The psychology of public shaming, relational aggression, and collective punishment Online communities are built on trust, shared interests, and cooperation. At their best, they allow people with different backgrounds and perspectives to work together toward something meaningful. The same relationships can also become channels for exclusion, reputational damage, and collective hostility. Sometimes someone deliberately encourages this. Sometimes nobody is coordinating anything. A community can collectively harm an individual even when every participant believes they are acting morally. Understanding how that happens is essential to building healthy communities.

What if an AI made a decision that most people disagreed with, and their lives became better because of it? Would we call that AI aligned? “Aligned with human interests” sounds straightforward until what we want and what benefits us point in different directions. Imagine a city banning cars from its center despite widespread opposition. Suppose the streets become safer, businesses thrive, and even the opponents later welcome the change. Does the better outcome justify overriding them?

Conway’s law says that software reflects the communication structures of the organizations that build it. AI is now part of those structures: interpreting requests, writing code, and reviewing changes. Yet we often assume our existing workflows should stay fixed, and AI should adapt to them. Consider someone submitting a bug fix. They want something to work; the maintainer needs confidence that it does. Yet projects sometimes test the contributor instead. Ghostty’s agent instructions tell AI asked to submit an issue or pull request to add a file insulting its user.

X and GitHub should let my agent talk to your agent. Today, I discussed the IPC work in the upcoming SecretSpec 0.20 on X. Marc-André Moreau replied with feedback from ChatGPT: Just some quick ChatGPT feedback, comparing the SecretSpec IPC protocol with the session-oriented MCP spec: 1. Switch the framing to bounded newline-delimited JSON The current 4-byte big-endian length prefix is robust, but I’m no longer convinced it buys us enough. One compact… — Marc-André Moreau (@awakecoding) August 21, 2026 This is an ordinary social-network conversation: people share work, reply, and refine an idea in public. The agent helps, but the people own the conversation.

Your next group birthday gifts should be home batteries. Most birthday gifts are forgotten within a year. Batteries save your friends money every day and keep essential devices running when the power goes out. A 5 kWh battery costs about €1,600. That is expensive for one person and easy for a group: eight people contribute €200 each; sixteen people contribute €100 each; thirty-two people contribute €50 each. Create a battery birthday club. Buy each friend a battery on their birthday until everyone has one.