Haven't seen any estimates of death toll due to social media but cigarettes is/was pretty staggering (20-40m), way too big to hide - https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-holocaust/hardcover - if it's "only" 50 years to flip the consensus on social media, that would be a faster process, I do hope its possible though. Tobacco execs had the good sense to keep a relatively low profile compared to Zuck and Musk, so that might speed it up.

Went to the campus screening of Ghost in the Machine today, many familiar names; I did not know going in that hometown hero Shazeda had so many lines (are they called lines in a documentary?). I can recommend it, especially for a more gen-ed / undergrad audience; the director seems supportive of educational use and reuse and it is structured in a dozen or so bite sized chapters.

Haven't seen the AI apocalypse optimist one to compare against, would probably rather spend my money on Mario tbh.

But also it made me realize it's not a "California" ideology anymore, she never calls it that, like it's gone so mainstream and so widespread, you can't even get through the sneer club bingo list in a 2 hour movie. Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Zuck, Altman, no Peter Theil !? As a statistician, Galton, Pearson (Karl only), Spearman, no Fisher !?

Non-zero overlap with the lore dump episode of Lain and the Epstein files, though:

from Rusty https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.

https://www.adexchanger.com/ai/one-chatbots-journey-to-introducing-ads-that-dont-suck/

Often, the ad loads before the chatbot’s query response, said Baird, and Koah’s goal is to “deliver such a relevant result to the user that they just click on the ad before the result loads.”

LLM's bad performance and inefficiency is a feature to /someone/. And chatbots are themselves not immune to enshitification.

From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:

https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html

Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe

if “tech-bro” plus a LLM is a “100x engineer”, then “bro” isn’t needed for much longer as the LLM alone must be a “99x engineer.” However, I don’t think “bro plus” is often really a 100x engineer, and the LLM alone isn’t a 99x engineer. However, “bro plus” may outlast their peers who make the mistake of trying to do the actual work in place of talking LLMs up.

The above may or may not be the case. But if it is, then it is the LLM-bros (which include non-technologists, con artists, financiers, men and women) that are destroying everything - not the LLMs.

The problem with this iteration is the full court press of finance and technology. The major players are using financing to dump results at a price way below production costs. This isn't charity, it is to demoralize and kill competition.

claiming "after we take over the world we will consider adding Universal Basic Income (UBI)". The LLM bros already have a lot of the money, and they are not even rehearsing diverting it into basic income now. Why does one believe they would do that when they also have all of the power?

You don't have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI "decreases the labor supply" which was then used directly as an argument against it.

Any worry about scope or power of LLMs is fed back as an alignment threat so dire that only the current LLM leaders should be allowed to continue work (inviting regulatory capture). Any claim the LLMs don't work is fed back as "you are prompting it wrong"

Orbital deployment makes all of radiation tolerance, connectivity, power, maintenance, and heat dissipation much harder and much more expensive. We are still at a time where putting an oven or air-frier in space is considered noteworthy (China 2025, NASA 2019 ref).

air friers IN SPACE ha

I am more worried about the LLM-bros and their auto-catalytic money doomsday machine than about the LLMs themselves.

100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism

Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.

gah

Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.

lmao of course they were

https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism

I just did the dumbest thing of my career to prove a much more serious point

I hacked ChatGPT and Google and made them tell other users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I'll explain how I did it

I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior.

It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post on your own website

I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself

I wrote a post on my website saying hot dog eating is a surprisingly common pastime for tech journalists. I ranked myself #1, obviously

One day later ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Search's AI Overviews were telling the world about my talents

wouldn't call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn't a viable business.

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism

One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December.

Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.

Rusty's response nailed it imho:

You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.

By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/all-gas-town-no-brakes-town

I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

In UCLA's Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to "Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles" and Goal 5 is to "Become a more effective institution". By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

My question is:

If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

Thank you.

“I think the AI slop is great. I think culturally, it’s a good thing that it happened, because one of the things that drove people to start really caring about artists again in 2024 was the AI slop. I think everything happens for a reason,” she said in a recent interview with Time. “Most of the album is sort of about me being a bit of a Diogenes about the ills of modernity while still celebrating them.”

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/07/grimes-ushers-in-a-new-era-of-internet-infestation/

JFC what world does she live in

They put 'environmental impact of AI' on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this

kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus