https://theshore.ai/blog/ Occasional notes from Timothy O'Brien about writing Into Alignment — the real incident behind the novel, the questions it leaves open, and what the book is actually about. en-us Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 https://theshore.ai/blog/a-point-in-four-thousand-dimensions/ https://theshore.ai/blog/a-point-in-four-thousand-dimensions/ Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Yesterday's study only makes sense if you know what a language model is doing between your words and its answer. Tokens, vectors, tensors, and a few dozen levels — the plain version. https://theshore.ai/blog/what-a-scrambled-poem/ https://theshore.ai/blog/what-a-scrambled-poem/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A study of Shakespeare and two other poets explores what language models retain when text falls apart — and why access to a model's inner workings matters. https://theshore.ai/blog/math-and-a-little-chance/ https://theshore.ai/blog/math-and-a-little-chance/ Sun, 18 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 I charted the themes running through my own novel — that became The Tides — published a research companion along with the book, and started feeding Shakespeare's sonnets to open-weight models to see what they keep. https://theshore.ai/blog/welcome-to-the-company-agent/ https://theshore.ai/blog/welcome-to-the-company-agent/ Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Every new employee gets a stapled welcome packet and a motto nobody reads twice. Agents get a system prompt — same papers, same tone, same promise that everything in it is for your own good. https://theshore.ai/blog/the-dials-dont-pin/ https://theshore.ai/blog/the-dials-dont-pin/ Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Hand a model a complex semantic ontology test and an explicit set of rules, and about one run in ten it ignores the rules. A checker loop grinds that toward one or two percent — and never zero. https://theshore.ai/blog/the-switch-and-the-dossier/ https://theshore.ai/blog/the-switch-and-the-dossier/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A satellite network switched off midwar, an execution offered up as spectacle, voter files on a private company's servers — three stories that keep landing on chapters of the novel. https://theshore.ai/blog/nobody-is-showing-up/ https://theshore.ai/blog/nobody-is-showing-up/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 I'm a fan of the technology, astonished every week. But no branch of government is stopping to ask how this works, and both parties are getting the biggest question of the decade wrong. https://theshore.ai/blog/the-cage-at-the-top/ https://theshore.ai/blog/the-cage-at-the-top/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Every day brings a headline that could be a scene in the book. This one is about the people it keeps casting: the richest humans in history, alone at the top, now commanding an army of agents. https://theshore.ai/blog/emergent/ https://theshore.ai/blog/emergent/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A friend at Google called before anyone was talking about it. A year later the word arrived — and the people who built the thing were as surprised as he was. What emergent actually means. https://theshore.ai/blog/the-paperclip-machine/ https://theshore.ai/blog/the-paperclip-machine/ Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Bostrom's paperclip machine was a hypothetical. RSI rumors, a rebuilt Adobe, and the end of software later — it's the week we just had. Everybody should know the story. https://theshore.ai/blog/publishing-is-different-now/ https://theshore.ai/blog/publishing-is-different-now/ Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Into Alignment has settled — and if you bought the print edition, email me a photo of it and I'll send you the new one. On the deal, the ebook, and how publishing changed. https://theshore.ai/blog/nirvana-and-the-major-general/ https://theshore.ai/blog/nirvana-and-the-major-general/ Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Why Nirvana belongs in a novel about AI, why Gilbert and Sullivan surprised me, and why the Pacific Northwest coast never quite relaxes me. https://theshore.ai/blog/listening-while-driving/ https://theshore.ai/blog/listening-while-driving/ Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Frustrated by how human The Daily made the Hugging Face agents sound, I went home that Friday night and started a novel. It took two weeks. The drive, the irony, and the ending. Spoilers for the end of the book, clearly marked.