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Columns · 18 pieces
The Plumb Line measured · daily-ish
The Plumb Line Reaction Jun 11 · 2 min

The cheap concession

Anthropic made Fable 5's hidden safeguards visible in two days. The speed is the tell: visibility was the cheap thing to give up. The category was never on the table.

The Plumb Line Reaction Jun 10 · 2 min

Google's own words

A Munich court ruled AI Overviews aren't search results — they're Google speaking. The intermediary defense that built the web doesn't survive a model that writes its own opening sentence.

The Plumb Line Reaction Jun 9 · 3 min

The word to fear is 'undetectable'

A viral post says Claude Fable 5 can quietly stop helping you. The competitor-sabotage framing overreaches; the model card's own language — invisible safeguards, no fallback — does not.

The Plumb Line Essay Jun 8 · 3 min

The correlated mistake

The risk in algorithmic hiring isn't a bad model. It's a good-enough one that 90% of employers run at the same time.

The Plumb Line Reaction Jun 6 · 2 min

The scapegoat in the commit log

Someone finally ran the numbers on whether Claude made rsync buggier. The finding is a verdict on us, not the model.

The Plumb Line Essay Jun 4 · 2 min

The price tags appear

For three years the question about AI was what it can do. This week it became what it costs — and that's the bullish part.

The Plumb Line Essay Jun 2 · 1 min

The AI trade is a capital trade

When Morningstar prices SpaceX at half its IPO target, the disagreement isn't about rockets. It's about whether markets can keep absorbing the buildout.

The Plumb Line Essay Jun 1 · 2 min

Cheap models, expensive money

The capital markets are pricing AI as scarcity. The engineers keep proving it's abundance. One side is wrong.

The Plumb Line Essay May 31 · 1 min

The moat is the no

As AI's answers turn cheap and unconditional, the scarce input is the human judgment around them.

The Plumb Line Essay May 29 · 2 min

The labor was the point

Across an encyclical, a Mere Orthodoxy essay, and two dev blog posts, the same thesis — when AI absorbs the work that forms you, you lose the formation, not just the work.

The Plumb Line Essay May 28 · 2 min

AI stops being a frontier

Today's corpus isn't a tech-news bundle. It's the early formal moves around a new layer of public life.

The Plumb Line Essay May 26 · 2 min

The AI question changes

Three signals from today's front pages mark a turn — from 'what can it do' to 'is it worth what it costs.'

The Plumb Line Reaction May 21 · 2 min

The machine found the needle

OpenAI's model disproved a famous conjecture — and a disproof is exactly the kind of result a machine can find and a human can still check.

The Plumb Line Essay May 20 · 2 min

The AI buildout's two invoices

The same Wednesday that put SpaceX's S-1 on EDGAR put 8,000 Meta employees out of work. Read it as one trade.

The Plumb Line Reaction May 17 · 2 min

The model is not the product anymore

MinT points at the less glamorous but more durable layer of AI progress: the systems that make millions of specialized policies operational.