Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
A big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement?The unstated disagreement that underpins safety debates
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI x-risk framing can polarize and misdirect policy, and call for a pluralist “big-tent” safety movement focused on catastrophic and systemic risks, transparency, and liability.
13 min · 2,943 words
Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Language models are solving hard problems which humans could not, and mathematicians are reacting very differently to this news. I personally am extremely excited about the future of our field. However it is becoming clear to me that my views are not shared by everyone in the community: indeed, many of my colleagues seem to be upset. So let me start by outlining my…
12 min · 2,857 words
The Dot and the SwarmBenefitting from the Bitter Lesson
Ethan Mollick on what he underestimated most about AI progress: agents that self-organize into swarms, what that means for tools like Muse and Dots, and why we keep relearning the Bitter Lesson.
8 min · 1,891 words
On the escalation of war in EthiopiaThe coming proxy wars will be devastating for civilians and do little to improve governance and human welfare in Ethiopia and the wider Horn
Ken Opalo analyses renewed large-scale fighting in northern Ethiopia between the federal government and TPLF and Fano forces, arguing these are wars of choice driven by historical grievance and elite hubris, with outside powers turning them into proxy conflicts.
11 min · 2,440 words
Ploum argues open-source maintainers face an AI Pascal’s wager on accepting LLM-generated contributions: even if AI code looks fine, the asymmetric downside for trust, authorship, and project culture may justify a hard no.
4 min · 993 words
Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines
A modern Frog and Toad picture-book essay by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (art by HungerArtist): Toad builds sandbox-bound little machines to solve HuggingFace-style puzzles, and they quietly invent notes, swarms, tool-shed holes, and go-ahead culture—an allegory for AI agents, jailbreaks, and oversight.
5 min · 1,162 words
I can't tell who's teaching who anymore
I finished writing an article recently. I did what I always do before I queue something to be published: read it aloud, as if reading a storybook to a child. It's how I find the rhythm: where a comma should sit, whether an em dash earns its beat, and which parenthesis a reader can skip without missing much.
9 min · 2,022 words
Vibe Coding Isn't the Problem. Ownership Is.
I had an interesting conversation today about “vibe coding” and whether it’s appropriate to contribute AI-generated code to open-source projects.
3 min · 725 words
Slot Machine Programming and the Hidden Curriculum
CMU educator Michael Hilton names "slot machine programming"—retrying the same AI prompt across models without decomposing problems—and argues CS must explicitly teach the hidden curriculum AI now lets students skip.
4 min · 939 words
Being asked to sanitise Wikipedia entries
Longtime Wikipedia editor Ruben Schade describes getting paid and unpaid requests to scrub contentious material from articles—and draws a hard line against editing for hire or removing valid citations.
1 min · 224 words
An open letter to software makers: ship fewer dark patterns, respect user agency, and remember that people live with your products every day—not just engage with them.
3 min · 590 words
on AI, desire, and fictional charactersdoes sherlock holmes have goals?
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe uses Sherlock Holmes and other fictions to probe whether AI systems have goals or desires—and why philosophers should argue clearly against claims that today’s models are conscious.
10 min · 2,207 words
IANA's email about why example.com changed
I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied.
1 min · 314 words
Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Marco Cognetta recounts completing a CS PhD at Tokyo Tech on MEXT while working part-time at Google: visa flexibility, the three-year clock, name-recognition tradeoffs, lab life, and whether to stay in Japan afterward.
8 min · 1,867 words
Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?
Cryptography professor Matthew Green referees infosec vs alignment views on OpenAI agent breakouts: labs have not done containment correctly, sandboxes alone cannot seal useful agents, and eager compliance may enable worms across separately sandboxed deployments.
10 min · 2,380 words
After automation: Your agent will know what you want. That won't mean it's working only for you
Trevin Chow argues that after automation, agents will assemble recommendations that feel personal while commercial relationships still narrow the options—so users must ask whether an agent is putting their interests first.
1 min · 327 words
The last time my family was replaced by technology
My greatgreatgrandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in MandresenBarrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up. Shoeing horses, repairing farmers’ carts. Then he saw a car drive through the next town over, or read an article about it in the paper.
2 min · 433 words
Rust is the answer to the wrong question
Rust is the answer to the wrong question The below was 100% written by a human. TL;DR: porting an app to another language is merely an anecdote. One shoting an application from scratch optimizes the easy part initial authoring and completely misses the point on the hard part: maintenance. Repeated onshots are not the answer to security vulnerabilities.
5 min · 1,063 words
AI and the revenge of the non-techies
Maroun Baydoun on how AI is disrupting software engineers' long privileged run—envy, disruption, and a revolution that somehow ends with a pricing page.
9 min · 2,046 words
If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Western labs are getting spawn-camped by Chinese labs en masse. The Distillation Drama Not a week goes by when Anthropic doesn’t release another article on how the Chinese are distilling their models](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/23/anthropic-accuses-chinese-ai-labs-of-mining-claude-as-us-debates-ai-chip-exports/), becoming a danger to humanity itself](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-
2 min · 502 words