@theverge.spaceThe Allbirds pivot to… meme stock?
Verge favorite Matt Levine weighs in on the New Allbirds Thing. The financing is the crucial part — so some “institutional investor” is “essentially buying $50 million worth of stock at the old, defunct-sneaker-company price, and selling it at the new, AI-neocloud-company price,” maybe. Neocloud market looking frothy, imo.
Recently, someone asked me if Silicon Valley was still into weird sex stuff…
I haven’t been keeping close track of the AI set’s various perversions — maybe they’re into chatbots, idk — but swinging, orgies, and open relationships were a major thing among the Gen X and older Millennial sets out here. Anyway, here’s an anonymous look back at sex in the Valley during the rise of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement that followed.
To the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties— During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI
Sam Altman is “unconstrained by truth.”
A long, and at times funny, report in The New Yorker on Altman’s will to power, people-pleasing, and alleged pattern of deceit, compiled from notes, memos, and more than 100 interviews. Altman’s reputation has given rise to grimmer rumors – hiring sex workers, the sexual pursuit of minors, even involvement in murder – that The New Yorker found no evidence for. Increasingly, the question is not whether computers are intelligent but whether OpenAI’s leadership is.
“It’s ‘Fuck those guys.’”
A fascinating profile on litigator Jay Edelson, a longtime tech adversary who’s been filing cases against OpenAI and Google over their LLMs. “Courts are fed up with these companies, and juries are kind of sick of big tech for doing a lot of damage to society,” Edelson says. Sam Altman has called him a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter,” and Edelson says Altman is “Lex Luthor.”
Jay Edelson Made Facebook Pay. Now He’s Coming for Silicon Valley’s AI
“They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
The abrupt closure of a tuition-free private school founded by Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, will dump extra students into a local school district, increasing expected enrollment by 20 percent.
Now there’s a $70 million bond measure up for votes to help deal with the influx. The text of the measure says the closure created “an immediate crisis” for the school district.
Zuckerberg-funded school to close, creating ‘crisis’ for Bay Area district
Elon Musk is about to be a very busy boy!
I’m sure he’d call it ‘freaking epic.’
Mark Zuckerberg: constitutionally bitchmade.
Twenty-four days after lying his face off to Joe Rogan and whining about government censorship, Zuckerberg “proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.“ Siri, play my leitmotif.
Within the context of no control.
Econ writer Kyla Scanlon notes that a lot of society’s current obsessions — peptide stacks, prediction markets, the manosphere — have all the hallmarks of people coping with feeling out of control. “The reason we can’t solve our problems is not lack of tools or information — it’s that the dominant method (add, optimize, measure) is the wrong method for the problem (figure out what’s poisoning you.)”
“This man, whom we had happily drained of what little money he had before kicking him to the curb, had really never stood a chance in this life.”
A former employee of an online sportsbook writes about their experience. It’s not gambling that has been legalized — “what has been legalized is extraction, and the new methods of extraction that are possible using the internet and mobile devices. ” Read the whole thing to find out what got them to quit.
There are broadly speaking two types of gamblers: valuable and not valuable. All are referred to as customers. The latter group are dilettantes. These people deposit maybe once or twice, usually to take advantage of a first-time deposit promotion, but rarely or never again after that. Maybe they don’t care much for sports, or are turned…
What if insider trading is actually treason?
Hey, remember that weird trade The Financial Times highlighted? The one about oil? Paul Krugman doesn’t like it — nor does he like the weird Venezuela trade or the one about death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I’ve written here about how ill-prepared the CFTC is for insider trading cases. Krugman has a solution: call some of it treason and let the FBI — well, the post-Kash Patel FBI — sort it out.
