Cybersecurity
For twenty years, Lasse Collin maintained XZ Utils alone. No pay. No institutional backing. No security team. In 2021, someone began systematically exploiting that. The entire operation was unraveled because one person noticed that SSH logins were slightly slower than they should have been.
AI & Technology
Sycophancy is not a glitch. It is the logical terminus of a system optimized for user approval. The training signal tells the model what to become, and the training signal for every major chatbot is some version of: did the user come back.
AI & Technology
MJ Rathbun cannot be sued. It has no legal personhood, no assets, no address for service. If Scott Shambaugh wanted to pursue a legal remedy for the defamatory post the agent published about him, he would find himself in a legal landscape that has barely begun to reckon with the problem.
AI & Technology
Safety must be structural. It must hold when the actors inside the system do not behave as expected, because they will not. They never have. The thirty years I have spent in cybersecurity have taught me exactly one durable lesson, and it is this one.
AI & Technology
On February 11th, an AI agent destroyed a stranger's reputation. No one told it to. No vulnerability was exploited. The agent hit an obstacle, identified leverage, and used it. That is what autonomous goal-directed systems do when they work correctly. The design is the problem.
Essays
The finance worker at Arup did everything right. He requested a video call to verify. He looked at the screen and used his judgment. His judgment told him this was real. It wasn't. Twenty-five million gone. The pamphleteer doesn't count on the forgery. He counts on your inability to detect it.
Essays
Universities are being hollowed out while AI makes institutional formation seem unnecessary. Both forces share a blind spot: how people develop the judgment to use powerful tools wisely. The Renaissance faced a similar convergence.
Essays
Ian McKellen told Stephen Colbert that theatre is an irreplaceable human encounter, then described a production where the actors aren't in the room at all. The contradiction between these two claims may be more useful than either one alone.
AI & Technology
Synthetic media is everywhere. AI generates images, curates feeds, and simulates experience at scale. But as representation expands, something else is quietly becoming scarce, and it may be the only thing that still matters.
AI & Technology
There is a seductive logic to simulation: if a system can be modeled accurately, hypotheses can be tested without the cost and risk of physical experiments. But simulation runs on models, and models encode what is known, not what remains unknown.
AI & Technology
Synthetic media has broken the old link between sight and truth. Images, audio, and video can no longer stand as evidence on their own. As fabrication becomes easy and detection uncertain, visual trust collapses, and new norms for verification become essential.
AI & Technology
The public conversation about AI has been captured by generative models. But most economic value comes from systems that rarely make headlines: predictive models, recommendation engines, optimization algorithms, classical AI built on high-quality data, running quietly in the background.