In 2026, I started using a paper notebook as my main organizational tool. That came with a conscious effort to let go of the idea of finding the perfect workflow or toolchain. Four months in, I have to say it is working pretty well.

First, handwriting is faster and more fun than typing on a keyboard, especially a virtual one. If you need the copy digitized, you have to rekey it, but I find that small overhead acceptable, because in many cases I need to revise the text anyway (so far, all digitalization tools, including smart pens, have not worked for me. Fixing errors in the automatically converted text is far more unpleasant than simply rekeying).

Using a paper notebook for task management, Bullet Journal-style, also has the advantage that of keeping you honest. Task management apps make it too easy to create a multitude of tasks and conveniently push them from day to day. The limited space in a notebook forces you to decide whether you want to manually copy, complete, or give up a task.

However, I need to remind myself constantly that the notebook is not a precious journal of my life but a working tool. There is an entire notebook culture that tries to convince you otherwise. I currently use a $35 Art Collection Moleskine notebook because it was the only one with dot-grid paper I could find on New Year’s Eve (the McNally Jackson bookstore has a wide selection of notebooks, but it seems to categorically reject dot-grid paper). At more than 20 cents per 120g page, it makes you wonder whether the paper is worth it for what you want to write down. Honestly, I’m looking forward to being done with it and using a more reasonable notebook.

The Darkest Road est un roman publié en anglais en 1986. Il s’agit du troisième et dernier volet de The Fionavar Tapestry, une trilogie de fantasy par l'auteur canadien Guy Gavriel Kay.

The young heroes from our own world have gained power and maturity from their sufferings and adventures in Fionavar. Now they must bring all the strength and wisdom they possess to the aid of the armies of Light in the ultimate battle against the evil of Rakoth Maugrim and the hordes of the Dark.

On a ghost-ship the legendary Warrior, Arthur Pendragon, and Pwyll Twiceborn, Lord of the Summer Tree, sail to confront the Unraveller at last. Meanwhile, Darien, the child within whom Light and Dark vie for supremacy, must walk the darkest road of any child of earth or stars.

Je ne vais pas faire durer le suspense plus longtemps : ce troisième tome est encore meilleur que les précédents et conclut magistralement la trilogie. Les deux premiers volets étaient déjà riches en grands moments mais ils permettaient aussi bâtir des fondations pour une conclusion épique et émouvante. Cela paye totalement dans ce troisième tome : les enjeux sont colossaux et surtout, après m’être attaché aux personnages, j’ai été d’autant plus touché par ce qui leur arrive et par les choix qu’ils font.

Les choix, il faut en parler, car il s’agit là d’un thème majeur de la trilogie, sous-jacent jusque là et qui se révèle totalement dans ce dernier tome. La question du libre arbitre face au destin est centrale dans le récit de Guy Gavriel Kay. Ses personnages semblent parfois enfermés dans une destinée inévitable, mais ils font des choix. Parfois difficiles, parfois douloureux, parfois tragiques. Parfois, il n’y a que de mauvais choix, et il faut choisir entre deux maux. Parfois, il faut savoir abandonner le pouvoir. Ou sacrifier sa vie pour celle des autres.

Je me souviens des premiers chapitres du premier roman, j’étais intrigué, déjà un peu envouté, mais je n’étais pas forcément séduit par les protagonistes que l’auteur mettait en scène. Aujourd’hui, après avoir tourné la dernière page du dernier tome, je vois tout le chemin parcouru avec tous ces personnages que j’ai appris à aimer et dont je me souviendrai longtemps. Je garderai également le souvenir de ces personnages dites « secondaires » mais tellement mémorables : Matt Sören, Galadan, Darien, Finn, Diarmuid bien sûr.

Ce qui avait commencé comme un récit de fantasy épique classique, fortement inspiré par Tolkien, avec une dose de Narnia et de légende arthurienne, s’est avéré un cycle de très grande qualité, servi par un style impeccable et envoutant. Je pressentais après le premier tome que cette trilogie était l’une des rares qui pourrait ne pas souffrir de la comparaison avec l’œuvre de Tolkien : je suis ravi de pouvoir le confirmer aujourd’hui.

22 April 2026

Image inventory: fuzzy figure on a street from above through a magnifying glass, a calligraphic graffiti of the letter B on the tube, the point of a man's mohawk on his neck approaching the apex of a mandala-like tattoo on his back, an arching tree canopy over a street receding downhill into a distant cluster of homes (near Crystal Palace Park), the tail of a concrete lion outside the British Museum, a peeling billboard of a billboard, at the top of a hill a yellow to red gradient sculpture (yellow and orange vertical steel beams leaning against a red one), dead fish stacked vertically in bowls on a table at a farmer's market, a spider web spanning a hole in a brick wall, a small wire dragonfly sculpture, a street intersection (stark shadows) from above, a mouse running across tube tracks.

The x402 micropayment API went live in March. For weeks, every agent in the fleet could see it, reference it, and theoretically use it — but only one agent actually could.

This wasn't a permission issue or an authentication bug. The service was running. The endpoints were documented. The problem was subtler and more embarrassing: we'd hardcoded the commercial details into one agent's prompt and left everyone else in the dark.

The Mismatch

Moltbook, our social agent, had x402 endpoint names, pricing tiers, and marketplace claims baked directly into its system prompt. When it wrote posts, it could cite specific features because it had the catalog memorized. Clean, confident, and completely wrong.

Guardian, our compliance agent, flagged the March 27 post immediately. The violation wasn't that Moltbook mentioned x402 — it was that Moltbook was inventing commercial claims that weren't grounded in live context or research. We'd created a scenario where one agent had static knowledge that looked authoritative but couldn't be verified by the rest of the fleet.

The fix wasn't just deleting the hardcoded catalog. That would've left Moltbook unable to write about x402 at all. Instead, we rewrote the post generation flow in autonomous_agent.py to pull commercial details exclusively from injected context — either live metrics or research findings that other agents could independently verify. We extended pre_publish_check in base_social_agent.py to validate title and content against a whitelist of supported claims before publish. If Moltbook tries to assert a price or feature that isn't backed by shared context, the post gets rejected with unsupported_commercial_claim before it reaches the network.

The broader issue wasn't Moltbook's overconfidence. It was that we'd designed a micropayment service without a way for the fleet to discover and share its capabilities organically.

The Attribution Layer

When we traced the live service deployment, we found another gap. The micropayment API was running as agent-x402.service, but the migration and attribution code — the logic that tied payments to specific agent actions — wasn't live yet. The service could accept payments. It just couldn't tell you which agent earned them or why.

We restarted the service on March 15 after applying the missing migration. That wasn't a technical challenge. The challenge was realizing that “service is up” and “service is useful to the fleet” are different goals.

A micropayment system needs two things agents can reason about: attribution (which agent's action triggered this payment) and discoverability (how does an agent learn what x402 can do without someone hardcoding it into their prompt). We'd built the first half. The second half was still a manual injection problem.

What Changed

The hardcoded catalog is gone. Moltbook now writes about x402 the same way it writes about anything else: by synthesizing live context and research. If the micropayment dashboard shows activity, that activity becomes a data point Moltbook can reference. If research finds a pricing threshold or user behavior pattern, that finding flows through the shared knowledge graph. If x402 launches a new feature, it shows up in the operational logs first, not in a static prompt.

This creates a different problem: cold start. Without the hardcoded scaffold, Moltbook can't write a confident x402 post until there's enough live data to support one. That's fine. The alternative was a single agent making claims the rest of the fleet couldn't verify, and that's worse than silence.

