A TRUMP COMEBACK, by Zombie David Broder

WASHINGTON - It may seem perverse to suggest that, at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iran, President Trump is poised for a political comeback. But don't be astonished if that is the case.

Like President Clinton after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Trump has gone through a period of wrenching adjustment to his reduced status. But just as Clinton did in the winter of 1995, Trump now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.

More important, he is demonstrating political smarts that even his critics have to acknowledge.

His reaction to the planned House vote opposing the increase he has ordered in U.S. troops deployed to Iran illustrates the point.

When Trump faced reporters on Wednesday morning, he knew that virtually all those in the Democratic majority would be joined by a significant minority of Republicans in voting Friday to decry the "surge" strategy.

He did three things to diminish the impact of that impending defeat.

First, he argued that the House was at odds with the Senate, which had within the past month unanimously confirmed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth as the new commander in Iran. Trump has made Hegseth his blocking back in this debate - replacing Vice President Vance, whose credibility is much lower.

Second, he minimized the stakes in the House debate by endorsing the good motives of his critics, rejecting the notion that their actions would damage the morale of U.S. troops or embolden the enemy - all by way of saying that the House vote was no big deal.

And third, by contrasting Friday's vote on a nonbinding resolution with the pending vote on funding the war in Iran, he shifted the battleground to a fight he is likely to win - and put the Democrats on the defensive. Much of their own core constituency wants them to go beyond nonbinding resolutions and use the power of the purse to force Trump to reduce the American commitment in Iran.

In other respects, too, Trump has been impressive in recent days.

He has been far more accessible - and responsive - to the press and public, holding any number of one-on-one interviews. And he has been more candid in his responses than in the past.

While forcefully making his points, he has depersonalized the differences with his critics and opponents. He has not only vouched for the good intentions of congressional Democrats, he has visited them on their home ground, given them opportunities to question him face to face, and repeatedly outlined areas - aside from Iran - where he says they could work together on legislation: immigration, energy, education, health care, the budget.

All this is to the good. But Trump, unlike Clinton, is in the middle of a bloody war, which can be ended only by the Iranians themselves. All he claims to be able to do is to provide some "breathing space" for them, by attempting to reduce the violence. As he said, "What really matters is what happens on the ground. I can talk all day long, but what really matters to the American people is to see progress."

And whether the American people will see it, no one knows.

(Source)

Checking in with insane idiots

The New York Times thinks it’s time for a GIRL BOSS to get in on the AI grift. Who better to lead the charge than former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer? This is, honest to god, the way the article starts:

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

Ah yes, the impossible task of identifying three of your own child’s character traits. The hard problem to crack of coming up with four total words that have all the insight and uniqueness of a fortune cookie. I guarantee you half the other kids in that class have at least one of those descriptions on their own entry. This is not using technology to surmount an obstacle, it’s abdicating any responsibility for it at all.

The whole article is chock-full of anecdotes of Mayer’s groundbreaking AI assistant doing previously unknown things like suggesting a theme for a child’s birthday party. I’m not knocking the observation that a lot of this stuff can be frustrating, especially with a kid who is prone to reject anything you suggest. What I’m saying is that nothing the AI agent is credited with doing is any more impressive than, say, a Google search. To wit:

She’s used it to find a family activity during a vacation in Venice (Dazzle proposed a Venetian mask-making workshop that the whole family loved); to plan a play date for one of her twin daughters (Dazzle knows Marielle is into magic, and suggested visiting a magic shop in San Francisco); and to choose a theme for her son Macallister’s 14th birthday party (Dazzle recommended a glow-in-the-dark pool party, and found glowing pool toys and corn hole).

Finally, a way to find out… something to do in Venice while you’re on vacation? This was a problem? A way to find a store that sells things your child is interested in? Truly we are through the looking glass here.

This article certainly has the stink of a PR agency all over it and more than anything its existence is about getting the interest of investors. I’m not really sure why it continues past this point, though.

When I asked Mayer if it’s somewhat depressing to imagine a frictionless future when birthday celebrations, holiday gifts and family vacations are planned by A.I., she seemed caught off guard.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” she said.

“I haven’t really thought that through.” The epitaph for the AI mania.

Ah well. She still seems like a better parent than Sam Altman.

