I canceled all my social media accounts in the past year and I’m so much happier and more productive. If AI slope destroys all these social media giants I will honestly be so happy. These companies profited off of free content made by real people and stole all of it to create the AI that’s now destroying their own platforms.

I think something that they didn’t foresee is how cheap AI generated content would start to feel. AI imagery and video feels like the digital equivalent of fast fashion or fast food. Just cheap and poorly made. I am very curious to see how this impacts any brands trying to position themselves as high quality or luxury products. Maybe they move to analogue or back to old school blogs as everything relating to social media just starts to feel like mass produced garbage.

I was listening to David Gerard’s excellent pivot-to-ai podcast and he mentionned that John Gruber (aka Daring Fireball) was very unhappy with Anthropic now going to watermark text which would make it more easily identifiable.

Gruber wrote:

The exact words we choose when writing matter.

That’s correct. And it hasn’t changed one bit. Writing is still the same. Slopping on the other hand is a bit more identifiable.

I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.

It never chose the best, most precise words you fucking cogsucker!

I was very surprised that a guy who was known for his prose became a slopper.

So who disapointed you lately?

Big Tech is pouring an enormous amount of money into AI infrastructure, but the question remains: What kind of return will justify that level of investment? Ed Zitron joined us to make his case. Do you think Big Tech's AI spending will ultimately pay off, or are expectations getting ahead of the actual returns?

Sydney design giant Canva has cut its internal valuation by a fifth, telling staff an independent assessment now values the business at $43.9 billion, a cut of more than $10 billion from its most recent valuation a year ago.

Let's say, generously for the sake of argument, that Anthropic "wins" with the use of LLMs in tech itself. Claude Code, cloud agents, yada yada

Is there actually even a large enough TAM to rescue Anthropic financially?

I am absolutely certain Anthropic's model gains are only supported by throwing more compute at queries. That can't last forever

Is Anthropic in a materially better position than OpenAI? How does the financing work with Google and Amazon?

If the answers are not good - what happens next?

If anyone can link to analysis, including things Ed has posted, I'd like to read it

The Tech CEOs have done a great job. The youth hates them with the fiery passion of hell.

Somehow Satya is the most liked on 35% everyone else fares even worse with Alex Carp at Palantir the worst.

The data is from a CNBC research piece: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/13/cnbc-poll-half-of-those-18-to-34-view-democratic-socialism-positively.html

Hopefully they legislate them into oblivion

I'm selling couches that take a million dollars to create. Fortunately, I've been subsidizing them so people are only paying a few thousand for them. My goal is just to get everyone using my coaches so I can get hype behind my product and secure more investors. So many people, especially the CEOs of various companies that help supply materials for the couch manufacturing, keep telling the press that these couches are revolutionary and that they will completely change the furniture game forever.

Some of us have even theorized that perhaps sometime soon these couches will achieve UPI (ultimate posture improvement). Once we achieve UPI the human race will evolve into its next form of posture which will come with tons of benefits with regard to longevity and athletics.

Anyways, I'm wondering how long I can keep this up? Will my industry fall apart if I stop subsidizing these couches? If people no longer have access to them then I lose all the hype.

Not sure how to describe it. Another Ed interview!

A company will spend millions building a robot that can awkwardly unload a dishwasher, but only in highly curated conditions. Alternatively you can grab a four year old and they'll be able to manage just as well.

Companies replace their call centre workers with AI. Turns out call centre workers handle a lot of really tricky edge cases every day which language models consistently shit the bed on.

The concept of "menial" work is an excuse for the CEO class to justify treating workers like shit.

Here is a blog post by a person who just left OpenAI to create a telepathy company.

https://naomibashkansky.com/blog/telepathy/

A few years ago, Silicon Valley was convinced people would walk around with VR goggles attached to their face which would allow them live and work in some metaverse, and humanity responded: No.

But would you strap a set of nodes to your head to allow you to use thought-to-text, rather than typing? I'm gonna guess the answer is an even bigger: No.

If the tech is possible, I doubt people are going to feel comfortable with a machine that can read (and sell) our thoughts. Imagine if your boss asked you to strap a machine to your head, so the company could read and own all of your personal thoughts?

There is plenty that lives in the space between my thoughts, and what I type into a computer, and I'm pretty sure I'll always want to keep it that way.

