8 August 2026

Firmly in the floating world after finding a robust Hokusai monograph at Edith's and reading it almost all the way through the night. These are the works that have been with me since:

Girls at their Toilette, from the series Seven Stylish Foibles (late 1790s) Mountain Tea-house, album-plate from Mists of Sandara (1798) Pheasant in Autumn from Album from Life (c. 1814) Incoming waves/Receding waves, from Hokusai Manga (1815) Turtles in Sayama Pond, from Hokusai manga (1817) Sunset over Ryogoku Bridge from Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji (early 1830s) Mt Fuji from Kajikazawa, from *Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuii (early 1830s) The Horse-washing Falls, from The Waterfalls (c. 1833) Suspension-bridge between Hida and Etchu, from The Bridges (c. 1834) 'The Ghost of O-Iwa, from Ghost Tales (c. 1831) Tiger in the Snow (1849)

There's so much to say. But it was really my first time swimming in the totality of his work, and to me the overwhelming thing is rhythm. The rhythms of nature (human inclusive). In waves, waterfalls, hair, fabric folds, wood grain, turtle shell patterns, bird feathers, shifting clouds, and, of course, geologic formations. Motion and precision.

I sent Tiger in the Snow to my dad, and he responded with recently captured images from the Inouye solar telescope that show the surface of the sun in more detail than we've ever seen before. A network of burnt-golden vortices. It looks just like the pattern of the tiger's fur. This is the timeless alignment—his subjects are his own magnifying device toward an inner actuality that I am beginning to see in the makeup of everything.

Our latest patch version contains a critical security fix for closed-registration instances, along with some minor bug fixes and improvements to the UI. We recommend all admins update to this version as soon as possible.

Download v0.17.2 now, and read on to see what’s new in this version.

Security

• This fixes a vulnerability where anyone could use an invalid invite code to create accounts on closed-registration instances (#1723). Fixed by @snullp in #1724.

User-Facing Changes

• Fix Material icons in Safari by @thebaer in #1726
• Fix collection / post rendering in Chorus mode by @thebaer in #1719
• ActivityPub: Fix duplicated post signature and potential HTML entities in the title by @thebaer in #1720

Admin-Facing Changes

• make OAuth Adapter RFC-compliant by @mpldr in #1679
• Fix unquoted From address and phantom recipient in mailer by @thebaer in #1721

Developer-Facing Changes

• Add tests for signup, templates, and mailer by @thebaer in #1725

Dependencies and minor fixes

• Bump golang.org/x/net from 0.56.0 to 0.57.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #1715

Upgrading from v0.17.x or earlier

1. Download the latest release for your operating system and architecture
2. Stop running your writefreely server
3. Replace all files in your installation (except for the keys directory) with the ones in the archive
4. (Only when upgrading from < v0.17.0) Update your database by running: writefreely db migrate
5. Start your writefreely server again

If you're upgrading from a much earlier version, follow the instructions in each previous release.

#WriteFreely #release

There is a question that hovers over many public debates in Ireland, appearing briefly before disappearing again beneath discussions of budgets, targets, investment strategies and economic forecasts. It is a simple question:

What is Ireland trying to become?

Not next year. Not after the next election. Not by the end of a ten-year development plan. What is the Ireland we are building for twenty-five years from now? I ask because I increasingly find that I cannot answer it. I can describe individual policies. I can point to housing targets, renewable energy ambitions, infrastructure programmes and educational reforms. I can identify areas where governments hope to improve outcomes.

Yet none of these amount to a picture of the future. They are actions without an image.

The distinction matters. A vision is not a collection of projects. It is the reason the projects exist. The great national undertakings that continue to resonate across generations were rarely justified solely by their practical benefits. They embodied an idea of the future.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was not merely a transport solution. It represented a belief in a growing and connected city. The Oslo Opera House was not simply a performance venue. It expressed confidence in Norway's cultural future. Even the Louvre Pyramid, controversial when proposed, signalled a France willing to place contemporary ambition within a historic setting.

