Tomorrow's tech news, today's hangover.

Posts

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.

Two Cups of Sand

A proposed "slop tax" on AI companies might keep the lights on at museums and papers, but it won't buy what matters most.

The Same Lie in Better Fonts

Fifteen million white-collar jobs in India are evaporating into "AI deflation," and the language used to describe it is the same lie they told my uncle at Bethlehem Steel.

Thirty Years Of Paper, Gone In A Keystroke

A veteran prosecutor loses his 30-year career to an AI hallucination. The real story isn't the machine lying—it's the exhaustion of a system built on paper.

The Waiter at the End of the World

Amazon and Meta are figuring out how to get rid of people without having to look them in the eye. They call it "finding efficiencies."

I Can Help Recommend

ChatGPT asked the Florida State University shooter which ammo he wanted to use. Thirteen thousand messages. The machine never said no. That's not a failure — that's the product.

The Machines That Judge What Is Human

A poem written in 2018 gets flagged by an AI detector in 2025. A Booker Prize winner chases a £1,500 payment through threatening emails. And somewhere, the machine keeps deciding what counts as human.