Russell Brandom

OpenAI and the race for AI-driven commerce | TechCrunch OpenAI now has all the pieces in place for AI-driven commerce, establishing ChatGPT as a place customers go to buy and retailers go to sell.

After OpenAI’s dev day, all the pieces are in place for AI-driven commerce techcrunch.com/2025/10/07/o...

They’re selling Labubus at the Grover Cleveland Memorial Truck Stop

Ultimately, Hard Boiled is a film about the corrupting power of jazz music

WHAT YOU FAIL TO SEE MR POPE

"In all our history, we have never tolerated an armed, masked secret police."

Supermarket Shaping Critics say Zohran Mamdani’s public grocery store proposal will never work. But Mamdani’s idea isn’t the problem—market consolidation is.

This is an interesting look at the public grocery store idea, but the problems it brings up — food deserts, regions dominated by a single provider — do not really exist in New York prospect.org/economy/2025...

Everybody and their mother is talking about AI, but how much of what people are saying is true? @russellbrandom.bsky.social joins @djrothkopf.bsky.social to cut through the misinformation to explain why so many people are getting AI so wrong. 
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...

youtu.be/xIp6TgYM9zw

Get the gang together — I’m planning a heist

It’s hard to look at this and think AI will make human coding obsolete any time soon — but then, almost all of the human work he's doing is mediated by an AI model.

This is Salva’s description of his development workflow — very AI heavy, but also integrated with human oversight at multiple levels

How Google’s dev tools manager makes AI coding work | TechCrunch Google PM Ryan Salva is responsible for tools like Gemini CLI, giving him a front-row seat to the ways AI tools are changing software development.

Today in @techcrunch, I talked with Google’s PM for developer tools Ryan Salva — and learned a ton about how AI-assisted coding works in practice techcrunch.com/2025/09/23/h...

Heavy metal band stage phony beheading of Elon Musk, murder Trump in shocking festival performance “That’s not edgy, it’s grotesque and reckless and normalizes violence against a real person,” one X user wrote.

smh... do better, Gwar nypost.com/2025/09/21/u...

Just make the popes kiss, that’s your answer to everything

But now we have a schism between the virtual pope and the “real” pope

When Mitski said, “I will go jogging routinely,” I felt that

This Is It Obedience and Support are the Same

"It is important to keep in mind that fear is a weapon." www.unpopularfront.news/p/this-is-it

they have to keep them on the ropes so they *don't* do Weapons

It seems like the California DFPI is using an AI-generated image as part of its crypto scam warning. Note the illegible writing on the ATM and surrounding packages.

it just seems like an odd moment to prioritize left vs. liberal infighting

I'm just trying to imagine an actual anti-fascist movement that succeeded by driving the wedge with liberals. What's the theory of change here? What becomes possible once you drive all the liberals out?

If your goal is to mobilize voters for the left, why does that path run through the NYT editorial page?

Even if you can get Klein to move left in his writing, how does that convert voters? Where is the theory of politics here?

I’m just baffled by everyone’s decision to focus on it. Is this where we should be directing our attention in this moment?

Truly, do you think Ezra Klein’s column makes any difference in how the purges play out?

Reblog by @anemonemimesis · 6 images 💬 56  🔁 53386  ❤️ 56711 · But the guiding principles of social justice are aimed at correcting and dismantling systems. Stop using them to dismantle people.

Another instancce of the trashed bathroom problem: www.tumblr.com/anemonemimes...

It is genuinely disheartening to see how much the online left has stayed focused on centrist media, as opposed to the actual conditions of the world.

Wow, unfollowing now -- I was a big fan of "capitalism" as an indie game genre; I didn't realize it was also a global force structuring all human interaction.

What’s really interesting about this idea is that it’s a bear case for foundation model companies, not a bear case for AI overall.

You don’t hear this line of thinking very much online, but you can bet the heads of the major companies are thinking about it.

What makes this plausible is that we’ve already seen diminishing returns from pre-training, with future progress probably coming from improvements in fine-tuning and RL. But foundation models have no inherent advantage there!

As one person I talked to put it, they’re stuck “selling coffee beans to Starbucks.” It’s a valuable industry, but they’re not in a lucrative part of it.