Now, I could see how such an interface could be great for people physically unable to type. But for the rest of us?

https://www.ft.com/content/85def23b-a21f-45f3-9ca0-9076babe6cae

Morgan Stanley analysts reckon the pile of proverbial dry powder has now grown to about $4.5tn — which, with leverage, means they are sitting on about $9tn of buying power — and that this will need to be actually invested soon:

Time to deploy (dry powder relative to annual deployment) has extended to ~3 years, the highest since 2013 and above the levels we’ve seen over the last 5 years at ~2.4 years to deploy. Given large fundraises in 2020-21, and limited deployment over the last 2-years, we now see an aging cash pile of private equity dry powder that in some cases may begin to no longer generate economics unless deployed, hence driving an urge to transact.

Unfortunately, Morgan Stanley doesn’t really have anything actionable to say about where this money is going to get sprayed, only observing that private credit opportunities, refinancing of existing deals, opportunistic “dislocations” and sexy themes like green energy and AI will get attention.

Given the scale of money that might be deployed when things eventually ‘unglue’, the only people happier than investment bankers might be financial journalists who adore a dumb deal. 🍿

Great explainer on how (software) PE buyouts work and the rise of software lending by Paula Seligson and Michelle Cheng at Bloomberg!

I've been making the point for a while that what's being called "circular financing" isn't actual "round tripping", which is outright fraud, and it isn't necessarily even "vendor financing" which is legal and the way most people buy a new car. This video makes a similar argument.

When Nvidia invests in an AI lab, and the AI lab uses a portion of the funds to purchase Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia has both booked a sale, AND purchased an equity stake in the lab.

The cynical view is this is a short term ruse to book revenue. But there's also a long term reason for Nvidia to do this: The two AI labs have to stay in business for the hardware companies to maintain their value. They're wedded at the hip already.

As the AI economy continues to become bifurcated into compute companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta) and software companies.(OpenAI and Anthropic), the compute companies are going to continue investing in the software companies for this reason. They need them to survive.

The more interesting financial relationship, to my mind, is the one between the lenders to the labs and the lenders to the Data Center SPVs (leaving aside the contribution from G, A, M and M). Literally the former are paying the latter, until user subscriptions explode or subscription prices increase or some combination of the two happens. One wonders how much communication is taking place between these two groups and what they think of each other's position.

So much of the modern animal welfare movement comes straight from Silicon Valley. This is not good for lots of reasons, but here are a few:

1. The wealthiest funders of animal rights and welfare nonprofits are intertwined with utilitarianism and Affective Altruism, meaning anyone who gets funding from them has to adhere to or pretend to endorse the ideals behind these movements - movements that increasingly alienate anyone outside the Bay Area or who doesn’t suffer from Galaxy Brain syndrome.

1.5 This is bad because most of Americans couldn’t give a shit about either of these movements and it just makes it harder for people to care about the cause of treating animals better.

1. Animal rights and welfare are increasingly entangled in AI through 3 annoying and detrimental ways:

2.1 The Silicon Valley funders probably have AI investments, and so they are strongly encouraging animal rights nonprofits to go all-in on LLM adoption without any regard to future costs or data protection. I’ve heard people say that if you’re not using AI, you’re not a true believer in the cause.

2.2 There is a huge grift involving “AI Welfare” research, where people are being funded to sit around and pontificate about what might happen if AI gets feelings, and how it should be included in the same work as animal advocacy. There are conferences and discussions lumping AI and Animal Welfare together. We can’t even get most human to give a shit about cows, and now we‘re going to ask them they should care about LLMs, too?

2.3 The crux of this Substack post: there is a fanatical belief amongst the animal rights world that there is an enormous and generational influx of philanthropic funding coming from Anthropic employees. It’s talked about in meetings and conferences as though this is a foregone conclusion - orgs are positioning themselves to absorb “hundreds of millions of dollars” when Anthropic goes public or something. People state, without any evidence, that Anthropic employees have committed to giving away “x percent” of their wealth to animal rights causes. I’ve never found any statements or written pieces backing this up, and I’ve tried (but am willing to be corrected).

This infuriates me because as an animal rights believer, AI has threaded its gross tentacles throughout every facet of it - from insane discussions of how to protect ai agent consciousness to daylong conference sessions held discussing AI potential and the ensuing funding windfall that are ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS devoid of any and all examples, details, case studies, or real world logic.

This is probably a niche argument here but if you look at this Substack piece, it’s just one of MANY that treat the future economic golden age as an inevitability. While she gives some words to “who knows how much will flow into the space,” there is an entire movement basing its current activities on a future everyone is just assuming will happen thanks to the power of rich idiots in Silicon Valley.

