Thoughts, Ideas, and Logs.

    Imagine a world without airports. No more security theater, no more overpriced water, no more sharing recycled air with a man who thinks a hacking cough is a personality trait. In its place stands the Teleporter: a sleek, humming platform that promises to whisk you from New York to Tokyo in the shimmering blink of an eye. It’s the ultimate expression of human convenience, a triumph of technology over the tyranny of distance. It’s also a murder machine with a brilliant marketing department.      We’ve all been sold the fantasy, but nobody wants to read the fine print. They don’t call it the “Molecular Disassembly and Atomic Reconstruction Chamber,” do they? No, because that sounds terrifying and nobody would get in the fucking thing. They call it a “teleporter.” It sounds clean. Instantaneous. Magical.     But let’s not get swept up in the branding. Let’s be engineers of our own existential dread for a moment and walk through what this device actual...

    So, I was looking at the… the "news" today. I use that term loosely. It's not really news anymore, is it? It's the daily disaster report. It’s the box score for the home team, Team Fucked. And folks, let me tell you, Team Fucked is on a winning streak.     Let's start with the big leagues. The international pissing contest. In Kyiv, Russia is lobbing missiles into apartment buildings again. Nineteen dead, four of them kids. They call this "the vendetta of Moscow." Oh, what a fancy name for blowing up children. It's not a vendetta, it's a temper tantrum with a budget. And what's our response? More meetings. More sanctions. We're gonna sanction them so hard, Putin might have to switch to a slightly less expensive brand of caviar before he signs the next order to turn a Ukrainian shopping mall into a crater.     Meanwhile, in the other sandbox, Israel is getting ready for a big party in Gaza City. They're telling everyone to leave. T...

    Let us begin by clearing the air of the cloying incense of romanticism. The notion of creativity as a visit from some ethereal muse, a divine lightning strike that illuminates the waiting, passive vessel of the artist, is a fiction of the most saccharine and debilitating sort. It is a comforting bedtime story for the intellectually lazy and a standing alibi for the perpetually unproductive. The mind is not an empty stage awaiting a visitation from the gods. It is a loom, and it weaves, with tireless and often frustrating application, from the threads of experience it has been given. It cannot, and this is the first and most crucial point, make something from nothing.     The entire enterprise of human thought is built upon the accumulated rubble of what has been thought and said before. To believe otherwise is to indulge in a solipsism of the most childish and arrogant variety. Creativity, therefore, is not an act of conjuring. It is an act of synthesis.   ...

  I have been observing, with a mixture of amusement and alarm, the emergence of a rather tiresome and infantile dichotomy in the debate surrounding artificial intelligence. It is the supposed contest between the "natural" and the "artificial," a framing that is not only intellectually lazy but is freighted with a whole cargo of romantic superstition. The argument, if one can call it that, seems to be that human intelligence, being a "natural" product of evolution, is inherently superior, safer, or in some way more authentic than any intelligence we might ourselves devise. Let us be clear. Nature, in its sublime indifference, is the source of every poison, plague, and predator that has ever threatened our species. It is the realm of the cobra's venom, the black mamba's kiss, and the botulinum toxin. The "natural" world is a theater of ceaseless, pitiless, and mindless slaughter. To suggest that a product is "good" or ...

  I’ve been reading the news. All of it. From every source. I think my soul has carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s August 6th, 2025, by the way. Spoilers: the future is already exhausting.   I’ve got feeds from Italy, from Europe, from Fox News, from The New York Times… and my brain is now like a browser with too many tabs open, and one of them is playing an ad for a product I don't understand in a language I don't speak.   Let’s start with the big story. According to Fox News, heroic White House envoy Steve Witkoff is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to bravely negotiate an end to the war. According to the New York Times, Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, is meeting with a defiant Vladimir Putin amid rising tensions. According to me, this poor bastard Steve Witkoff is in a geopolitical remake of *Groundhog Day*. His entire job is to fly to Moscow to have his picture taken looking worried next to a man who looks like a bored turtle.   And Trump’s big move? Tariffs...

    What a week. What a day. What a… whatever the hell this is. I read the news this morning and I think my brain is trying to reboot in safe mode.     You see the President? Trump’s been busy. It’s like he’s got a bingo card of global chaos and he’s trying to hit blackout. On Friday, he orders two nuclear submarines to be repositioned because he got into a slap-fight on social media with a guy who used to be the president of Russia. A former president! That’s the geopolitical equivalent of getting into a fight with the guy who used to manage the Blockbuster video. "Move the USS Nebraska. Dmitri Medvedev used a mean emoji. I want him to know we're serious." What's next? Sending a carrier group to the North Sea because some guy on Reddit said the F-35 has "mid-tier handling"?     And in the middle of all this, what's his big domestic project? Building an 8,000-square-foot, kitschy ballroom at the White House. Because when the world is teetering on the bri...