Read Perfection. Honestly cannot recommend. It would've made a good New Yorker essay poking fun at millennials, but as a novel it's a slog. The writer can write well but seems to have spent far too much time around boring rich people, and doesn't have enough to say.

It's so cool that when the right person lands a direct hit on ol' Elon he can't stop from lighting up and spinning his bowtie like a carnival game clown

The first instalment of our subscriber-only collaboration with the FT is live today. Our @caiwei.bsky.social speaks with John Thornhill about who is winning the AI race: China or Silicon Valley www.technologyreview.com/2025/11/03/1...

are we seriously securitizing ai data centres. are we deadass.

Brilliant cover story this week on the "senile belief system" of "Windsorism" by @willoyd.bsky.social:

I’ve been struck by how the British far right is using deepfake technology — less to deceive about specific events, more to tap into fascistic affects & desires. This is really frightening. My dispatch from grim corners of the Internet, for @lrb.co.uk online. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

I wrote about tech CEOs and lobtailing www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1...

Analysts show that capital expenditures on AI were so big over the last 6 months they added more to the GDP than *all consumer spending*. That growth is offsetting pain from the tariffs and slow job growth. So the AI bubble may be propping up the whole US economy. What happens if and when it pops?

Check out the colossal array of great Murphs in the replies.

This is, regrettably, a pretty persuasive take on where we're headed www.theguardian.com/environment/...

“There will be fewer, if any, enforcement actions about how companies are deploying AI,” says former FTC attorney Leah Frazier.

The gleeful doxing of someone cheating in public is bad even if they are a CEO and even if they are a Coldplay fan. It's bad because this kind of thing is happening to random people on TikTok for such crimes as "sitting silently on a plane" or "being attractive" www.404media.co/the-astronom...

Generative AI is impressive and great at a small proportion of the tasks we're currently trying to use it for. I can't believe how much fixing/editing we're putting up with for the remaining (majority) of use cases. It does feel a bit like we've collectively lost our minds sometimes.

The AI model is still slapping garbled, nonsensical captions on videos more than a month after launch, even when users explicitly ask for no captions at all.

This might be my favourite cat meme of 2025 so far

Everything about this story is *fantastic* but I particularly enjoyed the bonus fun sidebar: astronomers absolutely hate the moon

obviously this is mental in and of itself but man alive it really does suck extra hard when you think about all the ACTUAL CRIMES the police just isn't investigating, because of "lack of resources"

Some people believe chatbots like ChatGPT can provide an affordable alternative to in-person psychedelic-assisted therapy. Many experts say it’s a bad idea.

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

This has to be one of the bleakest stories from the AI relationships subgenre yet. I genuinely admire the writer's attempt to not portray these people as troubled freaks but I'm afraid it spectacularly failed. Real nails on a blackboard stuff. www.wired.com/story/couple...

Anyway the heat is making my floppy cat, Ernie, even floppier, so I'm just going to focus on that for a bit now

So this where we're at, then. There's no plan, no moral compass, no one has learned anything from history, and no one involved has the slightest clue what they are doing. Great!

Here's a big-picture geopolitical thread on Israel's war on Iran - its possibilities, impossibilities, dynamics, and delusions. My goal is to give you a full big-picture view in one place, which is why this is a long thread. If you prefer drip-fed updates, skip this thread.

Remembering this great tweet on the Summer Solstice

So happy Heston made this. Every time someone speaks up about their experiences of bipolar, it gets easier for those of us living with it. Poor guy though - I can't imagine living with it all the way to 57 (I was diagnosed a full 30 years younger than that!) www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029k2h

Farage and the far right in general come from a grievance culture. If you do what they want, even maximally – Brexit – they’ll move the goalposts and keep moaning. If you engage seriously with their concerns, they’ll find new ones. You will never satisfy them, because they don’t want to be satisfied

Fun story from @rhiannonwilliams.bsky.social here, about AI models and how easy (or not) it is to get them to talk filth. Claude is a boring prude. DeepSeek is kinda slutty 😏 www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/19/1...

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on. slate.com/technology/2...

Cutting benefits for people with disabilities makes people more Disabled.

I’m convinced this is how a bay leaf would talk

They say the Beach Boys survived the British invasion because of their unique sound. But I think it was that, as a California band, they were 5200 miles away. The British simply didn't have long-range weapons that effectively covered that distance

What is it about being a woman in your thirties that makes you become absolutely FASCINATED by whatever the moon's up to www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/strawbe...

Mar is spot on here. Big Tech bamboozles us and claims its (let's be honest, increasingly crappy) products are inevitable. It tells us we'll be left behind and DIE if we don't all adopt them! They aren't, and we won't. We deserve better.

Something I’m enjoying is watching the right try and make this situation “masculine” when it is two extremely catty and weak-seeming people having a petty, messy and passive aggressive argument in public, refusing to talk to each other at all

it’s time to replace all doctors with ai

"Do you even own a black suit?"

Common People was such a depressing opening to new Black Mirror that I'm not sure I can face watching any more of it. It's irritating too - they could have totally written a hopeful, optimistic version of the EXACT same story, with just a fraction more effort and lateral thinking.

Getting so tired of this narrative, which is not remotely backed up by evidence. Either Streeting doesn't know that, in which case he's an idiot, or he does and he's saying it anyway, in which case he's a terrible person www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet."

I wrote a spicy piece on "AI crawler wars"🐞 in @technologyreview.com (my first op-ed)! While we’re busy watching copyright lawsuits & the EU AI Act, there’s a quieter battle over data access that affects websites, everyday users, and the open web. 🔗 www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/11/1... 1/

Not a single care in the world

For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally—and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally-funded research. Now all that's being dismantled. 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/21/1...

In 2021 I called the internet a 'self-reinforcing misogyny machine'. With AI and X and Suck-up Zuck, the problem is only getting worse. So... what are we going to about it? If you're thinking about this or even better actively working on it, I'd love to chat. www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1...