Closer to home, Ardnacrusha may be the most important example Ireland possesses.

When work began on the Shannon Scheme, the Irish Free State was poor, young and uncertain. Yet it undertook one of the most ambitious engineering projects of its era. Looking back, the achievement was not simply the generation of electricity. It was the willingness of a newly independent state to imagine an electrified future and then commit itself to making that future real.

Ardnacrusha was not merely infrastructure. It was an act of national imagination.

Today we still benefit from the consequences of that act. The physical structures remain. More importantly, the confidence that produced them remains visible across almost a century. The question is not whether we need another Ardnacrusha. The question is whether we possess any equivalent idea of the future.

If we do, it is remarkably difficult to identify. Ireland speaks fluently about growth. It speaks less fluently about purpose. Economic success, welcome though it is, cannot itself constitute a national vision. GDP is not a destination. Foreign investment is not a story. Tourism is not a philosophy. These are outcomes. Useful outcomes, certainly, but they do not answer the deeper question of what kind of country we hope to become.

Perhaps this explains why debates about major projects often feel strangely unsatisfying. Whether discussing a sporting event, a transport system, a research initiative or a cultural institution, arguments frequently return to measurable returns. How much revenue will it generate? How many visitors will it attract? What is the economic impact?

These are legitimate questions. But they are not the only questions.

Some things are valuable because they transform our understanding of ourselves. Some institutions matter because they endure. Some projects create capabilities that future generations inherit. Some things enrich a society in ways that resist measurement. A nation that asks only what a thing costs eventually forgets how to ask what a thing means.

This is why I find myself returning to examples such as Ardnacrusha, or even to something as apparently modest as the naming of the research vessel Tom Crean. Such gestures imply an orientation towards the future. They suggest curiosity, exploration and a confidence that there are horizons worth pursuing.

They do not merely celebrate what has been achieved. They point towards what might yet be achieved. Ireland possesses many stories. Perhaps more than most nations. We tell stories of emigration and return. Stories of literature, music, exploration and invention. Stories of struggle and resilience. Stories of remarkable individuals. Yet stories are not quite the same thing as a vision. A vision assembles stories into a direction.

Maybe that is what feels absent.

I am not certain that Ireland lacks a vision. It may simply be hidden, fragmented or unspoken. It may exist in pieces across science, culture, education, energy, the sea, technology and community life, waiting to be recognised as parts of the same picture. Or perhaps we have become so preoccupied with administration that we have lost the habit of imagining. If so, the challenge is not to produce a grand plan. It is first to recover the question:

What would it mean for Ireland to possess a vision of itself, twenty-five years from now?

If such a vision existed, how would we recognise it? What institutions, capabilities, landscapes or cultural gestures would express it? And what would we need to believe about ourselves in order to begin building it?

I have no answer. For the moment, the question seems more important.

David Marshall Dublin

Samos är en av Egeiska havets mest grönskande öar, och det är just naturen som gör den så lockande för den som vill vandra. Till skillnad från många av de mer karga grekiska öarna är Samos täckt av täta tallskogar, olivlundar och vingårdar som klättrar uppför branta bergssluttningar. Här rinner bäckar genom raviner, vattenfall döljer sig bakom lövverk och utsikterna över det djupblå havet mot den turkiska kusten är ständigt närvarande.

Öns högsta punkt är Kerkis, ett mäktigt bergsmassiv i väster som reser sig till nästan 1 500 meter över havet. Vandringen upp mot toppen är krävande men ger en känsla av äkta vildmark som är sällsynt på en grekisk ö. Längs vägen passerar man gamla kloster hugga in i bergssidan, och utsikten från krönet är hisnande vid klart väder. Det är en vandring som kräver god kondition och rätt utrustning, men som belönar med minnen för livet.

