On Inauguration Day, fans of the All-In Podcast gathered in a billiards room in Washington DC to watch Donald Trump's swearing-in – and a few miles away, the podcast co-host and PayPal Mafia alum David Sacks prepared to ascend to his role as Trump's AI and crypto czar. Very popular in Silicon Valley, All-In is fiercely pro-capitalism and enthusiastic about the world of tech start-ups and investments. Last summer, its co-hosts, Sacks and Jason Calacanis in particular, became vocal in their support for Trump and attempted to rally other tech leaders, including their listeners, behind the candidate. Now, Sacks has a seat at the table in the White House, as do many others in tech, including a former Uber executive, a senior adviser at Palantir, and a PayPal co-founder, who was picked to be ambassador to Denmark (Greenland, a territory Trump wants to seize, is part of Denmark). It's a watershed moment for relationships between Silicon Valley and Washington and, more broadly, what's often described as the tech right.

It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell. Speaking to The Washington Post on the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo colorfully described the US military's contingency plan for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as flooding the narrow Taiwan Strait between the two countries with swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets in the region. "I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities," Paparo said, "so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything." Cheap, easily weaponizable drones have transformed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East in recent years, and the US military is rapidly adapting to this new uncrewed future.

DALL-E leverages text prompts for image creation. I've been experimenting with prompt design for game art generation, looking for a specific aesthetic of "cute, but horrifying". As generating imagery with AI becomes more widely available, prompt crafting will become more important. Here's some examples that use lots of "nudges" in the prompt to get a final style. I've tried referencing several different artists known for disturbing styles to create the aesthetic that I'm looking for.

SLUG: Everything Happens for a Reason HED: Black Mirror's Dating App Episode is a Perfect--and Heartbreaking--Portrayal of Modern Romance ALT HED: If You're Single, Black Mirror's Dating App Episode Will Break Your Heart DEK: In tackling the nightmarish world of dating apps, Black Mirror's "Hang the DJ" perfectly captures the desperation not only in trusting algorithms to find us a perfect love, but also in trying to date in this era at all. It's an understatement to say that romance took a beating this year. From the inauguration of a president who has confessed on tape to sexual predation, to the explosion of harassment and assault allegations that began this fall, women's confidence in men has reached unprecedented lows--which poses a not-insignificant issue among those who date them. Not that things were all that much better in 2016, or the year before that; Gamergate and the wave of campus assault reporting in recent years certainly didn't get many women in the mood, either. In fact, the past five or so years of dating men might best be described by involved parties as bleak.