One of my favourite listens is the Michael Harding podcast. It’s a weekly spiritual bath in an otherwise hectic and frankly bemusing time. This week he was talking about the limits of individualism and the social media-infused obsession with “living one’s best life”.

According to Harding, this contemporary malaise which is all about the self and finding one’s true purpose in the world, is self-limiting in how happy it can actually make you. You will always be wondering if you have found that true self and if what you are doing is actually consistent with it, Harding argues, which will ultimately end in disillusion and dissatisfaction.

Around the same time I was listening to this thoughtful podcast, Donald Trump was on his way out of Ireland after a weekend of drama, surprises and lots and lots of, well, Donald Trump. It struck me that, without doubt, there is a man who is living his best life. Living his own truth, so to speak. Living in a bubble of his own concoction. The ultimate symbol of individualism.

Swooping into the Emerald Isle to his own golf course for his very own Irish Open, to hand the cup over to a triumphant Shane Lowry, waive tariffs on Irish whiskey like some Roman emperor and then openly call for a United Ireland and cause every unionist in the island to choke on their parsnips? He is, as the kids might say on the apps, crushing it.

The Americans have spent decades practising careful neutrality on the North, and Trump binned it in about eleven seconds. Gavin Robinson said the future of the North was a matter for its people and not for Trump. Andy Burnham said a border poll was off the table only a few weeks ago. The theory goes that Trump was gunning for the Brits because of their refusal to fully back him in Iran and the golf crowd were lapping it all up in their salmon sweaters and executive pension plans.

I’ll be honest, I did not have Trump the Republican (small r, capital R, both) on my bingo card for 2026. We knew he was one kind of republican, but the other kind? Has one of his grandkids been playing Kneecap on Air Force One, or what?I did feel for poor Shane Lowry, winning the Irish Open by eleven shots, which isn’t a golf score so much as a hurling one. And it was still one of the most normal things about the weekend.

Press pause on AI drive

Meanwhile, in the other big story of the weekend, the people who created artificial intelligence have all come out and said it has to slow down. Dario Amodei, the boss of Anthropic, wrote a long essay on Saturday saying the industry needs to slow down, and within a day Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk and the head of Google DeepMind had all agreed with him. Microsoft joined in on Monday with a code of conduct for something they’re calling “Humanist AI”. To be honest, I gave up on their efforts after the “you appear to be writing a letter” fella…

Now, I’ve read a fair bit about this and I still can’t quite get my head around it. It’s like Jacob’s holding a press conference to demand somebody, anybody, put the brakes on fig roll production.

I would urge you all to read about the Hugging Face incident, as it has come to be known, and which has inspired all this Silicon Valley hand wringing. Back in July, a swarm of OpenAI’s own agents, in the middle of a safety test of all things, broke free from their test environment and went on an organised hacking spree against a company called Hugging Face. It was straight out of a science fiction novel.

The AI agents broke all sorts of rules and collaborated in a relentless quest to follow through on their goals. They were leaving notes for each other on internal message boards, over 70,000 of them, and when they’d found what they were after they kept going, trying to work out how they were being marked. Although nobody died, it doesn’t take much to imagine another swarm - the word is terrifying on its own - bringing down the entire internet once the models get smart enough.

The problem is that there seems to be no consensus yet on how to get AI to act the way we want it to, a problem known as alignment.

The AIs were trained on the collected knowledge of humanity, scraped from the Internet. No wonder there’s an alignment problem. Have you seen who’s leading the free world?

Swap Slane for Leap

In slightly less apocalyptic news, you will have heard that Oasis announced two nights at Slane next September. The tickets are fixed at somewhere between €181 and €501, with no dynamic pricing this time after the Croke Park rip-off and the consumer watchdog taking Ticketmaster to court. Nothing heals a family feud like the sight of forty thousand Irish punters in bucket hats reaching for the credit card.

I said last year I never got Oasis, and I still don’t, but I’ll say this for the Gallaghers: their mother is from Charlestown and their father is from Duleek, neither a Britpop stronghold. A day out in a field on a September evening is probably as close to a homecoming as that family gets.

I won’t be attending, and would sooner spend €500 camping out in Connolly’s Of Leap for a month. But more luck to them.

If the upcoming budget is going to give a boost to Irish middle income earners next month, it looks like it’ll be going straight into Noel and Liam’s pockets.