Diary: agentic stuff and other things

[mishka_discord]

1. It's difficult to maintain posting frequency. But now there is clearly enough material for a diary entry.

2. berggruen.org/essay-competition-open expects the decision in mid-December on their essay competition on the topic of consciousness (I have submitted a text which I am going to publish after they announce the decision).

3. In connection with HyperstitionAI (and, potentially, writing or generating texts on AI going well), there is now this interview created 2 years ago: www.lesswrong.com/posts/smJGKKrEejdg43mmi/utopiography-interview

>It serves people well to mostly build towards a good future rather than getting distracted by the shape of utopia, but having a vision of where we want to go can be helpful for both motivation and as a north star for guiding our efforts.

The video description references slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/

4. In connection with AI agentic coding and the new release of OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas AI browser.

4.1. First of all, security and privacy problems are formidable. It's not too difficult to install Codex CLI, I've done it easily with help from ChatGPT, but it's kind of scary to use in a naked fashion (and also annoying to click through all the confirmations). Simon Willison seems to advocate a good sandbox like Docker and --dangerously-skip-permissions

simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/living-dangerously-with-claude/ 

I am still hanging at the entrance to this pathway, reading what other people are doing, thinking about projects I want to try with this new mode, but not proceeding yet.

4.2. AI browsers are super-seductive and super-dangerous because of prompt injection. I am not sure what to do about that.

See, for example, simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/21/unseeable-prompt-injections/

In any case, luckily, I don't have the right hardware handy and so I will naturally follow Simon's advice from simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/21/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

>The security and privacy risks involved here still feel insurmountably high to me - I certainly won't be trusting any of these products until a bunch of security researchers have given them a very thorough beating.
>
>I'd like to see a deep explanation of the steps Atlas takes to avoid prompt injection attacks. Right now it looks like the main defense is expecting the user to carefully watch what agent mode is doing at all times!

But they are super-seductive (just watch the livestream, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UWKxJbjriY). As Aidan McLaughlin notes, x.com/aidan_mclau/status/1980690755057598496

>my quick two cents on the browser:
>
>i didn't use codex that much when it was cloud-only.
>but when it came to my CLI, it became super useful
>
>i didn't use agent that much when it was cloud-only.
>but now it's come to my browser...

4.3. OpenAI is very aggressive with recent introduction of ChatGPT Apps and Apps SDK during their recent OpenAI DevDay 2025 opening keynote with Sam Altman, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS1YqcewH0c, with pushing agents really hard, and now with this AI browser, ChatGPT Atlas, which does have an "agent mode".

If OpenAI were already silently taken over by an internal AI instructing them how to maximally insert it into the overall society, they could not have moved more aggressively. Of course, they all talk to their AIs a lot, and discuss with them how to proceed, so the boundary between AIs merely being influential and AIs being fully in charge is fuzzy and is moving gradually.

5. It turns out I have not looked at  Alex Mordvintsev's Twitter for a while. It's so good, beautiful neural cellular automata and other cool things, I should make a separate post reviewing various things from it: x.com/zzznah