Every person who has spent years saber rattling and pretending Iran was some rabid because it's muslim is responsible for this. The entire permission structure exists because of a multi-decade lie fronted by think tanks and cynical politicians yearning for a civilizational enemy.
AI Isn’t Too Big To Fail, And Saying It Is Only Exists To Endorse Bad Behavior That term “moral hazard” is important because (as discussed earlier) it’s the reason why the Bear Stearns bailout was likely an accelerant of the great financial crisis. Big banks correctly assumed they’d get bailed out, and acted as such. The 2008 bailout existed to stabilize the financial system, and succeeded in doing so by actually targeting the sources of the instability - liquidity, toxic assets, massive job-creators and so on and so forth. While we can (reasonably!) debate about how necessary it was in certain aspects (and the idea that a billion dollars of bonuses went to executives is fucking vile and everybody involved should be in prison, and no, they weren’t returned), it at least had an end point and eventually ended up with a narrow profit of $1 billion, per ProPublica. Put another way, the assets in question gained value, and entities borrowing from the Fed actually had to pay it back. If we assume that the AI bailout would be for OpenAI and Anthropic, it’s unclear what it is we’d be bailing out. Both of these companies lose billions of dollars a year and have no path to profitability, meaning that the money invested would have no real path to a return on investment. And let’s be really frank for a second: there is nothing “systemic” or even essential about generative AI. It does not have the returns or the efficacy or the outputs that mean that common jobs - other than “jobs at AI startups” - are now existentially tied to its existence. The collapse in value of AI startups wouldn’t be changed by a bailout unless the US government literally invested in worthless startups as a means of propping up venture capital, and said “bailout” would number in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and while I know you’re gonna say “ohhhh Trump is so corrupt oooh Trump will do this Trump will do that,” this is not a rational or logical or even historically-accurate thing to say. Tr…
Saying AI Is “Too Big To Fail” Is A Crutch To Avoid Thinking About Bad Things While I think a level of doomerism and depression drives the feeling that AI is “too big to fail,” I think an alarming amount of people use this logic as a means of avoiding thinking about bad things happening at all. If OpenAI isn’t too big to fail, that means that it either has to work out how to become profitable, or default on hundreds of billions of dollars of contracts with Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon. As a result, it’s convenient to just say “oh the government will bail them out,” because otherwise you have to accept that a company can grow very large, very quickly, mostly through outright deceit and overstatements of revenue and efficacy of its products. It also means that Anthropic and virtually every other AI startup are headed for the woodshed. There are no signs that these companies are becoming more profitable, and far more that they’re burning more every year rather than less, which again is deflected by saying “they’re in growth mode, and they’ll just “hit the profit lever” to work it out.” I also want to be clear that I’m not minimizing the carnage that will happen as a result of either or both of these companies collapsing. Hundreds of billions of dollars of equity investment have gone into AI startups, and those investments are likely to be somewhere between 0% and 10% of their current value by the time everything is done. Venture firms heavily-levered in these assets will face furious Limited Partners, something I warned about in the Enshittifinancial Crisis, who believed their funds were worth far more than they were thanks to the inflated investments in doomed LLM wrappers and associated startups. The toxic assets in the Great Financial Crisis were very, very different to equity investments in startups, and the only reason they were purchased was because the banks would’ve run out of money. A venture capital firm running out of money is a tragedy for its partner…
Without real, measurable productivity gains (outside of people saying “IT’S WRITING ALL MY CODE,” which doesn’t actually seem to be doing anything, economically speaking?)AI's economic effects are incredibly siloed - a process of banks and financial institutions sending money to NVIDIA or construction companies, or venture capitalists, in a roundabout way, sending money to Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Oracle. People aren’t making more money because of AI, new jobs aren’t being created because of AI, and the only people that seem to get “the benefits” are the already-rich or those co-opted to serve their needs. Eventually, I see Large Language Models as a forgotten category somewhere deep within Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure, or an on-device doohickey that particularly-dedicated software engineers play with. This feels unthinkable given the prominence of AI today - and by “prominence” I mean everybody talking about it and shoving it in your face rather than anything about efficacy or usefulness. Everything you see about AI today is a direct result of infinite resources and gullible investors, much like the Great Financial Crisis. The difference is that the only people that are truly gambling their futures on it are venture capitalists, private creditors and Business Development Companies like Blue Owl, and even then, the risk of an AI bubble bursting is horrible for them but not one that triggers a global financial crisis. What people aren’t really talking about is how bad this will be for the tech industry’s reputation. Silicon Valley and its associated tendrils have made one of the most horrible, ugly, upsetting and demoralizing plays in the history of capitalism - a violative, forced intrusion of Large Language Models sold through outright lies about “agents,” laundered through a captured media, pumping a stock market that feels more and more disconnected from real life every day. The tech industry likely doesn’t think about the outcomes of the bubbl…
When this collapses, I believe people will be joyous. I believe they will be ecstatic. And when they’re finished celebrating, they’ll see their 401Ks and the stock market bathed in blood. And they’ll blame Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Dario Amodei, Andy Jassy, and every other rotten executive that lied their way through the AI bubble. I think this might genuinely be what turns society against the tech industry, and I think that’s entirely fucking deserved considering the wretched state of our so-called innovators. Fuck these people.
