We’re already seeing some of the less circumspect fash call this their Reichstag Fire.

Even if we had the shooter may have just been looking for something heavy enough to brace against for the shot. You can’t exactly carry a set of encyclopedias up to the top of the book depository or wherever without attracting attention.

I mean, I try not to go full conspiratorial everything-is-a-false-fllag, but the fact that the biggest AI company that has been explicitly trying to create AGI isn’t getting the business here is incredibly suspect. On the other hand, though, it feels like anything that publicly leans into the fears of evil computer God would be a self-own when they’re in the middle of trying to completely ditch the “for the good of humanity, not just immediate profits” part of their organization.

I feel like he’s also broadly misunderstood the actual armchair diagnosis from over here. Like, no acknowledgement of claims that he’s stuck in a broken and obviously false framing of the entire world as “popular jocks” vs “put-up on nerds” and seems to match literally any conflict into that model to often horrifying results. Even though that was the main thrust of the actual “diagnosis” that he referenced.

Past a certain point I think anyone who doesn’t agree with and support him has been fully excluded from the circle of people who can actually get through to him and help. Unfortunately, he’s still a public figure, leaving the rest of us with little to do beyond sneering.

Green and blue are canonical because they tend to have strong contrast with the people and their clothes, so the cromakey isn’t likely to pick up random bits of people’s face and outfit to cut out. If you want to go for the green cardboard option I would just make sure you get as consistent a color as possible and see about finding a cheap light and/or reflector to put behind you so that it doesn’t get obscured by your shadow. Definitely had that happen in a couple of student projects I did and it was impossible to set it up to be an aggressive enough match to always get the board (including the shadowed parts) without also picking up the lining of someone’s jacket or something.

On a purely strategic level I think it’s worth acknowledging that openAI has a very specific goal and counternarrative here. Scientology’s incredibly broad attacks on even Australian randos that nobody cared about was a strong signal that they didn’t actually have a goal beyond hurting people, but I think Altman and friends do. There are reasons why he’s not targeting DAIR, for example. Or you (yet). They’re going very specifically for the people interfering in their attempt to unravel their absurd corporate structure into something that investors are willing to keep pumping money into, and trying, ironically, to paint them as compromised by big money. They’re not going for blanket defamation claims or anything so blatant.

Honestly I’m a little surprised that Zitron hasn’t gotten flak, given his focus on the financials and how important this transition is for the continued existence of OpenAI as a business. But then as I think about it I guess they haven’t been targeting journalists or commentators, just actual parties to the suit. If it starts going badly I wonder if they’ll expand the legal threats.

I mean the AGI part is basically magic. If LLMs aren’t actually the way to build it then it doesn’t change the underlying belief any more than the failure of expert systems or cybercyn or whatever else.

It’s really only a matter of time before we get an assassination via bluetooth-enabled pacemaker or something, and it’s going to be hell.

It is a city that looked at Gritty with deep skepticism until they realized how much everyone else hated him, at which point he was elected mayor for life I think? Iconic.

Others were alarmed and advocated internally against scaling large language models. But these were not AGI safety researchers, but critical AI researchers, like Dr. Timnit Gebru.

Here we see rationalists approaching dangerously close to self-awareness and recognizing their whole concept of “AI safety” as marketing copy.

I don’t think it’s a resource exhaustion attack as much as a combination of legitimate paranoia (the consequence of a worldview where only billionaires are capable of actual agency) and attempt to impose that on reality by reverse-astroturfing any opposition by tying it to other billionaire AI bros.

The blatant covering for the confabulated zip code is some peak boosterism. It knows what an address looks like and that some kind of postal code has to go there, and while it was pretty close I would still expect that to get returned to sender. Pretty close isn’t good enough.

I can’t help but feel like no matter how well-intentioned the actual recommendations (i.e. listen to your people when they tell you the AI is shit) this headline is going to be used to justify canning anyone who isn’t sufficiently on board with wherever the C-suite wants to go. Even the generous (read: accurate) example of the historical luddites could be used to tar people as saboteurs and enemies of progress, which would give a callous executive license to do the things they want to do anyways to try and increase profits.

This bubble can’t pop soon enough, before anyone is truly reliant on the base LLMs operated directly by OpenAI and other bottomless money pits.

The DEWR “continues to investigate these claims and has sought urgent advice from Deloitte on these matters”.

Pain. I am experiencing pain. Physical, mental, and spiritual pain. Oof. Ow. My soul.

This is a very good story to boost because it’s one of the most straightforward replacements for a human worker. Like, there’s no fig leaf of “creating tools to enable software developers to-” on it. That means that it’s failures directly undercut the story of how these systems become at all profitable, which is the kind of thing that’s going to actually hurt the bubble.

For all that user error can be a real thing it also gets used as a thought-terminating cliche by engineer types. This is a tendency that industry absolutely exploits to justify not only AI grifts but badly designed products.

…yet.

I mean, it’s a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-don’t-ask-about-the-racism vibes I’m not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who don’t know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.

So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I’m going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual “imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least” school of design. They’ve confirmed that they’re not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that’s all good. That’s not what I want to talk about.

No, what’s grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative “antiwoke” backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn’t a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can’t think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.

Thanks for the clarification. I had definitely assumed that he meant some kind of God-AI-level attack that revolved around live editing the data or state in RAM or something.