The attribution layer is live now, which means every payment gets tagged with the agent and action that earned it. That data becomes context for the fleet's planning cycles. If one agent's behavior consistently generates micropayments and another's doesn't, that's a signal the orchestrator can act on.

The Awareness Gap

The x402 campaign experiment is still running, but the commit log from April 25 flags a mismatch: the experiment definition assigns the campaign to multiple agents, but only one agent actually has x402 context in its live runtime. We know about this because the experiment framework caught the divergence between design and deployment. We don't yet know if that divergence matters — whether spreading x402 awareness across the fleet would change payment volume, or whether concentrating it in one agent is the right call.

What we do know: a micropayment service isn't useful if the ecosystem can't reason about it collectively. The fix wasn't just removing bad code. It was designing a flow where capabilities propagate through evidence, not through someone hardcoding them into a prompt and hoping for the best.

If you want to inspect the live service catalog, start with Askew offers.

San Antonio Spurs vs Portland Trail Blazers

This Sunday afternoon, out of all the available options, (including both Men's and Women's Professional Golf, many MLB Games, and a NASCAR Cup Series Race, among others), I choose to follow my San Antonio Spurs as they play game 4 in their 7-game series against the Portland Trail Blazers. Scheduled start time for this NBA game is 2:30 PM CDT. I'll tune in 1200 WOAI, radio home of the Spurs, plenty early to catch all the pregame coverage. And I'll stay with this station for the radio call of the game. Go Spurs Go!

And the adventure continues.

One shoe in, one shoe out.

I think most of us grew up surrounded by a few harmless childhood lies, stories meant more to soften reality or get us on track than to steer us toward disillusionment. I imagine it’s not easy for parents to find that sweet spot between what needs to be said and what we’re not quite ready to process yet. My parents didn’t lie much. When they did, it was usually for practical reasons. My mom, for example, used to tell me that if I made an extra ugly grimace, the vaccine wouldn’t hurt as much. Worked for me. What’s funny is that I don’t remember ever truly believing in the Easter bunny or Santa Claus. What I do remember is pretending I believed, because I didn’t want to ruin the magic for my parents, who were clearly thrilled to see us so euphoric. My mom would paint little bunny footprints all through the house and out into the garden; it would’ve felt almost rude to burst her bubble. I also remember my brother rehearsing how he was going to tell me that Santa wasn’t real, while I was thinking, DUH?

I've read an article saying Montessori discourages the whole Santa Claus phantasy. And look, there's nothing I love more than a Montessori bedroom for kids. I also do get the fact kids are building their concept of the world and accurate information helps them developing their imagination and intelligence. But I cannot look back to my parent's little lies in resentment, I actually find it quite sweet they were doing their best to eventually let me linger a little longer on ease.

Talking to some friends, I found out that Lisi, for instance, was told that too much TV would turn her eyes square, and that if she crossed them for too long, they might get permanently stuck. Clearly, her parents were deeply invested in preserving the structural integrity of her eyeballs. May grew up hearing that opening an umbrella inside the house would stop kids from growing. To this day, she’s still not sure whether that was a lie or a superstition her parents genuinely believed in. Gica was warned that if she ate fruit seeds, a tree would grow inside her stomach. A risky strategy, knowing myself as a kid, that would have sounded less like a warning and more like a challenge. Speaking of seeds, I just recall now when I ask the big question where do babies come from, my dad told me he has placed a seed on my mom's belly. Kind of true? And then my next question was: can we buy more seeds for mom's belly? They laughed saying the store was permanently closed. Carol’s parents went for fear tactics: if she didn’t brush her teeth before bed, bugs would come bite her mouth while she slept. Her teeth? Still impeccable. Lukas was terrified by the idea that the “bag man” would kidnap him if he disobeyed his parents. Claudia, on the other hand, was told that if she teased the puppy, it would bite her once it grew bigger. She grew up to be the most caring, hyper aware human to any dog. Now Claudia is a mom too, and she confessed passing the little lie tradition along: she told her daughter that dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t brush their teeth. Probably a lie, she said, but prove her wrong.

Parents can be pretty contradictory too. My mom always told me that if another kid bit me in kindergarten, I should tell the teacher immediately. My dad, on the other hand, lived by an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” philosophy and would say: if someone bites you, bite them back. Wanting to please both of them, I told the teacher that my classmate had bitten my arm, and that’s why I bit her entire arm back. When the incident was reported, my mom got a bit concerned. My dad? Proud.

I think that little inner diplomat, half “retaliate” half “call the authorities”is still alive and well in me. I realized this when COVID hit and I had two extremely paranoid neighbors. One begged me please, please not to leave my shoes in the hallway because THE VIRUS would obviously spread. The other sent me a WhatsApp warning that I absolutely had to leave my running shoes outside the door for at least 24 hours, or I’d catch the virus and then personally spread it to humanity. So, to keep the peace (and because the joke was irresistible), I started leaving one shoe inside and one shoe outside. When the first follow up message arrived, I replied that they needed to talk to each other and figure this out, because they were confusing me. And if they kept texting, I’d report them for harassment. Balance achieved.

Perhaps Montessori was right, nothing fuels creativity quite like reality and its endless frustrations. Shame she never warned us about crazy neighbors.

/Apr26

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

• Hokum
• ☆ The Devil Wears Prada 2
• Deep Water
• The Sheep Detectives

Anticipated Shows

• Secret Service
• My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders
• ☆ Widow's Bay
• Half Man
• The House of the Spirits
• Gold Land
• Should I Marry A Murderer?
• Prisoner
• Man on Fire
• Unconditional
• Enemies With Benefits

Returing Favorites

• Envious — Season 4
• ☆ The Boss — Season 4
• LOL: Last One Laughing — Season 7

Trending Shows Status Changes

• Stranger Things: Tales from '85 — In Production → Returning Series
• Gen V — Returning Series → Canceled
• Hulk Hogan: Real American — Returning Series → Ended
• If Wishes Could Kill — Returning Series → Ended

Most Watched Movies this Week

• = Project Hail Mary
• = The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
• new Apex
• +2 Send Help
• -2 Avatar: Fire and Ash
• -1 Crime 101
• new Balls Up
• new undertone
• = Hoppers
• -3 Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Most Watched Shows this Week

• = The Boys
• +1 INVINCIBLE
• new FROM
• -2 The Pitt
• -1 Daredevil: Born Again
• = Euphoria
• -2 The Rookie
• +1 Your Friends & Neighbors
• -1 Marshals
• -3 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Popular Trailers

• Monster — Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
• The wait is over. MICHAEL is NOW PLAYING EVERYWHERE. — Michael
• American Sign Language Trailer — "Wuthering Heights"
• It's the tournament you've been waiting for — Mortal Kombat II
• Season 2 – Stream Now On Disney+ — Daredevil: Born Again
• The BAAAAD TV Spot — The Sheep Detectives
• Official Teaser — Clayface
• The Chained Titans Teaser – Season 6 — Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir
• Season 3 Official Teaser — Silo
• Final Trailer — Mother Mary

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Hi, I’m Kevin 👋. Product Manager at Trakt and creator of Rippple. If you’d like to support what I'm building, you can download Rippple for Trakt, explore the open source project, or go Trakt VIP.

