#tech bubble

I have a work reunion thing coming up. I don’t really like reunions, particularly coworker ones. I don’t really see the point. If it’s a high school reunion, it’s remembering a shared misery with the people you grew up with. Sometimes it’s a pretty good way to see karma do its job. With work reunions, what’s the point? Yay, we did a thing for a rich guy? In this case the rich guy was some dude…

Pictured above, the personal computer after the AI bubble

As we settle into the new year, the tech landscape looks drastically different than the utopian future we were promised just a few years ago. If 2025 taught us anything, it is that the shine of novelty eventually wears off, leaving behind the stark reality of implementation. According to a recent piece in Bloomberg Opinion, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025 was “slop,” a term describing the overwhelming flood of low-quality, machine-generated content that has clogged our social feeds and search engines. Instead of the immediate cures for diseases or effortless solutions to climate change that early enthusiasts predicted, the internet has become a chaotic mix of synthetic media and spam.

🤖💥 Are we living in a trillion-dollar hallucination?

In my latest column on Pushing the Wave, I revisit the AI boom—and ask whether, as Carole Cadwalladr suggests, it’s become just another financial bubble.

From Dutch tulips to dotcoms to neural nets, history may not repeat itself, but it certainly seems to rhyme.

I discover that a while back some of my published work was appropriated by Meta and fed into their AI system. I was never approached for licensing, never paid – they just took my IP without permission and used it for their own commercial gain. To me that alone is reason enough to never use AI. But I won’t use it anyway. I like writing – the act of creating material is one of the main reasons I…

so this is all the hype behind "homeschooling?"

Byju demonstrates a math concept in an video for Think & Learn.

Photo: The Byju’s app, 2019. Getty Images/Rest of World

Photo: Think and Learn staff in Bengaluru, 2017. Getty Images/Rest of World

Photo: A teacher for a Byju’s company conducts an online coding class. Getty Images/Rest of World

Photo: A Byju’s advertisement in New Delhi, 2023. Getty Images/Rest of World

Photo: Think And Learn staff in Bengaluru, 2017. Getty Images/Rest of World