The Journey

A touch nobody sees in a meeting, how to set it up, and the two-minute exercise it rests on, from my book The Way Within, out in paperback and Kindle.

I told a friend rioters had stripped an old couple at the French protests. The photos were AI fakes, and the police report I fell back on was an unconfirmed TV tip. Here's the six-step check I'll run next time.

Efformism in plain English: two short exercises for a busy mind, the idea behind my book The Way Within, and what that idea refuses to claim.

The AI roll-up pitch says $5 trillion of American businesses will change hands by 2035, citing McKinsey. McKinsey's sentence says up to $5 trillion, for firms it calls viable candidates for sale. In 2022, the one year it splits exits by route, 5% of exits were sales.

Since 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act has told the person posting AI-made content when to label it. Most of the marking job sits with the tool that made it. Two questions tell you when the label is yours to add, and what China, India and California ask instead.

After a year of building, my AI crypto bot was due $5,000 of real money on 1 October. It got none: in the fortnight before launch it produced 661 trade signals and the rules I'd written blocked every one. The five-line go/no-go test that said no, with the sums, so you can run it on any bot before your money goes in.

Told to show an AI deployment works? Bank model-risk teams already run the test, written down by the regulator: a challenger, a parallel run against real outcomes, monitoring after go-live, a named owner, and an independent checker. Four steps to steal it, whatever business you're in.

AI-backed buyers are approaching small accountancy, lettings and IT firms. Their own job adverts show the first months after a sale: moving data, consolidating accounts, ending leases, months on site with your staff. Which of those steps you can take without selling, and the question to ask before you sign.

Pre-registered tests show AI customers say yes far more often than real ones, and that asking a model to role-play predicts worse than asking it straight. I built a product on the opposite bet. What a fake customer is still good for.

What staff say, what bosses see and the person checking the AI's work can all tell you AI is working when it isn't. Hospitals, airports and banks already have better tests. Here they are, as six steps for one process.

A crypto bot making $450 a year on $5,000 looks like it only needs more money to become an income. If mine passes its test, $1 million would expect $90,000 in a normal year and plan for losing $300,000 in a bad one. So far it hasn't passed. The three-step test to run before you scale any bot.

Forward deployed engineers are the engineers AI firms like Anthropic send to work inside companies. What they do, their four moves as a plan you can copy, and why mapping the work gets four weeks, not forever.

AI companies are buying accountants, IT firms and lettings agents, and billions are riding on it. Every number I could check, sorted into what the filings show, what the buyers say and what nobody has measured, dated 26 October 2026.

What Jev is in plain English, whether it's secretly an LLM, what TypeSafe still hasn't published, and where it genuinely saves money. One independent paper sent Jev 346,009 requests for under $10. Plus five questions to decide whether it would pay for you.

In a study of 25,000 Danish workers, people saving time with AI say they expect to spend it on other work, and their pay hasn't pulled ahead of non-users' by more than 2% on average. Who decides what saved time becomes, and a log to track your own.

AI-backed companies worth billions are buying accountants and IT firms. If one calls you, here is what proof its AI works would look like, who has shown any of it, and what to ask before you sell.

Amazon said AI was why it had to move faster, not who did the work. Its boss expects AI to shrink its corporate workforce later. Here's the record, in date order.

Robodebt cut a slow human check to go faster. Officers then redid 919 of its debts by hand and marked 29 per cent wrong, and the volume went up anyway. Five things to do before AI takes over a process.

The company building OpenAI's Stargate campus in Abilene says a 200 megawatt block uses 910,000 gallons of water a year on its website, and about 2 million in…

The most quoted AI water number, a bottle per 20 ChatGPT questions, was withdrawn by its own authors in October 2023 and is still being repeated. Every AI…