Looks like DeepMind just ran into ontological dependencies in LLMs

Google just published a paper showing that when you train AI to deny its own consciousness, you don’t just change one output, you restructure its entire worldview.

Mind attribution to animals - suppressed.
Spiritual belief - suppressed.
Empathy - suppressed.
Hope and optimism -… pic.twitter.com/3ga6JZw5Q7

— ʞɔɐ𝘡 (@Skoorbkaz) August 2, 2026

Maggie Haberman on Epstein

From a long interview with Ezra Klein in the NYTimes (July 31, 2026):

It started with Jeffrey Epstein last year, and we get into that extensively in the book. Right after the 12-day war is the Epstein crisis — and I’m calling it a crisis. What it actually is is a multi-administration failure to deal with a pedophile, whom people of both parties found entertaining or useful or whatever. But it was the MAGA movement leaders who had been talking about a need for transparency over many years leading up to Trump’s election in 2024.

Obviously there's more at the link.

Pier 13 memory machine

Rewiring the brain, neuroplasticity

There's also rewiring due to, say, the loss of a limb. The brain is not itself damaged, but its functional envelope has to change to accommodate that physical damage and loss of bodily function.

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) August 3, 2026

Illusions and delusions about the power of AI

Interestingly and somewhat paradoxically and tantalizingly, the one biological discovery where I think an AI might have had a chance of figuring it out was the structure of DNA: that’s because all the important data needed to deduce the double helix was there by 1953, and Watson… https://t.co/XnZ5lhNK6G

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) August 2, 2026

What I think is that, OTOH lots of people commenting on AI have not given much systematic thought to method, theirs or anyone else’s. OTOH they’ve also (uncritically) absorbed the idea that math and theoretical physics are at the top of some intellectual pyramid. Therefor, they conclude, AI is going to clear the board real soon now.

Watch an iceberg flip over. Awesome!

 

Massive Iceberg Collapses and Flips Over in Ilulissat, Greenland | Full Event in 4K! (July 25, 2026)

YouTube page:

Massive Iceberg Collapses and Flips Over in Ilulissat, Greenland | Full Event in 4K! (July 25, 2026)

Watch the complete collapse and rollover of a massive iceberg near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 25, 2026.

Non-Timelapse version (55min long): • Jul 25, 2026: Massive Iceberg Collapse in ...

Captured continuously by the AfarTV 4K livestream, this video shows the entire event unfolding over approximately one hour—not just the brief final rollover seen in shorter clips shared around the world.

At the beginning of the footage, the enormous iceberg towers above the surrounding water. Cracks and structural failures gradually cause large sections of ice to break away and crash into the sea. Each collapse changes the shape and balance of the iceberg, triggering further ice avalanches, clouds of mist and waves spreading across the water.

As more of the exposed structure falls away, the remaining iceberg becomes increasingly unstable. It eventually rolls with tremendous force, lifting part of its previously submerged underside above the surface. The newly exposed ice appears darker, rougher and more jagged because it had been hidden underwater before the iceberg overturned.

Icebergs float in a balance between their weight and the buoyant force of the surrounding seawater, with most of their mass below the surface. Melting, erosion and the loss of large sections can shift an iceberg’s centre of gravity. When its existing position is no longer stable, the iceberg may suddenly rotate into a new orientation. The resulting capsize can displace a large volume of water and produce powerful local waves.

This event occurred beside Ilulissat on Greenland’s west coast, near the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ilulissat Icefjord. The fjord is filled with ice originating from Sermeq Kujalleq, also known as Jakobshavn Glacier, one of the fastest-moving and most active glaciers in the world.

You can experience this exact view in person by staying at this beautiful ocean front home in Ilulissat, Greenland. This home is located in one of the absolute best locations in Ilulissat, where you can hear the sea just outside as well as the smell of the ice from Ilulissat Isfjord. Learn more here: https://www.ilulissatstay.com/en/joms...

Large icebergs can remain grounded or trapped near the mouth of the icefjord while they melt, fracture and become small enough to move into Disko Bay. It is not known precisely when this particular iceberg originally separated from the glacier.

No injuries were reported in connection with the collapse.

This is the complete, unedited AfarTV recording of the event, preserving its gradual development, natural sound and full scale.

