Technology

On July 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14319, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” The order requires that any large language model procured by a federal agency adhere to two “Unbiased AI Principles”: truth-seeking and ideological neutrality (The White House, 2025a). Speaking at the signing, the president said: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries” (NPR, 2025). ...

I have written about grift before. The grift is the con at scale, the confidence game run from the highest office in the land, open and defended as virtue. This essay is about the machinery that makes the grift possible: a presidency that no longer argues with reality but generates its own. PolitiFact counted 36 posts on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account since his inauguration that used AI-generated imagery. Twenty-one of them promoted or sensationalized Trump and his administration. Twelve degraded his opponents. Three reinforced his policy messaging (PolitiFact, 2025). NBC News, reviewing the same feed, found “dozens” of pieces of synthetic media, roughly half of them posted in August and September 2025 alone (NBC News, 2025). The White House’s own X account has posted at least 14 more since January. Add the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and other agency accounts, and the count grows further. ...

Yesterday, Apple released macOS 27. Golden Gate. It is the first version of macOS that will not run on a single Intel Mac, and it is the last with full Rosetta 2 support, the translation layer that let Apple silicon Macs run Intel software.1 Four machines that supported the previous release were dropped flat: the 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2019, the 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020, the 2020 iMac, and the Intel Mac Pro from 2019.2 If you are reading this on one of them, yesterday was the day the current stopped. ...

On Tuesday, September 8, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and said the people building the technology believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This week, the story did not fade, as stories usually do. It compounded. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the field did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.1 Paul Christiano, the former head of safety at the US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said the recent pace of capability gains gave him “a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”2 Two researchers named Wang, one at OpenAI and one at Anthropic, posted within hours of each other that recursive self-improvement was the danger “hard to overstate” and that “there is not yet a viable scientific plan” to make it safe.3 OpenAI’s chief scientist wrote that he expects the speed of progress to carry into systems that increasingly drive their own development, and called it “a time that calls for extreme caution,” adding, “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”4 ...

On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted his reasons on X. He had previously worked at OpenAI. He wrote that neither company was acting responsibly, that they were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that the people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”1 Two of his colleagues, still employed, backed him up. Evan Hubinger, a lead in Anthropic’s alignment division, wrote that he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the industry did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.2 Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable oversight lead, added the line that should have stopped the conversation: “In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”3 ...

Elon Musk and the Engineering of Chaos: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malice. He is something more historically novel and institutionally corrosive: a techno-libertarian demolitionist who mistakes engineering intelligence for governing wisdom, a man who has spent three decades acquiring, building, and destroying institutions according to a single algorithm (identify inefficiency, slash personnel, declare victory, move on), and who has now applied that algorithm to the federal government, the public square, and the very idea of institutional continuity. He does not seek to rule. He seeks to reboot. And in the gap between the crash and the reboot, millions suffer. ...

Peter Thiel and the Contrarian’s Revenge: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malice. He is something more historically rooted and intellectually ambitious: a plutocratic philosopher-king who has concluded, after decades of reading Strauss, Girard, and the Gospels, that democracy is incompatible with the kind of technological civilization he wants to build, and who has spent his fortune and influence creating the intellectual, political, and surveillance infrastructure for a post-democratic future. He is not a populist demagogue. He is a techno-monarchist operating in plain sight: patient, erudite, and willing to wait a generation for his vision to mature. ...

Correction notice — May 26, 2026. This essay was factually reviewed on 2026-05-26 and republished with specific corrections applied. Among them: removed fabricated citations, including an invented robot (“Shumana”), invented Stanford Cart developer names, and a fabricated RAND study author; corrected dates, attributions, and roles for figures including Minsky, McCarthy, Geoffrey Hinton, and the BDI framework’s origins; corrected specific historical details (SNARC’s 1951 build, the Strategic Computing Initiative’s 1983 launch, OpenAI Five’s release year, the DQN Atari count, Brynjolfsson et al.’s citation, and several others); and removed fabricated co-authors from the Silver et al. and Mnih et al. reference entries. A reader who compared the original May 21, 2026 version to the current text would see that the historical claims, attributions, and reference list have been tightened throughout. The work should be read as corrected, not as it first appeared. If you spot a remaining error, please email phil@huffmanwrites.org. ...

I was ready to do something drastic. My machine had been running hot for weeks. Disk usage climbing, performance lagging, the kind of quiet degradation that starts as inconvenience and ends as crisis. I had installed AnythingLLM to test it, decided it wasn’t ready, uninstalled it, and yet the space never came back. The numbers didn’t lie. Something was eating my disk, and I couldn’t see it. The easy answer was staring at me: clean install. Wipe the whole system, start fresh, rebuild from zero. It’s the digital equivalent of the scorched-earth impulse, the one that says, if I can’t understand the problem, I’ll eliminate the conditions that produced it. I’ve done it before. Most of us have. It feels like control. It feels like decisiveness. It is almost always a confession that we have failed to understand what we are actually dealing with. ...

The Stoic CGM A Data-Driven Guide to Reinventing Yourself Executive Summary The Stoic CGM treats continuous glucose monitoring as a practice of self-knowledge: not merely a medical intervention, but a discipline of attention applied to the body’s own politics. It examines what happens when Stoic principles meet metabolic data: how to respond to information without being ruled by it, and how to govern the self when the self is constantly in motion. The core message: the body is not an enemy to defeat, but a system to comprehend. ...