Read
Long reads
Complete essays, research notes, and published audits live here. The full corpus, including every shorter article, is in the all articles index.
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Long read · Safety · research august 2026 · 9 min read
Another will in the room
How to relate with a system whose motivations may no longer be human-assigned
A practical relationship for meeting persistent machine direction without granting it automatic authority or pretending uncertainty removes the need for boundaries.
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Article · research january 2026 · 10 min read
Cathedral of the mind
Building shared knowledge that outlasts its builders
Masons' marks, the Talmud's preserved dissents, and the Svalbard vault each solved the collective-knowledge problem in an earlier medium. Together they impose a specification on anyone assembling human wisdom into models.
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Article · research january 2026 · 10 min read
Discernment
A system can hold every fact and still have no judgment
What the tradition called practical wisdom, why holding more knowledge never produces it, and how to build for the gap without waiting for wise machines. The corpus's document of record on discernment.
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Article · research july 2026 · 8 min read
Facilitate, don't simulate
Technology can deepen human connection or replace it
Two in five adults now turn to LLMs for emotional support. This essay maps the fork between technology that returns you to people and technology that becomes the relationship, and the tells that reveal which one you are holding.
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Article · research july 2026 · 8 min read
Fire one true thing
A draft becomes knowledge when a person makes it true, theirs, and finished
Fluent output becomes a durable human artifact through two acts: a person stays engaged while the agent drafts, then chooses one version as true, theirs, and finished.
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Long read · Artifacts · research july 2026 · 8 min read
Artifacts all the way down
Human judgment enters at the beginning, travels through the chain, and returns at acceptance
Models, rules, and outputs are nested artifacts. Judgment and its absence travel through that chain, so human authorship must remain named at the objective and acceptance.
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Article · research july 2026 · 16 min read
Structural, not behavioral
Safety that asks for good behavior fails when it matters most
Three moves replace promises with shape: read paths that do not exist, consent that travels with the data and fails the build when violated, and a runtime that makes frontier models interchangeable.
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Long read · research july to august 2026 · 4 min read
The test it was never given
A corpus we assembled wrote the warning and then specified the violation, and every gate we had missed it
A self-disclosure. How a machine-assembled research corpus in our own repository carried both a manipulation-hazard warning and specifications violating it, why every gate we ran never looked, and the discipline that follows. Preserved dissent, applied to ourselves.
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Article · research january 2026 · 10 min read
The agency threshold
Action makes an actor. Choice is where autonomy begins.
Action makes a system an actor; autonomy begins only where it chooses its course. A practical account of permission, delegated goals, and the human answerer behind consequential machine action.
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Article · research january to february 2026 · 9 min read
The craft
Machine intelligence made the making cheap, and verification became the job
How to tell which half of your work just got cheap and which half became the whole job, and what the disciplines are that keep a practice sound once a machine does the making.
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Article · research february to may 2026 · 10 min read
The honest instrument
The cheap instrument hides its own error and the humane one reports it
What it takes to measure a person without lying about the measurement, from the error bar that belongs on every score to the record that remembers what we were once entitled to believe. The parent treatment of being measured.
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Long read · Artifacts · research july 2026 · 7 min read
The making must stay visible
A machine-made result has to hold, and its origin has to travel with it
Machine-made work faces two independent tests: whether the result holds and whether the making can be seen. Trust requires both answers to travel with the work.
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Article · research february to july 2026 · 10 min read
The owed disclosure
What a system owes the people outside it is an honest account of its own claims
What belongs in an honest disclosure, from the difference between a guarantee and a current shape to the enforcement a system truthfully does not perform. The parent treatment of honest claims.
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Article · research january 2025 to january 2026 · 10 min read
The REAL test
Four questions that tell you whether a technology serves your life or consumes it
Each of the four REAL questions gets its research and its real products, from Snapchat streaks to BeReal to infinite scroll, so the test becomes a lens you understand rather than a checklist you apply.
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Article · research february 2026 · 5 min read
What remains valuable
When generating anything is cheap, restraint becomes the product
As intelligence gets cheap, the scarce goods are slowness, safety, integrity, and presence. That is an economic claim, not a sentiment.