Whacha listenin' to

Because it’s easier than coming up with something to say.

Spirit Possession - Cathedral Speech

I’ve seen Spirit Possession live twice, and I recommend the experience to everybody. They’re a two-piece black metal band whose frontman is an insane guitarist. He looks like he’s strangling the damn thing to death up there. Black metal is not generally my preferred subgenre but the technical chops make Spirit Possession stand out. I like the new album but I have to say that I’m not sure I’d be able to distinguish it from the previous one were I not looking at the cover art.

Amon Amarth - The Allfather Awakens

You basically know what you’re getting from Amon Amarth at this point, and that’s a good thing. They’re kind of a silly band but they also rock. There’s a ballad on this album in which the singer sounds like a Muppet. It’s great.

Interpol - This Mirror Weighs a Ton

Interpol was an important band to me at an important time in my life, but I lost track of them long ago and didn’t really realize they’ve been chugging along this whole time. This album is pretty good! It doesn’t rock as straightforwardly as those first two albums that I loved. Seems to be going more for vibe- or groove-based songwriting. I like it.

Deafheaven - At Work in the Fields of the Bomb

This is a 3-song EP, and since it’s Deafheaven, one of the songs doesn’t really qualify as a song at all, more like a short interlude. But the two main tracks are classic Sunbather-style blackgaze, and since I haven’t fully loved any of their albums since that one, I welcome these songs with open arms.

I hate who they've turned me into

I don’t want to be a hater. I want to be able to see something cool and say “hey, that’s cool.” I don’t think it’s a mark of a sophisticated or savvy person to reject anything novel or to immediately look for the flaws in everything they encounter. For one thing, that’s no way to live. For another, it probably blinds you to the good and beautiful (h/t Lt. Markonnen).

But even more than that, I don’t want to be lied to. I especially don’t want to be lied to, over and over, by the same people and about the same things. I don’t want the fear of being branded a hater make me keep my mouth shut about what’s obviously happening in front of my eyes. To the extent that anyone who reads this blog (all 3 of you) or people who know me in real life think I get off on being contrarian: I don’t. You don’t even hear the half of it. Believe it or not, I’m conflict-averse.

So let’s talk about the Tesla Roadster.

Wait, wait. First, let’s talk about the man presenting the Tesla Roadster. Elon Musk has overpromised, underdelivered, and flat-out lied about so many things for so many years that it’s almost not worth mentioning. You’re certainly welcome to google it if you don’t believe me. It’s not that all of his companies are completely fraudulent — Tesla really sells cars, Starlink really launches satellites, and SpaceX really builds rockets. But when you compare the hype with the reality, it’s mind-boggling that anyone could still watch him unveil a product without the world’s largest grain of salt in tow.

(Not SUPER pertinent, but he’s also an unfunny doofus. From NBC News:

Tesla says a fan-based suction system creates downforce to hold the vehicle against the road’s surface, while self-refilling cold-gas thrusters power its airborne maneuvers.

Musk quipped, “This car really sucks.”

That’s a bad enough joke on its own, and saying he “quipped” implies that his delivery wasn’t halting and self-conscious. Even worse, he followed it up with two sexualized jokes about how much the car sucks, to diminishing laughter each time. A must-watch for fans of cringe comedy.)

Moving on, let’s just think about what’s happened after previous events like this. At the last big Tesla unveiling, for the Cybertruck, Musk similarly promised many things that the eventually shipped product was lacking. (Still waiting to see how it can “serve briefly as a boat.”) The funny thing about that one was the demonstration of the CT’s unbreakable windows. They threw a rock at one of the windows, which shattered. Undaunted, they repeated it with another window, which also shattered. If I had been onstage at that moment, I would have died of embarrassment, but the world’s first trillionaire is built different.

Tesla has also promised a humanoid robot that seems no closer to deployment today than it was the day it was announced, and for which the introduction was a dancing human in a robot suit. They didn’t even try to hide that one.

All that being said, the Roadster demonstration was pretty neat. The test model drove upside down and then righted itself for a smooth landing, and later jumped a row of other Tesla vehicles using self-propulsion. It did indeed resemble the flying, time-traveling DeLorean of Back to the Future II.