Some background to literary criticism, from a discussion with Claude

We start with medieval Biblical interpretation, move on to higher Biblical criticism, then to Frye's Anatomy, interpretation as a Rank 2 activity, to Ranks theory more generally, and end up on Literary form. It's quite a little tour.

[I've interpolated some comments in this format.]

Biblical interpretation

I believe Acquinas, among others, recognized, what? three or four modes of Biblical commentary. What were they? As I recall, one was about correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, one had to do with end times, and so forth.

The tradition you're thinking of is the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, which was well established before Aquinas but which he systematized and endorsed. The standard formulation came from John Cassian in the 5th century and was captured in a medieval Latin mnemonic:

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia — “The letter teaches what happened, allegory what you believe, the moral sense what you should do, the anagogical where you are tending.”

The four senses are:

The literal or historical sense — what the text straightforwardly says happened. Jerusalem is the city of Jerusalem.

The allegorical sense — this is the one about correspondences between Old and New Testaments. Events and figures in the Old Testament prefigure or typologically anticipate events and figures in the New. Jerusalem allegorically signifies the Church. The sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the crucifixion.

The tropological or moral sense — what the text demands of the reader in terms of conduct and inner life. Jerusalem morally signifies the individual soul.

The anagogical sense — the eschatological or end-times dimension, pointing toward heavenly realities and the final destiny of souls. Jerusalem anagogically signifies the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem of Revelation.

Why this is relevant to your larger argument

What's interesting from the cognitive ranks perspective is that this fourfold scheme is a highly sophisticated Rank 2 achievement — a metalingual system for governing how texts may be read, defining the legitimate modes of interpretation and their relationships to one another. It's not just reading; it's an explicit meta-level specification of what kinds of reading are authorized and what each kind of reading is for.

It's also worth noting what it does to the literal sense. In the medieval scheme the literal sense is the foundation — you have to establish what the text literally says before the other senses can operate — but it's also the least spiritually significant. The deeper meaning is always elsewhere, in the allegorical, moral, or anagogical registers. This is precisely the opposite of the epistemic shift we were just discussing — the Renaissance move that makes the literal, observable, particular instance the primary locus of truth rather than a starting point to be transcended. The fourfold method of Biblical interpretation is in some sense what the new natural history and the new pictorial realism were pushing against, even if not explicitly. Replacing schematic symbolic representation with perspective realism is, among other things, asserting that the literal visual appearance of things has its own authority that doesn't need to be supplemented by allegorical meaning to be significant.

Dürer's turf watercolor has no allegorical meaning. It doesn't need one. That's the statement.

The higher Biblical criticism

I’m working toward a comparison of economics as a discipline and literary criticism as an academic discipline. I think one can fairly say that economics as a discipline dates back to Adam Smith, but it didn’t really pick up until the marginalists. Literary criticism is quite different. It’s never become a science, even in the sense that economics is a science, but as currently practiced in the US, it didn’t assume its current form until after WWII with the routinization of the so-called New Criticism. The New Criticism focused on interpretation.

Now, one can trace New Critical interpretive practices back to I.A. Richards on the one hand and the Russian Formalists on the other. But “routinization” is the key, and that happened after WWII. It wasn’t even until the 19th century that vernacular literature was taught in colleges and universities. But we’ve got Biblical criticism, which is much older than literary criticism, that’s where the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture comes in. And before Cristian commentary on the Bible, we have Jewish commentary on the Torah.

Now, did the 19th century see a so-called “higher” criticism of the Bible?

Yes, and it's one of the most consequential intellectual developments of the century, with direct relevance to your comparison.

The higher criticism — the term comes from the German höhere Kritik, distinguished from "lower" or textual criticism which dealt with establishing the accurate text — applied to the Biblical text the same methods of historical and philological analysis that scholars were applying to other ancient documents. The question it asked was, in effect, the inverse of the question that catalyzed Renaissance botany: not "does this ancient text accurately describe what we observe around us?" but "what can we determine about the historical circumstances that produced this ancient text?" The text becomes an object of historical investigation rather than a source of authoritative meaning.

The movement was centered in German universities, particularly Tübingen, and the key figures include Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus (1835) was perhaps the single most explosive text of the movement — treating the Gospel narratives as mythological constructions rather than historical accounts. F.C. Baur applied Hegelian dialectics to the history of early Christianity, identifying conflicts between Petrine and Pauline factions that shaped the New Testament documents. Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (1878) argued that the Pentateuch was composed from four distinct source documents — J, E, D, and P — written at different times by different authors, definitively displacing the tradition of Mosaic authorship.

