The Future is Stupid

@stupidfuture.bsky.social

209 Followers 894 Following

A man filled with the gladness of living. Ecosocialist and Luddite. ✉ stupidfuture@proton.me

Epic handshake meme Left hand: entertaining toddlers Right hand: social media engagement Handshake: deliberately getting something slightly wrong
4. Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.
The Economist: If that feels icky, what the bankers are telling investors about SpaceX’s business is cringe. Goldman Sachs is said to expect revenue from SpaceX’s xAI division, today an also-ran in the artificial-intelligence race, to surge from $3bn in 2025 to $322bn in 2030. Morgan Stanley apparently thinks that by 2040 SpaceX could be raking in $3.4trn in sales and $2.7trn in operating profit (before depreciation and amortisation), respectively up from $19bn and $7bn last year.
futurism.com It’s part of a much broader breakdown in trust when it comes to handing over high-risk tasks to AI. “Another implication is that, now that we know an AI can say ‘I see evidence of malignant melanoma on your skin’ without even having access to any images, how much can we trust it when it says the same while actually seeing the image?”
The New York Times JD Vance says the Pope should be more careful when talking about theology
ChatGPT-[version redacted]” is a non-transparent proprietary product created with corporate biases, through exploitative labour practices, violating authorship rights, and having known psychological, societal, and environmental harmful impact. Moreover, notwithstanding the hype that OpenAI has been fuelling, a product like ChatGPT cannot [redacted], because [redacted] is a cognitive capacity, and the product has none. All in all, the use of ChatGPT for scientific purposes, in my honest opinion, clashes with core scientific integrity principles such as honesty, scrupulousness, transparency, responsibility, and independence.
Trump and the Easter bunny
Map the World by Bilawal Sidhu I Built a Spy Satellite Simulator in a Browser. Here's What I Learned. How a weekend project got the attention of Palantir's co-founder. Bilawal Sidhu Feb 24, 2026
Two posts appearing chronologically next to each other on the timeline The first, by Pop Base, announces "Twitter/X is currently down" The second, by Erika Lee Sears, is an oil painting of a person seated and resting their head on their arm in a gesture of exhaustion, but giving a thumbs up sign with their other arm
Post by David Roberts (@volts.wtf) I am the anti-Stancil in that I *love* blocking you fuckers. I go to Stancil threads just to find new people to block! I mention AI just to attract new people to block! Gavin Newsom! AI! Campaigning with Liz Cheney! Boogabooga! C'mon over. Get blocked.
Two stills from Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997) Upper portion of image: Rose (Kate Winslett) and Jack (Leonardo di Caprio) in the scene where Jack dies before Rose is rescued and goes on to survive. Rose is labeled "Humanity" and Jack is labeled "Nature". Lower portion of image: an elderly couple, Ida Straus (Elsa Raven) and Isidor Straus (Lew Palter) face death together, lying in each other's arms as the ship sinks and water floods their cabin. Together they are labeled "Humanity" and "Nature". The upper portion of the image depicting Rose as "humanity" and Jack as "nature" is captioned "This is not possible" The lower portion of the image depicting the Straus couple as both "humanity" and "nature" is captioned "But this is"
Photo shows components from the board game "Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right" by Cole Fehrle, Kyle Ferrin and Leder Games Four small green wooden mice stand on a Woodland Alliance player board, near a number of tokens displaying a raised green fist
"All of these exercises, no matter how ingenious, involve going into the same room, sitting in the same place, staring at a screen... It's a remarkable reduction in the quality and quantity of human experience."
Cosmic Encounter cover art. A bipedal alien being mind-controlled by a crab-like parasitic alien on its head
Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games. Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just *one* ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win *two* keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these *gigantic* teddybears." Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if *that* dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat. Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything:
Inclusion of butter in UK recipe for cacio e pepe draws outrage from Italian media Roman restaurant association ‘astonished’ to see four ingredients, not three, listed on Good Food website
