The most likely explanation for this doomerism, based on what we've actually seen with AI, is that the current tech has already started to hit fundamental walls where the frontier models are not growing fast enough to outpace the open source open weights models, and the leaders are panicking that the game is about to be called.

The second most likely is that the financial ticking time bomb is now a lot further ahead of the actual state of these companies and the value they can bring.

The least likely IMO is that they're actually closing in on anything resembling AGI.

If we had impending AGI this bad, I think we'd have seen at least one meaningful literal coup attempt in the US or China by a bunch of high ranking military officers if the officer corps genuinely had classified info (and I do think the military and IC would have it) showing Anthropic or OpenAI was being quite serious about how far along the tech is and how dangerous it is.

The biggest threat to the crypto industry always has been being coopted by the main financial sector, and that's happening. Every major firm is working on blockchain projects that do real things on chain and working out regulatory compliance and interoperability like professionals.

All it takes is a few accessible, programmable chains being used at scale by the financial sector, and it's game over for 99% of crypto. There's no need to use some rando crypto to power a software use case when you can take 5 minutes to use AI to wire up a connector that lets you send and receive stable coins at near ACH transfer prices to any bank in the world.

That's the future coming for crypto, and why only idiots are bullish on Bitcoin or any other "digital asset."

WordPress is basically designed, last I checked, to be entirely dependent on WordPress.org's infrastructure. That infrastructure is Matt's petty little fiefdom. That's how updates, plugins, themes, etc. are normally delivered to the users.

This is why WordPress should have created a real governance board a long time ago or formally submitted to the ASF or CNCF so that there'd be adults in the room who could punt someone like Matt if he decided to weaponize the FOSS infrastructure to punish a commercial rival.

This isn't even a license problem or anything like that. It's a simple case of one man who has way too much leverage over the entire ecosystem of a major FOSS project.

The SCOTUS should have directed the Treasury to require companies applying to submit reasonable evidence that they did not pass the costs onto their customers before paying them.

The warrant issue should revolve around one question: what is the likely, foreseeable outcome of having to wait for a judge to sign off on a warrant. It's low risk to get a warrant to pursue a typical car thief. It's unacceptably high risk to make law enforcement wait if the request is based around an Amber Alert or a suspect who is armed and dangerous and just fled the scene of a violent felony.

Traditionally, we've all been skeptical of the CFAA being applied to ToS violations, but I think there is a reasonable case to be made for a carve out to reform the CFAA to make it a crime to attach a bot that posts to a web site after their ToS prohibits writing.

Reading should still be a civil tort unless a scraper continuously imposes real costs or outages, but I think it would be very beneficial to establish a clear line that it absolutely can be a misdemeanor or even a felony to attach bots who write data when the ToS forbids that.

The science around addiction is much more advanced in 2026 than it was when many of us were kids and teens. Companies are much better at designing things in a way meant to artificially stimulate dopamine and things like that well above and beyond what normies can handle.

There is also a distinct difference between this sort of behavior and just selling something that is commonly known to be literally addicting like booze and drugs. Risking an addiction, with something known to be highly addicting, is different than just using software and finding out it was deliberately designed with dark patterns to trigger addiction in the average user.

Palmer Luckey explained it well in this interview. In any real war, we'll have to outsource a lot of production of weapons to our automotive sector like we did in WWII. The MIC is FUBAR that they're talking literal years before we can replace the interceptors we've spammed on Russia and Iran. In a real war with China, we'd need to replace that in a few weeks.

If Musk is correct, Altman carried out probably the worst case of fraud against a non-profit and its donors in American history. If he has a case, we should all hope Musk not only flays Altman's finances alive in court, but gets something rolling where Altman faces serious criminal charges for doing a bait-and-switch.

Their "but but security" arguments were atrociously insulting to intelligence. The vast majority of even government and corporate employees will never face an issue where there is a justification for "protecting them" from someone disassembling an iPhone and sneaking compromised components into the device. Those that have to worry about that have entire corporate and government security departments focused on actively providing countermeasures to ensure the employee doesn't create an opening into the infrastructure when they're abroad.

$54B to traditional MIC companies is a hard sell. They should instead drop a few billion in purchases and R&D grants on Anduril to see if they can really scale up as hoped. Anduril's approach is a lot more like China and Iran where they don't rely on fancy Western style MIC manufacturing and build platforms that are designed to be constructed with civilian manufacturing facilities.

That's why Iran is such a menace to Ukraine, Israel and the US. They can build loads of dirt cheap suicide drones that are plenty good enough to soak up our interceptors and swarm on our installations afterward.

A loot box may have nothing.

A quick search on Google and Gemini responded that you're wrong on this with Valve games. They always have give an item to the buyer.

I bought a ton of collectible cards when I was in middle school. I lost track of the number of times the value of the cards was worth even as much as the price paid for the pack.

Loot boxes are the same dynamic as long as they give something of intrinsic value in the game.

By the logic used by both the AG and this firm, every collectible card system is also gambling.

That includes baseball cards that my '46 Boomer dad grew up collecting.

Valve should mock the crap out of this buy just buying a collection of MTG, Pokemon, baseball cards, Marvel trading cards and random blind bags from 5 and Below, toss them at the jury and say "is this gambling too?"

Sony and Nintendo both had to increase the costs of their consoles once already, and Nintendo is warning that the Switch 2 might have to go up again because the memory situation is getting that bad.

On a grand scale, my gut says that China is doing to us with AI what we did with military spending to the USSR. The way these companies are inefficiently using capital is insane, but what's even crazier is how no one in the financial sector or government is willing to say "you're drunk, go home."

The one saving grace in all of this is that Tesla is dog-fooding their own AI chips, and Musk has hinted that they might declare war on Nvidia in the nearish future. Allegedly, their chips are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia's because they're specifically designed for AI workloads, particularly in embedded systems like cars and satellites (SpaceX is a fast growing private customer of Tesla here). That could end up shaking up a lot of things if it works out.