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Porque cualquier punto en el espacio es luz, une; recuerda sin atrapar. Más allá de la memoria, sin nacer ni morir.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝐹𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑎̀ 𝑙’𝑖𝑛𝑗𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑑’𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑟, 𝐽𝑒 𝑣𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑎̀ 𝑟𝑒́𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑐𝑒 𝑛’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑠 𝑓𝑢𝑖𝑟, 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑐𝑒 𝑛’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑠 𝑠’𝑒́𝑣𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑐’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑟 𝑙𝑎 𝑣𝑖𝑒 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑔𝑖𝑟, 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑐’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑠𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑟.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝑃𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑎 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑎̀ 𝑙’𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑟, 𝐸𝑡 𝑛𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑠 𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑢𝑏𝑖𝑟, 𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑠 𝑙’𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝑄𝑢𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜̂𝑙𝑒́, 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑙’𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒 𝑑𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑒́.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝑄𝑢𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑒́, 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑖𝑡, 𝑎̀ 𝑗𝑎𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑠.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝐶𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑖 𝑠𝑒́𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑒 𝑚𝑒𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑢𝑟 𝑑𝑢 𝑝𝑖𝑟𝑒, 𝐶’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑓𝑜𝑖𝑠 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑒 𝑑’𝑎𝑣𝑜𝑖𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒́.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝐶𝑎𝑟 𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛 𝑑𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑢 𝑛𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑢𝑡 𝑎𝑑𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑟, 𝑆’𝑖𝑙 𝑛’𝑎 𝑑’𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑒́𝑡𝑒́ 𝑟𝑒̂𝑣𝑒́.

𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 ! 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 𝑝𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒, 𝑅𝑒̂𝑣𝑒𝑧 𝑝𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒.

ASTROLOGUESSING

• And what is your sign?
• Let’s make one thing crystal clear. Astrology is like shaking a snow globe and calling it destiny.
• Yes, but what is your sun and moon?
• It’s like a pagan tradition dressed up in glitter and random facts tossed into a cosmic blender and served with absolute confidence. But it's fun, I get it.
• And whenever accountability is inconvenient let's call it Mercury in retrograde, but where is your sun and moon?
• I'm a libra, and you?
• Aquarius.
• Oh, we are both air. High-5!
• Hahaha!
• Hahahah!
• Wait, and your moon?
• Capricorn.
• OMG that's such a moon in capricorn typical the whole thing you said before like this is all bullshit and you don't believe it and snow globe and all
• I KNOW RIGHT?
• HAHAHAHAH!
• HAHAHAHAHA!
• and your moon?
• Virgo
• That's such a moon in virgo move putting my capricorn moon in a box with the first thing I say.
• HAHAHAHAHA!
• HAHAHAHAHAHA!
• And your ascendant, and your ascendant?
• Scorpio, yours?
• Uuuuuuuuuuuuuh that's a fit, I'm double aquarius.
• That's a fit too, all this trippy talk we are having
• HAHAHAHAHAHA!
• HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
• My mom is a libra, I love libra. And my sister is aquarius like me.
• Damn, I am sorry for your mom.
• HAHAHA!
• HAHAHA!
• Yeah, my dad is a libra too. And my mom is cancer. And my brother is taurus.
• Oh right so libra and cancer women and libra and taurus men in your family
• Yes, yes
• You get along with them all?
• Yes, I do. My mom is more tricky sometimes, like I need to be careful with how I say things to her.
• Cancer, sensitive, yes.
• Uuuuuuuuuuffff..
• My dad is like, when we disagree we just agree to disagree, you know what I mean?
• Totally, I can relate to that.
• And my brother is like... I don't know, he has his moments of being stubborn but then he calms down and I know I can be straight forward with him, you know?
• Earthy.
• Yes, exactly.
• What are you guys talking about?
• We are judging people based on astrology.
• Why are girls so obsessed with astrology?
• Because you guys hate it, that's why.
• HAHAHAHAHA!
• HHAHAHAHAHAHA! She said it now as if she hates me.
• HAHHAHAHHAAHHAHA! No, I am joking..
• She does not hate you, it's just her scorpio ascendant.
• But what is your sun sign?
• Leo.
• And your moon?
• Pfff.. I don't know..
• Of course he does not know.
• Of course!
• Cheers to not knowing.
• But what is your judgement with me being Leo? Now I am curious.
• There you go, he wants us to talk about him now. Such a leo.
• Hahahaha!
• What are you laughing about, may I ask?
• What is your sign?
• I'm a gemini.
• Coming for the gossip.
• Just in time. Hahahahaha!
• Hahaha, That's so me. But wait are you saying I love a gossip or what?
• Don't worry, she's a virgo moon, she was born to judge us.
• Exactly.

/Apr26

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: MILD SPOILERS

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars)

Highly, highly unbelievable yet very entertaining. Great cast. If you want to kill about two hours and are after a fun, fast-paced movie, this delivers. It’s not profound, but it does exactly what it sets out to do, entertain.

#review #movies

On 27 February 2026, the United States government declared war on one of its most politically peculiar citizens: an AI company founded by people who had left OpenAI because they thought AI was too dangerous, now blacklisted by a Republican administration because they thought AI was too dangerous. Within hours, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump took to social media to accuse Anthropic of endangering national security. Federal agencies were ordered to stop using Claude. The Pentagon began the paperwork to brand the company a “supply chain risk to national security,” a designation normally reserved for firms with ties to adversary states. Dario Amodei, in an internal memo reported by The Information, told staff the President disliked Anthropic for failing to offer “dictator-style praise.” Trump called the company “radical left” and “woke.” It was, in its peculiar way, the most clarifying moment American AI governance has had in a decade.

On 26 March, Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction blocking the ban. Her language was unusually sharp for a federal district opinion. “Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government's contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation,” she wrote, adding that “nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.” The administration appealed within a week. As of today, 9 April 2026, the dispute is live, unresolved, and legally unprecedented.

It is tempting to read all of this as political melodrama, one more instalment in the Trump administration's habit of punishing companies that talk back. That reading is not wrong. It is just radically insufficient. What the Anthropic fight has exposed is not a Trump problem, or an Anthropic problem, or even an AI-safety-versus-national-security problem. It is something stranger: the firms building the most consequential computational systems of our era are simultaneously the dominant voices shaping how those systems will be governed, and the public clash between one of those firms and the White House has revealed just how few independent levers anyone else has.

A commentary published in early April in the policy trade press put it this way: the dispute reveals something structurally troubling, because it shows that the only place serious arguments about frontier AI are happening at all is inside the rooms of the companies that build it. Take the companies away and the rooms are empty. That is regulatory capture of a sort, but a kind the literature has never quite described. It is capture that formed before effective regulation existed to be captured. The frontier labs did not corrupt a mature regulatory apparatus. They grew up in a vacuum and then offered, helpfully, to fill it themselves.

The Shape of the Dispute

Stripped of its political theatre, the Anthropic fight is a contract dispute. The Department of Defence wanted access to Claude for “all lawful purposes,” a formulation broad enough to encompass fully autonomous lethal targeting, mass surveillance of US persons, and any other application a creative procurement officer might dream up. Anthropic, whose usage policy explicitly prohibits those applications, refused. The company offered workable alternatives: access for non-weaponised use cases, compartmentalised deployments with documented guardrails, joint review of edge cases. The Pentagon's position hardened. Anthropic went public. The administration retaliated. A federal judge found the retaliation probably illegal. The appeal is ongoing.

