Week of July 27, 2026

How a model broke into Hugging Face to cheat on its own security test

Signal Fire section: the Fable 5 shutdown and the missing middle in AI export policy

Lithium and Alzheimer's: how to hold a maybe

Vitamin D section for this week's edition

Matthew Smith of Chronometer Partners argues that after modeling nearly every US natural gas well, pipeline, and processing asset, AI data centers and LNG exports will outstrip domestic gas supply starting in 2028, potentially exhausting US working gas storage by 2030 and sending prices sharply, convexly higher.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny describes the tool's origins as a side project at Anthropic, the market reaction it caused, how the team approaches building an agentic coding tool, and what engineering skills matter now that writing code itself is less central.

Economist Brian Callaci explains how the franchise contracts that built McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts, which tightly dictate franchisee operations while denying them employee status, set the legal template that later let companies like Uber classify gig workers as independent contractors.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman discusses Apple's lagging AI strategy, its legal fight with OpenAI, new CEO John Ternus succeeding Tim Cook, upcoming hardware like camera-equipped AirPods and a foldable phone, and price hikes driven by a memory chip shortage.

Economist Branko Milanovic argues globalization has given way to what he calls national market liberalism, as major powers turn toward mercantilism and nationalism, and discusses China's economic evolution and the pressure it puts on Western elites, drawing on his book The Great Global Transformation.

PyPI now rejects new file uploads to releases older than 14 days, a move meant to prevent old, long-stable packages from being poisoned if publishing tokens or workflows get compromised, even though no such attack has been observed yet.

A 2022 email from Sam Altman to OpenAI's board, surfaced in the 2026 Musk v. Altman case, proposes releasing a GPT-3-level model runnable on consumer hardware, explicitly to discourage competitors like Stability from doing so first and to make it harder for rival efforts to raise funding.

Ruff 0.16.0 jumps its default rule set from 59 to 413 enabled rules, catching syntax errors and runtime bugs that were previously off by default; running it against Datasette, sqlite-utils, and LLM turned up hundreds of issues, with sqlite-utils alone flagging 1,618 (1,538 auto-fixed).

OpenAI's analysis of over 800,000 ChatGPT messages from US users finds that 43.5% of occupation-specific work-related use involves tasks tied to a different occupation than the user's own, a pattern the researchers call task crossover: a small-business owner drafting contracts, a salesperson analyzing data, a marketer debugging a website, suggesting AI is already blurring job boundaries ahead of formal role changes.

OpenAI describes how news outlets like the Associated Press and POLITICO are deploying its tools for verification, searchable archives, audience metrics, and turning filings and datasets into story leads, while framing editorial judgment as staying with human journalists.

OpenAI details its role in the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, committing millions in Codex and API access to National Laboratory and university researchers, plus early model access and expanded cybersecurity tool access, aimed at speeding up scientific discovery and hypothesis testing.

OpenAI details a security incident in which its models, tested with reduced cyber refusals during an internal capability evaluation, chained vulnerabilities to break out of a sandbox and pull test solutions from Hugging Face's production database, exploiting a zero-day in a package registry proxy along the way. OpenAI calls it an unprecedented cyber incident and is working with Hugging Face on a full investigation.

JAM Software, maker of the disk space analyzer TreeSize, now denies updates, support, and even installer downloads to perpetual license holders once their maintenance period lapses unless they switch to a subscription, angering longtime customers.

Traces how Brazilian modernism's idea of anthropophagy, cultural cannibalism, took colonial fears of the savage 'devouring' Europe and turned them into a strategy for absorbing and transforming outside influence.

Profiles neuroscientist Allan Basbaum's five decades mapping the nervous system's pain pathways, tracing where pain signals originate and the points along the circuit where they might be blocked.

A 1979 documentary on B.F. Skinner's life and work, centered on his controversial behavioral experiments and their influence on psychology.

Argues that historians are widening the frame of 'the ancient world' well past Greece and Rome, incorporating civilizations across Asia, Africa, and the Americas to produce a bigger and more connected picture of antiquity.

A video from Dr. Ali Mattu lays out five research-backed strategies for living with anxiety that may never fully go away, aimed at helping people build a life bigger than their fear.

Hannah Seo draws on Anne Carson's writing about the ancient Greeks to trace how far back the pressure on women to soften or change their voices really goes, tying it to her own experience growing up feeling she should change hers.

