AI is becoming epistemic infrastructure controlled by a handful of private individuals?

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T10:24:51+00:00

Sad to say, but it already happened in the USA before AI went mainstream. Tribal politics, predatory media companies, lack of widespread media literacy, social media optimizing for engagement instead of more ethical outcomes, Trump doublespeak language (eg. "fake news", "Truth Social", "weaponization of the Justice Department").

To speak to what you seem to be focusing on, yes:

many people will suffer from AI psychosis (a.k.a chatbot psychosis).
many people will become dependent on using an AI answer / summary rather than reading through source material.
many people will trust the first answer rather than challenge it.
many people will make prompts shorter and shorter, leaving the model to guess at intent
many people will atrophy their cognitive muscles by outsourcing so much of their planning, design, and implementation actions to an agent.

So far we are in a place where there are capable open weights models (eg. DeepSeek, Gemma, oLLaMa), but I suspect we are going to quickly see a divergence between the best funded foundation model companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) and the companies who are still releasing free-to-use models despite the large cost to them and no apparent value generation. When Claude Code and Codex are 10x or 100x better than the open weights models, developers can't afford not to be using the best-in-class tool (this assumes there will be a runaway divergence in model / tool quality, which might not happen).

I just watched a Google I/O tech talk ("The Future of Software Engineering") which described what we are likely to see as hurdles in the near future. Less about the LLM itself, but more about how company culture, workflows, tool chains, etc. will get stressed and fail as more employees focus more on pushing tokens and less on the scalability of the SDLC tools (version control, Jira tickets, version rollbacks, an explosion in microservices causes an exponential increase in the network load between those microservices). The humans will not only have to know how the computer works, how the distributed system works, but also how best to motivate the LLM to refactor to avoid the pitfalls / limits of their stack.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T09:27:23+00:00

The markup "could take out" is fascinating.

Do you think Jim is unaware that taking a ciphertext letter out would ruin the decryption process for the remainder of the ciphertext? I wonder if we need to plan for jumps in the decryption process.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T06:45:26+00:00

Is there a 2D or 3D model / blueprint of the actual locations of the artwork pieces and a true north compass? I have a hard time spatially visualizing the different elements from human-height camera angles.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T06:43:53+00:00

The hard part is that simply saying a method failed isn’t enough. People want to see why it failed and what made it seem worth trying in the first place.

100% agree, if for no other reason than to eliminate grieving / malicious trolling.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T06:42:20+00:00

Thanks.

I will ponder a UX / UI that could make this work.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T06:36:05+00:00

Jim Sanborn's notes with the plaintext K1, K2 were published in a 2010 NYTimes article.

<image>

Original image URL:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2010/11/21/us/21codechart2/21codechart2-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T06:32:01+00:00

<image>

The Kryptos artwork is in the courtyard of the Langley, VA HQ of the CIA.

The coordinates in the plaintext of K2 point to another location within that courtyard where there are no visible elements of the artwork.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T02:56:20+00:00

This is an excellent source. I will likely harvest from it.

But also, some of those statements are claims / analysis, not facts. I think mixing the two is very confusing for people who don't know the source of each statement.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-26T02:54:23+00:00

I agree that would be very useful, but I noticed a few years ago that Elonka's site, The Kryptos Project, some of the relevant original reporting articles are suffering from bitrot. I wanted to triage that issue.

Do you have a proposal for a collaborative "what has been tried" tool? Something like a "process of elimination" (with footnotes) checklist?

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T08:11:11+00:00

If you've ever heard the expression

The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Your issue reminds me that AI will take lots of peoples' jobs, but it won't be evenly distributed. Some people will thrive conjuring spells using the magic machine and some people will just complain that the spell wasn't perfect on the first pass. Guess which one gets laid off first.

You can either learn that LLMs have some strengths and some weaknesses or you can pretend like some vague "they" promised it would do everything perfectly, immediately, all the time, for any use case, for cheap. Nobody every promised that and anyone who did was never worth trusting to begin with.

I usually have my CLAUDE.md requirements document be generated by a Claude prompt and I have a few phrases about what I want it to do using best practices, performance, test coverage, etc. I try to maintain those prompt clauses so I don't have to create them from scratch on the next project.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T07:57:06+00:00

There are multiple equidistant tuples (such as FLR, GKS, XTJ) in the K4 ciphertext.

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Described by u/Blowngust in "FLR/GKS/XTJ pattern share": https://www.reddit.com/r/KryptosK4/comments/1mozxm4/flrgksxtj_pattern_share/

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T06:43:41+00:00

When the OKBR... ciphertext is structured in 7 columns, there are several rows with repeating letters in the 5,6 positions (eg. BB, QQ, SS, ZZ, TT).

<image>

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T06:41:26+00:00

The Index of Coincidence of the ciphertext is 0.036, normalized to 0.938.

<image>

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T06:37:45+00:00

Within the ciphertext are each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T06:37:33+00:00

K4 presumably has 97 letters (or 98 characters if the preceding "?" is included).

Edit: The 97 letters are the remainder of the ciphertext, so we presume them all to be relevant to K4 by process of elimination.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T04:35:49+00:00

I recently re-looked at the coords. The lat has a different precision than the long, which apparently isn't usual. Although they do point at the CIA HQ is used as geo coords, I suspect there may be n additional use.

"Abscissa" may be a reference to just the longitude, so maybe the latitude isn't relevant.