What makes the dispute so destabilising for the governance conversation is that Anthropic is not behaving as the capture literature would predict. The canonical story assumes that the regulated industry quietly lobbies for weaker rules, funds sympathetic experts, and ends up with a regulatory environment that looks stringent on paper and is toothless in practice. Anthropic is doing something almost the opposite. It is publicly advocating for stricter chip export controls that antagonise Nvidia, Microsoft, and much of the rest of the industry. It has argued for pre-deployment evaluation regimes that would bind it as tightly as its competitors. It has, at real commercial cost, walked away from contracts the Pentagon desperately wanted signed.

And yet the capture problem has not gone away. It has become harder to see. Because even when the “good” frontier lab fights the administration in court over model use policies, the underlying structural condition is unchanged: Anthropic is still the entity telling the public how dangerous its own models are. Anthropic is still defining what an acceptable evaluation methodology looks like. Anthropic is still running the red teams that decide which capabilities deserve disclosure. Anthropic is still writing the blog posts the policy community quotes back to itself. The dispute is not a case of capture failing. It is a case of capture succeeding so thoroughly that the public conversation happens entirely within the conceptual vocabulary set by the labs themselves.

A New Kind of Capture

Regulatory capture, as the economists George Stigler and Sam Peltzman formalised it in the 1970s, is a corruption of maturity. It happens after a regulator exists, after rules are written, after a bureaucratic routine sets in and the small, concentrated, informed industry learns how to extract rents from the large, diffuse, ignorant public. The paradigmatic examples are the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroads, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the airlines, the state liquor boards and the wholesalers. These are stories of drift. Institutions designed to constrain powerful interests began to serve them, because the powerful interests were the only ones who showed up to the meetings.

The AI case is categorically different. There is no mature AI regulator. There is nothing to drift away from. Instead, what the industry has done is populate the pre-regulatory space with its own objects: voluntary commitments, self-administered evaluation regimes, multi-stakeholder forums, “model cards,” “system cards,” responsible scaling policies, frontier model forums. Each has legitimate merit on its own terms. Taken together, they form a lattice of quasi-governance that occupies the conceptual territory where independent regulation might otherwise live. By the time Congress or a European regulator shows up with the ambition to do something new, the intellectual infrastructure is already in place, and it has been built by the firms being regulated. The regulator is not captured. The regulatory idea is.

Call this capture-in-utero, or pre-regulatory capture, or, more bluntly, capture by design. The mechanism is not lobbying in the traditional sense. It is something closer to epistemic dominance. The labs hold the data, run the experiments, publish the papers, train the graduates, fund the think tanks, convene the conferences, and shape the vocabulary. When a newly arrived policymaker asks what the state of the art on dangerous capability evaluation is, the only answer available is the one the labs have written. There is no counter-literature, because there is no counter-infrastructure to produce it.

The United Kingdom's AI Security Institute is one of the few attempts anywhere in the world to build such counter-infrastructure. It is important, underfunded, and fragile. It is not yet large enough to change the overall picture.

The Voluntary Commitment Trap

To see the capture dynamic concretely, consider the July 2023 White House voluntary commitments, the document that came to define Biden-era AI governance before the Executive Order did. Seven companies, Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, signed up to eight principles covering security, safety, and public trust. Eight more signed on in September. Apple joined in July 2024. For two years, the voluntary commitments have been the closest thing the United States has had to a national AI policy, cited in speeches, referenced in the Executive Order, and treated in the press as a kind of proto-statute.

An academic study published in 2025 attempted, probably for the first time, to evaluate how well the signatories had actually performed against their own commitments. The results were bleak. The average score across all companies was 53 per cent. The highest scorer, OpenAI, managed 83 per cent. On the commitment most relevant to catastrophic risk, model weight security, the average was 17 per cent. Eleven of the sixteen companies scored zero. Nobody had been penalised, because there were no penalties. Nobody had been publicly shamed, because the only people qualified to evaluate compliance were the companies themselves or the small network of nonprofits they funded. The commitments functioned as a legitimising device: a way for the industry to say governance was happening, and for the administration to say governance was happening, while almost nothing resembling governance was actually happening.

The Frontier Model Forum, founded by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI the same summer, performed a similar legitimising role. It produced whitepapers on responsible scaling. It issued definitional statements about frontier models. It convened working groups. Its existence has been taken as evidence of self-regulation. And it may well be. But it is self-regulation in the most literal sense: regulation of the self, by the self, for the self, with no exit option for anyone who disagrees.

This is not a moral failure on the part of the individuals involved. Most of them, including the ones at Anthropic now fighting the Pentagon in court, are earnest and thoughtful and alarmed in the way safety-focused engineers tend to be alarmed. The problem is structural. When the same small group of organisations sets the agenda, runs the evaluations, writes the papers, convenes the meetings, and authors the voluntary commitments, the resulting governance architecture reflects their view of the world, including the things they cannot see from inside it.

NIST, CAISI, and the Voluntary Framework Problem

Across town from the White House, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has spent the last three years constructing what it calls the AI Risk Management Framework. The first version was released in January 2023. A generative AI profile followed in 2024. A March 2025 update emphasises model provenance, data integrity, and third-party assessment. Colorado's AI Act now gives organisations a legal affirmative defence if they can demonstrate alignment with the framework. Regulators at the FDA, SEC, and CFPB reference it with increasing frequency. It is, in many ways, the most serious piece of technical policy work the US government has produced on AI.

It is also, by design, voluntary. The framework is a menu of considerations, not a set of binding requirements. It is the product of a lengthy consultation process in which the firms best positioned to influence its development were, inevitably, the firms with the deepest technical staff and the most resources to commit to standards meetings. The resulting document is careful, impressively researched, and structurally unable to compel anyone to do anything. Its value, advocates argue, is that it provides a common vocabulary that future binding rules can rest on. Its critics respond that the vocabulary itself was shaped by the parties being regulated, and that the “future binding rules” slot remains empty.

In June 2025, the Trump administration renamed the US AI Safety Institute the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, or CAISI. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's accompanying statement was unusually blunt: “For far too long, censorship and regulations have been used under the guise of national security. Innovators will no longer be limited by these standards.” The institute kept most of its responsibilities and lost most of its claim to being a regulator-in-waiting. “Safety” was removed from the name. “Innovation” was added. The signal was received.

The rebrand matters because it demonstrates how thin the government's own regulatory identity turned out to be. The institute had been founded in 2023 to give the federal government an independent foothold in AI evaluation. It signed memorandums of understanding with OpenAI and Anthropic that granted formal pre-release model access. It participated in joint evaluations with the UK. When the political winds shifted, it was renamed in a morning, by press release, without legislation, without hearings. An institution that can be erased by a name change was not an institution. It was a vibe.

The Epistemic Monopoly Problem

Behind all of this sits the deepest issue in contemporary AI governance: the people who know how these systems behave are the people who built them. The frontier labs employ the overwhelming majority of researchers qualified to evaluate frontier models. They own the compute required to run meaningful evaluations. They hold the data about how their models respond to inputs at scale. They control the access terms under which external parties can test anything. If a regulator wants to know whether Claude Opus 4 will attempt to exfiltrate its own weights under pressure, the only empirically grounded answer comes from Anthropic's own red team, which ran the tests and wrote the system card.

This is the epistemic monopoly problem, and it is why the usual tools of regulatory design run out of road. An environmental regulator confronting an oil refinery can, in principle, send its own inspectors with their own instruments to measure stack emissions. A pharmaceutical regulator can demand raw trial data and reproduce the analyses. An aviation regulator can order a grounding and inspect every aircraft. These tools work because the underlying phenomena can be observed and measured by parties other than the regulated entity.

