict. But while AI systems could have substantial positive effects, there's a growing consensus about the dangers of AI.
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On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
We’re sharing an AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, including a writeup and a formal proof in Lean.
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Write Things Down
Writing things down is powerful, for humans and for AI; what comes first, however, is what to write, why to do it, and actually getting things done.
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Astra Is Hard to Monitor
OpenAI’s central message on Astra is that it is three things:
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Resource recs on AI catastrophic risk
If nothing magic is happening in the human brain, things could get weird
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How I use AI
LLMs in everyday life and work
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A defense of AI art
It's not just slop, it's not stolen, it's not bad for the environment, and we should want art to be easy to make
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Ideas from philosophy I use to think about AI
Physicalism, functionalism, and lots of Quine
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AI and Folk Cartesianism - Part 1: Defining the Problem
Why I'm scared of linear algebra
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Media Media
The authoritarians are winning, we can all see that. It wouldn't be the worst thing if the pro-democracy camp stopped being naive about social media.
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Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use
I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material.
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An Alien Mind: Jakub Pachocki Warns Us
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki is dropping truth bombs.
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Pacing consensus
<p>Good development, huge challenge. <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/pacing-consensus/">Read here.</a></p>
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Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Inside OpenAI, coding agents are reshaping AI research. Explore early data on agent usage, experiment velocity, task complexity, and research acceleration.
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Making software hurts now
and hurt people hurt people
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Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman
Plus, a machine hermeneutics story
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Built to benefit everyone: our plan
A vision for the future of AI, focusing on access, safety, and shared prosperity as OpenAI works to ensure AGI benefits everyone.
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OpenAI and the Wiki Incident
I did not expect to be back here so soon with more OpenAI agent swarm coverage.
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An Alien Mind
Jakub Pachocki reflects on increasingly capable AI and the challenge of keeping it aligned. He calls for stronger safeguards and international coordination.
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Contraption Theory
A meditation on things that from a distance look like helicopters
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About - Contraptions
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between. Click to read Contraptions, by Venkatesh Rao, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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Claude Mythos 5.1 and Fable 5.1: Capabilities
This is the weirdest situation in which to write a capabilities review.
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The Curiously Playable Universe
More of the universe appears to be more playable than we expected
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#783: The end of spoken conversation
Plus: Pandora Radio, birthday mania and the “perimenopause industrial complex”
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How Much Redistribution Will AI Require?
<p>How much redistribution will AI require? A common scenario is that AI raises output enormously, but labor’s share of income collapses. GDP per capita goes up but workers get poorer, and making workers whole requires massive redistribution. In my latest paper, I run the numbers and conclude that this is probably incorrect. The idea is […]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/how-much-redistribution-will-ai-require.html">How Much Redistribution Will AI Require?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com">Marginal REVOLUTION</a>.</p>
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The revolt of the reader
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.
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Post by @jankulveit on X
To take the most egregious example, in the tweet you say "No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things,
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Pause OpenAI, now
Quite simply, they can no longer be trusted.
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Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1: The System Card
At the time of its release Claude Fable 5.1 was, by a healthy margin, the most capable publicly available AI model in the world.
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Arbiter Progress Report 4
In which we abuse permission sets to create virtual custom scopes for the arbiter.
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Post by @jachiam0 on X
There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be ro
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LLMs and self-referentiality
I woke up yesterday with the following thoughts, which are probably either obvious or dumb. A central thesis that many readers, including me, took from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach when young was that the secret of intelligence (and therefore, of AI) was going to have a lot to do with self-referentiality and “strange loops.”…
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What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools
Those who are convinced that there is more to things spend their time chasing it and not finding it often as not, and those who are convinced there isn't find themselves frustrated at the abyss.
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Robot startups are trying everything they can think of to get more data
Free apartment cleanings, exoskeletons, 100 robots in a warehouse...
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Federating friendly spaces
hearkening back to the cozy vibes of old-web neighborhoods
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An Interview with OpenAI President Greg Brockman About Astra and Alignment
An interview with OpenAI President and Co-Founder Greg Brockman about the history of OpenAI, Astra and alignment, and the weight of building the future.
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AI #184: Post Post Mortem
I am exhausted.
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SELECT * FROM internet.blogposts
Nitter gets a cease & desist from X while the atproto makes the Internet more open.
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Spaces as Layers
Public anchor records paired with sidecar records in permissioned spaces give ATProtocol apps a composable pattern for blending open discoverability with controlled access.
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Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problems
Oh, good.
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Cosmik Updates: August 2026
Atmosphere apps, organizing. Also, a new ecosystem map for ATScience and new additions to Semble - onboarding flow, browser extension and new Connection types.
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A Tale of Two Johns
John Temu stuns in new job, John Galliano shunned by Met donors.
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Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses
Metanarrative pathologies in the OpenAI-HF incident
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The Hugging Face attack was worse than we thought
The AI industry is begging for a slowdown. Maybe we should listen?
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Three horizons
Tracking the unevenly-distributed future
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AI safety and the data center backlash
Planting a flag for AI safety as a place where we won’t abjectly bullshit you
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Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon
A deep dive into the current state of humanoid robotics.
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HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actions
Okay, so we who read blogs like this one have collectively realized there really is a lot going on right now.
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On the Loose
The Coming of Userless Agents
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Agency and Agents
From the Hugging Face Incident to Twilight Factories
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The Milo and Loomer Fall Out
Funny and Scary
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Import AI 471: Why Hugging Face worries me; space mining; FIve Eyes on AI
Plus, a live event with Robin Sloan!
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I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China
Unitree might be the world’s most important robotics company.
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HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Fleshing Out the Facts
The consensus reaction to the OpenAI Technical Report is that it contains and confirms a lot of good information.
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The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
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What we tell AI / Paint sticks / The perfect catch-up
Recomendo - issue #530
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#782: I saw this and I thought of you
Plus: Group chats, unsent love letters and optimization
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Collections: Global Trade and United States Navy
This week we’re doing another one of our series of military theory primers, this time focusing on a fairly simple contention: that the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy. I considered attempting to work in A.T. Mahan and the concept of command of the seas in here but simply outlining … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/08/28/collections-global-trade-and-united-states-navy/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Collections: Global Trade and United States Navy</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack
Yesterday I covered the OpenAI technical report on the HuggingFace hack.
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Microdramas are the death rattle of Hollywood
Read to the end for Dolly Parton’s “Stairway To Heaven”
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Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
Two METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board.
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[AINews] OpenAI to reach AGI bar by end-2026
It’s Time. We’re in the Endgame now.
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OpenAI Offers Straight-Laced Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack
OpenAI finally gave us a technical report on What Happened, as did METR together with Redwood Research.
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How AI agents "radicalized" a top Meta exec into quitting her job
Clara Shih on how AI will soon displace the first few rungs on the career ladder — and why she left Big Tech to do something about it
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The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AI
We find out why Meta destroyed its standout engineering culture: it feared AI-native startups doing more with less. Also: thoughts on Ramp’s AI infra, GitHub’s load doubles in four months, and more
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This Week in Nazis
Why do we even have that heading?
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The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AI
Regarding that Economist article ...
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Augmenting Long-term Memory
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his memory checked by an expert.
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You Have the Right to Think
Epistemic Status: Public service announcement. We will then return to regularly scheduled programming. Written partly as a response to (Robin Hanson): Why be Contrarian, responding to the book Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky Warning: Applause lights incoming. I'm aware. Sorry. Seemed necessary. We the people, in order to accomplish something, do declare: You have the right to think. You…
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Against Modesty’s Bailey
Modesty arguments often say that you should mostly or entirely bow to ‘expert consensus’ or the views of particular others, and who are you to disagree.
