It is obvious that outsourcing intelligence comes at a cognitive cost, and yet it is alarming that the cognitive cost is so catastrophically high.

The U.S. spends around two million dollars to shoot down each $35,000 Iranian drone.

Iran spends a few hundred thousand dollars shoot down each $30 million U.S. drone.

dronexl.co/2026/04/20/2...

I used Amazon's new AI bot for recommending books based on my reading habits. One of the recommendations appears to be a shoe.

Everyone who was paying attention saw it coming. In some circles the drone cost asymmetry discussion has been raging for a decade.

BUT WHY?

We all have days like this

People are having a great time dunking on this by saying things like "my car also goes faster than a human" but I doubt they'll be so smug when they're getting chased down an alley by one of these things for attending a protest.

Exclusive: Can AI judge journalism? A Thiel-backed startup says yes, even if it risks chilling whistleblowers Objection, a Thiel-backed startup, aims to use AI to judge journalism, letting users pay to challenge stories. Critics warn it could chill whistleblowers and reshape how media accountability works.

No 💘

techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/c...

The PM doth protest too much, methinks.

This makes no sense.

Drone operators controlling drones in the battlefield from outside of Ukraine. Interesting questions here about individuals taking on active combatant status despite being far beyond an active war zone.

AI was supposed to cure cancer.

We're living in the haughtiest times.

Because we all know that when it comes to art quantity ALWAYS trumps quality.

Pretty much sums up the state of journalism in 2026.

I wrote about some previous studies on this last year, and what struck me is that while it is obvious that people who use AI to think for them will do less thinking, it is alarming just how drastic the effect is and how quickly these dependencies take hold.

www.economist.com/science-and-...

Our era is going to be mocked relentlessly in the annals of history.

Pivoting to AI is the business world's version of using AI to generate ideas. In both cases you're calling it in because you're lazy as hell.

"What a strange scene for angels and archangels to contemplate! to behold beings of the same species...raging like tigers and demons, and accounting it their glory to hurl the instruments of death and destruction against each other, and to triumph in the number of the slain."
—Rev. Thomas Dick, 1845

Boars today, humans tomorrow.

This is a perfect piece of writing.

This could be a major development. Compared to aerial and maritime drones, which don't have to contend with things like fallen trees and muddy troughs, ground robots have always lagged behind on the adoption curve despite having been around for just as long. That may be changing.

In the course of reporting this story on censorship over the Iran war, I actually had an experience with using AI that I thought I'd share because I think it illustrates the ongoing promise and problems with the technology.

Short 🧵

www.npr.org/2026/04/10/n...

Trump Truth Social post: Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!! President DJT

presidential palantir shout out this morning

I think the problem isn't that the overviews themselves are flawed. There's a lot of bad info on the web. The problem is that they're designed to discourage the kind of multiple source checking that is the only foolproof way to figure out what's true and what isn't.

In previous technological revolutions, the new merely displaced the old. This time the new is quite literally eating everything that came before it.

2030 and once again I am standing in a line at the bank to cash a paper check

bsky.app/profile/toob...

Filing this under "Don't tell me to calm down."

cc: @hypervisible.blacksky.app