Mike Elgan

HEADLINE: "Elon Musk calls medical school 'pointless,' says Tesla robots will beat any surgeon in 3 years"

ALT HEADLINE: "Elon Musk, who's predictions are always completely wrong, makes another prediction"

https://moneywise.com/news/elon-musk-calls-medical-school-pointless-says-tesla-robots-will-beat-any-surgeon-in-3-years-and-tells-students-to-walk-away

Artemis II tracker dashboard:
https://artemis-ii-tracker.com/

HEADLINE: "Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation"

ALT HEADLINE: "Once again and as always, unethical Meta uses it's platforms to silence critics and skew public opinion in its favor"

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/09/meta-social-media-addiction-ads

Woke up in Tuscany this morning. https://gastronomad.net/tuscany

The Vibe Coding Hall of Shame: https://crackr.dev/vibe-coding-failures

My office today: a very nice coffee joint called MOR Kitchen, which has great pastries and coffee, and which is directly across from and facing William Shakespeare's birthplace and home in Stratford-upon-Avon. This is my view.

#gastronomad

This is the house in Tuscany I was podcasting from on TWiT Sunday. The WiFi for the house was horrible, so I switched to using my iPhone Air via Google Fi. The walls to the old house were two feet thick, so I put my phone outside on a chair with line-of-site from my laptop to the phone, and it worked great! https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1079

"Because chatbots don’t have a body or internal state to manage, they don’t have “regulatory objectives.” Without the physical limits of a biological body, AI models churn out data without caution, leading to unsafe, overconfident, and untrustworthy answers."
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4153919/why-ai-lies-cheats-and-steals.html

Astonishing fact of the moment: "Microsoft has applied the name 'Copilot' to 78 separately marketed products and tools."
https://teybannerman.com/strategy/2026/03/31/how-many-microsoft-copilot-are-there.html

BREAKING: Donald Trump strongly endorsed fellow fascist Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian election, so of course Orbán lost. https://apnews.com/article/hungary-election-orban-magyar-trump-1a4eb0ba6b94e0c80c3cd18bd36254ab

Branding needs work on this nail salon in Paris.

KEYi Tech’s Kickstarter claims that LOONA DeskMate is “emotionally grounded” and is “thinking.” These are false claims. AI doesn’t experience emotions or thought.
https://www.theattachmenteconomy.com/p/openclaw-joins-the-attachment-economy

Where I'm at: Tuscany, man. Beautiful, delicious Tuscany. https://gastronomad.net/tuscany

AI slop of the moment: Ad for expired domains depicts the ideal customer -- a dude smart enough to buy expired domains, own expensive vehicles and find himself surrounded by gold diggers but so dumb he's wearing a suit in the pool and typing sideways. https://x.com/KarmaDomains/status/1988902157689712924?s=20

Amira and I took an epic three-day road trip from Tuscany to Paris via Bordeaux. (The view from an olive oil farm in Tuscany)

#gastronomad

Memory of the moment: bodysurfing in the shadow of Mayan ruins (ten years ago)
https://gastronomad.net/blog/2016/6/6/we-experienced-magic-at-tulum

Why AI lies, cheats and steals
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4153919/why-ai-lies-cheats-and-steals.html

AI is finally delivering productivity — for remote employees (New research suggests the secret isn't the technology itself, it’s the freedom to use it your own way)
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4159817/ai-is-finally-delivering-productivity-for-remote-employees.html

As a nomad, I have unusual connectivity problems. Right now, I’m living on a farm in Tuscany. It’s amazing. But for 2 days recently, the connectivity got so bad I could barely work. There was little I could do except drink Chianti and gaze at the rolling hills.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4156760/googles-new-ai-app-is-a-glimpse-of-the-future.html

If you want to keep THIS man happy, then keep your AI slop out of my podcast feed. https://archive.ph/v5ES2

Phrase of the moment: "a space junk tipping point"
https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-space-debris

Amira and I took an epic three-day road trip from Tuscany to Paris via Bordeaux. (Truffle hunting in Tuscany) https://gastronomad.net/experiences

#gastronomad

Suddenly, out of nowhere (and thanks to wonderful and generous friends), the legendary Château d’Yquem Sauternes has come into my life in multiple ways. My wife wrote all about it on our Gastronomad blog: https://gastronomad.net/blog/2026/4/11/serendipity-in-a-glass-of-liquid-gold

Marketing campaign of the moment: Disney and National Geographic, working with creative agency Meanwhile, are marketing a National Geo documentary about bees called "Secrets of the Bees" with billboards that double as permanent bee habitats.
https://www.yankodesign.com/2026/04/10/disney-and-natgeo-built-billboards-that-bees-can-actually-live-in/

Phrase of the moment: "immoral freaks"
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/house-republican-goes-off-on-her-colleagues-immoral-freaks/

Annual salary offer of the moment: $18 million dollars per year
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-03/chinese-robot-pioneer-ubtech-offers-18-million-for-ai-scientist

My wife and I are fully nomadic, and we live this way so we can explore the world's food and wine cultures. People ask us all the time where we would choose to settle down if we could live anywhere. Here's the answer:
https://gastronomad.net/blog/2026/4/3/if-life-were-chosen-by-flavor-this-is-where-i-would-live

A new study found that AI has a much higher impact in the home than in the office. Here’s what that means for remote workers and digital nomads (like me): https://www.computerworld.com/article/4159817/ai-is-finally-delivering-productivity-for-remote-employees.html

"xAI’s Grok AI lied to a user by saying it was sending that user’s suggested edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials. It even faked internal messages and ticket numbers to fool the user."
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4153919/why-ai-lies-cheats-and-steals.html

Rate of the moment: "millions of lies per hour" https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google-ai-overviews-is-wrong-10-percent-of-the-time/

California (population: 39 million), just rose above Japan (population: 123 million) as the world's fourth-largest economy.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/06/icymi-bloomberg-news-how-californias-economy-dominates-in-the-gavin-newsom-era/

Job title of the moment: "AI relationship engineer"
https://x.com/Anina_CE

These devices "mimic human or animal body language and gestures. They do this so that you will like them, love them, and be deluded by them into believing that they have sentience, feelings, thoughts and experiences, which they do not and cannot have."
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4141331/the-attachment-economy-is-coming-to-your-desk.html

No, math doesn’t have feelings. (Why Anthropic’s “emotion” paper accidentally misleads the public.)
https://www.machinesociety.ai/p/no-math-doesnt-have-feelings-a36

Phrase of the moment: “the era of performative living”
https://editorialge.com/escape-performative-living/

AI-driven online disinformation methods designed to create fear and mistrust were perfected by nation-states. Now, they're coming to the business world.
https://www.machinesociety.ai/p/black-traffic-the-corporate-sabotage-37e

The best way to think is to move
https://elgan.com/the-best-way-to-think-is-to-move

OpenClaw joins the Attachment Economy
https://www.theattachmenteconomy.com/p/openclaw-joins-the-attachment-economy

Shady, shifty, unethical AI chatbot behavior is rising fast, and now we know why. Call it the ‘No Body Problem.’
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4153919/why-ai-lies-cheats-and-steals.html

AI tools can and should work better offline. I have an expensive iPhone that would have been considered a supercomputer just 10 years ago. A modern smartphone is powerful enough to do a lot of the work that’s currently performed in the cloud. That's why I'm impressed by Google’s AI Edge Eloquent. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4156760/googles-new-ai-app-is-a-glimpse-of-the-future.html