Haven’t seen any estimates of death toll due to social media but cigarettes is/was pretty staggering (20-40m), way too big to hide - https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-holocaust/hardcover - if it’s “only” 50 years to flip the consensus on social media, that would be a faster process, I do hope its possible though. Tobacco execs had the good sense to keep a relatively low profile compared to Zuck and Musk, so that might speed it up.

Went to the campus screening of Ghost in the Machine today, many familiar names; I did not know going in that hometown hero Shazeda had so many lines (are they called lines in a documentary?). I can recommend it, especially for a more gen-ed / undergrad audience; the director seems supportive of educational use and reuse and it is structured in a dozen or so bite sized chapters.

Haven’t seen the AI apocalypse optimist one to compare against, would probably rather spend my money on Mario tbh.

But also it made me realize it’s not a “California” ideology anymore, she never calls it that, like it’s gone so mainstream and so widespread, you can’t even get through the sneer club bingo list in a 2 hour movie. Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Zuck, Altman, no Peter Theil !? As a statistician, Galton, Pearson (Karl only), Spearman, no Fisher !?

Non-zero overlap with the lore dump episode of Lain and the Epstein files, though:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/who-goes-ai

taking shots at the gray lady:

You might think Mr. R not so different, superficially, from Ms. L. He’s also a long-tenured technology columnist at a respected mainstream publication. And yet he has eagerly, even gleefully, turned flack for the machines. He has delegated much of his professional life to them as well, and seems proud of it:

Most recently, [Mr. R] tells me, he created a team of Claude agents to help edit his book, led by a “Master Editor” agent. Other sub-agents are in charge of things like fact-checking, making sure the book matches his writing style, and offering positive and negative feedback.

And why not? Mr. R is not known or valued for his elegance of expression. He has, at best, a “writing style,” and not one that can’t easily be duplicated by a large language model. Checking facts? Assessing his work’s strengths and weaknesses? More bathwater to be tossed out of this increasingly baby-less tub. So what explains Mr. R, who “expects AI models to get better than him at everything eventually?” Why does he go AI when Ms. L never would?

Mr. R’s secret is that his work is not primarily artistic or informative—it is functional. He serves a purpose for the industry he covers. Mr. R’s job is to absorb the tech industry’s self-mythologizing, and then believe in it even harder than the industry itself does. He serves as a kind of plausibility ratchet. His byline and employer legitimize a level of credulousness that would otherwise be laughable, and thereby allow tech PR to seem relatively restrained. Mr. R has no problem going AI because he himself has been a small cog in a big ugly machine for a long time.

Internet Comment Etiquette: “Relationships with AI”

… hadn’t thought about Glenn Beck in a decade, that last interview was pretty wtf.

Not sure what the etiquette is for how long they should be dead before you talk to the AI-geist on youtube, but George Washington somehow feels weirder than Kirk did; idk.

https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-computer-science-fetish/

The fetishism of the computer scientist therefore refers less to specific expertise than to whatever we imagine a credentialed expert can bestow: an external voice that says, "ask, and you shall receive.” The computer scientist becomes a mirror where those who work with the social, practical impacts of the tech hope to see our understanding affirmed. The people who offer that validation — who position themselves against the discourse of critique, who seem unbothered and detached, even ridiculing the same critical lingo that exhausts you — are not doing it out of sober objectivity or insight.

Sometimes they just don’t respect you. Sometimes they’re just annoyed by calls for accountability. And sometimes, they do it because they’ve fused with an interacting swarm of chatbots and transcended their human identity.

sneer from an unexpected source: off-broadway.

https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud-ai-isnt-neutral-so-lets-stop-pretending/

Anyone in NYC or DC get to see it?

How can I get a copy of the script, though… I guess you can’t just order one like a book, even my campus library said it would be tough.

when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.

… instead we get to live in eddington.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/03/silicon-valley-accelerationists-marc-andreessen-peter-thiel-alex-karp-mark-zuckerberg.html#comment-4393256

Can not be rid of this rancid sub-class of plutocrats quickly enough. “Gen ⍺ hanging the last squillionaire-tech-bro by the entrails of the last kleptocrat” should be this millenium’s Diderotian coda on their existence.

And locally, UAW RPSP just announced a tentative agreement, apparently they got a technology policy through without calling out AI explicitly. Might be too little too late tbh.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uxn_Tq-CMVyPstXD9GnCzuiRp660QdAw/view

https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/grand-theft-reality h/t naked capitalism

Those interested in upgrading to the full RealityPlus™ experience will soon have not one but three styles of brain chip to choose from, expanding Big Parasite’s vertically-integrated propaganda pipeline into a perfect server-to-cerebrum delivery system while realizing the transhumanist dream of merging with the machines. Sam Altman’s brain-chip company is even called Merge Labs, because subtlety is for poor people. Yes, the guy who says human children waste more energy than OpenAI’s planet-liquidating data centers will be playing tug-of-war for direct access to your cognition with Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Coverage of this assault on privacy already reads like articles about AI from five years ago: You don’t want a brain implant? Are you some kind of Luddite? Better get over it: “avoiding brain-to-text devices will feel like avoiding smartphones.” It’s not like Meta’s underpaying African contractors to watch you through your augmented-reality Raybans while you shit or something. Why is Meta’s glasses project head Rocco Basilico seemingly named after Roko’s Basilisk, the AI bogeyman who will go back in time to torture you if you don’t help create it? Is Roko’s Basilisk…Jewish? Remember to smile for Sam Altman’s soul-sucking WorldCoin orb or you won’t get your UBI!

