I'm writing this by talking... Hands crossed. Sitting back. Just saying words out loud into a console that's going to turn them into an article, generate a cover image, produce audio, post it to my site, push it to LinkedIn. The whole thing. I'm not touching a keyboard. Last week I wrote a Mac app in twenty minutes. It connects over Bluetooth to my Ember mug and shows me the temperature in my menu bar. Not my mug. I didn't build the mug. Didn't invent the Bluetooth stack. I j

Palantir published a nine-point manifesto on AI sovereignty this week that's been making the rounds. The highlights: sovereignty dictates your institution's future, data retention is your treasure, tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation, and controlling your weights is controlling your fate. CEO Alex Karp followed it up on CNBC, calling the per-token pricing model a "tax" and suggesting something has gone "completely wrong" with how AI is sold to enterprises. It's worth

Everyone has been staring at the benchmark leaderboards. Meanwhile, the real fight moved somewhere else entirely. Apple just filed a 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI. Not over AI. Over manufacturing. The specific targets are Tang Tan — OpenAI's hardware chief, formerly Apple's VP of product design — and a former Apple engineer named Chang Lu. Apple's allegation is a coordinated extraction campaign: employees being actively pushed to download confidential files on their way out

I want to say upfront that "I built" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What I actually did was look at my coffee mug, have a thought, type that thought into Glaze, and go do other stuff. About fifteen or twenty minutes later, I had a finished, working macOS application sitting in my menu bar. It connected to my Ember Mug over Bluetooth, showed me the temperature, and sent me a push notification when the battery got low. I'm not sure "I built" is even the right

I want to be clear about something upfront: I claim zero talent or skill in what I'm about to describe. This is a broken clock story. The clock just happened to be right at a useful moment. Labor Day weekend 2024. Raining in South Florida. Bored enough to do something stupid. I grabbed a Xiao ESP32-C3 — tiny little microcontroller, about $5, probably the smallest ESP32 package I've ever seen — and eight buttons. Wired four of them to standard shortcuts: copy, paste, cut, ente

GPT-5.6 Sol launched today, July 9, 2026. Technically it's three models — Sol, Terra, and Luna — but let's be honest about what actually happened. OpenAI shipped one flagship model that everyone is going to talk about, and two supporting tiers designed to give developers options without sending their API bills to the moon. Sol is the thing. Terra and Luna are pricing strategy. Here's how I found out about it in the most anticlimactic way possible: I was already using i

Let me explain what happened... I found a vibe-coding tool for Mac called Glaze. I had 120 free tokens....I had a mildly annoying workflow problem involving prompts and clipboard management and too many browser tabs and about eight thousand open Notes documents I never look at. I told the AI to build me a small floating window. That’s where things got away from me. Here’s How the Evening Actually Went The original ask was pretty simple. Make me a floating sidecar window that

On July 7th, Norm AI closed a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation. Khosla Ventures led the round — the same firm that was the first institutional investor in OpenAI. Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, Craft Ventures, and New York Life all participated. So did Jeff Hammes, the former Chairman of Kirkland & Ellis — one of the most powerful law firms on earth — and Fenwick LLP, investing directly as a firm. The company has raised more than $260 mi

The Receipt OpenClaw — one of the most widely used open-source agent frameworks in the world — just shipped a feature called Dreaming. By default, it runs at 3:00 AM. Every night. Whether you’re awake or not. What it does, technically, is background memory consolidation: three phases (Light, REM, Deep) that sort recent short-term signals, reflect on themes, and promote the most durable insights into long-term memory. The system scores candidates on relevance, frequency, recen

A post crossed my feed this week with a T-Rex crushing a McKinsey building in its jaws, “AI” and “Anthropic” stamped across its side. The copy underneath: twenty Claude prompts that supposedly replace an entire finance consulting team. A three-statement financial model, priced at “$9,000 Big 4 engagement.” Cash flow forecasting, “$6,500 CFO-level build.” A SaaS metrics dashboard, “$8,000 SaaS CFO template.” Working capital optimization, “$6,000 McKinsey engagement.” Twenty li