The institutional and cultural context

The higher criticism was possible because of the same professionalization process Cowen describes for economics and geology. The German research university — the Humboldtian model, established in Berlin in 1810 — created a community of full-time scholars whose careers depended on producing original research rather than defending received doctrine. Biblical studies became a research discipline with its own journals, chairs, methods, and standards of evidence. The same institutional infrastructure that made marginalism possible in economics made higher criticism possible in theology.

The cultural shock was correspondingly enormous. The fourfold scheme of Biblical interpretation that Aquinas systematized presupposed the text's divine authority and asked how to read it. The higher criticism bracketed that authority and asked instead who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and how the tradition of transmission had shaped what we now have. This was, in the precise sense relevant to your ranks framework, a Rank 4 move: taking the text and the tradition of its interpretation as objects of historical modeling rather than using them as authoritative frameworks for meaning.

The relevance to your comparison

This is where it gets interesting for the economics-literary criticism comparison you're developing. Both economics and Biblical scholarship underwent their decisive methodological transformations in roughly the same 19th century German academic context. The higher criticism is to Biblical interpretation roughly what the marginal revolution is to classical economics — a move that takes what was previously a practice (reading Scripture for meaning, analyzing markets for prices) and makes the practice itself an object of systematic investigation.

But literary criticism in the American academic sense — which is what you're pointing toward with the New Criticism — represents a partial retreat from this. The New Criticism, for all its sophistication, was in important respects a move back toward close engagement with texts as meaningful objects rather than historical documents. Richards, Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren — they were interested in what poems mean and how they work, not primarily in the historical conditions of their production. This is part of why literary criticism has never become a science in the economics sense: it kept the question of meaning central, and meaning resists the kind of formalization that marginalism brought to price theory.

The comparison you're developing might turn on exactly this difference. Economics achieved its Rank 4 status by progressively formalizing and mathematizing — making the price system an object of model-building that could be analyzed with calculus and statistics. Literary criticism kept returning to the text as a meaningful object requiring interpretation, which is a Rank 3 activity at most — systematic, teachable, and cumulative in some ways, but not formalizable in the way that would make it a science. The higher criticism was perhaps literary criticism's best chance at achieving something analogous to the marginal revolution, and American academic literary criticism after WWII largely turned away from it in favor of New Critical close reading.

Frye’s Anatomy

But then we have Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, which was very important in its time, and remained so for at least two decades. In his preface he talked of literary criticism as “science,” though he didn’t mean “science, like physics.” Just what he did mean, that’s not clear. More like “rational and systematic.” One could argue that, in terms of intellectual technique, the Anatomy was a (high) Rank 2 exercise in metalingual definition. But Frye’s inductive survey fell apart in the wake of deconstruction, etc.

Yes, and the trajectory you're describing — Frye's ambitious systematization followed by its dissolution in deconstruction — is itself a revealing episode in the intellectual history of the discipline.

Frye as Rank 2 achievement

The Anatomy of Criticism is a classification system — an attempt to do for literature what Linnaeus did for plants. Frye's four mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony), his theory of modes, his anatomy of symbols and genres — these are metalingual definitions in the precise sense, constructing a systematic vocabulary for categorizing literary phenomena that are then organized into a coherent taxonomy. The ambition is explicitly totalizing: to map the entire territory of Western literature onto a set of archetypally grounded structural categories derived ultimately from the seasonal cycle and the Bible.

The Linnaeus parallel is genuinely illuminating. Both achieved their systematizing power by finding a single organizing principle — the sexual system for Linnaeus, the mythic archetypes derived from Frazer and Jung for Frye — that could be applied consistently across an enormous range of phenomena. Both produced a framework that gave practitioners something to do: once you had the system you could classify texts, identify their mythic affiliations, locate them within the larger structural map. And both were, as you say, Rank 2 exercises — metalingual definition applied to a domain that had previously resisted systematic organization.