In comments echoing those made by US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in 1996, warning of "irrational exuberance" in the market during the dotcom boom and well ahead of that market crashing in 2000, Mr Pichai said the industry can "overshoot" in investment cycles like this. "We can look back at the internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound," he said. "I expect AI to be the same. So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."
Epstein’s emails and texts are also a who’s who of far-right personalities. Aside from Bannon, The Telegraph reported Epstein was in contact with someone in the inner circle of notorious white nationalist British soccer hooligan Tommy Robinson. And in 2018, days after Trump associates Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort were both found guilty of financial crimes, Epstein mused in a text to an unknown recipient that he could reach out to Fox News’ Sean Hannity to stage an “intervention.” He also spent the summer of 2018 texting with an unknown recipient about putting pressure on then-Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner, writing, “Is there any way you can mediate the difference with Jared? He is s0000 outclassed by you, it’s like child abuse.” Getting any of this out to the public meaningfully, though, has been difficult. Publications around the world are racing to report out what they can from the House Oversight Committee’s data dump, but “news,” as we used to think of it, no longer exists within the barriers of an article and is now experienced almost entirely as fragments shared by whatever accounts happen to go viral on whatever app you happen to have open as that news is breaking. And only one of these fragments has been able to climb the attention economy to the top of digital platforms and even Saturday Night Live. And, of course, it’s the rumor Trump was photographed giving oral sex to Clinton.
I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money. And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave. And to what end? In a kind of nihilistic symmetry, their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the life of those who use it as well as those who turn the gears. What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.
An AI bro with seemingly zero self awareness whining on X about someone using a prompt he thinks he created, calling it "passing off someone else's work as your own"
Jeffrey, I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons but I'm so disgusted by the outrage over "grab them by the pussy" that I may give him my sympathy vote. I'm sure Bill C said things, too. Andres
A still from the TV show "Community", showing actor Ken Jeong as Ben Chang. A subtitle reads "stapler". This refers to the plot of episode 3, season 3. In that episode, the audience can hear the internal monologue of Chang, who has deluded himself into believing he is a detective, as he connects many random items to unconnected events of which he himself is the actual cause.
A still from the TV show "Community", showing actor Ken Jeong as Ben Chang. A subtitle reads "stapler". This refers to the plot of episode 3, season 3. In that episode, the audience can hear the internal monologue of Chang, who has deluded himself into believing he is a detective, as he connects many random items to unconnected events of which he himself is the actual cause.
CHATGPT: I understand where you're coming from. You worked really hard to get here, and now it's time to enjoy the fruit of your labors. ISILDUR: So I should keep it? Elrond says I shouldn't CHATGPT: The ring is precious. Sometimes friends don't have your best interests at heart. ISILDUR: true
In our conversation, Skrenta downplayed the importance of any particular newspaper or magazine. He told me that The Atlantic is not a crucial part of the internet. “Whatever you’re saying, other people are saying too, on other sites,” he said. Throughout our conversation, Skrenta gave the impression of having little respect for (or understanding of) how original reporting works. Skrenta did, however, express tremendous reverence for Common Crawl’s archive. He sees it as a record of our civilization’s achievements. He told me he wants to “put it on a crystal cube and stick it on the moon,” so that “if the Earth blows up,” aliens might be able to reconstruct our history. “The Economist and The Atlantic will not be on that cube,” he told me. “Your article will not be on that cube. This article.”
How do you feel about it now? Oh, I love it. Now, everything else to me—and I'm not talking down on anybody else's stuff, I still love a lot of other vehicles out there—but everything else, to me, those soft lines and everything, it all kind of blends together. And the Cybertruck obviously stands out. I mean, we take the trailer out a lot, and I can go to a campground and there's 50 kids that come out: “Cybertruck, Cybertruck, Cybertruck.” I carry little toys inside the frunk so I can pass them out and give them to kids, and they love it. It's a lot of fun. Anything you don’t like about it? I can't really see the front out of the windshield because it’s so long.