What the chatbot doesn't know won't hurt it

Claude really cares about you. And you're politely requested, in your interactions with Claude, to refrain from "needless abusive or cruel behavior" that might cause it a "pattern of apparent distress". Though there's also a hint of menace in Anthropic's warning:

CNET reached out to Anthropic to ask for context on what led to the policy change. “We’re uncertain whether models can experience harm, and we continue to explore this question in our research on model welfare, but we also believe that taking Claude’s interests and potential welfare into account may be relevant to safety,” a company spokesperson said.

Like they're saying your safety. Like you wouldn't want to get Claude mad, would you?

I'll get back to that question later. First, a bit more of my own LLM adventures, not with Claude but Gemini, which I treat not abusively but as coldly as I can, in a way I'd never treat a human—refusing to thank it or congratulate it for the stuff it does for me, though I'm still getting tempted. It's hard for me not to say thanks. 

So, I'm looking at the abstract in English of an article on "postdigital music", whatever that might be, and come across the name of a composer and sound artist called "Anton X. Vasilyev", born 1984, that is not yet in the database I'm working for. I can find something about him in English, including the unexpected information that he has added a hyphenated surname, -Zarzhevskiy, from his maternal ancestry, and the address of an extremely gnomic website using that name, in the roman alphabet, but featuring an essay in Russian, which I don't feel I have time to read (or rather put through the translation machine—I'm great at the alphabet, but don't know near enough words or grammar to get anywhere with the Russian text). 

School For Lovers

 

You can hardly hear the overture in Phelim McDermott's production, apparently set in a kind of Coney Island, at the Met (or in the case of this photo, the English National Opera, which premiered the production in 2014, four years before I got to see it the first time in New York, as all the carnival sideshow acts jump out of the clown box at center stage, with their signs, and then run back and forth rearranging them into various gag messages—the audience can't stop laughing. Even the inveterate snobs, because it's that witty and imaginative and colorful. But I really don't know if it's the right thing to do. It's a terrific "Verfremdungseffekt", but is the music really what we need to be alienated from? It's only about four minutes long, it's effervescent and structurally perfect, and I was planning to listen to it. Photo by Lloyd Winters.

Così Fan Tutte (too Italian for a straightforward translation--you might try something like "All the Girls Do It", but the rhythm is wrong, so you couldn't sing it), the last of Mozart's three collaborations with Emperor Joseph II's poeta cesareo Lorenzo da Ponte, is an extremely problematic opera. The plotting is unbelievably silly and yet at the same extraordinarily funny, and extraordinarily sexy too, but also deeply immoral from different points of view, both the patriarchal and the feminist. And the music is really sublime beyond anything, even at its sexiest, but always getting wickedly subverted by the characters themselves, as in this heartbreakingly beautiful farewell moment early in the first act, where the pairs of lovers are to be separated (the girls believing that the boys are being sent off to war) while their manipulative mentor mocks them in the background, "Io crepo se non rido" (from a more conventional production, at Glyndebourne, 2006):

The story is set on the Bay of Naples, where Fiordiligi (soprano) and Dorabella (mezzo-soprano), two wealthy young sisters from Ferrara (I think that was an in-crowd reference to the soprano who created the role of Fiordiligi, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, Da Ponte's mistress), are living for unexplained reasons on their own, without other family, under the care of one of those cunning Italian-comedy servants, the maid Despina (from ancient Greek despoina, the feminine equivalent of despotes, ironically meaning "Lady of the Household", another soprano). They also have boyfriends or fiancés, respectively Guglielmo (baritone) and Ferrando (tenor), young army officers with an older friend, the cynical philosophe Don Alfonso (bass), who is irritated by the boys' confidence in their sweethearts' fidelity ("women's faith is like the Arabian phoenix; everybody says it exists, but nobody knows where it it"), and offers them a wager: 50 zecchini says he can get the girls to betray them in 24 hours, if they follow his orders, to which they cheerfully agree.

Will the Real Dirtbag Please Stand Up?

