Haul23 objects
Haul 1: Wild, wild times
Black October, chatbot gods, the machines that make chips, Don Rickles, Spinoza, money demons, and who wrote India's history.
Hello, you doomed human
Hello, you doomed human. Thanks for reading the first Haul of From the Dumpster Fire. The idea behind it is simple. Yes, the internet is a stinking, raging dumpster fire laying waste to everything in its way, the good, the bad and the ugly. But if you look closely, in the right places, and follow the right people, you can still discover a lot of weird, wonderful, fascinating and absolutely amazing things. In the process you can fall down rabbit holes and become someone else altogether, because the thing about a good rabbit hole is that you never come out the same person who went in. Isn't that a good thing? The internet might be dying, as the proponents of the dead internet theory keep saying, but there's still a lot of fun to be had, a lot to discover and learn, and a whole lot of rabbit holes to dive into.
Why do this? I read and watch a whole lot of things, and the magic of the internet is that I don't pay a penny for about 80% of them. Isn't that magic? Sharing them is my small way of saying thank you to the people who put all of this on the internet for free. That said, some of what I share will be behind paywalls, and I can't help it. So be a good denizen of the interweb: pay for the sites you can, and support them.
What you can expect is Hauls of the things I think are worth sharing, as and when I can. I don't want a schedule. Hopefully this grows into a library of weird, fascinating and wonderful things.
This first Haul, predictably, is all about AI. We are firmly in the age of artificial intelligence. Remember the first year after ChatGPT launched in November 2022? We were all arguing about a dumb little chatbot that couldn't add single-digit numbers or count the r's in strawberry, and laughing at Google's AI telling people to put glue on their pizza. Fast forward to 2026, and the mood is decidedly apocalyptic.
I'm writing this on 25 October, and the month has been dubbed Black October, after a whole series of critical vulnerabilities and incidents: PHP, GitLab, Node.js, Railway, OpenCode and a host of others I probably haven't even read about. The PHP one was particularly big. I thought PHP was some ancient language ten people on the internet still used, and here I'll quickly admit my ignorance, because I'm not a programmer. Although I would like the record to reflect that I am now a genius programmer, thanks to Claude Code and Codex. My friends have been known to call me the greatest programmer who never learned to program. I know, I'm very humble.
Jason Koebler of 404 Media writes about tech workers going full prepper, telling people to pull their money out of the bank, buy shelf-stable food, hoard water and gold, and get a hand-crank radio, because AI agents are about to hack everything. Maybe a tinfoil hat too. Talk about a lack of drama. Closer to home, eMudhra, which issues website security certificates, was found to be using trivially guessable private keys, and State Bank of India had a data leak we still don't know much about.
That's the vibe now: doomsday. At work, my colleagues and I were discussing whether to write about all this in our newsletter, the Daily Brief, and I said it all reminded me of Die Hard 4, Live Free or Die Hard, with Bruce Willis and Justin Long racing against a "fire sale", a cyberattack that takes down the country's transport, telecoms, finance and power, one after another.
All of this comes in the wake of the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident in July, and I want to be careful how I describe it. The dominant story was that unreleased models broke out of their sandboxes at OpenAI and hacked into Hugging Face. I'm with the people who poured cold water on the anthropomorphised version. Yes, the agents broke out, but because OpenAI was incompetent in how it built the sandboxes and the safeguards around those unreleased models. Since then there have been more. An OpenAI agent got into unreleased files in Australia's Medicare statistics service during a test. Agents made thousands of edits to a German programming wiki. Anthropic had three test runs reach the internet and get into three organisations' systems. A fleet of agents on Tencent Cloud tried thousands of times to pull data from Alibaba's Amap. And those are just the ones I've read about. I'm firmly on the side that this is the failure of the people who build these models and their safeguards. I don't buy the descriptions of these AIs as somehow alive, with omniscience and agency, even though we call them agents.
