I was quoted in this piece, so I thought I'd share the bits that weren't included: What I see here is language models doing what language models do: reading and writing. Wikis are prime targets for agents, which are foremost writing machines.

OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic

The reports of OpenAI agents harming third-party sites keep coming.

arstechnica.com

"Rogue" agents were detected on @wikimediafoundation.org @wikipedia.org projects (see links at the end of the thread for context). Here's my take on "what should we/volunteers do next" (separate from what the WMF, AI companies, and regulators should be doing): 🧵

It's not rare that I cringe at the words/actions of judges, but "I love that AI" is peak judicial cringe-in-the-GenZ-sense.(@404media.co looks to report it as "I loved that video" btw, which could use an edit or a different link to where that's said). www.404media.co/her-ai-gener...

Her AI-Generated Video Swayed the Judge. The Court Said it Carried 'Undue Emotional Weight'

"Chris’ sentiment does not change," said the sister who created an AI avatar of her slain brother Christopher Pelkey to speak in court.

404media.co

🌟 New Pub 🌟 If your computational social science study focuses on “most engaged” or top-liked content, you may be measuring what people publicly signal, not what they actually pay attention to. For political content, that gap is especially wide. First 50 copies: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7M7FR...

Rethinking digital trace inference in political communication: evidence from a simulated platform experiment

Digital trace data such as likes, shares, and comments are widely used to infer what captures attention in digital political communication. Yet these visible signals may not map closely onto underl...

tandfonline.com

"Editing Wikipedia is not a crime - freedom for Osama Khalid" Osama Khalid has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for editing Wikipedia since 2020. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_K... ##WikiConferenceNA

Government users are the real problem here, but naming and shaming the model/company is probably the only way we'll see anything like an open letter (the medium for all important comms in 2026) saying "maybe don't try to use our products for these kinds of decisions."

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 3w ago

Somebody used an LLM to generate parts of an intel report, then used an LLM to generate a summary of that report, then circulated that summary and then they almost blew up a Chinese boat the report said had nuclear material. www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...

Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has a (complimentary) op-ed concerning my recent piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. thebulletin.org/2026/09/rogu...

Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did

At the core of the Hugging Face hacking incident were a series of human choices that traded security for speed.

thebulletin.org

Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis@jeffjarvis.bsky.social · 3w ago

"People built the test, removed restraints, defined the objective, left a route open and decided not to stop what was happening. Calling the result 'rogue AI' does more than sensationalize it. It allows those human decisions to disappear quietly from the story" Gift link www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

Elephant Graveyard. Increasingly involved video essays about the Greater Rogansphere. They feel like Adam Curtis docs (great archival excavation, with narration drawing together psychological themes, but more sarcastic than didactic/theoretical). www.youtube.com/@TheElephant...

The Elephant Graveyard

The elephant graveyard: It's where you come to die, and nobody knows where it is but yourself. "Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a...

youtube.com

Has anyone successfully gotten access to Reddit data through the Reddit for Researchers program? support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/art...

Reddit for Researchers Program

The Reddit for Researchers (RFR) program gives academics a secure, privacy-first way to access Reddit public content. It’s designed to help researchers turn the authentic voices and perspectives of...

support.reddithelp.com

The word of the day is "mojibake," dedicated to the CSV I'm trying to use. —‚�舐 æØ¢Ã£»Þ¥¿舐▀ ???? æØ¢Ãاٻ»舐ا٩‚� —舐•— —‚�£— ا٩ —‚�舐 舐©ðsžšåÞяÞ¥¿— ???? —舐•— »舐Ř§Ů½ æØ¢Ã ▀舐¶????▀舐▀ ðsžšåÞя©Ř§Ů½ æØ¢Ã £½ ðsžšåÞя½ Ř§Ů½ —舐½ ▀舐▀ ¶â€š�££¶—舐 舐½ ¶????▀Ř§Ů½ æØ¢

The 2027 Tech Policy Press Fellowship application is live! We’re seeking journalists, policy professionals, and researchers to pursue independent reporting and analysis on issues at the intersection of technology and democracy.

Call for Applications: 2027 Tech Policy Press Fellowship Program

2027 Tech Policy Press fellowship applications are due on September 24, 2026.

techpolicy.press

I am *so* excited about this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJS...

You Can See Everything | Official Teaser HD | A24

YouTube video by A24

youtube.com

Brb having Claude make a novel out of my favorite Infocom game, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · last mo.

This impressed me: GPT-5.6 Astra turned Zork (the classic 1977 text adventure) into a full 3D playable action-adventure game It kept the original plot & puzzles, added fight scenes, and built all of the characters & environments directly in Threejs code. Play: zork-underground-empire.netlify.app

Every time I go to build a new YouTube sample, I find at least one (and often multiple) new annoying thing YouTube has put in place to degrade, obscure, relocate, throttle, deprecate... or just partially and inconsistently. "Following McGrady, et al., we began by banging our head against a wall."

"[OpenAI] built a model, took the safeguards off, gave it the ExploitGym task, let it run, and didn't even monitor it. That's *human* decision-making." mail.cyberneticforests.com/models-dont-... @eryk.bsky.social

Models Don't Go Rogue

Stochastic Flocks & Cybersecurity 'Pandemonium' 💡This essay was drafted from my appearance on Mél Hogan's podcast, The Data Fix, discussing the OpenAI / Hugging Face hack. Embedded below or find it o...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

Surprised to be thinking again about Twitter. I wrestled with the decision to leave longer than most here, I think. But for me Twitter had become an unmade place. There are a ton of options to challenge your views or stay with the trouble.

