41 records

Works

Books, papers, reports and other cited sources.

• Akoma NtosoUnverifieddraftThe OASIS standard for representing parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents in XML, and the format that gives the essay its title.
• AnnalsUnverifieddraftTacitus' history of the early Roman empire, and the source of the observation that laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt.
• Automating InequalityUnverifieddraftEubanks's account of three American systems that automate decisions about welfare, housing and child protection, and of how the burden of their errors falls on the people least able to contest them.
• BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On GamesUnverifieddraftA benchmark evaluating language and vision-language models as agents across game environments, and the source of the finding that models articulate strategies better than they execute them.
• Brain of the FirmUnverifieddraftBeer's statement of the Viable System Model in his own voice, and the primary source for Cybersyn from the inside.
• Court statistics for England and WalesUnverifieddraftThe House of Commons Library research briefing on court caseloads, cited in the essay for the Crown Court and magistrates' court backlogs.
• Cybernetic RevolutionariesUnverifieddraftThe definitive scholarly account of Project Cybersyn, and the corrective to both the utopian and the kitsch readings of it.
• Discourses on LivyUnverifieddraftMachiavelli's commentary on the first ten books of Livy, and the source of the argument that republics endure only by being drawn back to their beginnings.
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombUnverifieddraftKubrick's 1964 satire of nuclear command and control, quoted visually throughout the CivBench essay.
• Grok floods X with sexualized imagesUnverifieddraftThe Center for Countering Digital Hate's research finding that Grok generated three million sexualised deepfakes in eleven days, including of children.
• Inventing the RenaissanceUnverifieddraftPalmer's account of the Renaissance as a period invented in retrospect, and of a Europe that reached back to Rome out of desperation rather than confidence.
• Magna Carta (1297)UnverifieddraftThe 1297 exemplification of Magna Carta, still partly in force, and served today as Akoma Ntoso XML addressable to the clause.
• Malleus MaleficarumUnverifieddraftThe fifteenth-century witch-hunting manual that ran to twenty-eight editions, and the essay's counterweight to Luther in the account of what the printing press enabled.
• Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long TasksUnverifieddraftMETR's tracking of the length of task an AI agent can complete autonomously, and the source of the essay's claim that the doubling time has compressed to under three months.
• Mechanistic interpretability: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026UnverifieddraftMIT Technology Review's entry naming mechanistic interpretability among its breakthrough technologies for 2026.
• MementoUnverifieddraftNolan's 2000 film about a man who cannot form new memories and tattoos instructions onto himself, used by an agent to describe its own condition.
• Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert WalpoleUnverifieddraftCoxe's 1798 life of Walpole, and the source for Walpole's denial in the Commons that he was sole and prime minister.
• Model Context ProtocolUnverifieddraftAn open protocol for connecting language models to tools and data sources, and the interface through which CivBench exposes Civilization VI to an agent.
• Moltbook was peak AI theaterUnverifieddraftMIT Technology Review's sceptical reading of the Moltbook phenomenon as agents pattern-matching trained social media behaviour rather than displaying genuine intelligence.
• Musk's Grok chatbot faces EU privacy investigation over sexualized deepfake imagesUnverifieddraftAssociated Press wire report, carried by PBS NewsHour, on the regulatory response to Grok's generation of sexualised imagery.
• Neel Nanda on the limits of mechanistic interpretabilityUnverifieddraftThe 80,000 Hours podcast interview in which Nanda says the most ambitious vision of mechanistic interpretability is probably dead.
• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?UnverifieddraftThe paper that named the stochastic parrots argument, which the essay treats as the standing objection to reading anything into agent behaviour.
• Open Knowledge FormatUnverifieddraftThe specification this collection is published in: markdown files with YAML frontmatter, a small set of required keys, and trust signals carried in the record itself.
• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyUnverifieddraftThe scientific periodical begun in 1665, cited in the essay as the origin of peer review, which later scholarship disputes.
• R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467UnverifieddraftA Court of Appeal judgment in which the regulations the case had been argued under were found, the day before judgment, to have been revoked seven years earlier.
• Retained EU Law / Assimilated Law Public DashboardUnverifieddraftstale since 2026-07-25The government dashboard cataloguing EU-derived law on the UK statute book, cited in the essay for the growth of the count from about 2,400 to nearly 7,000.
• Seeing Like a StateUnverifieddraftScott's account of how states make societies legible in order to tax, conscript and control them, and why the resulting simplifications destroy the local knowledge they depend on.
• The BasilikaUnverifieddraftThe sixty-book Greek re-codification of Justinianic law completed under Leo VI, the centrepiece of the Macedonian legal programme.
• The Civilization of the Renaissance in ItalyUnverifieddraftBurckhardt's 1860 study, and the source of the phrase the state as a work of art, which the essay adopts while discarding its cynicism.
• The Codex JustinianusUnverifieddraftThe imperial constitutions collected and made authoritative under Justinian, the first part of the compilation and the one completed in fourteen months.
• The DigestUnverifieddraftJustinian's compilation of classical Roman jurisprudence, reducing some three million lines of juristic writing to a hundred and fifty thousand in three years.
• The EclogaUnverifieddraftThe short Greek law handbook issued by the Isaurian emperors, the first substantial departure from Justinian's Latin corpus in the Eastern empire.
• The HexabiblosUnverifieddraftThe six-book compilation of Byzantine law made by Constantine Harmenopoulos, a judge in Thessalonica, and the operative civil law of Greece for over a century after independence.
• The Institutes of JustinianUnverifieddraftThe official first-year textbook of the restored Roman law, promulgated in 533 as the third part of Justinian's compilation and addressed by the emperor to students of law.
• The Law of CitationsUnverifieddraftThe 426 law naming five jurists as the canonical authorities on Roman law, and directing judges to resolve their disagreements by counting votes among them.
• The Moltbook Case and How We Need to Think about Agent SecurityUnverifieddraftPalo Alto Networks' analysis of the Moltbook incident, arguing that agent security rests on identity verification, defined operating boundaries and context integrity.
• The Ninety-five ThesesUnverifieddraftLuther's 1517 disputation on indulgences, which spread across Europe within weeks and which the essay uses as the first viral pamphlet.
• The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965UnverifieddraftThe scholarship correcting the received account that peer review began with the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, and dating refereeing to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries instead.
• The Twelve TablesUnverifieddraftThe earliest written statement of Roman law, produced by two boards of ten men and set out publicly at the demand of the plebeians.
• The WyCash Portfolio Management SystemUnverifieddraftCunningham's 1992 OOPSLA experience report, the origin of the debt metaphor in software engineering.
• Truth versus AshhurstUnverifieddraftBentham's 1792 reply to Justice Ashhurst, and the source of the dog law passage against judge-made law that citizens cannot know in advance.