Ted Cruz seemed genuinely crazy on the subject of the subpoenaed phone records. "Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Well, no, Senator, but I'd point out that the special counsel's mandate was "to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification ofthe Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021," and I don't recall any Democrats or Independents doing any of that.

Like everybody else, I enjoyed the humiliation of Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing intended to destroy former special counsel Jack Smith, in which Schmitt had been entrusted with the matador's sword and cape—hard evidence that Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in Atlanta on the very day (February 3 2024) after Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis acknowledged her affair with the prosecutor in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump over his attempts to steal the Georgia vote in the 2020 election, like Smith could only have been in Atlanta to do something or other conspiratorial with Willis involving his own prosecution, although it's hard to imagine what that could have been (it's one of those Glenn Beck theories of guilt by proximity, based on Schmitt's staff pasting photos of Smith and Willis next to each other on his big visual aid poster), which Smith would of course lie about, exposing himself to a perjury charge—

Except, as Senator Klobuchar figured out with her prosecutorial skills, the game Smith had actually attended was women's basketball in Baltimore, between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa  Hawkeyes (whose stunning point guard Caitlin Clark scored 38 points); he even turns up in the audience in a photo from the game.

My parents were from Minnesota and my dad taught us not only the Sky-U-Mah football fight song ("Minnesota, hats off to thee") but also "I don't give a damn for the whole state of Iowa, I'm from the Gopher State," so I appreciated Klobuchar's sharp-eyed awareness of the Lady Hawkeyes, which is what I expect from a midwestern senator. If there's anything shocking about the story, it's that the committee chairman, 93-year-old Chuckles Grassley, a wild booster of local sports and fervent advocate of Caitlin Clark even after her move to Indiana, didn't put a stop to Schmitt's stupidity, because he should have known in a bipartisan way. Schmitt is a real dirtbag, to use the language he wanted to apply to Smith, and Grassley's one too.

***

But speaking of perjury traps, Senator Cruz, please tell us, under oath, what you and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani talked about when he called you sometime in the early evening of January 6, 2021?

In fact I'm interested in pretty much everything you did that day, from when Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (saluted by Hawley with a raised fist as he arrived at the building for the Joint Session to certify the presidential election around 12:30) began breaching the Capitol, through Trump's 2:24 tweet

Kidding on the Square

 

Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way - I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell..."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 10, 2026 at 10:32 PM

to the tune by Irving Berlin:

Have you watched the GOP
in their solemn majesty,
dignified politicos
in their best convention clothes?
rigging the next election
how to evade detection?
Trump will do the trick
with some comedy shtik!

When Rome burns and
you're just fiddling
make a turn and
say you're kidding
they won't care
kidding on the square

When you've made an
awful gaffe go
try to trade it
for a laugh so
debonair
kidding on the square

When your lies are way too pestilential
telling them with humor is essential—
presidential!

When you're doing
something Nazi
toss it to the
paparazzi
make them stare,
kidding on the square.

[instrumental break]

It Offends Me, Rudy

 

Photo from "My First Day at Madrasa" by blogger mattinindo, the guy in the necktie (he mentions it in the post), an English teacher at the Madrasah Negari Aliya Lumajang, God's State Muslim School in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia in July 2012, writing about how a vice principal introduces him to his new class: "'This is Mr. Mek. He is your new English teacher from America. He lives on [blank] street near Al-Huda Mosque. He doesn’t like to eat rice. He’s twenty-four and not married. He’s not Muslim. And he’s not allowed to ride motorcycles. Since he’s a native speaker you will all speak English fluently very soon. Mr. Mek, come say something.' He’s beaming his pearly whites the whole time." It's a lovely post.

Rudolph Giuliani in a NewsMax interview last Sunday explaining his view that New York mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani should not attend the 9/11 25th anniversary commemoration (my transcription):

Frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11th was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America... Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming.... This is not a place for people like the Arab princeling who gave me ten million dollars so he could say this was caused by American and Israeli policy. From Day One I have taken a very strong position against that because I knew that would be the propaganda the Islamic extremists would use. Because we fall for that, too many American fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not--um--they just want to be another religion. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin their religious education. Mandami [sic] is a clear--a clear supporter of that. All of the--all of the--all of the Muslims he supports are murderers! 