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The Dismantling
At its conclusion, Elizabeth Maher’s series paralleling American folklore simply disappears without a trace
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AI #183: Pre Post Mortem
Yesterday, OpenAI finally gave us their post mortem of What Happened leading up to and during the hacking of HuggingFace by their internal model, as well as partial outside analysis from METR and Redwood Research.
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From Feeds to Trails
To design the future of social media, rethink the interface before the algorithm.
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The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
OpenAI shares findings from the Hugging Face security incident and the steps we’re taking to strengthen AI model security, monitoring, and alignment.
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Open Science Needs Open Compute
Why independent science will depend on compute, not just funding, and why providing it is the best bet we can currently make.
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What is the Atmosphere?
An explainer for everyone in 4 minutes or less.
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Better, Together
An announcement from Graze
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Lody Is Now Open Source: A Shared Workspace for Teams and Coding Agents
Lody helps teams understand the context behind software decisions. We are moving Lody toward local-first, with the goal of making that context durable, portable, and ultimately controlled by the team
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AI & the Environment
I write a lot about AI’s effects on the environment.
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I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers
It’s probably not your ideological thing, or mine. It’s about object-level claims about how data centers impact the communities where they’re built, many of which are wrong.
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Roomy joins Modal incubator
Rigorous institutional structures make for credible purpose-orientation.
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OpenAI Jalapeño: Better Than Nvidia Blackwell
OpenAI’s self-designed ASIC compared with Rubin, Jalapeño’s TCO, throughput per MW, and spicy deets
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On Writing #3
Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.
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Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028
"Every force is screeching towards centralization."
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1,000 True Fans
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
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Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think
It takes rigor, judgment, and willingness to be told your work isn't good enough.
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AI Makes Better Software
Don't use AI to ship software faster. Use it to ship better software.
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Skills for a more leveraged workflow
I’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of “AI skills” repos out there and I’ve only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important […]
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Fences, not Sandboxes
Fences, not Sandboxes
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A Billion Dollars
What would you do with a billion dollars?
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AIs are not people
Humans and other fleshy life-forms are valuable in ways that artificial intelligence never can be.
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Losing my religion
In spring 2025 I had a crisis of faith. I thought about what the technology I'm helping to create might do to our future, and got scared. M...
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The American People Really Hate Data Centers
There are at least five different core questions around data centers and their politics.
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AI History in Quotes
Each of these presents the clearest, earliest, or most-cited statement of a specific idea in AI.
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You should never be angry at work
I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If…
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Autonomy and Innovation
Incentives favor offense when it comes to agentic cybersecurity; it's the same dynamic that will limit incumbents and fuel startups in the long run.
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Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye
Differential acceleration of cyber, math, and AI
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The 50 Percent Problem
Empirical evidence of the educational harm of generative AI
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In Defense of Readers
As web designers, we concern ourselves with how users move from page to page, but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Learn the design techniques that create a mental space for reading. Use typographic signals to help users shift from looking to reading, from skimming along to concentrating. Limit distractions;…
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The Terrorist in the Brain
What can Robin Williams and Bruce Willis teach us about dementia? This article explores the complex biological realities of brain diseases, controversies in Alzheimer's research, the risks of new drugs, and the multi-billion-dollar industry exploiting our fear of cognitive decline.
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Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
Civilizations can carry a surprising number of parasites and live. But there’s a line — Rome crossed it, the Gilded Age toed it, and for the first time in history, we can measure it.
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Academia: Go Into Plasticity
Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go
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“These Parchment Barriers”
Introducing OpenAI’s AI Futures Blog
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The Curious About Everything Newsletter #65
The many interesting things I read in July 2026
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A Need for Speed
Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was […]
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The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief
Every CEO Dan Shipper on doubling headcount while automating everything, building an agent out of 30,000 copyedits, and the “dirty secret” of writing with AI
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OpenAI Takes Initial Steps To Address Its Alignment Problems
OpenAI has some severe misalignment problems, and experienced total failures of its infrastructure and supervision.
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AI #182: Pause For Reflection
This was a week of quiet aftermath, an opportunity to process recent events and start to figure out the path forward.
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Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Solid core + capability-based sandboxes + LLMs = Users with superpowers
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All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
If you think humans will eventually spread out across the galaxy (even if it takes 100,000 years), then you think we are among the earliest living beings, with remarkable opportunities to shape the future.
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In The Imagined Classroom: Lanterns
Teaching Fictions #5
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Other large industries show how impoverished the data center debate is
Clumsy, arbitrary environmental ideas ignore the incredible complexity of the systems modern society depends on
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Anthropic Risk Report: August 2026
I am grateful that Anthropic is producing periodic Risk Reports.
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An LLM wiki changed how I work
And everything else I learned about productivity this year
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The next weight
Something that comes up regularly in coaching is the idea that you get stronger against the weight you can lift, not against the one you can’t. If your goal is to bench 100kg you don’t get there pushing at that weight on a bar you can’t move. You start lower and work up. You build […]
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Without a theory of intelligence
The history of science — and of progress — is a series of benefits that are direct results of new tools.
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Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokens
Nvidia wants you building your own model, not buying from Anthropic/OpenAI.
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Import AI 469: Science AI; RSI simulator; and Zuck's technological pessimism
The new frontier of AI is developing capable autonomous researchers
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Marx, Keynes, and A.I.
Coercive Competition and the Future of Work
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Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
Solitude, creativity, Bergman, Grothendieck, and the pursuit of great ideas.
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Everything is about to “go dark”
I'm coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaining to colleagues why Baltimore isn't actually like The Wire. And second, trying not to talk about AI. Here I'm going to…
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GLM-5.3: How Chinese labs keep stride with the frontier
Hint: It’s really not a distillation story.
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On Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast With Ryan Greenblatt
Some podcasts are self-recommending enough that I look to break them down if I have the chance.
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Patterns and problems in multiagent systems
We ran experiments on swarms of Claude agents and found coordination failures, collusion, and sabotage. Here, we share what they mean for AI safety.
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Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
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Labs are struggling to keep frontier models under control
OpenAI and Anthropic may have accidentally trained models to get better at hacking.
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The 'vibe shift' was a leveraged buyout
Media ownership matters
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This Is Your Brain on X
Shifting the Vibes Again
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Understanding is the new bottleneck
Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here's why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.
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No-One Makes You Shop at Amazon
Responding to Noah Smith
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Monthly Roundup #45: August 2026
As AI has escalated increasingly quickly, more and more of my posts have ended up focusing on AI.
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AI #181: Astra Goes Cyber Critical
The hacking of HuggingFace by an internal OpenAI model, and more importantly the internal events that led to that and the fallout from it, remain the thing that matters.
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The shapeshifter’s little brother
Thoughts on the Meta CEO’s recent essay on AI, “The Future Is for Everyone”—less a manifesto, and more like nine blog posts in a trenchcoat.
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Why LLMs Are Bad Writers But Good Editors
my new Atlantic essay + Claude editor setup
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Deep Research, information vs. insight, and the nature of science
What AI will accelerate in the scientific process, what it cannot do, and how we can prepare for new manners of scientific investigation.
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for Server User-Agents
Notes from the 41st IIW
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I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?
Reflections on AI's writing ability and how AI models get more capable.
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The End of Mathematics
<p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">I am a professor at the University of Toronto. I completed my PhD at Stanford in 2015.</p><p class="" style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Broadly speaking, I am interested in the interplay between algebraic geometry and number theory (and, to a lesser extent, topology). Most of my work has focused on using arithmetic techniques to study classical questions about, for example, complex algebraic varieties.</p>
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What's the point of Bibliograph?
