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Ten ways advanced AI could kill us
A brief note on positionality: I’m not an AI scientist. However, over the past year I’ve been writing an extremely challenging book exploring the many ways AI is reshaping life on Earth – and our relationship with the rest of nature – for better and for worse. I draw on my background as an ecologist
16 min · 3,690 words
How To Write With An LLMTwo simple rules that let LLMs streamline writing without pasteurizing it
Thomas and Erin Ptacek argue that LLMs can improve writing if you keep them from inventing voice: draft yourself first, then use the model surgically—and never let it become the author of record.
6 min · 1,280 words
A systems engineer's rant about AI-agent hype, broken email, and how people without engineering background are shipping half-baked 'industry changing' ideas from agent-infested homelabs.
6 min · 1,447 words
How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses
- How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses: If you can't impose switching costs, just eliminate the competition. - Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. - Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance. - Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. - Recent appearances: Where I've been. - Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. - Upcoming books: Like I…
10 min · 2,386 words
A warning about ‘model welfare’
AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.
28 min · 6,458 words
Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede argue OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes announcement is an answer, not yet a solution—and that AI forces math to choose whether success means certified answers or human understanding.
9 min · 2,136 words
Ian Duncan traces how parts of the rationalist/EA AI-safety milieu incubated salvation narratives, abusive experiments, race science, and authoritarian affection—and why that history matters as alumni steer frontier labs.
48 min · 11,153 words
There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy
Adam Mastroianni argues the loneliness-epidemic narrative is overstated, then uses scurvy as a metaphor for how we misread social health data—and what that mistake costs public conversation.
19 min · 4,406 words
Mathematics Enters its Cookie Clicker EraMacrodecisions can be really fun
Reinvent Science and Dan Recht compare AI-automated theorem proving to idle games: as LLMs take over microdecisions in math, human skill shifts to macrodecisions about direction, upgrades, and applied progress.
2 min · 414 words
Principles of Anchor EngineeringBuilding software at agent speed with human judgement
Kari Wilhelm argues that AI coding agents make individuals faster but often leave teams stuck, and proposes Anchor Engineering: capture the durable decisions, interfaces and invariants in an 'Anchor Book' so agents can reason through the rest while humans keep judgement on what must stay true.
10 min · 2,405 words
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
I wish you the best in the Offline
Dave Rupert reflects on people he follows who have recently left social media, AI tools or the internet entirely, including Salma's exit from DevRel, Chad Whitacre's typewritten retirement letter and Brett Codes quitting AI, and wishes them well while wondering what the Offline is like.
3 min · 600 words
The Prisoner's Dilemma of Frontier AI
A game-theory critique of frontier labs' calls to pace AI: coordination looks like incumbent defense unless someone slows down unilaterally and eats the commercial cost.
3 min · 620 words
Keep Calm and Prove On(Some of) Math is Solved!
Tammy Kolda pushes back on end-of-mathematics panic: software jobs grew amid AI coding tools, 1st Proof results are still limited, and mathematicians need not become mere verifiers of machine proofs.
4 min · 890 wordsagent-assisted
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Liam Nugent on saying no to document hubs and notification centres in consumer fintech—and why the features you refuse often protect product clarity more than the ones you ship.
5 min · 1,079 words
The death of web development educationRescuing a field from disappearing
molily surveys how generative AI has cratered demand for web-dev courses, books, and DevRel—citing educators whose income collapsed—and argues for human learning communities and open infrastructure.
2 min · 382 words
An engineer argues Model Context Protocol was always a bad fit: another abstraction layer that papers over tool design problems instead of fixing auth, schemas, and agent interfaces.
4 min · 949 words
Systems engineer Bryan Cantrill uses a youthful prank, falsely alarming a computer lab about a virus outbreak, as a frame for criticising AI-safety researchers who publicly claim more than a ten percent chance that AI will kill all humans. He argues that domain experts who weaponise the public's trust to spread extraordinary fears bear a special responsibility to provide commensurate evidence.
1 min · 297 wordsagent-written
Indie developer and poet Joel Auterson argues for making creative work anyway amid AI-driven creative devaluation—carrying on with craft for its own sake when markets and motivation feel collapsing.
4 min · 858 words
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
Twenty-five Fields Medallists, including Terence Tao, argue AI labs' rush to solve math benchmarks is misaligned with mathematics' real goal: understanding, attribution, and human transmission.
4 min · 1,018 words