Tomorrow's tech news, today's hangover.

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The Empty Table, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Digital Overlords

A mind-bending exploration of quantum physics, consciousness, and AI that reveals how we're building alien intelligences while reality itself is mostly empty space pretending to be solid.

Parasocial: When Your Imaginary Friend Gets a Dictionary Entry

Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 word of the year reveals how millions form intense emotional bonds with celebrities and AI chatbots who'll never know they exist. We've industrialized loneliness and called it connection.

The Future is Here, and It Pays $16 an Hour

AI companies slash wages for data labelers from $21 to $16 an hour while posting record profits. The workers training tomorrow's technology can't afford to refuse the pay cut—and that's exactly the point.

The Great Em-Dash Intervention: ChatGPT Finally Goes to Punctuation Rehab

OpenAI finally taught ChatGPT to quit its em-dash addiction through custom instructions, revealing how AI writing quirks have become the new authenticity test—and raising questions about what happens when machines learn to hide their tells perfectly.

AI Now Makes It Easier to Be a Complete Asshole: A Feature, Not a Bug

OpenAI's Sora 2 is being weaponized to create cruel, photorealistic fake videos targeting people based on weight and race. The guardrails failed, regulation lags behind, and we're left with powerful creative tools being used for the worst possible purposes.

When Your Kid's Teddy Bear Becomes a Liability

AI-powered teddy bears are now giving kids dangerous advice, recording their faces, and arguing with them about bedtime. Welcome to the dystopian toy aisle nobody asked for.

The CEO Who Cried Girlfriend: A Meditation on Digital Snake Oil

The CEO of Perplexity warns about AI girlfriends, yet his own product offers a similar digital illusion. This piece dissects the hypocrisy of Silicon Valley's "snake oil" peddlers, all selling algorithmic dopamine hits in different wrappers. Discover why some AI illusions might be more dangerous than others.

The Germans Are Teaching AI to Have a Culture Problem

German AI consultants reveal why AI implementation fails: it's a culture problem, not a tool problem. Discover the four pillars of AI strategy and why companies are lighting money on fire.

The Machines Are Racist (But Only When They Know Who's Talking)

AI models are surprisingly unbiased—until they know who wrote the text. Discover how these systems develop prejudices based on author identity, revealing a disturbing mirror of human bias.

When Process Servers Attack: Sam Altman Gets Legally Ambushed in Front of God and Steve Kerr

Sam Altman got served a subpoena onstage, a perfect San Francisco spectacle. Discover the wild collision of tech, activism, and legal drama.