Zvi Mowshowitz’s April 2025 monthly roundup on his Substack “Don’t Worry About the Vase” covers a range of topics including platform fraud, AI lab operational security, judicial incentive design, and open-plan office productivity. Mowshowitz notes that AI “continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule” as context for the roundup’s slightly delayed publication.
On AI lab operational security, the roundup quotes a post from roon at OpenAI describing the difficulty AI labs face when internal communications are effectively public: “it’s a difficult position to be in when all your private comms are de facto public comms.” The roundup cites Dean W. Ball describing the same post as resonating deeply, while Mowshowitz adds that at Anthropic, strategy memos “usually do not leak” and speculates that OpenAI could manage operational security at a level comparable to the Manhattan Project if it chose to — while acknowledging the historical Manhattan Project was itself infiltrated.
On platform fraud, the roundup discusses Lyft’s fraud detection failures, citing a post by Sheel Mohnot about a ride that was logged from SFO to San Francisco in three minutes, with the driver claiming the pickup occurred and Lyft siding with the driver. Grant Slatton and nic carter are quoted arguing that ride-sharing and delivery platforms should assign greater weight to reports from customers with long histories of non-complaints. Mowshowitz argues Amazon handles this well for individual customers but does not extend the resolution to banning repeat fraudsters.
On judicial incentives, the roundup discusses a proposal by Alex Tabarrok, attributed via Steven Landsburg, to pay judges a bounty when they release a defendant who does not reoffend and fine them for later crimes. Mowshowitz argues against it on the grounds that economic incentives would crowd out other judicial values — truth, law, justice, and mercy — and cites Thornmallow’s observation that the cultural changes required to implement such a policy would themselves largely solve the underlying problem.
On open-plan offices, Mowshowitz quotes Amanda Askell of Anthropic: “Tech companies pay millions of dollars for their employees and then stick them in open-plan offices that make it nearly impossible to get work done.” He adds that he would “have to at least double my pay” to accept an open-plan arrangement.
The roundup also mentions a forthcoming book by Cate Hall and Sasha Chapin titled “You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life,” and notes that Apple’s default iOS notification database stores Signal message content in a way that allows authorities to extract it, linking to Signal’s recommended privacy setting.