I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

How do we make the experience of dating apps even worse? With AI, of course:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/12/chatgpt-ed-into-bed-chatfishing-on-dating-apps

The funniest bit is the guy who needed multiple exchanges with the ocean-boiling slop machine to come up with "Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you".

Lately I've been mildly annoyed when I just want to relax and watch gaming videos on Youtube and I see recommendations for some AI critihype. Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to click on one of them and of course the "original paper" the video is based on is the stupid Anthropic blog post about how the AI blackmailed someone (after it was told to blackmail someone). I was even more annoyed to find out how popular it is, but at least it shows how the general public has such a negative opinion of AI. Some of the comments are thankfully pushing back against the video and focusing on the real harms.

I thought that by now we would have learned from the tobacco companies to never trust "research" done by a company about their own products.

An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed

(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he's a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)

Global Crossing Is Reborn…

Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)

An AI Addendum

As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”

[...]

Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.

So for my gaming needs I check reddit every now and then, and on phone it had after the comments ended a related answers section, which gave related answers 99% of them in the same sub.

Now they out some ai generated shit between that and the answers are just horrible generic slop.

Check out this answer for example: https://www.reddit.com/answers/3c67990a-d1a2-4f86-b1e4-c2f3bb54803d/

Very important context here. I was looking at the starsector subreddit. (A 2d arcade like space shooter) This is about a minecraft like building game. (Most of the advice is also useless (how to survive: 'use mods!').

AI-faked videos of journalist arrests have started cropping up online, to the surprise of nobody except those creating AI video extruders.

as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I've never heard of that's gone fash. "GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??" "PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don't exist?" open source people, are you ok?

Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?

https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h

“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky

I am going outside to smoke something. I don't care what, just… something

Oh my god, The Guardian with the sneer:

Take a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI boss smiling in a kind of wan genius way, the humble lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to simply cover the bottom half of his face in any of these pictures, and you will immediately clock that Sam has the sad-psycho eyes of the lost woman’s boyfriend who the police have asked to front the missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we’re all worried sick and we just want you back.

I just wanted to lob a sneer at this article fawning over Sora 2: https://spyglass.org/soras-slop-hits-different/

And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen.

did this motherfucker just try to say "scaling comedy"? If you ever wondered why techbros are so unfunny, here's something to point at.

A quick OT post, to lighten the mood: https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/115344203384433517

Is there a general term for the type of experimental or vaporware tech whose main function is creating FUD and FOMO which slows down the adoption and development of more mature conventional solutions? In the case of public transit these are collectively known as gadgetbahns. Examples from other fields include SMRs, direct air carbon capture, various embrace-extend-extinguish schemes in the software world, extraterrestrial colonies and a host of consumer IoT gadgets.

A new psychology preprint argues that "contemporary AI is research misconduct".

a lobsters is mad that a middling Perl project gets upvotes just because it's "braincoded"

https://lobste.rs/s/bu1a84/i_brain_coded_static_image_gallery_few#c_um9usd

shot:

chaser:

(thread)