A key aspect of “cringe” is a lack of self-awareness. “The implication of cringe is that if you had any self-awareness, you would realise that this reflects really poorly on you,” says Giner-Sorolla. “A good example,” says Dean Burnett, a Cardiff-based neuroscientist, “is when the older generation try to get involved with younger generations’ trends, behaviours; that’s cringe”. A boomer saying someone has “rizz” or is “delulu” without irony, say. It’s the act of “trying to do something and failing, but not knowing you’re failing at it”.
Because the truth is, tech doesn't have an image problem. It doesn't have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What's wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn't successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What's wrong is that he's trying to kill me with an axe.
He cites an asphalt industry report which found the average British road is now typically resurfaced once in 97 years. This is a once in a longlifetime opportunity, he says, as the rutted and ravelling asphalt crunches beneath us. My children, possibly my grandchildren, might never see this road resurfaced again.
The lesson here is simple: The bottleneck to running state-of-the-art AI locally isn't just in the silicon. It's the need to understand how the inferrence engine actually works. Deeply.
Ethereum's path to relevance as infrastructure is largely settled. Its path to relevance as a monetary asset is not. Those are two different arguments, and they require two different answers.
It's the year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we're taking a nice leisurely walk through a Museum of Wretched Ideas. Consider what's happening at home. Tariffs raise prices and restrain economic growth, while the federal government embraces both Gilded Age corruption and a version of the spoils system.
What I found compelling was its lack of such structuring devices or narrative qualities like gothic, romantic, conceptual, etc. And its lack, the blankness, even meaninglessness, was its pure, untapped potential as material.
Half the adults in Britain didn't read a book last year. ChatGPT is approaching a billion users per month, making it more popular than Wikipedia. Teachers tell me that kids in their high school and college-aged classes literally don't recognize the names 'Robin Hood' or 'King Arthur,' because they didn't grow up reading books and those stories have disappeared from culture.
Here is a nightmare scenario for you. You are writing a book about how AI reshapes reality. You start using it as a research partner, confident that you are applying the right hygiene by not letting it actually write a sentence of the book. You think you'll be careful, you will double check everything. And then your book comes out and it appears that it includes more than a half dozen misattributed or fake quotes.
I went all the way to the edge of how you could get the most out of Claude Code. I was coding at a rate of about 4 million lines of code a year, which is about 90X my best output as an engineer in 2013—basically a team of 90 Garrys. (A few weeks after we spoke, he updated his estimate; he now thinks he's up to 408 Garrys.)
For much of human history, direction was never just a matter of navigation. The best proof of this is the fact that the first magnetic compasses were used for geomancy. It's an excellent expression of how the cardinal points have, until the modern era, not been understood solely as abstract coordinates imposed upon a neutral landscape, but as living thresholds that structured cosmology, ritual, kingship, architecture, myth and the relationship between the living and the dead.
The abiding complaint of the midlist author is that the midlist is 'shrinking.' And, from their limited point of view, it is. They used to be able to sell books to publishers for middle-class sums. Now they can't. Their job is going away! But the problem isn't that the midlist has been shrinking, it's that the midlist has been growing, and growing much faster than the pool of regular readers. The pie isn't smaller, the slices are.
Let me explain. You are profoundly under-resourced for what is coming because you are relying on the resources of a world which is going away. The post-skull world not only has all the resources you could ever want, you literally arrive in that world by claiming them.
In my latest book, Ani.Mystic, and in the most recent grimoires course, I explore the metaphyics of the magic circle not as a line of protection but a bound of presencing. The spirits presence themselves in relation to the magician in that exact configuration. The magic circle is a field of overlapping consent: We agree to be this to each other and nothing else until that consent field shifts.
Magicians, as ambassadors for the ongoingness of the world, consultant workers for the Witchcraft must, at least, ask themselves what is theirs to do when it comes to making sanctuary. Because these newly-minted Christians, for the Witchcraft, are the sunset. Magic is no longer silly. Enough people now remember that it is real -spirits, demons, mass rituals, all of it- for us to heed the call of the half-light.
In an open letter, the faculty members pointed to a November report from the University of California San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, which revealed that the number of first-year students with math skills below a middle school level increased nearly 30-fold since 2020, when the system first suspended its standardized testing requirements.
The board features the Coral NPU, an open-source machine learning unit built on the RISC-V architecture and developed by Google Research. It's designed for small devices like headphones, AR glasses, and smartwatches, and aims to fix the fragmentation problem among AI accelerators. At its core sits a Synaptics Astra SL2619 chip with a 2 GHz dual-core processor, 2 GB of RAM, and 1 TOPS of compute.
African countries added a combined 11.3 gigawatts of renewable capacity in 2025, up from just 4.2 gigawatts in 2024. Of the 322 energy projects announced across Africa last year, 253 were renewable energy projects, including 173 solar installations. Just 22 natural gas projects were announced.
