https://www.wheresyoured.at/news-openai-had-a-negative-122-operating-margin-in-q1-2026-and-chatgpt-growth-has-stalled/

5/22/2026 11:54:55 AM

Is anyone watching The Audacity with Zach Galafianakis? Kinda relevant to this thread.

5/22/2026 12:21:25 PM

Quote :

"The news has always been propaganda. The way to influence and direct in a democracy is through the press. That's how you drive action when you can't beat people into submission. Fox News just dropped all the pretense of it being a serious thing and sold it with pageant hair and mini-skirts. Tom Brokaw selling the Iraq war is the same thing, it just wears different clothes. Just because your college educated sensibilities cause you to cringe when Megan Kelly, a Stanford grad, mispronounces something (and fuck I do too), doesn't mean Fox is somehow more noble than what we had in the pre Fox era."

Do you think all propaganda is created equally? I mean, do you think one piece of propaganda has the same impact on society as any other piece of propaganda? Or that delivering one piece of propaganda is as responsible/irresponsible as delivering any other piece of propaganda? Because it definitely sounds like that is what you are saying....

5/22/2026 4:51:38 PM

Of course not which is why I use the Iraq war 1 as an example. Putting a 15-year-old girl up to talk about babies in an incubator being put on a floor until they die to justify killing 1 million people is pretty much the worst thing you could do. There are countless examples of horrific propaganda that predate Fox.

The only way to stop a bad propaganda with a microphone is a good propaganda with a microphone.

My favorite:

Quote :

"The U.S. opioid epidemic killed roughly 806,000 Americans from opioid overdose between 1999 and 2023 — orders of magnitude more than the post-9/11 risks (terrorism, Ebola, plane crashes, school shootings) that received saturation coverage — yet documented content analyses, journalism criticism, and the public reflections of the very reporters who broke the story show that corporate/mainstream U.S. media systematically under-covered and misframed the crisis for roughly its first 15 years (c. 1996–2011), and continued to misallocate attention long after. • The undercoverage was not random. It was driven by (a) successful Purdue Pharma/Sackler PR operations that planted an “anti-story” and intimidated outlets like the Orlando Sentinel; (b) the racialized framing inherited from the crack era, which made a largely white, rural/suburban drug death wave initially illegible as a “national emergency”; (c) editorial preferences for novel, dramatic risks (terrorism, Ebola, plane crashes) over a slow-moving, stigmatized public-health catastrophe; and (d) the structural displacement of drug coverage by terrorism after 9/11 — Pew documented a 66% drop in network coverage of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco in 2002–2005 versus 1997–2000. • The story was finally broken not by the national networks or front pages but by a small-paper reporter (Eric Eyre at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, 2016 Pulitzer), a handful of dogged book authors (Barry Meier, Sam Quinones, Beth Macy, Patrick Radden Keefe), academic content analysts (McGinty/Barry at Johns Hopkins; Netherland/Hansen), and the Washington Post/60 Minutes 2016 DEA exposé — by which point hundreds of thousands of Americans were already dead."

[Edited on May 22, 2026 at 5:35 PM. Reason : A]

5/22/2026 5:13:04 PM

Quote :

"https://www.wheresyoured.at/news-openai-had-a-negative-122-operating-margin-in-q1-2026-and-chatgpt-growth-has-stalled/"

Zitron used to be really good at understanding things, but he seems to have lost his mind when it comes to AI stuff. He's been posting moving goalposts about why AI is going to fail for the past year or so, and it's shocking how circular his logic is. I really used to respect him when he spoke on things that he actually understood- PR, Advertising, the pre-AI web economy. I think the fundamentals of what AI is have escaped him completely. I think he has zero clue what he's talking about in general, and he only talks about things that he can use to paint a poor picture of AI with.


Like, I get it. You read that it's damaging the environment, that makes you react in a way that instantly makes you think it's bad. Do some research, find out that that talking point is actually misinfo from a woman who doesn't understand orders of magnitude and posted a retraction. Companies are spending tons of money on it, tokens are expensive. Yeah, bad... but do some research on how that's being mitigated. Own up to the counterbalancing points. He's not even bothering to read the actual easy to source data. He's just writing immense screeds of shitposts about something he can’t even understand and won't bother to look in to.

TLDR, everything is bad to Zitron like everything was bad to Alex Jones or any other conspiracy nut - if you keep going down the psychosis hole into things that only confirm what you believe, you'll end up like this, too.

5/23/2026 3:05:06 PM

"Nobody wants this shit"

5/24/2026 11:02:42 AM

I'm not the one who made that argument, nor do I particularly agree with it, but I would argue that most do not want this shit injected into their lives 24/7 like companies are trying to do.

Just because I use agents at work, doesn't mean I want AI slop filling the internet, tv, or movies. Nor do I want my operating system, my browser, or any other devices/software to have any links to AI unless I explicitly grant it.

