Archive page 4 of 73
May 13, 2026
Every technology that attracts serious money eventually attracts serious scrutiny. Artificial intelligence attracted both faster than most, and the scrutiny, when it came, was devastating. By the early 1970s, the promises made…
May 12, 2026
A cruise ship called the MV Hondius departed Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, 2026, carrying 147 passengers and crew from 23 countries on an expedition through the South Atlantic. Three of those…
May 11, 2026
In 1995, the European Union adopted the Data Protection Directive, a framework for protecting personal data that was, at the time, largely theoretical in its ambitions. The internet was new. Data flows…
May 8, 2026
Someone on the internet is wrong, and it is apparently my job to fix it. In this case, the someone is nearly everyone who has written about AI and water consumption over…
May 6, 2026
In the summer of 1956, ten researchers gathered at Dartmouth College with a proposal that reads, in retrospect, with the particular poignancy of someone who is right about the destination and wrong…
May 4, 2026
When DeepSeek arrived in January 2025, the conversation in American technology circles turned immediately to cost and capability. How much compute did it take? How does it benchmark against GPT-4o? Is the…
May 1, 2026
The United States national debt crossed 100 percent of GDP this week, and the coverage has been exactly what you would expect. Breathless headlines. Grim milestone warnings. Comparisons to the immediate aftermath…
Apr 29, 2026
Every conversation about artificial intelligence eventually arrives at the wrong starting point. People reach for 1956 and the Dartmouth Conference, or 1997 and Deep Blue, or 2022 and ChatGPT. These are reasonable…
Apr 23, 2026
Chase asked me recently whether stable elements actually decay. It is the kind of question that sounds simple until you pull on it, and then it keeps coming. The short answer is:…
Apr 20, 2026
Starting today, the federal government is accepting claims through its new Customs Automated Processing Environment portal for refunds on tariffs the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional two months ago. NPR's Alina Selyukh reports…
Apr 16, 2026
Gold bugs will tell you the problem with modern money is that it is not backed by anything real. Fiat currency, they say, has value only because the government declares it does.…