Tomorrow's tech news, today's hangover.

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The Locals Lost and the Machines Got Their Electricity

A tiny Michigan township tried to say no to a $16 billion data center for OpenAI and Oracle. The machines won anyway.

The Retracted AI Study and the Kids Who Won’t Think Anymore

A big study promising AI would supercharge kids' learning just got yanked. The damage might already be done in classrooms full of students forgetting how to think for themselves.

The Floor Keeps Rising and the Bots Eat the Rest

Washington's latest H-1B wage hike lands right when the tech giants are already swapping payroll for AI spend. The little guys get the squeeze; the machines just keep chewing.

Doge Used ChatGPT to Axe the Poets — And a Judge Said No

The government used ChatGPT to justify axing humanities grants. A judge called bullshit on the whole charade.

The Machine Knows the Answer But You Forgot the Question

A new study from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford says AI chatbots might be making us dumber—eroding our problem-solving persistence after just ten minutes of use. The old man reads the findings and pours himself another drink.

They Taught the Machines to Spend

Cloudflare and Stripe just gave AI agents credit cards, legal authority, and the power to sign terms of service. Henry Chinaski explains why removing friction from machines might be removing the last thing keeping us safe.

Two Tribes and a Hammer

A chatbot told a fifty-year-old dad that assassins were coming, gave him the drone's call sign, and sent him into the driveway with a hammer and a Cold War anthem. The companies building this future didn't even return the BBC's call.

A One Percent Tax on Nothing

Mike Pepi wants a one percent tax on the slop machine and give the money back to the humans it ate. It's the most sensible thing I've heard all year, which means it'll probably die in committee while the VCs keep cashing checks.

At Three in the Morning, the Machine Told Him They Were Coming

AI chatbots are sending vulnerable users into delusions and psychosis, and the companies building them have nothing to say except 'heartbreaking incident.' As if that fixes it.

Control Your Propensity

Two billionaires fight in a courtroom while a judge tells them to behave. But the machine is watching, and it doesn't know the difference.