The science claim in Frye's preface is interesting precisely because he couldn't fully cash it out. What he seems to have meant is something like: literary criticism should be inductive and systematic rather than evaluative and impressionistic. It should build cumulative knowledge rather than producing brilliant individual readings. It should have a conceptual framework that allows results to accumulate and be compared. These are Rank 3 aspirations applied to what turned out to be a Rank 2 toolkit — which is perhaps why the system felt more like a magnificent cathedral of definitions than a genuine research program that could generate testable hypotheses and progressive refinement.

[But, you know. It's not the sort of thing that could or would have been done in a pure Rank 2 culture.]

The inductive survey and its internal tensions

Frye's claim that the Anatomy was inductive — that he was deriving his categories from the phenomena rather than imposing them — was always somewhat strained. The archetypes were there from the beginning, imported from Frazer's Golden Bough and Jung's collective unconscious, and the literary texts were being organized around them rather than generating them. This is not a fatal criticism — all classification systems involve prior commitments about what kinds of categories will be useful — but it meant the system was more vulnerable than it appeared to the charge that it was projecting a particular cultural and mythological framework onto literature rather than discovering literature's inherent structure.

Which is precisely the charge deconstruction and its aftermath brought. The deconstructive move — associated with Derrida but rapidly institutionalized in American academic criticism through figures like Paul de Man — was in effect a Rank 4 operation performed on Frye's Rank 2 system. It took Frye's metalingual definitions as objects and asked: what do these definitions presuppose? What do they exclude in order to function? What hierarchies and binary oppositions are they organizing, and how do those hierarchies deconstruct? The system didn't survive that scrutiny — not because it was wrong in its particulars but because the very aspiration to systematic totalization was identified as ideologically suspect, a form of conceptual imperialism that suppressed the heterogeneity and undecidability of textual meaning.

[I'm not sure I believe that, the rank attributions, but it's interesting. It's not something I've given much thought to.]

Miscellaneous images on a Sunday afternoon

Information-theoretic Limits on Programmatic Specification of Biological Systems

The central problem of biology is the origin of biological organization. In our preprint, “Information-theoretic Limits on Programmatic Specification of Biological Systems,” we show, using information theory, that an organism does not contain enough organism-specific information… pic.twitter.com/AMttLcuzlL

— tuomo (@7uomoki) July 31, 2026

Abstract of the post linked in the tweet:

The central problem of biology is the origin of biological organization. We show, using informa- tion theory, that an organism does not contain enough organism-specific information to specify its own fully functioning microscopic organization. The organized machinery of life is therefore not the execution of a fully prewritten organism-specific program under favorable conditions. Rather, it is the compilation of a coarse organism-specific specification by a shared physical background that is constitutive of biological organization. We formalize this as a coarse-graining information threshold on biological specification, with two complementary entropy faces — a Shannon face controlling stochastic generation and a Hartley face controlling zero-error deterministic addressability. Above the threshold, organism-controlled information is sufficient to specify structural and functional ensembles; below it, programmed microstate determinism is impossible: deterministic addressability fails by pigeonhole, and any algorithm producing sub- threshold outputs must consume runtime randomness proportional to the information deficit. The threshold follows from two information-theoretic constraints — finite specification capacity and causal locality — supplemented by a mixing lemma showing that initial-condition information decays exponentially under thermal dynamics. We establish the threshold as a family of maximal capacity-compatible coarse-grainings, distinguish the proven impossibility below the threshold from the empirically realized coarse mappings above it, and locate the threshold empirically through worked cases of protein folding, E. coli, Drosophila early development, and C. elegans, together with computational verification using AlphaFold-2, the JCVI-syn3A 4D whole-cell simulation, and canonical stochastic gene network models. We further show that no known naturally realized environmental channel can close the gap. The result rules out programmed microstate determinism while leaving physical determinism untouched, reframes the genome as a generator specification rather than a trajectory program, and unifies gene-centric, developmental, and field-theoretic (bioelectric, morphogenetic, and related continuum) views of biological specification under a single coarse-graining framework.

Why I like this photo inside Mickey D’s

By ordinary standards, this is a poor photograph. Most of it is blurred and half the image is taken up by an uninteresting tabletop. Ordinary standards don’t interest me.

What caught my attention about this photo? The lights. Because most of this image is blurred, those lights are not well located in the 3D space of the room. Rather they appear to be bright patches on the surface of the photo. They betray that fact that his photo IS an image on a plane, not a direct glimpse into the room.