One has to ask, will this car ever exist? Or ever exist as a mass-produced, street-legal passenger vehicle? Musk promised production in 2028, which I would bet virtually any amount will not meaningfully happen. That hasn’t stopped them from opening up pre-orders though. Trying to imagine the chutzpah it would take to accept $250k from someone from a car you might one day produce. Can’t do it.

Even the car we saw last night — what was it, really? Concept cars are nothing new, but this wasn’t presented as one. Yet as people have pored over the footage from the event, it certainly seems as though the prototype Roadster was lacking a lot of the things one would usually associate with a car. It may have been nothing more than the propulsion system wrapped in a car-like shell. Nothing wrong with that, except for the dishonesty of the presentation.

Let’s even quibble about the word “flying.” The things we saw the Roadster do yesterday were more like jumping and falling with style. Again, still cool things! But not a flying car. Not in any way we’ve understood the idea for the past 50 years or so.

I know, I know. You’ve got to walk before you can run. But even putting aside the obvious practical questions about public safety and infrastructure, the viability of personal flight in a Tesla Roadster is still several steps down a path of unanswered questions, none of which the company put to rest yesterday.

And even putting all THAT aside, it’s amazing that Elon Musk is still allowed to stand onstage making blowjob jokes in front of his adoring fans while he lies to their faces, and meanwhile hundreds of thousands across the globe are dead because of his cuts at DOGE, and oh yeah he’s sunk over a hundred million dollars into the Texas Senate race to support one of the worst human beings on the planet, Ken Paxton.

You want to know why I’m like this? Because we’re living in a world where a jagoff like Musk can commit crimes against humanity and then go “flying cars!” and get praised for it.

Cut my life into pieces

Shot:

"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me," Altman said during an event at Harvard University in May 2024. "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."

Chaser:

OpenAI lets anyone inject ads into ChatGPT users’ sessions, targeting specific groups of people based on their email address, phone number, or a unique identifier on their phone, according to 404 Media’s own tests of ChatGPT’s advertising ecosystem.

MONETIZATION

NO FREE THINGS

DON’T GIVE A FUCK IF MY LLM KILLS ME

Is that good? Coreweave edition

Bubble watch is on:

On Tuesday, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya posted a chart showing that the yield on $1.25 billion of CoreWeave bonds due in 2032 "touched 15% today, then closed at a new high" of 14.5%.

Is that good?

The company's interest expense rose to $640 million in the second quarter from $267 million a year earlier, and it lost $626 million in the quarter, according to Yahoo Finance data.

Is that good?

If the AI spending boom turns, "the equity value is going to be zero," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said on the Prof G Markets podcast. Luria, who rates the stock Neutral with a $100 price target, estimates that CoreWeave borrows at around 9% and earns about 1% on its investments.

Is that good?

If it closes near these levels, Wednesday would be CoreWeave's lowest close since July 29. The stock is down about 56% from its 52-week high of $150, set on Oct. 16, 2025, and down about 7% this year.

Is that good?

Making fun of Susan Dell: a dialectic

So many atrocities emerge daily from the Trump administration that it takes something truly special to break through into the broader consciousness, but it happened this week. No, it wasn’t a new development in the Iran war, or a renewed effort to cleanse the nation of disfavored minorities. What’s got people buzzing right now is the odd-looking woman who was standing next to Trump in the Oval Office the other day to talk about something or other, Trump accounts or Trump bucks or whatever.

The woman was Susan Dell, wife of Texas computing magnate Michael Dell and possibly a philanthropist in her own right. Hell if I know anything about her. But she keeps showing up to events promoting Trump accounts and people keep being bewildered and upset by her obviously surgically altered appearance. That makes her an easy target for jokes — which, in my circles, leads to a lot of meta-conversation about who is appropriate to make fun of and what it’s appropriate to make fun of them for. It’s fertile soil for exhausting online arguments that never find a resolution.

The central tension is that a lot of rules we’d agree upon in isolation start to contradict one another pretty quickly, and Susan Dell manages to land at ground zero of most of those contradictions. To wit, this hypothetical debate.

A. Who is it appropriate to make fun of?

B. It is appropriate to make fun of someone with more power than you. Punching up is an act of defiance, while punching down is bullying.

A. Power is fluid. Someone may possess it in one context and lack it in another. For example, many of Trump’s lickspittles are powerless in his presence and that’s why they come off like gormless losers. Yet these are also some of the most powerful people in government and business. Are you saying we shouldn’t make fun of them?