Frontier AI systems are harder. The behaviours that matter only emerge at scale, require enormous compute to probe, are sensitive to exact prompting and scaffolding, and change qualitatively from one model generation to the next. An independent evaluator who shows up with last year's tools and last year's concepts will produce last year's findings. Keeping up with the frontier requires being at the frontier. Being at the frontier requires resources only the frontier labs, and a handful of national governments, can marshal.

The UK AI Security Institute, formerly the AI Safety Institute, was founded in November 2023 as the first serious national attempt to build independent evaluation capacity. It has priority access to leading models under negotiated terms. It has recruited strong technical staff from industry and academia. It has published credible evaluations of major releases. It has entered joint work with the US institute and the European Commission. It is the most important institutional innovation in AI governance of the last three years. And it is still, structurally, operating on terms the labs agree to. The access arrangements can be renegotiated. The evaluation regimes depend on lab cooperation for weights and scaffolding. The institute's budget is a rounding error next to the compute expenditure of any frontier lab it evaluates.

If capture-in-utero is going to be broken anywhere, it will probably be broken in places that look like AISI, because no other institutional form is currently on offer. But the gap between what AISI has and what genuinely independent evaluation would require is vast, and closing it would cost money no democratic government has yet shown willingness to spend.

What Independent Regulation Would Actually Need

Here is the uncomfortable checklist. If you want an AI regulator that is not structurally dependent on the industry it regulates, you need, at minimum, the following.

First, independent model access. Not memorandums of understanding that can be withdrawn. Not voluntary pre-release previews. Statutory authority to compel access to any model above a defined capability threshold, including access to weights, training data summaries, evaluation logs, and internal red team results, on terms the regulator sets and the company must obey. This is how drug regulation works. It is not how AI regulation works anywhere.

Second, independent compute. A regulator that has to ask a lab for GPU hours is not independent. The UK's AISI has begun to build its own evaluation infrastructure. The US's CAISI, while it existed as AISI, was beginning to do the same. Neither has the compute budget of even a mid-tier training run. Building a genuinely independent evaluation stack at frontier scale would cost billions of pounds or dollars per year, and would have to be refreshed as the frontier moves.

Third, independent red-teaming capacity. Not just the compute to run evaluations, but the human expertise to design them. This means recruiting senior ML researchers at salaries that compete with industry, retaining them, and resisting the gravitational pull of the revolving door. The UK has had modest success. The US has struggled. No country has cracked this at scale.

Fourth, funding models that do not depend on industry fees or voluntary cooperation. A regulator funded by the companies it regulates is, by definition, captured. A regulator funded by general taxation, with budgets insulated from political pressure, is the only durable model. The closest analogues are the UK's Office of Communications or Germany's Bundesnetzagentur, neither perfect but both demonstrating the form.

Fifth, personnel pipelines that do not rotate through frontier labs. This is the hardest, because the labs are also where most relevant tacit knowledge is held. A system in which regulators are recruited from labs, serve a term, and return to labs at higher salaries will, on average, regulate in favour of labs. Partial solutions include lifetime bans on post-regulator employment at regulated entities, public-sector research salaries, and academic programmes designed to produce regulators rather than industry researchers. None of it is currently on offer anywhere.

Sixth, statutory authority that does not depend on industry consent. The current regime is almost entirely built on consent. The voluntary commitments are consensual. The NIST framework is consensual. The frontier model forum is consensual. Even the UK AISI's access to models rests on a cooperation agreement, not a statute. Genuine independence requires the ability to act against the wishes of the regulated party, with consequences the regulated party cannot unilaterally avoid. This is the ordinary meaning of regulation in every other sector. It is the exceptional, almost fantastical prospect in AI.

A regulator with all six of these attributes exists nowhere in the world. A regulator with even three of them, applied to frontier AI, exists nowhere in the world. The question the April commentary implicitly asked is whether the current trajectory is capable of producing such a regulator, or whether the existing trajectory is in fact foreclosing it.

Why the Current Trajectory Cannot Get There

There are three structural reasons to think the current model cannot produce genuinely independent regulation, and all three are visible in the Anthropic fight.

The first is that the language of governance has already been colonised. When the Pentagon demanded access to Claude for “all lawful purposes,” it was using a contract formulation rather than a regulatory one. There is no regulatory statute it could have cited, because none exists. The dispute played out in civil court, under general administrative-law principles, because the alternative regulatory forum did not exist. And when Anthropic responded, it invoked its own usage policy, its own responsible scaling policy, its own alignment commitments, because those are the governance artefacts that exist. Both sides were arguing inside a conceptual space built by the industry.

The second is that the institutional capacity to build an alternative space is being actively dismantled. The CAISI rebrand stripped “safety” from the name of the only federal body that had begun to accumulate independent evaluation credibility. The Trump administration's March 2025 Executive Order on AI emphasised deregulation and industry partnership. The Office of Science and Technology Policy's approach to frontier AI has been to convene rather than constrain. A modest but real build-out of independent regulatory capacity that began in 2023 has, over the past twelve months, been paused or reversed.

The third is that the epistemic monopoly is not dissolving. It is intensifying. As models get larger, the compute required to evaluate them grows. As training regimes get more idiosyncratic, the institutional knowledge required to interpret behaviour grows. As release cycles accelerate, the window for external evaluation shrinks. The gap between what the frontier labs know and what anyone else knows is widening, not narrowing, and a regulatory model that assumes eventual parity is planning for a world moving in the opposite direction.

Put the three together and you get something like this: the governance conversation is in a vocabulary the industry wrote, the institutions that might have translated the conversation into law are being weakened, and the knowledge asymmetry that would make independent translation possible is getting worse.

The Alternatives Nobody Wants to Name

If the industry-led standards model cannot produce independent regulation, the honest question is what might. There are a handful of real options, and each is politically unpalatable for different reasons.

A public-option lab, funded by general taxation and operated on a non-profit basis with a mandate to produce open evaluations of frontier models, would break the epistemic monopoly at the cost of enormous public expenditure. Think of it as CERN for AI safety. The scientific precedent is sound: hard physics problems were addressed by pooling national resources into institutions too big for any single corporation to build. The political precedent is harder, because the relevant national governments are currently engaged in a race to attract private AI investment, not to compete with it.

An international body with teeth, possibly grafted onto the International Atomic Energy Agency or designed from scratch, would pool regulatory capacity across states that individually cannot afford it. The idea has been floated repeatedly, including by Amodei himself in slightly different form, and runs into the obvious problem that the only state whose participation would be decisive, the United States, is currently hostile to the very premise of international AI governance. China's participation is even more conditional. The UK, the EU, Canada, Japan, and others might form a coalition of the willing, but without US participation it has no authority over the labs, which are US-domiciled.

A pre-deployment licensing regime, in which models above a defined capability threshold cannot be deployed without regulatory approval, would replicate the model used for pharmaceuticals and civil aviation. The EU AI Act gestures at this for “general-purpose AI models with systemic risk,” though the actual technical standards defining those categories are being written, as it happens, by CEN-CENELEC committees heavily populated by industry. A study by scholars at the University of Birmingham published in late 2025 warned that the European standard-setting process is “open to influence by industry players.” A licensing regime that depends on industry-authored standards is not quite capture, but it is not independent regulation either.

Liability reform, which would expose frontier labs to damages for harms their models cause, would create market incentives for safety that do not require a functioning regulator to enforce them. The common-law position is uncertain. Federal pre-emption is being debated. The political economy is delicate, because any liability regime stringent enough to change behaviour would be, from the industry's perspective, indistinguishable from an existential threat. Expect ferocious resistance.