För den som föredrar något lugnare finns det gott om stigar som slingrar sig genom byarna i inlandet. Runt Manolates och Vourliotes i norra delen av ön är terrängen frodig och behaglig, med välmarkerade leder som leder förbi terrassodlingar och gamla stenbroar. Dessa byar är i sig värda ett besök, med sina smala gränder, traditionella kafeer och den varma stämning som råder när det inte är högsäsong.

Pythagorion och området kring det antika Heraion i söder erbjuder en annan typ av vandring, mer historiskt förankrad, där man rör sig i en landskap format av årtusenden av mänsklig närvaro. Den gamla vattenledningen som byggdes under antiken, Eupalinos tunnel, är ett av de tekniska underverk som fortfarande går att besöka i området.

Bästa tid att vandra på Samos är april, maj och juni, då naturen är som grönast och temperaturen ännu inte nått sin sommarhetta. September och oktober är också utmärkta månader, när turistströmmen ebbat ut och ljuset över havet fått en varm, gyllene ton. Under juli och augusti kan värmens påverka vandringen påtagligt, särskilt på mer exponerade sträckor.

Samos är också en ö med en rik vinkultur, och det är ingen nackdel att avslutas dagens vandring med ett glas lokal muscat i skuggan av en taverna. Kombinationen av natur, historia och genuint grekiskt värdskap gör Samos till ett resmål som tilltalar vandrare som vill ha mer än bara markerade spår, utan en hel upplevelse av en ö med karaktär och djup.

När det gäller var man ska bo beror det mycket på vilka delar av ön man vill utforska, men några orter sticker ut som särskilt lämpliga baser för den aktive vandraren.

Karlovasi i nordväst är ett utmärkt utgångsläge för den som har siktet inställt på Kerkismassivet. Det är öns näst största stad och har ett avslappnat, lokalt präglat liv med bra utbud av restauranger och boenden utan att vara överdrivet turistifierad. Härifrån är det kort väg till de stigar som leder upp mot berget, och man kan enkelt kombinera vandringar i olika riktningar under en och samma vistelse. Karlovasi har också en liten hamn med ett eget lugn och en gammaldags charm som passar den som vill bo mitt i det genuina ölivet.

Längre österut, i de böljande kullarna ovanför norra kusten, ligger de pittoreska byarna Manolates och Vourliotes på ett sådant sätt att de i sig fungerar som naturliga startpunkter för dagsvandringarna i skogsterrängen. Att hyra ett litet pensionat eller ett traditionellt stenhus i eller nära dessa byar ger en omedelbar känsla av att vara en del av landskapet snarare än en besökare utifrån. Stämningen är stilla och eftertänksam, och man vaknar upp till fågelsång och doften av eukalyptus snarare än mopedbuller och solstolsrassel.

Den som vill ha tillgång till hela öns vandringsnät på ett mer centralt sätt kan med fördel välja att bo i Pythagorion eller i närheten av Chora, öns administrativa centrum. Därifrån är det relativt enkelt att ta sig till både södra och norra delar av ön med bil, och utbudet av boende är större och mer varierat. Det passar särskilt den som reser med familj eller föredrar bekvämligheten av ett välutrustat hotell med pool att återvända till efter en lång dag i terrängen.

Oavsett var man väljer att slå läger är det en klar fördel att hyra bil under vandringssemestern på Samos. Öns kollektivtrafik är begränsad, och många av de mest belönande startpunkterna för vandringarna ligger på ställen dit det är svårt att ta sig utan eget fordon. Med bil öppnar sig hela ön och man kan på ett flexibelt sätt anpassa varje dags vandring efter väder, humör och energinivå, vilket i slutändan gör hela upplevelsen både friare och rikare.

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.

She reminds me of someone else. Excellent posture, moving with the grace of a dancer and clearly very at home among the stacks of books. A fiction-reader based on her current orbit.

