Lila Shroff

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Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion.

Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what the means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed “an impressively impractical thing to do,” as he later wrote. “Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear.

For months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation’s top tech executives—including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei—were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, “and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.

Updated at 4:34 p.m. ET on May 2, 2026
Donald Trump is on TikTok doing his morning routine. “Get ready with me for a big day 💄🇺🇸,” reads the caption, as the president holds a makeup brush to his cheek. The scene is a still, ostensibly a screenshot of a TikTok clip. Like so much other AI-generated slop coursing through the internet, the image is fake and ridiculous.

When I opened Sora this morning, I was met with a flood of strange and disturbing AI-generated videos. On OpenAI’s video app, I scrolled through fabricated scenes of the Iran war and a barrage of fake Donald Trumps blabbering about Jeffrey Epstein. In my least favorite clip, I watched a man deep-fry an infant. The app lets users create fairly realistic-looking AI-generated clips—including of their own likeness—and then post them on a TikTok-like feed.

Americans are living in parallel AI universes. For much of the country, AI has come to mean ChatGPT, Google’s AI overviews, and the slop that now clogs social-media feeds. Meanwhile, tech hobbyists are becoming radicalized by bots that can work for hours on end, collapsing months of work into weeks, or weeks into an afternoon.
Recently, more people have started to play around with tools such as Claude Code.

Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president’s wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady’s name.

In August, an amateur French astronomer, Adrien Coffinet, messaged an email list dedicated to asteroid and comet research with an announcement. He’d identified a new quasi-moon: “2025 PN7 seems to be a quasi-satellite of the Earth,” he wrote. Last week, news of the quasi-moon went mainstream, as a surge of headlines declared that Earth officially had a second moon.
This isn’t exactly right: As several scientists reiterated to me, Earth still only has one real moon.

Hours deep into a recent migraine, I turned to ChatGPT for help. “How do I get my headache to stop?” I asked. The bot suggested that I drink water and pop a Tylenol—both of which I had already tried, and neither of which had helped. ChatGPT then made a tantalizing offer: “If you want, I can give a quick 5-minute routine right now to stop a headache.” This sounded too good to be true, but I was desperate, so I let ChatGPT guide me through a breathing and massage exercise. It didn’t work.

In May, I asked Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to write a birthday letter to my best friend. Within seconds, it spat out the most impressive piece of AI writing I have ever encountered. Instead of reading as soulless, machine-generated text, the letter felt unnervingly like something I might’ve actually written. “You’re probably rolling your eyes,” the letter read, after a sentence that my friend would most definitely have rolled his eyes at.

In the early 1950s, “Hi-Proteen” powder, one of the first modern protein supplements, hit the market. Initially, it tasted awful. But after its creator, Bob Hoffman, added in Hershey’s chocolate, the flavor improved. (He used a canoe paddle to stir his mixture in a giant vat.) Protein products have come a long way since then. Perhaps, they have come too far: Last weekend, at the gym, I was offered a can of lemon-flavored “protein ice tea.

Sorry to tell you this, but Google’s new AI shopping tool appears eager to give J. D. Vance breasts. Allow us to explain.
This week, at its annual software conference, Google released an AI tool called Try It On, which acts as a virtual dressing room: Upload images of yourself while shopping for clothes online, and Google will show you what you might look like in a selected garment.

Finals season looks different this year. Across college campuses, students are slogging their way through exams with all-nighters and lots of caffeine, just as they always have. But they’re also getting more help from AI than ever before. Through the end of May, OpenAI is offering students two months of free access to ChatGPT Plus, which normally costs $20 a month.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last night that seeks to give more power to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cleave through the supposed “waste, bloat, and insularity” in the federal government. The team is being given broad permission by Trump to disrupt work at key agencies and cut jobs.

For a brief moment earlier this month, I thought an old acquaintance had passed away. I was still groggy one morning when I checked my phone to find a notification delivering the news. “Obituary shared,” the message bluntly said, followed by his name. But when I opened my phone, I learned that he was very much still alive. Apple’s latest software update was to blame: A new feature that uses AI to summarize iPhone notifications had distorted the original text message.