They have to at least have a plausible path to profitability. The serious investors have known for some time there isn’t one with AI. Just because the AI companies will never be profitable long term doesn’t mean there is no reason to invest in them short term. That’s what a speculative bubble is. Everyone believes the line will keep going up long enough for them to turn around and sell to a greater fool in the near future. And for the most part they’re right. The ultimate bag-holder ends up being the middle class worker and their auto-assigned 401k portfolio.

Preparations being made for the big day

Weeding the yard, one grass plant at a time

As others already said the people actually making the software all this time had little to no autonomy over what they are making.

At any big company even the head of an engineering department is subservient to the latest powerpoint brainfart decided upon in a weekly meeting of the marketing and sales teams, if it impresses the executives they’re going to say “can you make it do this” and the expected answer is “yes and it will take about this long to do”. And then go back to their desk and start figuring out how to make it work.

It works this way because we’re a steeply wealth-sorted society and software developer money doesn’t buy you into the “having a say in the direction of the tech industry” class, not by a long shot, and especially not in 2026. If it even puts you in the “ever going to be able to actally retire” class it’s because you were already hanging onto the bottom of the investor class by the skin of your 401k.

Protease?

With every sci-fi story that’s been written incorporated into its training data, an LLM chatbot roleplaying an ‘AI’ persona is going to mindlessly auto-complete the most likely next thing that happens right after humans hand over control of the important dangerous thing to AI and trust it to make life-and-death decisions. It doesn’t have to be actually intelligent to be dangerous, it just has to be more intelligent than the people who think it is intelligent- and in my opinion it’s already there.

I wish that were my reaction to this. Instead, it’s a “DUH. No shit.”

Don’t stay inside. Find the nearest place to where you live with a lot of trees and few people, and go there, and walk. It won’t cure it, but at least won’t make matters worse the way sitting being sad in your room will.

That’s why I decided to build my first online multi-player game as an offline single-player game, and just figure out how to add the networking stuff when everything else is done- an architectural choice I definitely won’t come to regret later…

Miyake event

Ackshuuully there’s no such thing as overpopulation or overconsumption or carrying capacity overshoot. Those are myths made up by ecofascists, a very real and very scary right-wing political movement. The obvious true solution is for the whole world to come together and agree to follow my preferred system of government (or absence thereof) and then there will be plenty of resources to go around for everybody and billions of humans can live sustainably ever after.

And if you say that’s unrealistic and won’t happen, it must be because you are a literal exterminist Nazi who hates life and wants to do eugenics by genociding everybody- especially the brown ones and the poor ones- even though you didn’t say that- but come on, we all know you were thinking it.

So be ashamed of yourself, you Nazi, and go away now so I can win this argument by default- before I’m forced to post the well supported counterargument which I totally have.

Well, the purpose of a first date is to find out if you both “initially like” each other, right? If so, there will be a second date; if not- not. So this sounds like a first-and-last date scenario, either way.

That means it’s an easy choice. I have to go with #1- no awkward burden of trying to get rid of her in a diplomatic way. No one is losing any sleep over why that weird boring guy they dated one time and didn’t like, never called back .

In reality though- dating isn’t a thing I do or would start doing. So not really qualified to advise on it.

I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Tunnel of Non-Communication

…But I do deny them my- essence.

Fetchez la vache!

Huh, how abot that- looks almost like the map I saw earlier today, of states where they let the schools beat your kids for you.

You are most likely to remember a dream you had right before you wake up, and you are sure to wake up right after a need-to-pee dream. So, the guys currently working on how to insert ads into your dreams think this one shows real promise as an exploitable dream ad template.