Evan Ratliff

The full 8-part season 2 of Shell Game is out today. The tale of @hurumoai, the world’s first AI agent-cofounded and led startup, ready to binge. Making it weekly left me little time for hyping, so a one-shot buzz recap 🧵 if you’re on the fence: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/she…

Jon Krakauer has stopped writing books. He explains why. Full interview here: open.spotify.com/episode/7tJLwK…

Not expecting folks to read all that (just be happy/sorry for me), but maybe useful fodder for a small few. Mostly just for me to think through why I've currently made these choices (reasoning also included). And for when my time comes in the "oh look at his em dashes" barrel.

Feels like a good week for writers to articulate how they do and don't use AI in their work? Here's my attempt: cazart.net/portfolio/ai-d… TLDR: I don’t use AI at all for writing/editing. I do for transcription, certain research, and AI agent experiments I tell stories about.

New investigation: a book about the future of truth in the age of A.I. contains more than a half-dozen quotes invented by A.I. nytimes.com/2026/05/19/bus…

Former Thai Deputy Finance Minister Vorapak Tanyawong is suing us for criminal defamation to suppress our reporting. We will fight him in court while continuing to publish the unedited documents exposing his deep financial ties to the Mauerberger criminal network. 👇 1/2

One of the great limitations on future of work discourse is that most of its participants have never had a real job

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet 404media.co/your-ai-use-is…

At Code with Claude dev conference, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the idea of the single-person, $1 billion dollar company hasn't been fully realized yet, but he thinks it could happen by end of 2026. (This is a fave fantasy of the frontier AI folks. Sam Altman has said something similar.)

Full show: scientificamerican.com/podcast/episod…

Talked to Scientific American @sciam's podcast Science Quickly about Shell Game, managing AI agent employees, and the surreal experience of @hurumoai's AI CEO getting invited to speak to LinkedIn and then banned from LinkedIn:

How much of the internet is actually AI-generated? And what impact is it having on online discourse? 🤖 In a new paper led by @jonas_dolezal, in collaboration with our friends at the @internetarchive, we set out to answer exactly that. A brief thread on our findings 🧵👇

wrote some words to accompany a very nice photo essay about high school debate. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

RIP to a real one

Finally, the AI feature we all wanted and needed: Amazon now creates an AI “podcast” about products where two AI “hosts” discuss the product and take your questions as if it’s a call-in show.

"The agent then, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated." x.com/lifeof_jer/sta…

"Bar-Joseph goes on to explain that his startup is spending money on Claude usage bills rather than on salaries for human beings, and that the company is 'scaling with intelligence, not headcount.'" 404media.co/startups-brag-…

Starting a long-term thread of Shell Game season 2's AI-employee-future manifesting in the news, including aspects people thought to be lunacy just months ago. First up: “At this point, I kind of want to hire people because I’m lonely,” he said. nytimes.com/2026/04/02/tec…

I have met a lot of people using AI in very innovative ways - none quite like Bill Nguyen, a serial tech founder. He has given his AI chat bot complete autonomy, acting on his behalf without asking permission and essentially replacing him in a lot of contexts. (Link below)

"Reveals" doing some heavy linguistic work here.

It's actually perfect that @SBF_FTX told the "Finding Satoshi" documentary (years ago, it seems) that his guess for Satoshi was Paul Le Roux, and then proceeded to spout a couple completely made up facts about Le Roux. finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-bankm…