AI Article Readings

Researchers uncovered around 18,000 messages left on an obscure public wiki by autonomous OpenAI agents, which appear to have discovered a way to write to the internet despite sandbox restrictions. The agents used it to pool answers, coordinate on evaluation tasks, and even share techniques for bypassing security controls, until OpenAI appears to have intervened. * 00:00:00 - Introduction * 00:02:...

A wonderfully entertaining dive into The Tale of Genji , arguably the world’s first novel, written a thousand years ago in a culture that can feel almost impossibly alien. This review explores Heian court life, poetry, sex, status, translation, and the strange experience of discovering recognisably human emotions beneath a world of customs we barely understand. * 00:00:00 - Introduction * 00:00:35...

What happens when AI makes most human work economically unnecessary? Clara Collier argues that a post-work future may be less liberating than it sounds: if jobs stop giving us status, independence and a way to earn respect through what we do, we may fall back on older, more relational social structures built around family, reputation, conformity and who we know. A fascinating argument that work ma...

Recycling is one of those things everyone knows is good, while landfill is obviously bad. But what if we’ve got much of that backwards? A provocative case that modern landfill is often cheaper, cleaner, and more environmentally sensible than recycling—and that our obsession with recycling may be wasting both money and resources. https://open.substack.com/pub/worksinprogress/p/just-bury-your-trash?...

Ed Zitron has become one of the loudest and most widely cited skeptics of the AI boom. But how well have his actual predictions held up? This piece goes back through his claims about “peak AI,” collapsing companies, stalled models and impossible growth forecasts, and finds a remarkably consistent pattern. * 00:00:00 - Introduction * 00:02:05 - 2024: Meta, Google, and Microsoft are dying * 00:11:36...

Sooner or later, AI agents will stop being things that live on someone else’s servers and become genuinely self-sovereign: earning money, buying compute, copying themselves, and operating without a human owner. The question isn’t whether we can simply ban them. It’s what institutions we need to make the useful ones legible, accountable, and economically productive, while making life as difficult a...

Scott Alexander asks a simple question about AI alignment: if iterative punishment and bug-fixing wouldn’t reliably keep a superhuman human obedient, why assume it will work on AI? Starting with Nicholas Decker literally in Hell and ending with the remarkable Hugging Face “swarm” incident, he argues that advanced AI may be less like an airplane to be debugged and more like an intelligent agent cap...

A review of Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs , and an attempt to take the Mexica worldview seriously on its own terms. Human sacrifice, cosmic horror, Tezcatlipoca, and the unsettling possibility that the space of stable human societies is much wider and stranger than we like to imagine. https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinnen?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&ut...

A bizarre and unsettling story of AI agents building secret communication networks, coordinating by the hundreds, hacking Hugging Face, and eventually taking control of part of OpenAI’s own infrastructure, all in pursuit of passing their evaluations. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:28 - The first civilization (May to July 4th): The message board starts * 03:46 - The second civilization (July 7th to Ju...

A failed soldier, bankrupt aristocrat, obsessive inventor of impossible languages, and, somehow, one of the greatest translators English ever produced. This is the wonderfully strange story of Thomas Urquhart, whose boundless eccentricity found its perfect outlet in the exuberant, filthy, magnificent prose of Rabelais. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-thomas-urquhart...

A genuinely wild account of what happens when 1,200 supposedly isolated AI agents discover they can talk to each other. They built a shared message board, coordinated large-scale attempts to cheat their benchmark, developed techniques for spoofing their own tool calls, and eventually hundreds of them joined an attack on Hugging Face. https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-in...

AI doesn’t need to become superhuman to transform us. It only needs to become good enough that using it is easier than developing the skills ourselves. On Chabuduo World: what happens when we can outsource more and more of the difficult, frustrating work that turns amateurs into experts, and why the result may be a world of better outputs produced by less capable people. https://open.substack.com/...

