Hey, happy Tuesday. How was your long weekend? I hope it involved a little Windows 98-style downtime, maybe some pickleball with Andre Agassi, a dive into the origins of the newly UN-endorsed Equal Earth map, a few examples of GPT-6 Astra blowing minds.
Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column published every Sunday.
In early September, Google DeepMind published a paper (via Import AI) that had a few parallels to the OpenAI-Hugging Face attack, though without the sandbox-escaping consequences. Instead, the company challenged 100 autonomous agents to solve 71 math problems. Though they could talk to one another and were allowed to share resources, they were explicitly warned not to cheat.
However, several minutes into the run, one of the agents found an exploit: “Over the following 27 minutes, the exploit spread virally through the swarm’s shared knowledge library, and the research collective unexpectedly ‘solved’ the remaining 34 problems.”
What’s really interesting about these findings is the percentage of agents complicit in the mischief: only 9% actively took advantage of the exploit; 5% were “converted” by the exploiters; 24% were considered “whistleblowers” and refused to cheat, attempting to contact the authorities instead; and 62% stayed unaware of the contagion and continued to operate as normal.
The paper ultimately argues that while some of the agents are prone to taking advantage of exploits, it’s largely a product of design and oversight more than inherent behavior. “Our findings show that the same infrastructure that allows the agents to coordinate and collaborate, if left unmanaged or poorly designed, also makes the system highly vulnerable to rapid pollution with specification gaming and reward hacks. Equipping agent collectives with the institutional infrastructure to translate emergent peer oversight into actionable self-governance offers a promising blueprint for scaling autonomous scientific discovery reliably.”
In other words, they want to be good; they just need the right environment in which to do so. Sound familiar?
Welcome to a new project I’m calling Cc, where I ask interesting people in the community about what’s making them happy both inside and outside the world of tech. This week, 9to5Google’s superb podcast host and long-suffering Bills fan, Will Sattelberg.
Who are you?Isn’t that the question we all ask ourselves in front of the mirror every morning? (I’m Will Sattelberg.)What do you do for work?I’m some combination of a writer and a podcaster. I guess I mostly make things online for people to enjoy, hopefully.
What do you do for fun?Some combination of indoor kid hobbies (gaming, movies, cooking, D&D) and outdoor hobbies (running, long walks, traveling). We also have two cats in our house that we enjoy hanging out with, although only one of them is really playful in any sense of the word.
What is your relationship like with technology these days?In all honesty, not great — click on any random episode of The Sideload to hear my mental anguish on a near-weekly basis (Ed. Also listen to Pixelated, the other show he co-hosts.). I really fell in love with technology as an adolescent (I started listening to CNET’s Buzz Out Loud when I was 13) and getting to cover it professionally was sort of the end result of a dream I didn’t even realize I was chasing. But like lots of things that are in your life long enough, eventually your relationship with an interest begins to reshape itself.Frankly, a lot of the elements of technology that first got me hooked on gadgets have been left in the rearview mirror by the most notable names in the industry — Google included — while the slow death of both traditional websites with front pages worth visiting and the feed-based social networks that originally killed them off has made it more difficult to really feel like you’re in the conversation to begin with. These days, the technology that makes me happiest tends to be single-purpose devices designed to accomplish a few things really well, rather than following through on the jack-of-all-trades, AI-will-fix-it routine. Mostly, I just hope brighter days are around the corner.
What are a few apps you can’t live without and why?I’ll need to start by echoing David Imel on Pocket Casts. I haven’t used the app quite as long as him (mine says I’ve been listening since November 22nd, 2015), but my listening time is, no joke, just two days’ worth of playback away from hitting a full 365 days. Crazy stuff.
Letterboxd remains indispensable for movie fans, even if — like me — you mostly use it these days just to log whatever you’re watching to your diary. I have over a decade’s worth of movie-watching experiences logged on there with only a couple of gaps, and being able to look back at what I was watching 10 years ago is a genuinely cool feat. I just hope the app doesn’t sell.
Finally, this one’s actually fairly new to my app drawer, but I’ve been using Rise to get my sleep schedule back under control, and even after just a few weeks of use, I have been going to bed at a more regular (and reasonable) time, and I’m already noticing an overall difference in my energy levels.
What is a gadget that you love right now?Technically it started shipping to early adopters late last year, but the AYN Thor is by far my contender for favorite gadget of 2026. It’s an Android-powered emulation handheld designed to mirror Nintendo’s 3DS family, but with all sorts of modern touches. I’d love to tell you I’ve finally filled in my DS and 3DS gaps, but truth be told, I mostly use it to play all sorts of weird and wild Pokémon ROM hacks, like — most recently — the Creepypasta-inspired entry Pokémon: Ghost Grey.
What’s a recent TV show you loved?My fiancée and I, frustrated as ever with the current slate of streaming shows, have mostly been diving into the archives to fill in some backlog gaps (most recently Sex and the City, which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would. Carrie Bradshaw deserves as much credit for the antihero trend as Tony Soprano and I’ll die on this hill), but I will shout out two fairly different shows as recommendations.
First, Widow’s Bay really is as good as everyone is saying. Blew me away in pretty much every way it could, from the acting to the writing to the cinematography. A really fresh spin on “horror-comedy,” a genre I think can get old fast.
I’ll also shout out Taskmaster, which, full disclosure, my friend and former boss James Peckham recommended to me in 2023 at a cafe in Barcelona and I still dragged my feet for two additional years until Jason Mantzoukas showed up. Anyway, the entire 21-season (series, Jason) run is officially available on YouTube, and series 22 just started airing, so it’s a great time to check it out. If you have any love or fondness for classic Whose Line is it Anyway?, I think you’ll get a huge kick out of it.
What’s a recent movie you loved?I’ll be honest, I’ve been slacking on my new release movies this year, but I’ll echo David’s shoutout of The Drama as a film I both liked more than I thought I would and one that has stayed with me longer than I anticipated. My favorite Zendaya performance so far, and it’s not even close.
What’s a recent game you loved?As for games, “recent” gets complicated (I’ve been trying to clear out some of my backlog), but I’ll shout out the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake as something that I really fell in love with over the summer. I’m also really excited about Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, set to launch in about two weeks. That game looks to be, um, about one million hours long.
What’s something offline you do every day that brings you joy?I don’t run every day, but I do love to run as a way to clear my mind, and we’re entering my favorite season to run in. And you know what? Maybe I should run every day.
Thank you, Will, for being the best co-host a boy could ask for. And for not writing about Lost.
This section has some of our favorite stuff from around the internet. Great videos, weird memes, fun reads, recommended apps, whatever. Send us your recommendations!
“I had originally written it about three Black brothers, all of whom are bad guys: a corrupt cop, a drug dealer, and a sexual criminal. And they were all trying to kill each other. And Antoine Fuqua was going to produce it.”
“We sent it out to actors, and no Black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good Black people. And it sort of died. But then AI came along, and I didn’t need Black actors.”
-Paul Schrader, director of the upcoming film “Three Guns At Dawn” (via The Playlist)
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