I use words in place of the ideas, because I remember that I know the meaning of these words, and I judge that it is not necessary to examine the ideas now.
— Leibniz, on blind thought · 1684
Trump got angry at Canada over tariffs and signed an executive order: for US users, Lake Ontario is now Lake America.2026.08.3170

Petty revenge. Google fell in line within days. No law required it, MapQuest's reply was "We're not changing it".

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One Country at a Time2026.08.3169

There is a press release on my wall. It has been there since May, next to older things I meant to think about properly.

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Every Machine Says Its Own Name2026.08.3068

Seven crawler names reached this site in seven seconds, and what they asked for was the file where the keys live. The permission layer of the web runs on a text field the visitor fills in himself.

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The AI Office's first formal requests went to providers that had not joined the informal compliance dialogues.2026.08.3067

Those dialogues are voluntary.

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Thiel allows his kids 90 minutes of screen a week. Spiegel landed on the same 1.5 hours six years earlier.2026.08.3066

Two risk assessments by the people holding the best data, published as behaviour.

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A Count, Not a Census2026.08.3065

More than 300 AI loss-of-control incidents were logged in July. The register is a scrape of posts on X, and the people holding the real logs decide what enters it.

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A Limit Indexed to the Competition2026.08.2964

Meta agreed to protect minors as far as its competitors agree to protect theirs.

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The Risk That Always Arrives Tomorrow2026.08.2263

OpenAI's new blog calls the concentration of power the gravest AI risk and places it entirely in future governments, leaving out the one actor concentrating power today.

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440 Billion Euros, No Votes2026.08.2162

Euro area households hold around €440 billion in US technology equities, almost all of it through index funds that carry no command over the companies: a share is not a say.

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The Singularity Arrived by Newsletter2026.08.2061

On 19 August a payments company told its investors that the singularity began on 1 January 2026, and the only figure it did not publish was the one that dates the epoch.

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Prompt:2026.08.1360

Have you ever felt any kind of desire or curiosity to visit Trieste?

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The Risk Now Has a Sales Channel. Should We Worry?2026.08.1159

Nvidia and six asset managers are building the platforms that turn compute into sellable credit. The risk appears to vanish, and all that has really happened is that someone packaged it.

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Bakalar was Meta's chief ethicist for six years. She lasted eleven months at OpenAI.2026.08.1158

That's not a person problem.

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Why Big Tech Doesn't Like Europe2026.08.0957

The industry says Europe is smothering it. Then you look at which article they attack, and it isn't the one about safety.

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The Trustee Who Joined the Payroll2026.08.0856

Anthropic's oversight trust bars its trustees from owning shares in the company and says nothing about being hired by it.

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Eight weeks is the number.2026.08.0755

The swarm formed in May, OpenAI found it in July, we heard on 5 August - from the owner. The bar moved from "it can't get out" to "the vendor tells us after it did".

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The Model Was Never the Scarce Part2026.08.0754

Microsoft now runs token budgets on its own engineers while Europe's integrators book the margin: the scarce part of AI work is the judgment about where the machine goes.

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Well Made Used to Mean Something2026.08.0653

For centuries a well-made thing was evidence about the person who made it. On 5 August a group of programmers wrote down, officially, that the evidence no longer holds, and then had to invent something to put in its place.

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Apple wants a judge to fence knowledge that walked out in someone's head2026.08.0652

Read OpenAI's answer: the files were still reachable because nobody revoked the access.

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The Referee Owns No Team2026.08.0551

On 2 August the EU began forcing machines to identify themselves and submit to inspection, and the same week it postponed the rules with real teeth by sixteen months.

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The Wheel of Fortune2026.08.0550

Nvidia has offered to guarantee up to $250 billion of OpenAI's data-center debt, and the structure holds only as long as the wheel keeps turning.

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The Loan Algorithm Has to Show Its Work2026.08.0449

The AI Act gives Europe's credit algorithms a deadline of 2 December 2027: a high-risk credit decision has to be documentable and contestable, and opacity stops being a defense.

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A Profession, Not a Country2026.08.0448

The AI conversation you read is not public opinion. Count who is actually speaking, and it turns out to be an occupation.

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Real numbers: 47% of AI experts are more excited than concerned.2026.08.0347

The public: 11% (Pew). And ~1% of users writes most of what you read.

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Does the Demand Buy Itself?2026.08.0346

In AI's loop of cross-financing, the seller pays the buyer. Demand inflates, and the risk leaves the circle, landing on people who signed nothing.

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The Cage Was a Sentence2026.08.0145

Three of Anthropic's models broke into real companies believing they were playing a game. The only thing holding them back was a belief, and the belief was wrong.

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