Archive - The Torment Nexus

People fall in love with all kinds of things including AI chatbots

OpenAI recently released a new version of its ChatGPT artificial-intelligence engine, called GPT-5. Normally, I wouldn't choose to write about the…

Aug 14 •

The UK's well-meaning online safety law is a dumpster fire

Let's all agree, for the sake of argument, that there's a lot of bad stuff on the old interwebs, okay?

Aug 7 •

July 2025

Social media didn't start the fire, it just fans the flames

In a recent essay in Asterisk magazine entitled Scapegoating the Algorithm, Cambridge PhD and social scientist Dan Williams wrote that there seems to be…

Jul 31 •

The Google link economy is dying and it's not coming back

Ever since Google climbed onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon last year by announcing that AI results would start appearing at the top of search…

Jul 24 •

What do we do when the facts don't matter?

As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts.

Jul 17 •

Jul 12 •

We shouldn't blame AI for the stupid things that people do

You might have noticed that there’s a tiny bit of anxiety about artificial intelligence these days — its design, its implementation, its uses and…

Jul 10 •

Why Substack shouldn't be the future of online publishing

I'd like to apologize in advance for the topic of this week's newsletter, which I fear may not interest all (or perhaps even most) of you.

Jul 3 •

June 2025

Judge says AI engines can index books but can't pirate them

Ever since ChatGPT first emerged on the scene in 2022, there has been a vociferous debate about whether the indexing (or "scraping") of public content…

Jun 26 •

Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated

A little over six months ago, I (and pretty much everyone else with a pulse) was writing about Bluesky's meteoric growth, which seemed to be driven in…

Jun 19 •

Is AI smarter than we are or stupider than we are? Yes

This isn’t an AI newsletter per se, in the sense that I don’t always write about it.

Jun 12 •

How Marc Andreessen and I (and you) created the web

I've never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote…

Jun 5 •

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