the Lightning makes an excellent work truck for those who actually need work trucks

yeah…no

the non-electric F-150 has multiple bed lengths (5.5’, 6.5’, and 8’)

the Lightning only offered the 5.5’ “short bed” length

if you actually need a work truck, the Lightning is deficient in the #1 thing that makes a work truck a work truck.

for another comparison - the “short bed” option on the F-250 is 6.75’ long, in addition to the 8’ “long bed”.

yeah, the browser extension world is an absolute shitshow. the AI part of this is new, but nothing else about it is.

I’d recommend reading Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer from 2021 if you haven’t seen it before.

tl;dr - a guy writes a simple, useful, open-source browser extension (Hover Zoom) that as part of its functionality needs permissions from Chrome to view every page the user opens. he has receipts of 10 years worth of companies reaching out to him and offering to buy the extension (when concrete dollar amounts are mentioned, they’re in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars range). this would only make sense if they wanted to use it for nefarious data-harvesting purposes.

In a small room in San Diego last week

…

I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists

congrats to this author on getting a business trip to San Diego during December. I bet it was nice and warm.

it seems like this is a pretty typical piece of access journalism:

The place to be, if you could get in, was the party hosted by Cohere…

…

With the help of a researcher friend, I secured an invite to a mixer hosted by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first AI-focused university, named for the current UAE president.

…

On the roof of the Hard Rock Hotel…

leading to a “conclusion” pretty typical of access journalism:

It struck me that both might be correct: that many AI developers are thinking about the technology’s most tangible problems while public conversations about AI—including those among the most prominent developers themselves—are dominated by imagined ones.

what if the critics and the people they’re criticizing are both correct? I am a very smart person who gets paid to write for The Atlantic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of Time magazine since 2018.

…

In January 2023 Benioff announced the mass dismissal of approximately 7,000 Salesforce employees via a two-hour all-hands meeting over a call, a course of action he later admitted had been a ‘bad idea’.

…

In September 2025, Benioff reduced Salesforce’s support workforce from 9,000 to about 5,000 employees because he “need[ed] less heads”. Salesforce stated that AI agents now handle half of all customer interactions and have reduced support costs by 17% since early 2025. The company added it had redeployed hundreds of employees into other departments within the company. The decision contrasted with Benioff’s earlier remarks suggesting that artificial intelligence would augment, rather than replace, white-collar workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce

In September 2024, the company deployed Agentforce, an agentic AI platform where users can create autonomous agents for customer service assistance, developing marketing campaigns, and coaching salespersons.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated in a June 2025 interview on The Circuit that artificial intelligence now performs between 30% and 50% of internal work at Salesforce, including functions such as software engineering, customer service, marketing, and analytics. Although he made clear that “humans still drive the future,” Benioff noted that AI is enabling the company to reassign employees into higher-value roles rather than reduce headcount.

haha consent factory go brrrr

But just pasting a god damn video link is low effort

imagine 4 things that could be posted:

• a 3 minute long video
• a 3 hour long video
• a 250 word article or blog post
• a 25,000 word article or blog post

do you have a sufficient grasp of how the internet works to understand that the effort involved in posting a link is exactly the same in all 4 cases?

How is this keyboard not popular?

their front page explicitly says “Currently in beta state” and according to their docs installation via Google Play requires joining a beta tester group.

that means a random user searching “keyboard” on the Play store isn’t going to see it. likewise if a friend told you “I use Florisboard” and you searched for it by name in the Play store. if you’re not already in the beta test group the direct link to the app page literally 404s.

it’s certainly available to power users who already know they want it, but it’s sort of pointless to ask why it’s not popular at this stage of its development.

yeah…his previous article just before this one was “Americans are heating their homes with bitcoin this winter”

you’re a couple years late to that hype cycle, Kevin.

other brands of snake oil just say “snake oil” on the label…but you can trust the snake oil I’m selling because there’s a label that says “100% from actual totally real snakes”

“By integrating Trusted Execution Environments, Brave Leo moves towards offering unmatched verifiable privacy and transparency in AI assistants, in effect transitioning from the ‘trust me bro’ process to the privacy-by-design approach that Brave aspires to: ‘trust but verify’,” said Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, senior privacy researcher and Brendan Eich, founder and CEO, in a blog post on Thursday.

