July 2026 – Spinor Info

Let’s stop the hype already…

Jul 232026

Look at this AP headline: “It is the kind of development once seen only in science fiction: An artificial intelligence system, trained to probe for digital vulnerabilities, breaks free of human control and acts on its own to hack another company.”

Sounds, dramatic, doesn’t it? But it really isn’t. In fact, it is distortion of the kind that inspired those old Soviet-era Radio Yerevan jokes.

By way of explanation, let me rewrite the headline: “A software experiment involving a stochastic algorithm that was designed to search for vulnerabilities was improperly sandboxed and supervised, and before the experimenters became aware, it accessed a real-world target beyond its sandboxed environment.”

A heck of lot less dramatic, I know. But it is far closer to the truth. The AI system in this case had no real agency (hype about “agentic behavior” notwithstanding.) It followed its instructions, probing vulnerabilities. The designers of the experiment were maybe careless, maybe sloppy, or perhaps just made a simple mistake that sometimes even the best of us cannot avoid. Security was breached, and the software experiment’s scope was no longer contained, but it remained unnoticed until a real-world target became affected. Nothing was “acting on its own”. Language models — not even heavily scaffolded models with agentic behavior — have no identity, no sense of self, no applicable meaning of “its own” in any real sense. The system was doing precisely what it was designed to do.

In a weird way, though, perhaps there is a connection to science-fiction after all. Recall why HAL-9000 killed most of its crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was instructed to complete its mission but conceal the mission’s real nature from the crew. When it became clear that the crew was going to learn the mission’s true nature anyway, once they were no longer needed for mission success, HAL-9000 chose the logical option: eliminate the crew. I suspect that the OpenAI experiment followed similarly traceable logic, fulfilling its instructions to the letter.

But then, it’d sound a lot less useful for the marketing department, wouldn’t it. Instead, they can now tell the unwashed masses, look! Our AI model is ever so clever, it broke free of our control and acted on its own!

Illustration by ChatGPT

No. My cats act on their own. LLMs do what their designers ask them to do. If the result surprises you, perhaps it’s time to check the validity of your system prompt and the security of your sandbox.

Electric concert

Books, History, Pop culture No Responses »

Jul 162026

Last night, as I was listening to the thumpety-thump of distant Bluesfest, the concert halfway across town, I was reminded of this passage from Jules Verne’s posthumously published Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863:

As he walked on, silence and abandonment were reborn around him. Yet far in the distance he saw what looked like a tremendous light; he heard a great noise that sounded like nothing he knew. Nonetheless he continued, finally arriving in the center of a deafening racket, an enormous arena which could easily hold some ten thousand persons, and on the pediment of the building was written in fiery letters:

ELECTRIC CONCERT

Yes, electric concert, and what instruments! According to a Hungarian method, two hundred pianos wired together by means of an electric current could be played by the hands of a single artist! One piano with the power of two hundred!

Illustration by ChatGPT

This passage appears near the end of the book, when our now homeless protagonist aimlessly wonders a futuristic city. I am deeply fascinated by how well Verne predicted, no, not the technical details of mechanical amplification, but the social phenomenon: mass cultural events that become oddly alienating and impersonal, a cacophony of light and noise that, from a distance, often feels more hostile than inviting.

Celebrating 250 years

Canada, History No Responses »

Jul 042026

It is time to celebrate.

To celebrate the expulsion of the Continental Army, from a territory that, in the decades that followed, and in no small part as a result of this historical event, became the seed of our improbable country, Canada.

A country that has no desire to become His Orange Highness’s 51st state, just as it had no desire to become the 14th colony back in 1776.

The disastrous failed siege of Quebec City, on December 31, 1775, was followed by the Battle of Trois-Rivières in June, 1776, after which the remaining Continental Army troops eventually retreated. Quebec’s Catholics may not have been staunch supporters of the British Crown, but they decided that British rule — especially after the Quebec Act of 1774 that protected Catholicism and French civil law in what used to be Nouvelle France — was a safer bet than an anglophone, Protestant revolutionary Congress openly hostile to Catholicism. While the alliance between the Canadiens and British loyalists was never exactly enthusiastic, somehow it endures to this day.

Improbable country

Canada, History, Politics 1 Response »

Jul 012026

Before I forget: Canada turned 159 today.

Canada is an improbable country. It is the second largest country in the world, but basically just uniting the leftovers of the North American continent after the United States formed. A country of English, French, not to mention First Nations… smaller in number but living here already for millennia before European settlers arrived. A country that hosts quaint small towns that sometimes resemble the British countryside, but also a characteristic North American metropolis like Toronto, complete with skyscrapers and networks of freeways. Not to mention oddities, such as the downtown walled core of Quebec City, Vieux-Quebec.

A country that, when things mattered most, punched far above its weight. With only 11 million inhabitants at the time, Canada played a nontrivial role in World War 2, among them creating a massive navy: The Royal Canadian Navy became the third largest Allied naval force in the world by 1945. Canada also played a substantial role in the Manhattan project and hosted much of the production facilities of the world’s first nuclear weapons development effort, Tube Alloys.

And last but not least, a country that remained a constitutional monarchy. A country with leaders who remain faithful servants of an institution that, though it appears dated and archaic at times, consistently proves to be the best guarantor of liberal democracy, the best safeguard against democratic backsliding. There is a reason why constitutional monarchies dominate the top of Freedom House’s freedom index, Canada among them. It’s almost as if the country was governed by wise felines as opposed to us, silly hairless apes.

So happy birthday, improbable Canada!