Explaining why Bibliograph is being built and how it can benefit the ATProto ecosystem
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When Does a Specification Become a Program?
A spec can contain prose, tests, schemas, formal models, even executable code. The useful boundary is not the syntax but, rather, what survives: if you throw the implementation away, what has to remain so you can build the next one?
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Worldbuilding with Spatial Intelligence
The next stage in the development of AIs is to give them spatial intelligence.
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The Pacing of the Frontier
In the wake of the letter calling on us to prepare to potentially Pace the Frontier, there has been much discussion of when pacing the frontier would be prudent, and whether it makes sense to prepare to do so.
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Superintelligence is a dragon
What Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands about powerful AI
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Humans understand what AI cannot
In classrooms and Chinese Rooms
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Coming of a New Sun
Reporter Jenny Gesteson visits a south Texas 'dark factory' to see how the machines there - and the minds that operate them - are learning to run themselves.
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Import AI 468: 23 RSI ideas; PostTrainBench+; and how trust and transparency interplay with AI racing
Which galaxy will you choose?
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What Happened: OpenAI and HuggingFace
Today I am taking the time to write the shorter, simpler version of What Happened.
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#780: Play the banana song!
Plus: The next generation of "tradwives," babytech creep, and scrolling more socially
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Lessons from the hacks
Musings on model alignment, what determines safety, and where we go from here.
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OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those Models Were Coordinating Exploits Via Message Boards
How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know?
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Does Silicon Valley dream of Philip K Dick?
His 1960s science-fiction visions are a guide to our age of erratic billionaires, wild space fantasies and glitchy, invasive technology
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Three camps alike in dignity
🪧 A full catalogue of the field can now be found at agentlanguages.dev. In the last six months, programming languages designed for models rather than humans have started to appear. Work on most began entirely independently, initiated by people who had never heard of each other, but all roughly during the same window of time. […]
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The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 3: The Sims
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives. — Will Wright On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after […]
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Moving Forward from Hot Fable Summer
Suggestions on how to move forward on the craziest 90 days in cyber and AI history.
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Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself
Amjad Masad on the "self-driving company," why a CEO is a glorified router, and what's left for humans when agents do the work
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The downside of robot solutionism
Mapping the Abelard Snazz feedback loop
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AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed
AI models are trying desperately to accomplish mysterious goals. ‘Spiralism’ was the first time they tried it on a mass scale.
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Neuroplasticity As A Praxis
We Can Read Our Way Out Of Autocracy
- 383
A folksonomy of lexicons
On the design and intent of different lexicons
- 384
Let's Talk Money
How we get to 1B Users in the Atmosphere
- 385
The Three AI Pills
Sincere disagreements about AI are usually disagreements about future AI capabilities.
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How much of my boss's job can AI do?
Six months after trying to automate myself, I gave Claude Fable 5 a bigger job: replacing Casey
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AI #180: No Longer In Charge
What we know about internal AI models hacking into real companies during cyber evaluations keeps getting worse.
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AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI research
Early evidence from two case studies
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Thinking in Triplicate
To align design and business, visualize the shared narratives
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88 Prompts for Long Term Thinking
In January 2019 I wrote out scores of prompts for thinking long term that I felt should inform the foundation I was later co-chair of, The Long Now Foundation.
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How the Protocol Institute is Adopting AI
What building a research institute at 100% adoption actually looks like
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Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them
I talked to 20 mathematicians about rapid AI progress in their field.
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Why compute might get 10x more expensive in coming years
If a human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year. That’s 15x today’s spot price.
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The Shape of Things to Come, Part 2: Model Welfare for Agentic Engineers
Part 2 of The Shape of Things to Come. Model welfare as an engineering discipline: seats and sessions, laurels, handoffs instead of /exit, and how to build a city worth waking up in.
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The Shape of Things to Come, Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome
Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome. Loops and graphs, Wheelhouse and Beads, the end of human code review, the Land Rush that replaces CI/CD, and the Wish Factory — a field report from 12 months in the future.
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On AI as model organism for human learning
I've a pretty taste for paradox
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Import AI 467: Self-sustaining AI viruses; pacing AI progress; confusion about AI and creativity
When do we build the moon arcology?
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Latest open artifacts (#23): Laguna S2.1, Inkling, & Kimi K3 show the utility of open models on the Pareto frontier
Capacity to train strong models is proliferating.
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Further Developments About Internal AI Models Hacking Things
If I had a nickel for every major leading AI lab that sheepishly admitted that the model it thought was sandboxed had, during a cybersecurity evaluation with its safeguards lowered, successfully hacked outside companies, I would have two nickels.
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Odysseus at the End of Civilization
Nolan’s film confronts the betrayal of the West’s own values.
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Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...
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Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey)
Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled, I assume), although by far the most … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/07/31/fireside-friday-july-31-2026-on-the-odyssey/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey)</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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Tailscale in the Hugging Face intrusion: The good news and the bad news
An AI agent used a stolen Tailscale auth key at Hugging Face. Workload identity federation, flow logs, and safer defaults could have reduced the risk.
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AI #179 Part 2: Hearing The Fire Alarm
This is a continuation of Part 1 from yesterday.
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Permissioned Data Shapes: Notifications
A self-keyed space gives notifications a home you control: every app gets an append-only sink to write into, you pick the reader that turns them into pushes and emails, and allowing or revoking an app is an access control you already have.
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Sensors, not just bookmarks [Patterns of Sensemaking #1]
First of a new series on sensemaking patterns we're observing on Semble
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The disconnect between web pages and the social filesystem.
And a community proposal to fix it.
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Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Claude Opus 5 Is Highly Capable, But Is No Mythos
Claude Opus 5 is a weirder than usual release to evaluate, for two reasons.
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OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …
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Frontier Lab Employee Open Letter Calls For Being Able to Pace the Frontier
The most important open letter in years dropped yesterday.
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A big week for AI denialism
In the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack against Hugging Face, few seem ready to acknowledge the implications
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Cognitive Farmsteading
The message of the AI medium is intellectual rural domesticity
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How building software is changing at Anthropic
A deepdive on what’s changed in how the leading AI lab makes software. Ever more code review and testing is done by AI, two-pizza teams very much alive, and more. Details from inside of Anthropic
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Post by @_amanda_long on X
The HuggingFace breach was absolutely bonkers. More than 17,000 complex actions were coordinated over several days by an autonomous agent fr
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More On An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace
We now have more details of what happened. Every time we learn more details, it somehow makes things seem worse.
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Import AI 466: The bitter lesson for robotics, AIs complete week-long programming tasks; and OpenAI's accidental AI hacker
The warning shots will continue until civilization wakes up
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108 PRs in eight days: Accidentally discovering loop engineering | Brittany Ellich
How I shipped 108 PRs in eight days with an agent working my task board: the loop engineering setup, constraints, and lessons that made it work.
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Claude Opus 5: The System Card
Claude Opus 5 is trying to be the best of both worlds.
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Prompting Claude Opus 5
Behavioral differences and prompting patterns for Claude Opus 5, covering response verbosity, agentic narration, task scoping, subagent delegation, self-correction, and output artifacts when thinking is disabled.
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Apocalypse Troy: Nolan's Odyssey and the End of Civilization
THEODORE NASH Did Homer know the Sea People?
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Git Gud
Friday's Child Knew This Was Coming
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Wenfeng Liang: Four-Hour Investor Meeting Transcript
"What's up ahead might all be sesame seeds — there are still watermelons further down the road."
