A couple of subscribers have asked if I'd consider occasionally (or regularly) including articles in languages other than English. That's not going to happen. Why? I'm more of a poly-not than a polyglot. Despite trying, I've never been able to learn a (what's to me) foreign language to a level at which I could read general interest newspaper or magazine articles. So, while I could randomly grab a non-English article or essay off the web, I wouldn't know whether or not it was any good.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil — Welcome to the world of emergent misalignment, a chilling side effect of feeding AI models prompts and data that causes them to spit out the unexpected.

From the article:

The researchers who used bad medical or financial advice found that their small datasets resulted in models that were significantly more misaligned than the original one based on insecure code. Their models produced malicious answers 40% of the time, compared to the original 5.9%, and were more coherent.

Corporations Want to Prevent Workers From Leaving Their Jobs — If there wasn't enough to hate about big corporations, now more than a few are adopting new twist on the idea of the company store and saddling employees with debts that they can probably never repay. An underhanded tactic that shows how little power labour has nowadays.

From the article:

By blocking workers from seeking better jobs elsewhere, these agreements are weaponized to drive down wages, limit bargaining power, and lock workers into unsafe working conditions or abusive workplace environments. Constraining worker mobility can even restrict economic growth and hamper new businesses looking to attract a workforce with potentially better pay

The rewards of ruin — There's a perception that when an empire crumbles, the result is widespread desolation, mass displacement, and the average person being forced into poverty and hunger. As it turns out, that's not always the case.

From the article:

There are various reasons why collapse could benefit human welfare. States often demanded tax in the form of grain. Without tax collectors passing by, people often had more to eat. More than that, without the pressure to grow tax crops, they often diversified their diet to include more animal protein, which beget stronger bones. A flight away from cities towards rural areas also meant less circulation of infectious disease.

From East India Company to Big Tech: Why corporations keep seeking colonies — Some things never change, like voracious and profit-hungry companies trying to find new markets to exploit. Nowadays, they can do that from the comfort of Silicon Valley (or elsewhere) but still with near impunity.

From the article:

Strip away the digital veneer, and the model looks strikingly familiar: paying cloud rent in the online world is similar to paying taxes in the offline one. As the real economy shifts to digital, it could be a case of corporations building empires for their states, or states enabling corporations to build empires of their own.