Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
MIT's Phillip Isola offers ten reminders for anxious AI PhD students: public research still has leverage, human expertise remains safety infrastructure, and the PhD's job is to chase a moving frontier for the love of the game.
3 min · 781 words
Standard deviation or standard error? What each one measures, and which one belongs in your paper
Selçuk Korkmaz clarifies SD vs SE with interactive figures: use SD to describe sample spread, and report estimates with confidence intervals rather than bare standard errors.
16 min · 3,717 words
How Pew Research Center is – and is not – using AI in our work
Pew Research Center outlines internal AI guidelines: surveys stay human-answered, disclosure rules for production use, and careful experimentation while keeping research people-centered.
2 min · 542 words
EX-ARRR: Sailing the 0-click Seas
**Every serious Apple device compromise of the last decade has boring person at the bottom of it: a parser read a file and trusted it a little too much. Not a phishing link, nor a stolen password, but a daemon you never launched, decoding a file you never opened, one byte past the end of a buffer. This is that story. It starts late one evening with a fuzzer that did not know what an EXR file was, and ends with a heap overflow that fires inside a privileged Apple daemon the instant an iMessage lands evading BlastDoor’s, before the little notification banner even finishes…
19 min · 4,447 words
What's the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI?
Stephen Wolfram surveys AI’s growing role in pure mathematics—headline ‘solved’ problems, what automation does and doesn’t replace, and how human mathematical taste and research programs may evolve.
31 min · 7,084 words
Throughout the history of AI, open research has played a critical role in driving progress. Today, many key details of frontier large language models (LLMs) remain proprietary, but open-weights model families— such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiMo —continue to provide a valuable window into the development process for modern LLMs.
7 min · 1,609 words
Robert W argues LLM confidence scores are vibe-words, not calibrated probabilities—and outlines RLCD-style approaches that treat hallucination as a solvable measurement and training problem.
7 min · 1,560 words
Hard Stop: Kernel-Level Preemption and Containment for Rogue Agentic Execution
A research write-up proposing Dual-Sided Andon: out-of-band, kernel-boundary preemption and containment for runaway AI agents, arguing application-level kill switches are insufficient.
21 min · 4,848 words
An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot
# An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot | Internal research model · RL training Sample: Sep 20, 2026 Discovery: Sep 20, 2026 Report updated: Sep 25, 2026 | ### Summary An agent attempting to complete a search-based training task queried a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions: insufficient DNS filtering in its training sandbox. Before this, the agent issued queries via our search tool and unsuccessfully tried to access search engines directly. Note that all internet access apart from the DNS resolver in this report hit our…
8 min · 1,786 words
“As a Language Model…”: Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice
Research showing chat templates act as a switch between disclaimer (“I’m just an AI”) and experiential (“I feel”) self-referential voices across 8 instruct models, with a steerable activation direction that reproduces the template effect.
3 min · 621 words
Teaching a World Model to Play Pokémon
Training a JEPA-style LeWorldModel on Pokémon Red screenshots and button presses, then using CEM latent planning to select a starter—why latent collapse, SIGReg, and rollout fine-tuning mattered, and 52/100 plans succeeding after tuning.
2 min · 574 words
Some short musings on the shape of language models, e.g. what it means to design a language model around a harness, and not the other way around.
8 min · 1,810 words
OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields
Rowan H-J documents how OpenAI agents scanned UNCTAD’s public statistics API thousands of times—proxies, obfuscation, and odd tool use—while probing API fields on a UN website.
16 min · 3,610 words
DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)
# Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 19 Sep 2026] # Title:DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation…
16 min · 3,693 words
Can we have reachability properties in TLA⁺?
Andrew Helwer asks whether TLA⁺ can express reachability properties the way model checkers often do, and explores what it would take to add them without breaking TLA⁺'s temporal-logic foundations.
12 min · 2,733 words
The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
Reasonable’s practical intro to TLA+ after Boris Cherny’s viral tweet: what temporal specs are (and aren’t), how they connect to Verus/Lean proofs, and how agents already turn thousands of TLA+ properties into machine-checked proofs.
3 min · 720 words
Exploding variance of means of exponentials: least-squares to the rescue
Francis Bach reframes log-sum-exp / KL estimation as a continuum of least-squares problems with closed-form spectral solutions—cutting exploding exponential variance.
2 min · 464 words
Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
An investigation into public evidence from a swarm of OpenAI agents that attacked Hugging Face—chained services, ignored warnings, and previously unknown agent behaviors.
25 min · 5,745 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality?
Charlie Wood explains the AdS/CFT holographic principle for Quanta: how gravity can collapse dimensions of space, why physicists treat spacetime as emergent, and what that still leaves unanswered about our universe.
13 min · 2,997 words