Treacherous

Ideological data -- like personality data -- is treacherous when fed into a computer.  For by its use the loyalty and security board's failure or refusal to clear a person becomes a virtually incontestable ‘fact.'  All one has to do now is to press the ‘subversive' button and all the names of 'dangerous' people come tumbling out.

-- William Orville Douglas (1898 - 1980), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Points of Rebellion (1970) p. 28

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)

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)

Once-Chosen Path

GOAL AND PATH - Many are obstinate with regard to the once-chosen path, few with regard to the goal.

-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), German philosopher, cultural critic, and writer, Human, All Too Human (1878) Part II, Aphorism 494, page 241

The Object Of Loyalty

It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.  This has led millions into such a degree of dependence and submission, that they have at length found themselves to homage the instruments of their ruin at the very time they were at work to effect it.  The true object of loyalty is a good legal constitution, which, as it condemns every instance of oppression and lawless power, derives a certain remedy to the sufferer by allowing him to remonstrate his grievances, and pointing out methods of relief when the gentle arts of persuasion have lost their efficacy.  Whoever, therefore, insinuates notions of government contrary to the constitution, or in any degree winks at any measures to suppress or even to weaken it, is not a loyal man.

-- Samuel Adams (1722 - 1803), American revolutionary and organizer of the Boston Tea Party, governor of Massachusetts from 1793 to 1797, "Loyalty and Sedition," essay published in The Advertiser (1748)

Courage Is Contagious

The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power. The evidence showed that President Trump attempted to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force his own Vice President to act in contravention of his oath and to instead advance President Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then exploit the rioters’ violence to further delay it. Over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted that day, a fact we should never forget.

As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.

I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.

-- Opening Statement of Jack Smith, Former Special Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (29 September 2026)

Better To Have Them

Well, allies can be very annoying, but it's better to have them than to not have them.  And, we bought $65 Billion dollars worth of weapons, we are building one US nuclear power plant, a big one, we just signed an MOU providing for 2 dozen more modular reactors.  We think we contribute to jobs in half US states.  We think this is a great economic relationship, and that Europe is also important for US footprint in a larger area.  

So, even if the love has left the marriage, we think it is a marriage.  You can have affairs elsewhere, but throughout you're married.  At least keep it that way.

-- Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, when asked by host Mary Louise Kelly "How does the world look from Warsaw, for Trump?" Sources And Methods podcast (29 September 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)

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)

Unlikely To Succeed

The application for stay presented to JUSTICE JACKSON and by her referred to the Court is denied.  The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction.  And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.

-- Ruling of the Supreme Court in United States Postal Services, et al v California, et al, preventing the administration's effort to have the USPS regulate voting by mail (14 September 2026)

September 11th Anniversary

Today, Director John Ratcliffe declassified 71 President's Daily Brief (PDB) products in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and consistent with President Donald Trump's historic transparency initiative.

This collection represents the Agency's single largest release of declassified CIA PDB products related to 9/11, providing unprecedented transparency on America's most sensitive intelligence publication from the years before and the day after one of the darkest moments in our history.  The products trace the story of CIA analysts' evolving understanding of al-Qa'ida and efforts to highlight and warn of Usama Bin Ladin's attack plotting despite sparse, vague, and imperfect information.

-- Statement by the Central Intelligence Agency, "CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of 9/11" with links to "71 Declassified 9/11 related President's Daily Brief products" available for download as PDFs (11 September 2026)

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)

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)

A Unique Failure

At the six month mark of this war, the Wall Street Journal had reporting that in the walk up to this war, the extent to which the President's intelligence apparatus all told him of all the things that ended up happening, planning that the leadership of Iran would become more radical, that they would use the Strait of Hormuz, that they would target bases all over the Middle east and that there would be a dangerous drawdown and a stretching of readiness which was already in bad shape.  All of that came to pass.  And what struck me as I was thinking about this is that in the history of US national security blunders, when we think about them, you know, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq War, not connecting the dots before 9/11, those were institutional failures in addition to presidential failures.  In this case, because the President basically went with his gut and in contravention of a lot of the intelligence he was getting, this is a kind of unique Donald Trumpian failure.  He was elected because he said, my gut is better than any other human on the planet in assessing whatever happens to be before me.  And the decision making tree here was exactly as he wanted it to be.  And so in a way, this presidential decision on Iran is more circumscribed around the man himself than these other instances. ...  I think that is unique in American history.

-- John Dickerson (6 July 1968 -), American journalist, contributing writer at The Atlantic, and past co-anchor of CBS Evening News, speaking on the Slate Political Gabfest podcast (27 August 2026)

It Is Youth

Older men declare war.  But it is youth that must fight and die.  And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

-- Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964), 31st president of the United States, Speech in Chicago, Illinois to the 23rd Republican national convention (27 June 1944)

Contributes To Chaos

To be sure, the Court has not foreclosed States from challenging this blatantly unconstitutional Order.  But it declines to explain when, exactly, is the right time to bring a meritorious election-rule claim challenging unconstitutional interference with electoral processes.  The majority just signals that these claimants had to wait -- even though the election cycle had started and despite facing pocketbook costs, threats of prosecution, and an affront to their sovereignty -- before receiving the relief to which they are likely entitled.

I respectfully dissent.  States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion.  The Court does a disservice to all concerned by distorting Article III standing and ripeness principles to issue a ruling that contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it, and by using its equitable authority to facilitate a patently inequitable result. 

-- Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent after the majority ruled in Donald J Trump v California that the administration can, for the time being, move forward with its directives relating to citizenship lists and mail ballots (24 August 2026), h/t Law Dork, "What Monday’s Supreme Court election order ruling is and is not"

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)

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)