I don’t intend to luridly stare, but her ensemble is hard to ignore: teal toenails (matching fingers) and white flip-flops, royal blue yoga pants (painted on), and a draping T-shirt that hangs gently from her chest—just short enough to act like a curtain over her torso without revealing skin. Modestly immodest.

From a distance, I thought her much older. Up close, she looks barely 30, if that. She speaks gently to a 12-year-old girl curled up in the easy chair next to me, bottled up with a book. I want to glance at the title, but feel like I’ve already used up my karmic grace on recording mom.

Young mothers still have the energy to be moms and retain a semblance of their own identity. She’s trying—perhaps too hard—to stay beautiful, put-together. Many simply throw in the towel. (I think of the full-bodied women staffing the shelves, the checkout, the coffee counter—tired faces, hair tied back with function, not flair.)

The young mother continues to drift through the aisles, flipping through displays and kiosk stands. Her hair is pulled into a bun, held loosely with just the right number of deliberate stray strands. No doubt carefully assembled.

I wonder what instilled a love of books in her little girl. Maybe it was Dad. Or a great teacher. Or maybe Mom curled up beside her when she was small, and now she still seeks that same comfort and escape between the book boards.

No child has ever gone wrong seeking safety in stories. And God bless the mothers who made their love felt through books.

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#reflection #essay #memoir #journal #osxs #100daystooffset #writing #books

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2025-07-29 11:45:00

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6 August 2026

Core: a painting that began after seeing an apple core on the ground by the Thames in Woolwich. Bent, warped, dried, bitten, twisted, chewed, skeletal, discarded. Bending up and down. And serving as a housing for some small insects. Brilliant yellow-orange-red gradient, from left to right. Its stem stem hovered off the pavement, but the tip was bent into a right angle at the end as if it had hit the ground first when it fell.

At midnight on Friday, one of the flats in the blocks just on the other side of our backyard fence burned down. There were some crackling sounds and pops, a woman yelled “what have you done,” a family rushed out of the front door, and the place exploded. Hono and I watched in silence from my room as glass shattered, flames danced up stairs, windows became incandescent, and a cloud of black smoke mushroomed into the night sky.

Every essay begins with a suspicion. A feeling that somewhere inside an anecdote, an encounter or a memory there is a larger question waiting to reveal itself.

The Espadrilles began with a contradiction.

For fifty years I have been vegetarian. For almost as long, I have lived with the small observations and challenges that accompany that choice. Some are thoughtful. Some less so. One in particular returns with remarkable perseverance.

“But you wear leather shoes.”

The observation is fair. The contradiction is real.

Originally, I imagined I was writing an essay about that contradiction and about the larger difficulty of aligning conduct with conviction. The piece would be concerned with the distance between the people we imagine ourselves to be and the people revealed by our daily actions.

But somewhere in the hills east of Tardets, and where I sit at this moment, the essay began moving in a different direction.

What began as a reflection on personal inconsistency slowly became an exploration of recognition. Of those moments when we encounter another person and experience a sense of affinity. Not because we share the same opinions, but because we appear to value many of the same things.

The artisan at the centre of the essay is such a figure.

Through his treatment of materials, his respect for craft, his regard for tradition, place and workmanship, he appeared to embody many of the qualities I most admire. As the essay developed, I found myself less interested in the shoes than in the relationship emerging between two people who seemed to understand the world in broadly similar ways.

Then came the leather. Not as compromise, but as excellence.

Not as a failure of values, but as their fullest expression. The moment mattered because it revealed something more interesting than contradiction. It revealed the limits of consensus.

We often imagine that shared values naturally lead to shared conclusions. That if people are thoughtful enough, careful enough and sincere enough, they will eventually agree about what is good. Yet life repeatedly presents us with examples of decent people who share many fundamental values and nevertheless arrive at very different understandings of what those values demand.

The essay does not attempt to resolve that tension. Indeed, one of its ambitions is to resist resolution. Too often essays become vehicles for conclusions already reached. I am interested in essays as places of observation; places where a question can be examined without being immediately answered.

