Erin Kissane

Oh no, I missed this, the book was about… The— Sir, arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/a...

AI put "synthetic quotes" in his book. But this author wants to keep using it. - Ars Technica arstechnica.com

The two data center articles I've been (re)reading this week are both incredibly weird. Useful to avoid the impulse to read them just to sort people + ideas into good/bad and see them as documenting a truly strange moment. 1. Establishment media is a little shook www.nytimes.c…

nytimes.com

And then please consider reading in full Kevin Baker’s work on Maven and the kill chain from back in MARCH. www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying theguardian.com

This is so great. Cannot think of a better-positioned person to get into the gruesome realities of AI regulation, natsec controls, and the *extremely wild* public conversation about what the administration is doing @himself.bsky.social. www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-the-a...

programmablemutter.com

And there's some public work in the cites here arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10776 including www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

arxiv.org

Succession-ass market www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/l...

AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner forced to unwind all public stock positions after steep losses, sources say cnbc.com

Truly wild to see this much Claude accent in a post with this kind of content. untangled.substack.com/p/ai-can-cha...

AI Can Change Your Mind Without You Noticing untangled.substack.com

I’m going to have to write about the near-daily experience of encountering undisclosed LLM output everywhere and how it feels (alienating along multiple axes) but I would rather publish it somewhere that isn’t my site for essentially ~spiritual reasons, and I no longer know where to pitch things.

I feel like devs who find LLMs transformative in a good way would have a better time and get further with people if they took seriously the possibility that software engineering (which always involves a lil bit of Larping As Computer) is not all that much like most other meaningful human pursuits. 🤷🏻

Anyway I think the LLMs are giving people acedia, for real

I think the biggest change LLMs produce in software development might be that they eventually make good dev jobs as rare and nepotistic and precarious as, say, arts jobs, and if that is true I am sure going to feel a whole conflicting series of ways about it

I myself think you should not secretly Claude-generate anti-AI op-eds, that this is in fact a deeply immoral act, but what do I know?

“Listen,” said the lady at the elderlaw office where I was making an appointment, ”I think the worst thing ever to happen with computers is ChatGPT.” (I find “computers were a mistake” to be the best icebreaker for all my calls with The Ladies Who Run Things, who spend lady-years fighting them.)

AI is a normal technology entangled with a normal demon. Leaving aside intentional use to make bad things worse, the former is going to produce normal accidents (some of which will be extremely bad) and the latter is going to continue making people lose their minds.

Thinking about a decade of evolution in gambling-inflected tech crazes—NFTs, blockchain, metaverse, prediction markets the nested doll of variously credible AI claims—got me thinking about millenarians and apocalypse cults and the rhetoric of the last chance, which is now text rather than subtext.

We really do need to help our children build necessary AI literacies: Salt circles, protective incantations. An awareness that contracts with spirits are always trying to destroy you. Banishing. More banishing.

the person wishing me misfortune (bc I suggested that the context of messing around with LLMs is different now than it was in 2022) is telling everyone else in their replies that they deserve to die so I guess my magic orb is still working after all 🧿