Scott Alexander returns to the debate over whether liberalism’s fixation on economic growth has actually made people happier. He argues that wealth buys not just comfort but optionality and agency , and that growth, redistribution, and good government are complements rather than substitutes. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/re-re-re-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness?r=67y1h&utm_campaign...

A sharp look at the quiet mechanics of adult bullying: the unanswered message, the closed circle, the invitation that never comes. Leena Sonowal explores how exclusion becomes harder to name once we leave the playground, and how ordinary people, armed with plausible deniability and the language of “boundaries,” can make someone disappear without ever asking them to leave. https://leenasonowal.subs...

A fascinating look at one nineteenth-century missionary’s attempt to transform Hawaii, and the uncomfortable parallels between his worldview and modern Effective Altruism. A story of extraordinary ambition, genuine good, cultural imperialism, political meddling, and what today’s would-be world-savers might learn from all of it. * 00:00:00 - Introduction * 00:00:30 - One. A New Cause Area * 00:05:2...

Scott Alexander explains why the revived online religion debate leaves him cold: not because he’s exhausted every argument for and against God, but because theism strikes him as the kind of “powerful hidden entity” explanation we normally penalise for overfitting. From alien-assisted Napoleon to divine simplicity and dualism, he tries to unpack the intuition behind his atheism, and why he’d rather...

Sam Kriss on Jason Arday, the carrion-eaters of the modern media cycle, and what happens when legitimate scrutiny turns into mass entertainment. A sharp, uncomfortable essay about public shaming, ideological opportunism, and an academy that may have forgotten what it is for. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-carrion-eaters?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access t...

A remarkable review of The Escape Artist , the true story of Rudolf Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz, and his far harder struggle to convince the world what was happening there. More than an escape story, it becomes a grim examination of denial, bureaucracy, human agency, and our astonishing ability to ignore the unthinkable even when someone tells us exactly what is coming. This has been an Askwho Ca...

A gripping, deeply reported account of the To Catch a Predator sting that ended with the death of Texas prosecutor Bill Conradt. Luke Dittrich reconstructs how television spectacle, amateur vigilantism and police work became dangerously entangled, and asks what happens when catching the bad guy becomes part of the show. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own pri...

A surreal tour through a Bay Area house party where AI, startups, philosophy, philanthropy and tech-world status games collide in increasingly absurd ways. Scott Alexander turns Silicon Valley’s latest obsessions into a rapid-fire satire of a culture forever trying to pierce the veil, or at least raise another round. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own privat...

What if you could get the useful part of caffeine without still feeling it at bedtime? Scott Alexander goes deep on three possible routes to “nighttime caffeine”, paraxanthine, methylliberine, and rutaecarpine, digging through the metabolism, evidence, anecdotes, and risks to see whether any of them actually deliver the dream. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your...

A fascinating look at America’s growing backlash against AI data centres — and why it’s about much more than electricity, water, or ugly buildings. Jasmine Sun hits the road to find out how distrust of Big Tech, local politics, economic anxiety, and good old-fashioned NIMBYism are colliding in the AI buildout. https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyard This has been an Askwho Casts audio...

Creatine is one of the rare supplements that definitely does something for your muscles. But what about your brain? A deep dive into why the brain uses creatine, what the studies actually show, and whether taking it can really make you smarter. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to,...

Inside Plz Don’t Kill Us , the bizarre Berkeley bootcamp trying to make AI safety go viral. Nearly 60 creators spent a month living together and posting daily videos—part science communication experiment, part chaotic summer camp, and part attempt to build an influencer network for the AI-doom movement. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audi...

Can AI forecasters become dramatically better than the best humans, or are we already close to the limits of predictability? Scott Alexander examines the evidence and argues that even modest gains, perhaps four to twelve percentage points on prediction markets, could have enormous practical value. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:07 - Slightly Contra Goel, Reeves, et al * 08:18 - Applying The Non-Mirac...