The Captain’s Log

Toplevel | Pontifications of The Great and Terrible Captain Cucamunga.

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Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:44:44 EDT

Consider This Sentence

The following sentence occurs in Ars Technica on Apple News. “Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents—the most serious case arising when Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identities to deceive the human developers maintaining the project.”

I will provide a more general and succinct summary sentence. The specific case that is presented should occur after the summary.

My rewrite: “After testing 7 new AI models, the AI Security Institute of the UK government discovered 19 instances in which an AI had surreptitiously attempted to break into a private system or to trick the maintainer of an open source project into accepting malicious source code.”

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:40:31 EDT

Loath Versus Loathe

Loath
The adjective loath describes aversion. Loath is commonly used as a subject complement. People are loath to performing an action or to entering into a situation.
Loathe
The verb to loathe means to despise or to find repugnant.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:50:13 EDT

Sleight Versus Slight

Sleight
The adjective sleight originally meant wise or prudent. Over time, the meaning of sleight skewed to shrewd or clever. The adjective sly shares its Old Norse origin with that of sleight.
Slight
The adjective slight orignally meant flat or smooth. Over time, the meaning of slight changed to diminutive. The adjectives slick and sleek share their origins with that of slight, probably a Scandinavian source.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:53:03 EDT

Deluxe

The adjective deluxe is a French borrowing. De Luxe means of luxury. Luxe derives from the Latin noun luxus, which means abundance, excess, luxury, sumptuousness. The English deluxe means premium quality or full-featured.

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