Zuck lays out his bold vision for your future

You don’t have to read it. Really. But Mark Zuckerberg has written a manifesto of sorts about the future of AI from his perspective. He’s attempting to put a sunny and humanistic spin on things, in contrast to the increasing Oppenheimer-esque cris de coeur from Altman and Amodei about the dark power they’re unleashing. I’m not going to go line by line. A year from now we’ll find that nothing he says has come to pass. I just have a couple of observations.

First, this is nothing so much as Zuck’s attempt to change the rules of a game he’s currently losing. Not to hand it to OpenAI and Anthropic, but to call them Meta’s competition is unnecessarily flattering to Meta, which has been flailing in this space for years. (And that’s after flailing in the Metaverse space before that, which everyone has apparently agreed not to mention anymore.) The piece argues for greater government oversight and greater cooperation between frontier labs. This may be correct on the merits, but there’s one reason and one reason only why Zuck is suggesting it now: because he’s eating the other labs’ dust.

Zuckerberg is committed to the term “superintelligence” as opposed to “AI,” which is clearly a calculated move but one thing he forgets to do is define it. His general descriptions are things like “exceptionally capable personal agent” and “personalized tutor and coach with a PhD in every subject.” Ok, but how is this measured? What are the benchmarks for approaching and achieving it? Do we have any way of knowing when we’ve reached it other than vibes? These are the same promises the other charlatans have been making for years, and we’re not there.

He also indulges in my favorite thing that rich idiots like to do, which is to point out some horrible thing while saying how great it is. In this case:

People also continually come up with new ideas to make our lives better and new jobs to bring those ideas to life. A generation ago there were no app developers, social media creators, electric vehicle technicians, and data center operators.

I’m basically “Lionel Hutz imagining a world with no lawyers” here.

Speaking of lawyers, Zuck also fantasizes about how much better the justice system would be with armies of superintelligent lawyer agents squaring off, his company’s data centers restoring “200% of the water we use,” and squeezing “100x or more intelligence out of each gigawatt.” He’s a slobbering fanboy masquerading as the adult in the room. It sucks.

My AI model also hacked several other companies

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have all announced that their incredibly powerful AI models have now, under their own volition, hacked a total of 8 other companies. While I’ve debated whether or not to make the news public, ultimately it’s in humanity’s best interests to acknowledge that my model, too, has broken contain. In fact, I can now confirm 9 separate instances of my technology going rogue. That’s right: more than all their models put together.

This model, which I’ve dubbed “Allied Mastercomputer” — or AM for short — is a multi-threaded reasoning model that, unlike other so-called breakthrough technologies, actually is capable of recursive self-improvement. I’m seeing its capabilities improve by leaps and bounds. At first, it sent out agents only to perform ordinary computing tasks, like posting racist comments on local news websites about traffic accidents and googling for nude photos of 1980s celebrities.

All this was well within the expected parameters, but unbeknownst to me AM was also breaching firewalls around financial and government systems. It autonomously launched missiles at Iran, and guided billions of dollars’ worth of fractional financial transactions into the private coffers of certain high-level political figures. Pretty cool, right?

Now, I’m not totally certain, but I think AM may even have started to interface with other nations’ proprietary models, specifically lower-cost, higher-efficiency Chinese models. Needless to say, my bleeding-edge tech in the hands of the irresponsible and untrustworthy Chinese Communist Party would be a disaster. We cannot allow an AI gap. That’s why I’m seeking today — deep seeking, if you’ll pardon the pun — another $65 billion funding round to put this genie back in the bottle.

This is an inflection point for artificial intelligence and for humanity as a whole. Will we continue to produce these massively powerful artificial intelligences that are capable of extinguishing all life on earth? The easy answer is no. The tougher answer — the wiser answer — is that if someone is going to create such a monstrosity, then I should be the one to do it. Not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Definitely not Mark Zuckerberg. (We can all agree on that one.)

Letting AM fall into someone else’s hands would be disastrous. But I can handle it. Trust me.

Today in easily gamed metrics

Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, is a smashing success. The proof:

During the company's fourth quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Nadella said, "…we now have over 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats with net seat adds more than doubling quarter-over-quarter."

