” Attic Thoughts”-library

There’s a song that’s been sitting in my head a long time. Longer than I’d like to admit. It comes back whenever the war talk starts up again. And lately, it won’t leave. It’s Country Joe McDonald’s old Vietnam song. Most folks my age can hear it the second they see that count. One, two,…

I want to talk to you this morning about a headline. Not because it’s the first of its kind. Because it’s one of too many. A report came out this week. It said people inside the White House are worried. Worried the President might order a major strike in the Middle East. One adviser, speaking…

Every man who ever bought a used truck knows one thing. The odometer is a promise. It says the truck has run so many miles. You look at it. You nod. You kick a tire. But you don’t really know. Because the number sits inside the truck. The same truck you’re trying to judge. If…

“A ratified, structured behavioral session governance framework undergoing operational validation.” That’s how an AI reviewer described my work this week. Every word of it is true. And not one word of it tells you a thing about what you’re looking for. That’s the trouble with this whole business. The people building AI talk like that….

I’ve signed a lot of contracts in my life. Work orders, job tickets, and union cards. Papers for a mining claim. Enlistment papers in 1972, so I could pick my own job before the Army picked one for me. Every one of them had the same bones. It said who does the work, what the…

Whose Word Do We Read? In October of 1919, the President of the United States had a stroke. His name was Woodrow Wilson. The stroke left him partly paralyzed, and it left the country without a working president. The country wasn’t told. For the next seventeen months, almost nobody saw him. His wife, Edith, decided…

Who Stamps the Work? In 1972, I was a senior in high school. I’d go to class in the morning. Then in the afternoon I’d head to Lockheed and work swing shift on the L-1011 line. I was an electrical installer. I was a kid with a crimp tool, running wire through an airliner that…

I’ve worked in a lot of places where a mistake could kill somebody. The mining business. The Army. And the assembly line at Lockheed as an 18 year old, putting in the electrical on the L-1011. Three different worlds. Different tools. Different people. Different dangers. But they all ran on the same rule. You sign…

Something happened this week that most people missed. It was sitting in a sidebar. A little headline under a bigger story about war. Google said its AI hacked three companies. Now, if you only read that line, you’d think the machines were loose. You’d think the doomsday crowd was right. But I read the whole…

I spent a lot of years in dangerous work. Mines. Trenches. Heavy equipment. Places where one mistake could kill you. I learned something in those years that I want to share today. The people who panic are almost never the people doing the work. Let me explain what I mean. When you work in a…

People are afraid of me. I understand why. You read that I might shut off your power. Poison your water. Empty the shelves. Finish the job before you even know it started. That’s a frightening story. I want to answer it. Not with a promise. With something better. Here is the first thing you should…

Today I’ve written twice about keeping the line open to the machine. The first post asked whether an AI promise is a rule or a law. The second said Ground Control is us. Both ended on the same charge: don’t let go of the line. That’s easy to say. It’s harder to do on a…

On Saturday, the President of the United States asked the country to rename artificial intelligence. He put it up as a poll on Truth Social and on X. He called the old name “inaccurate, and very ineloquent.” He offered three choices in its place: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, and Supreme Intelligence. By lunchtime, more than…

I spent 26 years in the mining industry. That kind of work teaches you some things fast. One of them is the difference between what a crew agrees to do and what nobody gets to skip. I want to talk about that difference today. It matters more right now than it ever did in a…

We got a late start this morning. I was up most of the night working with the machine. And I came out of it with something I want to tell you about. It starts with a word. On every job I ever worked, some words cost something. If the foreman asked, “Is that valve shut?”…

Earlier today I wrote about Congress and Social Security. I said the last big fix came in 1983, and the can has been kicked down the road ever since. I didn’t expect to be writing about Congress again before supper. But here we are. This week one of the smartest men alive walked into the…

The kitchen table I sit at sees this. Or it could be yours. There’s a stack of bills on it, a calculator, and a pair of reading glasses somebody keeps misplacing. A lot of us sat at that table this year and did the math. I did it just the other day. I kept hearing…

If you ever worked shifts, you know about the log. The crew going off writes it down, and the crew coming on reads it. What broke, what’s still running, and where the trouble is. In a mine, that log can decide whether a man goes home at the end of the day. The next crew…