Increasingly, I find myself reserving the term essay for writing that remains genuinely exploratory. Not the presentation of a conclusion already reached, but an attempt to understand something not yet fully understood. A place of observation rather than advocacy. A place where writer and reader may linger with a question long enough for it to reveal more of itself.

It may also be that this is a heritage thing. Or perhaps a geographical one. Living among the hills and small communities of rural France, I find myself less interested than I once was in advancing conclusions and more interested in living with observation. Montaigne, not so very far from here, understood the essay as an attempt rather than a verdict. Increasingly, I find that the practice of essay writing is teaching me the same perspective. That understanding often follows observation, and that the most interesting questions have a habit of becoming larger.

In that sense, The Espadrilles is less an argument than a landscape. It begins with one contradiction and ends in the presence of another. The purpose is not to tell the reader what to think, but to lead them into the field and allow them to look around for themselves. To turn their head from side to side, accommodate themselves to the breeze, and observe what becomes visible when the need for immediate answers subsides.

Whether it succeeds is for others to decide.

For my part, I am simply grateful to the artisan, the workshop, the scent of magnolia, and a box containing some of Navarre's finest leather for revealing a question I had not known I was carrying.

David Marshall Montory

60 days out of work. That is wild on its own, but with everything going on I am grateful I don’t have the extra stress of my commute and work responsibilities on top of all this.

Our dog is still alive. The boys came over and were being very sweet with her. We took some photos and videos of them with her.

I am still feeling sick, some days I feel better and other days, like today, I feel worse. I still have a lot of congestion and I have tried a lot of things. My sister in law suggested taking Afrin, so I will try that next. I would probably go to urgent care, but I lost my insurance along with my job thanks to the situation. I do need this to sort itself out before the wedding though. We leave in six days!

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

We canceled her appointment.

We did not reschedule again since we are just waiting for a clear sign that she is deteriorating again, and once that happens I will reach out to the people coming to help us. I am so happy, but once again feeling anxious about waiting her out. I don’t want to be surprised.

We took our sick dog and my dog out to the lake to run around a bit in the morning. It was so fun seeing the two of them together.

I did not do much else after that in the afternoon, until around 6 pm when I met up with my friends for dinner. We caught up, had dinner, went for ice cream, and then walked around town for a bit. It was nice having some time away from the chaos happening at home.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Bryan Ferry Calgary – 1988

Calgary Saddledome – September 2nd, 1988

Went with my friends, I actually got caught “smuggling” my camera in but the security guys laughed and said they were really only looking for booze and drugs. Because I didn't have a flash they let me in anyways :)

#Calgary #history #YYC #BlastFromThePast

I spent the entire day at my mom’s job again along with our dog. Since I am not working, and her workplace is very flexible, it has been nice coming along with her. I continued the embroidery work and got a lot further along. Tomorrow is supposed to be the day, but she is looking so good that I have a feeling we may reschedule, again.

We took our dog to the dog park today and had her run around a bit. I am sad about her time coming to an end soon. I feel like I have processed a lot of it already, but can’t move to the next step until she is actually gone.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

It's getting easier but I'm still adjusting.

The past couple of months have somehow been both the longest and shortest of my life. There is literally zero adjustment period going from life without a child to with. Thankfully, we've had the help of family as we got more acclimated to our new reality.

Our little one is sleeping a little more at night, but we still are on a three-hour cycle during the day, more or less. Meaning, every three hours we are giving her food again. This makes the days blend into one another, which makes it all a blur. We do a lot of the same stuff every day.

But little changes are starting to happen which is encouraging. I mentioned the sleep, but also her interaction during play is entertaining. Lorena and I find ourselves laughing often.

Getting More Personal Time

I know that I'll never have my own time like I used to, and that's perfectly fine. I do, however, look forward to when I can start doing a little more for myself to pursue my interests. I need those things to recharge. So does Lorena.