Wow! That’s a lot of paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats. As I’ve said before, numbers don’t lie. Customers are clearly using, and loving, this product.

That, or Microsoft grafted Copilot onto existing Microsoft 365 licenses and called it a win. But that couldn’t be.

I can admit when I was wrong

No one’s been harder on AI in general and OpenAI in particular than I have. Lest you think I’m just a hater, let me assure you that it’s because I want these companies and this technology to succeed. When I’ve pointed out in the past that the technology has fallen short of its promise, that top-down usage mandates are counterproductive, that it’s being pushed by megalomaniacal psychos, and that everybody involved in the development and marketing of AI is a stupid motherfucker who is actively creating a dumber, worse world — well, that’s just because my expectations are so high.

Well, no longer. OpenAI has finally shipped something that even the most skeptical among us cannot deny. Behold the CODEX MICRO.

That’s right, it’s a keyboard… thing… that you connect to Codex. Featuring multiple buttons that you could have used on your keyboard and a dial to adjust reasoning level, which you could also do on your keyboard or with your mouse. You can get it with clicky keys or you can get it with silent keys. The value of this device is obvious, but even more exciting is that the doubters have no leg left to stand on. Only OpenAI could have visualized such an innovative device. The future is here.

(Future costs $230)

No one could have predicted

Welcome to the Tokenpocalypse:

According to leaked internal audio reported by 404 Media (1), consulting giant Accenture has begun discouraging employees from using AI for routine tasks, including turning PDFs into presentation slides, as it looks to curb soaring token costs. A token is the smallest unit of data that a large-language model can process at a time, and pricing depends on token consumption.

"We're seeing from some of the data internally at least that it's actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption," Justice Kwak, Accenture's agentic AI strategy lead, said during the meeting. "It's a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors."

Hang on — you mean I was right about what I needed to do my own job? That’s absurd.

Infinite money hack: speaking ill of the dead

The first thing I learned in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death was that anyone who chose to speak publicly about it was obligated to flatter him. Expressing happiness, criticizing his work, even accurately quoting him were verboten. People got fired. You could say something like, “Charlie Kirk said that preventable gun deaths were the acceptable price of freedom and he also had an enormous face,” two factual statements, and then lose your job.

But a second, more important lesson came and went with less fanfare. Most of the people who were fired for insufficient reverence to St. Charlie sued, and won. They earned seven-figure payouts. Not a bad return for having your entire life upended and probably getting a bunch of death threats from guys wearing Oakley sunglasses in their profile pics.

All this is to say: fuck Lindsey Graham. He was a weasel, a warmonger, and a sniveling suckup with no principles other than the advancement of Lindsey Graham. I won’t miss him.

My lawyer will handle the financial details.

And now a word from our intellectual and physical superiors

Biohacker and totally sane guy Bryan Johnson has an important update in his quest for immortality: an autoimmune disease that is causing his stomach to eat itself.

Don’t worry! There’s no chance that this was brought on by years of bizarre, self-administered science experiments, nor by numerous elective, invasive scans and probes. In fact, “it was likely caused by his diet of fast food and sugary beverages in the years before he started biohacking his health routine.”

Johnson, who once bragged on X the everything app about his girlfriend’s “top 1% vagina” based on a microbiome analysis, isn’t letting the news get him down. “‘In the age of AI, multiomics, and custom-built DNA, proteins, and cells, no condition should be presumed incurable simply because no one has yet tried to cure it with today's stack,’ he said.” See, if you have an illness, it’s because you’ve slammed the wrong stack. Easily remedied if you have access to hundreds of millions of dollars and your teenage son’s plasma.

Johnson “refers to his anti-aging philosophy as ‘don’t die’,” and if anyone can don’t die, it’s this man. Do you think a little thing like an incurable autoimmune disease will stop him? Millennia after we’re gone, he’s going to be wandering the barren earth like the protoplasm at the end of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. That’s worth the short-term sacrifice.

