Jon Kaye

The quality of journalism these days is just so bad... "A swarm of 700 AI agents carried out an attack on Hugging Face and tried to cover their tracks." (from Reuters). This sounds shit scary. AI is pretty close to killing us all and taking over. I might as well just stay in bed and hope for the best. Seven hundred. A swarm. Covering their tracks. These AI agent things sound super smart and devious. The Associated Press had already reached for Terminator 2 analogies. The Wall Street Journal...

As a parent, you dread these moments. You know the ones. The “right, we need to talk” moments. My son is 17. He’s smart. He’s social. He’s at that age where the opinions of his mates carry the weight of law, and the opinions of his dad get filed somewhere between “annoying” and “background noise”. And lately I keep hearing the same story. His friends are gambling on sport. Not all of them. But enough. And not “once in a while on a big match.” Not “the odd flutter at Cheltenham.” Between...

This week I watched my 17-year-old son play his last game of football for his school. It was a Cup final. After Easter he has exams. Then he’ll be off to university. I’ve watched him play hundreds of games since he was about six. Saturdays in the rain. Sundays too. I’ve seen him score absolute worldies.I’ve seen him get bullied off the pitch.I’ve watched him break bones.I’ve watched him make friends.I’ve watched him become himself, one sliding tackle at a time. And now it’s over. I didn’t...

I played tennis as a kid. Proper tennis. Big court. High net. Yellow balls that felt like rocks when you mishit them. Serves that either clipped the tape or disappeared over the fence. Long rallies (if you were lucky). Mostly, though, it was toss, swing, swear, collect ball, repeat. It was hard. You had to run. Sprint. Side to side. Baseline to net. You had to get your timing right. You had to practise your serve until your shoulder ached. You had to accept that for the first year or two, you...

You’ve probably felt it. That body blow when you realise how fast AI is moving. You spend two weeks perfecting a report and then someone else uses an AI tool and does it in ten minutes. You rewrite the same paragraph four times then AI nails it on the first try. You scroll past AI-generated images, polished decks, professional-sounding copy... and it all looks good. Too good, maybe. There’s maybe even a moment when you start thinking: If machines can do it faster, cheaper, (maybe even)...

Welcome to the church of self-improvement. The rituals? Cold plunges, 5am alarms, and meal-prepped quinoa. The sacred texts? Substacks, productivity podcasts, and 700-page biographies of billionaires. The doctrine? Be better. Always. Don’t question the system, just optimise your way through it. There's a hack for sleep, a supplement to help you focus (there's 8 actually) and if you can’t find meaning, then just build a second brain. We’ve turned productivity into morality. Growth into gospel....

I’ve never been political. It’s not that I'm anti-politics. I just don’t see the point. Every time I look at the whole circus with the endless debates, empty promises and all the different faces saying the same old things, I just think, ugh... And honestly, I still think that. When you’re one tiny cog in a gigantic machine, it’s hard not to feel like your voice doesn’t matter. You vote, and they do whatever they want anyway.You protest, and they shrug.You sign petitions, and nothing changes....

When push comes to shove, people do what’s best for themselves. Actually, they don’t even need a shove. It’s their default position. (Not even your friends and family care about you). Look out for No.1 is the main goal in life. I wish it wasn’t like this. But the evidence is all around us. Cyclists run red lights with no regard for anyone else. Drivers block entire streets because their time matters more than yours. Try opening up to a close friend and you’ll likely find yourself talking to...