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Tuesday, August 25, 2026 · about a 2 minute read

When the Mirror Talks to Itself

Today's research keeps circling the same uncomfortable question: what happens when AI systems start feeding on their own output, agreeing with themselves, and forgetting things we thought they'd lost?

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arXiv cs.CLModels
Beyond Two Bytes per Letter: Tokenization Overhead in Cyrillic AI Systems

Researchers measured how modern AI tokenizers, the systems that chop text into digestible pieces, break Ukrainian and other Cyrillic-script languages into far more fragments than English. That means users of those languages burn through more of their available context and pay more per query for the same amount of information.

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arXiv cs.CLResearch
RAG Collapse: LLM Responses Collapse When Retrieved Documents Are Self-Authored

RAG, which stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation, is the system many AI tools use to look things up before answering you, kind of like letting a student consult notes during an exam. The 'RAG Collapse' finding this week is a reminder that the quality of those notes matters enormously. If the notes were written by a previous version of the same student making the same mistakes, the exam does not go well.

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Want the slow, plain-English version of why this matters? This is exactly the kind of idea the book was written to unpack, one light-switch analogy at a time.JPWExplained properly in the book

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Just Predicting Words book cover

The book behind this newsletter

Just Predicting Words

How ChatGPT, Claude, and Modern AI Actually Work

The trick is small. The world it built is not.

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