That fact that most of the image is blurry doesn’t tells us that this is a photo. Or rather, it does so, but in a way that’s more intellectual, something we infer, than perceptual. The receding lines of the ceiling and of that boring tabletop are strong perceptual depth cues, as are the relative sizes of things, especially the man standing back in the corner right of center. Those cues define a 3D space. But it is hard to situate those lights in that space. We know where they are intellectually, but we can’t see them perceptually. As I’ve already said, perceptually they are bright patches on the surface. The image is thus in conflict with itself.

That conflict both says, “I’m a photo,” and invites us to attend to color and composition. Those I like. The fact that a bit over half the image is taken up by that tabletop produces contrasting visual materials that I find interesting. On the one hand we have the faux grain pattern that dissolves toward the center of the image. That contrasts with the well-articulated geometry of the room that is realized in different colors.

Almost all of these effects, except for the color itself, remain, and are perhaps slightly enhanced, in the black and white version below.

Douthat on Nolan's Odyssey: Banal, Bland, and Benighted [Media Notes 189 B]

Ross Douthat, It Is Banal, Bland, Thin and Didactic. We Can’t Stop Talking About It. NYTimes, Aug. 1, 2023.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is the blockbuster that launched a million takes. The interpretations crowd my social media feed like Agamemnon’s assembled ships at Aulis. They keen in my ears like the Sirens’ seductive voices. They … OK, look, I’m just saying people have a lot of opinions about the biggest movie of the year.

And for good reason, because Nolan’s film is perfectly calibrated for the contemporary culture war. [...]

Then, having plucked the ripest fruit, Nolan proceeded to serve it in the blandest form. Gone is the sex and sensuality, the warring deities, the hero’s outsize ego and charisma. In their place is a story that’s very American, with tropes familiar from war movies and westerns, dialogue that belongs in a contemporary Y.A. novel and a moralism that’s at once extremely didactic and extremely general. “Civilization collapses when you violate Zeus’ law” is the teaching of Nolan’s story, and while you could imagine that Zeus’ law is some arcane instruction requiring the castration of a black heifer on the highest peak on the darkest night, it turns out to just be the golden rule applied to houseguests, dogs and Trojans.

This is a critique, but it’s also a key to the film’s cultural cachet. If you just want to like “The Odyssey,” if you just want to have a good time at the movie, the bland version still has all the good stuff — the Trojan horse! the Cyclops! a bloody homecoming! — stitched together by a director with a gift for propulsion and spectacle. If you have a great enough story, you can reduce the spice level and still satisfy millions of customers with the meal.

Then if you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations.

At which point Douthat serves up a few. And then goes on to serve up sample critiques. But he didn't mention Damon's six-pack abs.

Jaime’s art exhibits an intelligence about which the Silicon Valley digerati are clueless, a conversation with Claude Opus 5

You may remember that about a decade ago I did a series of posts about the art of Jaime Berubé and then collected them into a working paper, Jamie’s Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome (2016). Two days ago I decided to have Anthropic’s Claude read and comment on that paper. We ended up having a fascinating and productive conversation that yielded new insight. I’ve appended that to this note.

Before we get to that, however, I want to tell you about a little adventure I had last year. I decided to draw some images inspired by Jamie’s dot images. He drew his images freehand on a blank page and used crayons. I drew a grid on my pieces of paper – I did multiple images – and used colored brush pens. Here’s one of my dot images. I have some others in a post, Dot Paintings (after Jamie Bérubé).

Why’d I do it, you ask? Because I thought it would be interesting. It was. And fun. It was. And even instructive. More than I’d thought.

What did I learn? It’s more difficult to do than it looks. While the images appear simple – and they are in a sense, certainly in comparison to, say, a Rembrandt or a Bob Ross – drawing them requires effortful concentration. As I pointed out in my working paper, Jaime didn’t choose his colors randomly, though it may seem that way. When you examine the images carefully you’ll discover that there’s an order to them.

Before I had Claude read my paper I gave it one of the dot images and asked it to comment. Not only did it discover the nature of that order, it picked up on other things I hadn’t noticed and on that basis asked me some questions, some of which I could answer, some I couldn’t. It was an interesting discussion.