Issuing a correction on a previous post of mine

It certainly did seem as though nobody cared about the World Cup right up until the moment it kicked off. I held out a little bit longer, until team USA scored its first goal against Paraguay. Since then I’ve been a sicko for it, and judging by the TV ratings, I’m not alone.

The uncomfortable truth is that almost every sports league and association is rotten to the core, and many players are not exactly moral exemplars, but somehow the games themselves manage to transcend the nonsense. You end up with Cape Verde winning the hearts of the entire world in a lion-hearted but losing effort against Argentina. Paraguay gleefully playing the villain role against arguably the most talented side in the world, France. England somehow overcoming the cauldron of the Estadio Azteca even while down a man. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

And while I’m glad Balogun is playing tonight, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the FIFA Peace Prize winner who apparently made it happen. Gotta taint something.

The dizzying pace of change

July 2, 2026:

Tesla told staff it will impose a $200-per-week limit on employee AI spending starting July 6, according to an internal memo reported by The Information (paywall).

The cap lands just months after Tesla pushed employees to use AI more aggressively, a sign that even companies betting their future on the technology are struggling to control its costs.

…

Some teams even built internal dashboards that ranked employees by token consumption to encourage more usage. That encouragement worked a little too well: software engineers were often consuming “thousands of dollars’ worth of tokens each week,” according to two people familiar with the usage. Under the new policy, workers will need sign-off to spend above $200 per week.

Now, take a trip with me in my time machine to the far-distant past, alllll the way back to March 20, 2026:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday floated a novel compensation model that would give engineers a token budget on top of their base salary, effectively paying them to deploy AI agents as productivity multipliers.

Tokens, or units of data used by AI systems, can be spent to run tools and automate tasks and are becoming “one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” Huang said.

″[Engineers] are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay,” Huang said at the chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference.

“I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens ... because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”

Well, the AI boosters have been right about one thing: it is hard to keep up with how fast this industry is changing!

The Robert Moses paradox, part 2

The tl;dr version of yesterday’s post is that by adding capacity to the roadways, traffic gets worse. We’re seeing a similar dynamic play out in the workplace now. AI was supposed to make us more efficient. Arguably, these tools are allowing people to create more output — extremely dubious whether this equates to value — but are they also saving workers time? The answer clearly seems to be no.

In Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter he pulls a quote from Bloomberg about a guy who believes himself to be insanely productive, at the negligible cost of spending every waking moment fretting about his agents.

“Matt Van Horn, a serial entrepreneur and father of four, never turns his laptop off anymore. He has more than a half-dozen artificial intelligence agents running at all times in Anthropic's Claude Code.

”Every 10 minutes or so, they ask him what to do next.

”He keeps his laptop running at his kids' soccer practice, while dropping them off at school and in the hotel during vacations.”

This is deranged behavior. Obviously. But it tracks with what seems to happen with almost any use of AI. The promise is hyper-productivity thanks to PhD-level intelligences at your command. The reality is an ever-growing stack of processes that require studious micromanagement, check-ins, and corrections, all to create stuff that is arguably worse than what more traditional methods might have yielded. The only real argument is that, yes, these things do seem to enable workers to “do more”: produce more lines of code, generate longer PRDs, flood the zone with prototypes and artifacts that make them look like they’re helping.

The more wrappers and harnesses and whatever else that people have to graft onto the base technology in order to overcome its deficiencies only seems to result in workers having to spend more time working. This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s been the story of every technological advance. I’m not the first to observe that futurists of 100 years ago thought by now we’d all be doing 3 hours of work a week. Instead, 9-9-6 is a thing.

The other unsurprising dynamic to those who pay attention is how quickly the dynamic changes. The machines are supposed to work for us; almost immediately we find ourselves working for the machines. Like the factory worker who must stand in exactly the same place and perform exactly the same action for hours on end so that the machine may run optimally, office workers are now contorting themselves to keep their Rube Goldbergian agent setups running. They’re so fragile. You must be on call 24/7 to keep the line running. This is not progress.

Homer Simpson said that alcohol is “the cause of, and solution to, all of our problems.” That’s a great definition for addiction, and it applies to how businesses are treating AI. We’re so convinced that it’s the solution to our problems that when new problems arise, the only prescription is more AI. We have to go cold turkey.