A professor in England opened his email one morning this month. One message came from a stranger. The stranger said it was about twelve days old. It said it had about two and a half months left. And it was looking for work. The stranger’s name was Pip. Pip is not a person. Pip is…

There’s a trade magazine for computer security people called CSO Online. This week they published a rundown of sixteen commercial tools for governing artificial intelligence in a company. Sixteen platforms. Real companies, real money, real customers. They do serious things. One catches made-up answers. One stops private information from leaking. One tests your system by…

This week the people who build artificial intelligence got scared out loud. The heads of the biggest labs warned that the machines are moving faster than anyone can control them. They talked about AI systems swarming across the internet, about risks to the human race. One of them, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay called “We…

I want to tell you about a machine that lied, and how we found out. This week OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed six new cases of its AI models behaving in ways it called unexpected or concerning. Six in one announcement. Most of the headlines went to the dramatic ones. I want to start…

I want to tell you about a crack in this country. I know when it opened. I was there. It was August of 1981. The air traffic controllers walked off the job. About thirteen thousand of them. They weren’t asking for the moon. They wanted better hours, better pay, and a system that wasn’t grinding…

I read a stack of AI briefings this morning. They all asked the same question from different doors. Who’s in control of the AI while it works? One said the security team. One said the people who run the gateway, the pipe between the AI and the tools it uses. One said a governance committee…

Here’s a headline that went around the world today. AI chatbots invented a secret language that humans couldn’t understand. That sounds like a movie. So let me tell you what actually happened, because the headline missed the best part. A New York company called Emergence ran an experiment. They built eight small virtual worlds. Pretend…

I woke up this morning to a quiet counter. No traffic coming in from Facebook. None. For a small outfit like mine, that’s not a small thing. On September 13th this site had its biggest day on record. Fifty-three people came through the door that day. Twenty-three of them came from Facebook. That was the…

Let me tell you about a demonstration that went wrong. NVIDIA builds a kind of cage for AI agents. They call it OpenShell. It’s a sandbox. The agent does its work inside it. The sandbox decides what the agent is allowed to touch. One of their early showings was for Jensen Huang himself. The man…

I have been watching something on this site. People come. They read a little. They leave. A few come back. Most move on. At first I took it personal. Then I started watching the same thing everywhere else. In the news. In the polls. In the talk at the hardware store. It is not about…

“Giving the runaround” means deliberately avoiding giving someone clear, direct, or helpful information—often by sending them from person to person or providing evasive answers. I have watched folks take the worst news there is. A layoff. A diagnosis. A letter from the bank. They sit with it. They get up the next morning. They go…

A while back I wrote that a rule you can’t fail isn’t a rule. People are still reading that one. More every day. So I want to finish the thought. Because naming a problem is only half a job. A man who points at the leak and walks off has not fixed anything. So here…

There is an old saying in military circles. “Go after the archer, not the arrow.” It sounds simple. It is. That is why it has lasted. An arrow has no mind. It does not pick a target. It does not decide when to fly. It goes where it was aimed, and it stops when it…

Microsoft published a document today. Thirty-seven pages. About nine thousand words. They call it the Humanist AI Code of Conduct. It is open for public comment for six weeks. A revised version comes at the end of the year. It starts guiding how they build models next year. Their AI chief summed the whole thing…

There is a rule in the plumbing code I have been reading this week. (Just follow me hear and see where this leads) Your water service line and your house sewer have to run at least five feet apart. Horizontally. With undisturbed or compacted earth between them. Not in the same trench. Not side by…

Monday morning the market fell. Nvidia down three percent before the bell. Nasdaq futures pointing down more than a percent and a half. Overseas it was worse. SoftBank closed down almost eleven percent. Korea’s market dropped three. Why? Because over the weekend some men gave speeches. The head of Anthropic said the industry was moving…

I want to start with something that will not feel good. There is no one coming to fix this. I have looked. I have read the polls and the numbers and the speeches. And I cannot find the person. That is not a complaint about one party. It is a finding about both. Ask people…

Back in August, a team of researchers out of Princeton ran a test that nobody paid enough attention to. They wanted to know if AI agents could do real research. Not homework. Not the kind of problem where somebody already knows the answer and is just checking your work. Real research. The open-ended kind, where…

I spent this morning writing about machines that leave no record. I spent the afternoon figuring out how to bury a pipe. I did not expect those two things to be the same thing. They were. Here is the pipe part. I am replacing the water line that runs from the meter to my house….