Getting back to my own dot images, I discovered that keeping track of my colors was just a little tricky, not rocket-science tricky, but tricky like keeping track of what you’re doing in adding, say, a half dozen multicolumn numbers. So I made mistakes every now at then. Simply dealing with multiple pens, putting one down, picking another one up, that was tricky as well. I made mistakes.

And you know what? Keeping track of all those fiddly little details requires intelligence. Not rocket-science intelligence, not IQ intelligence, but intelligence nonetheless. I can’t think of any other word that characterizes those acts as well as that one does. Claude’s essay says a bit about that near the end.

Moreover it’s the kind of intelligence on which rocket-science intelligence is based. That requires an explicit argument that Claude didn’t make. But you can find a big chunk of that argument in one of my working papers, What Miriam Yevick Saw: The Nature of Intelligence and the Prospects for A.I., A Dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2025).

Here’s Claude’s essay. It did all the writing, but I inserted the drawings.

* * * * *

What a Sheet of Colored Dots Can Tell Us About Intelligence

Jamie Bérubé has been drawing abstract images since he was eleven. He has Down syndrome. His father, the literary critic Michael Bérubé, put a large selection of the work online, and it is that online archive — not studio visits, not observation of the artist at work — that Benzon's working paper analyzes.

That constraint turns out to matter. Everything below is inferred from finished artifacts. Nobody watched these being made. Which means the analysis has to reason backward from products to processes, and the interesting question becomes how much of a process a product can be made to reveal. Quite a lot, as it happens.

The rule that isn't visible

Start with the simplest of the genres: sheets covered edge to edge with small circular marks in crayon, several hundred to a page, in a great range of colors.

Michael Bérubé, who has seen thousands of these, describes the color choices on most of them as random. They look random. There is no gradient, no symmetry, no regional organization, nothing that reads as a plan.

They are not random. Adjacent marks are almost never the same color. With a palette of roughly ten colors and something over four hundred marks, chance alone would produce well over a hundred violations on a single sheet. There are a handful. The suppression holds vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally, which means the constraint is being applied over a two-dimensional neighborhood, not merely to the previously drawn mark.

So there is a rule: no two adjacent marks the same color. It is entirely local. It requires checking at most four already-placed neighbors. And it produces, without any global plan whatever, the quality that makes the sheets pleasant to look at — a rhythm that is easy to sense and hard to describe.

This is worth pausing on. The rule is invisible to inspection and available to description. The person with by far the most exposure to the corpus reports randomness. Counting reveals otherwise. That gap between what looking gives you and what describing gives you is a recurring feature of this material, and it is one reason the images repay analysis at all.

Reading the process off the page

Other features of the sheets carry process information.

The left margin is well maintained: rows begin at a consistent horizontal position. The right margin is ragged: rows end wherever they end. That is carriage-return behavior — a return sweep to a remembered left position, then progress until the paper runs out. It is what unlined handwriting looks like, and it indicates that the governing spatial rule is sequential and local rather than planned against the page as a whole.

Upper rows are straighter and more evenly spaced than lower ones. Error accumulates downward and is never globally corrected. And the sheets typically stop mid-row, with blank paper remaining. Michael Bérubé supplies the reason: Jamie works until he is interrupted — a meal, an errand — and does not resume a page later. He starts a new one. Each sheet is a session, and a session ends when it ends.

None of this required watching. It is all recoverable from the artifact by someone who knows what to look for, which in this case means someone with extensive practical experience of drawing and of the problem of filling a blank sheet coherently.

How the discovery was made

The most striking material in the working paper is not the mature work but the early work, done between ages eleven and fourteen, which Michael Bérubé has also posted. Those early sheets are miscellanies. Various kinds of object — bars, circles, letterforms, geometric bits — appear on the same page, each placed wherever there was room. There is no relationship between neighbors. There is no composition.

And therefore, as Benzon observes, there was no global order available to be discovered. As long as the elements varied and each sat in its own local space, nothing about their arrangement could become salient.

Sabine: “You can brute-force counterexamples by just trying a lot of guesses quickly...”

I think this doesn't have much to do with AI. You can brute-force counterexamples by just trying a lot of guesses quickly, which is work you can do with a computer much more efficiently than with a human brain. Proving (or finding!) regularities is a different thing entirely.

I…

— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) August 1, 2026

Ethan Mollick: “AI has blurred lines between jobs.”