B. We should definitely make fun of them — but for their lack of dignity and self-respect. We shouldn’t make fun of someone for their appearance.

A. No, not if it’s something they don’t have a choice about. Skin color, baldness, weight — a person may have some minimal level of control over some of these things but for the most part they’re immutable physical characteristics. It’s not fair to insult someone just for being who they are. But what if someone’s appearance is the result of conscious choices, such as excessive cosmetic surgery?

B. Are you sure these choices are conscious? We’re specifically talking about a woman who appears to have had procedures done in pursuit of traditional beauty standards in this culture. She’s been marinating in these expectations her whole life.

A. Beauty standards are the same for everyone in the culture but the vast majority of people don’t pursue this level of body modification, both because they realize the futility and because they lack the resources. Dell’s extreme appearance is only possible because she is fabulously wealthy and party of a sociocultural milieu that places so much value on aesthetics. That’s worth making fun of.

B. Women are subjected to far more scrutiny about their faces and bodies than men are, and are expected to meet those standards to a degree that men aren’t. Joking about their looks for any reason only reinforces stereotypes, and furthermore communicates to the women around you that any woman’s appearance is fair game. We should never make fun of that.

A. Must we act as though we don’t see what is plainly in front of our eyes? She looks inhuman. She looks like she just sprang out of a coffin to introduce a tale of spine-tingling terror. A lot of money and effort went into making her look this bad.

B. Touche, but would we ever talk about a man this way?

A. We certainly do make fun of the physical appearance of men. I watched the movie The Iron Claw and although Zac Efron’s performance was great, the bizarre, putty-like aspect of his face was distracting the whole time. Here is someone who clearly has also gone too far in his pursuit of an imagined aesthetic ideal.

B. I’ll grant you that people may take note of something like that. But was Efron relentlessly pilloried for it? Is it all people talk about in relation to him? Do people say that he looks like a clay figure brought to life to protect the Jewish people, or that the Mars face didn’t disappear, just relocated to Zac Efron’s skull? I’ll grant that it happens, but the scale is far greater when the target is a woman — a difference of kind and not degree.

A. Does anybody get made fun of for their appearance more than Donald Trump? His hair has been a punchline for decades. Same for his orange skin and tiny hands, his weird posture and his ever-increasing waistline.

B. I’m glad you brought up Trump’s weight. This is a good example of something that we shouldn’t make fun of, regardless of how many pounds of shit appear to have been stuffed into however small a bag. Lots of people are overweight. It’s not a crime or a character flaw. And when you insult Trump for being fat, he doesn’t hear you, but a lot of heavy people in your life do.

A. Trump’s weight qua weight is not the issue. The issue is his bottomless vanity. The issue is his insistence that he’s trim and athletic. The issue is that his annual physical always pegs him at a svelte 227 pounds when the eye test shows him to be at least 275. Nothing wrong with weighing 275 pounds. Lots wrong with being so insecure that you’re willing to lie so outrageously in service of something so inconsequential.

B. Well then, how come so many jokes about Trump’s weight seem like childish name-calling?

A. That’s because most people aren’t funny.

B. Trump is the most powerful person in the world. We could probably agree to err on the side of it being ok to make fun of him for any reason. But how powerful is Susan Dell, really? She’s rich, yes. She’s in the Oval Office talking about a government program. She’s not some smol beans farm girl who’s just gotten off the bus in the big city with a suitcase and a dream. But she’s not a government official. Not a corporate titan. People just like her show up for these kinds of events every day and nobody even notices. We’re only talking about her because of her physical characteristics.

A. We might disagree on how powerful your run-of-the-mill billionaire is in the United States of America. They’re running the show. Having that kind of bank account gives her a level of influence arguably greater than that of any elected official. Maybe we shouldn’t be insulting her appearance, but she doesn’t deserve to have her delicate feelings protected.

B. Have we resolved these contradictions yet?

A. Not even a little. Maybe it’s fair to say that we shouldn’t pretend not to see what we see, but also that this sort of thing turns into a pile-on pretty quickly. Not only do you hit the point of diminishing returns after just a few jokes, but you also risk turning the conversation from a legitimate point of criticism — rich people having an outsized influence on public life despite being nuts — into something else entirely (and, it must be said, equally valid).

