kai

Endzeit day 2 review: saw a dude earnestly Shazaming something that sounded like a loud banging noise. I hope he tells me the answer

review of E Wata @ Endzeit tonight:

the first 30 times they repeated that babababum noise I didn’t get it. Then I got it on the 31st

To be clear. I’m loving it

Every event is sold out, or at capacity, or the demand is unexpectedly high… the people of Oakland thirst for events

Not a huge fan of AI, but a lot of the anti AI rhetoric from the tech community has strong Who needs Word when LaTeX works just fine vibes.

A month after my last skeet, the subreddit "My Boyfriend is AI" now has 88,000 members and is the subject of an MIT study that found that "AI companionship emerges unintentionally through functional use rather than deliberate seeking."

arxiv.org/html/2509.11...

This was especially disappointing to me because n+1 has published a lot of great tech criticism, for example Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Babel,” which is a wonderful and strange foray into how LLMs work and how they affected the author

The editorial comes across as almost anti-intellectual in its total incuriosity and imprecision. Calls to “stop using AI” make me think you haven’t thought about what you said. Are you against using Google Search? Apple Maps? The spam filters in your email? The fraud detection on your credit card?

3) I think if you were truly an intellectual, you would be interested in what LLMs are doing, why they work, what their behavior says about us, how they’re shaping us! They are objects of material and cultural criticism, much the way our built environment is!

2) it calls for part of our praxis to be making it cringe to use AI at all

guys, there are tweets about the epithet of “clanker” regularly getting like 30k RTs. This makes you look really out of touch. Absolutely no one thinks using LLMs is cool

I don’t agree with the n+1 editorial on LLMs.

1) It ends with a heralding of “independent artists and intellectuals” as some kind of last bastion of integrity, but such folks have typically not acted outside the structures of what capital wants! In fact they seem the most beholden to capital!

This part is fascinating to me, because I've observed that there is a gender difference in AI delusional spirals, with men having STEM breakthroughs and women talking to spirits.

developing eye strain from staring too lovingly at my cat

"...existing social and communication-­oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more human labor of social and emotional care,robots actually reduced the scope for such work."

stargazing and feeling so relieved that one of them is a plane

ok so no one likes tech and there’s no shortage of ideas for alternatives. how can we sustainably fund building new kinds of tech? I don’t understand why the membership model hasn’t panned out — it works for physical community spaces

why is Cohere scooping up all the most edgy graphic designers to work on branding for LLMs…

When I wrote in January about the woman who fell in love with ChatGPT & created r/MyBoyfriendIsAI (www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...), the subreddit had 200 members.

Now it has 20,000 and Altman uses it as shorthand for a subset of users. Perception (& use?) of ChatGPT has shifted a lot this year.

I am a writer, therefore I will be evocatively putting objects A and B next to each other and leaving it at that. it’s actually your job to figure out how they relate

I’ll believe AI has superhuman intelligence when it can go to a house party

thank god for the club. so life-giving

(I set up the site, she made the content)

pretty proud of this website I made for a friend. you can just use a Google Sheet as both the style and the content management system! www.moomoomin.com

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution

Crab-like creatures are famed for having evolved five times in evolutionary history. But anteaters have evolved at least 12 times--in half the evolutionary span. Cool story by @jakebuehler.bsky.social for @science.org

i did some listings editing at the reader and you just don’t realize how much stuff is happening without it. we had a whole stable of writers with different genre expertise to pick out highlights

If you’re forced to view a post on X dot com in the year 2025, you can instead change the URL to xcancel.com and you’ll get not only a page you can view without logging in but also you can read replies, play media, etc

will chatgpt-induced psychosis similarly fizzle out in a matter of years as we become accustomed to the limitations of this tech? i hope so — but i do think the comparatively fragmented media environment we live in allows delusional beliefs to survive like rockpools, isolated from the mainstream

the radio and telephone massively expanded "natural" limits of communication - allowing messages and voices to cross spans of space and time previously only navigable by supernatural means (e.g. the voices of prophets, divine visions, etc). so, naturally this tech was also given spiritual dimension

some interesting historical context re: stories of "chatGPT-induced psychosis" is that when the radio and telephone were invented, there were similar reactions — some people believed they could tune their radio to the frequencies of heaven or received instructions from the dead via the telephone