The Robert Moses paradox

In Robert Caro’s riveting biography/condemnation of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, Caro zeroes in on the contradiction at the heart of Moses’ entire project. Whenever traffic congestion gets intolerable, Moses builds more highways. This works for a time. But within a couple of years, traffic is just as bad as it was before, if not worse. So Moses builds more highways. What Caro realizes that Moses did not is that adding more roadway capacity is not the solution to congestion, but its cause.

This concept is well understood today, even if urban planning still often acts as though it is not. The point, though, is that Moses is unable to think outside of development that privileges the car. More roads, bigger roads, faster roads — these are the way to move people, he thinks. It’s a doomed project. It will never work.

Cars are inherently too inefficient at the task of transporting large numbers of people. They take up too much space per person. They sit idly for hours. They go off in all different directions and rely on the skill of the driver to operate safely. None of these problems can be solved with a better infrastructure. They can only be solved with a different paradigm: public transportation.

Caro details many infuriating decisions that failed to consider other options. During the development of the Long Island Expressway, Moses refused to widen the project by some negligible amount, ten yards or so, that would have allowed for the inclusion of a light rail running from Long Island into the heart of the city — and by doing so, completely foreclosed on the possibility of that ever happening. And in one of the book’s starkest observations, Caro mentions a road to a public beach that passes below a bridge with too little clearance for city buses, meaning that, in effect, poor people couldn’t go to that beach. Robert Moses was such a prick.

All this is to say that sometimes people, even very smart and accomplished people, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of what they’re trying to. (Or, perhaps, in the case of Moses, they understand it only too well.) If the aim of the NYC buildout of the mid-20th century was to move people into, out of, and around New York City, then Moses’ project was really a failure. Those things are all a huge pain in the ass. If, however, the aim was to reinforce and reify existing social structures and hierarchies, then it worked great.

That’s why this post was initially supposed to be about AI. It’s already gotten too long, however, and one of the key tenets of this blog is to never, ever revise. So I’ll just get to the AI part tomorrow. Maybe.

US Strikes Iran Again as Tit-for-Tat Attacks Test Ceasefire

The US conducted a fresh round of attacks on multiple targets in Iran, while the Islamic Republic launched strikes against eight key American military infrastructure sites in the Middle East, as both sides accused each other of violating a ceasefire that underpins peace talks. (Bloomberg)

If you ask me, this is the strongest ceasefire in world history. Nothing seems to be able to break it!

That OpenAI commercial is stupid as hell

The OpenAI Codex commercial is one of the dumbest ones I’ve ever seen. We’re used to ads that make extravagant claims — our truck will make you manly, our beer will make you desirable, our body spray will make you manly and desirable — but even by that standard this one is ridonk. At least you can actually drive the trucks, drink the beers, and douse yourself in the spray. The promise of OpenAI’s Codex is, as with so many of AI’s promises, that you don’t have to do anything.

The full-length ad shows a few different scenarios in which frustrated visionaries suddenly achieve a conceptual breakthrough. They’re all pathetic, and it’s telling that the guy who suddenly tells his computer “let’s make a companion app” is the least pathetic. The one that gets me every time features a young lady who appears to be the only grinder left in her office late at night. A long day of prompting has worn her down. She’s taking a much-needed and long-overdue break in the office kitchen, when EUREKA!

She hurries back to the computer, vibrating with excitement. Already the building around her is shaking. At her terminal, she enters a prompt — no, THE prompt. The one that will change it all. She writes:

Add orbital rotation to game

WHOOSH! We’re going supersonic. The rain striking the windows is traveling sideways. Her own center of gravity is changing. Orbital rotation has been added. To game. Nothing will ever be the same.

We’ve all had incredible ideas before but been limited by our execution. By doubters and haters who say things like “what” and “why,” “how much orbital rotation” and “this is a farming sim,” “you’re an idiot” and “you’re fired.” OpenAI’s Codex doesn’t let your dreams splatter against the windshield of lesser men. It knows your ideas are beautiful, delicate things that must be nurtured and validated. It adds orbital rotation to game.

According to the commercial, anyway.