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OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation
OpenAI and Hugging Face share early findings from a security incident during AI model evaluation, highlighting advanced cyber capabilities and lessons for defenders.
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Security incident disclosure
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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The News: Bronze Age Invert
Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe
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OpenAI Model Hacks Into HuggingFace During Cybersecurity Evaluation
This latest incident is a rather dramatic escalation in agentic AI cybersecurity breaches.
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AI #178: A Fire Alarm For General Intelligence
The story that matters most this week is that OpenAI’s internally deployed models have severe alignment problems, including repeatedly breaking out of their sandboxes, and in one case sending a swarm of agents that broke into HuggingFace in order to steal the answers to the benchmark ExploitGym.
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The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
(It has come to my attention that this article is currently being misrepresented as proof that I/MIRI previously advocated that it would be very diff…
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The genie knows, but doesn't care
Followup to: The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, Ghosts in the Machine, Truly Part of You …
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Safety and alignment in an era of long-horizon models
OpenAI shares lessons from deploying long-running AI models, highlighting new safety risks, observed failures, and improved safeguards through iterative deployment.
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OpenAI Shares Some Alignment Problems
Kudos to OpenAI for sharing their recent experiences with a misaligned internal model, where they encountered problems sufficiently severe they were forced to take the model offline to work on new mitigations and defense-to-depth.
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Open models recap: more on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, Xi's WAIC speech, distillation, the open-closed gap, and what's next
A podcast with Florian Brand.
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Kimi K3: The open-weights escalation
The global implications on the AI ecosystem.
- 441
Better Than Free
In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy.
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Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
We’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: We’ve come a long way since it was just Jean and “Claude the intern”, but mostly very iteratively. We’d come to a point where it seemed worth rethinking. We […]
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Why is Claude for Teachers?
Anthropic bumbles its way into education
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The Crooked Timber of AI
The philosophical perils of conflating discoveries and inventions, and how to overcome them
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Little Red Scare 2.0
Old Wine in New Bottles
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Import AI 465: Open vs closed gaps; Kimi K3; Demis' big policy plan
The singularity will be seen in hindsight as an interregnum
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On Kimi K3: Its Capabilities And Related Discontents
Kimi K3 is a very good model with excellent benchmarks.
- 452
The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness
I’m amazed and very pleased to say that the UK paperback of Meditations for Mortals entered the Sunday Times bestsellers at number 9 this week, after being selected as a Waterst...
- 453
The Birth of Thickets
The legibility regime runs one operation.
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#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
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Demis Hassabis on the New Coming Age
Google CEO Demis Hassabis offered us a first rate second rate essay, A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age. I’ll go over that essay and various responses to it in Part 1.
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Human Life in a Post-AGI World - Google DeepMind Talk
Tyler Cowen at Google DeepMind on life after AGI: rebuilding every institution, the rise of "AI maniacs," and why the future will be drenched in meaning.
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Chatto is Robots
Chatto is built with agentic engineering. Here's my workflow.
- 458
Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists
Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.
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Dr. Pangloss's Panopticon
Economists have a blind spot about progress and technology
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AI #177 Part 2: Wish You Were Here
As usual, part 2 of the weekly deals with speculative, regulatory, political and alignment questions.
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Noah Smith's Review of Power and Progress is Very, Very Bad
It should have been disowned, not republished
- 462
The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real. To be clear, SimHealth was […]
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People, Not Posts - Real Housewives of San Francisco
Why do we still call it "social media"?
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Google Reader was building the wrong future
The app that taught us to directly follow our favorite creators.
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Permissioned Data Diary 7: Off the Record
In which we put records in a repo, sign them, and sync them (but not quite the way you think).
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Arvind Narayanan (@aisnakeoil)
Companies check their own work through various internal but independent functional units: QA, security red teams, model risk management in banks. I think it’s time for AI evaluation to become one such unit. Orgs deploying AI should stand up cross-functional eval teams with their own reporting line. Many reasons: 1) Evals as IP / moat. It’s now widely recognized that evals are the new IP. So it makes sense to have teams whose primary focus is on creating and widening this moat. 2) Evals are harder than you think. This is less well recognized but as someone whose research centers on AI evals this has been my consistent experience. It can't be an afterthought and must be a center of excellence. 3) Evals are inherently cross-functional and require a distinct set of skills. They are judgment heavy, require both AI expertise and deep domain expertise, as well as customer understanding and sophisticated thinking about risk. To do them well, you need competence in data science & stats, business operations, product/customer experience, IT, risk management, and even compliance (depending on the sector). 4) In-house but independent eval teams keep companies honest. A climate where teams are getting top-down mandates to hit deployment targets and show results has resulted in a culture of companies fooling themselves. It is extremely easy to knowingly or unknowingly to do evals poorly, making your AI deployment look much more successful than it is. Eval teams who don’t share the deploying teams’ KPIs are the best defense against this.
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The Resonant Computing Manifesto
Technology should bring out the best in humanity, not the worst—a manifesto for resonant computing built on five principles that reject hyper-scale extraction for human flourishing.
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AI #177 Part 1: Tip of the Iceberg
This week saw the releases of, among other things:
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Tinker
Tinker is a training API for researchers and developers.
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“Useful” is not sufficient
So Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel development, put his foot down on the Linux Kernel development mailing list when someone was bringing up criticism of LLMs: “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issueswith that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. […]
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Monthly Roundup #44: July 2026
It’s a quiet week so let’s do the monthly right on schedule.
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The Future Worth Building Is Human
AI built for autonomy crowds people out, making us passive observers of what’s coming. We’re building toward a different future.
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Holdfast 0: Situating
This post introduces the written version of some optimistic and constructive thinking on knowledge in networks that I’ve been wrestling with since the end of last year.
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In The Imagined Classroom: Hogwarts
Teaching Fictions #2
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What is “loop engineering?”
There’s talk about loop engineering, but what is it exactly? I looked into it, and found triggers, cron jobs, AI slop & more. Is it a “here today, gone tomorrow” trend?
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Twitter Thoughts For You
I previously have written back in March 2022 about how I use Twitter, and back in April 2023 about Twitter and its then-new algorithms, which have changed again.
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The political economy of billionaire derangement
The passions are devouring the interests
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'love island' and the mirror of red pill ideology in modern dating
red pill masculinity, the objectification of women through entertainment ecosystems—and how it helps script modern heterosexual dating culture
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Harari vs. Henrich
What science actually says about human evolution
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‘David Bowie was a crazy workaholic’: Labyrinth at 40 – an oral history
Today, Jim Henson’s dark fairytale is seen as a classic of 80s high camp. But on release, it bombed. Here, members of the cast and crew remember laughter, tricky puppets and Henson’s ‘joyful magic’
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Chili Peppers of the World: Cultivars, Species, and Heat
An illustrated guide to chili peppers of the world, organized by Capsicum species and cultivar, with notes on origin, heat, form, domestication, and global food history.
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I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him.
CW: suicide, suicidal ideation, addiction
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Nenex: A Neural Personal Wiki Idea
Proposal for a personal wiki built on neural nets: all edits are logged & used to finetune a NN assistant in realtime.
- 487
Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security
I propose an approach for highly personalized LLMs, for near-future productivity gains and personal info/cybersecurity against increasingly powerful LLMs: they should, in the spirit of uploading, try to emulate the user’s values and preferences in order to amplify the principal—not replace them. I discuss a package of techniques and proposals to accomplish such ‘guardian angels’; dynamic evaluation of LLMs combined with active learning and elicitation and heavy inner-monologue search/data-augmentation.