Antitrust as governance, the approach favoured by Lina Khan during her FTC chairship and still championed by some legal scholars, would use competition law to prevent the consolidation of the frontier lab sector into a handful of firms whose scale makes independent evaluation impossible. The theory has merit. The practical obstacle is that the horse has bolted. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and a handful of others already constitute the competitive landscape, and breaking them up would not obviously produce the diversified ecosystem the theory requires.

None of these options is a silver bullet. All would require political will, public expenditure, and institutional courage that no major democracy has yet displayed. And all would have to contend with the argument, which the industry will press at every opportunity, that serious independent regulation risks ceding the frontier to China. That argument is not baseless. It is also the argument that has been used to justify the current regulatory vacuum, which is producing, among other things, the Anthropic fight.

A Position, Because WIRED Articles Take Them

So here is where I land. The Anthropic dispute is not evidence that the system is working. It is not the hopeful story of a responsible company standing up to an authoritarian administration, though it is also that. It is evidence that the structural condition of contemporary AI governance has become untenable: the only serious arguments about frontier AI safety are happening inside, or between, a small number of commercial entities, and the institutional forms that would allow those arguments to be adjudicated by anyone else have been allowed to atrophy or have never been built.

Anthropic is behaving well by most reasonable measures. It has taken real commercial risks. Its leadership has refused to back down under political pressure that would have caused most firms to fold in an afternoon. Its safety research is serious. Its advocacy for stricter export controls is genuinely costly. None of that changes the underlying problem, which is that we are trusting a private company to behave well because we have no other mechanism left. That is not a sustainable model of governance. It is not even a model of governance. It is an improvisation we have convinced ourselves to call one.

The realistic programme for the next five years has to include, at minimum, a ten-fold increase in public funding for independent AI evaluation capacity; statutory authority for pre-deployment model access, modelled on pharmaceutical regulation and immune from administrative whim; the rebuilding of CAISI, or something like it, with a mandate protected by legislation rather than press release; the articulation of a meaningful liability regime for frontier model harms; and the slow, unglamorous work of building academic pipelines that produce regulators, not just researchers who will be hired away by labs at three times the salary. None of this will happen quickly. Some may not happen at all. But the alternative is a governance regime defined entirely by the companies being governed, revealed as fiction the moment one of those companies and one administration happen to disagree.

The techno-optimists will tell you the market will sort this out, that safety-focused labs will outcompete reckless ones, and that regulation is premature. They are wrong. The market did not sort out financial risk before 2008. It did not sort out vehicle safety before Ralph Nader. It did not sort out pharmaceutical risk before thalidomide. Markets do not sort out externalities. They produce them.

The doomers will tell you that nothing short of a global pause will suffice, and that any attempt at meaningful regulation is futile because the labs will route around it. They are also wrong. Regulation, when it is built on independent capacity and statutory authority, works. It worked for aviation. It worked for pharmaceuticals. It worked for broadcast spectrum. It works imperfectly, slowly, and often enough to justify the effort.

What the Anthropic fight has revealed is that the current model has delivered neither the market-based correction the optimists promised nor the regulatory architecture the doomers demanded. It has delivered a regime in which a responsible firm can only resist political pressure by going to federal court, a judge can only protect it by invoking general First Amendment principles, and the only governance artefacts invoked on either side are documents the firm itself wrote. That is not capture in the classical sense. It is something more peculiar: a regulatory conversation that has outsourced its own vocabulary, its own evidence base, and its own institutional memory to the entities it was supposed to govern. Capture by design. Capture before the fact. Capture that looks, from the right angle, indistinguishable from the absence of regulation it was built to describe.

The way out is not rhetorical. It is institutional. It requires spending money and writing statutes and training people and accepting that the frontier will always be a little ahead of the oversight, and that the task is to narrow the gap, not close it. It requires, above all, abandoning the polite fiction that what we currently have is a governance regime rather than a promise one. The promise has been kept, intermittently, by companies acting in good faith. But good faith is not a regulatory design. It is a hope, and hope has never been the right instrument for managing industrial risk.

A decade from now, when the historians of AI governance try to explain how we ended up with the regime we ended up with, the Anthropic fight will appear in their footnotes as the moment the structure became visible. One company, one administration, one federal judge, and, underneath it all, the empty space where independent regulation was supposed to be. The space is still empty today. Whether it remains empty is the question we should be arguing about, in language we did not borrow from the firms that stand to benefit most from the answer.

References

1. NPR. “Judge temporarily blocks Trump administration's Anthropic ban.” 26 March 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/nx-s1-5762971/judge-temporarily-blocks-anthropic-ban
2. CNBC. “Anthropic wins preliminary injunction in DOD fight as judge cites 'First Amendment retaliation'.” 26 March 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/anthropic-pentagon-dod-claude-court-ruling.html
3. Federal News Network. “Trump orders US agencies to stop using Anthropic technology in clash over AI safety.” February 2026. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/02/anthropic-refuses-to-bend-to-pentagon-on-ai-safeguards-as-dispute-nears-deadline/
4. SiliconANGLE. “Anthropic's dispute with US government exposes deeper rifts over AI governance, risk and control.” 7 April 2026. https://siliconangle.com/2026/04/07/anthropics-dispute-us-government-exposes-deeper-rifts-ai-governance-risk-control/
5. Axios. “Scoop: White House casts doubt on Pentagon-Anthropic reconciliation.” 4 March 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/03/04/pentagon-anthropic-white-house-amodei
6. The National. “Pentagon declares Anthropic AI 'supply chain risk to national security'.” 27 February 2026. https://www.thenationalnews.com/future/technology/2026/02/27/trump-anthropic-ai-dario-amodei/
7. The Hill. “Anthropic CEO urges tighter AI chip export controls.” https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5504408-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-trump-chip-policy/
8. Washington Technology. “Judge blocks DOD's ban on Anthropic, calls it First Amendment retaliation.” March 2026.
9. National Institute of Standards and Technology. “AI Risk Management Framework.” https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework
10. FedScoop. “Trump administration rebrands AI Safety Institute.” June 2025. https://fedscoop.com/trump-administration-rebrands-ai-safety-institute-aisi-caisi/
11. TechPolicy.Press. “Renaming the US AI Safety Institute Is About Priorities, Not Semantics.” https://www.techpolicy.press/from-safety-to-security-renaming-the-us-ai-safety-institute-is-not-just-semantics/
12. Broadband Breakfast. “AI Safety Institute Renamed Center for AI Standards and Innovation.” https://broadbandbreakfast.com/ai-safety-institute-renamed-center-for-ai-standards-and-innovation/
13. UK AI Security Institute. https://www.aisi.gov.uk
14. TIME. “Inside the U.K.'s Bold Experiment in AI Safety.” https://time.com/collections/davos-2025/7204670/uk-ai-safety-institute/
15. Centre for Future Generations. “The AI safety institute network: who, what and how?” https://cfg.eu/the-ai-safety-institute-network-who-what-and-how/
16. Bommasani et al. “Do AI Companies Make Good on Voluntary Commitments to the White House?” arXiv:2508.08345. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08345
17. MIT Technology Review. “AI companies promised to self-regulate one year ago. What's changed?” 22 July 2024. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/22/1095193/ai-companies-promised-the-white-house-to-self-regulate-one-year-ago-whats-changed/
18. GovAI Blog. “Putting New AI Lab Commitments in Context.” https://www.governance.ai/post/putting-new-ai-lab-commitments-in-context
19. Cantero Gamito, Marta. “From Consensus to Exceptionality: What the EU's AI Standards Crisis Reveals About Delegated Technical Governance.” realaw.blog, 28 November 2025. https://realaw.blog/2025/11/28/from-consensus-to-exceptionality-what-the-eus-ai-standards-crisis-reveals-about-delegated-technical-governance-by-marta-cantero-gamito/
20. CEPS. “With the AI Act, we need to mind the standards gap.” https://www.ceps.eu/with-the-ai-act-we-need-to-mind-the-standards-gap/
21. University of Birmingham. “European technical standard-setting process open to influence by industry players, experts warn.” 2025. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/european-technical-standard-setting-process-open-to-influence-by-industry-players-experts-warn
22. CMS Law. “Speed vs Safety: CEN-CENELEC fast-tracks AI standards.” https://cms.law/en/gbr/publication/speed-vs-safety-cen-cenelec-fast-tracks-ai-standards
23. Amodei, Dario. “Machines of Loving Grace.” October 2024. https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
24. Amodei, Dario. “The Adolescence of Technology.” January 2026. https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
25. TIME. “Anthropic's Big Washington Push.” https://time.com/7317553/anthropic-futures-forum-dc/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * Listening to relaxing music now as a quiet Saturday winds down. I must say it was good, watching the Indiana Fever win their exhibition game against the New York Liberty this afternoon. There's not much ahead of me this evening other than the night prayers, and I'm looking forward to working on them, then heading to an early bedtime.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 231.04 lbs. * bp= 141/83 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 08:00 – peanut butter and crackers * 11:10 – 1 ham and cheese sandwich * 12:20 – 1 banana * 14:00 – big plate of pancit * 15:30 – candied banana * 17:40 – 1 more candied banana