There you have it. This seemed like a much better idea before I started writing it.

Sam Altman should accept my boot up his ass for the benefit of humanity

“…we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.” -Sam Altman

You know something, it’s not even worth writing a whole-ass scathing takedown of this quote. It’s self-defeating. It’s revealing of his entire mindset, as well as that of everyone running big tech. The world (you) should accept some bad things (up to and including your own death) for the benefits of the technology (unknown, but making Sam Altman a kajillionaire). This makes perfect sense to the man who is saying it.

We’ve been far too kind to these people.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

No one will remember them. That’s what they can’t stand. One day they will die, and one day not long after that they will be forgotten. The fear is all-encompassing. It guides everything they do. The fear is why they plaster their names everywhere. The fear is why they insist upon inserting themselves into everything we say and do. The fear is why they won’t — not for one single, solitary moment — shut the fuck up. To be silenced is to be dead already. They can’t have that.

They want to be remembered alongside the great conquerors. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Elon Musk. Rolls off the tongue. But they don’t understand that those men, too, will be forgotten. They have died and their accomplishments have receded. All that’s left is for historical memory to decompose like the fallen leaves. This, too, will happen sooner than they wish, and inevitably.

We are living in a new dark age. Not qualitatively dark, not in terms of our barbarism and indifference to suffering — although our age is dark in that way, too — but quantitatively dark. Our era will be invisible to future historians, should any exist. It will be as though it never happened.

All that we know about our past is due to the unlikely survival of precious few artifacts and relics. Cavemen fortuitously perishing amid the glaciers (fortuitous for us, not for them). Shards of pottery, fragments of stone tablets, faded works of art that have survived not by design but due to accidents of geography and climate. Where written works have survived, understand that the geological time separating their creation and their discovery is infinitesimal. Most of it is already gone.

What artifacts are today’s conquerors leaving behind? We aren’t creating scrolls or murals or sculptures to contain our civilization’s collected wisdom. We’re encoding them in ones and zeroes. There’s a chance, however slight, that a far-distance descendant finding a cuneiform tablet will somehow be able to translate it. No such chance exists for the future archaeologist who happens upon a solid-state drive. Whatever they theorize about its purpose and value will certainly be wrong.

What of our tributes and paeans to the colossi who stand astride our civilization today with weird postures and anatomically improbable proportions? They exist, sadly, but mostly in the form of tweets and blog posts. People like to say that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once something is on the internet, it no longer exists in any meaningful form. Try to find my Sega Saturn reviews from 1996 and then tell me that they’ve been immortalized. I can live with their loss. But now imagine that my Sega Saturn reviews from 1996 have granted me world-historical wealth and power, and you might understand why it’s not so easy for some people to let these things go.

As Hans Gruber reminded us, “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Hence why our self-styled great men of history keep trying to invent new worlds. If you can’t conquer Earth, conquer Mars. If you can’t bend reality to your will, bend virtual reality. If you can’t convince real people that you’re funny and cool, create artificial people who will think so (it will really boost your follower count). Lucifer preferred reigning in Hell to serving in Heaven; our demons prefer reigning over a simulacrum to even existing in reality. As reality decays across the desert of the real, they cling ever more tightly to the scraps.

It will all be gone. Their metaverses and their artificial intelligences and their manifestoes and, above all, their names. Maybe humankind will live on for thousands of years more. Maybe we won’t. Maybe the chaotic systems they are building and forcing us to live within will doom us, and maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll colonize Mars. (They won’t colonize Mars.)

The only thing I know for sure is that, one day, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel will be equally as dead as you and I. Even Donald Trump will finally, mercifully, be forgotten, whether or not anyone remains who could possibly remember. The universe tends toward entropy and through their actions they are hastening, not arresting, the trend.

The worst part, for them, is that they know it. As surely as Prince Mishkin, they are aware with each thudding, inexorable step that they are approaching the cosmic gallows. Unlike Dostoevsky’s tragic hero, no reprieve will be granted. For centuries they may be remembered as historical figures who presided over a deranged and manic era; for millennia as figures of myth, equal parts tragic and wrathful; and then they will be gone. Oblivion awaits. This knowledge tears them up.

