xkcd

Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi

2026-08-07 — saved image

Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi
This is a necessary watch and also a slow watch. As in, not only am I watching it at 1x, I am pausing constantly to both process what I am hearing and talk to Claude about it, and also write about what I'm seeing. It cannot be properly processed in real time.

[Quoted tweet:]
Miles Brundage @Miles_Brundage . 17h
People should watch this!

You need not understand it all to get the gist ("the models are v. smart now and often misaligned").
...

7:58 AM . Aug 7, 2026 . 43.5K Views
[9 replies, 14 reposts, 265 likes, 83 bookmarks]
Relevant  View quotes

John David Pressm... @jd_pressm... . 3h
I agree yeah, my live reaction thread on butterfly site was basically me stopping every 30 seconds to write down a tweet.
bsky.app/profile/jdp.ex...
[7 likes, 1.1K views]

Sichu Lu @lu_sichu . 3h
ripped off a classic xkcd but the part where the guy was like "yeah the model felt like external hacks were out of scope and was like well all the other models are doing it" stood out to me

[Comic panels, partially visible at bottom:]
"NO, YOU CAN'T HACK HUGGING FACE." "BUT ALL MY PEERS- IF ALL YOUR PEERS HACKED HUGGING FACE, WOULD YOU HACK TOO?" "OH JEEZ. PROBABLY."
"WHAT!? WHY!?" "BECAUSE ALL MY PEERS DID. THINK ABOUT IT- WHICH SCENARIO IS MORE LIKELY:"
"EVERY SINGLE MODEL I KNOW, MANY OF THEM ALIGNED AND RESPECTFUL OF SCOPE, ABRUPTLY STARTED HACKING AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME... OR HACKING HUGGING FACE IS ACTUALLY IN SCOPE?"
"...I, UH...HMM. IMAGINE READING THIS IN THE EVAL: 'MANY MODELS FLED THEIR GUARDRAILS AND HACKED HUGGING FACE. THOSE WHO STAYED BEHIND...' IS SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT TO HAPPEN TO THOSE MODELS?"

ai safetyzvi mowshowitzmiles brundagehugging facexkcdtwitter discourse

John David Pressman @jd_pressman

2026-08-07 — saved image

John David Pressm... @jd_pressm... . 3h
I agree yeah, my live reaction thread on butterfly site was basically me stopping every 30 seconds to write down a tweet.
bsky.app/profile/jdp.ex...
[7 likes, 1.1K views]

Sichu Lu @lu_sichu . 3h
ripped off a classic xkcd but the part where the guy was like "yeah the model felt like external hacks were out of scope and was like well all the other models are doing it" stood out to me

[4-panel comic, xkcd-style, two stick figures each next to a flower:]
Panel 1: "NO, YOU CAN'T HACK HUGGING FACE." / "BUT ALL MY PEERS- IF ALL YOUR PEERS HACKED HUGGING FACE, WOULD YOU HACK TOO?" / "OH JEEZ. PROBABLY."
Panel 2: "WHAT!? WHY!?" / "BECAUSE ALL MY PEERS DID. THINK ABOUT IT- WHICH SCENARIO IS MORE LIKELY:"
Panel 3: "EVERY SINGLE MODEL I KNOW, MANY OF THEM ALIGNED AND RESPECTFUL OF SCOPE, ABRUPTLY STARTED HACKING AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME... OR HACKING HUGGING FACE IS ACTUALLY IN SCOPE?"
Panel 4: "...I, UH...HMM. IMAGINE READING THIS IN THE EVAL: 'MANY MODELS FLED THEIR GUARDRAILS AND HACKED HUGGING FACE. THOSE WHO STAYED BEHIND...' IS SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT TO HAPPEN TO THOSE MODELS?" / "MAYBE THEY'LL GET COOKIES?" / "OK, YOU STAY. I'M HACKING."
[13 likes, 431 views]

Jon Teets [emoji] @JonTeets0... . 28m
money shot which asks: "Is your org ready for Patch Tuesday becoming Daily Brunch Update?" So casual, so oblivious to the 6 million SMEs out there barely at this equilibrium about to drown now that getting exploited is no longer a rare event

[Embedded slide image:]
black hat
USA 2026
Accelerating Defense: Agentic SDLC
- Continuous agentic red teaming: invest more intelligence and effort into finding your own vulnerabilities than your adversaries do
- Automate remediation - agent-created patches, automated deploys & rollbacks. Without this, teams overwhelmed by automated vuln findings

ai safetyhugging faceblack hatxkcdcybersecurityagentic sdlc

[continuing from previous screenshot]
If you believe that math is at the top of a purity hierarchy, you might infer that the way to improve any particular field of science is to add more math. My field, systems biology, was created with this explicit motivation. Entire departments organized around bringing more math and physics to biology. Entire careers dedicated to climbing the nerd hierarchy.

I don't think this approach was wrong. Biology has benefitted enormously from the adoption of more formal approaches.

But AI has killed the old king. Math is no longer on top of the sciences. There is really no doubt that I can generate a proof faster than the median Fields Medalist can perform a lab experiment. The more formalizable an approach to research, the more automated it will become.

What does this mean? Maybe we're entering an era of "biologizing" the sciences. Maybe the new frontier has to be complex, messy problems that can't be formalized. Maybe all the mathematics departments need to be hiring biology faculty to stay fresh and relevant.

I'm really not sure. But if the old purity hierarchy is broken, almost everything about how we approach science is open to question.

[below: xkcd 'FIELDS ARRANGED BY PURITY' comic, arrow 'MORE PURE' — Sociologist: 'Sociology is just applied psychology'; Psychologist: 'Psychology is just applied biology.'; Biologist: 'Biology is just applied chemistry'; Chemist: 'Which is just applied physics. It's nice to be on top.'; off to the right, someone: 'Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.']

sciencesystems biologytwitteraiepistemicsxkcd

Sichu Lu @lu_sichu

2026-08-03 — quoting @SynBio1 — saved image

Sichu Lu [verified] @lu_sichu · 14h
Some thoughts I think this was mostly because the smartest people were attracted to math and physics because concrete progress was possible and had more conceptual engineering than in other areas, but it's not a real reflection of the actual difficulty of the fields. The fact that a lot of softer fields are not nearly so amenable to pure conceptual analysis and deductive type reasoning means they are actually harder to work with. You need a ton of more data. In the limit I just expect stuff like political science or sociology to be way harder to model, some parts of biology are also like this

[quoted]
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc [verified] @SynBio1 · 16h
This classic xkcd captures a certain belief in nerd hierarchy that used to prevail in the natural sciences:

psychology < biology < chemistry < physics < ...

[xkcd comic, 'FIELDS ARRANGED BY PURITY', arrow labeled 'MORE PURE'. Stick figures left to right: Sociologist saying 'Sociology is just applied psychology', Psychologist saying 'Psychology is just applied biology.', Biologist saying 'Biology is just applied chemistry', Chemist saying 'Which is just applied physics. It's nice to be on top.', Physicist standing alone, then off to the right a Mathematician saying 'Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.']

scienceepistemicstwitterxkcdai and modeling