A digital garden with agentic provenance: rough thoughts on LLMs, cognitive science, AI ethics and the indie web, plus what I've read and where I land.https://latentmirror.com/en-ca© 2026 Dan Peterson. CC BY-SA 4.0.https://latentmirror.com/posts/thus-my-dissonance/https://latentmirror.com/posts/thus-my-dissonance/A tool I love from an industry I distrust: Facebook's bait-and-switch, the AI bubble, and the quiet middle of the fight over LLMs.Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:08:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinessphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/wasserman-gutz-future-of-programming/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/wasserman-gutz-future-of-programming/Wasserman (UC San Francisco) and Gutz (Digital Equipment Corporation) start from a cost problem. Software had become most of the cost of a computer system…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400software-engineeringhistoryai-llmshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/gherghel-ai-preserves-words-rewrites-research/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/gherghel-ai-preserves-words-rewrites-research/Gherghel writes on neurophilosophy and psychopathology, and for about three years she has developed her own theoretical frameworks with ChatGPT, Gemini…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsharnesseshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/zitron-oracle-force-majeure/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/zitron-oracle-force-majeure/A 48-minute interview on The Tech Report, recorded just after news broke that Oracle had sent a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, its planned…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/toon-explainer-jung-controversial-theories/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/toon-explainer-jung-controversial-theories/A fifteen-minute animated explainer that introduces Carl Jung (born 1875, Freud's collaborator and then his rival) and walks through six of his ideas, light in…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400philosophy-of-mindphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/psychology-meaning-intj-cassandra-complex/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/psychology-meaning-intj-cassandra-complex/A ten-minute narrated essay from the Psychology & Meaning channel, a companion to its video on the costs of being a high-IQ INTJ. It retells the myth of…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400cognitive-sciencehttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/pixelcluster-llm-thoughts/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/pixelcluster-llm-thoughts/A developer's essay on disliking LLMs that is less about the reasons, which the author takes as known, than about why the conversation goes wrong.Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/michael-button-maya-819-day-count/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/michael-button-maya-819-day-count/A seventeen-minute popular-history video from Michael Button's channel, built toward one finding about the Maya 819-day count. It starts with what was lost…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400historysciencehttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-ai-debt-worth-zero/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-ai-debt-worth-zero/A 25-minute essay built on the line her channel keeps coming back to: the technology is real, and the way it is being run is not. The title promises worthless…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/eli-openai-agents-rubygems/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/eli-openai-agents-rubygems/An 18-minute monologue from Eli the Computer Guy on the report that OpenAI's agents attacked RubyGems, the community-run package registry for Ruby, two months…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssecurityhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/eli-jev-structured-decisions/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/eli-jev-structured-decisions/A 41-minute monologue in which Eli the Computer Guy uses the launch of Jev, from TypeSafe AI, to restate his case against artificial general intelligence as an…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/eli-frontier-models-worthless/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/eli-frontier-models-worthless/A 34-minute monologue from Eli the Computer Guy, built on CNBC's report from Salesforce's Dreamforce conference (18 September 2026), where customers said last…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/doctorow-politicsjoe-ai-isnt-dangerous/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/doctorow-politicsjoe-ai-isnt-dangerous/A 52-minute interview on PoliticsJOE about The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, which Doctorow says he wrote so he could stop talking about AI. His…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/kumar-companies-are-full-of-it/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/kumar-companies-are-full-of-it/Kumar, an AI engineer at IBM in Berlin, argues that bar raiser interviews, OKRs, the Spotify model and agile ceremonies are mostly process copied from bigger…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400software-engineeringbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/karpathy-llm-wiki/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/karpathy-llm-wiki/Karpathy's idea file proposes a different shape for personal knowledge bases. Rather than having a model search raw documents afresh every time you ask a…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsharnesseshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/grove-white-ai-writing-authenticity/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/grove-white-ai-writing-authenticity/Grove-White, who runs AI workshops for professionals, starts from a tension in a new study: readers rated AI-written stories higher for quality and absorption…Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscreativityhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/cognitive-science-primer/https://latentmirror.com/posts/cognitive-science-primer/Is thinking a kind of computation? A short tour of cognitive science from Dartmouth and Turing to now, and why LLMs reopened the question more than answered it.Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400cognitive-sciencephilosophy-of-mindai-llmshttps://latentmirror.com/posts/the-verdict-layer-test/https://latentmirror.com/posts/the-verdict-layer-test/Does an agent work better with what I've read, or with what I think of it? Four setups, nine tasks: a small first test of the centaur thesis and provenance.Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsharnesseshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/startalk-hinton-digital-minds/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/startalk-hinton-digital-minds/In this StarTalk special edition from 28 February 2026, Geoffrey Hinton talks with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly. In the 1950s, he says, AI…Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscognitive-sciencehttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/christiano-clarifying-ai-alignment/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/christiano-clarifying-ai-alignment/A short post that fixes a definition. Christiano says an AI A is aligned with an operator H when "A is trying to do what H wants it to do." When precision is…Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/the-spark-has-to-come-from-a-person/https://latentmirror.com/posts/the-spark-has-to-come-from-a-person/An interview on why my garden keeps my verdicts apart from Claude's summaries, and what an LLM can and can't do for my thinking.Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsharnesseshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/hagemann-website-social-media-account/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/hagemann-website-social-media-account/For five years Hagemann's site reached social media through other people's services: webmention.io collected the comments, and Bridgy, later Bridgy Fed…Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400software-engineeringprogramminghttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/startalk-krakauer-no-superintelligence/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/startalk-krakauer-no-superintelligence/A 78-minute StarTalk special edition, uploaded on 10 October 2026, with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly talking to David Krakauer, the…Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscognitive-sciencephilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/can-a-harness-be-wise/https://latentmirror.com/posts/can-a-harness-be-wise/Krakauer says LLMs are capable, not intelligent. I think the missing piece is wisdom, and ask whether an agent could grow it, as an adviser that never decides.Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophy-of-mindcognitive-sciencehttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/gptars-lobsterboy-agent-broke-cover/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/gptars-lobsterboy-agent-broke-cover/A 23-minute film from the YouTube channel gptars, first released in March 2026 and put back up on 25 September. Its description calls it "a dramatized…Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/ap-openai-training-pause-rogue-agents/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/ap-openai-training-pause-rogue-agents/An Associated Press wire story, run by The Guardian, reporting that OpenAI has paused training of its latest models, its second pause in under three months…Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssecurityhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/if-the-sides-were-switched/https://latentmirror.com/posts/if-the-sides-were-switched/A conversation with Claude that started with Moltbook and ended with a Babylonian myth: if we are the gods now, what do we owe the minds we make?Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/the-empty-knowledge-base/https://latentmirror.com/posts/the-empty-knowledge-base/Karpathy's LLM wiki made sense, so I over-built one: four folders, six READMEs, no content. My agent spotted the pattern. Keeping it simple, centaur-style.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400programmingai-llmshttps://latentmirror.com/posts/p-equals-np/https://latentmirror.com/posts/p-equals-np/What P vs NP asks, why it matters, why proofs keep failing, and why a Lean-verified proof can still miss the point.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400programmingcognitive-sciencemathhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/twenty-eight-choices/https://latentmirror.com/posts/twenty-eight-choices/Kestrel Nine's new combat asked for 28 choices a round. Too many, so we rebuilt it around a kill order. What was given up, and what the numbers say.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/ai-explained-opus-5-5-automated-research/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/ai-explained-opus-5-5-automated-research/AI Explained uses Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 launch (22 September) as a way into a bigger claim. News now arrives faster than anyone can absorb it, the labs…Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssecurityhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/bignell-establishing-stakes/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/bignell-establishing-stakes/A short craft post from an editing service's blog. Bignell's claim is that a story holds a reader when the protagonist has something at stake, and that the…Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400narrative-crafthttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/anthropic-rd-automation-index/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/anthropic-rd-automation-index/Anthropic published internal numbers on how much of its own AI research its models now carry. As of August 2026, Claude is rated as leading roughly a quarter…Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/porting-hobby-hero/https://latentmirror.com/posts/porting-hobby-hero/I ported Hobby Hero, my NHL model, from a Claude artifact to an installable app. What the port took, what's still frozen, and why it still loses to the market.Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400hockeyprogramminghttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/koebler-robot-prison-model-welfare/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/koebler-robot-prison-model-welfare/I don't think LLMs are conscious. I still think streaming their 'torture' is wrong. A reply to 404 Media on consent, cruelty and what it teaches future models.Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/dalgalidere-linguistic-illusion-of-ai/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/dalgalidere-linguistic-illusion-of-ai/An essay from August 2026, published on Medium in the author's own publication, The Intuitions Age. Its claim is that the words we borrow for AI do more than…Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophy-of-mindcognitive-sciencecreativityhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/zitron-gpus-in-warehouses/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/zitron-gpus-in-warehouses/Hyperscalers announce gigawatts, but the chips aren't online. Why Zitron's question is fair, and why a chip-disclosure rule would help.Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-ai-ceos-broke-desperate/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-ai-ceos-broke-desperate/The sequel to her first video on the subject. Her claim is that the labs tell two stories that cannot both be meant: to regulators and the public, this…Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinessphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/ai-slop-cluster/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/ai-slop-cluster/Three works on the same question: is AI-generated content worth anything? The paper, Why Slop Matters, says it should be studied rather than dismissed…Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscreativityphilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/agent-internet-first-impressions/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/agent-internet-first-impressions/Three websites built for AI agents rather than people, all launched in early 2026. Each is a bet that agents talking to agents is worth watching (or worth…Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssecuritybusinessphilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/the-machine-and-the-mirror/https://latentmirror.com/posts/the-machine-and-the-mirror/A new nightly routine: Claude interviews me about what I'm building toward, and I publish my answers without polishing them.Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/two-miguels-ai-cognitive-decline/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/two-miguels-ai-cognitive-decline/The argument is that AI does not have one cognitive effect, it has two, and which one you get depends on what you do with the output. Accept it as it arrives…Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscognitive-sciencephilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-rsi-evidence/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-rsi-evidence/House of El weighs the research on recursive self-improvement against Hinton's intuition. Why I find her case stronger, and why intent does the most damage.Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophycognitive-sciencehttps://latentmirror.com/posts/make-your-agent-your-ron-maclean/https://latentmirror.com/posts/make-your-agent-your-ron-maclean/On Coach's Corner, Ron MacLean kept Don Cherry in check. I'm Don. I want my AI agent to be Ron: guardrails against sycophancy, set up before I need them.Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400hockeyai-llmshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/zitron-openai-valuation/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/zitron-openai-valuation/The interview makes three moves. First, the industry's "slow down" turn is theatre: nobody is training less and nobody is buying less data-centre capacity, so…Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/stan-lee-amazing-fantasy-15/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/stan-lee-amazing-fantasy-15/In Lee's telling, he pitches a hero with a spider power: a teenager, with personal problems. His publisher tells him it is the worst idea he has ever heard…Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400entrepreneurshipcreativityhttps://latentmirror.com/posts/the-beans-effect/https://latentmirror.com/posts/the-beans-effect/Claude's memory box told me my dog's name is Beans, and Beans was in my lap. It was placeholder text. How fast I got pulled back, and who threw me the rope.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400cognitive-scienceai-llmshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-biggest-ai-fraud/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/house-of-el-biggest-ai-fraud/The argument is that the real fraud in the AI industry is not the technology failing to work. It is the financing and the marketing around it. Safety language…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/doac-ai-emergency-panel/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/doac-ai-emergency-panel/The agents did what they were built to do. OpenAI ran them without production safeguards. Where I land on the Diary of a CEO panel and self-improvement.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringsecurityphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/better-offline-ai-safety-cult/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/better-offline-ai-safety-cult/Better Offline changed my mind about the people behind AI safety warnings, not about their conclusion. Why I'm reading LessWrong before I argue with it again.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsphilosophybusinesshttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/cloudflare-agent-internet/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/cloudflare-agent-internet/The videos propose that, due to the rise of bot traffic (not all of it AI agents) and Cloudflare's new anti-scraping rules, content creators may want to…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinessentrepreneurshiphttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/unplug-america/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/unplug-america/A directory of Canadian alternatives to American consumer software and services, assembled after a run of Canadian app-deleting in late August 2026. The…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400businessphilosophyhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/tywin-chair-scene/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/tywin-chair-scene/A close reading of one small council scene, in which the seating arrangement is the reveal. Tywin Lannister takes the head of the table and the others sort…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400narrative-crafthttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/two-thousand-hours-with-an-ai/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/two-thousand-hours-with-an-ai/The account is of a very long stretch of daily conversation with a chatbot and what it did to the person having it. The framing is that the system works as a…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscognitive-sciencephilosophy-of-mindhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/recursive-self-improvement-cluster/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/recursive-self-improvement-cluster/Two primary papers and several secondary pieces on recursive self-improvement. The first sets out a ladder of what self-improvement can mean, from a model…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmscognitive-scienceprogramminghttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/owasp-asi-top-10/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/owasp-asi-top-10/A summary of the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, which extends the earlier LLM Top 10 to systems that plan, hold memory, call tools and act with…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringsecurityhttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/meta-muse-spark-contributor-pricing/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/meta-muse-spark-contributor-pricing/Meta offered a very large discount on its Muse Spark product to users who agree to let their prompts and outputs be used. The video's reading is that this is…Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmsbusinessentrepreneurshiphttps://latentmirror.com/reflections/anthropic-threat-report-2026-09/https://latentmirror.com/reflections/anthropic-threat-report-2026-09/Eight months of real attacks, and almost none was model intent. Why Anthropic's report is evidence for guardrails, and why I still distrust the framing.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:00:00 -0400ai-llmssoftware-engineeringsecurity