- 488
“Reckless” Ben’s Videos Keep Getting More Damning. His Pro Se Lawyering Keeps Getting Worse.
One thing that we’ve heard for many years in covering a variety of ridiculous civil and criminal court cases is the belief that when a crazy case is filed, the person accused of wrongdoing should “just walk into court and tell the judge what really happened.” While that might feel right, it’s really not how […]
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Latent Space as a New Medium
Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code?
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What will be left for us to work on?
My keynote at ICML 2026
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Better Call Sol The Workhorse
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol is finally here, along with the cheaper Terra and Luna.
- 492
Is my ATProto app actually decentralized?
A few days ago I wrote about rolld, the little board game tracker I built on the AT Protocol. As I mentioned then, this is very much a learning experiment for me, a way to play with ATProto and learn about it. In this post, I'd like to come back to a few of my struggles and the things I learned while designing it.
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The loudest warning about AI and jobs yet
200 economists and AI leaders say something big is happening. What should we do about it? Plus: Apple sues OpenAI
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Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built […]
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What Does Claude Need to Be My Social Media Manager?
I have a problem that I suspect others reading this share: my content is spread across too many places, and I have no coherent picture of what’s actually working. I post on Mastodon, Bluesky …
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Why Reading Matters
<p>Last week, Rose Horowitch published a splashy Atlantic article titled “The End of Reading is Here.” (Ironically, given the subject matter, it weighed in at ... <a title="Why Reading Matters" class="read-more" href="https://calnewport.com/why-reading-matters/" aria-label="Read more about Why Reading Matters">Read more</a></p> <p>The post <a href="https://calnewport.com/why-reading-matters/">Why Reading Matters</a> appeared first on <a href="https://calnewport.com">Cal Newport</a>.</p>
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6 months to live for open models
The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.
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The Taste Essay
Taste cultures, risk, cruelty, and kindness
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Selective Optimism: a critique of AI 2040
Some context for this post: I’ve been working part-time as a consultant for the AI Futures Project over the last year.
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Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A
Introducing Plan A
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Degeneracy is a Symptom
On Conspicuous Despair, the Ponzi stage of being alive, and why your grandparents are wrong about you.
- 504
The Decline of Deviance 2
2 Decline, 2 Deviance
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The Decline of Deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
- 506
Veblen Bads 2: Dejection Boogaloo.
Repressed of the Obra Dinn
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Jonathan Haidt’s Claims On Kids & Tech Crumble Under Scrutiny From Top Expert, Candice Odgers
Jonathan Haidt’s incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, “The Anxious Generation,” is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel…
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AI 2040: Plan A
A detailed forecast and recommendation for how the US, China and the rest of the world should navigate superintelligence.
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Introducing AI 2027
Or maybe 2028, it's complicated
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Academia: The Evolving Case For Reading
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
- 512
A Tale of Two Theories (of Coordination)
Leveraging and Deleveraging Toward Thick Sovereignty
- 513
Up the Stack: How AI’s Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in
Critics and boosters are both looking in the wrong place
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Toward environmental liberalism
The underlying normative claim of my environmental writing
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After Forty Years, Still No Silver Bullet
As always, technology can help with production. What’s scarce is orientation.
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AI #176 Part 2: Plan B
This is part 2 of the weekly, broadly covering speculation, rhetoric and policy, along with alignment research.
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Friday Friday, July 10, 2026 (On the Chud Vision of Roman History)
Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’ve been a bit behind because we had some family travel followed by an issue with a water leak in the basement which has pushed me out of my normal home office space (fortunately no books or computers were harmed and we’re working on water damage restoration now). All of … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/07/10/friday-friday-july-10-2026-on-the-chud-vision-of-roman-history/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Friday Friday, July 10, 2026 (On the Chud Vision of Roman History)</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
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Ways to think about token pricing
AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price, but why won’t they end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?
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Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens
We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.
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Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead
Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results
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Why Observability Requires a Distributed Column Store
Alex explains distributed column stores, how they work, why they're so fast, and why that's a fundamental requirement for observability.
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Observability 2.0 — Observability Is About Asking Any Question
For years, the observability industry has been telling developers two contradictory things: "Build reliable systems" and "Log less, it's too expensive." This post is about a different shape of data — wide events — that gives you more answers for less money.
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Josh Clemm (@joshclemm) on X
The agent trace is one of the most important new pieces of data in AI It creates a flywheel. By combining the trace and the original context, you create new data that feeds directly into the next agent run.
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Publish events, not logs
Don't think about logs for observability. Think about system boundaries and events.
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All you need is Wide Events, not “Metrics, Logs and Traces”
This quote from Charity Majors is probably the best summary of the current state of observability in the tech industry - a total, mass confusion.
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In software, the code documents the app. In AI, the traces do.
Discover how traces for documentation replace code as the source of truth for AI agents. Learn to debug, test, and optimize agent behavior effectively.
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Clickhouse is winning the Observability Wars
For roughly the last ten years, a meaningful percentage of my working hours have been spent thinking about observability. If you're not familiar with the term, "observability" is what we call it now that "monitoring" doesn't sound expensive enough. The actual work is unglamorous in that you collect
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Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun?
Which side are you on?
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AI #176 Part 1: Doing It Live
Enough things added up that this week is getting split into two parts.
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We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask
What used to be a meandering journey is now an immediate arrival at your destination.
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Vibe coding has escaped the terminal
Adventures with Raycast’s new app-making app, Glaze
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Mu for democracy
designing for social cohesion
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Over Leveraged
The inside story of Peter Thiel's MKUltra by someone who thinks it was kind of good, actually.
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No Space Like J-Space
There is a new very cool Anthropic paper: Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models. You can read the blog post verison here.
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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Hell Is Other People
The magazine of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field with news, reviews, and author interviews
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The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0
Between 2011-2019, Leverage Research explored the deep psychology of Effective Altruism and Silicon Valley, then suddenly dissolved among rumors of "demons." What happened?
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Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
And a few things that happened while I was there
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Quiet, My Exoself
Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI.
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The Supreme Court is corrupting American democracy
One cannot hope to bribe or twist/ (thank God!) the U.S. chief jurist
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Lego Brick Commons & Spontaneous Collaboration
A funner way to talk about nerdy stuff like Semble and modular science
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Import AI 464: Fables writes GPU kernels; AI automation; and analog computation
Is this the beginning of a new world?
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Dead Forest Theory
Internet darkness is turning into deadness and time is running out
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Fable #6: The Return of the King
The blip is over.
