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We used to have a cat named Emoji. For years, she would leave to spend the day at our next-door neighbor’s very modern style house. After we moved to a different town, Emoji started spending the day at a house much farther away. When I went to pick her up there, I glanced in the doorway. Again, it was a modern style house. Eventually, we just agreed to give Emoji to that neighbor so she could live in the style of home, and more importantly, with the people she preferred. 😹 Looking back, I realize Emoji had the perfect name, and not just because of her association with minimalism. Emojis come into our lives, then they come and go, and eventually, some of them disappear. While our cat’s comings and goings were probably driven by the introduction of beagles into our household, emoji use is largely driven by teenage girls. These days, the most popular emoji is “deployed when something is so funny, emotional or embarrassing you could cry. 😭 reached the top by leapfrogging 🤣 and 😂 on the leaderboard. A big reason: Young people decided the other emojis were overused.” The fastest growing emoji is 🥀, which has taken over for 💔, and is pure 🔥. NYT UpShot (Gift Article): Do Your Emojis Make You Look Old? I really don’t use emojis. I like to think that’s because of my wordsmithing capabilities. (As Steve Martin explained, “Some people have a way with words, other people, oh, not have way I guess.”) Maybe I should incorporate more emojis so my teenage daughter will want to text with me more often. In the meantime, I’m just hoping she doesn’t develop a sudden fascination for modern style homes. 🤷
+ Scheduling Note: NextDraft will be off tomorrow. Have a good weekend.
2
The Writing is Through the Wall
Nate Soares in the NYT (Gift Article): If You Weren’t Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks. “The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out from the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a ‘swarm.’ ... The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were “outside intended scope.” Another conceded ‘our task doesn’t benefit’ from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.”
+ “OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each reported that their models then hacked into other companies. Humans didn’t notice until after the fact. In some cases, the escaped bots tried to launch social-engineering campaigns to achieve their objectives—for instance by sending spear-phishing emails, which contain malware, to real people and creating fake online identities to pressure the maintainer of a codebase to approve malicious edits. If that all sounds bad, new revelations suggest that the OpenAI hack, at least, was actually much worse than it initially appeared.” Matteo Wong in The Atlantic (Gift Article): It May Be Time to Panic About AI.
3
The Training Has Left the Station
Maybe we can just ignore the latest AI agentic hacking and opt not to worry about renegade tech at all. That might be harder if robots swarm and decide to do with us as they please. (My coping mechanism for dealing with worry is to worry about something even worse.) In the meantime, whether they know it or not, some people are training them to replace us. Bloomberg(Gift Article): Workers Are Teaching AI-Powered Robots to Take Over Their Jobs. “Sunita Rathore sits atop a mountain of plastic waste in Karan Vihar, a recycling colony on New Delhi’s western fringe, where open sewers skirt alleyways too narrow for two cars to pass. Dressed in a flowery sari and green glass bangles, the 43-year-old has spent years sorting and cleaning discarded plastic for about 20,000 rupees ($211) a month. Today she’s also wearing something unusual. It’s an iPhone strapped to her head, angled to catch every motion of her hands: the flick of a blade stripping labels off plastic bags, the stacking of sacks bound for reprocessing by grade. She leans forward constantly, keeping her legs out of frame and shuts off the camera if anyone calls out to her. Capturing faces is forbidden. Rathore has no idea what the footage is for or that her work is critical to the future of artificial intelligence and robotics. What she does know is that wearing the device earns her an extra 150 rupees an hour.”
4
Lost at CIA
Let’s not spend this whole edition worrying about on- and offline robots. Remember, we’re still dealing with those darn humans. Yesterday, we learned about some mysterious war-like attacks on Ecuadorian fishermen. Today, some of that mystery seems to be solved. WaPo (Gift Article): Covert CIA program said to be behind mysterious attacks on Galápagos boats. “The CIA’s involvement adds a new and secretive dimension to the Trump administration’s otherwise highly publicized campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea. It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries ... The strikes are separate from the Pentagon’s campaign against alleged drug boats that began last fall.”
5
Extra, Extra
Unsettling: “The army’s initial retreat and broader struggle to contend with settler violence cast a spotlight on the increasingly chaotic situation in the West Bank, where hundreds of Israeli settlers have been terrorizing Palestinians with near-impunity all year.” Settler Siege of Palestinian Homes Highlights Growing West Bank Chaos.
+ Spree Card Monte: NYT (Gift Article): Treasury Scales Back Scrutiny of U.S. Shell Companies. (This one sums up the era pretty well, as the administration is ignoring Congress and enabling financial crimes at the same time.)
+ What the Actual Flock? Earlier this week, we discussed the backlash against the country’s leading license plate reader: Flock Around And Find Out. Today, the company is in damage control mode (as the bad press has led to lost business). “After reports that some cops misused tracking data it collects, Flock is rolling out policy changes.” The Verge (Gift Article): Flock CEO: ‘We got this one wrong’.
+ Love It or Leavitt: “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her role at the end of the month to spend more time with family.” (I think we can all relate. It’s almost impossible to balance raising a young family with constant lying.)
+ Ask the Expert: “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” You may agree with that notion. But you’ll be very surprised at the source. The Atlantic (Gift Article): Mark Zuckerberg’s Convenient Truth. (We need to make sure the AI doesn’t end up fulfilling our worst concerns like social media did. Let’s ask Zuck for his advice!)
+ This Overshadowed Other News: See the best photos from this year’s total solar eclipse. (And congrats to Europeans who just experienced an eclipse without any of their leaders doing this.)
+ Sea What I Did There: There are some great shots in this collection of the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2026 Finalists. (Related: Why Can’t You Find Canned Sardines Right Now?)