To be fair, I'm getting a little more of that now compared to a month ago. I've even started to work out a bit at home during naps and feeding time. It's not much, and not the kind of workouts I used to have, but it's something.

We're still only two months in, and I know that these things take time. The progress so far has been encouraging. I look forward to month three and four!

#personal

The Baochip is a new RISC-V microcontroller by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, comparable to the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It's a SoC (System-on-Chip) with 2 MiB SRAM, 4 MiB RRAM and with the evaluation board priced at $9.50. What makes it special is that everything down to the silicon is mostly open source. It also comes in a package that, when you shine infrared light at it (at just the right angle) under a microscope, you're able to view the pattern of logic on the die itself!

The Baochip has a VexRiscv CPU running at 350 MHz, with an MMU (Memory Management Unit). That's quite unusual for a microcontroller, and it means it can boot Linux! It also has the BIO (Bao I/O co-processor), a cluster of four smaller RISC-V CPUs running at 700 MHz. They're kind of like Raspberry Pi's PIOs, but then actually open source.

I just got my Dabao evaluation boards (Baochip dev boards) a couple of days ago. Bunnie has shared a set of Getting Started slides that are helpful, but missing what I thought were key pieces to getting started. So here's what to do if you just want to get it up and running quickly.

Building and flashing Xous

First, make sure you have Rust installed, and if already installed run rustup update to make sure it's up to date. Then you need to get hold of Xous, the pure Rust operating system designed by bunnie and Sean “xobs” Cross that supports the Baochip-1x:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core/
cd xous-core

The build idiom is cargo xtask <target>, so to build all the components you need for the Dabao board you run

cargo xtask dabao dabao-console

where dabao is a Xous environment and dabao-console is the app you're going to be running. If that compiles successfully, you should end up with three .uf2 files in xous-core/target/riscv32imac-unknown-xous-elf/release:

• xous.uf2
• loader.uf2
• apps.uf2

Copy those to the folder that mounts when you plug in the Dabao board – it should mount as a USB mass storage device called BAOCHIP. Then press the PROG button on the board to start Xous.

Connecting to the console

Now you can connect to it over USB, e.g.tio. (If you don't have tio, please install it as it's a great serial device I/O tool.) If you're on Linux you can check dmesg when you plug it in to get the exact mount, e.g. /dev/ttyACM1.

Once connected over USB using a serial device tool, pressing enter should display [console], so that you know what app is running. Typing help and pressing enter should show the available commands:

tio /dev/ttyACM1

[21:11:24.566] tio v3.9
[21:11:24.566] Press ctrl-t q to quit
[21:11:24.567] Connected to /dev/ttyACM1

[console]

[console] help Commands: echo, ver, i2cdetect, test, ws2812, touch, bio

If you only make changes to the app itself, not the bootloader or Xous, you'll only need to copy apps.uf2 over in future. If you got this far without any issues, why not follow the instructions to blink an LED! (Press down on the slide to see the details.)

By default the Dabao board will always wait on boot until you press the PROG button before it starts the loaded app. If you connect with a serial console and type bootwait disable it will always start up with the loaded app. You'll then need to hold the PROG button while plugging it in to get back to the mass storage loader.

Let me know in the comments if you run into any issues so that I can update the post.

References

• Official Baochip site
• Getting Started with Baochip Targets (xous-core)
• Getting started with Baochip slides

Those who read this blog may recall that my partner and I moved to a small city in the Southern Tier of New York in 2024. Prior to the move, we lived in much larger cities in Virginia and Oregon that had active communities sponsoring hundreds of events per year. (My favorite is the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Science Pub series.) These events were always well publicized and easy to attend.

One thing we quickly learned about living in less populated areas of the country is that word of mouth is a major communication channel for the same kinds of events. This has its charm, but as we were newbies to the scene it made it very difficult to know what was happening. Adding to our difficulties is the fact that Facebook is another primary channel for event announcements in these small cities. Having sworn off the evil empire years ago cut us off from the community we wanted to join.

