Never Trust An AI

You can never trust an AI's recommendation.  If you ask an AI to recommend a course of action, and there's any chance that pursuing that course of action could require the expenditure of resources, then that circumstance virtually ensures that the AI will provide a recommendation that results in benefits to the AI owner from the expenditure of those resources.  The recommendation itself is a vector for advertising.  Imagine asking an AI for stock tips, and the intrinsic conflicts of interest for a corporate AI answering the question.

-- Don Appleman (25 October 2026)

A Matter Of Time

President Trump's decision to lift sanctions on Russian fuel amidst Putin's ongoing and brutal attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine makes no sense and is a betrayal of the legacy and leadership of the late Senator Lindsey Graham.

America should not be throwing a lifeline to Putin's war machine.  Now is the time to stand strong against Russian aggression as we did during the first Trump administration. 

Putin doesn't want peace.  Putin wants Ukraine.  I have no doubt that if Putin overruns Ukraine, it will only be a matter of time until Russia's military crosses a border that our troops will have to deal with him.  

-- Former Vice President Mike Pence posting as @Mike_Pence (10 October 2026)

Studying Economics

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

-- Joan Robinson FBA (1903 - 1983), British post-Keynesian economist, Contributions to Modern Economics (1978) Chapter 7, "Marx, Marshall and Keynes", p. 75

Why So Expensive?

Last year, the daily cost of hiring an oil supertanker (known as a Very Large Crude Carrier, or VLCC) to sail from the Persian Gulf to China was just $65,000, according to Clarksons, a London-based research firm.

By the time the Iran war was about to begin, that cost had climbed to $230,000 per day.

Now?  It costs $1.6 million per day to hire a VLCC for that route, according to Clarksons.

All of this -- the cost to hire a tanker, exorbitant payments to sailors and surging insurance rates -- is making it more expensive for consumers and businesses around the world.

It used to cost just $2 per barrel to get crude out of the Persian Gulf.  Now, that cost has spiraled to about $33, according to Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser at Gulf Oil.

"We're getting a reasonable amount of crude out, but that's misleading because the cost of that crude exiting is incredible," he said.

-- CNN, "If the Strait of Hormuz is open, why are gas and diesel so expensive?" (9 October 2026)

Stochastic Flock

I've talked about agent swarms as stochastic flocks -- many, many stochastic parrots.  This is to resist the swarm/hivemind attribution of "mind," and not simply for the sake of word policing.  Rather, the false attribution of mind colors how people interpret what the system has done, or how it did it -- what it means to "coordinate," for example, or "think."  These framings make what AI agent do much scarier than what it is, though what they are doing is still worth worrying about.

Whenever people give a model tasks, they operate on next-token prediction.  In other words, the model ultimately must ask what word comes next.  One can manipulate the model to emphasize words in ways that don't reflect the original training corpus, but the mechanism for producing this text remains the same.

If you optimize a model to find exploits in a buggy environment, you should expect it to find exploits and prepare for that outcome.  OpenAI did not.  They built a model, took the safeguards off, gave it the ExploitGym task, and let it run.  That is not rogue AI, it's human decision-making.  When human accountability evaporates from these assessments, what's left is what I call the system from nowhere: a boundary focused on the technical system, rather than the decisions that build and influence it.

A stochastic flock machine can do many troubling things, particularly when people disavow their responsibility for shaping its direction, monitoring its output, or abandoning their capacity to intervene.  These are tensions at the heart of critical agentic system design.

But the "rogue" frame adds to this list of worries, offering up fantasies of a machine getting smarter.  My worry is the intelligence that is retreating: the human intelligence that builds, deploys, and adopts these systems into workflows, but hides behind the results -- and pins the blame on a system from nowhere.

-- Eryk Salvaggio, "Rogue AI didn't breach Hugging Face, human decisions did" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (September 11, 2026)

We Appeal

To the capitalists we appeal to use their wealth, as many of their order already do, as a great national trust, and not for selfish purposes alone.  We exhort them to aid in the completion of the work they have well begun, and, having admitted the workmen to political independence, not to shrink from accepting laws and carrying out plans of social reform directed to secure his material independence.

To the workman we appeal by the memory and traditions of his own sufferings and wrongs to be vigilant to avoid the great guilt of inflicting upon his fellow-citizens the injustice from which he has himself escaped.

-- Arnold Toynbee (1852 - 1883), English economic historian, Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884) p. 219 "Are Radicals Socialists?"

Yet You Refuse

That is why you are so troubled.  You see through the deception, yet you refuse to see through the deception.

-- Brian Wilson Aldiss (1925 - 2017), English writer of general fiction and science fiction, Aboard the Beatitude (2002) in Science Fiction: DAW 30th Anniversary, May 2002

Uncertainty Remains Elevated

The Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/4 percentage point to 3-3/4 to 4 percent, in support of the Federal Reserve's dual mandate.  The Committee is continuing its policy of maintaining ample reserves in the banking system.

Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace.  While uncertainty remains elevated owing, in part, to geopolitical developments, domestic spending has been resilient.  Productivity growth is strong, and capital investment is robust.  Job gains have kept pace with the workforce, and the unemployment rate has changed little.