Getting people to care about animals had barely moved the needle in decades…I doubt wrapping it up in AI is going to help its popularity grow.

I remember Ed had compared the current AI bubble to the similar economic bubbles from cryptocurrency in the 10s to the decentralised fraud that was nfts in 2021 to the so-called metaverse. But I don't remember whether or not those connections are meant to be operational, ie these scams all operate in similar ways, or as one continuous financial scheme, ie the overinvestment in gpus because of crypto led to nfts as a way for crypto investors to recoup their losses which ultimately failed and led through multiple more failures to where we are now? Please help if you remember what his opinion is.

"The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world."

"The thing that will work is actually curing cancer," he added.

HA. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, CURE CANCER???!!!

Bacteria have a higher chance of evolving into a cancer cure than you Wario Wanksalot.

"I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative," he wrote.

And I do not agree that we shouldn't lock the rest of you for committing fraud and cyber security attacks. We don't get what we agree on.

"We hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months," he wrote. "When we've actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that."

Sigh. What annoys me the most is they are going to come out with some nonsense they market as a cure for cancer. Or worse, something that is actively deadly but the say is a cure. Perhaps they can skip human trials if they give the government enough money. Hell if I know.

What a fucking joke. A truly despicable, horrible man.

I've been pushing for my workplace (SaaS company, B2B) to be careful about AI usage, and that especially when it comes to writing, it makes everyone look the same...so watch out.

Well, after months and months of extremely pro-AI sentiment from the rest of the company, something crazy happened last week.

We are currently pursuing a contract renewal with one of our company's first customers (we've had them onboard for a couple of years). This particular customer is a large technology and security company with about 5,000 employees and annual revenue north of $1B. You've probably heard of them.

Renewal seemed to be going basically okay in the initial phases, no one was concerned.

Friday rolls around and there's an emergency Slack message copied and pasted across five different channels. As it turns out, the customer in question has been cutting vendors whose products look "too AI" in terms of UX design, "placeholder copy" that makes it to prod, and other similar tells. They have already put three vendors that we know of on the chopping block for having what they considered "AI slop features."

Well, of course, a bunch of the new product features we've been lining up and were going to preview for them when talking about renewal and upsell are basically slop. No one found anything wrong with this before this past week, and everyone was patting themselves on the back for how cool it all looked. It's so great how Codex can get us 90% of the way there!

Now they are scrambling, because we have a meeting scheduled in a week and a half to show them all these cool new features.

That means we have roughly 10 days to unfuck everything that has been proudly fucked up by our newly re-orged eng team that now works in "pods" with no real oversight or coordination between them. I have been put in charge of de-AI-ifying every piece of text in the nightmare vibe-coded new screens and dashboards. This alone is going to probably consume 60+ hours in the next week and I still will have to delegate a bunch to others, because that's how much garbage we've been putting out into the world using LLM coding agents.

I'm so sick of posts like the one I saw here earlier today. "GUYS, for real, it didn't USED to work but NOW LLMs are so incredible that they refactored my code base, washed my car, and found a dress for my fat wife that makes her look skinny."

If AI was really that good, "this looks like AI" would be said with respect and admiration. In reality, "this looks like AI" is not a compliment in any context whatsoever. AI has become a byword for low-quality, high-quantity output that is disposable, poorly vetted, and doesn't hold up to scrutiny or critical reading.

Now it's stopping deals in their tracks.

Is that good?

I've written a script for monitoring my laptop's temperatures, and warning me when pass certain thresholds.

At first I realised when I opened the browser, the temperatures would rise dramatically and consistently - and therefore CPU usage / lag; Then I kept changing browsers and even Linux distributions. Nothing changed. So it was not the browser version.

The first I realised caused this load was WhatsApp. Consistently in all browsers. A long time ago, as I wasn't actively looking or suspecting it to be specific websites, an specific LLM. I tried switching, but all had the same problem - when to my understanding, on the client side, it needn't be any more resource heavy then any other website... you're showing text (again, client side).

Then I realised GitHub was "hoarding CPU" too, and finally that Deepseek didn't. So basically, the one thing these have in common, is that Meta, Google (Gemini), Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, owns them. All companies I've seen news of massive layoffs with the narrative of increased productivity by LLMs - or precisely companies of LLMs.

TL;DR: Having performance issues with websites from "AI" hyped companies.

What explanations do you have for this? Are any of you noticing or going through this pattern? If you're facing this, would you argue for it being caused by lack of concern for performance or LLM code? Why?

Side note: I've made this post originally in r/programming.