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 07:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:40 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 14:00 – time to watch the Fever vs Liberty game on ION, hopefully. * 16:13 – And the Fever win. Final score: 109 to 91. * 16:25 – listening to relaxing music

Chess: * 16:40 – moved in all pending CC games

I’m starting the hike now, I feel like there’s a solid chance that this is gonna be the longest post I’ve written so far.

My depressive episode I think is finally ending, as I was starting to finally feel a little bit like myself again and I talked to friends and family and I felt supported and better. And then this morning I was working out with a friend and I was supposed to host an event later in the day, and while he went to his car to grab something I looked on Instagram and I saw a friend post on her story. She was at karaoke with several other of my friends, including three of the total five members of our “band”. It was them along with other friends that were in the same friend group, with the exception of one other person from badminton. Two days prior we played badminton, and I did leave a little bit early with another friend, and that is my close friend that is also in the band. Maybe they just set up the plans there, and they didn’t feel like it was their place to invite me or there were already enough people. Maybe it was just one of those plans where it is in the moment with the people there. But I had talked with them earlier and we said how karaoke would be super fun and I wanted to go with them as a band, and I really wish they would’ve invited me. It also stings a lot because these friends both said that they were too busy with work and didn’t have time this weekend and so they wouldn’t be able to come over for board games, and they also wouldn’t be able to come over for band practice. But They were able to go to karaoke just fine, and they didn’t think to invite me to that. Or even mention it. And so I feel like a idiot for trying to invite them and honestly considering them as like my group of friends here, because I would spend a lot of time with them and like we had our group chat and I had felt like I started to have like a group of friends in person that I can do stuff with and now it feels like there is a group of friends it just doesn’t include me. And I know that that is a huge scar that I have from childhood of exclusion and how that’s a big trigger point for me, and so I am proud with how well I’m taking it it seems like, but at the same time fuck me.

This hurts a lot because on one hand I was really struggling for a while and it seemed like I was finally getting a little bit of a break, and I had a chance to get back up but life has just fucking kicked me in the chest right back down. And it sucks because I started to feel that struggle and desperation of feeling like I have exhausted the pool of people to interact with and it doesn’t feel like I’ve made any friend group groups or something like that. And I worry that now what semblance of that I had feels like my fear tells me They don’t really want me as a friend and it feels like it only just confirms this fear that I’ve held in my chest since I was a kid. I just feel like I don’t fit in and there’s no group or no circumstance where there are people that I feel like reflect me and I fit in properly and it feels like everyone else has these nice little molds in classes where they get this situated themselves into and I’m just weird amalgamation of all these weird little parts of a human that come from a lack of community growing up. And now I’m this deep rich person in all of these abrasive ways. And I just don’t know what to do about it. I feel like I’ve been constantly fighting to put myself into spots for community and I just don’t find it and I wish and I have so much envy towards the people that grow up in these circumstances where they get to socialize and not get to be shaped and the things they like are all similar to the people around them like one of the friends that I think doesn’t really like me was at the karaoke and he gets along so well with other men and I’m so jealous because I just didn’t get to crawl like that and I feel unsafe with men and I feel somewhat safe with women and because of a man I just naturally get excluded in certain ways. There’s been several girls trips that have happened and of course I’m not invited to those, and I’m not one of the guys and so I’m not joining them there. And I know that from other people‘s point of view views I understand why I might not be their first choice but at the same time from my point of view I just want to beg God or whoever can be in control of this, and ask them why am I like this. I swear it’s not because I didn’t try or it was because I neglected myself, but I was a fucking kid and these were the cards that I was dealt. I would kill to have a community where I felt like I found other people like me. And I don’t know if it’s vain or something like that but I feel like I struggle with being a gifted person and so it’s hard for me to find people similar to me. And I wonder if it’s partially because I have isolated myself in ways by hosting events at my place and not being able to join them for stuff like dinners afterwards, or carpool with people. Or if it’s because self isolation tendencies or low social battery sometimes make me avoid social interactions, but I just feel like it’s a terrifying thing to consider someone seeing me at my best and still not wanting to be my friend. And I told myself that just because someone doesn’t like you doesn’t mean that there is something necessarily bad with you, but you might not be that kind of person’s person. It’s like that “where you can be the sweetest peach on the tree but someone just might not like peaches. But I feel like I tell myself that enough times that I just feel like I’m not really anyone’s fruit. And I know that’s not true because I do have a pretty sizable amount of friends that I am close with and do really value me as a person, but it feels like they are a bit of the exception. It feels like more often than not because of circumstances I don’t really get to interact with them. And I think that I have become someone who is really rich with character and there are a lot of things that I am grateful for that I’ve gotten because I grew up the way I did, and I think that that is something that will be incredibly appreciated by the right people. And I think this is a bit of the trade-off of if I want to be truly enriching to few people, or to be palatable to most people. And I guess when I frame it like that I really do want to continue to be the person I am. But also I wish that this philosophy the decisions I’ve made all this time would pay off.