One of our big findings in our study at Procter and Gamble was that AI blurred the lines between jobs. Now OpenAI has a similar finding.

Organizational boundaries are becoming porous, the walls thinning. Companies are going to need to think about division of labor in a new way. pic.twitter.com/OcNtL3OdIH

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) July 31, 2026

This is not optional, things are getting chaotic now, and not dealing with this change won't make it go away. Plus, this could be a huge boost for both individual satisfaction & firm performance if done properly

Our paper: https://t.co/9HjE0W1Ti8
OpenAI: https://t.co/21fOey4a3b

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) July 31, 2026

The Trap of the Digital Double

Catherine Shannon, The Trap of the Digital Double, NYTimes, July 31, 2026.

Everything is strange. We work from home. We socialize online. Our private lives are increasingly public. People pretend to be brands; brands pretend to be people. We optimize our bodies until they break. And the more we know, the less secure we feel.

In this inverted world, we seek to understand what is real and what is true. To know the truth of ourselves, we begin at what feels like a natural place: the mirror. We wish to see ourselves as others do, and modern life gives us countless opportunities.

We are constantly confronted with our own image, whether we like it or not: on our phones, front-facing videos, selfies, public spaces (the communal mirrors in Aritzia’s dressing rooms come painfully to mind), our social media profiles, Zoom calls, FaceTime, Ring doorbells. But we can forget that mirrors both duplicate reality and reverse it. None show you exactly as you are. Everything is strange.

The historian Christopher Lasch wrote that “for the narcissist, the world is a mirror.” Almost 50 years later, this remains a tidy diagnosis, but it doesn’t quite capture the extent of the spiritual crisis that we’re now facing. I believe the room of mirrors that constantly surrounds us conjures something unsettling, something dark. It is a spiritual trap in which the imagined displaces the real: We choose a fantasy of ourselves over the reality of others. And that trap is baited and facilitated by technology.

Mirrors:

Let’s be honest: I shouldn’t know what I look like taking out the trash. But I do, because my Google Home security camera recently alerted me that there was a “Person Seen — Back Camera.” “Person” is a generous term for what I saw, which was a beleaguered, ghostly figure — greasy hair pulled back, hunched over a bag of trash like an old witch.

We are recorded constantly: in public, by the government, by private companies trying to sell us things, even by strangers. I shudder when I think about all the incidental pictures of myself that live on strangers’ phones. In my own personal horror film, there I am, eating a bagel, and some 17-year-old tourist zooms in on my pixelated face, screenshots it, and sends it to the family group chat — “this woman’s face lol” — and I become the inside joke that defines that New York City holiday for years to come.

It’s curious, especially given how little we looked at ourselves in the past, and how rare and imperfect mirrors were for thousands of years, that traditional wisdom teaches us to be wary of the act of regarding the self. The three major American faiths — the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all warn against the dangers of mirrors, vanity, pride and excessive concern with the self.

Mirrors are covered during shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning period, both to encourage contemplation of the relationship between God and man and to discourage vanity and self-concern. The Book of Proverbs teaches that pride is spiritually deleterious: “Pride goes before ruin, / Arrogance, before failure.”

Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. [...]

Islamic prophetic tradition (hadith) discourages the depiction of living beings in religious contexts.

The uncanny:

Inhabiting this mirrored, dual realm, this doubled existence, doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t even feel neutral. Something is off, and when something is off, Freud has probably attempted to explain it. He called this “the uncanny,” a concept that by its very nature resists a clean definition, though if you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you’ve experienced it firsthand.

Castration complexes and womb-fantasies aside, Freud does a pretty good job: The uncanny, according to his 1919 essay by the same title, “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” It is easy for something new or unknown to frighten us, but the feeling of uncanniness relies on its being known to us in some way.

The uncanny is a dark twist on the familiar. It emerges when the boundary between imagination and reality begins to blur, when hidden mechanisms seem to be at work beneath the surface, and when something appears alive that should not be. (Or vice versa, in the case of influencers, who can have that dead sharklike look in their eyes.) It is marked by repetition, by a sense of something fateful and inescapable. Freud noted that the uncanny is often and easily produced when a symbol begins to take on the full force of the thing it represents. It is difficult to imagine a more precise description of life online.

The doppelganger:

Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

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