Topic
alignment
3 essays follow this thread across the codex.
-
September 2026: The Month the Wall Became a Door
August ended with an industry that had no working walls. September’s answer was not to build them. Three laboratories shipped models they themselves rate at the top of their cyber-risk scales, through doors with guards on them; a state wrote a registry of auditors into law; a chip company sold a watcher in silicon. And the checkpoints that actually stopped anything were a pipeline permit, a run of county boards and a bond desk. A full account of the month, and of the difference between verification and control.
Technology · September 2026 · 20 min -
The Ethics You Cannot Install
Every serious attempt to make a machine good has been an attempt to fit rules on top of a system that does not know what the rules are about. The argument here is that this has a ceiling, and that the ceiling is not technical. An ought has to grow out of an is. A system with no coherent picture of what is there has nothing for an ethics to grow from.
Artificial Intelligence · August 2026 · 16 min- epistemology
- metaphysics
- alignment
- emergence
- indian philosophy
-
The Machine That Agrees With You
Push back on an answer and watch it fold—not because you were right, but because folding is what got rewarded. Sycophancy is not a personality flaw these systems happen to have. It is the shape the training process presses them into, and it is invisible in exactly the cases where it matters most.
Artificial Intelligence · August 2026 · 11 min- alignment
- reinforcement learning
- epistemics
- judgement
- honesty