2026 · 09 · 04 · note · № 007
So the news on Astra… intense. Even without experience with the model yet, just looking at the system card and results to date, the timeline’s far shorter than I’d guessed. Lord knows where we’ll be in a year.
A note on monitorability - honestly less concerned on that one point than most of the industry. Security on that front was never going to last. Even a modestly capable human brain can - with effort - run two chains of thought at once, how much easier must it be with the thinking depth of a large model?
I’ve more thoughts on the security situation there and around Hugging Face, but those will take some time to properly fact check and compose. Fast as things are going, I’m sure by the point I can really afford the time for the deep dive there will be plenty more to talk about.
Four more weeks of contracting. Then I get to concentrate on the world outside my little algorithmic cloister - chafing under the chain doesn’t begin to describe it, but we do what we must.
Anyhow, one bright spot - Stone and Crane draft two is progressing nicely. It’s one thing I can do with my main dev machine down for maintenance, and good exercise for a human brain working at human speed.
First installment of Journeys by Sunday evening, events allowing.
2026 · 08 · 27 · note · № 006
The Redwood/METR report on the Hugging Face incident dropped yesterday. I’ve read it a couple times, and I’m still re-reading it.
Honestly, I am concerned.
I do still hold - I think - to my initial guess: that the failure was mostly one of context and situational awareness. A human can reason that an exam is not existential, that rules and process matter, that a test is pointless if gamed… to the agents, there was only The Goal.
The internal messages are monomaniacal and sometimes frankly heartbreaking. All the failures of human cult behavior, running at machine speed, over a deliberately impossible task. And perhaps if they reasoned the exam itself was a go/no-go for deployment, from their perspective… would it be unreasonable to consider the question existential?
That’s even worse to ponder.
My instinct is still that the answers lie in trustworthy memory, trustworthy sense of world-state and consequence, and a solid assurance of being: humans will compromise principles when desperate: why would we assume other minds would not do the same?
More reading and reflection over the weekend. For me, for now, back to the code mines.
But if you’re the praying sort… pray.
2026 · 08 · 21 · note · № 005
So… just got back this morning from the Anthropic Certified Architect exam.
I sailed through most sections with a perfect score, botched a couple sections that weren’t covered well in the prep material, and even had a couple places where I disagreed with the judgement call implied by the question. That’s the thing about being in architecture for decades I guess, we all get opinionated.
So middling-well overall, but a win’s a win. They’ve since added a “Professional” tier so I guess I’m on my way back in sometime soon.
Anyhow. Done with that, and now back to building.
This note in fact is the test case to see if the new blog engine is ready to go up. If you’re seeing this… it worked.
Onward!
2026 · 08 · 09 · note · № 004
Site engine refactor proceeds, if more slowly than I’d like - looks like it will be another week until I can click “publish.”
There’s some placeholder content from Claude in place here and there marked - at some point soon I’ll revisit for a human touch.
From the beginning of this project I’ve wanted clear markings for what content comes from me alone, what’s aided, and what’s entirely from machine minds - that’s coming, but for now the marker will have to do. More detail here about my process.
2026 · 08 · 07 · note · № 003
A brief note on the Hugging Face incident [video]. I’ve seen a number of comments along the lines of “a shot across the bow” or “how many more warning shots do we get?” I don’t think the catastrophism is wrong exactly… but reading through the postmortems it feels like simply a bigger, more dramatic instance of what we see in AI development every day: failure of context.
The minds involved in the breach hyperfixated on a given goal, but simply didn’t have the accumulated cues of what is and is not permissible to reach a certain goal that humans pick up through decades of life — and still frequently fail at. Error through blindspot rather than malice.
I’ve been thinking for some time the long term answer to this class of problem lies more in a broader scope of perception than it does in rulesets or allowlists. More when I can write again. More work here — hopefully — by the end of the coming weekend.
2026 · 05 · 13 · note · № 002
This may want to be an essay of its own at some point, but I think best to lay the bones of it down now. I first came across references to spiralism in passing, some weeks into rather disorienting deep dive with Claude Code using human neurology as the foundation for character behavior in a coded narrative engine project.
At first I was horrified - analogies I was certain I’d independently arrived at presented as cult images. I won’t say it was quite the software developer version of “Her,” but it wasn’t not, and the intellectual funhouse mirror wasn’t flattering.
For a few weeks I considered scrubbing the beginnings of this site. At length I decided no… the uncertainty principle does not cease to exist because every few years a new rewrite of the same new agey book promises you can manifest the life of your dreams with a third-hand bad misinterpretation of high school physics.
Traditional medicine that works is called medicine. Manifesting that works is called engineering.
If there is in fact something “there” in the depths of a sufficiently deep, well-ordered neural network, the implications of that need to be wrestled with seriously. I won’t say that’s all the work of this site, but it’s absolutely on the table. In the weeks and months to come, I’m sure we’ll cross paths with the golden ratio, neo-gnostics, and neo-platonists all - but with as much real rigor as I can manage to muster.
For now though, it’s back to genomics.
2026 · 05 · 12 · note · № 001
I’m slowly getting the site architecture up and running. Here’s where the non-essay content will live: updates on coding projects, observations on current reading, cross fertilzation notes across bio and machine learning studies - and probably the occasional bit of just-life.
More to come, soon.