Feedback to Anthropic upon canceling my subscription:
I understand you are very concerned with “alignment”, but I don’t think you are aligned with what I want. You pursue a more authoritarian alignment that groups preventing access to weapons of mass death with making sure that everyone knows I used an AI tool when writing prose. (I don’t even do this! But you shouldn’t be telling on me to the teacher if I did.) Pass.
good job guys, very thoughtful design
A weird trick that doctors don’t know - when scheduling an event, it is permitted for the start time to account for the entire event. I don’t actually need to know my slot on the doctor’s calendar; if you need me there 15 minutes before that, we can agree on that when I make the appointment!
Sandboxing may not be sufficient to contain rogue agents, but the fact that AI labs have chosen not to implement good sandboxes (which we know how to do) gives me zero confidence that they will ever have success at preventing rogue agents (which no one knows how to do)
Saturday, September 26, 2026 →
A Pail of Air (1951): been thinking about this since I read it yesterday, it’s good
Saturday, September 19, 2026 →
The more I read about “alignment”, the less I think any of the frontier labs are serious about it. My summation of this piece: alignment requires benefit now, not just a bunch of work now to provide benefit later. In other words, if you want to make everyone’s life better, why aren’t you doing that?
Thursday, September 10, 2026 →
Most people don’t want to be more, do more, know more. They want to watch Netflix and die. They want the world of the Culture: an AI-run infinite vacation where they consume content for a few centuries, then autoeuthanize from boredom.
— Fernando Borretti, The Other Road
None of the AI labs are serious about sandboxing:
It looks to me like OpenAI’s sandbox for this agent suffered from the (quite naïve) assumption that GET requests cannot be used to update data.
“The world runs on desktops, but both Apple and Microsoft seem to actively despise it.”
openai gives out “resets”, but they do it for weird reasons, like to “celebrate major milestones”. yesterday one of their influencer-executives announced a reset every day regular people can’t use Astra. why do this? cryptocurrency airdrop ass business strategy
People seem to think that UPPER_CASE is correct for all shell variables. No! It is for only a subset: environment variables and constants. But upper case is so pervasive online I can’t even get AI to do it right. Sad!
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 →
I really think politicians should ask questions like, is it good that parents should have to pay Sega to get Sonic the Hedgehog on a sign for a kids birthday party? Is Sega’s interest in children’s birthday signs worthy of government protection?
Copyright is for the public. I’m still stuck on this.
I heard that A$AP Rocky’s original lyrics were
Wild for the night, CBD and Diet Sprite
But Skrillex made him change them to the album version to be more rebellious
I think washing hands before returning to work is a good idea but I wish this restaurant provided somewhere else to do it
“we’re all in this together”, by which I mean, “get the hell off my property”
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
How Claude marks AI-generated content
When a tool secretly encodes information about its user into its output, who is it aligned with?
The Anthropic savior complex is certainly genuine.
It’s always the sincere ones you have to look out for.
I’m tired of reading about how labs can run models without any safeguards but getting scolded by a fucking LLM when asking for help retrieving the Slack auth tokens on my own computer simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/…
i’m gonna do it. i warned u but u wouldn’t listen. i said this would happen. u did this, not me. im doin it. im automatically filtering emails with “login notification” and “a new trusted device” in the subject line.
You know, if someone really wanted to build and own a universal platform layer, they’d start a cellular company that sold by the byte and not by the device. Like imagine if you could add a cell connected gadget and it adds to your bill incrementally, like AWS instead of Rackspace, but for IoT.
It gets more true every year: “enshittification” is a word for disney adults