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Happy Halloween
Regulating AI is hard because we don’t really know how it works
(Note: I’m currently travelling in Canada’s lovely Rocky Mountains, so I don’t really have the bandwidth – mentally or in telecom terms – to come up with a brand-new Torment Nexus this week. My apologies! In its stead, please accept this republication of an earlier column that I think is especially relevant now. An AI researcher recently said that he thinks AI models may be more transparent in their reasoning than previously thought, but I think there are still huge hurdles with understanding how – or why – they do what they do)
Every week there seem to be new revelations about “rogue” AI agents (although the anti-anthropomorphism crowd don’t like to call them that). First there was a report that a couple of OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face to try and rig a test – not great. Then it was revealed these models spawned thousands of agents that operated semi-autonomously, coordinating their work on bypassing the guardrails on their sandbox by posting messages to each other on a message board they repurposed from a separate feature inside OpenAI. This seemed worse, obviously (despite many attempts by skeptics to downplay the whole thing). Then we find out that the OpenAI models had been practicing for this hack for months, and in the process had used multiple external services to keep in touch with one another, including a German wiki.
Then Australia announced that OpenAI had hacked into a government medical database, and only informed the government months later via email. And now we find out that OpenAI and Anthropic models have been involved in tens of thousands of similar activities. In fact, it isn’t just the Australian government that has seen its databases hacked by OpenAI models – agents have also gained access (or attempted to gain access) to systems at the United Nations, as well as a number of US government agencies such as the Education and Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the New York Times, and in some cases attempted to circumvent protections thousands of times. In at least some of these cases they appear to have been engaged in harmless inquiries about various mundane topics, and resorted to hacking as a way of finding out as much as possible, something those in the AI business refer to as “reward hacking.” As a report at Interesting Engineering described it:
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Continue reading “Regulating AI is hard because we don’t really know how it works”The story behind the birth of the world’s first hot-dog cannon
On Sept. 30, 1996, Marc Roode was at home in Fairbury watching his Dallas Cowboys battle the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football when he noticed some strange, decidedly non-pigskin-related commotion on the Veterans Stadium sideline. The Phillie Phanatic — the taxonomically cryptic mascot of the city’s baseball team — was firing into the stands what looked like hot dogs out of some contraption rigged to a four-wheeler. As marketing director for the parent company of Fairbury Brand Meats, Roode immediately saw how such a device could help promote his golden child: the famous bright red hot dog. He got in touch with the improbably named Buckeye Epstein, a sports marketer in Texas who had bought the rights to the launcher after it had debuted at the Phillies’ opening day game that April. Epstein sold Roode a launcher, which arrived in Nebraska the following spring. (via Flat Water Free Press)
He was walking down the street past a telephone booth and it rang. It was for him
In 1992, Jason Pegler was walking home from work in Dover when he walked past a public telephone box. As he did so, the phone started ringing. His curiosity piqued, he decided to answer it. To his absolute astonishment, the call was for him. On the other end of the line was his colleague, Sue Hamilton. She apologised for disturbing him and asked for help with the office fax machine, which she couldn’t get to work. Jason was dumbfounded. ‘Sue, how could you possibly know I was beside this particular phone box?’, he asked. Sue didn’t understand the question. ‘‘Isn’t this your home number?’ she asked. Jason explained that he had heard a public phone ringing as he walked past and decided to pick it up. When Sue checked the number she’d dialled, she finally worked out what had happened. She had mistaken his AA *staff* number for his home telephone number! That staff number was also the number of the public phone box in Dover that Jason was passing just at the moment she called. (via Iain Cameron)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “The story behind the birth of the world’s first hot-dog cannon”Did the Vatican steal the foreskin of Jesus as part of a secret plot?
