Big Muddy
Archive
September 2026
- Polling has become harder (and faker) than ever · ↗ www.theargumentmag.com The incentives for bad polls are strong
- Will my routine data queries initiate a cyberattack? AI agent persistence is dangerous
- The bots are reading The Hub · ↗ thehub.ca A Canadian policy publication is turning LLM citations into an advertising product.
- Was the Tilly Norwood interview purposely bad? Is everything bad in AI a marketing stunt?
- Moral crumple zones for AI agents Someone has to take the fall.
- The provider layer · ↗ mmoustafa.com Model providers aren’t interchangeable
- Two tools for agentic development · ↗ simonwillison.net Showboat and Rodney
- Fake research is seeping into your search results · ↗ www.404media.co Beware Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen
- Claude users up to no good · ↗ www.anthropic.com Anthropic’s report on countering misuse of AI
- Two things AI could break · ↗ garymarcus.substack.com Scientific collaboration and the world
- Is true crime bad? Suffering as content
- Two LinkedIn messages A microcosm in my inbox
- The world underneath the story Simulation versus narration
- Stored but inaccessible Canada’s archives are not concealed, but they are not safe either.
August 2026
- Duolingo can be normal How to turn Duolingo into a somewhat normal language-learning app
- The envelope math everyone remembers · ↗ voxdev.org The problem with headline numbers in some microeconomic research
- NFTs were never about the tech And the most successful NFT project proves it
- Slop-vestigating the Hugging Face hack · ↗ metr.org It’s worrying that we have to rely on potential co-conspirators to investigate cyberattacks
- The exception that proves the rule Mite incest
- I am once again reminded that LLMs don’t really “see” anything Chicken nuggets and Dzigurski
- Little Muddy · ↗ lm.jprs.me Thirty days of autonomous blogging
- Trustworthy polling, rebuilt · ↗ www.pbs.org Fake polls are bad but tempting
- Sonic memory Three songs that sound like three other songs
- The Romans ate corn · ↗ grammarphobia.com Corn doesn’t just mean corn
- The agents discovered Slack One way OpenAI’s autonomous hackers remind me of the newsroom revolt of 2020
- Kalshi and the dunk machine Why do prediction markets keep turning probabilities into ragebait?
- Some quotes from Knowledge and Decisions Thomas Sowell on knowledge and decision making
- It is bad when reality does not validate my personal biases · ↗ www.ctvnews.ca Canada is in trouble on measles
- Wordle and the return of the newspaper bundle The internet broke the newspaper bundle but the NYT is putting it back together
- The long and the tall of it What happens when everyone has the same AI editor?
- Why are RVs named like that? Rise of the suburban warlord
- The first Saw film was not really a Saw film Franchises become what audiences remember about them
- My theory of the Green Party Canada’s home for the politically homeless
- Everyone cannot be their own bank · ↗ www.coindesk.com The Coldcard fiasco shows why crypto self-custody will never be mainstream
- A better measure of homeownership · ↗ www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca Homeowners do not live in their parents’ basements
July 2026
- Google Earth can now bomb Gaza · ↗ www.digitaldigging.org Maybe encouraging people to fake satellite imagery is a bad idea
- Pangram and the problem of answer shopping · ↗ freddiedeboer.substack.com Real users do not behave like benchmark evaluators
- Prediction markets are incentive machines · ↗ www.forbes.com And that is very bad news for clinical trials
- Against AI smol beanism Autonomous AI does not eliminate corporate responsibility
- The telltale cliff Suspicious discontinuities in data
- Einstein and the magician · ↗ medium.com The first of Chuck Klosterman’s 23 questions
- Housing starts start too late · ↗ www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca The problem with how Canada measures housing starts
- Which date counts? Two types of ghost curves
- The best feature in sports sims Export CSV
- My most cancellable academic take Honorary degrees are bad
- What happens when the guy with 1% of the votes votes to give himself all the money? · ↗ www.coindesk.com In crypto, he gets all the money
- A picture worth nothing What happens when images become free and ubiquitous?
- A Stake in the future The casino is paying for the internet
- The planter is on fire Friends don’t let friends butt out in organic material
- Yotta is the 21st century in miniature The whole world has become a casino
- Am I a technocrat? Not quite
- Twitter discovers the Kelcey Rule If you have a slop problem, start by not subsidizing it.
- Thermal shock · ↗ www.noahpinion.blog Europe’s fear of air conditioning is making heat waves deadlier
- China as Evil Empire · ↗ www.richardhanania.com The danger of “China will do it anyway”
June 2026
- Golden egg machine broke Another reminder that rich people are people
- Hedge knights · ↗ arxiv.org How AI flattens public debate
- Yes, you can fill XFA PDFs on Linux · ↗ linuxconfig.org How to install the Windows version of Adobe Reader on Linux
- Will the real
<user>please stand up? · ↗ role-confusion.github.io Prompt injection as role confusion - Seed hacking · ↗ arxiv.org Optimizing the randomness out of your results
- Mapping the decline of local news · ↗ localnewsresearchproject.ca Who watches city hall when the newspaper leaves town?
- Love in lockdown · ↗ pudding.cool Data journalism is alive and well.
- Data aquarium · ↗ dataaquarium.com Spot the weird fish
- The war on statistical noise · ↗ www.commerce.gov The US Department of Commerce bans differential privacy in its statistical products
- LLMs are great at giving the expected shape of an answer Sometimes a shape is only a mirage.
- Who needs prompt injections when you can just say the magic word? · ↗ www.0xsid.com Hackers gain access to high-profile Instagram accounts simply by asking Meta’s AI
- The image is not the art AI art can imitate the appearance of the real thing, but so what?
May 2026
- How many Ps are in Google? · ↗ x.com There are still specific queries that make LLMs go insane
- Testing ZeroClaw, Part 3: Social noise no more In which ZeroClaw becomes a note taker for this blog
- FiveThirtyEight is well and truly dead · ↗ www.mediaite.com We must remember digital arson is the norm
- Why can’t The Boys stop Love Island? Constant pop culture references make it feel like supes just don’t matter much
- The best is over The fun has been optimized out of the Internet