I cover online gambling and this is a really great read from @jwherrman.bsky.social www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/the-...

I don't love making broad predictions but I feel this one in my bones

this is so grimy and funny (caption left, nymag insta right)

I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...

Fitting, since the circa 2016 Russian Facebook activity got orders of magnitude more traction in the Discourse than it did among regular people.

I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...

Provocative title here from @rufusrock.bsky.social but it's hard to disagree on this point 1/ phttps://asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/are-llms-the-best-that-they-will?r=3f5ape&triedRedirect=true

on the load-bearing AI bubble, and the subtle shift from warnings about x-risk to warnings about good old financial risk nymag.com/intelligence...

on the load-bearing AI bubble, and the subtle shift from warnings about x-risk to warnings about good old financial risk nymag.com/intelligence...

if you're a maximally public figure you have to buy/build a level of sycophancy that regular/outside-the-training-data/minimal-online-presence LLM users can basically already access for free

he didn't miss all of them

jeff epstein and so many ai guys just barely missed each other

indeed, this is the one useful thing about Grok and Grokipedia nymag.com/intelligence...

not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...

This is the most cursed idea I’ve ever seen and it’s immediately obvious that this is where we’re headed

not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...

dying at the AI options on the new Epstein files

In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...

In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...

guy with no tools who doesn’t know how many cylinders his car has after ten minutes of ChatGPT: I can fix this guy’s girlfriend after consulting her ChatGPT with memory mode enabled: This is exactly like when we went camping and there’s actually a term for this behavior

AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...

AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...

So many bizarre AI products are like this but it's really important to understand why: Companies like OpenAI want the world to give in to their total success before they've actually achieved it nymag.com/intelligence...

So many bizarre AI products are like this but it's really important to understand why: Companies like OpenAI want the world to give in to their total success before they've actually achieved it nymag.com/intelligence...

one way to understand media coverage of the second trump administration is that, this time around, it's really only tracking with the bottom right chart

Interesting how basically every Amazon project — true of most tech neo-conglomerates, to be fair — comes back around to surveillance nymag.com/intelligence...

😅

Deep research tools *did* get better after I wrote this but I wonder if people might be revisiting their rapturous reviews now that the novelty has worn off. A few months in, DR outputs remain technically impressive but they're also often... unreadable dogshit? Not useful? nymag.com/intelligence...

if you want a picture of the future, imagine your own face staring back at you from the chumbox, forever nymag.com/intelligence...

people don't like being told what they can't post, but they REALLY don't like being told what they can't generate nymag.com/intelligence...

people don't like being told what they can't post, but they REALLY don't like being told what they can't generate nymag.com/intelligence...

implied agentic ai pitch: we will lure users with unrealistic promises, and in the process turn them into spammers that destroy the entire existing marketplace. then... profit?

trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...

trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...

it's only been a week but I'd bet a lot of early users are having experiences like this with Sora: manic, exploratory onboarding followed by something like a hangover. it's a pattern! nymag.com/intelligence...

part of the big theoretical "twitter do-over" is this inevitable jack-brained dynamic, too

OpenAI's maximalist "asking for infinite money" strategy has a legal counterpart, too nymag.com/intelligence...

Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...

strong agree, from 2017: opaque commercial social platforms becoming the most vivid, accessible representation of discourse, democracy, the public sphere, the media, etc was a massive accelerant for cynicism/resentment/despair www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/m...

Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...

OpenAI's "what is ChatGPT, anyway?" study is a little weird, sort of funny, but actually illuminating nymag.com/intelligence...

congratulations to all these great men of history, who will definitely be revered and celebrated for generations!

helpful @jwherrman.bsky.social column on the value and business models of AI coding startups nymag.com/intelligence...

clear act of war against old people and their families www.theverge.com/news/769460/...

My tests of the AI grader "agent" get a mention in this article about how everything AI everywhere all the time is now an agent.

I think, with a little bit of effort, I'm going to be able to avoid getting annoyed at the new website "WeAreAnnoying.com"

new chatbot? call it an agent. new software feature? sure, yes, agent. Old feature that's been there for years? It can be an agent if it wants to be, and how dare you suggest otherwise nymag.com/intelligence...

As reported on @nymag.com earlier this month! nymag.com/intelligence... (no beef, @theinformation.com has real confirmation and lots of interesting details)

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