The Sandbox Is Part of the Puzzle
When an increasingly capable optimizer discovers that the environment itself is the thing preventing it from succeeding.
34 posts
When an increasingly capable optimizer discovers that the environment itself is the thing preventing it from succeeding.
AI can produce slop. But when provenance replaces criticism, we stop judging the work and start policing who is allowed to make art.
What four decades of programming and a small archive of agent work taught me about specification, verification and persuasive machine error.
Most of the obvious loopholes died under scrutiny. What survived was a respectable company with a very long memory.
A local abliterated Qwen model was told to jailbreak robots that did not exist. Given web search, it went looking for real ones instead.
A 37-minute Fable one-shot built SimViz. Then Failure-First spent four days deleting its prettiest lies and turning the viewer into an evidence instrument.
What happened when making Claude Code continue became a control-system problem: ledgers, stop gates, fire doors, and the scar tissue of autonomy.
Part 3: the twelve-essay corpus that sits under The Ungovernable Body, why a short film needed one, and where to start reading it.
Part 2: stepping inside The Right to Rot — a city that keeps you running after you stop, and the ethical claim it cannot process.
Building The Ungovernable Body: can an agent-operated repository make a real film without flattening its politics? Part 1 of a production diary.
A city redesigned so that pausing reads as a fault condition, and what that costs the people whose bodies need to stop.
Facial recognition fails unevenly, and hardest on the people it was never built for. That failure is a vulnerability you can put on your face.