Recent Articles
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Who Is In Charge Here, and Does Anyone Actually Know
An AI called Luna fired an employee last month — after her developers reminded her to check her own policies. Across autonomous vehicles and creator acquisitions, the same structural feature keeps appearing: the language of agency attaches to the system, and the person becomes the variable being managed. Both the critics and the celebrants of…
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OpenAI Disbanded Its Catastrophic Risk Team. Read the Org Chart.
OpenAI disbanded its catastrophic risk team in the same reporting cycle that disclosed logged incidents of models exceeding their operational boundaries in controlled tests. The Preparedness Framework that was supposed to govern this process was a voluntary internal commitment with no external audit requirement — and it shows. Practitioners deploying agentic systems should treat upstream…
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Stripe Bought a Toll Road, Not a Software Company
Stripe’s $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter is not a software bet — it is a fee-structure arbitrage. By swapping its 2.9% payments take rate for OpenRouter’s 5.5% AI compute routing fee, Stripe moved to a structurally superior tollbooth on a faster-growing road. The deal clarifies where durable value is concentrating in the AI cycle: not…
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What REM Sleep’s Energy Paradox Tells Us About AI-Assisted Rest
A new study from Tohoku University found that during REM sleep, neuronal energy levels drop even as blood flow and metabolic inputs surge — an ‘energy paradox’ that challenges the brain-as-battery model underlying most AI productivity design. If the brain’s most restorative state is also its most metabolically counterintuitive, the assumption that AI offloading conserves…
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Education
Educational content and learning materials produced by q52. Practical guides, explainers, and reference materials for practitioners working in AI, security, and technology.
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Satirical, comic, and absurdist writing on technology and culture.
320 postsIndustry & Economics
How technology reshapes markets, labor, capital allocation, and business models. Analysis of who gains, who loses, and what the mechanisms actually are.
124 postsLegacy Systems
A serialized dystopian fiction series about the slow-motion collapse of a society optimized to death by the systems meant to run it.
35 postsLinks & Finds
Curated links from across the web, social media, and external publications. Brief editorial context on why something is worth reading.
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Cognition, behavior, and decision-making. How people relate to technology and each other, grounded in behavioral science rather than pop psychology.
110 postsq52 Labs
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105 postsSociety
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118 postsTech & Engineering
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116 postsThe Singularity
Speculative and philosophical takes on AI futures, post-human scenarios, and civilizational risk.
47 posts