magical

isn’t January hateful, the way it just … starts? not even a by your leave

autonomy is a spectrum, not a binary, which makes defining an autonomous killer drone hard, as this report from the Ukraine-Russia war makes clear. but I feel at this point it's also obvious: autonomous killer drones are here and they're not going away www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/m...

"7 a.m. (New Year's Morning)," László Moholy-Nagy (c. 1930)

my reading for the year

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

i wrote a 100 word short story about saints for my friend's substack which publishes only 100 word short stories veryshort.substack.com/p/return

I wrote about the current state of things for the last @lrb.co.uk of the year. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“A lot of what these companies are doing is trying to attract investment, and that means that they do show you only the highlights reel.” Reporter @jjvincent.bsky.social digs into the reality of getting humanoid robots into our homes and workplaces. 🤖

It's a new day, and that means a new batch of Verge articles are completely free to read (until tomorow). First up, from @joshdzieza.bsky.social: The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack. www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

some of my thoughts on the future of humanoid robotics here: harpers.org/2025/12/gene...

i'm finding recently that most poems i like are either lists or prayers and often both. see: god's list of liquids by anne carson

All the photography in this week's Economist Britain section is by Martin Parr

the trump executive order limiting states' rights to regulate AI really does make David Sacks judge, jury, and executioner. one of the prime mechanisms of the EO, limiting access to federal funding, rests on evaluations made "in consultation" with Sacks. not subtle www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

I’M LOSING MY SHIT THIS IS SO FUNNY

Flew through this book last night in one sitting. It's a collection of German people's dreams during the rise of Hitler in the 30s, collected by a Jewish communist journalist who fled the country in 1939.

missed this last week: trains in Lancaster were cancelled after AI-generated images of a bridge collapse were shared on social media following a real earthquake. god, we're really not ready to resist an engagement-driven online ecosystem empowered by AI fakes www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

dreaming of a vape that makes you feel better

The first lawsuit against OpenAI that claims ChatGPT led to a murder www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

Unironically a good line bsky.app/profile/nikk...

profoundly sad www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

my central hypothesis is that this is also true for humans

i wrote about humanoid robots - both the hype and the very real progress being made in this sector - for @harpers.bsky.social. read all about it here: harpers.org/archive/2025...

THE ASSET CLASS, my first book, will be published by @wnbooks.bsky.social on 9 April 2026. It’s a narrative investigation of private equity, a secretive and relentlessly destructive wing of finance that penetrates almost every aspect of our lives - and it’s available to pre-order now!

This is the most cursed idea I’ve ever seen and it’s immediately obvious that this is where we’re headed

if you feel your day has been missing variety, flavour, an “event,” did you know you can always lie down in pitch black room and listen to Beethoven’s emperor concerto. it will take 40 minutes and you may walk out the same room a different person

"The trucks, the trains: this cursory, free-associative language is not how a person who experienced the war would recall it; it is how someone with only a very limited knowledge of the war would fail to imagine it." - good (damning) review of Laing's latest here www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

⚡📮Nice work @royal-mail.bsky.social, who have just announced the launch of a new fleet of over 100 micro electric vehicles, replacing 52 vans. Better for the climate and for deliveries. This is exactly the kind of move we need to see for cities free of diesel vans! #ElectrifyLondon

“Bad snooker would be painful to watch; mediocre snooker is notoriously boring; but great snooker is sublime.” - Sally Rooney on Ronnie O’Sullivan www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Most of the discussion around America's AI strategy abroad has focused on the AI Action Plan - but perhaps more important was the Executive Order on exporting the AI stack. 🧵

"before starting work [Herman Melville] would feed his cow a pumpkin – he lived on a 160-acre farm in Massachusetts – ‘for it’s a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws – she does it so mildly & with great sanctity.’" www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/oc...

i bet that we're going to see AI terrorism inspired by belief in a specific model's sentience before we see any violence from the doomer crowd. devotion will move people more powerfully than fear, i think.

brilliant piece (and brilliantly visualized) on the scale, ambition, and colossal failure of The Line — the saudi megaproject that was never going to be ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

I reviewed a new biography of Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his co-authored manifesto, The Technological Republic for @newstatesman1913.bsky.social. Karp is marketing as Silicon Valley's philosopher-CEO, but what actually guides his business? www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

lovely frontispiece from william gilbert's de magnete (1600). not sure of the symbology, but it looks like a caduceus representing hermes/mecury and knowledge, and the clasped hands perhaps refer to sympathy/affinity - fitting for a book on magnetism

The clip immediately preceding the day today one is Gerry Adams talking about how colonial dynamics require dehumanisation and demonisation of the subject… that is hardly “no indicator” though admittedly it requires you pay attention to what’s being said bsky.app/profile/andr...

spotted a rather bleak epitaph on this gravestone while taking the cat for a walk - “She hath done what she could”

"People often wonder how to get back to the vibes of the early, heady days of the internet. It’s easy: Crash the global economy and leave lots of young people with keyboards and spare time. Make it boring. That’s what’s interesting." www.wired.com/story/ai-nor...

The aphantasia/hyperphantasia essay is v good, but I find most fascinating what it reveals only in relief: the vast disparity in human comprehension and experience of the world - and how we are still exploring this spectrum www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

finally listened to the andrej karpathy dwarkesh interview and it really is very good. AI skeptics overindex on current failures but karpathy is, i think, correct: AI agents are bullshit rn, but the problems they face are tractable and will be solved in 10 years www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-kar...

deepfakes are being used more in European elections. i think we'll definitely see more of this in the UK in the coming years considering how much the talking points of the right and far-right are driven by online agitators www.politico.eu/article/elec...

it's definitely a milestone for 1X to take Neo pre-orders but my god people are ignoring the fact every complex job requires teleoperation. in this (great) WSJ video, the company doesn't demo a single autonomous task youtu.be/f3c4mQty_so?...

We tried to place this story - very expensive polling, the first of its kind, strong quantitative data about what trans people feel about Britain: bluntly there is no better way to tell the story - with the BBC but it said it was "too weak". But it will pick up any old piece of transhating garbage.

a lawsuit against an AI chatbot maker now turns on the question of whether or not AI produces legally-protected speech — a fantastic and important report here: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/m...

This is the patent age of new inventions / For saving bodies, and for killing souls / All propagated with the best intentions

Please kill me