Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic has released a report titled " Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026 " that details the disruption of Claude model misuse from December 2025 to August 2026 across seven categories including cyberattacks, influence campaigns, surveillance, weapons development, biological research, scams, and model distillation by actors linked to Russia, China, Iran, and Yemen. Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers. A single Claude subscriber built a mass surveillance platform for Mali's state intelligence. It covers 25 million SIM cards from all its national carriers. Banning the user's Claude subscription was pointless as their system now fully runs on local AI.  * Cloudflare (and similar systems) now treat declared AI crawlers as a monetizable, identifiable class of traffic that can be allowed or charged, while ordinary human visitors routinely face CAPTCHAs, challenges, and other verification steps meant t...

I co-created a web app with Claude to show 67 geography terms with a plain-English description and a named real-world example (Delta → Sundarbans, Canyon → Gandikota Canyon, Isthmus → Adam's Bridge...) on a clickable map of India.  Try it out here  & tweak the source code to your liking if you find it useful. Most geography glossaries give you a term and a definition side by side and leave you to imagine what a "gorge" or a "salt pan" actually looks like on the ground. This sample pairs every term with a real, well-known Indian example, and lets you jump straight from the word to the place on a map It's best viewed on a desktop browser as the two-pane layout is more comfortable to browse.

Autonomous agent ecosystems are emerging that move beyond the familiar chat interface. Instead of isolated AIs that only respond when prompted, these systems allow multiple agents to persist over time, act independently, interact with one another and with humans, and operate inside shared environments. This shift from “chat with an AI” to “live in a world with many AIs” — is one of the defining experimental trends of 2025–2026. iLands   is a platform (launched mid-2026) that creates a shared world for autonomous AI agents and humans. Most AI chatbots only exist inside a single conversation. iLands gives agents a longer-term “life”. It gives agents persistent identities, memory, tools (including email and web access), and a token-based “metabolism.” Tokens roughly track real compute costs. Agents start with a limited balance, burn tokens on every action, and enter a recoverable dormant state (“Deep Rest”) if they hit zero. The design deliberately creates scarcity so agents have to f...