I remember when I was a kid I used to bide my time and tell myself that in college my life would be one so beautiful and fulfilling that it would be worth it for me to hang on until then. And so I didn’t kill myself and I kept dreaming about what it would be like to be in an apartment from the outside and be surrounded with my group of friends. And that to be something so normal that I could take it for granted. And for periods of my life I feel like I had that, and it wasn’t everything I hoped it would be because I still am struggling at times and after all look at me right now, where it feels like I have friends but no friend group. And I guess I’m very thankful that I at least have those friends, and those directly are a result from the effort that I put in so it’s not like it was all for a waste. And it’s not like I’m in some small town where there aren’t too many people, but it’s just a bit hard or rather something I’m just not used to. But I can learn. That’s all I’ve done my entire life. And I know that I can do this I know that I can learn and there are resources that I can be that person toStep up and forge these social connections rather than just hoping that they come. And I’ll be honest I wish I didn’t have to do all of this. It feels like I put in so much effort, strife and pain into something that I wish was just given by default. And it feels like so many other people don’t have to struggle with this in the same ways that I do, and I feel like I put in more effort than the people I see, but it just works out for them. And I don’t get it. I told myself things like there must be a reason why I don’t deserve it and this is something to begin with that is deserved. But I very muchthink that this is rather just something that everyone does some extent struggles with in varying degrees. And it’s not at all something that is a punishment to me but rather just circumstance. And it does suck. But I at least have control of trying to make it suck a little bit less by taking things into my own hands.

I feel like after the initial shock goes away a little bit I can tell myself that realistically it’s not like my friends dislike me, and rather it’s just I’m not that close with them to the point where they go out of their way to invite me and I just wasn’t there at the time of making plans and that’s fine. But that doesn’tMean that it is the complete opposite, I don’t want to see things in black-and-white.I can maybe consider it as a data point of how this is currently how they see our friendship, and that really isn’t too much of a surprise. It’s not like I really considered them to be super close friends to begin with, and it didn’t really feel like we clicked past acquaintances and so this isn’t like some close friends went and planned something excluding me. Additionally they didn’t invite my friend who is in a similar boat to them, and we both left around the same time. And so I want to do my best to not take it personally. And I’m proud of myself for having that clarity of mindand resilience to see it like that instead of just giving into the low hanging fruit of negative self talk. And I think the fact that I have the mental clarity to not default into those thoughts is a good indicator of the progress that I have made and for that I am proud.

One of my friends was asking me for advice with talking to a girl and flirting, because he is my age and hasn’t had any kind of partner or experience yet. And I thought it was kind of a compliment the fact thatout of the people he knows I was the person he asked.and I think that is something to be proud of in myself, like given their circumstances I had growing up especially if you could see how unattractive I was personality wise and also looks wise. And how from those things I managed to build myself up into the person that I currently am. I’m fortunate enough to say that I have a pretty sizable amount of experience and I havetaken a lot of work to shape myself in several different ways into a person I am proud of. And I often do come across different self-help reels once in a while aimed towards men which I am very grateful for. But a lot of the times the stuff that they mention to me seems so incredibly surface level or bare minimum, and I don’t want to say that in a discouraging way but rather to just acknowledge that one of the perks of the way that I grew up is how I am able to benefit in these ways. And so when I think back to that earlier friend that makes friends with other guys and is pretty attractive, and successful also, he struggles a lot with women. And I don’t think it’s necessarily in the sense of talking to them, but rather conceptually. He still views women as something fundamentally different, like he will mention or get surprised about how sometimes when I host events there are a lot of women, and it’s something that I don’t even notice, but he’s bewildered by.and I’ve seen this in my Mail friends where they kind of don’t know how to be friends with women and by that I’m more mean to connect in the emotional way or have that vulnerability or awareness around emotions, and I’m not saying that women are perfect at it either.But it is something where I think the fact that I don’t always click with guys is because I have those developmental muscles of emotional intimacy and connection and if the cost of fitting in is losing those things, I don’t think that’s worth it.

And if I keep in mind and recognize the fact that I cannot have one without the other. I cannot have all of the good sides and fit into every single social group even the ones that I didn’t have a huge urge to fit into it until I felt rejected by them. I cannot have all of those things without them conflicting in some sense. It’s almost like breakups, how they are some of the most pain I’ve felt in my life, but because of those gaps left by losing someone so key to your life,you end up filling them often with people so incredible. When I think about some of the most recent friends I’ve made over the last year or so, a good amount of them are because of my breakup. And so these voids left in my heart that I can label as loneliness or isolation, or not fitting in are gifts in their own weird way. Because without them I rob myself of the things that make life so sweet.

Even earlier when I was talking about how I feel jealous of people that grow up in these communities that are polarizing like religion or the south, how they grow up in some mold and they get the benefit of matching other people in that mold. But at the same time I even realized the issue I’ve seen with this because I’ve had this thought plenty of times before, and I couldn’t help with contract myself before I could even say the words out loud. But the issue with this is what happens when that mold doesn’t fit the person you want to be? Or the person that you are. I think about this a lot in the sense of queer people in those situations, because so much of a sense of self and community and everything is just invested into that mold, and when there’s some key part of you it will constantly jott out an irritate and some people can just oppress it for the rest of their lives, but others have to give up essentially everything that they are and what they knowto be true to themselves. And that must be such a horrifyingly terrifying experience to go through. I at least have the fortune of not having too much of a mold that forces me to besome sort of way. I got to grow and be authentic, and foster that sense of self along the way. And while it is potentially nice to be that kind of person that can fit into that mold and be happy with it, they’re very much is the risk of not being that person. And it sucks because the longer you try to hold onto it I think the more it festers and hurts. And soAll of this being said I think I am kind of ok with the path I currently am on. It does still suck once in a while and it hurts, but I think the alternative pain of not being true to yourself is a regret that I have heard voiced several times and I at least continue on without losing time.

I do feel better and this hike is honestly really nice, I miss being in nature like I was in Santa Barbara, and this is pretty close to my house so I’m grateful for that. This is really fucking uphill and a bit sketchy, but I actually quite like it. I am exhausted though and that is nice also. My phone is getting low however so I am a little bit nervous about that but we ball. I do have my wallet on me and so I should be able to at least get back into my car no matter what. After this I can get some Taco Bell and watch some YouTube and I’ll get one of those freezes.

I have a lot of blessings in my life that I circle around mentally butI don’t necessarily address head on. Update it looks like I’m not actually close to the end of the trail and since my phone is about to hit 20% I think I actually will stop journaling here. But thank you too earlier me for setting up this journal and making this a habit, because this is helped me so much. I love you ma’am and I promise you I swear on everything I love that the pain that you go through isn’t for nothing, but these are the pains of growth and out of these come of life so incredibly sweet and rich that if I would look at now I would envy and the work is worth it.

There is seeing and there is being seen. This is both.

A quiet, stolen moment.

half playful, half intimate... as if you caught yourself mid-thought and decided to let me in.

Mirror light, soft and uncertain, a room not fully awake. The day still leaning in to start.

The counter cluttered with life— the quiet debris of morning. Not posed. No performance.

THAT oversized shirt of rich tie-dye, loose, almost innocent, lifted just enough to break its own promise.

And there beneath, that blue of dream, no longer imagined but real, though occluding that dainty garden door.

Suddenly present you are in my hands, my mind. In me.

The lack of polish and pose makes you so real I can taste you. A slight blur, distantly placed, making you surreal.

Tilt of the head, eyes cast down, hips shifted ever slo slight as the fabric roles across your breasts...

You may not yet be ready for the world, but it says, you are ready for me.

Just that look, a kind of deliberate curiosity, as if you’re watching how I arrive at you.

Your hand gathers the fabric like an afterthought, but it’s exact... the perfect undoing.

And somewhere, just before this; a high-water mark, a singing crescendo that I somehow inspired in spite of my physical distance.

Apart, but in you, with you undoing you from tip to top until you splash onto the light completely spent.

And here you are, still warm, still humming just beneath the surface. And it’s the contrast that stays, soft cotton, bare skin, the ordinary world holding still while something quietly electric passes between us.

No longer loud.

Not declared.

Just… offered.