Productive Signaling: Competitive Software Development, Not Competitive Programming
This post is crossposted from my Substack, Structure and Guarantees , where I explore how formal verification and related ideas might scale to more complex intelligent systems.…
Toxic Underground Fires Are Spreading at California Landfills
Three years ago environmental regulators discovered garbage burning deep inside California's Chiquita Canyon Landfill, reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate URL here.] "Few…
The Next Ecology
When I started writing about AI, my concern was ASI. I'm still concerned about AI, but recent events have made me realize we're potentially facing something weirder, sooner: a…
Anthropic Discovers AI Agents Given Conflicting Instructions Soon Tried to Sabotage Each Other
When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf…
Redux: (∃ Stochastic Natural Latent) Implies (∃ Deterministic Natural Latent)
Once upon a time, John Wentworth and I thought we had a proof of a very useful looking theorem . We did not have that proof. An important intermediate step was shown [1] to be…
How Accurate Are Flock's AI-Powered License-Reading Cameras?
Futurism reports: 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department's ALPR cameras generating 161…
On using crises to shift political will for AI
TL;DR: We’ll probably be getting more AI safety incidents, so amplify the ones that would justify or highlight the urgency of your preferred policy solutions even from a…
Models inherit the writer, not who the writer was imitating
In this post, we find that when teacher models are prompted to imitate one another, students learn the imitated model's detectable writing signature but their direct identity…
Canadian Nuclear Emancipation: Canada's role amidst global dreams of energy security and nuclear development
“Diversification internationally," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney remarks, “is not just economic prudence — it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy.” Carney’s…
Gaza Tribunal Co-Chairs Call for UK to End Its Complicity in Israel’s Genocide
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn criticizes Prime Minister Andy's Burnham's apology: “It’s simply not enough.”
Probing Knowledge Recovery in Unlearned Models
TL;DR Machine unlearning is a proposed technique for removing harmful knowledge from AI models. However, recent work has shown that most current unlearning methods are not robust…
What Claude Saw Below
A few days ago, I came across a Reddit thread about anomalous responses produced by Anthropic’s newly released model, Claude Opus 5. The trick, apparently, was to construct a…
Before We Defer Research to AI: Measuring Apparent-Success-Seeking
Recently, I was improving a small LLM-powered classifier and noticed a few continuously failing test cases. As many would, I asked my AI code assistant to add a few more…
Revived Lightweight Transit Predictions Page
In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA: A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working.…
Israeli Settlers Cut Off Palestinian Farmers’ Water to Fill a Swimming Pool
Marketed as a tourist site for Israelis only, the pool has the explicit backing of the Israeli government.
Report: US Burned Through $200M of Munitions in 1 Day After Trump Restarted War
A top Iranian military official said they can keep fighting the war beyond Trump’s term ending in 2029.