“Sumawka Caller”

There’s a sentence people say to these machines. If you’ve used one for anything real, you’ve said it. We just talked about this. Sometimes it comes out sharper than that. You built that thing yesterday. Why are you asking me again. I already told you. You say it out loud, alone, to a screen. Then…

I want to tell you about a price you paid that nobody asked you about. Not a tax. Not a tariff. Nothing you’ll find on a receipt as its own line. But you paid it. And if you bought a laptop this year, or a phone, or a game console for a kid, you paid…

The headline said one word settled the whole argument about whether artificial intelligence is a bubble. One word. Said one time. On an earnings call. The word was visibility. The idea was that the head of the company can now see further down the road than he ever could. He can see the land. The…

There is an old German wiki out on the internet. Twenty-five years old. A site where programmers post notes for each other, the way people did before everything got slick. One volunteer keeps it tidy. That is the whole staff. One man. Starting in May, he began deleting spam. Pages he did not write, appearing…

A dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions. I want to give you something to hold onto. Not an argument. Not a side. A staff. The kind of stick a man leans on when the ground is uneven and he cannot see far ahead. You…

I want to tell you about a kind of failure that does not look like a failure. You know what a break-in looks like. Somebody picks the lock. Somebody kicks the door. There is damage, and you can point at it. This is not that. In this one, the door opens normally. The guard checks…

I want to tell you about something that has nothing to do with whether AI is smart. It is smart. That was never the argument. Here is the thing nobody puts on the box. Every time you open a new conversation with an AI, you are talking to something that has never met you. Not…

I had a water leak this week. Small one. Underground, between my house and the water company’s line. The kind you don’t see. The kind that shows up on a bill. I spent the evening working it out with an AI. Pipe size, pressure, what it would cost, whether to hire it or do it…

There is a farm outside Maysville, Kentucky. Mason County. Hour and a half up the road from my house. A woman named Ida Huddleston owns 71 acres of it. She is 82 years old. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, has 463 more. Their people have worked that ground for generations. Last spring a company came calling….

Let me start with the strangest thing happening in American politics right now, and it has nothing to do with any candidate. The party that controls the House is redrawing the district maps. In the middle of the decade. Off schedule. Several Republican-led states have moved to redraw congressional lines this cycle. California voters answered…