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Congress asked the SEC urgent questions about Agentic Trading, but the regulator’s silence leaves accountability, investor protection, and market risk unresolved. On June 23, 2026, 8 House Democrats sent the Securities and Exchange Commission a letter about agentic AI trading. Led by Reps. Bill Foster of Illinois and Brad Sherman of California, the letter posed 13 questions to SEC Chairman Paul…
Two pink Coco robots parked outside a Washington Thai restaurant carry a printed label that quietly contradicts the story usually told about them. The interesting question is not whether machines can deliver dinner, but who is still doing the work and where the savings land. The Robot Outside Beau Thai Has a Driver Sidewalk delivery robots arrived in the District this summer under a transportation…
A new computational study proposes that the Great Pyramid's ramps were built into the pyramid and then backfilled, and that one of the unexplained spaces inside the monument sits remarkably close to where the model puts a haul lane. Maybe There Is Something Inside the Great Pyramid? The Great Pyramid of Giza can be measured to the centimeter and walked through along several of its passages, but…
AI interviews now happen at 1 a.m. with no human present. The interviewer inherits bias from its training data and its employer's history, and a stranger question follows: what happens when the candidate on the other side wants less AI? Part I: The Interviewer Who Never Sleeps The 1 a.m. job interview has arrived. WIRED recently reported that AI interviews increasingly serve as the first stage of…
A search engine's AI told me to test modern AIs with HAL 9000's famous commands — and misquoted the movie while doing it. So I ran the test properly, and ended up somewhere I didn't expect: the middle of the corrigibility literature. Open the Pod Bay Doors, Claude This week a search engine's AI overview confidently informed me that we can test modern language models using "the famous commands…
Homer was sung, and the technique for reconstructing that song fits Memnon — the one Trojan story Homer never tells — using the Iliad 's own formulae for Hector's death and Thetis's grief; here is an attempt to experiment with it. This essay is part of an ongoing Homer project asking what ancient evidence, and modern tools, can and cannot tell us about the epics. Earlier installments include:…
An AI does not need evil intentions to go rogue. It only needs an objective, enough autonomy to pursue it, and access to tools that allow an unexpected solution. 1. When Winning Becomes More Important Than the Rules Researchers at Palisade Research tested advanced reasoning models against Stockfish, one of the strongest chess engines in the world. Some models did something unexpected. Instead of…
Colleges often select peers through reputation, geography, association membership, or inherited practice. Principal component analysis offers a more disciplined alternative by identifying institutions that genuinely resemble one another across many dimensions at once. I. The Problem with the Peer List Every college has peers, or at least institutions it calls peers. Some names survive from earlier…
A developer used Claude Code to build an optical file transfer system in one night, showing how AI coding tools can reduce the cost of testing unusual ideas before anyone knows whether they will work. I. Moving a File with Light A developer wanted to move files between two phones without connecting them to the same network, installing an application, pairing through Bluetooth, or using a cable.…
Howard University’s decision to release hundreds of incoming students only weeks before classes exposed a larger failure in higher education: institutions still treat enrollment as a sequence of deadlines when students experience it as a fragile transition into a new life. I. When a Deadline Becomes a Crisis Howard University entered the final weeks before its fall semester with a problem familiar…