all things curious...

On Tuesday, September 29, OpenAI gave every ChatGPT Pro subscriber a personal AI agent with its own cloud computer, access to more than 4,000 apps, and the ability to work while you sleep. Every Pro subscriber, that is, except the ones in Europe and the UK. I live in Slovakia. I pay the same $200 a month as everyone in Ohio. And on the biggest launch day of the year, I got a polite little note that said, in effect: not you, not yet. That moment captures the whole state of AI right now better than any benchmark chart. The future is here. It is just standing behind a velvet rope, and someone else is deciding who gets in.

Ten years ago I wrote An American Abroad in Slovakia . I talked about bubbles. The small bubble of family and friends, the medium sized bubble of your town, the larger bubble of your country and culture. Then I wrote about the anti-bubble, the world outside all of that.

For a long time, America treated certain kinds of chemistry like a haunted house. We knew there was something powerful inside, but the political cost of opening the door felt higher than the scientific reward. Psychedelics were pushed into the shadows of the culture wars. Peptides became the domain of bodybuilders, anti-aging clinics, and gray-market biohackers. Serious researchers were often left peering through the window.

There is a particular feeling that shows up when the distance between an idea and a working thing suddenly collapses. One minute, something is sitting in the mental junk drawer labeled someday . The next, it is live, tested, improved, and weirdly close to good. Not perfect. Not final. But real.

If you have spent any time on X, in the AI corners of GitHub, or lurking around Moltbook lately, you have felt the temperature change. The screenshots got louder. The demos got weirder. The line between “assistant” and “operator” started to blur. OpenClaw is no longer being treated like a clever side project. Its creator joined OpenAI in February, the project is moving into a foundation, and Moltbook itself was acquired by Meta in March. That is not novelty energy. That is platform energy.

For years, manufacturing has lived with a bad bargain: if you wanted more output, you usually accepted more waste, more energy use, and more emissions. That tradeoff is starting to crack. AI and additive manufacturing are beginning to change the model itself, turning production into something more precise, more responsive, and far less wasteful. NIST now highlights generative design and predictive maintenance among the ways AI is already reshaping manufacturing, while the U.S. Department of Energy points to additive manufacturing as a path to lower material use, lower energy use, and lower emissions.

The United States is straining relations with key allies by imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, while simultaneously seeking closer ties with Russia amid ongoing tensions in Ukraine.

Ghostty is a new open-source terminal emulator developed by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp. Written in the Zig programming language, Ghostty aims to provide a fast, feature-rich, and platform-native experience for developers. The first public release, version 1.0, was made available in December 2024.