I think an appropriate analogy might be sportbooks. Yes, some people did ask for legalization of online sports betting, but did they necessarily ask for it to become so prevalent everywhere in ads or the sports watching experience in general? Did they ask for betting opportunities and discussion to be damn near everywhere (stadiums, ads, sports shows, etc). What about the people that didn't ask for it? It's still slammed in their faces constantly

5/24/2026 11:37:56 AM

^

Quote :

"it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that. Nothing could be more obvious, of course, especially to those who have given more than two minutes of thought to the matter. Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. "

5/24/2026 11:47:51 AM

I started this thread with, and have reiterated a great many times, the idea that AI is a useful tool and demands more research and investment.

I have stronger concerns with the companies currently competing for marketshare and the lengths they're willing to go to achieve that end.

I have milder concerns about AI slop filling the internet/forms of media I enjoy and how those models were trained. I think dead internet theory is extremely real and think that ai produced 'art' is bereft of any true creativity and is ethically dubious.

5/24/2026 11:55:35 AM

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/world/americas/peter-thiel-argentina.html?unlocked_article_code=1.l1A.P3XX.k6dnRRKUYL6J&smid=nytcore-ios-share

this is just too on the nose

5/28/2026 3:33:25 PM

Ah yes, I'm sure this will be the man to herald in our new utopia.

5/28/2026 3:47:12 PM

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-solves-erdos-problem-openai-c4029e84?st=Ej2s5h&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Quote :

"A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It."

5/29/2026 10:59:10 PM

there will undoubtedly be a lot of noise about this, but I'm interested to see where it goes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/opinion/artificial-intelligence-bernie-sanders.html

[Edited on June 1, 2026 at 12:13 PM. Reason : seek signal]

6/1/2026 12:07:32 PM

I’d agree it needs to happen. Unfortunately it will be terribly mismanaged if it comes about

6/1/2026 12:53:39 PM

Some levity?

Quote :

"Oh, you can't write a 5-page book report without AI? I fucking wrote 5-page book reports without having read the goddamn book. Get your finger out of your ass. In conclusion, "Hamlet" is a play of contrasts."

https://bsky.app/profile/ostrichson.bsky.social/post/3mnaaksgo4c22

6/1/2026 10:28:32 PM

it was 10 pages on twitter

[Edited on June 1, 2026 at 10:44 PM. Reason : stealing content on the One True Ethical Social Network!?]

6/1/2026 10:44:08 PM

6/1/2026 10:58:02 PM

Twitter won't even let me read replies without logging in. And since I don't have an account, it's of little value to me.

6/2/2026 5:52:32 AM

When is the last time you even tried? If you are not logged in, it should look like this

6/2/2026 9:51:02 AM

This morning on qntmfred's twitter link right before I wrote that. Maybe it's my ad blocker settings. If I click read replies in the phone browser, it tries to force me to download the app. Annoying behavior. Bluesky works perfectly.

6/2/2026 1:16:23 PM

This song was written circa 1996 about personal computers and the internet but could just as easily have been written about AI:



Especially the line, "It makes no sense to have experience"

--THE Bruce Dickinson

6/3/2026 7:45:08 AM

https://youtu.be/Juc-IyTdSho

Figure appears to be faking demos.

6/3/2026 8:35:23 AM

^ adcock is shady and I think kind of an idiot, but the criticism of the robot there don’t make sense. Figure oversells their capabilities but they have a real RL control stack that they’re demoing. The narrator is mixing up teleoperation with remote control— all these robot demos are remote control now. We’re probably still a few months away from real time end to end multimodal RL based control but it’s coming this year (and has been demoed in labs just extremely slow).

[Edited on June 3, 2026 at 10:55 AM. Reason : O]

6/3/2026 10:54:42 AM

The robot had a more human walk than Melania did.

6/3/2026 12:20:42 PM

Quote :

"The narrator is mixing up teleoperation with remote control— all these robot demos are remote control now. We’re probably still a few months away from real time end to end multimodal RL based control but it’s coming this year "

There are plenty of them and they "work" for some definition of work end to end. If you mean the distinction of a model running on a lap top and communicating the action over usb/serial to set of actuators sure, that's remote too I guess. But some have the control embedded via something like a jetson.


https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/early-access-isaac-gr00t-n1-7-open-reasoning-vla-model-for-humanoid-robotics/366916

6/3/2026 1:37:04 PM

Quote :

"--THE Bruce Dickinson"

lol fr i was so confused with the cowbell sketch at first before i realized it wasn't the iron maiden guy

6/3/2026 3:13:06 PM

marko, thank you for often appreciating my oddball references. It's very gratifying.

