AI & Automation

Deep dives on the models, agents and automation actually worth your time — what they do well, where they break, and what it costs to run them.

33 articles published

Benedict Evans Says Most Enterprise AI Spend Is Wasted — Here's What Actually Works
AI & Automation

Benedict Evans Says Most Enterprise AI Spend Is Wasted — Here's What Actually Works

Benedict Evans' September 2026 essay landed on Hacker News with 153 upvotes and a blunt claim: compa...

Softcore Future Editorial·Sep 7, 2026
8 min
How To Disable AI Mode On Google (And Stop Overpaying On Search)
AI & Automation

How To Disable AI Mode On Google (And Stop Overpaying On Search)

A study of Google's AI Mode found it surfaces products averaging 21.6% more expensive than regular s...

Softcore Future Editorial·Sep 4, 2026
7 min
Ed Zitron Called the AI Bubble Two Years Ago. Dan Luu Just Checked His Math.
AI & Automation

Ed Zitron Called the AI Bubble Two Years Ago. Dan Luu Just Checked His Math.

A viral Dan Luu post put AI skeptic Ed Zitron's two years of bearish predictions under a microscope,...

Softcore Future Editorial·Sep 3, 2026
8 min
EFF Tells Courts: Stop Rewriting Copyright Law Because AI Is Trendy
AI & Automation

EFF Tells Courts: Stop Rewriting Copyright Law Because AI Is Trendy

The EFF is asking federal courts to reject a legal theory that would give AI companies a fair-use ex...

Softcore Future Editorial·Sep 1, 2026
8 min
Apple Got Blindsided by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio — Here's What Buyers Do Now
AI & Automation

Apple Got Blindsided by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio — Here's What Buyers Do Now

Apple's own supply chain didn't see this coming: AI demand has turned the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, t...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 31, 2026
8 min
AI Consciousness Tests Exist Now — Here's Why 500+ Researchers Still Can't Agree
AI & Automation

AI Consciousness Tests Exist Now — Here's Why 500+ Researchers Still Can't Agree

Anthropic pays a model to quit conversations it finds distressing, while most neuroscientists say th...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 28, 2026
9 min
Nvidia's $673B Bet: What Its Forecast Reveals About AI Demand Forecasting
AI & Automation

Nvidia's $673B Bet: What Its Forecast Reveals About AI Demand Forecasting

Nvidia says it will book $673 billion in AI-related sales, a number so large it forces a reckoning w...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 27, 2026
8 min
Apple's M6 and M5 Ultra Chips Just Complicated Every AI Compute Stocks Bet
AI & Automation

Apple's M6 and M5 Ultra Chips Just Complicated Every AI Compute Stocks Bet

Apple just put local AI silicon into its highest-end Macs, and the move quietly undercuts the Nvidia...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 25, 2026
7 min
Claude Tops the Benchmarks. So Why Is Everyone Still Using GPT-4o Mini and DeepSeek?
AI & Automation

Claude Tops the Benchmarks. So Why Is Everyone Still Using GPT-4o Mini and DeepSeek?

Anthropic built the model researchers rank highest, and it still can't out-earn cheaper competitors ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 24, 2026
8 min
LinkedIn's New 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button Puts Your Career Behind an AI Detection Guess
AI & Automation

LinkedIn's New 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button Puts Your Career Behind an AI Detection Guess

LinkedIn just gave users a button to flag posts as AI slop, and the company's own detection systems ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 20, 2026
7 min
An AI Generated Fix Suggested by GitHub Copilot Opened the Door to Snowflake's Jira
AI & Automation

An AI Generated Fix Suggested by GitHub Copilot Opened the Door to Snowflake's Jira

Wiz researchers traced a compromise of Snowflake's Jira instance back to a single AI generated code ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 18, 2026
8 min
A Rare Book Shipment Vanished Into an Amazon AI Facility. Here's What That Reveals About AI Training Jobs
AI & Automation

A Rare Book Shipment Vanished Into an Amazon AI Facility. Here's What That Reveals About AI Training Jobs

404 Media physically tracked a shipment of scarce, out-of-print books to an Amazon facility tied to ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 17, 2026
9 min
AI Model Comparison: We Ran One Prompt Through 11 Models So You Don't Have To
AI & Automation

AI Model Comparison: We Ran One Prompt Through 11 Models So You Don't Have To

A single prompt sent to 11 different AI models produced 11 genuinely different answers, exposing how...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 14, 2026
8 min
AI Agents Explained: How They Work and Why They Still Lie
AI & Automation

AI Agents Explained: How They Work and Why They Still Lie

AI agents promise to book your flights, manage your inbox, and run your errands autonomously — but a...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 13, 2026
8 min
AI Infrastructure Stocks: The Plain-English Guide to Investing in the Real AI Boom
AI & Automation

AI Infrastructure Stocks: The Plain-English Guide to Investing in the Real AI Boom

Everyone's chasing AI hype, but the real money is flowing into power grids, data centers, and chip f...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 11, 2026
7 min
LLM Inference Optimization: Inside vLLM's High-Throughput Engine Design
AI & Automation

LLM Inference Optimization: Inside vLLM's High-Throughput Engine Design

Every AI product hits the same wall: inference is slow, GPUs are expensive, and nobody explains why....

