illegal solutions

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta fame posted a manifesto. He lays out an idea of a "future for everyone", although I don't think his group of everyone comprises those outside his tax bracket. The screed itself is too long and glazes over ideas that are inconvenient, as one might expect of a silicon valley bro archetype. It's almost certainly AI-generated, and thus should be discarded as half-thought-through slop, but let's give it the time of day. I'll break down particular pain points and how his…

Kalshi and Polymarket are the big names in the new sector of "prediction markets", and other established names like Robinhood and Crypto.com are getting in on it too. They claim to be the most accurate way to predict future outcomes, but what are they really? They very specifically avoid the language of "bet" due to legal implications, but that gets closer to the heart of what is happening here. Are people really trading futures about who will be the presidential nominee in 2028, or would it be…

In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. xAI gets to flout economic planning and restrictions that any normal group would have to follow, all for the sake of being able to get another fuckass data center built in record time. In the meantime, real people will…

In this article I'll share some of the things I found regarding the organization WorkMoney, who keeps serving me ads on Instagram about "protecting the PFD". It's not a particularly intensive search, mostly given the relative secrecy surrounding the internals of non-profit organizations. This group acts as a means of funneling dark money into a surface level "politically neutral" service which purports to just want to help the average American and serves to reinforce capitalist narratives. They…

This should be a pretty quick one all in all. I just wanted to explain how I have structured the site, and how I write these updates. For informational purposes and hopefully inspiring others to take the dive into just posting things.

>I am tortured in new and exciting ways by the latest developments in technology. Today, as a part of Google I/O, Google announced the "Universal Cart" and another push towards "agentic shopping", this time with backing from a large variety of retail partners. In this piece, I'll explore how shopping is another front of the culture war, AI continues to gild shit, and these developments push us towards new and awful futures.

CEO of Suno Mikey Shulmanwent on Training Data hosted by Sonya Huang, the podcasting arm of Sequoia Capital (which manages $56B in assets), to talk about how everyone can make music now thanks to their incredible product. I'll discuss in this article how Silicon Valley doesn't understand music or artistic creation, and how framing music in this way destroys any actual novelty or joy. Sorry for the length.