Riding the spin of the clock
In case you’ve missed it, almost every AI company has recently disclosed an incident where their AIs independently chose to perform cyber-attacks on other companies’ infrastructure. The first was OpenAI , but since then other companies, including Anthropic and Meta , have done forensic retrospectives and discovered more incidents that went unnoticed. This even includes a government agency, the UK…
Content warning: as with the last article , if you’re currently struggling with your mental health, consider skipping this, especially if you’re a parent. Contains emotionally heavy content and some foul language. Act one: 2026, a reader’s home “I don’t buy it.” “Hm?” He looks up from his laptop in the cozy living room to see that his reading partner has done the same, this site’s last article on…
Content warning: if you’re currently struggling with your mental health, beware reading this. I’ve hesitated for years to write and post this, largely because I worry that it might negatively impact my friends and family, most of whom don’t have any leverage to affect the issues I’m about to discuss. If you work for a major tech company or have any influence in government, though, you may…
Over the past few years of tech industry ruin, I’ve had friends and family worriedly ask me and my wife how our jobs have been going. “I’ve been seeing news of layoffs,” they say. “Why is it that almost every single tech company seems to be tightening its belt, cutting costs, and laying people off all at once?” Among other causes, I usually mention government interest rates. And I’m sometimes met…
People kept saying that a total eclipse is a totally different experience from a partial one. I didn’t understand why. I’d heard it from Randall Munroe of xkcd fame as far back as 2017 . He reiterated the message this year . But the one that stuck most in my mind was a quote from this article by Anne Dillard (emphasis mine): I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very…
Update April 2026: this article is now partially obsolete. These days, all major search engines include AI models that will search the internet for you and summarize the information in the results. To adapt this article’s lesson to today, I’d say: go ahead and use those AI search engines, but make sure you also follow the included citations to see where the AI is getting its information from. Use…
If you’ve been using AI chatbots in the past year or two, hopefully you’ve realized that they’re often pathological liars. Here’s a funny example of that from the legal world : A lawyer asked ChatGPT for examples of cases that supported an argument they were trying to make. ChatGPT, as it often does, hallucinated wildly—it invented several supporting cases out of thin air. When the lawyer was…
There’s an idea in software product development called “3X”, standing for Explore, Expand, and Extract. Each is supposed to represent a different stage of a software product’s journey. This was originally proposed by Kent Beck , one of the original pioneers of the Agile Software Development movement. He has a lot of writing about how the model works and some of its consequences , but here’s my…
Imagine you were looking for convincing explanations as to why stealing is wrong. Let’s use the example of stealing from your local mom-and-pop store. You ask a therapist, and they make an appeal to your empathy. Think about how that would make the owners feel: they rely on selling their goods to make a living, and if too much is stolen they may not be able to make ends meet. You have a good…
In my day job, I build a platform: that is, software that lets other people build things. The tools we build are used by people both inside and outside the company to make some pretty neat stuff. Since we’re co-workers, though, the internal folks using our platform get the privilege of talking directly to me and my team on a regular basis. As a result, I deal with a lot of teams on that are in…