Late Tuesday night, Sam Altman posted two sentences on X: “GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday. We're expanding preview access globally now.” By morning it was a standard tech news cycle — pricing tables, benchmark charts, the usual “which tier should you use” explainers. Sol at $5 input / $30 output per million tokens, Terra at $2.50/$15, Luna at $1/$6. Sol is OpenAI's strongest model yet, meaningfully better at coding, biology, and cyb

Anthropic published a paper a few hours before this piece went out, and the internet already knows what it's going to do with it: turn “Claude has a mechanism for conscious access” into “Anthropic thinks Claude is conscious.” That headline will spread fast. It's also not what the paper says, and the actual finding is more useful than the sci-fi version. The Receipt Anthropic's researchers built a tool they call a JSpace lens — JSpace, short for Jacobian space, the mathematica

Nikkei Asia dropped a number this week that deserves more attention than it's getting, mostly because it landed in a business section instead of a national security one: China now files more fintech patents than any other country on Earth, by a wide margin, in a field the U.S. was supposed to own by default. Nikkei and the research firm Patent Result examined fintech patent filings across 118 countries and regions over the past decade. Total filings nearly tripled to roughly

In March, Anthropic quietly shipped tracking code inside Claude Code that checked whether a user's machine was set to a Chinese time zone and whether it was talking to domains linked to certain Chinese AI companies. It sat there undisclosed until a developer found it, Alibaba banned Claude Code over it, and Anthropic pulled the code last week, calling it an "experiment" it would replace with "better defenses." Set aside for a second whether the tracking itself was the right c

A video's been making the rounds this week breaking down a trio of new SpaceX-adjacent trademarks — Starmind, Stargaze, Starfall — and connecting them to a real FCC filing: SpaceX asking permission to launch up to one million satellites as an orbital data center constellation. The video's framing is clean and mostly right: Starlink becomes the communications layer, the new constellation becomes the compute layer, laser links between satellites become the internal data fabric.

Today America turns two hundred and fifty, and I've got a confession: I love this holiday more than almost any other, and it has almost nothing to do with fireworks and everything to do with fireworks. Let me explain. I've been building professional-grade firework shows since I was about ten years old, and I'm fifty-one now, so do the math — that's four decades of taking a legal-adjacent hobby entirely too seriously. It started with wooden shipping pallets, five or six of the

I watched a clip on TikTok this week of a woman explaining her business to a host, and I need to talk about it, because it's one of the best real-world examples I've seen of exactly what I've been saying since 2023 — and it's also proof of something most people building with AI right now don't want to hear. What She Actually Built She sells custom GPTs — the ones you build on a standard $20/month ChatGPT account — to coaches, founders, and consultants. She's doing around $100

In 2021, Ingka Group — the company that operates roughly 87% of IKEA's global retail — deployed a customer service chatbot named Billie. Between 2021 and 2023, Billie handled 3.2 million interactions and resolved about 47% of them, saving the company roughly €13 million. Straightforward automation story, the kind that gets a line in an annual report and nothing more. What happened next is the part that actually earned IKEA its reputation as the anti-Klarna: instead of looking

The stat making the rounds is real: Meta employees consumed 73.7 trillion AI tokens in about 30 days, which works out to roughly $221 million a month and $2.65 billion a year at list price. That's not exaggerated. It's in an internal memo, first reported by The Information, sent to roughly 6,000 employees warning that internal AI usage costs are approaching billions of dollars in 2026. But the number by itself misses the actual story, and the actual story is better than the n

Right now, somewhere, a defense planner is looking at a drone that can identify, track, and fire on a target in under a millisecond — faster than any human operator could possibly approve the shot — and deciding whether to cut the human out of the loop entirely. Not because they want to. Because they've concluded that if they don't, and their adversary does, they lose. That decision is being made in conference rooms this year, not in a science fiction script. I've written bef