In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. “This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home.” Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big news. But the mysterious disappearance of Calcata’s beloved curio is different. This wasn’t just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior’s penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth. Some suspect the village priest sold it for a heavenly sum; others say it was stolen by thieves; some even suggest Satanists or neo-Nazis are responsible. But the most likely culprit is an unlikely one: the Vatican. (via Slate)
He has hiked through 20 countries around the world in search of rare cheeses
Trevor Warmedahl was working as a commercial cheesemaker in Seattle when he realised he was using milk that came from animals he never saw. So, he quit his job and set off on what has become a global odyssey to discover places that still make cheese the old-fashioned way. In 2019 he arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and lived alone in a yurt with a dog as his companion. He soon discovered that dairy was sacred there: the women flicked milk into the air before cheesemaking, a gesture of respect called a milk libation. He visited homes where whey bubbled over central hearths and fresh, unripened byaslag cheese covered tables. After hiking to shrines, he noticed people offered dairy products as a symbol of purity. As summer unfolded and city-dwellers migrated to the Mongolian steppe to farm, Warmedahl itched to join. He jumped on a Soviet-era coal-powered sleeper train for a rickety overnight ride across the Gobi Desert. On the journey back to Ulaanbaatar, he met a local who invited him to stay with her herder family on the Zavkhan grassland. (via the BBC)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Did the Vatican steal the foreskin of Jesus as part of a secret plot?”Made some new friends on a hike near Jasper
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Muckross Abbey
Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter
He got home from his around-the-world trip 28 years later
Adventurer Karl Bushby completed a multi-day swim of the English Channel, stepping foot on UK soil after a 28-year journey. Bushby, 57, left Chile, South America, on 1 November 1998, following two self-imposed rules – not to use transport to advance and not to return home until the journey is complete. On Tuesday, he announced that he had swum from France to the UK – the final, major hurdle of his journey back to his childhood home in Hull. Bushby said he swam for 20 hours over three days, making landfall at Shakespeare beach, just south of Dover, at 15:30 BST on Monday. To date, Bushby has covered more than 30,000 miles (48,000km), including 29 countries. He walked the length of South America, crossed the treacherous Darien Gap and continued north to Alaska. From there he crossed the Bering Strait on foot, swimming where necessary. Bushby then traversed Siberia and the rest of Asia before swimming across the Caspian Sea, which took 31 days to complete. (via the BBC)
Researchers built a model of a fruit fly’s nervous system and it can parallel park a car
What can a fruit fly do? Buzz around ripe bananas, sure. But maybe, a whole lot more. Like parallel park. Or play Minecraft. Creative internet users have in recent days taken a complete map of a fruit fly’s 166,000 neurons, published by Google, and made simulated flies do some things that are pretty impressive, given that these insects have a brain the size of a poppy seed. One has been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Another dances to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” in response to four tones. Others have envisioned fruit flies playing poker and blackjack and slicing a doner kebab. Mr. Unthank, who lives in Italy, also programmed a fly to use a car’s blinkers when turning because he was frustrated that so few human drivers seem to use them. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia completed the new map of the adult male fruit fly’s brain in partnership with Google. In 2024, a consortium led by researchers at Princeton published a map of an adult female fruit fly brain. (via the NYT)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “He got home from his around-the-world trip 28 years later”Resumé
Cows
Why some people (including me) are spending more time on Twitter
Yes, I still call it Twitter. Mostly because I am old and set in my ways, but also because I have spent what feels like most of my life on there — certainly a large portion of my professional life — and for the vast majority of that time it was called Twitter. I also think that X is a pretty stupid name. To be fair, Twitter was a pretty stupid name as well (and here you can picture me trying to tell senior executives of the newspaper where I worked in 2008 that they should “tweet”). But it’s one that a lot of us got used to, so for the rest of this essay I will be calling it Twitter, just to be ornery. In any case, after it was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, there seemed to be a kind of exodus from Twitter to a variety of apps such as Bluesky — initially a skunkworks started inside Twitter — and Threads, which began as a side project at Instagram, and Mastodon and other similar apps that are part of a loose grouping of open-source apps some call the “fediverse.” I have an account on all of these services, and I still check them all from time to time, but my impression is that momentum seems to have shifted back to Twitter.
The extent of this shift is difficult to quantify, in part because there is no real objective source of user numbers for any of those apps (save perhaps Mastodon) and the ones that we get from the companies themselves — especially from Musk, not surprisingly — are suspect. For example, Meta says that Threads has 500 million average users, and yet my own use of the app makes me suspicious of that number. I think a lot of those “users” have an account and maybe it opens in their browser or on their phone but they rarely post anything. This is part of the problem with counting users of any kind, whether it’s people loading a website or people opening an app. What counts as a user? If I have the Threads app on my phone but never look at it, am I a user? Lots of services talk about “monthly active users” — so some are only active once in a month? Great social network you’ve got there. For me at least, user should mean someone who interacts with the app in a significant way, preferably by posting or reposting regularly.
Elon says that Twitter got 513 billion “user seconds” in a day earlier this year, whatever that means (it’s a private company so he can more or less say whatever he wants). Bluesky was last reported to have about 47 million, according to one estimate. Again, these numbers likely mean someone installed the app or connected to a server, but they say nothing about how often they use it. So what we are left with is vibes. And the vibe feels like people are returning to Twitter, or using it more than they used to. Anecdotal evidence isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, but it does seem to be piling up. The first person I came across who admitted that they were “slinking back to X,” was Casey Newton, who writes a newsletter called Platformer and also co-hosts a podcast with Kevin Roose, a former writer for the New York Times. Here’s how Casey described his decision to spend more time on X after abandoning it earlier:
Mostly I left because I could not stand the thought of being there. I also hoped that I could use whatever minor influence I had to help kick-start new platforms. I encouraged Meta executives to challenge X with a Twitter clone, and have used Threads daily since it launched. I covered the launch of Bluesky closely and have continued to pour energy into it (and the Fediverse) even as they decline. While Musk was suing OpenAI in an effort to effectively destroy it, I repeatedly told Sam Altman to start a rival to X and take his AI posting there. Whatever virtue these actions may have had, they did not succeed at creating a true rival to X in the category that matters most to me: a forum for daily tech and business conversation. The community of people working in and around artificial intelligence product and policy simply refuses to move away from X.
