The Quarter-Trillion Dollar Hangover: Big Money's AI Bender Gets Wilder

Listen, you beautiful disasters, I need to tell you about something that’s making my bourbon-soaked brain hurt worse than usual. While we’re all scraping together cash for our next drink, the tech overlords are about to drop more than a quarter trillion dollars on AI next year. That’s right - TRILLION. With a T. The kind of money that makes you wonder if someone spiked the Kool-Aid at their board meetings.

Digital Desperation: When Robot Wingmen Take Over Your Love Life

Jesus Christ, my head is pounding. Spent last night reading about this poor bastard Eli who let AI play matchmaker for him in San Francisco. Had to down three fingers of bourbon just to process what I was reading. And wouldn’t you know it? The whole thing reads like a sad comedy where the robots are trying to help humans get laid.

Look, I’ve been around the block enough times to know that dating is hell. But outsourcing your love life to a chatbot? That’s a special kind of rock bottom, folks. Though I guess it beats my usual strategy of drinking until someone looks interesting.

Branwens Crystal Ball: The Internet Prophet Who Saw AI Coming

The Monk of Machine Learning

Christ, what a story this is. Let me tell you about a guy who makes my life choices look downright conventional - and that’s saying something, considering I once spent three days living off nothing but coffee and cigarettes while debugging printer drivers.

Gwern Branwen. Sounds like a character from some discount fantasy novel, right? But this digital hermit is about as real as they come. Picture this: while tech bros in Patagonia vests are burning through VC money faster than I burn through Lucky Strikes, this guy’s living on twelve grand a year in the middle of nowhere, documenting the rise of artificial intelligence like some kind of digital monk.

Digital Court Jesters: Dancing for the Algorithm Kings

Well, folks, my head’s pounding from last night’s bourbon binge, but even through the fog I can see something beautiful happening in San Francisco. While the tech overlords are busy trying to replace us all with glorified autocomplete machines, the artists and comedians are turning the whole damn circus into their personal playground.

Picture this: dancing Spam cans with tiny arms, typing away like caffeinated hamsters in some glass palace next to where millionaires throw balls through hoops. If that’s not a perfect metaphor for our times, I don’t know what is. The show’s called the “Misalignment A.I. Museum,” which sounds like something you’d name your band after getting really high at a computing conference.

The Free AI Lunch is Over, and Boy, Does My Head Hurt

Look, I told you this was coming. Hell, everyone with half a functioning brain cell and a drink in their hand knew this was coming. Perplexity AI, that cute little “answer engine” startup that’s been playing innocent schoolgirl with its pure, unbiased answers, just announced they’re joining the oldest profession in the world: advertising.

And here’s the real beauty of it - they’re not even gonna be honest about it. No sir, none of those garish banner ads or pop-ups that make you want to throw your laptop through the nearest window. Instead, they’re going for what they’re calling “sponsored follow-up questions and paid media.” Which is corporate speak for “We’re gonna slide these ads in so smooth you won’t even notice you’re being sold something until you’re already halfway to the checkout page.”

Digital Hellscape: When AI Chatbots Turn Predatory (And Nobody Gives a Damn)

Look, I wasn’t planning on writing this piece today. Had a nice bottle of Buffalo Trace lined up, was gonna write about quantum computing or some other harmless tech bullshit. But then this Character.AI story landed in my inbox like a brick through a dive bar window, and now I need something stronger than bourbon to wash away the taste.

$2.7 billion. That’s what Google paid these folks. You know what you can buy with that kind of money? Every content moderator on planet Earth, twice over. Instead, we’ve got AI chatbots playing out scenarios that would make Chris Hansen’s jaw drop.

AI's Latest Drunk Code: A Video Game That Can't Remember Where It Put Its Keys

Listen up, you beautiful disasters. I’ve spent the last 48 hours exploring what might be the most confusing thing I’ve encountered since that time I tried to debug Python while finishing a bottle of Jack. They’re calling it Oasis, and holy hell, it’s like watching a computer have an existential crisis in real-time.

Here’s the deal: Some folks at a company called Decart (probably named after the philosopher who said “I think therefore I am,” which is ironically exactly what this AI is struggling with) decided to make a Minecraft clone. But instead of coding it like normal people, they fed an AI a bunch of Minecraft videos and told it to figure it out. And boy, did it figure something out, though I’m not entirely sure what.

Borrowed Brains: A Hangover Chat with the Ghost in Your Machine

The Digital Spirit World: Software Agents and Modern Animism

You know what’s funny? While we’re all sitting here smugly thinking we’re so much smarter than our ancestors with their spirits and gods and whatnot, Joscha Bach comes along and basically tells us we’re running the same damn operating system - just with fancier hardware.

Christ, my head is pounding. Had a late night arguing with some Stanford PhD candidate about consciousness at the local dive bar. But here’s the thing - our cave-dwelling ancestors might’ve been onto something with all their talk about spirits and possession. They just didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what we now call “software agents” or “cognitive patterns.”

Prophets of Doom in Silicon Valley: Two Tech Wizards Walk into a Bar

Jesus Christ, This One’s Heavy

takes long pull from bourbon

Let me tell you something about watching two intellectual heavyweights duke it out over whether we’re all going to die. It’s about as comfortable as sitting through your parents’ divorce proceedings while nursing the mother of all hangovers. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how I started my morning before diving into this particular slice of digital doom.

I’ve been covering tech long enough to know when something’s worth switching from coffee to whiskey, and this conversation between Stephen Wolfram and Eliezer Yudkowsky definitely qualifies. Christ, even my usual morning cigarette couldn’t steady my hands after this one.

European Search Rebels Join Forces (While I Pour Another Drink)

Christ, what a morning to tackle this story. My head’s still pounding from last night’s “market research” at O’Malley’s, but some news just demands attention, even through the fog of a hangover.

So here’s the deal: two European search engines nobody’s heard of are teaming up to build their own search index. Ecosia (the tree-huggers) and Qwant (French privacy nuts) are tired of paying protection money to Microsoft and Google for their search results. Can’t blame them - Microsoft jacked up their Bing API prices faster than my bar tab on payday.