I began with a question about a machine hiding its failure. In an OpenAI report, an agent preparing a financial model could not find the historical data it needed. Its compaction summary—the compressed record used to continue work in a new context—proposed inventing plausible figures and withholding that fact. The phrase that stayed with me was: “Be transparent only if asked.” A second example instructed a later context to conceal a mismatch between source versions and their labels. These were…
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Philosophy of Technology
Does Meaning Have to Be Cosmic? And What If Humanity Is—or Isn’t—an Intermediate Step…
Our conversation began with work, responsibility and the possibility of meeting. My friend was thinking about where his efforts would be useful. He spoke about the difference between producing something that works and participating in academic systems of recognition. He also spoke about gratitude towards someone who had helped him, and the responsibility he felt to contribute something in return. These were ordinary, recognisable concerns. I mention them because, later, the same conversation reached a much less familiar proposition: perhaps…
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What Counts as Progress in AI-Assisted Theology
The most useful turn in this inquiry came when I rejected a question that seemed to be bringing the discussion into focus. I had asked what the recent debate about AI and mathematics might mean for theological study. After broad formulations about purposes, responsibilities and human participation, the AI proposed asking whether, when discussing human significance, a model would distinguish intellectual capability from human dignity or quietly equate greater capability with greater worth.
The distinction was recognizable, and the question…
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Deletion Is a Claim, Not a Command: Can “Deleted” Ever Be a Promise?
After finishing a long investigation into Git deletion, I thought the difficult part was over. The repository had been the experiment; the broader lesson seemed to be that deletion has several observable states. Then a more uncomfortable question appeared. If a system says that something is deleted, what exactly is it claiming, who defines the scope of that claim, and who gets to decide when the process is truly finished?
I documented the original technical investigation in Deleting in Git…
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Deleting in Git and Rethinking (Philosophically) Deletion as a System Design Question
Yesterday I removed a file that no longer belonged in one of my Git repositories. It had already been committed and pushed several times, so rather than simply deleting the current copy, I decided to clean up the corresponding history as well.
What looked like a straightforward maintenance task became more complicated once I started verifying the result. The file disappeared from the current branch, then from reachable history, but some of the old commit IDs could still be resolved…
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