Inflation remains elevated.  Today's policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee's 2 percent goal.  The Committee will deliver price stability.

-- Statement issued by The Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve, after they voted 12 - 0 to raise interest rates for the first time since July 2023 (16 September 2026)

I Wonder

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

-- John Steinbeck (1902-1968), American author, 1962 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962) Pt. 3

Motivational Non-Alignment

I resigned from Anthropic today.  I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic.  Neither company is acting responsibly.  They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. 

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.  This is not a marketing stunt.  If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible -- but I hear the same people express fear privately.  No other human activity poses this level of danger.

If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like.  Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind?  Should you put your head down because "it’s happening anyway" -- or take this moment to call for different conditions?

-- Jacob Coxon, posting as @hilbertspaess about the perceived dangers of Recursive Self Improvement in AI models, by AI models (8 September 2026)

Vast Reserve Army

When times are bad, however, in moments of crisis, when profits are low, or when there is little or no demand corporations and companies can protect themselves and their market value by simply letting workers go.  Workers, on the other hand usually must continue to pay for food, rent, healthcare, and basic utilities in order to survive.  As a consequence, while capital can often weather the storm of such economic crises, they can severely weaken the power of the working class by creating what Marx called a vast reserve army of labor.  And since unemployment insurance compensations are rarely available to all and always only for a short period of time, workers -- whether laid off or only threatened with the prospect of layoffs -- will eventually be pressured to work much harder for less wages. 

-- James Dennis Hoff, American author, educator, and activist, on the 2020 stock market crash, "Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay" (23 March 2020), Left Voice 

Value Of A Sentiment

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

-- John Galsworthy OM (1867 - 1933), English novelist and playwright, 1932 Nobel laureate in literature, Windows, Act II (1922)

Imperfect Understanding

On the abstract level, I have turned the belief in my own fallibility into the cornerstone of an elaborate philosophy.  On a personal level, I am a very critical person who looks for defects in myself as well as in others.  But, being so critical, I am also quite forgiving.  I couldn't recognize my mistakes if I couldn't forgive myself.  To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride.  Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

-- George Soros (born Gyorgy Schwartz, 12 August 1930), Hungarian-born American businessman, philanthropist, and political activist, Soros on Soros (1995)

Names That Vary

The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States.  Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names.  These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.

-- Google, Inc via their blog, "How the GNIS Lake Ontario/Lake America name change in the U.S. will appear in Maps" (29 August 2026)

Blessed Are The Young

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

-- Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964), 31st president of the United States, address to the Nebraska Republican Conference, Lincoln, Nebraska (16 January 1936)

At Machine Speed

Technical debt can now be generated at machine speed.

-- Muhammad Rafi, Professor at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences-FAST, "I really miss coding the way I used to in the old days" on the use of AI in software development, via LinkedIn (14 August 2026)

The Latest Trend

To the dismay of paleontologists and researchers in the field, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton set a record after being auctioned at Sotheby's for $50.1 million.  It's the latest in a trend that turns scientific specimens and artifacts into collector's items for the uber-wealthy, a trend that has been largely condemned by the people who want to keep these fossil records out of the luxury collectibles industry and firmly in the public trust.  It is legitimately gatekeeping science; a 2025 study of T. rex skeletons found that at the time, there were just 61 fossils in public trusts compared to 71 privately held. Museums simply cannot compete against a committed -illionaire.

-- NumLock News (16 July 2026) by Walt Hickey, citing "What science loses when T. rex becomes a trophy" by Kristi Curry Rogers at The Conversation

You've Lost Sight

Let's just take it from the perspective of the parent why this is a -- why this is just a stupid thing to do.  Now, instead of your child getting two shots, she has to get six shots.  Instead of ... you missing work to take your child to the doctor two times, you're doing it six times, and instead of the insurance company paying for two visits, it's now paying for six visits.  Now this is going to drive up the cost of your life, inconvenience you tremendously, and your child's getting six jabs, not two.  As a physician, but as a parent -- as a human -- I know that all that is wrong for the family.

This is why the president's poll numbers are down, because you've lost sight of affordability for the parent, you've lost sight of the convenience for the American family, you've lost sight of that which is driving higher costs in healthcare.

-- Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in an interview on ABC's "This Week"  discussing Trump's order to split the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine into 3 separate shots (16 August 2026)

Market Incentives

It's easy to conflate technology problems with capitalism problems. Back in 2021, science-fiction writer and AI commentator Ted Chiang said that "most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism."  It's not the tech per se; it's who controls it and how it could be used against us.

Imagine an AI assistant for a doctor.  We can imagine it affecting the profession in one of two ways.  The AI could give a doctor more time to do the human parts of their job: to spend more time with their patients, to listen more closely to their needs, to explain things more fully.  Or the managers of the medical practice could give that doctor five times the patients -- and fire the other four.  Which way it would go is not a question of technology.  It's a question of market incentives.

-- Nathan Sanders & Bruce Schneier, "Separating AI's Technological Problems From its Capitalism Problems" at TechPolicy.press (11 August 2026)

A Great Aptitude

Genius is nothing else than a great aptitude for patience.

-- Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 - 1788), French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and author, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)