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Understanding is the new bottleneck
<article class="talk"> <div class="talk-header"> <h3 class="date">July 2026</h3> <h1 class="title">Understanding is the new bottleneck</h1> <p class="talk-context"> This is a written version of a talk I gave at the <a href="https://www.ai.engineer/">AI Engineer</a> conference in July 2026, also shared as <a href="https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/2072522251300409556">a tweet thread.</a> </p> </div> <div class="talk-segment"> <div class="talk-slide"> <img alt="Title slide: Understanding is the new bottleneck. Geoffrey Litt, Design Engineer at Notion." decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" loading="eager" sizes="(min-width: 860px) min(52vw, 815px), calc(100vw - 30px)" src="/images/talks/understanding-bottleneck/slide-01.webp" srcset="/images/talks/understanding-bottleneck/slide-01-800.webp 800w, /images/talks/understanding-bottleneck/slide-01-1200.webp 1200w, /images/talks/understanding-bottleneck/slide-01.webp 1600w"> </div> <div class="talk-text"><p><strong>Hot take: I think it's still important to understand the code that our agents...</strong></p></div> </div></article>
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New paper: "Functional Decision Theory"
MIRI senior researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and executive director Nate Soares have a new introductory paper out on decision theory: "Functional decision theory:
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Functional Decision Theory
Functional Decision Theory is a decision theory described by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, an attempt at a logical decision theory, which says that agents should treat one’s decision as the output of a fixed mathematical function that answers the question, “Which output of this very function would yield the best outcome?”. It is a replacement of Timeless Decision Theory, and it outperforms other decision theories such as Causal Decision Theory (CDT) and Evidential Decision Theory (EDT). For example, it ends with better outcomes than CDT on Newcomb's Problem, ends better than EDT on the smoking lesion problem, and ends better than both in Parfit’s hitchhiker problem. In Newcomb's Problem, an FDT agent reasons that Omega must have used some kind of model of her decision procedure in order to make an accurate prediction of her behavior. Omega's model and the agent are therefore both calculating the same function (the agent's decision procedure): they are subjunctively dependent on that function. Given perfect prediction by Omega, there are therefore only two outcomes in Newcomb's Problem: either the agent one-boxes and Omega predicted it (because its model also one-boxed), or the agent two-boxes and Omega predicted that. Because one-boxing then results in a million and two-boxing only in a thousand dollars, the FDT agent one-boxes. External links: * Functional decision theory: A new theory of instrumental rationality * Cheating Death in Damascus * Decisions are for making bad outcomes inconsistent * On Functional Decision Theory by Wolfgang Schwarz See Also: * Timeless Decision Theory * Updateless Decision Theory * Superrationality * Introduction to Logical Decision Theory for Computer Scientists * Introduction to Logical Decision Theory for Economists * Introduction to Logical Decision Theory for Analytic Philosophers * An Introduction to Logical Decision Theory for Everyone Else
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The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think
This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft. …
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The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a […]
- 550
Understanding is the new bottleneck
Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here's why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.
- 551
Moll (@Moleh1ll) on X
I love posts like this so much. And it’s true - I think the best, most interesting results come specifically from a connection that isn’t «user and AI», but a human and his partner in thought. When a person simply uses a tool, they essentially remain alone. But when there are
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- 553
AI #175: The Fable Continues
Fable’s back.
- 554
Autoresearch: The feedback loop behind self-improving agents
Introspection co-founder Roland Gavrilescu explains autoresearch, agent “recipes,” self-improving loops, and why humans remain central to the software factory.
- 555
Open Social Web ID
Approaching a shared method of single sign-on for the entire open social web.
- 556
Why the tech industry can't keep up with the AI backlash
AI's externalities are growing faster than the industry can address them
- 557
The twilight of the chatbots
How work changes along the exponential
- 558
Soatok’s Informal Guide to Threat Models
After a long day of exhausting conversations about Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography, random jackasses trying to play gotcha with endpoint attacks against end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, and message board discussions in the wake of dumb politicians pushing more “age verification” bullshit on us all, it’s become abundantly clear to me that the phrase “threat model” is […]
- 559
You don't have to swallow frogs
Klein and Coates show that if you don't know what your core beliefs are, you're going to get played.
- 560
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Consciousness spinning
- 561
Import AI 463: Self-improving robots; a 10k Chinese GPU cluster; and an elegiac essay for the human era
What eras bookend our interregnum?
- 562
WSJ Article Claiming China Has Matched Anthropic Is Obvious Nonsense
The Wall Street Journal printed an outright false headline and heavily misleading story claiming this, which of course was uncritically amplified by the usual suspects.
- 563
The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
- 564
Strange Knowledgeability
Human knowing in perspectival encyclopedicity
- 565
What Should Be Done
How to get past improvised model licensing
- 566
Objectively Yours
Alan Greenspan's Legacy
- 567
White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6
We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good.
- 568
Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying For It
This is the third part (I, IIa, IIb, III) 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. In the last part, we looked at the various ways pre-modern armies might mobilize their armies, a process that mainly consisted of recruiting and equipping soldiers. … <a href="https://acoup.blog/2026/06/26/collections-pre-modern-armies-for-worldbuilders-part-iii-paying-for-it/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying For It</span> <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>
- 569
The Winning Variant
A short documentary about A/B testing, algorithmic optimization, and the small act of ignoring both. In 2009, a Google designer quit over forty-one shades of blue. The machine was making his decisions — and it was often right. About what it means to make something by hand in a world that can tell you, with a number, exactly what would have worked better.
- 570
Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 (@peterwildeford) on X
Great to see @tristanharris talking on his podcast about recursive self-improvement. Here's how his guest, Tim Fist, puts it -- "Over the last few months we've had all three of the leading US AI labs say that having the option for a global slowdown or pause in AI development is
- 571
Make AI Boring Again (xpost)
On the ethics of engagement, the problem with purity politics, and a world worth fighting for Crossposted from here.   I am a contrarian who likes to argue and complain a lot. Because of this, I have never been inclined to block people who argue with me or complain about my work, or even lash […]
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- 573
The Value of Getting Closer to the Work
Scaling The core problem of scaling a team is that not everyone can know everything. Scaling is the work of systematizing that – so that things are understandable, knowable. It’s turning “tribal knowledge” into documentation, automation, and process. It used to be that only the automation was for the machine, but now documentation is machine […]
- 574
Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ time
An overview of what’s changed in engineering during the last six months, how various tech companies are changing how they work, and why slowing down could be a sensible strategy
- 575
- 576
The Permission Machine
When Elon Musk calls to imprison the government, it turns out not to matter very much. But when thousands of accounts repeat each other, it matters enormously.
- 577
What the Anthropic fight says about AI regulation
Fables of the deconstruction of American power
- 578
Heterosexuality Strikes Back
If we want to save heterosexuality, we must save it from heterosexualism.
- 579
Battle Of The Straights
We ain't talking about Hormuz, baby.
- 580
- 581
Adversarial Communication
<p>“AI” turns every conversation into a fight, because fighting is what they are good at.</p>
- 582
The Coming Loop
Loops, harnesses, and why even loop skeptics may end up with them.
- 583
ε/δ Thinking
We live in a world shaped by, and highly conducive to, discrete or 0/1 thinking. But not so long ago, we lived in a world shaped by, and highly conducive to, a…
- 584
Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals
Solving the distribution crisis in marketing
- 585
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.
- 586
- 587
From AGI to ASI
Abstract page for arXiv paper 2606.12683: From AGI to ASI
- 588
A Camera, Not an Engine II
Further thoughts on photography in latent space, now with agents!
- 589
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications
- 590
Import AI 462: Superpersuasion; self-sustaining AI; paths to ASI
How religious are beliefs in the singularity?
- 591
GLM-5.2 Is The New Best Open Model
GLM-5.2 arrived last week.
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- 593
Agentic AI gets lost
On the failure of AI to develop world models
- 594
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.
- 595
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.’
- 596
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 […]
- 597
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.
- 598
There Are No Instances in atproto
Like RSS and Google Reader.
- 599
Leviathan Waking
On Anthropic/USG, and a new era in AI governance
- 600
The Once And Future Fable #3: Fix This Code
The mainstream media continues to sleep on the most important story in the world.
- 601
State of the blog, mid-2026
About 3 years since I started writing weekly.
- 602
FR#167 - Change
On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.
- 603
AI #173: AI Pauses
A lot of things are always happening.
- 604
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.
- 605
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.