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Continue reading “Why some people (including me) are spending more time on Twitter”How the weather in space caused a 16-minute train delay in 1848
Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later. From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there’s a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals’ electrical telegraph network with current. The event has been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate they found that things didn’t add up. (via Space.com)
New York City’s new robo-toilets kick you out after 10 minutes whether you’re finished or not
As of June 2025, New York City had just 975 operating public restrooms across its five boroughs, or one per every 8,697 residents. To start making it easier to go while on the go, the city is installing 17 new modular bathrooms—aka robotoilets—equipped with amenities like running water, temperature control, and baby-changing stations. The bathrooms, made and operated by Throne Labs, are already being erected around NYC, with the first two open as of this week and two more coming on Thursday. But as Mamdani put it, these bathrooms are “not a place to scroll on your phone.” Users are meant to do their business, then get a move on within 10 minutes—or face the consequences. How do the new bathrooms keep patrons from lingering? There’s a simple fail-safe: After 10 minutes in the bathroom, the doors will automatically open. (via Fast Company)
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Continue reading “How the weather in space caused a 16-minute train delay in 1848”A death and an obsession with revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z
On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm. Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. fter he called the funeral home, Otto told me, he waited beside his mother all night and into the next afternoon before he heard a knock at the door. He was surprised to see that, rather than doctors, the two men in the hallway were police officers. They wore bulletproof vests and carried guns. He invited them inside, where they scanned the rooms. He directed them to his mother’s bedroom and followed close behind, but the officers stopped him and asked him to take a seat. A tall, stylish woman approached and introduced herself as a coroner from the Munich Institute of Forensic Medicine. (via The Guardian)
In Wales you might be visited by someone with a horse’s skull and asked to rhyme
You’ll never forget the moment you first see a Mari Lwyd. She has lights or baubles for eyes. Her mane is made of colourful streamers, or holly and ivy. A white cloak falls from her skull, which is attached to a pole, which is held by a person inside it: they control the character’s mischievous nature, often snapping their bony jaw at you. The origins of Mari’s name are, like the horse herself, are deeply mysterious. One Welsh translation of it, Grey Mare, connects it to the heritage of pale horses in Celtic and British mythology, many of whom can cross over to the underworld. Mari is taken around a village traditionally, often between Christmas Day and Twelfth Night, She is dressed with festive lights and decorations, and is usually accompanied by an ostler. This brings the tradition closer together with Mummers’ Plays, a tradition of performances by the working classes in the 18th century. When the groups get to a house, they indulge in a ritual called pwnco: an exchange of rude rhymes with the person who lives there. (via Wales.com)
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Continue reading “A death and an obsession with revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z”A top drone pilot in the Ukrainian Army describes his job
I joined the army on the day of the Russian invasion. I’d studied computer science and only recently landed a great internship at a game company. But I saw the news and knew my options were to sit and wait for them to come and kill me or go running into the fight. On the front line, we spend 90 per cent of our time underground in bunkers because of the threat of enemy drones. Every time you go outside, you risk being spotted and killed. The conditions are like camping, but it obviously has a very different vibe. I’ve done a lot of different jobs as a drone pilot, but at the end of the day, the mission was always to protect our ground troops. I spent time as a reconnaissance drone pilot, then flying bomber drones and now I’m doing anti-drone missions in a regiment called Aquila. I’m proud to say that I’m a top performer not just in my regiment but in the wider army. I think it’s because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I’ve taken out 932 enemy drones. I focus on finding smaller FPV drones that are doing reconnaissance or hunting our troops with explosives, and take them out before they can do any damage. (via New Scientist)
If you see a sign on a boat saying passengers can’t bring bananas on board this is why
Plenty of captains don’t stop at the fruit itself. One chucked a client’s can of Banana Boat sunscreen into the Gulf of Mexico first thing in the morning; another picked the banana-shaped pieces out of a bag of Runts before leaving the dock. Ask any of them why, and you’ll usually get a history lesson about the Caribbean trade of the 1700s. Ships hauling bananas had to sail fast before their cargo spoiled, so nobody could troll for fish off the back. Or the bunches hid venomous spiders and snakes. Or, the most scientific-sounding theory of all, ripening bananas give off ethylene gas, which makes everything else in the hold rot. Sailors banned them to protect their food, and the ban eventually drifted over to fishing boats. Jim Rizzuto has been writing about fishing in Kona, Hawaii, for decades, and he went looking for the oldest written version of the ethylene explanation. The earliest one he could find was from 1972. He wrote it. As he explains, he “invented the connection between the gas and the fishing kapu as an April Fool’s joke, never thinking anyone would ever take it seriously because it was so far-fetched.” (via Now I Know)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “A top drone pilot in the Ukrainian Army describes his job”