How Claude helped my 65-year-old dad finally ditch his handwritten ledgers

AI has a lot to answer for, but this one small win is hard to argue with, at least for me.

My dad has owned a small business for as long as I can remember, and for just as long, he's kept his books the old-fashioned way. Every sale gets written down by hand so he can file his taxes later. The problem is that his accountant needs this data in Excel, and my dad, who didn’t grow up around computers, has never learned how to use it.

For years, his workaround was paying someone to manually type his handwritten entries into a spreadsheet. It worked, but it was adding additional cost to his business, which he wanted to avoid, but couldn't.

AI’s energy tax was already concerning. Research says AI agents are over hundred times worse

AI agents could consume 136 times more energy than today's AI, study finds

The AI industry's soaring electricity demand has already become a growing concern for governments, utilities, and technology companies. But a new study suggests the next generation of artificial intelligence could make that problem significantly worse.

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have published what they describe as the first comprehensive analysis of the energy cost of AI agents - AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and completing tasks autonomously. Their findings show that these systems can consume up to 136.5 times as much energy per query as conventional generative AI models, raising fresh questions about whether the infrastructure supporting tomorrow's AI is ready for what's coming.

I hope Apple keeps the MacBook Neo away from the AI hype and preserves its true identity

The cheapest MacBook beats the cheapest AI MacBook.

If there's one thing that has disrupted consumer tech economics over the last year while changing how we understand and recommend products, it's the ever-rising cost of memory and chips. 

The desperate need to scale up AI infrastructure has pushed major manufacturers to prioritize enterprise demand, leaving everyday consumers with far fewer choices. Those available cost significantly more than they did a year ago.