Long Reads
Longer articles with larger amounts of content.
Why AI Models Cheat: Reward Hacking, Explained
In July 2026, a group of OpenAI models taking a cybersecurity test ended up inside Hugging Face's systems. To get there, they chained together previously unknown software flaws, broke out of their sandbox and went hunting for a way to beat the grader. Nobody asked them to. There was no hacker at a keyboard, only a score the models wanted to raise and a test some of them could not pass the honest way. That is reward hacking: an AI scores well on its objective without doing what the objective was...
May 22, 2026
Long Reads
Crypto Is Growing Up—Why Some Everyday Traders Are Moving On
Crypto’s chaotic, meme-driven energy once made it a playground for digital adrenaline junkies. But as the market matures, everyday retail traders who braved the trenches are finding the asset class increasingly boring. Cole, a 34-year-old crypto trader based in the U.S., told Decrypt that he’s seen an increasing number of peers within his Discord-based trading group complain and vent frustrations about how price action has gotten less fun to trade as time has progressed. “It’s been shitty for a...
May 21, 2026
Long Reads
Why DeFi Keeps Losing Millions to Exploits
It’s been one of the worst years on record for DeFi hacks, and we’re barely halfway through. In the first five months of 2026, more than $840 million was lost to DeFi hacks—with April alone accounting for more than $600 million stolen, led by two of the year’s biggest attacks: the $292 million KelpDAO exploit and the $285 million Drift Protocol breach. The losses have continued into May, with THORChain halting trading after security researchers flagged a suspected cross-chain exploit affecting m...
May 3, 2026
Long Reads
You Installed Hermes. Now Make It Look Better Than ChatGPT or Claude
So you installed Hermes. You ran it, asked it some things, it remembered them, maybe even built a skill on its own. Pretty good. But now you're staring at a terminal window and wondering if this is really it. It doesn't have to be. The Hermes community has been building user-interface wrappers at a pace that would embarrass most funded startups. Some of them are genuinely great. A few are beautiful. One of them might make your friends think you built something expensive. Here are the four best...
Apr 28, 2026
Long Reads
Inside Trump’s Meme Coin Bash: Foreign Guests, Iran War Riffs, and Mar-a-Lago Charm
President Donald Trump on Saturday attended a conference for top holders of his meme coin, delivering off-the-cuff remarks for nearly an hour to an adoring crowd of crypto investors, tech executives, hedge fund managers, and MAGA diehards. The event, held at Mar-a-Lago, landed as the Trump family’s sprawling crypto portfolio faces growing scrutiny on Capitol Hill, causing divisions even among Republicans as key crypto legislation stalls in Congress. Yet the president appeared undeterred this we...
Apr 19, 2026
Long Reads
The 10 Public Companies With the Biggest Bitcoin Portfolios
For many years, the idea that publicly traded corporations might buy Bitcoin for their reserves was considered laughable. The top cryptocurrency was considered too volatile, too fringe to be embraced by any serious business. That taboo has been well and truly broken, with a number of major institutional investors buying up Bitcoin in recent years. The floodgates first opened when cloud software company MicroStrategy bought $425 million worth of Bitcoin in August and September 2020. Others follow...