Brimstone
Dollhouse
An anthology of Cornell Woolrich works

I watched it in theatres, and I saw all the Orwellian touches, and I've been sad that *that* movie wasn't made ever since.

#Robotjox

Seriously, there's a genuinely good movie about militarism and fascism *just* below the surface of that movie, and we all deserve to see it.

Alien Nation Intro YouTube video by TVTunes Quiz

Anyway: this still slaps www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyW...

SORRY STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS SHOW

Two big points about the Newcomers:

- They were physically way, WAY stronger than humans, like effortlessly so, but also
- Saltwater, like normal ocean water? The *sea?* It burned them like acid. Even the smell of it bothered them

I loved that juxtaposition

💯💯💯

And hey, it's not REALLY unacceptable he's a bigot! A Newcomer killed his partner! Ya gotta understand that!

Big "Well, you can't blame her for hating you, her high school bully was a Black girl" vibes! MMM. YUMMY.

The New Angoulême Festival Organizer Has Been Named The Morgane Group has been chosen as the organizer for the Angoulême comics festival moving forward, but challenges remain

I'm intrigued by this outcome (and also wrote this story)

it’s not that the broad center-left/democratic party is blameless or that the political right is never reacting to changes/provocations or the like, but that victory and defeat, success and failure are shaped by actors on both sides, as well as broad forces and the contingency of human events

if the right is successful, it must be because the liberals possess some fatal shortcoming or overreached in a way that mechanically produced backlash. the idea that the political right is its own thing with its own aims, can harness discontent and take advantage of contingency is verboten i guess

flipping through a proof of yet another book from a somewhat well known liberal voice diagnosing “where the left went wrong” and i’m struck, again, by the fact that a large part (if not most) of the liberal commentariat simply does not believe that the political right has agency.

Curious how this will poll in the (I’m using the term literally here) fly-over states. You get sonic booms so rich people get shorter flights

the Boots Riley discourse on twitter isn't going far enough imo. if you're actually a leftist, you shouldn't even be *watching* movies and television. the only way to actually be a Marxist is to live in a big tank like a guild navigator in Dune so that you can spend 24 hours a day posting

If we could take our follows and followers with us, it wouldn't be a problem. But the sites *all* want to be monopolies, now.

Meanwhile, they're firing the staff who maintain the code and replacing them with Claude, so I suspect collapse and migration are in our future.

Except for Mastodon.

I have *no idea* what they think the structure of a university is, though. Uni presidents are figureheads. They don't appoint people on a whim. Departments elect their own chairs. I think they think universities work like corporations. It's distracting.

#Rooster #TV #HBO

I'm really enjoying #Rooster as a companion show to #Shrinking: a show about flawed people who are trying to be better. Right now, with the state of the world as it is, it's helpful to see, even fictionalized, that that's possible.

I have *no idea* what they think the structure of a university […]

As Bluesky continues to chug and stutter, I'm going to remind everyone that I have an account on Mastodon: @orionkidder@mas.to. There are a lot of friends on here who I would miss if this site crashed, and I will not be going onto Instragram. I also have a Tumblr account that I barely use.

100%. I still don't think enough people get how Kennedy's "MAHA" is inherently fascistic. He's making it hard not to see it over the last few days, though.

So hey that's eugenics

A War of the Ages

Via TextsFromSuperheroes.com

Baby drag on a budget

whY iS evERyONe aROunD TRUmP tiEd To EPstEiN?

Fascinating observation.

If there’s anything driving student grade inflation it’s the administrative industrial complex’s obsession with metrics and evaluation as standards by which to judge performance in education. Tying the health of a department to that shit is a MISTAKE.

I wouldn’t piss on Harvard to put it out if it was on fire. Having said that, none of the folks I know who teach at Harvard or have taught at Harvard are afraid of failing some student because the dean will personally summon them.

Lots of replies are talking about how the dean is trump, which is terrifying.

But also, this dude is a shitty educator perpetuating a right wing talking point about education that is simply not true.

Though my arguments might be verbose, they’re ultimately pretty simple: AI does not provide even an iota of the benefits — economic or otherwise — to justify its ruinous costs. Every new story that runs about cost-cutting or horrible burnrates increasingly validates my position, and for the most part, boosters respond by saying “well LOOK at how BIG the REVENUES are.” It isn’t! AI revenues are dogshit. They’re awful. They’re pathetic. The entire industry — including OpenAI and Anthropic’s theoretical revenues of $13.1 billion and $4.5 billion — hit around $65 billion last year, and that includes the revenues from providing compute generated by neoclouds like CoreWeave and hyperscalers like Microsoft. I’m also just gonna come out and say it: I think the AI startups are misleading their investors and the general public about their revenues. My reporting from last year had OpenAI’s revenues at somewhere in the region of $4.3 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, and Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in an an affidavit that the company had made revenue “exceeding” (sigh) $5 billion through March 9, 2026, which does not make sense when you add up all the annualized revenue figures reported about this company.