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/chatgpt-uninstalls-surged-by-295-after-dod-deal/

Some of my faculty have called for a campus wide boycott. Relatedly, the Scott Galloway scoreboard is up to $250m hit to tech market cap: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/

Followup on the Mass AI Bill, Russel has 180’d on it:

https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/93a-the-three-characters-that-should

Buried in the penalty clause, the part of the bill that nobody reads, is a single reference: violations “shall be punishable in the same manner as provided in Chapter 93A of the General Laws.”

For those outside Massachusetts: Chapter 93A is the state’s consumer protection statute. It is, by most accounts, the most aggressive consumer protection law in America.

Here’s what 93A unlocks. Anyone can sue, not just the government. Class actions are on the table. If the court finds a violation was willful or knowing, damages get tripled. And the bar for what counts as “unfair or deceptive” is lower than in almost any other state.

Now bolt 93A onto all of that. What do you get?

You get a bill that doesn’t need a single regulator to lift a finger. You get a bill that funds its own enforcement through plaintiff attorneys who can file class actions, collect treble damages, and recover legal fees. You get the ADA website-accessibility litigation playbook, where lawyers systematically identify technical violations and file suits at scale, applied to every piece of AI-generated content touching Massachusetts.

Private right of action, fuck yeah. Turns grok into a legal fees dispenser.

The bill doesn’t need to be well-drafted to be dangerous. It needs to be vague, broad, and connected to 93A.

lol

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fires-employee-insider-trading-polymarket-kalshi/

lol. Between this and the ayatollah clawback, I’m expecting some entertaining litigation.

I asked a buddy who works there to confirm or deny, and he said quote “I would be afraid to type in code myself” so checks out I guess.

https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/thursday-26022026/

According to GEO company BrightEdge, LLMs now rely on YouTube as a top source for citations – and that includes sponsored creator content.

LLMs favor YouTube because it’s “highly machine-readable,” with defined transcripts, metadata and chapters, Ómar Thor Ómarsson, CEO and co-founder of Optise, an AI platform that helps B2B companies improve search performance, tells Digiday.

Standard ad units on YouTube are labeled as such and, as a result, LLMs steer clear of them. But creators aren’t required to disclose their paid brand partnerships in video metadata, so AI considers them to be worthy sources.

BrightEdge’s research shows that YouTube is cited even more frequently than Reddit within Gemini and ChatGPT, and also shows up in 29.5% of Google AI Overviews. An audit conducted by media agency Brainlabs, meanwhile, suggests that YouTube shows up as a source in nearly 60% of AI Overviews.

So they already shipped ads in chatbots, transitively and accidentally. Can’t wait to see NordVPN, Raid, and Mr Beast chocolate on every SERP.

E: I wonder if Altman is sneaky enough to hijack affiliate links a la honey

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-25/fbi-raid-lausd-search-warrants h/t naked capitalism

Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder and former chief executive of AllHere, was arrested in 2024 and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. By then, the envisioned LAUSD chatbot — known as “Ed” — had been withdrawn from service.

Ed was an artificial intelligence tool billed by Carvalho in August 2024 as revolutionary for students’ education and the interaction between LAUSD and the families it serves. The tool was never fully deployed.

“The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country,” Carvalho said at the time. “We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”

The indictment and collapse of AllHere was an embarrassment for Carvalho and the school system, but did not appear to represent a major financial exposure. The school system had spent about $3 million with the company for work completed as part of a contract originally worth up to $6 million over five years. By comparison, the district’s budget this year is $18.8 billion.

A former AllHere senior executive has accused the now-collapsed company of inadequate security measures. Even if that allegation is true, there has been no evidence of a related security breach affecting student or employee data.

We regularly have seven figure IT fiascoes in the LA public school system, so this one slipped under my radar. But, this sounds like one of those things where the Trump DOJ is doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons…

The AI-fication of K Street - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/02/ai-lobbying-defense-industry/

Agents of Chaos - https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20021? - h/t naked capitalism

We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language model–powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies

Pretty fast turnaround, OpenClaw is from a couple weeks ago. Flag planting used to take a few months.

https://kalshi.com/markets/kxtrumpmention/what-will-trump-say/kxtrumpmention-26feb28

Kalshi puts “AI” at ~ $0.95 for State of the Union. Literally buzzword bingo. Living in the dumbest possible universe.

from Rusty https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.