Heard about the below last night; apparently survivors are forced into arbitration, so only the dead can sue. IANAL but thats pretty messed up.

https://techjusticelaw.org/2025/08/30/from-homework-help-to-suicide-planning-family-sues-openai-and-samuel-altman-alleging-chatgpt-coached-teen-son-to-suicide/

I got paid $2700 for teaching a semester. Adjuncting sucks. It doesn't get better.

Even if you finished, all the postdocs I know had their NSF starter kit yanked.

When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.

Excerpt from the new Bender / Hanna book, AI Hype Is the Product and Everyone’s Buying It :

OpenAI alums cofounded Anthropic, a company solely focused on creating generative AI tools, and received $580 million in an investment round led by crypto-scammer Sam Bankman-Fried.

Just wondering, but what ever happened to those shares of Anthropic that SBF bought? Was it part of FTX (and the bankruptcy), or did he buy it himself and still holds them in prison? Or have they just been diluted to zero at this point anyway?

EDIT:

Found it; It was owned by FTX and part of the estate bankruptcy; 2/3 went to Abu Dhabi + Jane Street1, and the remainder went at $30 / share to a bunch of VC2.

In a similar train of thought:

A.I. as normal technology (derogatory) | Max Read

But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?

It’ll probably earn a lot of users if and when Github goes down the shitter.

I'd argue GH is well on it's way, probably jumped around the time Hacktoberfest morphed into a DDoS on maintainers. Or maybe more recently, when they handed peoples repos (and API keys lol) over to Copilot. Or maybe earlier, when they started calling their users "maintainers" instead of "developers". Sometime in the last 6 years though.

There have been a number of contenders over the years - gitlab, gitea but none of them have been able to brand/market well enough to really to really impact GH or to compete with the subsidized free storage and Actions credits plus switching costs. Even Atlassian / BB is largely irrelevant.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten lol but good for lore:

The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’

Nikhil's guest post at Zitron just went up - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/

EDIT: the intro was strong enough I threw in $7. Second half is just as good.

I liked his stuff on wework back in the day. Funny how he could see one tech grift really clearly and fall for another. Then again, WeWork is in the black these days. Anyway I think Galloway pivoted (apologies) to Mens Rights lately; and he also gave some money to UCLA Extension (ie not the main campus) which is a bit hard to interpret.

One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370

Sure, done.

I have LLMs translate novels, I can tell when they run over the window because they forget characters' gender half way through, things like that. Lots of legal documents are even longer, maybe.