6/3/2026 10:44:10 PM

I had a hard time deciding where to post this so I'm posting it twice

https://www.wral.com/news/nccapitol/pro-carolina-hurricanes-post-by-us-senate-candidate-whatley-draws-scrutiny-for-ai-use-june-2026/

Quote :

"Jacksandrei Blakenekov"

6/4/2026 12:53:38 PM

to be fair to the zealots, AI didn’t come up with the name Jacksandrei Blakenekov

humans did, which is another win for humanity

6/4/2026 1:07:38 PM

i can't wait for my agent to read this thread to me in 10 years.

[Edited on July 12, 2026 at 7:49 PM. Reason : *seconds]

7/12/2026 7:48:44 PM

That Claude commercial they're running during the World Cup creeps me out. I couldn't even get through it a second time.

7/16/2026 10:09:12 AM

This one? Music with the piano sounds like One Battle After Another.

7/16/2026 10:21:38 AM

they've been getting roasted on twitter for it too. the theme is correct. there are hard questions here. and the commercial is supposed to signal that anthropic isn't running away from them (as opposed to what people fear AI companies are doing -- running toward money. and power. and the hubris of creating the god machine, etc). the commercial's narrative structure was supposed to lead people from the doom questions to the hope questions with the suggestion that as time goes on we'll figure out the doom questions and be left with the positives that AI will bring. but because they started the commercial with the doom questions, they unintentionally poisoned the well for the viewer. now they're emotionally anchored to the doom questions. oops.

[Edited on July 16, 2026 at 10:57 AM. Reason : we are only human]

7/16/2026 10:52:54 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture#Counterexample

7/20/2026 10:31:32 AM

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-ad-revenue-ai-advertising-financial-projection

7/20/2026 4:48:56 PM

Quote :

" It’s actually really funny, leftists always loved the Potter books and identified with the characters but when given the chance to be wizards in real life they deny magic even exists and prefer to stay muggles"

8/2/2026 8:57:04 AM

Leftists don't like AI and the right does?

8/2/2026 10:29:41 AM

In my sample of 3 leftist (visible tranny flags) coffee shops they also had stop whatever local data center was nearby poster. Seems like most of the online discourse concurs. Also, the VC and Elon pro AI Trump side in 2024 seems right.

8/2/2026 10:35:30 AM

OK, so coffee snobs are against AI.

8/2/2026 10:55:39 AM

Boomer ass Facebook meme that completely misreads those books

8/2/2026 11:39:00 AM

data center hate seems pretty bipartisan

8/2/2026 11:44:01 AM

For real. The MAGA rednecks around here are pretty up in arms about the data center that bypassed public comment.

Also, I have never read or watched anything Harry Potter related. But I HAVE eaten the Butterbeer-flavored Hershey's Kisses (when I got them for free), and re-sold a Harry Potter LEGO game that I also got for free. Otherwise, don't need the poor man's Tolkein.

Preemptive thegoodlife3 dismissive reply on the Harry Potter bit: "Cool man"

8/2/2026 12:31:20 PM

meanwhile back in reality

Quote :

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture#Counterexample"

let's see what humanity has been able to accomplish using AI since last week's generational discovery





[Edited on August 2, 2026 at 1:06 PM. Reason : reality is undefeated]

8/2/2026 1:05:38 PM

Quote :

"Boomer ass Facebook meme that completely misreads those books"

Ok, Muggle.

You repeatedly talk like "oh it's snake oil". I think what I said in another thread, that it's possible the economics collapse, that all this automation has diminishing returns and doesn't fix real problems (better roads which is a proxy for real life). And that remains to be seen. But it is PFM.

[Edited on August 2, 2026 at 1:40 PM. Reason : a]

8/2/2026 1:33:08 PM

Quote :

"meanwhile back in reality"

Wait, are you saying Harry Potter isn't real?!

What if I put on my robe and wizard hat?! Would that change your mind?!

8/2/2026 5:15:18 PM

^^ just think it’s telling that whoever would think to write that as some gotcha has a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic themes of that series

magic wasn’t a commodity one could purchase. calling AI “magic” in that scenario says all you need to know about the person attempting to make that point.

8/2/2026 6:22:05 PM

^

I posted it here specifically because of your snake oil comment.

In the analogy the harness is the wand. Magic exists like models exist and are non-deterministic, it's harnessed by someone learning to use a wand to direct it. Each wand has it's own quirks, mispeaking a spell causes unpredictable effects. Similar to model use and harnesses.

Granted, it's not like a muggle could purchase a wand in the book. Maybe the aristocracy @ OpenAI et all are the wizards and everyone else is a muggle with the fantasy they can buy a wand.

8/2/2026 8:16:07 PM

8/2/2026 8:30:34 PM

LOL!

Yeah, that sounds like an absolutely terrible use case.

8/2/2026 8:57:13 PM

that’s who I have in mind when I talk about snake oil

unserious people who are in too deep

8/2/2026 9:30:51 PM