A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026

I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast where he talks about how proud he was of this phrase from his post: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth…”. He notes that someone online commented on that phrase, saying it sounded like a mix of classic literature and a line from The Simpsons. Amused, Cantrill says he came up with the line all by himself, so he knew it wasn’t a classic literature reference nor a line from The Simpsons. But just to be sure, he Google’d it: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth” with “The Simpsons” tagged on to the end. To his surprise, Google’s AI told him that the line was, in fact, a line from The Simpsons. Here’s Google’s response (as reported by Cantrill): During…

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