In any case, I keep coming back to the word “hysteria,” because it’s hard to find another word to describe this hype cycle. The way that the media, the markets, analysts, executives, and venture capitalists discuss AI is totally divorced from reality, discussing “agents” in terms that don’t match with reality and AI data centers in terms of “gigawatts” that are entirely fucking theoretical, all with a terrifying certainty that makes me wonder what it is I’m missing. But every sign points to me being right, and if I’m right at the scale I think I’m right, I think we’re about to have a legitimacy crisis in investing and mainstream media, because regular people are keenly aware that something isn’t right, in many cases, it’s because they’re able to count.

The AI bubble has entered its most hysterical phase, with every defense worded in the future tense, every argument written with enough word salad to put Sweetgreen out of business, and few tangible explanations as to how any of this works out economically.
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Last week, a report from Goldman Sachs revealed that (and I quote) “...companies are overrunning their initial budgets for inference by orders of magnitude (we heard one industry datapoint on inference costs in engineering now approaching about 10% of headcount cost, but could be on track to be on par with headcounts costs in the next several quarters based on current trajectories.” To simplify, this means that some companies are spending as much as 10% of the cost of their employees on generative AI services, all without appearing to provide any stability, quality or efficiency gains, or (not that I want this) justification to lay people off.

The Information’s Laura Bratton also reported last week that Uber had managed to blow through its entire AI budget for the year a few months into 2026: Uber’s surging use of AI coding tools, particularly Anthropic’s Claude Code, has maxed out its full year AI budget just a few months into 2026, according to chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga. “I'm back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Neppalli Naga said in an interview. … He wouldn’t disclose exact figures of the company’s software budget or what it spends on AI coding tools. Uber’s research and development expenses, which typically reflect companies’ costs of developing new AI products, rose 9% to $3.4 billion in 2025 from the previous year, and the firm said in a recent securities filing it expects that cost will continue rising on an absolute dollar basis. Uber’s CTO also added that about “...11% of real, live updates to the code in its backend systems are being written by AI agents primarily built with Claude Code, up from just a fraction of a percent three months ago.” Anyone who has ever used Uber’s app in the last year can see how well that’s going, especially if they’ve had to file any kind of support ticket. Honestly, I find this all completely fucking insane. The whole sales pitch for generative AI is that it’s meant to be this magical, efficiency-driving panacea, yet whenever you ask somebody about it the answer is either “yeah, we’re writing all the code with it!” without any described benefits or “it costs so much fucking money, man.”

Another of my pale horses is companies reckoning with the true cost of generative AI.

Now Goldman Sachs says that some companies are spending as much as 10% of headcount on LLM tokens, and are on course to spend *100%* in the next few quarters.

www.wheresyoured.at/four-horseme...

Congratulations to all the current winners of the “Fell For It Again Award.” Per the Financial Times: Anthropic has said it will hold off on a wider release of the model until it is reassured that it is safe and cannot be abused by bad actors. The company also has a finite amount of computing power and has suffered outages in recent weeks. Multiple people with knowledge of the matter suggested Anthropic was holding back from a wider release until it could reliably serve the model to customers. So, yeah, anyone in the media who bought the line of shit from Dario Amodei that this was “too dangerous to release” is a mark. Cal Newport has an excellent piece debunking the hype, but my general feeling is that if Mythos was so powerful, how did Claude Code’s source code leak? Did… Anthropic not bother to use its super-powerful Mythos model to check? Or did it not find anything? Either way, very embarrassing for all involved.

Also, the Financial Times reports that it looks like Mythos was held back not because of how powerful and scary it was, but because of Anthropic's ongoing capacity issues. Congratulations to everyone who fell for this.
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Four Horsemen of the AIpocalypse If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, includ...

Today's free newsletter is about four signs that the AI bubble is bursting: Anthropic's services and economics are decaying, AI demand is inflated, more than 50% of data centers under construction are for two companies, and NVIDIA is warehousing $150bn+ of GPUs.
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Honesty, anyone falling for Carlson claiming he feels bad for getting Tr*mp elected needs a good shake. He's grifting you! There's an angle! He's still a white supremacist!