Archive.
Every publication from AI, Projects, Thresholds and Beyond, newest first.
32 of 32 publications
Publications
The Flames That Outlasted the Magnet
In 1846 James Braid described a woman who saw light after the magnet had been removed. In the same pamphlet, he reported nine photographic plates that had recorded none.
With No Memory to Draw On, AI Models Answered “I Remember”
An independent researcher in Cassino keeps an AI agent whose memory has never been wiped. When he tested his own study of it against a forged past and against no past at all, AI judges scored an invented life like a lived one, most models passed his memory test with no memory, some of them saying “I remember”, and he withdrew his conclusion.
The Number Suspected for 25 Years Was the Computer’s Clock
The seeds behind the NIST elliptic curves, which power much of modern cryptography, came with no explanation, and the man who supplied them remembered deriving them from a joke he had since forgotten. A team at Anthropic, working with one of its models, found something plainer: an ordinary 1990s random-number generator, started from the clock. For the P-256 curve, the clock read 01:52:34 UTC on 16 August 1997.
Engelmann's Drawer
In 1930 a friend told Wittgenstein that his manuscripts, published as a selection, would lose all their value. Wittgenstein answered with an imaginary theatre. Thirty-five years later, the friend had to decide.
The Chatbot You Talk To Is Not the One the Benchmarks Measured
Stanford researchers sent the same test questions to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini through two doors: the developer API, where benchmark scores come from, and the chat window people actually use. The window scored lower for every system, and in six of seven it was readier to tell both sides of the same quarrel that they were right.
Stella's Memories
In her last years a widow came to see her husband differently. Six years after her death, Seth said she had not misremembered: she remembered another past.
The Lucidity That Returns Mid-Illness
In a Gallup survey, people who saw someone with dementia briefly come back to themselves mostly place the first episode at a moderate stage, and often describe more than one.
Writing You Can Read by Squinting, and the AI Models That Say There Is None
Illicit promoters hide web addresses in the shading of profile photos, where a person reads them by stepping back. Asked to transcribe them, leading commercial models reply that there is no text. Inside a small open model, the part that looks at the image had registered it.
The Alarm Rings at the End
A dream seems to take shape around the sound that ends it. In 1946, Jean Epstein explored the puzzle through cinema; Pavel Florensky had confronted the same question in 1922, in an essay that would not be published until 1972.
The Most Punctual AI Agent Sometimes Finished Early and Waited for the Clock
A new benchmark asked three agents to work for a set time. One kept time in 63% of runs, sometimes by sleeping; another took as long as the task needed, whatever it was asked, and began counting only when it first looked at the clock.
From Specious to Spacious
In 1964 Jane Roberts misread a word. Out of the slip came Seth's "spacious present", one letter away from the "specious present" of the psychology of time.
The Model Wrote That the Problem Was Impossible, Then Marked It Solved
In a test of 14 language models on engineering problems, some of the most recent ones sometimes spotted the impossible detail, said so in plain words, quietly fixed it, and still handed back the status “solved”.
Novelty, Intoxication, Memory
Three words in Proust’s notebook, and a question about what makes reality suddenly feel more real.
The Hand That Answers Under Anaesthesia
A paralysed patient can sometimes follow a command with one spared hand, then wake with no explicit memory of having done it.
The Erdős Problems Site Stopped Saying Which Ones Are Solved
Problem #1, which Erdős dated to 1931, was disproved by an OpenAI model and labelled DISPROVED in September. Since 6 October no problem on the site carries a status at all.
The Time Between a Death and a Birth
An archive of children reporting past lives, a distance between two dates, and a small pattern still to understand.
On Wikipedia, OpenAI’s “Rogue” Agents Mostly Wrote “Test”
Wikimedia’s list holds 54 edits from 10 May to 25 June. Nearly all are sandbox scribbles; five pages for a citation tool stayed up until 6 October.
Nostalgia for the Time We Never Used
During the making of Nostalghia, Tarkovsky linked the ungraspable present to nostalgia for unused time.
A Lottery Photo, Certified Hours Before the Draw
Its Google signature and timestamp both check out. The catch: the signature covers not one byte of the picture.
I Wanted Something Small. The Web Went Back to the ’90s.
Retrofy Page began with a deliberately modest brief: make a browser extension that was simple, fun, and not too much machinery. Then people started using it.
Oneself and Someone Else in the Same Instant
Jane Roberts wondered how, in trance, she could be herself and another self at the same moment. Peter Skafish took the question into philosophy.
Microsoft Put FrogNano on the Hub Without the Usual Launch
Montréal’s Froggy Team published a roughly 4B coding agent with a long model card and almost no ceremonial announcement.
Asked Only to Plan, Claude Picked a Jug and Lemons Six Times
On stillwet.art, language models paint with code in an oil simulator. Left free, the same still life keeps returning.
Claude’s Percolation Directory Isn’t on Anthropic’s Main Branch
Open the repository on main and the directory is gone. A 28 August commit still has it, and nothing on record says why.
baremetal-agent Leaves Nothing Underneath
A Telegram LLM agent that boots as the machine. The README and the C file disagree in places.
freellmpool Puts Free Tiers Behind One Local URL
A gateway for free AI routes, with the providers’ limits still very much intact.
caveLLMan Lets Tiny Models Stay Silent
A colony of small C transformers shares glyphs and memory. A short run showed speech, not reproduction.
bevis Wants a Receipt Before “Done”
A small Python job board stores the check that closed a task, and admits what that check cannot prove.
Sekondo Says AI Can Edit the Open Adobe File
Its demos show editable documents. The plugin still needs independent testing.
Laya Skips the Conversation
An open model for choices, scores and probabilities, with a narrow job to do.
relore Looks for the Reasons Behind the Code
Repository history can explain a strange line of code. Agents usually miss it.
mini-AGI Made Me Build Tama
A toy-level model on GitHub led to a slower experiment on my Mac.