In a world where your economic value can evaporate overnight, “Become a whole person” sounds like advice from someone who has never worried about next month’s rent. The utilitarian case for education has the force of necessity behind it. For millions of people, making yourself useful is what responsibility to their families demands.
Yet if the response to being replaceable is always to train for a different function, you have entered a race you structurally cannot win. The principle that makes your education valuable is the same principle that makes you disposable the moment the function migrates.
The scramble into computer science was an early sign of the trap: students rushed toward the field that seemed safest, and then AI began destabilizing the very functions it trained them to perform. The flight to function looks rational from inside it; that is what makes it a trap.
— Read on blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/you-are-not-a-function
Author: Jason
How Anthropic Discovered Mythos AI Was Too Dangerous For Release – Bloomberg
Within hours Carlini found numerous techniques to infiltrate systems used around the world. Once Carlini was back in Anthropic’s downtown San Francisco office, he discovered Mythos was able to autonomously create powerful break-in tools, including against Linux, the open-source code that underpins most of modern computing.
How Anthropic Discovered Mythos AI Was Too Dangerous For Release – Bloomberg
Mythos orchestrated the digital equivalent of a bank robbery: getting past security protocols and through the front door of networks, and breaking into digital vaults that gave it access to online treasures. AI had picked locks, but now it could pull off an entire heist.
Carlini and some of his colleagues began alerting staff to what they’d found. And each day they continued to discover high-severity and critical bugs in the systems Mythos probed, the kind of flaws normally uncovered by the world’s best hackers.
Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose
The “expensive” bag costs less. But VF Corp doesn’t want you to do this math, because the $35 bag creates a repeat customer every eighteen months. The $200 bag creates one transaction and zero follow-ups. From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.
That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.
— Read on www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-backpack-got-worse-on-purpose
Fake It ‘Til You Make It?
Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm. Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist. These ginned-up interactions push the songs and the discussion about them higher up a platform’s algorithmic rankings. And social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are, increasingly, where (real) fans discover new music.
“We can drive impressions on anything at this point,” Spelman told Billboard. “We know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages.” Spelman has dubbed the process “trend simulation.” And the campaigns themselves are referred to by Chaotic Good as “narrative” or UGC (for “user-generated content”) campaigns.
Now Chaotic Good cofounder Adam Tarsia confirms to WIRED that his company engineered campaigns for both Geese and Cameron Winter. “We helped distribute clips of them performing and doing some interviews on TikTok,” Tarsia says via email, speaking on behalf of Chaotic Good. “I understand that ‘industry plant’ discourse is inevitable, but we’ve had the pleasure of being Geese fans since their 2021 project Projector,” which, he notes, was released four full years before his agency launched.
The long-bubbling suspicions about the band’s rise boiled over the first week of April. A viral Substack post by singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb traced the connection between Geese and Chaotic Good and mulled the fuzzy ethics of such marketing. As McLamb summed up the model: “If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.”
The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop | WIRED
Interesting. But if these Chaotic Good folks are using the algorithms to get a band noticed and then people are saying “hey, I like that” and buying in, isn’t that just marketing? Astroturf and pay-to-play has always been a thing (online and off).
Dark GDP: The Economics of Entangled Time
The central claim is this: when you scroll a social media feed, watch algorithmically recommended content, or interact with any digital interface that monitors your behavior, you are not merely consuming a free product. You are simultaneously producing a distinct economic output — behavioral data that serves as a critical input to AI training, targeted advertising, and algorithmic product development. This production is not compensated by wages. It is not recorded in any national accounting system. And its aggregate value may be large enough to reshape our understanding of the global economy.
The six hours and forty-seven minutes on my screen time report are not wasted time. They may be uncompensated labor. And the difference between those two interpretations has consequences that reach far beyond my Sunday morning guilt.
— Read on navvaidhyanathanatvysdomai.substack.com/p/dark-gdp-the-economics-of-entangled
The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril | WIRED
THIS MONTH, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”
USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannet that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They’re able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they’re blocking access,” Graham says.
The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril | WIRED
The Death of a Superman – Believer Magazine
Tonight he was hitting one of his usuals, a clothing donation bin just off Van Nuys Boulevard. Getting in required some finesse, but if you found something to stand on, held the door just so, and crawled halfway in, you could retrieve stuff people had donated. It was a good spot for bin-diving—next to a Wells Fargo parking lot, across the street from a Kingdom of Jesus Christ church. Nobody was going to bother you there on a Friday night.
Dennis started pulling himself headfirst into the chute; he got his head all the way in, and his left arm too. Then something slipped.
Maybe it was a hand, maybe it was a foot. The chute’s pull-door swung down, crashing onto Dennis’s throat. He struggled, hands and feet free of the ground—like Superman in flight, but all wrong. He couldn’t get traction on anything. The metal door cut into his skin and crushed his larynx; he couldn’t get air through. Dennis couldn’t breathe. He was asphyxiating, and he was alone. With his head still upside down, the blood ran out of his nose. His limbs ceased their frantic motions. Superman’s heart stopped.
The endless traffic of Van Nuys Boulevard pulsed all night, indifferent.
Buttermilk & Molasses: Clarifying Gusts
“I hate pancreatic cancer,” he says on the podcast. “I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.”
The prayer of pancreatic cancer. The prayer of a difficult birth. The prayer of a marriage broken. The prayer of losing the person who knew you longest.
That’s the winnowing. The long moments of clarifying prayer.
What does it take for us to actually see our life, as it is, while we’re still in it?
CLARIFYING GUSTS – by John Sarvay
From Early Nirvana To Phish, A Chicago Fan’s Secret Recordings Of 10,000 Shows Are Now Online
After a blast of guitar feedback, 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, “School.”
Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.”
Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one.
Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra
When I work with agents, I’m usually doing some version of this: set direction, trigger action, watch what happens, evaluate, intervene, adjust, try again. That reads lke a game loop rather than a single uninterrupted act of thought. There’s an ongoing cycle of action, feedback, and response. That feeling then is much closer, for me, to sports, or to video and board games, than to the usual idea of being ‘in the zone’ or deep work.
— Read on dehora.net/journal/2026/working-with-agents-doesnt-feel-like-flow