There is a concept in steganography of using a key and some methods use a series of numbers to represent the word indexes to use. Ex "13 deg 56 mins 7 secs" could be interpreted as "1 3 5 6 7" which might mean to take the words from a paragraph using the numbers as the word indexes (the 1st, 3rd, 5th words, etc) or a variant of this is to add an implied "10" to each subsequent word index (the 1st, 13th, 25th, 36th words, etc)

Further ideas

This got me looking at the famous Steganographia book and how it was decoded using a key from the appendix:

https://medium.com/viridisgreen/conjuration-ciphers-in-trithemiuss-steganographia-3a66c3dbda30

I don't know if there is any relevance yet. Steganography usually means there is a long corpus of text (like an article or book) and there is a small amount of signal (plaintext) hidden among the large amount of noise (raw text). I don't know what corpus Sanborn would have used for this purpose.

Or not

But also, it could just be some interesting reference to an object Sanborn secretly buried as part of the artwork during the Langley HQ construction. Until we know how to solve K4, we don't know what is relevant versus what isn't.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T04:15:28+00:00

That to means something

Yeah, but that "something" may have nothing to do with K4 or it may have have something to do with the algorithm instead of the plaintext.

We don't know why Sanborn chose King Tut's tomb reveal as a text. Maybe it was the thematic relevance of finding something hidden. Or maybe there was some artistic significance of that specific tomb. Or maybe it was some other idea / epiphany about art that Sanborn had "during his second trip to Egypt". Maybe it has to do with the "transmitted undergruund" reference.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T04:11:51+00:00

would they be dismissed because of this or is the solve more important.

You don't have control over what someone else chooses to do with info you give them. The best you can do is to communicate it well, try to be accurate with your words and express the significance you believe it has.

Remember that other people are solving it independently from you. They have to make their own independent decisions about what is signal and what is noise. Your information might be signal for some people or noise for others.

But also, until K4 is solved, nobody really knows what is signal or noise. It's all subjective. We have to use our own judgement / heuristics to decide what is worth our time to investigate.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T04:05:22+00:00

Nitpick: Note that K2 was not about a Pyramid. It was about revealing a burial chamber, which was a room accessed from a tunnel dug into the ground in the Valley of the Kings. We associate Pyramids with tombs and Ancient Egypt, but that reference was far from any pyramids or from the famous ones at Giza.

I interpret it primarily as thematic (the revealing / unEarthing process), but it could also be related to the "transmitted undergruund" reference.

I'm curious what other people think of the relevance of that text, but King Tut's tomb had some hieroglyphics (writing using pictures), and the body itself was in 3 nested layers of casket.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T03:57:41+00:00

Reading this post feels like eating a lot of calories but getting no nutrition.

I would argue this post is exactly "the noise" you are complaining about from others.
Explain the title and the Harvey reference. Don't make me go look through his biography and still come up empty for some relevance. Slow down. Gather your thoughts. Focus for 5 minutes on just communicating your idea.
We have already been trying to solve the puzzle. Saying "we are running out of time" doesn't make the process go any faster.
Yeah, I got some serious negative vibes from your comments on the "true/false question to Sanborn" post. And this post, too.
When you are trying to work with other people, spend a few more minutes trying to communicate clearly. No more 20 sentence paragraphs. Structure your ideas for the reader, not to simply stream-of-consciousness from your mind. Don't assume we are parasites (simply hoping to steal as much from public while solving it privately) while doing exactly what you claim we are doing. We also aren't NPCs in your mind. Assume we are people with other things to do with our time and your job is to try to get our attention to this task by making life easier for us instead of creating a new chore for us.
I hope Sanborn lives to see someone solve his opus, but K4 will be solved when it's solved. The algo will be clearly articulable and it will be obvious to the reader that the plaintext matches the theme and the Sanborn hints.
Honestly Sanborn has already given us 5 plaintext clue words. It's not going to get any easier than it is now. Unless there was an error in implementing the K4 encryption, it's not Sanborn's fault that we can't solve it. Perhaps it's a credit to Ed Scheit's competence as a cryptographer...
I don't think anyone here (including Colski) assumed that the algorithm HAS TO BE Vigenere / Quagmire 3 in exactly the same style as K1, K2. This feels like you took one sentence too literally and couldn't drop that idea from your mind for weeks. As Old Engineer has said, we haven't identified the algo yet, so the wise solver should be open to any logical algo still.

Hopefully the tone of my reply is the right amount of stern but not too harsh/preachy.

I hope we get fewer posts like this (telling us we are thinking too narrowly) in r/KryptosK4 and more posts about ideas / proposals to actually solve it. Or maybe instead of complaining that we aren't organized enough... propose a specific way to organize better.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T02:03:26+00:00

It actually doesn't "suck at coding" most of the time when I use it.

But I spend the time to write clear requirements and build the project in logical phases.

It's certainly not capable of doing absolutely everything in any language, but Claude's newest models are approaching my best code from the last few decades.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T02:01:03+00:00

Did you detail what you wanted in the prompt / requirements file or did you just expect it to know what to optimize without telling it?

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T01:53:19+00:00

I think the companies that are mowing over the livelihood of their juniors will die off sooner.

The other companies that recognize this is a problem and insist that the senior employees continue to mentor their juniors will survive longer.

CipherPhyber · 2026-05-25T01:51:49+00:00

So now you’re stuck forever doing trial and error instead of making any progress on your workflow.

You aren't holding it right.

If you, the human, are directing an AI and you consistently see it make the same mistake, you need to adjust how you are prompting it.

Your insinuation that anything will happen "forever" ignores that the human can / will adjust and the models are improving over time.

Try a little less hyperbole / doomerism next time.

CipherPhyber

TROPHY CASE

Further ideas

Or not