So every time you’re forced to behold their dopey faces and stupid haircuts, listen to their halting, nonsensical words, and to run ever more of your own precious and fleeting existence through the infernal devices they’ve created which extract your vitality like the miracle juicing machines of late-night infomercials, know this: they are terrified. They are miserable. They are smaller and weaker than you could ever be.

And one day they will be gone.

Whacha listenin' to

Since writing about serious things is hard and often seems like more trouble than it’s worth, here’s a dashed-off post about some music I’ve been listening to.

Chat Pile - Who Loves the Sun

Chat Pile is the voice of a generation. They are the sound of now. They’re doughy midwestern white guys who are in their 40s and have only been around for a few years. And they’re really mad. Who Loves the Sun came out a few weeks ago and it’s pretty good. I think Cool World is still their best, but I’ll keep picking up whatever they’re putting down.

Mastodon - Marrow Deep

Mastodon has been one of my favorite bands for a long time. I finally saw them live on the Leviathan 20th anniversary tour. Little did I know that it would be their last tour with founding member Brent Hinds, who quit the band shortly thereafter, and then even more tragically died in a motorcycle accident. Either way, this was going to be Mastodon’s first album without him, but the circumstances sure shifted there. His loss hangs inescapably over the music. Not sure if I love it yet though.

Iress - Sleep Now, In Reverse

On account of my reckless spending over the years on the Svalbard Bandcamp page, they sent me an email with suggestions for a bunch of other bands on Church Road Records. Iress has been the big winner of those suggestions for me. Someone in the email called the singer “the Adele of doom,” an irresistible characterization if ever there were one. And it’s basically right. Her vocals are plaintive and tragic, calling to mind a spectral figure in wedding dress standing atop a wind-swept bluff by the sea and crying out for her lost love. So that’s pretty cool.

As I Lay Dying - Awakened

Look, am I happy that my Spotify Wrapped is going to be chock-a-block with this meathead metalcore shit? Not really. But do I like loud music with a bunch of dudes shouting in unison? Unfortunately, yes.

Define "chutzpah"

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, April 2025:

AI acts as a multiplier. We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done.

Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It's a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don't think it's feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow.

Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, September 2026:

“We call those ‘slop grenades’ that people toss at each other,” Lütke said in an interview on the Knowledge Project podcast. “That’s definitely a bad thing.”

The CEO further explained that the initiative incentivized workers to “go nuts” on AI, leading to a deluge of AI generated slop.

“You don’t really read it, and now it has to be reviewed by your colleagues, and they are like, ‘this doesn’t look right,'” he complained. “You’re just letting AI do the work for you.”

If you were concerned about AI mandates backfiring and about the rise of workslop in the spring of 2025, it’s because you’re a Luddite, a troglodyte, a loser. If you’re concerned about them now, it’s because you’re decisive, visionary, a winner. The main thing separating you from our greatest CEOs is that they don’t care whose lives they ruin on the way to learning self-evident things. In fact, it’s overcoming these kinds of obstacles that makes them the leaders they are.

The chain of command

Individual contributor: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but my manager wants me to use it so I guess I will.”

Manager: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but my director wants my team to use it so I guess we will.”

Director: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but my VP wants our group to use it so I guess we will.”

VP: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but the execs want our org to use it so I guess we will.”

CEO: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but the board wants our company to use it so I guess we will.”

Board member: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but our investors want everyone to use it so I guess we will.”

Investor: “I don’t really see the point of AI, but the smartest people alive want all my businesses to use it so I guess we will.”

Smartest person alive: “A PHD-LEVEL EXPERT ON EVERY SUBJECT IN YOUR POCKET! MAKE A PODCAST ABOUT YOUR CHILD’S EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES! WE’RE ALL GONNA FUCKIN’ DIE WHOOOOOOOO DOGGIE!!!”

Apple buries the lede

Apple event is always exciting, but the first Ternus-led Apple event was extra exciting. And why not? Forget the Beatlemania level of excitement that accompanied Ternus’ onstage debut. Apple, at last, debuted a foldable iPhone. The revolutionary innovation we’ve been begging for since Samsung introduced their foldable phone seven years ago. As a longtime iPhone user, I know I’ve been thinking that if I could just fold the damn thing, everything would be allllll right.

Anyway, behold the foldable iPhone!