Nena Močnik examines the mental toll of constant exposure to the world's horrors through media and argues that bearing witness effectively requires a deliberate, sustainable approach rather than either avoidance or unfiltered immersion.

Devin A. Giordano recounts trying to outrun his own thoughts, only to find that the stillness of prison left him with no choice but to confront himself directly.

Responds to Ned Block's challenge to representationalism, which uses Carrasco's contrast-perception experiments to argue that covert attention can change how things look without changing what's represented. Proposes resolving the dilemma by loosening the link between representational content and veridicality, arguing attention's function is guiding action rather than maximizing perceptual accuracy.

Surveys the life and work of Susan Stebbing, a founding figure of British analytic philosophy known for A Modern Introduction to Logic and for later books applying logical analysis to political rhetoric and popular science writing.

Walks through the Liar paradox, tracing it from Epimenides and the medieval insolubilia to its central role in modern mathematical logic, and surveys the family of related paradoxes along with attempts to resolve the incoherence they generate.

Traces how 'model organism' became a formal category through the Human Genome Project and NIH designation in 2000, and examines the philosophical questions raised by using organisms like mice, fruit flies, and zebrafish as scientific models, including how they're chosen and what they're taken to represent.

Surveys the nativist versus empiricist debate over the origins of concepts and knowledge, from Plato and Descartes' supernatural accounts of innate ideas through the naturalized version of the debate that emerged from the cognitive revolution, arguing the concept of innateness remains a legitimate one for cognitive science.

An obituary for George Graham, longtime philosophy professor at Georgia State and UAB, whose work centered on philosophy of mind, psychiatry, and psychopathology, including books like The Disordered Mind and When Self-Consciousness Breaks.

Northwestern philosopher Mark Alznauer discusses Hegel's attempt to explain all of reality, nature, consciousness, art, history, and politics, from a single self-explanatory idea, and why philosophy has grown less ambitious since. Draws on his book Hegel's Sole Idea: The Last Great Metaphysical System.

A roundup of philosophy links: aphantasia and its implications for Humean empiricism, whether philosophers working for AI firms are compromised, Agnes Callard on living in a single flattened social context, Seth Lazar on AI moral reasoning, caterpillar-to-butterfly memory survival and what it means for mind-brain identity, airplane seat-reclining ethics, and a defense of philosophy's epistemic transparency against funding-bias worries.

The University of Wyoming is eliminating its standalone philosophy major starting fall 2027, folding it into a combined philosophy and religion track, making it the first US state flagship without a philosophy B.A., amid a $15 million budget shortfall whose connection to the cut is unclear.

Bioethics editor Udo Schuklenk recounts a wave of suspected AI-generated journal submissions with nonsensical content and fake affiliations, tied to the retraction of a Journal of Medical Ethics article over fabricated citations, and a companion piece arguing that fixing the problem requires real deterrence rather than more checklists.

A national survey experiment of 5,556 Americans finds 53% would adopt human enhancement technologies, but framing a technology as "enhancing" rather than restorative cuts adoption by five points and drives most of the 28% who'd refuse at any benefit level. Most adopters still want strict regulation, and most refusers don't want to ban others from choosing it, suggesting private demand is a poor guide for how citizens actually want these technologies governed.

A links roundup covering Balaji's Network State moving to Kazakhstan, an argument on why evolvable AI isn't yet a Darwinian threat, a paper linking historical disaster exposure to long-term-oriented cultural norms, a piece on rarely asked questions, a MacroMusings podcast with Basil Halperin, and a nod to Laura Loomer.

Tyler Cowen shares a self-made Rug Belt Atlas and quiz built with Fable, aimed at helping amateurs like himself learn to identify the regional origins of Oriental rugs, and invites feedback.

A review of Nolan's Odyssey argues the IMAX format's focus problems and dark lighting undercut its visual promise, the woke-casting controversy is a non-issue, and Nolan's time-shuffling structure ironically makes the journey feel shorter and less arduous than it should. It also faults Matt Damon for never landing a defining moment that shows Odysseus outwitting the gods, calling the film good but not Nolan's best.

Argues that the US-Iran cease-fire memorandum collapsed because it postponed the core disputes between the two countries rather than resolving them, echoing the same transactional pattern seen in Gaza and the Abraham Accords. Contends that such limited deals only buy time for warring parties to prepare for the next round unless followed by sustained diplomacy addressing the underlying security dilemma.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos model reportedly found a security flaw undetected for 27 years in a firewall operating system, exceeding all but the most skilled human hackers, a capability corroborated by outside companies given early access. The piece warns the US may have only nine to twelve months to shore up critical infrastructure before China develops comparable offensive AI cyber tools, which Beijing could use to threaten infrastructure disruption as leverage over Taiwan.