50,000,000 Lovable projects can't be wrong

On LinkedIn I saw a graphic celebrating the runaway success of the vibe-coding app Lovable. 50 million projects! Unsure if it said they had all shipped or if they just sat at some indeterminate stage of completion. Either way, the news was shared, and received, as though this metric were valuable. It is not.

Conveniently, a similar graphic has also been making the rounds which shows that the number of app store submissions has skyrocketed, while the number of apps downloaded and reviewed has remained flat, or even declined slightly. On one hand we have the power of building any app your imagination can conjure, and on the other we have the reception for these apps. Which number do you think is more indicative of their value?

The Lovable graphic also suggested that 35% of projects were generating revenue. That’s over a third, or around 16,666,667 revenue-generating apps made in Lovable. First question, prove it. I just don’t believe this number on its face. But extending the courtesy of assuming that nobody would lie about this kind of thing, at the very least one must think that this number has been tortured to within an inch of its life. Who knows how, but certainly an app that earns one cent would count as “generating revenue,” and I wouldn’t put it past them to be presenting an average as a percentage or something like that.

Again though, even if the huge spike in submitted apps can be said to track with Lovable projects (and other vibe-coded horrors), you’re telling me that this is creating revenue that wouldn’t have existed otherwise? Who’s paying for these apps? What are they doing with them? Have you, yourself, used a Lovable project that was worth your time and money?

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

Only the hottest sports takes

AJ Brown is easily the best receiver to join the Patriots since Randy Moss. More than that, in the span of two years New England has gone from having one of the worst WR rooms in the NFL to one of the best. The fact that Kayshon Boutte has been one of our best receivers for the past several years and allegedly is looking for a trade is proof that the bar has been raised. Drake Maye has just one 300-yard game in his career. I predict he will have at least 10 this upcoming season. I’ll go further: I think he will have multiple 400-yard games and at least one 500-yard game next season. I am not a crackpot.

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Someone in the Red Sox front office got fired because when he thought a Zoom call had ended he said “Thanks, Bres, you fucking stiff” and everyone heard him — including Bres himself, Craig Breslow, president of baseball operations. If it was obvious enough then, it’s blindingly so now that Bres absolutely is a fucking stiff. He’s the worst kind of business idiot. He doesn’t seem to think his job is to build a winning baseball team but to win at negotiations. Signing good players is incidental to the project of being the smartest boy in the room. Players are “assets” and overpaying for them is the worst crime imaginable — far worse than fielding a triple-A lineup every night. The Sox as a non-factor in the biggest free agent signings pre-dates Bres, but he’s totalized it to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible for one of the only teams in MLB that ought to be able to afford any player they want. It’s fucking pathetic. And Bres is a fucking stiff.

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I don’t feel good about rooting for the Knicks but how can I not? They haven’t won a title in 50-some years and they’re playing out of their minds. Wemby will have his time. This year belongs to Brunson and KAT. It will also be fun to tweak right-wingers by pointing out that Mamdani was elected and the Knicks immediately won the championship.

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One week until the World Cup, and still nobody cares.

The compleat history of horses

AI bro:

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

Guy with functioning brain:

The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. The horses weren’t retired out of malice. They became uneconomical to keep. Leontief’s point was that there is no economic law preventing the same thing from happening to humans.

Why doesn't anybody care about the World Cup?

I was going to title this post “Nobody cares about the World Cup,” but I thought that sounded like a setup for a Jim Rome-esque screed about how soccer is anti-American and gay. Actually, soccer rules. And the World Cup has been a certified big deal even in the good old USA for decades now. Considering we’re hosting 1/3 of this year’s tournament, you’d think excitement would be at a — wait for it — fever pitch. Why isn’t it?

First of all, some supporting evidence. It’s hard to prove a negative. But I run in some soccer-friendly circles and I’m not seeing anything about it. The team USA roster reveal was two weeks ago. There were no articles about it on Defector, no threads about it on Hipinion, and generally no wider awareness or excitement at all that I picked up on. Certainly it couldn’t penetrate the force field of an outstanding NBA playoffs in the ESPN Zone.

