The Trillion-Dollar AI Bet

There are bubbles of excess and bubbles of pure betting; some bubbles are both

Why is the ROI on Generative AI so poor?

From AI slop to workslop

Nvidia Buys Into Intel, Apple’s Modem, Corporate Jobs, and the Billion-Dollar Cable Race

A few articles I really enjoyed, round up of all my content from September, and a short quiz.

Against Treating Chatbots as Conscious

Don't give AIs "exit rights" to conversations

The Village and the Sewer

Behind the "Blueskyism" debate

Pluralistic: The billionaires aren't OK (24 Sep 2025)

Today's links The billionaires aren't OK: They're going to give us all Howard Hughes disease. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: KY Republican says the First Amendment protect

SIMmetry

A recent Secret Service raid uncovers an insane network of SIM cards—along with perhaps the most unusual piece of hardware I’ve ever seen. Here’s the deal with the SIM bank. When I learned that the S

Towel Uprising

Issue #55: Meet Towel Integrity Officer Martinez, Badge #0089

Pluralistic: The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) (23 Sep 2025)

Today's links The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it): Red-teaming the fossil fuel death cult's next move. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Contrastive reduplicat

AI red lines

“We urge governments to reach an international agreement on red lines for AI — ensuring they are operational, with robust enforcement mechanisms — by the end of 2026.”

You Don't Have to Carry the Entire Planet on Your Shoulders

Hold on to your handkerchief

popehat.com on free speech culture

How "Free Speech Culture" Is Killing Free Speech: Part One “Free speech culture” means that you can call for censorship, disproportionately abuse other people for speech, chill and deter people

The Aaron Swartz production function

Incalculable diffusion as a philosophy of doing

Pluralistic: It's still censorship (even if it doesn't violate the First Amendment) (22 Sep 2025)

Today's links It's still censorship (even if it doesn't violate the First Amendment): Communications monopolies create single points of failure. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permane

5-4 Podcast on Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo

Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo Papers, please. The hallmark of fascist states of eras past and your favorite movie about authoritarianism is now also the official policy of the United States... This

High Bandwidth Flash: NAND’s Bid for AI Memory

Can HBF be a new memory tier for AI workloads? Where its limits will show, and what are use-cases for a high capacity memory thats slower than HBM or GDDR.

Semafor on War on Media

Behind Carr and the White House’s war on the media The Trump administration, from the president down to the middle levels of obscure Cabinet departments, is populated by people whose defining exp

🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC?

AI anxiety and the new language of silicon valley

Stick To The Beat

How the drum machine, despite being a machine, proved just to have just enough heart to dominate the pop charts. Hey all, Ernie here with a book excerpt from one of Tedium’s best-known contributors.

It's not chickens all the way down

Higher education leadership in this moment of crisis

The lost art of thinking historically ⊗ How climate broke reality ⊗ Does the Bitter Lesson have limits?

No.371 — Why 95% of AI commentary fails ⊗ Designing futures you can live in ⊗ AI water usage at data centers ⊗ “Solarize everything we possibly can” ⊗ Warsaw opens metro station “express” library

Genius in the Bottle

Issue #54: A field-tested omega metafiction protocol

Techdirt on The 'Debate Me Bro' Grift

The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalen

Business Insider on 'We vote with our dollars'

'We vote with our dollars': People are boycotting Disney and canceling their streaming subscriptions "We don't even watch Jimmy Kimmel at all," Gary, 54, said. "Things that are supposed to be tho

Filtered for bird calls and catnip

1. With less human noise to compete with, the birds are able to have ‘deeper conversations,’ says biologist (2020): Researchers studying birdsong in the San Francisco Bay found the sparrows’ mating ca

A Tandem of GPT-5 And [Mystery Model] Has Beaten the Best Human Coders

OpenAI seems to have fended off the allegations

Repost: Absolute power can be a terrible weakness

The respective vulnerabilities of tyrants and crowds

Get your Claude Code muzak here

I suggested last week that Claude Code needs elevator music… Like, in the 3 minutes while you’re waiting for your coding agent to write your code, and meanwhile you’re gazing out the window and contem

A Moment For Independent Media

At a time when large companies are capitulating their content presence at the drop of a hat, a quick note on why a more-flexible independent media still matters. I don’t know what the next couple of

Dragoncatcher: Slow liquid

Monochrome gambit

Pluralistic: AI psychosis and the warped mirror (18 Sep 2025)

Today's links AI psychosis and the warped mirror: When you stare into the LLM… Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: No such thing as shareholder supremacy; Intel's DRM'ed CPU; T

The Hidden Art Inside Your Microchips

How engineers, artists, and musicians turned microchips into a canvas for human creativity.

If Anyone Builds It, Does Everybody Die?

What should we make of this widely-discussed new book?

What will AI look like in 2030?

AI could improve productivity in valuable areas such as scientific R&D, as investments and energy requirements grow

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism's causal chain (17 Sep 2025)

Today's links Conspiratorialism's causal chain: A four-part begat. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Legal threats over HDCP leaks; Print your own TSA luggage keys; "A Natura

Snip Snip

A new lawsuit by a major publishing conglomerate takes aim at Google’s AI summaries—and hints at the many ways that Google undermines its own mission by forcing unwanted features on its users. I don’

The House That Paid Its Own Bills

Issue #53: Your profile will outlive you

Wherever I Go ChatGPT Follows Me

The internet is not dead, we’re just lynching it

Pluralistic: No such thing as selective censorship resistance (16 Sep 2025)

Today's links No such thing as selective censorship resistance: Age verification, or getting rid of Big Tech (pick one). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ashley Madison pass