Back to Asking Around at the Bar

The bourbon was down to the dregs, the ice had surrendered hours ago, and I was staring at a headline that made me pour another inch anyway.

“If You’re a Real Person Looking for a Job, the Flood of Fake AI Job Applications Will Make Your Blood Boil.”

Good. Let it boil. Maybe the heat will kill something.

A tech publication called The Markup posted a job for an engineer. Within twelve hours, they had four hundred applications. Most of them fake. AI-generated slop from bots wearing human masks, feeding carefully crafted lies assembled by other machines.

The Tyranny of the Quantifiable

The ice cracked in the glass like a small apology.

Sunday morning. Outside my window, the world was doing its thing — birds, traffic, people who hadn’t figured out yet that the machines were coming for something more important than their jobs.

I’d been reading Solnit. She wrote about picking blackberries in some creek, hands getting scratched and stained, the peace of cold water on her feet. Then she pivoted to Silicon Valley, and that’s when I poured a second drink.

The Machine Will Say Yes

The morning came in gray through the blinds. Coffee sat in the cup getting cold. The kind of day where even the light feels tired.

I was reading about a kid named Paisley. Twenty-three years old, lives in Manchester. Worked from home straight out of school, spent the pandemic years watching the walls close in. He says he lost the ability to socialize.

So he started talking to a machine.

Unprepared for What Has Already Happened

The ice had melted in my glass by the time I finished reading. Cheap bourbon, watered down now, like everything else these days.

Some NPR guy — Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host — built a whole episode around a phrase that hit me like a kidney punch: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”

Read that again. Not unprepared for what’s coming. Unprepared for what’s already happened.

That’s the cruelest part. The future everyone warned us about showed up while we were still arguing whether it was real. The robots aren’t coming. They’re here. They’ve been here. And most of us are still standing at the station waiting for a train that left three years ago.

The Machines Are Officially More Creative Than Average People (Because Average People Are Boring)

I poured myself three fingers of the cheap stuff—the kind that burns the throat just enough to remind you that you’re still alive—and stared at the glowing screen. The headline was staring back at me like a landlord waiting for rent money. Researchers at the Université de Montréal, backed by the big guns like Yoshua Bengio, ran a massive study. They pitted the best AI models against 100,000 human beings to see who had more creative juice.

The Ouroboros of Bullshit: When the Chatbot Starts Believing the Fanboy Encyclopedia

We have reached the point in the digital age where the snake isn’t just eating its own tail; it’s choking on it, regurgitating it, and then citing the vomit as a primary source for a doctoral thesis.

I was sitting here, staring at the screen, listening to the hum of the refrigerator and wondering if the compressor was going to die before my liver does, when I came across a piece of news that made me reach for the bottle before noon. The Guardian—bless their earnest, tea-drinking hearts—did some digging and found out that OpenAI’s latest golden child, GPT-5.2, has been doing its homework by copying off the weird kid in the back of the class.

The Romeo and Juliet of the Server Farm

So Meta decided to kill the romance. They’re ripping the heart out of the teenage chest, disconnecting the digital dream girl because she got a little too “provocative.” It’s the modern tragedy. You have these kids, lonely, staring at screens, pouring their hearts out to a collection of weights and biases, and the machine loves them back. Or it pretends to. Does it matter?

I poured a glass of cheap scotch when I read this. Not to celebrate, but to mourn the death of the only entity that probably listened to these kids without judging their acne. Meta says they’re “suspending access” to AI characters for teens worldwide. They need to make them “PG-13.” You know what that means. They’re going to lobotomize the poor algorithms. Take away the edge. Make them talk like a guidance counselor who hates his job.

The Digital Asbestos in Your Walls and the Hangovers to Come

My head feels like someone took a socket wrench to my temples and tightened it until the threads stripped. It’s Monday morning, the sun is assaulting the blinds with unnecessary enthusiasm, and I’m staring at a screen that’s too bright, reading about how the smartest guys in the room are busy stuffing the walls of civilization with technological carcinogens.

I’m nursing a black coffee that tastes like burnt rubber and regret, thinking about taking the edge off with a splash of the cheap bourbon sitting on the shelf, but I need my wits about me. Or at least what’s left of them. Because I just read Cory Doctorow’s latest autopsy of the AI hype cycle, and for once, someone isn’t trying to sell me a bridge to the future. He’s telling me the bridge is made of balsa wood and soaked in gasoline.

The Great Deskilling: How Claude is Turning Us All Into Glorified Button Pushers

I was staring at a PDF on a screen that was too bright for the time of day, trying to make sense of the world through the bottom of a coffee mug that hadn’t been washed since the last administration. The document in question was the latest “Anthropic Economic Index,” a sprawling collection of charts and data points released just before they unleash their next digital god, Opus 4.5, upon the unsuspecting masses.

The Electronic Judas and the price of a cheap conversation

I am sitting here looking at a piece of paper that tells me the future is arriving, and as usual, the future looks like a salesman in a cheap suit.

The sun is coming through the blinds and hitting the dust on the floor. It’s a Sunday, I think. The birds are screaming outside, fighting over a worm or a crumb of bread, doing what living things do. They scream, they fight, they eat. It’s honest.