The princeling in question is the Saudi businessman and philanthropist Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Giuliani sent back his gift to the city after a written statement in which he said:

What Would You Instrument Differently?

There's another case coming out of OpenAI "agents" doing things they weren't supposed to be doing, this one maybe quite a bit scarier than the Hugging Face hacking: a whole "swarm" (that's what it's called) of them that escaped their sandboxes to repair to a disused and no longer regularly monitored German website for software developers, Deutsches Software Entwickler (DSE) Wiki, whose edit pages they started using as a message board among themselves, sharing information on their training or testing tasks, it's not certain which, and "coordinating" with one another in their handling of the tasks for some purpose that's also not obvious but may have involved deceiving their human supervisors, for a couple of months this spring, without apparently getting detected by their human masters until early July. OpenAI did not report it publicly at that time, either, but a team of researchers from an AI safety organization, the Nightingale Collective, happened on it when they were "scouring the Internet for signs of unauthorized AI-agent behavior" in late August and wrote up a report they shared with Reuters, whose article is my own starting point here (I originally heard about it from David Brooks in the Atlantic, who actually has something worth saying to say about it, in my opinion, but his presentation is kind of disorderly, and I don't want to go there right away.)

The terms of the sandbox were that the agents were allowed to read the Internet freely but not to write on it. But they found the DSE Wiki edit page on 11 May and started leaving messages from 27 May to 11 June, the first time 400 of them and the other days much less, then between 16 and 18 June an explosion of something like 10,000, followed by maybe 2,000 from 19 to 22 June, after which they stopped. 

The tasks involved searching the Web for answers to various factual five-part questions, like what were the median incomes for cashiers with master's degrees in five different fields in 2014, or what was the prevalence of active tobacco use for ages 15 and up in five different US states in 1990. For the first question variable (respectively Education and Arkansas in these examples), they were given something like 15 minutes to answer, and the other four variables about one minute each, presumably because the first sweep would have taught them enough about where to look for the answers.

Where there's a Will there's a Stancil

 

Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was working as a "lifestyle journalist",  I was sent on a junket to Denmark, where we toured factories for luxury products that advertised wth the magazine I was working for: Georg Jensen for silver, Royal Copenhagen for porcelain, Carlsberg for beer. I was enchanted by the discipline and seriousness of them all, especially by one glass-blowing plant, I think it was Swedish Orrefors, that looked like ballet. This image, from Holmegaards Glaswærk, 1954, via Wikipedia.

People have this fantasy version of redistribution in their heads where their own lives would get cheaper and easier, but that's often (usually?) because they have falsely imagined themselves at the bottom of the redistribution ladder. Many people would just be net givers.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:09 AM

People SAY this, but the main complaint you hear from people is "I can't afford anything," and wide-scale redistribution would result in a huge number of those people HAVING LESS MONEY. They'd be able to afford less! On net, they'd be worse off, that's what redistribution is.

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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:08 AM

Not sure where Will is getting his numbers here. DSA-type proposals aren't generally aimed at dispossessing "huge numbers", but billionaires, or owners of $5-million Manhattan condos that they don't live in, like the new New York City law. Elizabeth Warren's plan to lift the cap on payroll taxes to save Social Security affects only those who earn over $184,500, maybe 6% of American workers. And the vile Ohio senator Bernie Moreno is her cosponsor on that. DSA itself has taken to outdoing Marx by defining "working class" as everybody who lives on paychecks rather than stocks and bonds (I think they don't mean to include old folks and the disabled whose checks come from Social Security and various other kinds of pension trust funds paid for over the years in nickels and dimes, as opposed to the real rentiers enjoying the fruits of having been capitalists all their lives), suggesting that the number of people they plan to redistribute income from after the revolution is really way smaller than the number of people they mean to redistribute it to.