He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.

Bubble or Nothing | Center for Public Enterprise h/t The Syllabus, dry but good.

Data centers are, first and foremost, a real estate asset

They specifically note that after the 2-5 year mini-perm the developers are planning on dumping the debt into commercial mortgage backed securities. Echoes of 2008.

However, project finance lawyers have mentioned that many data center project finance loans are backed not just by the value of the real estate but by tenants’ cash flows on “booked-but-not-billing” terms — meaning that the promised cash flow need not have materialized.

Echoes of Enron.

Best part is the footnote:

About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.

He somehow did an ad read in the middle of a substack post. Sign of the times.

Corey Quinn wrote a spite-driven-dev cli for it - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_im-humbled-to-announce-that-after-launching-activity-7397400805458395137-73Ua

Internet Comment Etiquette: “Fixing the AI Coke Ad” nsfw, happy friday

time for me to learn something else, then; what do people use these days for microservices instead of flask? fastapi?

EDIT:

oh come the fuck on google AIO

The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher

All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.

Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.

Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.

They’ve always wanted this, indeed. There’s some comfort to me in the reminder that this year’s layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.

For me, I started noticing Taulia spam via a clients SAP last Jan, and Bill.com started doing similar a few months after. I think the new part is that these are now integrated into the platforms, like how Klarna bnpl is directly integrated into the ecom storefronts.

My clients’ billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, it’s bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.

New singularity dropped and I’d missed it: https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economics-transformative-ai/coasean-singularity-demand-supply-and-market-design-ai-agents

I don’t really see AI getting rid of ticketmaster or other transaction costs in the real world, so this is just some econ theory crafting.

Technopagans

Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.

“I think the AI slop is great. I think culturally, it’s a good thing that it happened, because one of the things that drove people to start really caring about artists again in 2024 was the AI slop. I think everything happens for a reason,” she said in a recent interview with Time. “Most of the album is sort of about me being a bit of a Diogenes about the ills of modernity while still celebrating them.”

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/07/grimes-ushers-in-a-new-era-of-internet-infestation/

JFC what world does she live in

Sounds exactly like what happened at iNaturalist.

I tried making one a few years back, maybe time to update it.

https://nfultz.github.io/murderboard/wpc-murderboard.htm

(arrow keys to scroll)

https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OgV-chad-ide-the-first-brainrot-ide

wat

https://micahflee.com/practical-defenses-against-technofascism/ at BSidesPDX

Happy Gilmore is ruined for me.

Interesting that for the musk article, it has the “see edits” button disabled. ha

E:

I peeked under the hood, “see edits” data is in page.fixedIssues on the api, ripe for scraping: https://grokipedia.com/api/page?slug=StarCraft_II&includeContent=false

She Rides Shotgun - basically Lone Wolf and Cub + Breaking Bad combo. I loved the novel back when it came out, the film is reasonably faithful to it.

Apologies for doing journal club instead of sneer club.

Voiseux, G., Tao Zhou, R., & Huang, H.-C. (Brad). (2025). Accepting the unacceptable in the AI era: When & how AI recommendations drive unethical decisions in organizations. Behavioral Science & Policy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607251384574

abstract:

In today’s workplaces, the promise of AI recommendations must be balanced against possible risks. We conducted an experiment to better understand when and how ethical concerns could arise. In total, 379 managers made either one or multiple organizational decisions with input from a human or AI source. We found that, when making multiple, simultaneous decisions, managers who received AI recommendations were more likely to exhibit lowered moral awareness, meaning reduced recognition of a situation’s moral or ethical implications, compared with those receiving human guidance. This tendency did not occur when making a single decision. In supplemental experiments, we found that receiving AI recommendations on multiple decisions increased the likelihood of making a less ethical choice. These findings highlight the importance of developing organizational policies that mitigate ethical risks posed by using AI in decision-making. Such policies could, for example, nudge employees toward recalling ethical guidelines or reduce the volume of decisions that are made simultaneously.

so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.