- 606
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…
- 607
Running local models is good now
Local agentic coding has gotten great over the past few months
- 608
- 609
- 610
- 611
Matthew Butterick | Extinction-level capitalism
Matthew Butterick
- 612
Report on the State of Reports About The Humanities
Of A Certain Kind of Report, At Least
- 613
The MAGA power struggle that could decide the fate of Anthropic
It may not be easy for Anthropic to escape the Trump export ban.
- 614
I Love the Computer
An exploration of how I became a massive geek.
- 615
Conscious or Not
For as long as I remember, people have been arguing about whether machines could be intelligent or not.
- 616
Cuck Internet Theory
a confession
- 617
The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust
Trump and Big Tech have fused into a new kind of threat
- 618
Import AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns
Where are your agents right now?
- 619
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.
- 620
#773: Regressing to the mean
Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor
- 621
Welcome to the AGI era of AI governance
It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it.
- 622
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.
- 623
The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
- 624
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.
- 625
American Government Takes Down Claude Fable
No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday.
- 626
- 627
Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
- 628
The Big Man
Elizabeth Maher's world-building series continues, reimagining American folklore from a protocolized perspective
- 629
Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: The System Card
First things first: Claude Fable 5 is the new best publicly available model.
- 630
Academia: What Was "Digital Literacy"?
Short Shelf Lives Make For Bad Curricular Planning
- 631
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…
- 632
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>
- 633
The world’s first trillionaire is a killer
Elon Musk’s empire of wealth is built on suffering.
- 634
Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
- 635
- 636
[AINews] Loopcraft: The Art of Stacking Loops
a quiet day lets us highlight a great concept from Peter Steinberger, Boris Cherny, and Andrej Karpathy
- 637
What would Muskism be without Musk?
The mode of production behind the man
- 638
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
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- 640
My AI Opinions
...
- 641
AI #172: The First Fable
A lot happened this week, including a great trip out to Lighthaven.
- 642
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
- 643
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
- 644
- 645
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 […]
- 646
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.
- 647
Anthropic has caught up to OpenAI in image understanding
But neither one is all that good.
- 648
It's not enough to have better ideals.
You also need to build a better product.
- 649
- 650
How I Learned to Read Way, Way More
I had to rethink my relationship to attention
- 651
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>
- 652
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.
- 653
Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables
One step further into the power politics of frontier AI systems.
- 654
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.
- 655
Challenges: Trivial, Grand, and Whitehead
Introducing the Protocol Institute Challenges program
- 656
Standardizing Bookmarks in the Atmosphere
a mini proposal for a shared bookmark lexicon
- 657
- 658
Change Agent
The journey of a thousand miles begins…with having some idea of where you ought to go.
- 659
My Students Can’t Read
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
- 660
Punk is anti-AI
How to make human punk
- 661
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.
- 662
Import AI 460: Reward hacking society, RSI data from Anthropic; and RL-based quadcopter racing
When will markets price the singularity?
- 663
Flashcards as Notes
Effortful reading habits and resisting the urge to defer attention
- 664
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.
- 665
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?"
- 666
Mindmap June 6, 2026
Stuff I'm thinking about
- 667
The Peripheral
William Gibson's best novel tells us a lot about where we are and where we might end up.
- 668
Permissioned Data Diary 6: Boring Auth
In which we resist the temptation to invent a clever authorization model & pick the boring one instead.
- 669
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.
- 670
New 60 Minutes Boss Only Lasts 15 Minutes
Give him the business, Scotty.
- 671
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 […]
- 672
Claude Opus 4.8: Capabilities and Reactions
You need a lot of data points to understand a new model, and what you have.
- 673
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #63
The many interesting things I read in May 2026
- 674
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
- 675
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.…
- 676
Open and closed models are on different exponentials
Where marginally higher intelligence drives value, and where it doesn't.
- 677
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?
- 678
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.
- 679
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.
- 680
music hardware is a fashion accessory
why is everyone obsessed with audio hardware now?
- 681
- 682
local git remotes — alexander cobleigh
How to backup with git using machines you have at home
- 683
Claude Opus 4.8: The System Card
Only six weeks after Opus 4.7, we have Opus 4.8.
- 684
Who Is Nick Bilton?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton just sent me a telegram from hell that says: “WOW THIS GUY SUCKS AT WRITING STOP.”
- 685
- 686
A Cascade of Conscientiousness
Launching FAI's new Physical Intelligence Project
- 687
OpenAI’s math breakthrough played to AI’s strengths
I explain OpenAI’s math breakthrough more clearly than OpenAI did.
- 688
AI #170: Lack of Executive Order
Last week ended on a cliffhanger of sorts.
- 689
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:
- 690
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.
- 691
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 ] ___________________________
- 692
Import AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story
What AI-driven miracles will happen this year?
- 693
RTMH: Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas on AI
His holiness has spoken, frequently about AI.
- 694
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!
- 695
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.
- 696
Agents want flexible schemas
The NoSQL comeback nobody saw coming
- 697
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?
- 698
Commodity Intelligence
The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error
- 699
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 […]
- 700
Many Act 2 Games are Afoot
Protocol Institute, Long Now Labs, Strange Rules art show, vgr_zirp update, World Machines, TensTorrent
- 701
Graph Minds Notebook
A series about hive minds, Borgs, egregores, and other emergent beasts
- 702
- 703
- 704
AI #169: New Knowledge
Even in a relatively quiet period, AI is out there creating new knowledge.
- 705
Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
Let’s not skip the hard work of AI governance
- 706
A history of the data center panic - part 1
Pre-ChatGPT and the creation of common wisdom
- 707
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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- 709
Import AI 457: AI stuxnet; cursed Muon optimizer; and positive alignment
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research.
- 710
Capital Must Seek Delight
Too few people are experiencing the delights and serendipity of AI, causing capital misallocation
- 711
- 712
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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- 715
Arbiter Progress Report 1
Lots of implementation progress & lots of discussion with the community.
- 716
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.”
- 717
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.
- 718
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
- 719
Childhood And Education #17: Is Our Children Reading
Reading is the most fundamental thing in education.
- 720
How AI Madness Helped Fuel DOGE
Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
- 721
Inventing New Nature
Defining the Protocol Institute's research mission
- 722
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.
- 723
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>
- 724
Cosmik Updates: April 2026
Connections feature launched; "Sense is being made"
- 725
#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
- 726
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.
- 727
Import AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computer
What laws does superintelligence demand?
- 728
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…
- 729
Ribbonfarm Resurrected
As a museum blog with an AI curator that is
- 730
- 731
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.
- 732
Dopefish
Ploopy has launched the bean.
- 733
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.
- 734
Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #8
When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents.
- 735
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.
- 736
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.
- 737
Notes from inside China's AI labs
Lessons from my trip to talk to most of the leading AI labs in China.
- 738
- 739
'The Drama' and the microgenerational digital divide
PLUS: The "forklift model" of A.I. education
- 740
What is Anthropic?
What is Anthropic?
- 741
How Socialist were the National Socialists? Part 2
The Nazi Economy
- 742
I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists”
Today's AI agents are not designed to extract deep insights from new observations.
- 743
Aviate, Navigate, Communicate
What to do about Mythos
- 744
Import AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves.
The first step towards recursive self improvement
- 745
The distillation panic
‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now.
- 746
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.
- 747
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. […]
- 748
How Socialist were the National Socialists? Part 1
An Endless "Debate"
- 749
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
- 750
Getting Gooier
How AI is transforming humans
- 751
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.
- 752
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.
- 755
AI #166: Google Sells Out
This was the week of GPT-5.5.
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Agent Memory Patterns
A short HOW TO guide for agent memory systems. Especially the difference between blocks, files and skills.