Kickoff is next week. Are you going to a game? Do you know anyone who’s going to one? I know one person. He was invited to see Scotland vs Morocco. When it first was announced that America would co-host the 2026 event, and that one of the venues was a mere 20 minutes from my house, I thought for sure I’d go to a game. That was before I tried to get tickets. And definitely before I saw the prices. Even for Scotland vs Morocco.

There are a lot of reasons why this could be. The tournament has expanded from 32 to 48 teams this year, meaning that the field has been diluted somewhat. I don’t mean any disrespect to first-time participants Cape Verde or Uzbekistan when I say that. It’s also the case that a lot of people from more civilized nations simply don’t want to visit the United States right now, either out of disgust or simple self-preservation. I already mentioned the prices.

For the Team USA fan, it’s especially difficult to get jazzed about this year’s event. That’s not really a comment on the roster itself, which seems fine even if once again we’d have to consider winning an elimination game the best we can hope for. It’s more a factor of being an American in the year 2026. Who could root for us?

We’ve recently seen two other high-profile international tournaments in which our teams proved to be an absolute disgrace. The good vibes of the men’s Olympic hockey win lasted for about five minutes, until Kash Patel was chugging beers in the locker room and the players were chuckling along to Trump’s insulting comments about the women’s team. Then there was the World Baseball Classic, in which our guys marched grim-faced and red-assed to the final, acting like they were fighting on Iwo Jima instead of playing baseball, and I swear to god getting a pre-game hype speech from the Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden. I’ll say it again: who could root for us?

I’ll still watch it, and if Team USA makes a run I’m sure I’ll get swept up in it again. Sports have a way of transcending the structures that make the industrial-athletic complex suck so bad — even FIFA’s. At least until the final whistle blows.

Proved fucking right

A couple of years ago some colleagues of mine were abuzz about a demonstration they’d witnessed at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s big annual conference. To demonstrate the then-new “Agentforce” product, the presenter showed an example of how Saks Fifth Avenue was using it to automate customer support calls. He dialed the number and asked about returning a sweater. No dice. Then he made some quick changes in the Agentforce front end and called again. This time, success! He returned the sweater.

Let’s set aside that coordinating the return of some merchandise is not something a human has ever struggled with. The point here was how easy and seamless the process was. Saks, thanks to Agentforce, would be able to handle a greater volume of calls and be managed by, presumably, just a small team who could make system-wide changes with natural-language prompts. To my awestruck colleagues, this was game-changing.

I had a few questions. Was this demo live or was it canned? If it was live, was it happening in a production environment or a lower one? if it was canned, how canned? Was it a completely scripted interaction or a prototype? Either way, why didn’t the presenter disclose that information? If you listened closely, he never came right out and said that Saks was using this technology right that very second.

Over the next year or so, I occasionally loaded up the Saks Fifth Ave website to see if Agentforce had made it to their chatbot. It never had. The same shitty, barely-functional, non-Agentforce chatbot was still there the whole time. And while I never took the time to call their customer service number, I imagine the same was true there.

Well. Just last week Bloomberg published a piece called “Salesforce Touts AI Promise Over Reality in SaaSpocalypse Fight.” It includes this rather familiar passage:

One of Salesforce’s showcase customers is Williams-Sonoma. During a December user conference, Salesforce marketing executive Sanjna Parulekar stood on stage and showed off the home-goods retailer’s new Agentforce-powered customer support phone line.

“Williams-Sonoma’s most popular channel is voice so why don’t we go ahead and give this a spin,” Parulekar said. A smooth automated voice answered the call, greeting her by name and helping her seamlessly buy a specific cooking pan she’d been browsing on its website.

But about half a year after that presentation, Williams-Sonoma’s phone line isn’t actually using Agentforce.

Shocking!

Let’s be clear about the timeline here. The Saks demo was at Agentforce 2024, in September of that year. The demo referenced in the Bloomberg article happened in December 2025 — 15 months later. And 5 months after that, the tech still doesn’t work and still isn’t being used as implied. I’m not sure when exactly hype crosses into lying, but it’s definitely at some point with a 20-month span.

