The gap between 'technically literate' and 'technically panicked' is approximately one unexpected error message wide. The art of helpdesk isn't troubleshooting hardware. It's troubleshooting humans, and humans are considerably less predictable than hardware.

Telling a chatbot to pretend it's an expert doesn't make it more accurate. It actually encourages hallucination by making the model overly confident in its own knowledge. That's not a quirk. That's a documented risk. Save the role-playing for brainstorming. For anything where accuracy matters, keep it grounded.

Barcelona just deployed 600 robots into the homes of elderly residents, and honestly? My first reaction was somewhere between "that's adorable" and "the future arrived while I was updating firmware." A 67-year-old woman named Irene hadn't danced in over 20 years.

CAS published a recap of their Life Sciences Summits from late 2025 this month and it is worth reading if you care about where AI is actually landing in high-stakes, regulated environments. The summits brought together pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, CROs, and academic institutions across Europe, South Korea, and Japan to talk about AI in drug discovery.

Absolute Security released research this month that I want to talk about because it is the kind of data that should land differently than it usually does. They polled 750 CISOs in the US and UK and found that over half of respondents had suffered a cyberattack, ransomware infection, or data breach in the past year that took endpoint devices out of action.

I want to write something true and a little sentimental this month because December makes me feel that way and also because I have genuinely good in-laws and the world does not celebrate that enough. There is a whole industry of in-law complaint content out there and I have always felt slightly left out of it because my experience has been the opposite.

I need to talk about Celebrity Beyond. I have been on cruises before and I have enjoyed them in the pleasant, generic way that cruises are designed to be enjoyed. Celebrity Beyond is not that. Celebrity Beyond is what happens when a cruise line decides to actually think carefully about design, food, service, and atmosphere, and then executes on all of it at a level that makes you rethink what a vacation is supposed to feel like.

Science News ran a profile this month on Bhavin Shastri, a physicist and engineer at Queen's University in Canada, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Shastri is building photonic computers, computers that use light instead of electricity to process information.

Back in June I wrote about the Gallup data showing AI use at work had nearly doubled in two years. I wanted to revisit that conversation because the numbers have continued to move and the governance situation has not improved at the pace it should have. As of mid-2025, about 40% of US employees report using AI at least a few times per year, with frequent use concentrated in technology, finance, and professional services.

I have a birthday this month. I am not going to tell you which one specifically because that information is on a need-to-know basis and most people do not need to know. What I will tell you is that I am squarely in what the culture politely calls middle life and what I personally call the era of extremely informed decision-making.

Google quietly dropped something interesting this week inside NotebookLM: Video Overviews. If you have not been using NotebookLM, the short version is that it is a research tool that lets you feed it your own documents, notes, and sources and then ask questions, generate summaries, and create Audio Overviews, which are essentially AI-generated podcast-style discussions about your material.

Gallup dropped a report this month that made me put down my coffee and stare at the wall for a moment. The share of US employees who use AI at least a few times per year has gone from 21% to 40% in just two years. Weekly use has nearly doubled. Daily use has doubled in just the past year.