I've been running Follow the Crypto since 2024. Today I'm relaunching it as Tech Influence Watch, expanded to cover AI political spending alongside crypto. They’ve spent more than $400 million this election cycle, and now you can follow it in close to real time. influence.citationneeded.news

Free newsletter: The dawn of token-based-billing has shown that generative AI doesn’t have a return on investment. It's too unpredictable, too unreliable, you can't easily measure the cost of tasks, and organizations are already pulling back. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/

An $18bn data center project in sulphuric springs Texas that broke ground in June 2025 is being sued by the construction firm that has been left unpaid. Project is halted due to the developers not getting funding. Our first horseman has arrived msbglobalservices.com/matrix-data-...

Whenever people are like 'the lived experience of the economy is bad, but the economy numbers are good, this doesn't make sense' this is why.

“They need us to believe not just that AI is useful, but that it is inevitable, arriving fast, and bringing about a radically different world. That’s the only way to keep the cash-furnace stoked.”

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes

Too many people still confuse Software Engineering with writing code. Code is the artifact. Software Engineering is understanding the problem, making tradeoffs, designing the system, reducing complexity, and deciding what shouldn't be built. No amount of 'vibe coding' can help you with this.

My CEO is trying to rush a vibe coded *By Our UX Designer* feature to Prod, thinking that it's safe enough behind a feature flag. dumpster. fire. #fuckGenAI

Anyone else find it super weird that @vox.com has an AI booster on staff?

fuck this shit

[tw: suicide] Is anyone else mega depressed & only clinging on to their sanity by essentially using "The Gen AI Bubble Will Pop" as a survival mantra?

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

What so many have experienced personally has been confirmed by a new study: AI has been a disaster for working artists.

evangelicals have finally created. the golden calf. from the classic bible story “don’t create a golden calf”

The past month a coworker's been trying to fix some errors in our code. So he asked Claude. The answer spat out was absolute gibberish if you know React, but he did not. So he implemented a different fix (overengineered) & pestered my team to implement half. All he needed was to flip a flag on. 🤡

"prioritize Agents doing the work for them" Just use a good old fashioned automation people!! Actually reliable!!

As soon as the first generation not brain-damaged by leaded gasoline got the chance to vote, they elected a black president. And by God, if we have to inflict a new wave of mass cognitive damage to stop that from happening again, WE SHALL!

Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon have announced that they now plan to spend $725 billion on infrastructure this year — mostly AI data centers. With that money America could end homelessness, alleviate hunger, make public colleges free, and more.

Why Alex Karp Decided It Was Time to Tell Everyone Palantir is in the Fascism Business

my main concern is the harm rather than the output, so i don't really need to hear a product testimonial from someone who found it useful. because i don't care

I keep getting asked at worked if I've tried asking the latest Coding AI du jour and at no point have I ever wanted to try them. 🤬 Usually come up with some excuse or other but I figure at some point some exec is gonna get suspicious 😰

I've been asked a few times about these tools and refused every time. (I'm also very sad that one of them is borrowing the name from one of my favorite Star Trek characters, Dax)

NEW: I've been shocked by some of the numbers I've been seeing on behind-the-meter power plants for data centers, so I did a little math. less than a dozen gas plants being built to power data centers for big tech companies could emit a maximum of nearly 130 million tons of CO2e each year (!)

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

Tech CEOs suggest AI job losses could be offset by Universal Basic Income, which they will violently oppose thebeaverton.com/2025/11/tech...

This discourse rolls around every six months and I'm always happy to chime in: ELEMENTARY is a great TV show qua TV show and best modern interpretation of Holmes, including that one you're thinking of, which was more of one dude's intermittent hobby, which also somehow turned into CRIME DR. WHO.

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse Media and universities: AI is here to stay

"Luddites" is a good term for those who oppose AI because the Luddites weren't against *all* technology, just forms of technology that they knew would pay workers less and turn out a shittier product

When it comes to writing, the process is the purpose. You don’t have to always like or enjoy the process, but if you don’t respect it enough to do it yourself, there is no purpose. AI will never fill that void. www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-t...

Oh so now copyright matters.

I literally came to support this platform because I've been so sick and tired of other platforms (looking at you twitter) for incorporating gen AI on their sites. What a way to reward the people that made you big enough to compete with twitter.

OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Rule 5 “Everyone can be conned” writ large.

I appreciate @seanhollister.bsky.social 's reporting here about the latest step Google is taking in their quest to destroy the information ecosystem and disempower information seekers: www.theverge.com/tech/896490/... 🧵>>

I've been a programmer for a while, trying to make a career of it. We all agree that art and music are creative processes that deserve protection from AI. Am I the only one who also considers code a creative work?

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

"Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought: You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another though. The process of writing itself leads to previously unthought thoughts [and] crystallizes half-formulated or unformulated thoughts" - Lynn Hunt

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

But the one thing it does do well is code *touches earpiece* I’m getting an update …

no I guess we won't acknowledge that this is all stolen from human writers

What coders lose by relying on AI. From our event with the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures. (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

one google data center in virginia two million gallons of water per day information only released under court order & risk of contempt

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

I know people keep saying GenAI is ~tHe FuTuRe~ ... but saying things a zillion times doesn't make it true

Mind you these workers are specifically Kenyan workers who are made to view and annotate the absolute worst things created by man and machine for extremely low pay and absolutely no support or care from Meta for the trauma they endure every day at work

“the story of making AI ‘safe’ is fundamentally a story about class, about which humans absorb the costs so that other humans never have to think about them.” siliconcanals.com/sc-d-i-spent...

The left is not "missing out" on AI. It's winning the argument. Americans worry about AI and dislike tech CEOs. They're mobilizing against data centers. They support regulation, even refusal. Calls for the left to embrace AI are an effort to change the terms of the debate in Silicon Valley's favor.

just spitballing but some of it might have something to do with 15 years of sociopathic behavior culminating in the enthusiastic embrace of violent fascism