The blog is back. Yes, your worst nightmare continues. Just when you thought it was over, here comes the final jump scare—except it isn’t Halloween yet, and the monster is a middle-aged man with a WordPress login. Let’s see if I can pump something worth a shit into the blogosphere. As usual, we’ll start with music. Something a little different: Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, from Drastic Symphonies. Apparently, the only thing “Hysteria” was missing was several dozen classically trained musicians making the neighbors wonder whether I’m having a breakdown in surround sound. Also on today’s menu: the Apple Emmys, the Kennedy Center standoff, and AI panic.
AI Panic Is Mostly a “Series of Tubes” Problem
I do an AI podcast. That was not really the plan, but AI has a way of eating the agenda before lunch. It was supposed to be about tech, sports, and politics; instead it has mostly been tech and politics. That makes the current crossover between AI and politics unavoidable. Democrats are pushing a doom narrative that often reveals how little some politicians understand the technology. Sometimes it sounds less like policy and more like someone watched Terminator on a plane without headphones. It reminds me of 2006, when Alaska Senator Ted Stevens tried to explain the internet during a net-neutrality debate and called it “a series of tubes.” The line became shorthand for Congress attempting to regulate technology it had only just met in the hallway. The useful thing to remember: AI is software. Powerful software, yes, but software. It is not sentient, and it is not sitting in a server room plotting humanity’s end while stroking a mechanical cat. The bigger, more ordinary risk is the same one we have always had—a bad actor using a powerful tool for bad purposes.
The Morris Worm: When Software Broke the Internet in 1988
History already has plenty of examples. In 1988, Cornell graduate student Robert Tappan Morris released what became known as the Morris worm, apparently intending to gauge the size of the internet. A flaw caused it to reinfect machines aggressively, and within 24 hours roughly 6,000 of the 60,000 computers connected to the internet had been hit. That was about 10 percent of the internet—back when the entire thing could practically fit into a Costco parking lot. The worm did not destroy files, but it clogged systems and made them unusable, and Morris became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Software does not have to be evil or alive to cause chaos. Sometimes all it needs is one clever idea, one bad assumption and a nationwide IT meeting nobody wanted.
The Upside: AI Finds Bugs Faster (and Ships Them Too)
The upside is that our software may get more secure faster. AI is very good at spotting patterns, including the patterns programmers desperately wish they had not shipped. Microsoft says AI is helping it examine software more often than was practical before, and its September 2026 Patch Tuesday release fixed 974 vulnerabilities—the company’s biggest security release on record. Of course, that enormous patch also introduced bugs that required an emergency follow-up, because Windows remains committed to the full circle of life: patch, reboot, patch the patch. Apple’s security bounty program did not disappear; it expanded. Apple says it has paid more than $35 million to over 800 security researchers, while its rules warn that AI-assisted reports still need to be validated by a human. Translation: use AI to find the bug, but do not make the people in Cupertino read 40,000 confident hallucinations before breakfast.
Trump vs. the Kennedy Center: Now With a 30-Day Cooling-Off Period
We live in truly bizarre times. Saying that barely captures it. Our President is among the most self-centered people ever to hold the office—by a wide margin. How Republicans looked at him and thought, “This is our guy,” I have no idea. Have you followed his Trump diaper tantrum over the Kennedy Center? Congress designated the building as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy in 1964. Trump’s handpicked board later added Trump’s name, courts ordered it removed, and now he says the renovation will not proceed unless his name goes back up. He has even threatened demolition. A federal judge just ordered 30 days’ notice before any major physical changes, which is where we are now: a court has effectively imposed a cooling-off period in case the President tries to rage-demolish a performing arts center. The building houses an orchestra; it should not need a hostage negotiator. People put names on statues, buildings and monuments to honor extraordinary lives after the fact. Doing it to yourself while you are alive and in office is not tribute; it is branding. If you have to hold a theater hostage to manufacture your legacy, the reviews are already in.
Apple Emmys: A 29-Win Night That Felt Like a Keynote
Apple had one hell of a night at the Emmys. The company walked away with 29 wins, which is not bad for the side business that started as a place to keep Jason Sudeikis in a tracksuit. Widow’s Bay did most of the damage, taking 14 Emmys and setting a record for the most wins by a comedy series in a single season. It won Outstanding Comedy Series, along with acting awards for Matthew Rhys, Kate O’Flynn and Stephen Root. At a certain point the ceremony stopped feeling like the Emmys and started feeling like an Apple keynote—only with better outfits and fewer people pretending a slightly thinner device had changed civilization.
Pluribus added six wins, and the Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show with Bad Bunny picked up seven. Add it all up and Apple finished as the most-awarded network of the year. HBO may still have hospitals, dragons and decades of prestige, but Apple apparently brought a giant reusable shopping bag and cleaned out the trophy table. Tim Cook probably went home wondering why the trophies did not come in space black.
I Play Rocky, Steve Jobs, and iPhone Launch Day
The trailer for I Play Rocky dropped, and I am intrigued. The film follows a broke and unknown Sylvester Stallone as he writes Rocky and refuses to sell it unless he can play the lead, turning the making of the ultimate underdog movie into its own underdog movie. Anthony Ippolito plays Stallone, Peter Farrelly directs, and it arrives in November—nearly 50 years after the original Rocky. It could be genuinely inspiring, or it could be two hours of one man doing a Stallone voice so committed that every sentence needs subtitles. Either way, I’m in.
Jony Ive on Hollywood’s Steve Jobs
That trailer pairs nicely with a 2015 Vanity Fair conversation featuring Jony Ive, J.J. Abrams and Brian Grazer. Asked about Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, Ive said he had not seen it, but people close to Jobs had—and the man they described was someone he barely recognized. His larger point was that real lives can be hijacked by filmmakers with agendas. Fair point. A biopic has roughly the same relationship to a biography that a hot dog has to anatomy: the ingredients may be familiar, but everything has been rearranged for easier consumption. Hollywood needs a hero, a villain and a furious backstage argument exactly seven minutes before a major product launch. Real life contains meetings, email chains and people staring into spreadsheets, which apparently did poorly in test screenings.
Still, the clip below is one of my favorite scenes from Steve Jobs, a film that grew out of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography even as Aaron Sorkin took the usual dramatic liberties. I bring it up because today is iPhone 18 Pro launch day—19 years after the original iPhone went on sale in 2007. Nineteen years. The iPhone is now old enough to vote, drive and insist that its battery is still perfectly healthy at 82 percent. It has gone from a glass-and-metal miracle to the object we curse when a webpage takes half a second too long to load. Yet every launch retains a little of the original Jobs-era magic: Apple announces the most advanced iPhone ever made, the world nods, checks its trade-in value and suddenly regards last year’s phone as farming equipment.
Have an excellent Friday, everyone. Whatever you’ve got going on—golf, doing absolutely nothing, or just making it to 5 o’clock without your phone trying to talk you into an AI apocalypse—enjoy it. I’ll be around here somewhere between the Def Leppard playlist and already turning over what’s next on Apple’s roadmap, because old habits die hard. If you want to yell at me about any of it—the Kennedy Center, the Emmys, or the fact that I called Rocky “an underdog movie about an underdog movie” and now can’t stop thinking about it—the comments are open and I actually read them. Thanks for sticking around through the long hiatus. It means more than the view count would ever suggest. See you next time, series of tubes and all.
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