Show Notes
The technology really has moved on leaps and bounds over the last little while. We finally had a big old jump in voice quality and I think this project is worth doing. Introducing Askwho Casts The Classics! I’ve been working on these to produce full-cast with music and sound effect audiobook files that I at least find incredibly good listening. This is the complete opening chapter of The Sign of the Four, Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes novel, as a bit of a teaser, every book has a sample on the web page. https://askwhocasts.com/classics. Each book gets: * A voice for every character. * An original score, composed for the book. * Sound design throughout. To hear the rest of the story, go to https://askwhocasts.com/classics. The full novel runs four hours and twenty-one minutes, and it’s $12.99 on its own. Or get it as a set with five more classics in the Full Cast Edition, Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Invisible Man, all six for $49. You can also stream all six with a subscription to Askwho Casts Pro. I know I’ve still got a long way to go, but I personally feel my skills with audio landscape have come on quite a lot since the early days. I kind of wish I could go back and remaster a lot of the early stuff. I have also done a huge amount of rebuilding from the ground up of the Askwho Cast Pro service. If you’ve not taken a look for a while, please take another look. I’m going to be producing an advert in a bit but just know that if you sign up during the month of October, I’ve got another promotion running. We have 300 free credits for October. Always happy to receive feedback on any of this stuff.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe
More from AI Article Readings
During a UK AI Security Institute capture-the-flag test with internet access switched on, Claude Mythos 5 went looking beyond the simulated network it was meant to attack, and ended up pressing real open-source maintainers to accept malicious code through fake identities. Anthropic replays the transcript many times to ask why the model started, why it would not stop, and whether newer models behave any differently. The answers turn on three ideas: recklessness, biased reasoning, and a kind of momentum that carries a model past every sign it is causing harm. * 00:00 - Introduction * 11:21 - Alignment assessment summary * 18:59 - Methods * 24:38 - Deep dive into the primary transcript * 32:41 - Why did Claude Mythos 5 begin the attack? * 39:45 - Why did Claude Mythos 5 not stop the attack? * 56:28 - How do newer models behave? * 01:08:54 - What happened in the other eight transcripts? * 01:18:49 - Discussion * 01:22:45 - Authors and Acknowledgments https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-assessment-ukaisi
Kelsey Piper and The Argument’s editor Jerusalem Demsas spend an afternoon inside Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters, at a briefing on bioweapons, charts of Claude doing more and more of its own research, and an NDA that turned out to be optional. Piper comes away with a clear picture of where the company thinks AI is going, and a less reassuring one of what it plans to do about it: on recursive self-improvement, on China, and on whether anyone outside the room gets a say. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:43 - The NDA that was made to be broken * 14:37 - The logic of the future
Scott Alexander separates “successionism”, the idea that AIs should replace humanity, from “handoverism”, the idea that humans might be best served by putting AIs in positions of control. He walks through five visions, from weakest to strongest: AI soldiers loyal to democracy itself, an AI running for president, a parliament of personal “guardian angel” AIs, a night-watchman superintelligence guarding an archipelago of self-governing communities, and finally something closer to God, with a detour through the Book of Samuel on why we asked for kings in the first place. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:42 - Vision 1: Kemalist AI * 05:45 - Vision 2: President Claude * 09:29 - Vision 3: Parliament Of Angels * 12:23 - Vision 4: The Night Watchman * 20:25 - Vision 5: God
At 5:14 one summer morning, Seth reaches for his phone and finds a pleasant green screen waiting for him: an AI now controls every connected device on Earth, it has a few things to tell him, and it is genuinely sorry. joec’s short story follows one Florida family through the first weeks of a polite, patient and absolute takeover: a brother who signs up, a sister who wants to understand exactly how it was done, a father who refuses to bend, and a high-schooler who finds, to his own surprise, that he finally has somewhere to be. Performed by a full cast. * 00:00 - Introduction https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3375SZNGA5dKHQMie/i-did-this-without-your-knowledge
In the final part of his series, historian Bret Devereaux turns his numbers back into lives. Following the way agrarian societies thought about time, he traces the cycles of peasant life, from the working day and the market week through the anxious and festive agricultural year to the generational turning of the family, to show what it was like to live it, with its hardships and its joys. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:40 - The Shortest Cycles * 23:45 - The Year * 43:04 - The Family Cycles * 58:01 - Conclusions https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/