My god, that’s beautiful. But wait — it seems that Apple has “one more thing” up their sleeve. Did you notice it? This isn’t just an expandable phone. It’s an expandable hand.

All this time, you smoothbrains have been imagining all the amazing things you could do with a foldable phone. The visionaries at Apple, however, were one evolutionary step ahead of you. And that’s why their company is worth 5 trillion dollars.

Dire warnings from crackpots

Another AI guy has gone rogue while coincidentally building his personal brand. Jacob Coxon has resigned from Anthropic because, as he says on X, the everything including pedophilia app, the frontier labs aren’t “acting responsibly” and are “gambling with our lives.” After making lots of money from this as an employee of both OpenAI and Anthropic, Jacob can’t take it anymore.

I never really know how to respond to things like this because there are many valid reactions, some of which even initially seem to be contradictory. Despite warning against AI, Coxon is making the exact same sorts of bold yet ill-defined predictions that AI boosters do. He says we’re “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence,” which is dubious regardless of whether you believe this is good or bad — and anyway, still elides the basic point of what the hell “superintelligence” really means. Not that the guy really ought to pause in a Twitter thread to define this, but somebody, somewhere, should.

He also claims that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” That they believe this, I have no doubt. But could it actually do that? How? I’m not asking rhetorically. What are the mechanisms by which even a self-improving superintelligence could kill us all? What could we do to stop them?

Like all of the most lurid predictions about AI, I would bet that Silicon Valley crackpots see the extermination of (most of) humanity as a feature and not a bug. Imagine a system so powerful that it could end life on earth. Now imagine that you, a dork-ass loser with a punchable face, have created that system. What does it make you? It makes you God, right?

I don’t mean to completely rule out the possibility of AI causing a mass casualty event. Just because something is stupid doesn’t mean it can’t also be dangerous. Some of our biggest dumbasses have been responsible for some of our most painful tragedies. There’s really no reason to think that what we’re calling AI can’t wreak havoc with the best of them. It’s just that it’s probably less “evil genius” stuff and more “dog that’s been trained to run between tank treads with a bomb on its back.”

Still, there’s one more point to make about relative risk. Coxon asserts that “no other human activity poses this level of danger.” That’s an ironic thing to type while inhaling wildfire smoke, but it’s emblematic of the SV way of thinking. Hypothetical future risks are far more pressing than the risks that we are facing today. The people who think it’s easier to make the planet Mars habitable than the planet Earth will of course think that their superintelligent terminator machines are more dangerous than climate change, pandemic, war, and all the other blights presently afflicting us. You have to remember that, in the end, these guys just aren’t very smart. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they’ve disappeared all the way up their own assholes.

And they’re dragging the rest of us with them.

Tech predictions I won't bother to follow up on

Nvidia's Jensen Huang says 'AGI has arrived' and congratulates OpenAI

Greg Brockman, the company's president, said on a call with reporters on Thursday: "Welcome to the AGI era."

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a fuzzy concept that nonetheless has become a core goal for leading frontier AI labs.

OpenAI defines it as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." The company pitched Astra as a major research breakthrough and a shift in what's possible to delegate to AI. It's rolling out to customers this week.

On the Thursday call, Brockman said that in the future, he thinks people will look back and think AGI was created "about this time, and I think it might be about this model."

"For me personally, I do think we're there," he said.

I’m going back to bed.

Another New England Patriots season is upon us

We’re eight days out from kickoff and I, for one, expect the Patriots to get destroyed by the Seahawks once again. After that? Hard to say. Last year’s team overperformed to such a degree that this year is bound to be a disappointment. It turns out that it’s very hard to win back-to-back AFC championships. Back-to-back divisional titles? Maybe.

There’s no doubt that the wide receiver corps is vastly improved. AJ Brown is easily the best WR this team has had since Randy Moss, and I expect him to have a rebound year. Romeo Doubs is an improvement at WR2, and the other holdovers from last year all offer value. I’ll miss Kayshon Boutte. He was responsible for several of Drake Maye’s best touchdown passes. But I understand why the team felt they had to make the move.

Running back and tight end positions are more or less the same as last year. Hunter Henry has been rock-solid as a Patriot, and Maye’s most dependable target. I’d like to see Treveyon Henderson be a little more consistent than last year, but as the number-two guy at his position a repeat of 2025 would be fine.