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“The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” -Walter Benjamin
If you’re about to have an AI-induced break with reality, try and make it a fun one. Don’t harm yourself and others like so many do. Instead try molding a very specific rock formation out of your mashed potatoes and then driving out to the desert.
The discovery that ICE began using Subarus shook me to my core. My culture is not a costume
society: what happened to all the hard drives?
sam altman with a suspiciously hard drive shaped stomach:
The whole world is about to watch as a country of people get forced into starvation for no reason
www.reuters.com/business/ene...
I wonder if I’ll ever stop being angry all of the time.
I'm feeling really good that we leapt off twitter with both feet last February. People need to grow some backbones.
I think it’s really cool that you could point to a million metrics where china is ahead of us but when you tell it to most Americans they are like “yeah but they have police”
I assume tennis broadcasts will stop showing the American flag next to players’ names now like they did with the Russian and Belarussian players.
An official warm-up puck from the December 3, 2025 New York Sirens @ Seattle Torrent game that Seattle won 2-1. The puck is signed by Alex Carpenter, who was the second star of the game.
The arena was so loud after both goals that I still have no idea what our goal song is, but I do have this puck!
Thanks for the puck Alex (I picked it up after my failed catch attempt), and great win tonight @pwhltorrent.bsky.social!
The new Seattle Kraken 3rd alternate jersey. The jersey is primarily black with some red highlight bands around the bottom of the jersey and the sleeves. The sleeves have several bands above the red band in a pale turquoise color that get progressively darker as they get closer to the shoulders and disappear. The Kraken logo is in the center of the jersey and has this same pale turquoise color. The Muckleshoot sponsor patch on the lapel of the jersey has lettering in this same pale turquoise color, as does the outline of the numbers and anchor logo on the shoulders.
The new Seattle Kraken 3rd alternate jersey photographed with long exposure in pitch black darkness. The Seattle Kraken logo, Muckleshoot sponsor patch on the lapel of the jersey, the outline of the numbers, and the anchor logo on the shoulders are the only visible elements as the “pale turquoise” elements on them when photographed in normal lighting glows in the dark.
This arrived just in time for the @seattlekraken.com to debut them on-ice this Saturday! The promotional photos are one thing, but seeing it glow in person is something else - easily my favorite jersey I own for any sport.
40-40 is the second-highest-scoring tie game in nfl history, and the very highest of the super bowl era
40-40 is a scorigami. congrats everybody
Actually: Matt Lafleur masterclass
GREEN BAY WHAT THE FUCK MAN
Immaculate Grid “Some Guys I Remember” Hockey answers from left-to-right, top-to-bottom: Eeli Tolvanen, Matty Beniers, Kaapo Kakko, Alex Wennberg, Vince Dunn, Adam Larsson, Will Borgen, Joey Daccord, and Martin Jones.
Not being creative on this one, just some current and former @seattlekraken.com guys we’re fans of in my household. #LetsGoKraken 🦑
Inspiration for a themed grid hit while I was watching today’s stream.
Immaculate Grid “Some Guys I Remember” Baseball answers from left-to-right, top-to-bottom: Lyle Overbay, Ben Sheets, J.J. Hardy, Bill Hall, Trevor Hoffman, Corey Hart, Nyjer Morgan, John Axford, and CC Sabathia.
Thanks for having @adarowski.bsky.social, @mayormccheese.bsky.social, and I on! Here's my own Brewers Guys grid (and shout out to Twitch user "lyleoverbay").
Immaculate Grid “Some Guys I Remember” American Football answers from left-to-right, top-to-bottom: Ahman Green, Chad Clifton, Mark Tauscher, Al Harris, Donald Driver, Nick Barnett, Darren Sharper, Bubba Franks, and B.J. Raji.
Since @davidjroth.bsky.social already put together an excellent Brewers Guys grid in his article, here are some Packers Guys.
defector.com/defector-and...
It’s so exhausting having to present any criticism of this obvious bullshit with the caveat “yes, the next Einstein could have a shower thought tomorrow that makes all this look like a good idea”
Immaculate grid answer for April 1, 2025, left-to-right, top-to-bottom: Hernán Pérez, Bill Hall, Craig Counsell, Yuniesky Betancourt, Eric Sogard, Eric Thames, Tyler Saladino, Luis Urías, Owen Miller
Went with a theme of "utility players I remember from the Brewers" (I may have stretched the definition of "utility player" a little bit):
⚾️ Immaculate Grid 730 9/9:
Rarity: 0
IMMACULATE!
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Play at:
immaculategrid.com
@seattlekraken.com @alisonl.bsky.social “That guy” is me, and John Forslund is absolutely correct. Congrats Eeli! #SeaKraken