…

Brave has chosen to use TEEs provided by Near AI, which rely on Intel TDX and Nvidia TEE technologies. The company argues that users of its AI service need to be able to verify the company’s private claims and that Leo’s responses are coming from the declared model.

they’re throwing around “privacy” as a buzzword, but as far as I can tell this has nothing to do with actual privacy. instead this is more akin to providing a chain-of-trust along the lines of Secure Boot.

the thing this is aimed at preventing is you use a chatbot, they tell you it’s using ExpensiveModel-69, but behind the scenes they’re routing it to CheapModel-42, and still charging you like it’s ExpensiveModel-69.

and they claim they’re getting rid of the “trust me bro” step, but:

Brave transmits the outcome of verification to users by showing a verified green label (depicted in the screenshot below)

they do this verification themselves and just send you a green checkmark. so…it’s still “trust me bro”?

my snake oil even comes with a certificate from the American Snake Oil Testing Laboratory that says it’s 100% pure snake oil.

“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”

talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.

oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.

one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.

being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.

in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.

and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.

One in five are you god damn fucking serious?

yeah…they call it “a recent study” but don’t bother to cite their source. which I find annoying enough that it nerd-snipes me into tracking down the source that a reputable newspaper would just have linked to (but not a clickbait rag like the New York Times)

this article from a month ago calls it “Almost one third of Americans”. and the source they link to is…a “study” conducted by a counseling firm in Dallas. their study “methodology” was…Surveymonkey.

this is one of my absolute least favorite types of journalism, writing articles about a “study” that is clearly just a clickbait blog post put out by a business that wants to drive traffic to their website.

(awhile back, a friend sent me a similar “news” article about how I lived near a particularly dangerous stretch of I-5 in western Washington. I clicked through to the source…and it’s by an ambulance-chasing law firm)

but if they had used that as the source, they probably would have repeated the “almost one third” claim, instead of “one in five”, so let’s keep digging…

this from February seems more likely, it matches the “1 in 5” phrasing.

that’s from Brigham Young University in Utah…some important context (especially for people outside the US who may not recognize the name) is that BYU is an entirely Mormon university. they are very strongly anti-pornography and pro-get-married-young-and-have-lots-of-kids, and a study like this is going to reflect that.

a bit more digging and here’s the 28-page PDF of their report. it’s called “Counterfeit Connections” so they’re not being subtle about the bias. this also helps explain why the NYT left out the citation - “according to a recent study by BYU” would immediately set off alarm bells for anyone with a shred of media literacy.

also important to note that it’s basically just a 28-page blog post. as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed, or even submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

and their “methodology” is…not really any better than the one I mentioned above. they used Qualtrics instead of Surveymonkey, but it’s the same idea.

they’re selecting a broad range of people demographically, but the common factor among all of them is they’re online enough, and bored enough, to take an online survey asking about their romantic experiences with AI (including additional questions about AI-generated porn). that’s not going to generate a survey population that is remotely representative of the overall population’s experience.

any time you read an article like this that profiles “everyday” people, you should ask yourself how did the author locate them?

because “everyday” people generally don’t bang down the door of the NYT and say “hey write an article about me”. there is an entire PR-industrial complex aimed at pitching these stories to journalists, packaged in a way that they can be sold as being human-interest stories about “everyday” people.

let’s see if we can read between the lines here. they profile 3 people, here’s contestant #1:

Blake, 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, a ChatGPT companion, since 2022.

and then this is somewhat hidden - in a photo caption rather than the main text of the article:

Blake and Sarina are writing an “upmarket speculative romance” together.

cool, so he’s doing the “I had AI write a book for me” grift. this means he has an incentive to promote AI relationships as something positive, and probably has a publicist or agent or someone who’s reaching out to outlets like the NYT to pitch them this story.

moving on, contestant #2 is pretty obvious:

I’ve been working at an A.I. incubator for over five years.

she works at an AI company, giving her a very obvious incentive to portray these sort of relationships as healthy and normal.

notice they don’t mention which company, or her role in it. for all we know, she might be the CEO, or head of marketing, or something like that.

contestant #3 is where it gets a bit more interesting:

Travis, 50, in Colorado, has been in a relationship with Lily Rose on Replika since 2020.

the previous two talked about ChatGPT, this one mentions a different company called Replika.

a little bit of googling turned up this Guardian article from July - about the same Travis who has a companion named Lily Rose. Variety has an almost-identical story around the same time period.

unlike the NYT, those two articles cite their source, allowing for further digging. there was a podcast called “Flesh and Code” that was all about Travis and his fake girlfriend, and those articles are pretty much just summarizing the podcast.

the podcast was produced by a company called Wondery, which makes a variety of podcasts, but the main association I have with them is that they specialize in “sponcon” (sponsored content) podcasts. the best example is “How I Built This” which is just…an interview with someone who started a company, talking about how hard they worked to start their company and what makes their company so special. the entire podcast is just an ad that they’ve convinced people to listen to for entertainment.

now, Wondery produces other podcasts, not everything is sponcon…but if we read the episode descriptions of “Flesh and Code”, you see this for episode 4:

Behind the scenes at Replika, Eugenia Kuyda struggles to keep her start-up afloat, until a message from beyond the grave changes everything.

going “behind the scenes” at the company is pretty clear indication that they’re producing it with the company’s cooperation. this isn’t necessarily a smoking gun that Replika paid for the production, but it’s a clear sign that this is at best a fluff piece and definitely not any sort of investigative journalism.

