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.

https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/the-ad-context-protocol-aims-to-make-sense-of-agentic-ad-demand/ - one more way to not know which half of your marketing spend was useless, or one step closer to reifying dead internet theory?

Apologies in advance for the infohazard

Tucker - Every Tech Billionaire Is Having the Same Haunting Vision. Demonologist Explains Why

Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson

WTF. how is he going mainstream.

e

LAND: I mean, I’m obviously skeptical of the fact that large chunks of Silicon Valley are engaged in occult rituals involving involving a numogram. But I mean, it’s not something I guess I have any authority to to talk about. Well, I mean, I can only say that they they certainly aren’t in contact with me if if that is happening. They’re they’re doing it very, you know, if not privately at least. It’s my involvement is is actually zero in that.

https://www.theverge.com/news/797540/dc-comics-jim-lee-no-generative-ai-pledge - for context, Jim Lee was the 90s XMen artist and Image Comics cofounder.

jwz ditching basecamp - decent discussion. tbh, I ctrl-f’d for the Jira sneers. Also includes a GitLab sneer that was not on my radar.

Newsom signed the AI Bill (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-law-california-ca-companies-regulation-newsom-rcna234562) but looks like they took out the private right of action vs the one last year that he vetoed, so basically defanged.

I do predict even more compliance pop ups in the near future though.

Not sure if this was posted before

The Company Man | LW

“There is no such thing as sex,” Vox says from his lotus position, his eyes closed in religious ecstasy, “only the One Mind jerking itself off.”

AI Shovelware: One Month Later by Mike Judge

The fact that we’re not seeing this gold rush behavior tells you everything. Either the productivity gains aren’t real, or every tech executive in Silicon Valley has suddenly forgotten how capitalism works.

… por que no los dos …

They banned the guy that wrote the theil antichrist notes.

https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/

Stephens and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. Kulkarni declined to answer questions about the lectures, citing the off-the-record policy.

legal threats?

Just got back from the Ted Chiang talk at the law school, talk was good but all the Q&A was lawyers ask-telling about LLMs. Not a single question for him about his fiction. :(

They put ‘environmental impact of AI’ on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this

kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus

ruby’s had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the “rockstar dev” archetype literally became big directly because of ruby’s popularity and perception at the time

I had to look it up, the ~Rails Conf~ Golden Gate Ruby Conf code like a porn star thing was 2009, I didn’t hallucinate it. DHH has deleted those tweets.

I feel old now.

Heard about the below last night; apparently survivors are forced into arbitration, so only the dead can sue. IANAL but thats pretty messed up.

https://techjusticelaw.org/2025/08/30/from-homework-help-to-suicide-planning-family-sues-openai-and-samuel-altman-alleging-chatgpt-coached-teen-son-to-suicide/

I got paid $2700 for teaching a semester. Adjuncting sucks. It doesn’t get better.

Even if you finished, all the postdocs I know had their NSF starter kit yanked.

For those of you in the (West) LA area, there’s a panel with Brian Merchant happening tomorrow. Probably no food this school year but still looks good.

https://law.ucla.edu/events/democracy-technology-salon

If anyone does turn up, codeword is banana bread, otherwise I’ll assume you’re a lawyer (not derogatory).

When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.

Excerpt from the new Bender / Hanna book, AI Hype Is the Product and Everyone’s Buying It :

OpenAI alums cofounded Anthropic, a company solely focused on creating generative AI tools, and received $580 million in an investment round led by crypto-scammer Sam Bankman-Fried.

Just wondering, but what ever happened to those shares of Anthropic that SBF bought? Was it part of FTX (and the bankruptcy), or did he buy it himself and still holds them in prison? Or have they just been diluted to zero at this point anyway?

EDIT:

Found it; It was owned by FTX and part of the estate bankruptcy; 2/3 went to Abu Dhabi + Jane Street1, and the remainder went at $30 / share to a bunch of VC2.

In April 2021, AI Dungeon implemented a new algorithm for content moderation to prevent instances of text-based simulated child pornography created by users. The moderation process involved a human moderator reading through private stories.[49][41][50][51] The filter frequently flagged false positives due to wording (terms like “eight-year-old laptop” misinterpreted as the age of a child), affecting both pornographic and non-pornographic stories. Controversy and review bombing of AI Dungeon occurred as a result of the moderation system, citing false positives and a lack of communication between Latitude and its user base following the change.[40]

Haha. Good find.

In a similar train of thought:

A.I. as normal technology (derogatory) | Max Read

But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?