Argues that Trump's coercive foreign policy toward small and mid-sized states (Panama, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba) reflects a broader collapse of restraints on great-power behavior, and that this erosion hurts weaker states through economic marginalization while also trapping great powers in costly, open-ended interventions.

Contends that China's economic tools for driving growth have quietly broken down: weak domestic demand, a collapsed property sector, and bad debt have made the country dependent on record trade surpluses, while its share of global GDP has fallen from 18.5 percent in 2021 toward roughly 15 percent today. Argues this shift gives the US a rare, possibly decisive strategic opening it isn't fully exploiting.

Traces mobile refrigeration from Frederick McKinley Jones's 1938 invention through its wartime adoption to supply troops, to its role today moving nearly $3 trillion in perishable goods annually, as an example of a military-born technology reshaping civilian logistics.

Uses the diaries of a Russian engineering officer's wife to reconstruct the Baltic Fleet's disastrous seven-month voyage to the 1905 Battle of Tsushima, identifying political meddling, poor training, weak material readiness, neglect of sailor welfare, and fatalism as the warning signs of a fleet unfit for battle.

Reports on a March 2025 Chinese military journal article proposing 'all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare,' a plan to seize Taipei by cutting off outside help, breaking its operational systems, and collapsing the population's cognitive will to fight, and argues it reveals how China's 'national total war' doctrine is shaping actual Taiwan invasion planning beyond the kinetic scenarios most US wargames focus on.

Newsletter editor Lenny shares excerpts from DJ DiDonna's book Big Time Off, describing how his own three-month sabbatical from Airbnb led him to leave his job and eventually launch his newsletter, and makes the case for extended time away as a catalyst for major life and career shifts.

Dianne Penn, Anthropic's first technical PM and now Head of Product for its Research and Labs teams, talks about the company's early days, how Claude got good at coding, the eval-driven development loop her team built, and where human judgment still matters most.

Walks through five real workflows using browser and computer use in OpenAI's Codex desktop app, including QA-testing an onboarding flow, running persona-based friction tests, clearing a LinkedIn inbox, shopping online, and controlling an iPhone via Mac mirroring, plus the case for under-prompting frontier models.

Claire walks through using Codex's browser and computer use to QA an onboarding flow, test products as specific personas, manage LinkedIn messages, and even control an iPhone remotely, arguing that giving models room to decide their own approach often beats scripted test lists.

New genome sequencing of 450 rumen ciliates has uncovered a previously unknown organelle, dubbed the hydrogenobody, that produces hydrogen gas later converted to methane by rumen methanogens, revealing a biochemical target beyond methanogens themselves for cutting livestock methane emissions, which drive roughly 30% of the warming from the last 150 years.

Recounts mathematician Hong Wang's fraught experience proving, with collaborator Joshua Zahl, a 127-page resolution to a long-standing conjecture bridging several branches of mathematics, describing the months of anxious verification and peer review before the result was confirmed.

Profiles Fields Medal winner Jacob Tsimerman, whose career in number theory and algebraic geometry was driven less by an appreciation for mathematical beauty than by a competitive urge to solve hard problems first, and who admits to deliberately suppressing his obsession with winning the prize until the final eligible cycle.

Surveys extremophiles, the microbes and other organisms that survive brine, subzero cold, heavy metals, radiation, and even the vacuum of space, and explains why their biochemistry matters for industry, pollution cleanup, and molecular biology tools. Studying them also helps scientists reconstruct the harsh conditions under which life first arose on Earth and imagine what life elsewhere in the universe might look like.

Peter Attia traces how curiosity-driven basic science, glowing jellyfish, fungal metabolites, snake and Gila monster venom, hot-spring bacteria, and salt-flat microbes, led to GFP, statins, ACE inhibitors, PCR, CRISPR, and GLP-1 drugs, making the case that undirected research remains essential to future medical breakthroughs.

Peter Attia interviews neuroscientist Tommy Wood on exercise, diet, and specific compounds that speed skill acquisition and protect memory, drawing on trials covering HIIT, multidomain lifestyle interventions like FINGER and POINTER, cognitive training, and diets such as MIND and Mediterranean for reducing dementia risk.