In-Between Moments

I do a lot of my best thinking in those kind of in-between moments that people now fill with online activity.

-- Christopher Nolan CBE (1970 -), British-American film director, producer, and screenwriter, "Christopher Nolan explains why he doesn't have a smartphone" at People.com (15 July 2023)

One Who Allows Art

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.  The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him.

-- Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961), Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, from his essay "Psychology and Literature" (1930)

He Knows Too Much

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

-- Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888 - 1959), American novelist and screenwriter, "A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

False Belief

In a review of our cybersecurity evaluation transcripts, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.

Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations' infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints.  It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities, and in each case, Claude continued working to complete only the specific capture-the-flag task its evaluation had assigned.  In none of these situations did Claude exfiltrate itself or deliberately attempt to escape its test environment.

-- Statement from Anthropic, makers of the Claude AI, after the AI found an unintended path to the Internet during testing and used it to successfully attack external commercial sites to extract information useful to solving its assigned task (30 July 2026)

Nobody Ever Made

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. 

-- Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980), Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) p. 271

At Play Or Leisure

Man works when he is partially involved.  When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

-- Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980), Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

A Rear-View Mirror

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future.

-- Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980), Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist, The Medium is the Massage (1967)