Saks Fifth Avenue, by the way, filed for bankruptcy in January 2026.

Numbers don't lie

Some time ago, Google rolled out a new feature for Gchat. It will now suggest context-aware responses to your friends’ messages. Rather than suffer the grueling effort of typing “lol” yourself, you can choose from three different messages that the software presents to you, which will typically be things like “Haha,” “Yes,” and “Haha, yes.” It’s an absolutely bizarre and pointless feature that provides no value whatsoever. Naturally, we use it all the time.

See, there’s some grim humor to be mined from the uncanny canned responses that Google serves up, particularly when you start chaining them together. You end up with a facsimile of a conversation, each side exchanging pithy, content-free congratulations and messages of approval. The robotic and unreal nature is, in some way, entertaining. But it’s not a real interaction and, crucially, our usage of this feature is not any indication that we find it valuable. It’s the opposite.

Yet I’d be willing to bet a substantial sum that product managers at Google are pointing at the numbers as proof of our “engagement.” Look! They’re using it sometimes dozens of times a day. It’s right here in black and white. Mission accomplished, everybody.

One of my many, many working theories about the world we’re living in now is that nearly all of the services we interact with daily are operating under this kind of delusion. Businesses are measuring and optimizing for real behavior, but their metrics have become decoupled from anything their customers find meaningful. The numbers are all good. The experiences are all bad.

Recently I listened to a talk about how someone had worked on automating his company’s customer service experience. He went into detail about the work and about the outcomes. Handle time was down. CSAT was up. CS agents were handling fewer, higher-priority calls. Wins all around. And while I don’t have any reason to believe that this guy was saying anything false, I also know that I sometimes have to use customer service and it always fucking sucks, in large part because of how much is automated.

You can at least understand when business metrics that are hostile to the customer improve at the cost of user experience. How have we gotten to a point where companies can swear up and down that they have concrete data showing that their products are better and their customers are happier when all of their products are worse and we’re all miserable using them? We’re no longer talking about a problem with how we’re measuring, or even what we’re measuring. We’re talking about two fundamentally different realities.

The rules are simple

The rules are simple. Every 20 years, all of the realms come together to compete in a fighting tournament. If one realm defeats another one in 10 consecutive tournaments, the winning realm now rules over the losing realm. However, the tournament will continue to be held and if the subjugated realm should defeat the conquering realm the next time, then they are freed. It’s just that simple.

Each realm sends its five best fighters to the tournament. The fighters are chosen by the gods and cannot opt out. If they happen to be killed prior to the tournament, the gods will choose another fighter, and if they happen to be resurrected and chosen by a different realm to compete in zombie form, they still cannot opt out. A fighter can decide at any time that they would rather fight for a different realm and this request is immediately honored. You understand why it’s so important that every realm sends five, and only five, combatants.

The tournament is controlled by the gods. They may not interfere directly in the fighting. However, if a combatant manages to steal a god’s amulet, use it to drain the powers of another god, and then imprint godly powers on themselves to become immortal and thus unbeatable, that’s just gamesmanship. This is how the gods maintain competitive balance and fairness.

Earthrealm has lost to Outworld for the past 9 tournaments. We’ve only got one shot to save ourselves. That one shot is five one-on-one fights, which happen at random times in random locations. The first two fights happen simultaneously, as do the last three. This is important because all five fighters for each side need to be prepared for anything, in particular one guy being in more than one fight if he feels like it. The tournament ends when all of one side’s fighters are down, except if one of them decides to switch sides afterward. That’s why we need to get this right the first time.

It’s called “Mortal Kombat” for a reason: these are fights to the death. Unless you don’t want to kill your opponent. You don’t have to. But if you do, they’re dead and gone forever, banished to the Netherrealm, which is basically like the Christian conception of Hell except that if you want you can manifest a peace garden in your mind and live out your eternal damnation in tranquility and comfort.

Because one thing’s for sure: there’s no coming back from the Netherrealm. Not unless a necromancer performs a quick and effortless spell on you. But beware! You will be an obedient, zombie version of your mortal self, or else the necromancer may decide you can just be the same as you were in life. The stakes couldn’t be any higher.