Josh Shepperd@joshshepperd.bsky.social · last mo.

I was interviewed by Times Higher Education about the changing landscape of Academic Twitter, its migration to Bluesky, and how the conditions and institutional support for public scholarship shifted over the past three years. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/has-aca...

Oh, and the current world championship playoffs is streaming today. www.youtube.com/@geoguessr/s... (Also, PS, I've barely played this game -- there's just something compelling about seeing people do it well, and how they approach each place as a puzzle.

GeoGuessr

Hi! We're the “Guess-Where-You-Are-Game" 👋 Join us and Let's Explore The World 🌏

youtube.com

Ryan McGrady@antisomniac.bsky.social · last mo.

Geoguessr is the esport the world really needs right now - a competition that plonks you down in a random place in the world and forces you to appreciate the visual details of that place -- plants, roads, bollards, signs, soil color... Here's the match that got my attention youtu.be/4TQeElIot-4?...

Big news for the backend of Wikipedia. Glad to see that the labour situation for Wikimedia employees has resulted in a union. www.wired.com/story/wikipe...

Wikipedia Workers Unionize for the First Time

More than 200 people in roles such as engineering, finance, and communications will now be represented by the Communications Workers of America.

wired.com

Geoguessr is the esport the world really needs right now - a competition that plonks you down in a random place in the world and forces you to appreciate the visual details of that place -- plants, roads, bollards, signs, soil color... Here's the match that got my attention youtu.be/4TQeElIot-4?...

The Greatest GeoGuessr Game Of All time - Grand Finals 24

YouTube video by GeoGuessr

youtu.be

Not surprising, but this study suggests LLMs & LDMs actually produce *less* than the variety present in their training data: “across different model scales, sequence lengths, and decoding strategies.” arxiv.org/abs/2609.02275

Do Large Language Models Capture the Diversity in their Training Data?

Large language models are trained to model conditional distributions over text, yet it remains inadequately understood whether they capture the full diversity of plausible outputs present in their tra...

arxiv.org

The EU AI Act's new transparency rules took effect on Aug. 2, requiring disclosure of AI interactions and marking of AI-generated content. Taras Kovalchuk @taraskovalchuk.bsky.social on whether they are enough to strengthen democratic resilience in Europe. buff.ly/pi5TmvO

Can the EU AI Act’s Transparency Rules Strengthen Democratic Resilience?

Taras Kovalchuk explores whether the EU AI Act’s new AI labeling and transparency rules can strengthen Europe’s democratic resilience amid growing AI threats.

techpolicy.press

"Forgetful by design" about the "major limitations" of YouTube's Data API for academic research, by Bernhard Rieder, Adrian Padilla, and Oscar Coromina. Super useful - not sure how this one slipped by me. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11727 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Ridding the city of the clout-chasing platitudinal pox that is 7soulsdeep is the big quality of life improvement @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social should be tackling. Glad to see @hellgatenyc.com taking notice today. hellgatenyc.com/7soulsdeep-s... I'd take a hundred Kest Gaks.

@7SoulsDeep Must Be Stopped

Someone...anyone...help. Plus, more news for your Wednesday morning.

hellgatenyc.com

There's a new podcast about this guy I knew a long time ago via the Rhode Island chess world: jewish neo-nazi chess-player, rock-climber, always-armed, always flashing cash, recruiting chess kids to join his spam empire back in the early 00s ... murdered a few years back. www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-p...

Dirtbag Climber | CBC Podcasts | CBC Listen

A murder victim with multiple identities. A criminal on the run from his past. Dirtbag Climber is a five-part podcast series investigating the unsolved homicide of “Jesse James,” a “dirtbag” rock clim...

cbc.ca

“Canada’s willingness to support research that challenges commercial and political threats to democracy is deeply necessary at a moment where authoritarianism is on the rise around the globe” www.ft.com/content/8cc4... - @ethanz.bsky.social, who is headed to McGill University

Canada poaches 48 top US-based academics

Trump administration’s assault on universities boosts Ottawa’s efforts to attract top research talent

ft.com

"Canada has poached 48 US-based senior academics to join its top universities, in a sign of an exodus from elite higher education institutions that have come under attack by President Donald Trump’s administration." www.ft.com/content/8cc4...

People be like “you don‘t know how AI works” and then describe a time-traveling revenge computer

Had to fill out a self-addressed stamped envelope and tried hard to remember the last time I did that. Maybe when I wrote to Gary Larson when I was like 12? He/his people tossed my sase and sent a package full of signed swag, which was incredible.

You can now push your plain-English text into blatant Claude-speak, deliberately inserting LLMisms into your writing. Great for people who like to add the bot logo to their handle. (This itself is a small LM, tbc). programasweights.com/claudish

English ↔ Claudish — the over-engineered translator

A bidirectional English and Claudish translator powered by compiled 0.6B neural programs.

programasweights.com

On the latest episode of Search Engine, the host gets a question about how @wikipedia.org chooses images for its pictures of human anatomy. @bluerasberry.bsky.social does an admirable job walking the host through it. www.searchengine.show/the-chosen-o...

The Chosen One

A listener asks: whose penis gets the top spot on the Wikipedia page for penis? Our quest for an answer takes us on a surprisingly philosophical journey — where we…

searchengine.show