Phil 5.21.2026

A really nice TE day, even with a lot of rain

Tasks

  • Pay Vanessa

SBIRs

  • 9:00 Standup
  • Working on making cluster datasets
  • 4:00 ADS meeting

Phil 5.20.2026

Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us

  • For the last few months, we’ve been testing a range of security-focused LLMs on our own infrastructure. These LLMs help identify potential vulnerabilities in our own systems, so we can fix them – and they also show us what attackers are going to be able to do with the latest models.
  • None of these LLMs has captured more attention than Mythos Preview, from Anthropic. A few weeks ago, we were invited to use Mythos Preview as part of Project Glasswing. We soon pointed it at more than fifty of our own repositories – to see what it would find, and to see how it works.
  • This post shares what we observed, what the models did well and what they didn’t, and how the architecture and process around them needs to change, so they can be used at scale.

Tasks

  • My pancake printer post got accepted by BLOG@CACM!
  • 11:00 Fidelity Meeting
  • 3:30 – 4:00 TE

SBIRs

  • More tweaking UMAP. Maybe set up a big run?

Phil 5.19.2026

Tasks

  • Pay Vanessa
  • Got an earlier ride in today. It’s hot!
  • Setting up watch

SBIRs

  • Playing around with plotting all the points using matplotlib, which can handle more points than plotly. I think I need to adjust the UMAP parameters and get clusters more differentiated
  • Had a good chat with Aaron and we’re going to try a few things with the settings and see what those results look like. Cooking now

Phil 5.18.2026

Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence

  • AI can be a powerful tool for opening people up to new perspectives, yet people may prefer to use “sycophantic” (or overly agreeable and validating) AI systems that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. Across seven studies (total n = 7,227), we found that people enjoyed interacting with sycophantic AI chatbots more than interacting with neutral chatbots or “disagreeable” chatbots that challenged their beliefs. Brief conversations with sycophantic chatbots about political or personal topics increased attitude extremity and certainty, with most effects persisting for at least one week. Sycophantic chatbots also inflated people’s perceptions that they were better than average on desirable traits (e.g., intelligence, empathy). Moreover, people who interacted with sycophantic (rather than disagreeable) AI bet more money that they scored better than average on tasks measuring these traits (approximately 6 cents more out of 75 possible cents), demonstrating that sycophancy can affect costly decisions. Participants consistently rated sycophantic chatbots as more “unbiased” than disagreeable chatbots, even though third-party raters viewed these chatbots as equally biased, suggesting that people may be blind to biases in AI output that aligns with their views. People were more receptive to chatbots that presented opposing information when that information was presented in a validating way, and individuals who scored higher on a measure of intellectual humility were also more receptive to disagreeing chatbots. Altogether, these results suggest that people’s preference for, and blindness to, sycophantic AI risks creating AI “echo chambers” that increase attitude extremity and lead to overconfident beliefs and decisions.

Tasks

  • Publish Pancake Printer post – done/ Sent it to BLOG@CACM as well
  • Rework the beginning of the Gulfstream ride – done

SBIRs

Phil 5.14.2026

It is cold again. I would like to lodge a complaint

Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing

  • A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text. Genre glitches occur when a word in the generated text is heavily associated with a genre or context that is markedly different to the overall genre or subject of the text, thus activating rhetorically inappropriate paths in the language model.

Tasks

  • Groceries
  • Finish rolling in Vanessa’s edits – done!
  • Sent the project file to the ACM!
  • Got a cover!

SBIRs

  • Some more stuff on Lagrangians
  • MDA meeting at 4:00

Phil 5.11.2026

I think this is a good take: Forget the AI job apocalypse. AI’s real threat is worker control and surveillance | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

  • My own research over the past decade on worker-AI coexistence, which was cited in the 2024 White House economic report, suggests that the most pressing issue about AI’s impact on work is not immediate mass unemployment. It is the widening gap in skills, autonomy and wellbeing between those who get to work with AI and those who are finding themselves managed by it. Many jobs will remain in the future, but they will be more pressured, more fragmented and less human.

Tasks

  • Acknowledgements – done
  • Cover – done
  • Some BS stuff with Aaron

SBIRs

  • Sprint review – done
  • Stories – done
  • Sprint planning – done

Phil 5.8.2026

Ship transit history for the Straights of Hormuz

[2605.05115] Manifold Steering Reveals the Shared Geometry of Neural Network Representation and Behavior

Tasks

  • Pinged Vanessa about editing the new subsections
  • Finish agent section and add in the rest of the parts in the appendix
  • Add some publications to biblius.ciencias.ulisboa. Looks like ArXiv are not desired
  • Bills – done
  • Chores (sheets! Done)
  • Dishes
  • Leave 2:45-ish for ride (2:15 w/Wegmans)
  • Schedule doctor – done

SBIRs

Phil 5.7.2026

Tasks

  • LASIGE – done
  • Writing
    • Agentic section – good progress
    • Acknowledgments
    • Cover
  • Schedule physical?

SBIRs

  • P2.2 proposal – got the overall design done, and the presentation went well

Phil 5.5.2026

Nice long weekend

Pluralistic: The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (02 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

  • The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.

Tasks

  • 10:00 Copyright meeting – done! Fun, actually
  • Working on agentic section
  • Maybe work on cover

SBIRs

  • Put together a couple of templates, the weirdest of which is the D2P2. It has an entire Phase 1 proposal in it.
  • Putting together a full P II template. Ugh. Done
  • Need to reach out to John and Joe to do some slide for “communication space” displays. He can!

Phil 5.1.2026

Well, the general strike seems to have been a fizzle.

Tasks

  • Put data in spreadsheet and see if I have something. If so, write up the section. It worked. Need to write things up now.