It’s also worth remembering that many Americans love their jobs for reasons beyond the financial ones. A good job gives you an identity, status, community, and a reason to leave the house. In other words, it gives you dignity, and that’s not something that a public wealth fund can substitute for. UBI may still be worth doing; should vast numbers of Americans become unemployed due to AI, some form of it may well be necessary. In the meantime, though, I suspect AI companies will find that gauzy promises of future welfare payments will help them about as much as their gauzy promises of future cancer cures — which is to say, not much. What Americans actually want, it’s not clear that AI can give them. And the sooner that AI executives understand that, the better off we’ll all be.

I wrote about tech companies' move to promote universal basic income to calm the AI backlash and why it's probably not going to work www.platformer.news/ubi-ai-publi...

Rest assured that Tim will still be around to hand out gold statues to authoritarians around the world in exchange for tariff relief

Agencies in talks with Trump, family to resolve $10B lawsuit over tax leaks President Trump and his family are suing federal agencies over leaks of their tax information. Court filings say they’re in talks to find a solution instead of heading to trial.

that beep beep beep sound you hear is the president and his family backing a truck up to the US treasury...

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

“It's not that surprising that a language model would have learned about the concepts of emotions and how they drive people's behavior,” Lindsey said. More notable, he said, is that emotions seemed to be “driving models’ behavior in these sort of human-reminiscent ways.” For example: when a user flippantly tells the model that they’ve taken a dangerous dose of Tylenol, even though the user doesn’t seem concerned, “the fear neurons spike right before Claude is giving its response,” Lindsey said. Not only that — the fear is higher if a higher dose of Tylenol is swapped into the prompt, which I find strangely cute.

Telling an LLM you just took a large amount of Tylenol activates parts of the model associated with stress — and can affect how well it performs a task. What's going on? @ellamarkianos.bsky.social investigates www.platformer.news/chatbot-emot...

“It’s 2026 and we’ve decided the Siri team should learn how to code” unfortunately one of the funnier stories of 2026 so far

My Allbirds shoes telling me to kill myself

Dammit it’s already happening

thank you!

i am SO MAD it happened the day after recording ... 😭

ChatGPT: you’re right you’re so much smarter than him. He’s so schlubby and you’re so suave. Columbo will never catch you.

“Dying shoe company becomes compute provider” is easily the best bubble story we have seen so far

Ok. So why didn’t it?

22 Short Films About Springfield first aired on 14th April 1996, making Steamed Hams thirty years old today.

Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa” Meta’s new rules let it ban users or suppress comments that include the word “antifa” alongside “content-level threat signals.”

Meta recently added new restrictions around "Antifa content" on Facebook and Instagram. Internal documents I reviewed show it applies when a user merely uses the word "Antifa" in a post.

theintercept.com/2026/04/14/f...

Sam Altman’s second thoughts OpenAI’s CEO is asking the public to lower the temperature on AI. But who turned it up in the first place?

"If we really might be facing 'the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,' as Altman once wrote, shouldn’t we expect people at some point to (non-violently) freak out?" www.platformer.news/sam-altman-a... @caseynewton.bsky.social

I have this enabled on my account, use a range of Google services daily, and it has never once manifested itself in any way

Sam Altman’s second thoughts OpenAI’s CEO is asking the public to lower the temperature on AI. But who turned it up in the first place?

Excellent post from @caseynewton.bsky.social on Sam Altman, the attacks on his home, Altman’s own words, and OpenAI lobbying

www.platformer.news/sam-altman-a...

Given these facts, I struggle to understand what it would mean to “de-escalate the rhetoric” around AI. The CEOs are more convinced than ever that powerful intelligence will arrive within the next few years. The public increasingly believes them — and is appalled by the implications. It seems strange to suggest that, amidst accelerating breakthroughs in AI model performance, everyone needs to calm down. If we really might be facing “the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” as Altman once wrote, shouldn’t we expect people at some point to (non-violently) freak out?

I wrote about the disturbing rise of AI-related violence and how CEOs' own rhetoric has put the public on edge www.platformer.news/sam-altman-a...

a screenshot of the "New Bestsellers" list from Substack, with Andrew Tate in the #1 position

Hey, look at Substack promoting Andrew Tate as the #1 new bestseller. The company's amoral leadership & backers will platform anyone, even ludicrously toxic rapists & human traffickers.

the passive voice store was visited by me and you were known by everybody there

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

I use the old maxim “if this is important it will find me again”

☠️

But the frontier has not been waiting for Meta to catch up with it. The day before Meta’s launch, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, a model so capable at discovering software vulnerabilities that it would not release it to the general public. The flip side of that is that the model is extremely capable at agentic coding — it scored 93.9% on SWE-bench Verified, compared to 77.4% for Muse Spark — and Anthropic is already presumably using it heavily as it builds its next set of models and products. OpenAI will reportedly release a similar model soon, and will also restrict its use. (That model is distinct from another next-generation model, codenamed “Spud,” said to be arriving soon.) Overnight, the true frontier in AI development became a model that’s too good to ship. And because those labs can use those models in development, the gap between them and everyone else may be compounding.

Meta may be back in the AI race — but the race is speeding up, and its rivals' advantages may be compounding. I wrote about Muse Spark: www.platformer.news/meta-muse-sp...

i can't delete my account for several job-related reasons but i haven't tweeted since 2023 and do not otherwise engage

dave what the hell is going on with your tabs

If you are here because X is down right now, welcome! Let us know how we can help you to never go back

omg thank you!

It really sucks when you're trying to procrastinate and Google has not yet rolled out vertical tabs to your Chrome browser

Arby’s Reclassifies Their Food As Entertainment Restaurant Says Menu Items Intended For Amusement Purposes Only

Arby’s Reclassifies Their Food As Entertainment theonion.com/arbys-reclassifies-their...

I have a perfect idea for fixing and funding this app simultaneously: make each reply cost $1, to be refunded when it is liked by the OP.