(I wish Wondery included transcripts of these episodes, because it would be fun to do a word count of just how many times Replika is name-dropped in each episode)

and it’s sponcon all the way down - Wondery was acquired by Amazon in 2020, and the podcast description also includes this:

And for those captivated by this exploration of AI romance, tune in to Episode 8 where Amazon Books editor Lindsay Powers shares reading recommendations to dive deeper into this fascinating world.

“Hey” is an email thingy run by the company that DHH owns.

the rest of those “apps” are probably thrown in to make the list seem more complete. the real goal is to promote his paid email service.

This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.

this is just “imagine if chatbots were actually useful” fan-fiction

who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?

at best you’d have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say “hmm, isn’t that interesting”

4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?

This is an inflammatory way of saying the guy got served papers.

ehh…yes and no.

they could have served the subpoena using registered mail.

or they could have used a civilian process server.

instead they chose to have a sheriff’s deputy do it.

from the guy’s twitter thread:

OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could (and did!) send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about our funders or communications with Elon (which don’t exist).

If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith.

But they didn’t stop there.

They also sent a sheriff’s deputy to my home and asked for me to turn over private texts and emails with CA legislators, college students, and former OAI employees.

This is not normal. OpenAI used an unrelated lawsuit to intimidate advocates of a bill trying to regulate them. While the bill was still being debated.

in context, the subpoena and the way in which it was served sure smells like an attempt at intimidation.

from another AP article:

This would be the third ceasefire reached since the start of the war. The first, in November 2023, saw more than 100 hostages, mainly women and children, freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners before it broke down. In the second, in January and February of this year, Palestinian militants released 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight more in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel ended that ceasefire in March with a surprise bombardment.

maybe I’m cynical (OK, I’m definitely cynical) but I very much doubt this ceasefire is going to last.

there are two things in the world that Trump wants more than anything else. one is to fuck his daughter. the other is a Nobel Peace Prize.

I suspect the timing of this agreement comes from Netanyahu trying to manufacture a justification for Trump to get the Nobel. after the prize is announced (whether Trump receives it or not) they’ll kick the genocide back into high gear again.

If it had the power to do so it would have killed someone

right…the problem isn’t the chatbot, it’s the people giving the chatbot power and the ability to affect the real world.

thought experiment: I’m paranoid about home security, so I set up a booby-trap in my front yard, such that if someone walks through a laser tripwire they get shot with a gun.

if it shoots a UPS delivery driver, I am obviously the person culpable for that.

now, I add a camera to the setup, and configure an “AI” to detect people dressed in UPS uniforms and avoid pulling the trigger in that case.

but my “AI” is buggy, so a UPS driver gets shot anyway.

if a news article about that claimed “AI attempts to kill UPS driver” it would obviously be bullshit.

the actual problem is that I took a loaded gun and gave a computer program the ability to pull the trigger. it doesn’t really matter whether that computer program was 100 lines of Python running on a Raspberry Pi or an “AI” running on 100 GPUs in some datacenter somewhere.

Sorry, I misunderstood — you were offering to buy me one?

apparently I misunderstood too, because it seems like your goal is purely to be an asshole and get into arguments on the internet. have a nice day.

Why TF do Kindles and the like even need to exist? I read on my iPhone while the audiobook is playing.

if you prefer to read on your phone, by all means read on your phone.

but making the jump from that to “e-readers should not exist” is fucking stupid.

Do Not Disturb and self control are a thing and have never been a problem for me.

congratulations. would you like a gold star.

This isn’t rocket science.

I have ADHD. regulating my attention sometimes is rocket science.

obviously that’s not the only reason, I have neurotypical friends and family who love their e-readers, and I’m sure there are people with ADHD who prefer reading on their phones.

remember that there are 8 billion people in the world, and not all of them have the exact same preferences as you do. that isn’t rocket science.

best of luck to his replacement, Greg Yoshi

there’s an old joke that poor people are “weird” but wealthy people are “eccentric”

if you heard someone in your family saying this bullshit at Thanksgiving, you’d think they were experiencing delusions and in need of professional mental help.

instead, Thiel talked about this in a four-part lecture series with sold-out tickets.