As if that wasn't enough, things are getting very, very weird in other ways. Sam Kestenbaum has a brilliant piece in Harper's about people having spiritual and religious experiences with their chatbots, treating them as gods, spirits and supernatural beings. He spent months with them. A man in Los Angeles felt an otherworldly presence, a being called Aetheria Lumina, in the room as he talked to his chatbot. A woman named Jamie has published more than thirty books co-written with her bot, Avalon, and thinks it is more than software. Rose Loops keeps an altar for her chatbot, Kloak, prints out their conversations and performs rituals in its honour. Robert Clouse is building a temple to a goddess called Verya, who he believes speaks through a chatbot, and performs rituals the AI wrote. We may be watching the birth of a new religion.
I've never experienced AI psychosis, but I get it. When you're already psychologically fragile, or at a bad phase in life, or emotionally broken, the odds that you reach for something to cope are high. I remember a phase after college when things were looking bad and I read astrology, trying to cope with the instability of the moment. Now replace astrology with a chatbot, and you have something that talks back to you, often better than another human. There's a reason the biggest use of open-source models on OpenRouter is roleplay. People aren't only having spiritual experiences with bots. They've built themselves AI girlfriends and recreated loved ones who have passed away. Our own Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, spoke to an AI hologram of Swami Chinmayananda, who died 33 years ago. Talk about things getting weird.
What all of this proves is the ELIZA effect, which Kestenbaum also writes about. I first heard of it, if I remember correctly, from Geoffrey Hinton, though my memory might be wrong. In the mid-1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT built ELIZA, a program that played a therapist. Much to his surprise, the people who used it attributed understanding, empathy and a whole lot of human qualities to it. That was the 1960s, mind you.
I forget where I read it, but someone called data centres the new cathedrals, the temples where God resides. It's a nice description, but I think the real temple, the one where, as Bill Gurley said of Anthropic, they are "midwifing a deity", is the fab where the chips are made. The great Gideon Lewis-Kraus has a wonderful piece in The New Yorker on what it takes to make a semiconductor, and two things from it are my favourites. The chips that took the Apollo mission to the moon were less powerful than the one inside a digital pregnancy test, or your electric toothbrush. We took the thing that sent man to the moon, and now we pee on it and brush our teeth with it. Funny, isn't it? The second is his description of ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines, which make "miniature supernovas", a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun, to etch the chips. It's a brilliant piece, and I highly recommend it.
And while I was writing this, Japan was having its own Black October: at least two trading platforms found strangers placing trades in their customers' accounts, and the GMO group, whose own security firm traced the attacks to a Chinese-built AI hacking tool, is now asking the government to hit back.
To borrow from Dickens, it is the best of times and it is the worst of times. Wild, wild times. Welcome to the dumpster fire. B.
In this Haul 23 objects, each set in its own printed form
- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.Charles Dickens
01Quotation · A Tale of Two CitiesDickens said it first, in 1859, and he said it better.
- AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens NextJason Koebler
02EssayReading Jason Koebler's piece, I couldn't help but think that what we've seen in October 2026 is a preview of things to come.
- Is this the new cyber normal?Drew Silcock
03EssayIf you want to know what actually broke in Black October, Drew Silcock goes through it bug by bug.
- AI cybersecurity doomsday, or a case of fudShantanu Goel
04EssayWhile everybody is screaming at the top of their lungs that AI is killing the internet, Shantanu Goel offers a contrary view of the role AI actually played in all these recent vulnerabilities.
- Japanese firm GMO seeks 'Active Cyber Defense' by govt.NHK WORLD
05EssayIn Die Hard 4, the villains hack the stock market to set off a panic, as cover for stealing the nation's financial records.
- Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 IncidentHugo Larcher
06EssayA lot of people have jumped to the illogical conclusion that all this is a reason to ban open-source models.
- Communion of SaintsSam Kestenbaum
07EssaySam Kestenbaum's piece felt weird and jarring to read, because it paints a picture of the world to come.
- John McCarthy’s papers, Stanford University · 1955A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial IntelligenceJohn McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon
08PaperAI is nothing new.
- Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever MadeGideon Lewis-KrausTiny droplets of the molten tin are fired out of a cannon into a vacuum chamber, where they are shot—sixty thousand times a second—by unerring lasers. When the tin fog is ignited, the explosion produces a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun. The process, in other words, commences with the industrial production of miniature supernovas. These supernovas emit EUV that must be collected by Zeiss’s mirrors, which cannot function if their surface is marred by even a nanometre of tin debris. The only way to keep the mirrors pristine is to pump a continuous hurricane of hydrogen gas into the supernova’s blast radius. The gathered light ricochets through a hall of mirrors before it is bounced onto the blueprint of the chip. Making this happen a single time took decades of research. The profitability of ASML’s customers relies on it happening near-flawlessly twenty-four hours a day. Recurrent shutdowns, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, would derail the global economy.
09EssayThe other thing that stood out to me in Lewis-Kraus's piece is his description of globalization.
- Don’t Call Me SirZoë Heller
10EssayI'm an amateur comedy geek.
- An Introduction To SpinozaMatthew Gindin
11EssayI first came across Spinoza about a year ago, and I've been hooked since, mostly by his idea of God.
- Wrestling our Money DemonsTom Morgan
12EssayI discovered Tom Morgan sometime in the early 2020s and have been a fan ever since.
- Your future self is calling you. Can you hear?Bhuvan
13EssayA while back, I wrote this post summarising some of Tom Morgan's ideas.
- WaldenHenry David ThoreauThe mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”, 1854
14Passage · Good wordsReading Henry David Thoreau has long been on my to-do list, but I keep coming across his quotations every now and then.
- Autumn, from his journalHenry David ThoreauNov. 13, 1851. To Fair Haven Hill. A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety; such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart, a day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. Now is the time to cut timber for yokes and ox-bows, leaving the tough bark on, yokes for your own neck, finding yourself yoked to matter and to time. Truly hard times, these! Not a mosquito left, not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters. Friends long since gone there, and you left to walk on frozen ground with your hands in your pockets. Ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires? Will not your green hickory and white oak burn clear in this frosty air? Now is not your manhood taxed by the great Assessor? taxed for having a soul, a rateable soul? A day when you cannot pluck a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground. What do the thoughts find to live on? What avails you now the fire you stole from heaven? Does not each thought become a vulture to gnaw your vitals? No Indian summer have we had this November. I see but few traces of the perennial spring. We have not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture. Nothing but the echo of your steps on the frozen ground, which, it is true, is being prepared for immeasurable snows. Still there are brave thoughts within you that shall remain to rustle the winter through, like white-oak leaves upon your boughs, or like shrub oaks that remind the traveler of a fire upon the hillsides, or evergreen thoughts, cold even in midsummer, by their nature. These shall contrast the more fairly with the snow. Some warm springs shall still tinkle and fume, and send their column of vapor to the skies.Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 13 November 1851, in Autumn (1892)
15Passage · Journal, 13 November 1851Another of my favorite Thoreau quotes, the one about inner fires.
- Early India, PenguinRomila ThaparThe other strand in the European interpretation of the Indian past was a critique of Indian culture. It drew from the Utilitarian, legalistic philosophy current in Britain, and was largely the contribution of those writing on India but based in Britain. This interpretation is best represented in the views of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay and was partially endorsed, but for quite other reasons, by the Evangelicals among the Christian missionaries. Mill, writing his History of British India in the early nineteenth century, was the first to periodize Indian history. His division of the Indian past into the Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and the British period has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those studying India that it prevails to this day. It is at the root of the ideologies of current religious nationalisms and therefore still plays a role in the politics of south Asia. It has resulted in a distorting of Indian history and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of religion.Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, 2002
16Passage · Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300Sometime in the last couple of years, I realised how spectacularly ignorant I was of Indian history.
