More AI blackmail and deception

More AI blackmail and deception

Claude 4 Opus has received a level three rating on the company’s four point ‘AI responsibility’ scale – implying the model has ‘significantly higher risk’ than previous models.

While the Level 3 ranking is largely about the model’s capability to aid in the development of nuclear and biological weapons, the Opus also exhibited other troubling behaviors during testing – something already noted in other models.

  • In one scenario highlighted in Opus 4’s 120-page “system card,” the model was given access to fictional emails about its creators and told that the system was going to be replaced.
  • On multiple occasions it attempted to blackmail the engineer about an affair mentioned in the emails in order to avoid being replaced, although it did start with less drastic efforts.
  • Meanwhile, an outside group found that an early version of Opus 4 schemed and deceived more than any frontier model it had encountered and recommended that that version not be released internally or externally.
  • “We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions,” Apollo Research said in notes included as part of Anthropic’s safety report for Opus 4.
Excellent advice for AI coding

Excellent advice for AI coding

Many junior engineers type a vague prompt, accept whatever comes back, ship it, pray. But watching a senior developer use AI changed his mind.

But watching a senior engineer vibe coding and a junior engineer vibe coding reveals it isn’t prompting techniques or tool skill. It’s that the senior engineer was already disciplined, and the AI amplifies whatever discipline — or lack of it — you bring.

Here’s a good article on techniques senior developers use (and have almost always used even before AI) that separates them from how most junior engineers work.

Prompts that help AI not forget important details

Prompts that help AI not forget important details

Elton Jones uses these prompts when he finds his AI agent keeps forgetting important points when making further decisions:

  • The personal memorization prompt (since ChatGPT knows that I’m a journalist, I’ll use this during some of our career-centered chats): You are my continuity editor. Track my writing goals, audience, publication targets, article ideas, previous conclusions, and ongoing projects. Before every response, remind yourself of any relevant context and explain how it affects your recommendation.
  • The decision tracking prompt: Maintain a decision log. Record every major choice, recommendation, and conclusion we reach. Reference the log before making new suggestions.
  • The conversation brief prompt: Create a one-page briefing document that a new assistant could read to instantly understand everything important about this conversation.
  • The running context prompt: Before answering, summarize the key facts, goals, preferences, and decisions we’ve discussed so far. Then use that summary to answer my question.
  • The key fact prioritizer prompt: What are the five most important things you’ve learned from me during this conversation? Explain how they should influence your next response.
I Pencil

I Pencil

The best explanation of why capitalism works better than just about every other method of bringing people together to a common, mutually beneficial purpose. Even when those doing might even hate or disagree with each other.

Fable created 1:1 clone of Slack

Fable created 1:1 clone of Slack

This guy one-shotted a complete Slack clone as well as server in less than 10 minutes.

Which honestly (I’m going to say it), I don’t understand why folks feel the need to re-invent chat clients, online meeting apps, and source control every 5 years and think they’re ‘disrupting the ecosystem’.

No, you’re repeated making the same stuff that has existed since 1970 – and many times not any better. Just re-writing something using the latest hot tech or UI is not innovation nor actually moving the industry forward.

Nicholas Carlini’s now infamous black hat conference talk

Nicholas Carlini’s now infamous black hat conference talk

Nicholas Carlini – an AI researcher at Anthropic – came to the much vaunted Black-hat conference in Feb 2026. He gave a chilling warning: we have AI’s now that are finding so many zero-day bugs that we simply can’t file them fast enough. A storm is coming and he was begging for help.

The security community (much like the open source community) has largely scoffed at ‘AI slop’. That’s all changed in the last 6 months. What has since come to light is exactly what he said. Linux is now having weekly bug fixes in the hundreds. Oracle in the thousands.

Carroll County Accident

Carroll County Accident

“The Carroll County Accident” is a 1968 country song written by Bob Ferguson, and recorded by Porter Wagoner that year.

According to an interview that Bob Ferguson gave to Steve Eng for his Porter Wagoner biography, Ferguson wrote the song while driving from Nashville, Tennessee to a concert in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He recounted that he passed a sign for Carroll County, Tennessee, which inspired the song’s title, and by the time he saw a sign for Carroll County, Mississippi, the song was a finished work.

Network breakthrough: Amazon flat random networks

Network breakthrough: Amazon flat random networks

A 2026 report by Wired shared that Amazon supposedly has developed a new kind of flat network architecture. It’s kind of a holy grail idea that people have tried before, but never been able to pull off well. This new architecture supposedly allows them to use 69% fewer routers and switches, and 40% less power at the massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers. Yet provide 33% better throughput.

The core of the breakthrough is called resilient network graphs, or RNG. It’s a way to use random cable connections to make a network more efficient. It’s counter-intuitive, but researchers have long thought a more distributed or even random physical networking connectivity architecture would be faster and remove many bottlenecks often found in strict tree or ring hierarchies.
What finally makes it possible are two key innovations. On the hardware side is a device called a ShuffleBox, which randomizes physical cable connections between network components to make the network structure more efficient. It pairs that hardware with routing software called Spraypoint, a custom traffic-routing algorithm specifically designed to work within the RNG design. 

It’s about truly living

It’s about truly living

Following Christ is not about just ‘avoiding being bad’. Nor is it just some big list of what you cannot do. It’s about following a way that lets us embrace a life of meaning and real freedom. Life as we are meant to live. A life of true joy. A life lived with others without shame or fear. Living the kind of interior peace and fulfillment that all the money, politics, fame, power, possessions, and fancy jobs cannot give. More than that, it’s living day by day in a personal relationship with an infinite God who loves you.

It is most especially true on how we should live with each other. To love our neighbors even if they do not love us. To treat others fairly in all aspects of our life. But even more so, to see the unique gifts and talents we have used rightly at the service of others. To help the poor, the orphan, the needy who sit outside our door so everyone has what they need. It shows us how to really correct wrongs by asking for forgiveness when we have hurt others and find peace when we forgive those who have hurt us. It frees us from being trapped in lives of bitterness, outrage, and revenge for a hurt that often clouds how we react to everyone in our lives.

Believing living a certain way will make your life better is an act of faith. Many dismiss the idea of faith. Despite what the modern world says, you act on faith all the time. Faith is essential and unavoidable part of your life all day. You have faith your car is safe every time you get in. You have faith the company you work for will pay you on time. You have faith that laws and public policies will make our lives better. You live in faith that your heart will keep beating from one moment to the next. Every moment of your life has small and large acts of faith.

Faith is rarely blind – we have good evidence for our faith. We believe engineering work around the design of cars and the laws governing building them make cars safe. We put faith in public policy based on years of behavioral research and test them evidence. We learn to trust friends and family by our actions. We put our faith in the teaching of Christ with evidence too. We look at the lives of those that lived well what Jesus taught, and see the evidence. We examine his teachings to see if they stand up to real life. We look at the lives of those who learn to forgive and ask for forgiveness.

You make acts of faith every day – why not make an act of faith to try something today God’s way and see what happens?