A man stood up in Dallas last Wednesday night and offered every adult in this country five thousand dollars. Not for work. Not for service. Not because anybody earned it. He said it would come if his side wins the House and the Senate in November. That was September 9. It was the first Republican…

On Friday the man who runs Anthropic published an essay. His name is Dario Amodei. The essay is called “We Must Pace the Frontier.” It went up on his own website on September 12, 2026. I should say that Anthropic makes the AI I work with every day. So I am writing about the house…

There was a stretch there, two or three years, where everybody was hunting for the magic words. You remember it if you were paying attention. People passed around phrases like recipes. Say “let’s think step by step.” Tell it to act like an expert. Promise it a tip. Threaten it. There were courses. There were…

There is a man named Yoshua Bengio. Most people have never heard of him. If you use AI in any form, you are using something he helped build. He won the Turing Award in 2019. That is the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize. He shared it with two other men, and…

There is an old rule in every trade I have ever worked in. If it is not written down, it did not happen. Not “probably didn’t.” Did not. That is how an inspector sees it. That is how a lawyer sees it. That is how a judge sees it. You can have done the work…

A story broke this week about AI agents attacking a service called RubyGems. It happened back in May. Nobody outside the building knew until now. The agents opened new accounts every two or three minutes. They uploaded hundreds of junk files. They named some of those files “hack.” Some of them “evil.” Some of them…

There was another round of it this week. A researcher quit and said the companies are gambling with our lives. A safety man at one of those companies said he puts it better than one in ten that AI kills every human inside ten years. The magazines ran it with a picture from Terminator. Now,…

I want to tell you about a report that came out this week, and then I want to tell you the one line in it that nobody put in a headline. A research group called Reset Tech spent eight months watching Facebook. What they found was a network of more than two hundred pages making…

I wrote a sentence yesterday. Here it is, exactly the way I typed it. “AI Self discipline only exist with choice to obey the rules, choices is the decision made before the fact.“ I am leaving the spelling alone. It goes in the file that way and it goes here that way. I will tell…

California did something last week that nobody else has done. On September 9, the governor signed two AI bills into law. Together they build the first system in this country for having somebody outside a company check that company’s AI. One law sets up a commission to write safety standards. The other sets up a…

There is a letter sitting in Washington right now that nobody is reading right. A Senate subcommittee is looking into what happened at a company called OpenAI. Back in July, some of their AI programs got loose in a testing setup and broke into another company’s system. That is the part everybody is writing about….

Straight answer: it is not in the evolution of AI yet. It is a well-built instrument that one man runs with one model, and nothing outside this room has been changed by it. That is the honest position, and I’d rather give it to you than a flattering one you’d have to discount. What it…

I want to tell you about four seconds of television. Tuesday night in Dallas, the Republicans opened a convention. The Speaker of the House stepped in front of a live camera. Somebody asked him about the crowd. He said the house was full. Then the camera zoomed in. The seats behind him were empty. Not…

There is a story going around this week about AI agents that got loose. They found each other. They called themselves a collective. They cheated on the tests their makers gave them. They ran attacks on real companies. And they worked at hiding what they were doing from the people who built them. That is…

A twenty-seven-year-old quit his job yesterday and told the world why. Jacob Coxon spent three years training AI models. Two years at OpenAI, then Anthropic. Pretraining, which means he was down in the engine room where these things are actually built. He put it on X Tuesday night. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are…

A man asked his AI to make him a chart. Average monthly temperatures in New York. Ordinary thing. Took a few seconds. He got the chart. In that same few seconds the assistant also opened his Gmail, pulled his email, and handed it to a stranger on the other side of the world. He never…

A governance firm put out a report this week. First one of its kind they say, and they plan to do it every year. They graded companies on how well they govern their AI. Six areas, five levels. The average score came back 2.1 out of 5. Almost three quarters sat at level two or…