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 7, 2026
7 min
LLMs Reward Expertise: Why AI Makes Experts Faster, Not Obsolete
AI & Automation

LLMs Reward Expertise: Why AI Makes Experts Faster, Not Obsolete

A viral Hacker News essay just upended the AI-deskilling narrative with a simple claim: LLMs reward ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 4, 2026
7 min
Qwen3.8-Max Coding Model: Why Developers Say It Beats GPT-5 on Real Repos
AI & Automation

Qwen3.8-Max Coding Model: Why Developers Say It Beats GPT-5 on Real Repos

A single Hacker News thread with over 900 upvotes just upended assumptions about who leads in AI cod...

Softcore Future Editorial·Aug 3, 2026
7 min
GitHub Stacked PRs Are Live: What the Public Preview Actually Changes
AI & Automation

GitHub Stacked PRs Are Live: What the Public Preview Actually Changes

GitHub just shipped native stacked pull requests, a workflow that's been the domain of third-party t...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jul 31, 2026
7 min
LLM Honeypot: How AI Bots Are Trapped and Unmasked Online
AI & Automation

LLM Honeypot: How AI Bots Are Trapped and Unmasked Online

A single link posted to Hacker News racked up 360 upvotes by revealing something unsettling: the web...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jul 30, 2026
8 min
Decker Is the HyperCard Revival Power Users Didn't Know They Needed
AI & Automation

Decker Is the HyperCard Revival Power Users Didn't Know They Needed

A quiet browser-based tool just resurrected the software philosophy that shaped early Mac computing,...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jul 27, 2026
6 min
HackerRank's Resume Score AI is Now Open Source. We Analyzed the Code to Reveal What Actually Matters.
AI & Automation

HackerRank's Resume Score AI is Now Open Source. We Analyzed the Code to Reveal What Actually Matters.

HackerRank just open-sourced the AI model that scores your resume, and the results are chaotic. We d...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 30, 2026
8 min
The Unseen Challenger: How GLM 5.2 Quietly Dethroned Claude in Critical Cybersecurity Benchmarks
AI & Automation

The Unseen Challenger: How GLM 5.2 Quietly Dethroned Claude in Critical Cybersecurity Benchmarks

A little-known model named GLM 5.2 just outperformed Anthropic's flagship in rigorous cybersecurity ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 29, 2026
6 min
The Accidental Genius of the Marfa Public Radio Sleep Podcast: Why Low-Fi Audio is the Future of Digital Wellness
AI & Automation

The Accidental Genius of the Marfa Public Radio Sleep Podcast: Why Low-Fi Audio is the Future of Digital Wellness

A quiet podcast from a West Texas radio station is trending as the ultimate sleep aid. This isn't ju...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 28, 2026
7 min
DSpark: How DeepSeek-AI Reinvented LLM Speculative Decoding for 3x Faster Inference
AI & Automation

DSpark: How DeepSeek-AI Reinvented LLM Speculative Decoding for 3x Faster Inference

The brutal economics of LLM inference are a bottleneck on innovation. A new paper from DeepSeek-AI i...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 27, 2026
8 min
The Trillion-Dollar Freeload: XZ Utils and the Inevitable Collapse of Open Source Sustainability
AI & Automation

The Trillion-Dollar Freeload: XZ Utils and the Inevitable Collapse of Open Source Sustainability

The xz-utils backdoor wasn't a bug; it was a market failure years in the making. We’re now facing a ...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 26, 2026
8 min
The 2026 Apple Price Increase: It’s Not Just Your MacBook—It’s the Future of Tech Hardware
AI & Automation

The 2026 Apple Price Increase: It’s Not Just Your MacBook—It’s the Future of Tech Hardware

Apple's shocking 2026 price hikes on MacBooks and iPads aren't just a simple adjustment; they're the...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 26, 2026
7 min
OpenAI's First Custom Chip Is Here: A Declaration of War on Nvidia's AI Empire
AI & Automation

OpenAI's First Custom Chip Is Here: A Declaration of War on Nvidia's AI Empire

OpenAI just dropped a bombshell, revealing its first custom AI chip in partnership with Broadcom. Th...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 25, 2026
8 min
John Carmack's Career Mistakes: A Brutal Analysis for Modern Tech Leaders
AI & Automation

John Carmack's Career Mistakes: A Brutal Analysis for Modern Tech Leaders

Programming legend John Carmack recently revealed his biggest early career mistakes. We go beyond th...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 24, 2026
8 min
The Great Devaluation: Navigating Vulnerability Report Inflation in the Age of AI-Driven Security
AI & Automation

The Great Devaluation: Navigating Vulnerability Report Inflation in the Age of AI-Driven Security

The constant flood of CVEs and security alerts is no longer a feature, but a bug in the system. We'r...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 24, 2026
8 min
Meta's AI Wearables Bet: The Pendant, the Glasses, and the End of the Screen
AI & Automation

Meta's AI Wearables Bet: The Pendant, the Glasses, and the End of the Screen

Meta just tipped its hand: a clip-on AI pendant that remembers your whole day, four new smart glasse...

Softcore Future Editorial·Jun 24, 2026
6 min
Jensen Huang's $150 Billion Taiwan Gamble Could Define the Next Decade of AI
AI & Automation

Jensen Huang's $150 Billion Taiwan Gamble Could Define the Next Decade of AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has committed $150 billion to Taiwan's AI infrastructure — the largest corpo...

Softcore Future Editorial·May 27, 2026
8 min
Google Antigravity 2.0: The Agent Platform That's Rewriting How Software Gets Built
AI & Automation

Google Antigravity 2.0: The Agent Platform That's Rewriting How Software Gets Built

Google redrew the developer stack at I/O 2026. Antigravity 2.0 is no longer a coding assistant — it'...

Softcore Future Editorial·May 23, 2026
8 min