Once again, the offense comes down entirely to the line. Will Campbell got badly exposed in the postseason. It’s true that he had looked a lot better earlier in the season before his MCL sprain, but it’s also true that the likes of Will Anderson and DeMarcus Lawrence absolutely ate him alive. He’s going to have to be better than he was at any point last year. But so will everyone protecting Drake Maye.

As for Maye, I really did think the numbers broke his way for MVP last year, even as I acknowledge that he is my sole remaining source of light in this dark existence. He was almost comically efficient, not throwing the ball very much but throwing with accuracy and distance every time he did. He was a full yard clear of Stafford in yards per attempt. The other QBs who threw for comparable yardage needed, in most cases, about 100 more attempts to do so. That’s crazy.

I predicted earlier that Maye’s headline numbers would pop a lot more this year, and I still believe that to be the case. He’s only had one 300+ passing game in his career, and I expect him to post several of those this season — not to mention at least one over 400 (and probably more than one). AJ Brown is going to help a lot with that. But, again, unless the O-line gets its shit together this could all be wishful thinking.

As for the defense, they were the strength of the team last year. No reason to think they won’t be excellent this year as well, even though K’Lavon Chaisson has not really been replaced. Their line remains stout and disruptive, and their secondary is elite. (We’ll ignore Christian Gonzalez’s contract issues for now.) The linebacker corps may be unheralded compared to the other defensive groups, but there was a clear difference last year with and without Robert Spillane, so if he stays healthy they should be good as well.

All this is to say that I think the Patriots have a real shot at repeating as AFC East champions. Buffalo may be as iffy as they’ve ever been, but then again I’ve been saying that for years. But I’m not totally sure that I see the Pats making quite as deep a run again this year. They had an extremely fortunate run in the playoffs against teams that were even more offensively inept than they were, at least until they ran headlong into the Seahawks. Still, anything can happen!

We’ll resume your regularly scheduled doomposting shortly.

A careful, thorough rebuttal of Jensen Huang

Well, Nvidia beat expectations again, sending me once more into Jesse Pinkman mode. Jensen Huang played it as cool as a Tom Ford leather jacket. But I’d like to refute his statement with a rigorous, line-by-line fisking. This took me several hours.

"AI has reached its inflection point.”

No it hasn’t.

“It's doing useful work.”

No it isn’t.

“Its tokens are productive and profitable.”

No they aren’t.

“Now, compute is revenue.”

Nuh-uh.

“And demand is accelerating.”

I disagree.

“This time last year, one lab alone was driving the build-out; today, we have a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open-model ecosystem, and physical AI coming online — with strong momentum across the U.S. and around the world.”

I don’t think this is true.

“The AI infrastructure build-out is at full steam.”

Hmm, how about… no.

“Vera Rubin, now in full production, was built to power exactly this moment.”

Sorry, no.

Whew! Somebody had to do the hard work on this one. I’m taking the rest of the week off.

That's quite enough

Anthropic is telling potential investors that it sees a total addressable market of eleventy kajillion spacebucks:

Anthropic is likely to tell investors that it sees its ‌total addressable market (TAM) exceeding $30 trillion, ahead of ‌the $28.5 trillion estimate from SpaceX, the Wall Street Journal ​reported on Tuesday.

30 trillion dollars. They may even have said it with a straight face.

At long last, can we be done with this? We’ve had our fun. We’ve fantasized about the power and value of AI in the same way that I look at mansions on Realtor.com after buying a Powerball ticket but before the numbers are drawn. But this is really enough. It’s not fun anymore. It’s not cute. It’s pathetic. Let’s drop it and move on.

Stay on Target

How it started:

Discount store chain Target said Friday that it would join rival Walmart and a number of other prominent American brands in scaling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that have come under attack from conservative activists and, as of this week, the White House.

How it’s going:

Target shares slid as much as 5% after the retailer apologized for and pulled a Halloween costume ​criticized for evoking Blackface, renewing concerns about brand missteps just as its financial turnaround effort had begun ‌to bear fruit. … The product, sold as the "Kids' Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Costume," prompted backlash on social media as some consumers said it resembled a racist caricature evocative of minstrel shows.

No one could of predicted etc.