Dr. Chatbot Will See You Now (If the WiFi Holds Up)

You walk into a doctor’s office these days—doesn’t matter if it’s London, Leeds, or Los Angeles—and you expect a certain ritual. The cold stethoscope, the judgmental look when you lie about how many units of alcohol you consume per week, the illegible scribble on a prescription pad. You expect a human being, flawed and tired, to look at your meat-sack body and tell you why it’s failing.

But apparently, that’s old fashioned. That’s nostalgic thinking, like missing rotary phones or smoking in hospitals.

The Great Digital Hangover: Why Your Robot Coder is Actually a Drunk Intern

My head feels like someone is playing the drums inside it using rusty screwdrivers for sticks, and the sunlight coming through the blinds is judging me. It’s Wednesday, usually the day the world decides to be halfway reasonable, but apparently, the tech sector didn’t get the memo. I’m staring at a screen that’s too bright, reading a report that confirms what every cynical bastard with a keyboard has suspected for the last two years: The robots aren’t taking our jobs. They’re just making our jobs really, really stupid.

Drinking Alone with the Digital Ghosts of Ariana Grande

You know the world has finally tipped over the edge and fallen into the sewer when you’re reading about fans fighting other fans over who has the right to steal a pop star’s face. It used to be that if you liked a singer, you bought their record, maybe a t-shirt, and if you were really gone in the head, you screamed at them from the nosebleed section of an arena. That was the transaction. They sang, you listened, and everyone went home to their separate, messy lives.

Sixty Minutes to Nowhere

Autonomous Assistants and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

It’s Tuesday noon and some guy named Dominic wants to teach me how to build “autonomous assistants” that “really work for me.”

I’m sitting here with a beer going warm, looking at this LinkedIn post, wondering when exactly we all agreed to stop being honest with each other.

“Without you having to constantly intervene,” he writes.

I once had a woman tell me the same thing about our relationship. Lasted three months. She intervened plenty.

Love, Loneliness, and the Cold Embrace of the Machine

I woke up this morning with the kind of headache that feels like a construction crew is using my frontal lobe as a foundation for a new parking garage. The sun is trying to push through the blinds, and it’s failing, much like my attempts to ignore the state of the world. It’s Monday, the day the universe reminds you that you owe it money, time, or sanity.

I poured a glass of the amber stuff—medicinal, purely medicinal—and opened up the news. I shouldn’t have done that. Not on an empty stomach.

The Great Lobotomy: Why We Stopped Thinking and Started Prompting

I woke up this morning with a head full of broken glass and a distinct feeling that the world had shifted on its axis while I was busy sleeping off the cheap stuff. Usually, that feeling is just dehydration and the regret of buying a round for strangers who didn’t like me anyway. But today, staring at the glowing screen that serves as my only constant companion, I realized the nausea wasn’t from the bourbon. It was existential.

More Rules for Ham on Rye than for the God Machine

There is a special kind of madness that happens when you read the news on a Saturday morning with a headache that feels like a construction crew is jackhammering behind your eyes. The sun is too bright, the coffee is too black, and the headlines are screaming that the human race is actively trying to fire itself.

I was reading about Max Tegmark. He’s a physicist from MIT, a guy with a brain the size of a watermelons who spent some time in Lisbon at the Web Summit. Lisbon is nice. Good wine. Probably too much sun for a guy like me, but a nice place to announce the end of the world. Tegmark was there amidst the tech bros and the startup pitches, trying to tell everyone that the party is over, but nobody wants to hear the music stop when there’s still venture capital left in the keg.

The Great Digital Meat Grinder: A toast to the discarded

The spreadsheets are bleeding again. I spent the morning staring at the numbers, and the numbers stared back, cold and indifferent as a lizard on a rock. We’re nearly at the end of 2025, a year that was supposed to be the glittering future, the apex of human ingenuity. Instead, it’s just another year where the suits in the glass towers decided that the most efficient way to save a buck is to throw a human being into the furnace.

Gravy, Grit, and the Algorithm: How Your Turkey Dinner Became a Hazardous Material Event

The holidays are looming over us like a thunderhead full of acid rain. It’s that time of year when societal obligation forces you into a confined space with people sharing your DNA but none of your interests, all centered around the ritual sacrifice of a flightless bird. The pressure is on. You have to perform. You have to provide sustenance that doesn’t result in a mass casualty event or a trip to the emergency room. Naturally, in our infinite laziness, we turn to the glowing rectangle in our pockets for guidance. We ask the oracle for a way to roast a turkey without burning the house down.

The Dictionary Officially Declares We Are Drowning in Artificial Vomit

My head feels like it’s been stuffed with insulation foam and kicked down a flight of concrete stairs. The sun is doing that thing where it glares through the blinds with judgemental intensity, demanding I acknowledge the day. I’m not ready for the day. I’m barely ready for the coffee I just spiked with a generous pour of something brown and cheap that I found on the bottom shelf.

I opened the laptop to check the wires, see what fresh hell the digital overlords have cooked up for us while I was sleeping off the previous night’s bad decisions. Usually, it’s the standard fare: a billionaire building a bunker, a new phone that does exactly what the old phone did but costs a kidney, or some startup promising to digitize the human soul for a monthly subscription fee.