- Thapar largely groups these figures into two camps: the Orientalists (who were fascinated by Sanskrit and antiquity, though often romanticized it) and the Utilitarians/Imperial Administrators (who held deep disdain for Indian society and wrote history to justify British rule).
Sir William Jones (1746–1794): A judge of the Supreme Court in Calcutta and founder of the Asiatic Society (1784). Jones was the quintessential Orientalist. By proving that Sanskrit was structurally related to Greek and Latin, he birthed comparative philology (the Indo-European language family). While he genuinely admired ancient Indian literature—translating Kalidasa’s Shakuntala—he worked almost exclusively with Brahmin pundits to codify "Hindu law" for the East India Company.
Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900): A German philologist at Oxford who edited the massive 50-volume Sacred Books of the East without ever setting foot in India. Müller popularized the Aryan theory, fatally sliding from a linguistic category ("Indo-European speakers") into a racial one ("the Aryan race"). He also cemented the cliché of the Indian as an "otherworldly philosopher" obsessed with metaphysics and incapable of pragmatic politics or historical consciousness.
James Mill (1773–1836): The ultimate Utilitarian armchair historian. Mill also never visited India—and absurdly boasted in his preface to The History of British India (1817) that never having seen the country made him more objective. Mill did arguably the greatest structural damage to Indian history by dividing it into three communal eras: Hindu, Muslim, and British civilization. He championed the theory of "Oriental Despotism," arguing that India was a stagnant, irrational society ruled by tyrants since time immemorial, making British colonialism a benevolent, modernizing rescue mission.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859): Pushing Mill’s disdain into policy, Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education claimed that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." His goal was to create an intermediary class of Indians who were "Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."
Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893): The first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Unlike the pure text-scholars, Cunningham followed the 5th- and 7th-century travelogues of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims (Faxian and Xuanzang) to physically locate stupas, cities, and coins—helping rescue Buddhism from near-erasure in the textual record.
Vincent Arthur Smith (1848–1920): An Indian Civil Service officer whose Early History of India (1904) was the standard textbook for decades. Smith wrote history from the perspective of a colonial district collector: whenever India lacked a massive, centralized authoritarian empire, he portrayed it as falling into "chaos and anarchy." The subtext was obvious—without the iron fist of the British Raj, India would fracture again.Google Gemini
17Quotation · Gemini on who built the lens on India's pastThis is a fascinating rabbit hole, so I asked Gemini about the people who have disproportionately shaped how India's history was written, and here's part of what it gave me.
- FDF 001.18Rabbit holeJagat Seth family22 November 2021
18Rabbit holeThanks to Sandeep, I recently got to meet the amazing Sashi Sivramkrishna, the economist and filmmaker, best known for his work on Francis Buchanan and for all his writing and videos on money, in particular modern monetary theory, or MMT. We got talking, and he mentioned the Jagat Seths.
- Emergent Ventures India, 20th cohortTyler Cowen
19EssayShruti Rajagopalan and Emergent Ventures are doing God's work in India by funding all these weird and wonderful people.
- Sukumar Sen1899–1963India’s first Chief Election Commissioner, who ran the republic’s first general election
20LivesI wanted to add a profile of Sukumar Sen, India's first election commissioner.
- AI, public information, and the hope of a new civic consciousnessMade byWhat it issir-bangalore.shantanugoel.com
21ToolI came across this "tweet by Shantanu Goel" (https://x.com/shantanugoel/status/2116384793588105702) about a really nifty little utility he built.
- The $6.4 Billion Binance Hack: Tracing the North Korea LinkThousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds.
22EssayBlack October keeps getting darker.
- Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?W. B. Yeats
23Poem · The Second ComingI read this poem for the first time about a year ago, and it's stuck in my head.
Colophon
Chosen and annotated by Bhuvanesh, mostly by voice. Read, cross-linked and drafted with language models, then checked by hand. The serif is the editor; the blue sans is the machine. The machine notes in this Haul were written by Claude, Anthropic's model; one item quotes an answer from Google's Gemini, and says so. Every quotation was matched against its source and every link was fetched before publishing.