October 2025 wrap-up
What have I been doing and learning this month? This blog post triples as my notes, a status update, and a way to share the things I found interesting this month.
Highlights
I wrapped up my n8n contract on the 8th October, and have been on holiday, so there isn't a huge amount to share. I did have an excellent mini-break in London for my 40th birthday (if you've never been to the Tate Modern, go).
Watching
Erm . . . not so much.
Reading
The AI collection
This has been an ongoing theme through the year, increasing in September, and then turning into a deluge of headlines in October. This month I'm pulling together these links, whether I actually read them in October or in previous months (but most of these are pretty new).
First, a whole bunch of articles on looming economic doom:
- The Case Against Generative AI - Ed Zitron: the long read. Ed Zitron has been writing on the theme of "AI is economically unsustainable" for some time now (I first encountered one of his articles on the topic in early 2025), but this one is very long, very detailed, and to an extent acts as a summary of some of the previous material.
- The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh - Cory Doctorow: another voice on the economics of AI question. A similar take to Zitron, and considerably shorter.
- A roundup of mainstream news headlines all saying broadly the same thing: AI is propping up the US stock markets, valuations are crazy, this is almost certainly a bubble.
- Bank of England warns of growing risk that AI bubble could burst - The Guardian
- 'It's going to be really bad': Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley - BBC
- America is now one big bet on AI - Financial Times (paywall)
- Praetorian Capital, a hedge fund, wrote about an AI bubble back in August, but more recently added An AI Addendum, which looks closer at the costs of data centres and the views of on-the-ground experts.
Given the two possible AI futures seem to be either wild predictions of AI replacing us all, or depressing predictions of an AI bubble bursting and wrecking the economy, this old movie tagline has been going round my brain:
Leaving the economic apocalypse aside for a moment, The Oatmeal has an artist's take on AI, which expresses a lot of my feelings more eloquently than I can: Let's talk about AI art - The Oatmeal.
And finally we have a report by Anthropic on the security (or lack thereof) of LLMs: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size - Anthropic
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