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The Moving Bottleneck: What Actually Limits AI Progress?

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AI progress is supposed to be running into limits almost everywhere at once. Frontier models are consuming much of the readily available high-quality public text; giant training clusters strain semiconductor supply chains and electricity infrastructure; more elaborate reasoning systems consume increasing amounts of computation after training; and AI agents can perform impressive individual tasks while remaining unreliable over long workflows. Yet frontier AI is not behaving like a technology at its ceiling. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index reports a roughly 30 percentage-point improvement in a single year on Humanity’s Last Exam, a benchmark deliberately designed to remain difficult for advanced models. On OSWorld, which tests an agent’s ability to operate computers, performance rose from roughly 12 percent to 66.3 percent. The same report captures the other side of the picture: agents still fail roughly one in three structured benchmark attempts, while systems capable of solving extremely ...
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Open Source Built the Internet. Who Will Keep It Secure?

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The PHP security crisis of October 2026 reveals a difficult problem beneath the internet's shared infrastructure: everyone depends on it, but responsibility for securing it is scattered across people and organisations with very different resources and incentives. In 2024, while addressing findings from an external security audit, a PHP developer discovered signs of a problem in the programming language's memory management. Several possible fixes were considered, but each threatened to break something else. The work stalled, restarted and stalled again. Two years later, researchers demonstrated how the underlying weakness could be exploited to run an attacker's code on a vulnerable server. On 21 October 2026, the PHP project released emergency updates for two critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated 9.2 under the CVSS 4.0 scoring system. The affected software was hardly obscure. According to W3Techs , as of 24 October 2026, PHP is used b...
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Knot of Shadows Review: A Small Mystery with Large Theological Questions

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Lois McMaster Bujold's Knot of Shadows is one of the smaller Penric and Desdemona stories in almost every sense. Its mystery is local, the stakes are limited, and by the end very little about the larger shape of Penric's life has changed. Yet that smallness is also what makes the novella interesting. After so many stories have established Penric, Desdemona and the metaphysics of the World of the Five Gods, Bujold no longer needs to make the world larger. She can use a short story to look more closely at one strange corner of it. Knot of Shadows consequently feels less like another stage in Penric's biography than an experiment conducted inside a mature fictional world. The plot provides the mystery; the more interesting question is what happens when one of the world's apparently settled supernatural rules produces an unexpected edge case. Cover image: Knot of Shadows by Lois McMaster Bujold, published by Subterranean Press. Dust-jacket illustration ...
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Slow Horses Season 3 Review: When MI5 Protects Itself

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Official promotional artwork for Slow Horses Season 3. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. The first season of Slow Horses distinguished between visible and protected failure . The second separated competence from control . Season three pushes both ideas towards a harsher conclusion: when the institution’s reputation is threatened, guilt matters less than who has enough power to redirect the blame. Adapted from Real Tigers , the third of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels , Apple TV+’s six-episode third season begins with a compromised operation in Istanbul and a secret buried inside MI5. Years later, a member of Slough House is taken hostage, apparently as part of an elaborate attempt to test the Service’s defences. What begins as a private grievance gradually exposes a struggle over evidence, reputation and control. The season also makes Jackson Lamb’s attachment to his team unmistakable. Lamb protects people the Service considers dis...
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The Case Against Reality Review: When Fitness Beats Truth

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Cover image: The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman, published by W. W. Norton & Company. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality begins with a surprisingly difficult question: why should evolution make us see reality as it really is? Natural selection tracks reproductive success, not philosophical accuracy. From that modest starting point Hoffman eventually arrives at an extraordinary conclusion: space, time and physical objects may be no more like objective reality than the icons on a computer desktop are like the electronics underneath. The first claim is easy to take seriously. The difficulty is working out how much of the rest actually follows from it. Hoffman makes a strong case that evolution gives us no guarantee of a perfectly truthful picture of the world. He makes a much more ambitious claim when he argues that our perceptual interface may bear little structural resemblance to fundamental reality, ...
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Everyone Has to Lose Something: A Fiscal Grand Bargain for the Ageing West

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Editorial image generated by the author. The fiscal problem facing much of the developed world is hardly mysterious. Ageing populations are increasing pension and healthcare costs while governments carry debts accumulated through financial crises, years of unusually cheap borrowing and the pandemic. Higher interest rates have made those debts harder to ignore. Nor is there much mystery about the available remedies. Governments can raise taxes, reduce benefits, increase retirement ages, constrain healthcare spending, require people to finance more of their own retirement, or spend less elsewhere. The difficulty begins when someone has to choose who pays. That makes the problem partly one of political design. The ageing West does not lack plausible ways of stabilising its public finances; it lacks reforms capable of surviving democratic politics for thirty years. A durable settlement would therefore look very different from a conventional austerity programme. It would ...
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