Ian Reppel

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LLMs vs Jev: Fallible, With or Without Extra Text

The Last Man on Earth ends with the last man revealed as the monster. I put three dilemmas inspired by it to TypeSafe’s Jev and five frontier models.

20 Sep 2026

ML Before AI

You’re not a urologist just because you took a squirt without hitting your slippers in the morning.

19 Sep 2026

[citation invented]

Citations are the industry’s answer to a question nobody asked: whether a claim can be checked by someone willing to put in the effort. Unfortunately, ain’t nobody got no time for that shit.

19 Sep 2026

What Suffering Is Made Of

The question is not “Can they reason?” nor “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?”

13 Sep 2026

To Strain at a Gnat

Anthropic is not sure whether Claude can suffer. Meanwhile the industry is making sure we do, by automating away the work worth doing and leaving the drudgery.

10 Sep 2026

The Last Vendor

Open weights got close enough to the frontier that the vendor stopped mattering.

01 Sep 2026

The Hamster Did My Homework

Did you craft this document through careful back-and-forth with an AI assistant, or did Claude write it while you were taking a dump?

30 Aug 2026

Listening to the Talking Planet

Off the coast of Dominica, the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) is feeding thousands of sperm whale codas into the same kind of large language models (LLMs) that power human chatbots.

25 Jul 2026

The Cassandra Tax

Cassandra saw Troy burning before the first torch was even lit. She was ignored, silenced, and murdered, and the city burned anyway.

11 Jul 2026

Why Effective Altruism Ignores Latin America

GiveWell has directed $2.3 billion in grants since 2014, of which Latin America received 0.02 cents per dollar. Yet 220 million people in the region live in or near poverty.

10 Jul 2026

How Successful Companies Go Blind

The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.

09 Jul 2026

The Emperor's New Xerox

Imitation has become the sincerest form of strategy.

08 Jul 2026