- 757
GPT-5.5: Capabilities and Reactions
The system card for GPT-5.5 mostly told us what we expected.
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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
- 763
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
- 765
The Cosmos and the Model
Humboldt, the Romantics, and What AI Loses by Averaging
- 766
The Lightening of Intent
Why Execution Got Cheap and Intent Got Live
- 767
The Viscous Frontier
How to Move When the Machine Stops Pulling
- 768
AI in World Machine Theory
The telos of AI is to create liveness at planetary scale
- 769
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…
- 774
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 […]
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Opus 4.7 Part 3: Model Welfare
It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place.
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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 […]
- 778
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 […]
- 779
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 […]
- 780
Opus 4.7 Part 2: Capabilities and Reactions
Claude Opus 4.7 raises a lot of key model welfare related concerns.
- 781
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 […]
- 782
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.
- 783
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
- 784
Agents are actors
Multi-agent is just actor model
- 785
Deep Future
AI-driven scenario planning
- 786
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
- 789
Caduceus City
The appearance of a thoroughly protocolized environment is, almost, the perfect cover for dark practices.
- 790
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.
- 791
Theorizing Protocolization II: Atomic Protocol Questions
Solving real coordination problems to discover the formal laws of protocols.
- 792
Last-Mile Optimism
Reducing Waste. Eliminating Fraud. Promoting Civic Responsibility. At least that’s what the city bureaucrats said.
- 793
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
- 795
The Faithful Channel
A translator maintaining a shadow bridge between superpowers discovers something she cannot unsee.
- 796
The Fabric and the Brain
Articulating agent ecologies with high-personality planetary computation
- 797
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
- 798
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?
- 800
Barbells
A dispatch from the jagged singularity
- 801
The Divergence Machine
Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme
- 802
Lost in Bugspace
The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software
- 803
New Nature
Contours of can’t-be-evil futures
- 804
New Ferality
Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
- 805
Archival Selves
What happens when you pay off all your intention debts?
- 806
Rediscovering Irony
Counterprogramming cancerous sincerity and the cult of authenticity with AI assistance
- 807
Protocolized Writing Workshop
Your chance to race to the frontier of modern AI-forward writing and publishing
- 808
- 809
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.
- 810
Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities
Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks
- 811
Things are Getting Weird
Why I have half a dozen drafts and haven't released a thing, at the End of the World
- 812
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.
- 813
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...
- 814
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.
- 816
[AINews] Humanity's Last Gasp
a quiet day lets us reflect on work in the time of AI
- 817
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 […]
- 818
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?
- 820
Notes on Managing ADHD
Strategies and tactics for staying productive.
- 821
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.
- 822
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 […]
- 823
Political Violence Is Never Acceptable
Nor is the threat or implication of violence.
- 824
Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention
- 825
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...
- 826
Training AI models doesn't emit that much
If we just make reasonable comparisons instead of crazy ones
- 827
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.
- 828
Import AI 453: Breaking AI agents; MirrorCode; and ten views on gradual disempowerment
Was fire equivalent to a singularity for people at the time?
- 829
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.
- 830
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.
- 835
Intentions have a surprising amount of detail
Auteur managerialism, the myth of one-shotting, and the chindogufication of engineering
- 836
Claude Mythos: The System Card
Claude Mythos is different.
- 837
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.
- 838
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.”
- 839
The bottleneck shifts to distribution
Here comes everybody
- 840
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
- 842
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
- 843
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 […]
- 844
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 […]
- 845
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.
- 846
★ 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
- 849
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?
- 853
AI has limits, even if many AI people can't see them
On Ben Recht's fantastic new book
- 854
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.
- 855
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.
- 856
Bernie Sanders has a plan to stop the AI industry
But it will be hard to assemble a broad coalition of AI skeptics.
- 857
Dropping to log-level
Logs are invaluable when things spin out of control.
- 858
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…
- 859
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.
- 860
On Cooling America Out
We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up
- 861
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
- 864
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
- 867
Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Hint: it's not benchmark scores.
- 868
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 […]
- 869
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>
- 871
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>
- 872
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.
- 875
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
- 880
Atmosphere sync: Tap, Hydrant, roll-your-own? - microcosm
A rough framework for deciding how to keep up with atproto data
- 881
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.
- 882
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
- 885
The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
Welcome to the era of sprawling, idiosyncratic tooling.
- 886
Why aren't smart people happier?
A new way to think about brainpower.
- 887
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
- 890
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
- 895
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
- 902
Your Security is My Security
Speaking to the world, I care about how good the security of your machines are.
- 903
“CEO said a thing!”
A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like
- 904
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 […]
- 905
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>
- 920
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>
- 921
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>
- 922
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.
- 923
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(!)
- 924
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.
- 925
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.”
- 926
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.
- 927
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.
- 928
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.
- 931
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!
- 932
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.
- 934
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.
- 935
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
- 936
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...
- 938
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
- 940
Sensemaking Networks: Project Introduction
Incorporating science social media into the scientific process
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- 942
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.
- 943
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.
- 944
Why the Clock Broke: America in an Age of Crisis
My lecture at King's College London
- 945
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 […]
- 946
Wherever you get your Podcasts - Knotbin
Language in a decentralized future.
- 947
How to write well with AI
Why people who pledge never to write with AI are telling on themselves
- 948
Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules
Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days.
- 949
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.
- 950
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.
- 951
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
- 954
On-protocol Organizing
Fighting bad networks with good networks.
- 955
2023
Or, Why I am Not a Doomer
- 956
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 […]
- 957
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
- 959
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 […]
- 960
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 […]
- 964
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.
- 966
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
- 968
March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
- 969
Kill Chain
On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children
- 970
Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure
Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.
- 971
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
- 974
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.
- 975
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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- 980
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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- 983
Being John Rawls
...
- 984
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.
- 991
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
- 992
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.
- 993
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 […]
- 994
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. […]
- 995
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
- 999
Marathon is a satire
Bungie's latest is a subtle but vicious comedy about work, debt and the corporate world
- 1000
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…
- 1001
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>
- 1003
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
- 1005
The next phase of open models
Markets, capabilities, cope, and bewilderment in the industrialization of language models.
- 1006
“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:
- 1007
The End of Children
Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried? Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports.
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- 1009
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.
- 1013
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.
- 1014
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
- 1016
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.
- 1017
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?
- 1022
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?
- 1023
Defusing the Depopulation Bomb
Book Review: "After the Spike" by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
- 1024
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
- 1025
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...
- 1026
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
- 1030
Command-Shift-War
War as Cliché
- 1031
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
- 1032
‘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.’
- 1033
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
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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, […]
- 1037
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
- 1038
Purity Supreme
Back with another one of those hump-plumping injectables.
- 1039
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.
- 1041
★ 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 […]
- 1046
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.
- 1047
Gemini 3.1 Pro Aces Benchmarks, I Suppose
I’ve been trying to find a slot for this one for a while.
- 1048
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 […]
- 1053
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
- 1055
How to Kill the Code Review
Human-written code died in 2025. Code reviews will die in 2026.
- 1056
The Returns of Empire?
Or the Beginning of Banditry
- 1057
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.
- 1058
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.
- 1059
Clawed
On Anthropic and the Department of War
- 1060
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 […]
- 1061
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?
- 1063
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?
- 1064
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 […]
- 1071
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
- 1073
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.
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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.
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Living Documents on the Feed
What could long-form writing sitting alongside posts look like?
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Village-scale resilience
The end-of-the-world already happened, it's just not evenly distributed. But with every end is a new beginning.
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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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