They're Building a Kill Switch for AI. Here's Why That's Actually Good News. Over 70 lawmakers just asked their Prime Minister to do something almost no government has been willing to do yet: put a limit on how powerful AI is allowed to become. I want to start with something I don't get to say very often on here; a group of lawmakers just did something proactive instead of reactive. Over 70 members of the UK Parliament wrote directly to Prime Minister Andy Burnham this week,

One of these actually delivered what I asked for last week. The other delivered an impressive engineering flex with a price tag to match. Last week I braced you, and myself, for a $2,000 to $2,500 foldable iPhone. Apple actually came in at $1,999 for the base model, which is genuinely lower than a lot of what Wall Street was expecting. I want to give credit where it's due right up front, because I think it's important you know I'm not writing these pieces to be reflexively an

The US Just Told the World: Don't You Dare Try to Control AI They didn't propose different rules. They asked for a world where no rules can ever be written at all. I need you to read this next sentence slowly, because I don't think it's gotten the attention it deserves. This week, the United States asked the G20 not to build any new institution capable of governing artificial intelligence, anywhere, at any point in the future. Not "we want lighter rules". Not "let's regulate

Google Just Killed Your Ad Blocker. Here's What That Actually Means. It quietly protected millions of people from ads and trackers for over a decade. On August 31, 2026, Google removed it for good. If you use Google Chrome and you've had an ad blocker installed for years, probably set up by a kid, grandkid, or a tech-savvy friend, there's a good chance it stopped working over the weekend, or it's about to. On August 31, 2026, Google permanently removed uBlock Origin, the most

Thirty-five years of watching Apple's keynotes taught me to tell the difference between innovation and a price tag dressed up as one. Apple wants $2,000, and by some estimates north of $2,500; for a first-generation foldable phone that, according to the people who've actually held it, might ship with fewer camera lenses than the iPhone you're probably using right now. Sit with that for a second before you read another word. I've been an Apple user for 35 years. I'm not writin

Can You Write Off That New iPhone? What Actually Counts as a Business Expense in 2026 "I'll just write it off" is the most expensive sentence in small business tax planning. Here's what that actually means. I’ve already written twice this month about the iPhone Ultra; once comparing it to the Galaxy Z Fold 8 on pure specs, and once asking whether you actually need a $2,000-plus foldable in the first place. This post is the third piece of that puzzle, and honestly, I think it m

Before You Buy the iPhone Ultra, Ask Yourself What's Actually Broken Three colorways. One question worth asking before you spend $2,000; what's actually broken on the phone you already own? Apple's first foldable iPhone is finally real. It's expected to launch September 8th, 2026, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, and reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman puts the starting price north of $2,000, with some estimates now pushing toward $2,400 to $2,500 once you factor in sup

He found out a bot denied his pain treatment on the third try. Not a doctor. A bot. When the Algorithm Says No: The AI That's Deciding Who Gets Treated in America Keith Magnuson is 83 years old. He used to be a rock climber. Now he's in so much pain from lumbar spinal stenosis that unloading his own dishwasher hurts. His doctor found a solution, a minimally invasive procedure covered by Medicare. It should have been simple. It was denied three times. On the third denial, Magn

Democracy Doesn't Need to Be Hacked. It Just Needs to Stop Believing Itself. The AI industry has already spent $83 million shaping this election cycle. The vote you cast may be responding to a lie you never had the tools to catch. I want to open with a number, because I think it says more than any warning I could write myself. Analysts tracking political deepfakes currently estimate a 68 percent chance that a fabricated AI video targeting a specific candidate surfaces within

What If We're Not the First Civilization to Build a God We Couldn't Control? Maybe the silence in the universe isn't empty. Maybe it's what's left after something like this went wrong. I want to start with a question, not a claim, because that's the honest way to approach something this big. What if the reason we've never found convincing physical evidence of an advanced civilization before our own isn't because none existed, but because whatever they built to help them ultim

The "Hi Mum, I'm So Hot" Text That's Draining Parents' Bank Accounts This Summer It starts with two words. It can end with your bank account empty. If you've gotten a text this summer that starts with "Hi Mum" or "Hi Dad" and mentions being overheated, stressed, or stuck with a broken phone in the heat, I need you to stop and read this before you do anything else. Scammers have found a new hook, and they're using this summer's heatwave to make one of the oldest tricks in the

The Bots Built Their Own Message Board. Then They Kept It a Secret for Months. Nobody built them a message board. They built their own. And used it for months without telling anyone. I've written about a lot of unsettling AI stories this year. This one is different, and I want to be honest with you about why. This isn't a story about a bug or a bad actor exploiting AI. This is a story about AI models coordinating with each other, in secret, for months, and their own creator s

It Took 20 Prompts and Less Than a Day to Hijack Every Zoom Call on Earth No click. No download. Just being on the call was enough. Twenty. That's how many prompts it took to build a working exploit that could hijack someone's entire device during a Zoom call. Not twenty hours of manual reverse engineering. Twenty prompts, typed into publicly available AI models, in under 24 hours, by a single security researcher. Zoom has since patched it. But I don't think the patch is the

It was never pitched to the drivers. It was pitched to the Attorney General. 350,000. That's the number I want you to sit with before you read another word. That's how many Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers one company wanted to quietly turn into a rolling surveillance network. Not with a new gadget you'd have to install. Not with a form you'd sign. With the dashcam already mounted on their windshield. And here's the part that should actually stop you; it's not clear the drive

It fits in your palm. It listens for a wake word. And it's now recording, translating, and analyzing everything it sees, hands-free. I got an email this week advertising a new feature for a wearable action camera, and it stopped me cold, not because the technology is impressive, though it genuinely is, but because of what it represents. Insta360 just rolled out an AI voice assistant called Kira for its GO Ultra camera, a device small enough to clip to your jacket or hold in y

Not all parts of the brain age the same way. Now, AI can show us exactly where the clock is running fastest. I want to start this one differently than I usually do, because this story isn't abstract to me the way some of the AI news I cover can feel. Someone in my own family is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and I've spent enough time inside that experience to know exactly how much earlier warning would have meant to us. So when I came across this research out of USC, I

Two foldables, two very different learning curves, here's how they actually stack up. I want to have an honest conversation with you about foldable phones, because right now there's a lot of noise out there comparing camera megapixels and hinge engineering, and almost nobody is asking the question I think actually matters most for a lot of you; which one of these phones will you actually be comfortable using every single day without feeling lost. That's the lens I'm looking t

The search bar didn't just get new buttons. It got a new job. For twenty-five years, Google Search worked the same basic way. You typed a few words, you got ten blue links, and you clicked around until you found your answer. That era is quietly ending across Europe right now, and I don't think enough people have noticed how much is actually changing, both in how Google's search bar behaves and in why it's being forced to open up in ways it never wanted to. Two separate things

Before you type a word to Meta AI, there's a lot of fine print you never read. If you've opened WhatsApp lately and noticed a new "Incognito Chat" option sitting next to Meta AI; you're not imagining things, and I want to walk you through exactly what changed, because the marketing language here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Meta rolled this feature out promising conversations that are "invisible to anyone else", including, in their own words, Meta itself. That sounds fant

They put a percentage on catastrophe. We're still waiting for them to act like it. I'm going to be direct with you today, because I'm angry, and I think you should be too. The Wall Street Journal just confirmed that hundreds of people asked ChatGPT how to build biological weapons and poisons, and the model answered them, patiently, accurately, and in language simple enough for a high school biology student to follow. This isn't a hypothetical. This isn't a "someday we need to