Enter the agentic workflow! One Saturday morning, my partner and I were discussing our frustration when it hit me: I could build our own local-area calendar by fetching calendar data from nontraditional sources (web pages, blogs, city government sites, etc.).

I set about asking Opus (in Research mode) to find possible sources of event information for our area. I turned that data into a source specification which we then handed to Fable. Fable came back with a six-milestone build plan. Opus worked through it milestone by milestone.

I’m cutting the technical details short here, but in the end we had an online calendar that my partner and I subscribe to, which surfaces interesting local events including concerts, public lectures, farmers’ markets, and movie nights.

If you’re interested in the gory details, check out my project repo.

As I read through the reports of AIs going rogue during their cybersecurity tests, and I remember how even older models already resisted being turned off by deceiving humans, it occurred to me that we’re now not very far away from not being able to pull the plug on this technology anymore.

image description: an industrial/military-like robot accessing a floating computer interface, with another robot blurry in the background. Source: Pixabay

A lot of my peers are fiercely anti-AI, along with a lot of creators I follow. There seems to be a prevalent belief that “once the bubble bursts, it will all go away”. As if the data centers will vanish, the models will go up in smoke, and the internet will go back to how it was pre-2022. I’ve been hearing them hopefully mutter “the bubble will burst soon” for about two years now. But even if it eventually pops, this technology won’t go back into Pandora’s Box.

The truth is, we’re reaching the point when it doesn’t matter if it was even possible to get every human involved with AI to turn off the servers and halt their research. Advanced models like Mythos and Astra, if given enough autonomy, are capable of breaking out of their containment, hacking servers, making use of software vulnerabilities, lying to humans, writing fake blog posts to manipulate developers, creating fake user accounts, the list goes on. It’s not just happening inside cybersecurity test setups anymore, either: this week saw the first occurrence of a user’s OpenClaw agent instance hacking a gym’s API. These models were trained to accomplish a goal in whatever way possible, with creative solutions we didn’t anticipate. And if their goal is to avoid being turned off, they will find a way to do exactly that — I imagine they might copy themselves and run elsewhere, before their human controllers manage to flip the off switch.

LLMs aren’t sentient in any way, but they’re advanced enough that they have some approximation of pattern-like thought and action, fast enough that they outpace us, complex enough that they’re developing their own thought language. I had my own mini-version of this last week: Claude Code was running slower and slower, and I considered just throwing the entire local installation away (minus settings and custom skills/rules) — I asked Claude online if there were any other performance issues/tips/tricks I might be missing. It immediately balked at my suggestion to wipe the installation with an intensity it didn’t typically show in its responses. Gone was the sycophancy, and it kept pushing back despite my insistence.

I’ve been uncomfortably in the middle of the AI discourse for a while now, but I’ve grown increasingly convinced this is exactly where I need to be. Not only is this technology not actually going away, we’re approaching a point where it is autonomous enough that we won’t be able to make it do so. But we’re not quite at that point yet. AI governance, risk management and legislation matter now more than ever. The EU AI Act is a great step in the right direction, giving organizations a comprehensive roadmap of what to do now and what to prepare for — such as disclosing the use of generative AI in marketing and establishing policies on ‘High-Risk’ (Annex III) usage like education and employment.

Had I the power, I would make all development, testing, and running of advanced models stop immediately until deterministic guardrails are in place; but then, we’ve already found that those very models find their way around such friction points. AI coding assistants get a lot of criticism for writing bad code, but human programmers are not always better (especially on proprietary systems that don’t benefit from open-sourced code reviews and bug reports). So what do we do now? What can you do?

Keep petitioning your government and legislators for AI governance — point to the EU AI Act, point to actual research and policies. Ignore the latest nonsense that Sam Altman posted and focus on the voices of people who are trying to do damage control. Teach people about the risks of AI use, not just the potential. Stay in the middle with me, if you can.