This is wild: essentially every LLM—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—keeps using the same character when asked to make up a story, a guy called 'Elias Thorne'. He appears so much it's impacting Google Trends data and the self-published book market. Now we might know why www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why

LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon bo...

404media.co

The current AI bubble is the product of a much longer legacy: the 20th century push for data-driven command-and-control systems under the banner of "cybernetics." It is more or less explicitly aimed at deskilling the masses while centralizing elite power. davidzmorris.substack.com/p/the-cybern...

👁️ The Cybernetic Disease

One impulse explains the last 50 years: Command, Control, Extract.

davidzmorris.substack.com

My royalties are calculated every six months. So the next few weeks would be a GREAT time to buy Stealing the future. To nudge you, I’ve made the preview of one of my favorite sections of the book free. It's about sharks, death, and the Apocalypse. davidzmorris.substack.com/p/the-physic...

🦈The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Rationalism Against Reason

Prophecy and Immortality are two sides of the same delusion.

davidzmorris.substack.com

I’m sorry i just nearly dropped my handheld while watching a reaction because WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS LINE FROM DRAKES ALBUM

On the strange case of Katie Lin. Lin was a scam victim who hired a fraudulent tracing service to find her money. The report pointed to Tornado Cash, and she testified in Roman Storm's trial on that basis. Then the fraudulent trace was unmasked. youtu.be/kB5b0hOBuNY?...

👁️ Video: Tornado Cash and Katie Lin

YouTube video by Dark Markets

youtu.be

The case against Roman Storm raises fundamental questions about freedom and privacy in the digital age. The trial was also marked by a bizarre tangle of procedural shenanigans. Most shocking may be the prosecution's mishandling of a witness named Hanfeng "Katie" Lin. (LIR)

New today at Dark Markets. "Dead Eyes: Sam Altman's Worldcoin, Revisited." davidzmorris.substack.com/p/dead-eyes-...

On these people’s insane beliefs about predicting the future with logic and reason etc, check out @davidzmorris.bsky.social’s book

I’ll be appearing with Wajahat Ali at 3pm today to talk about Palantir’s bizarre manifesto, Iran’s attacks on Data Centers, Sam Altman’s habitual lying … And why the OpenAI IPO might never happen. thelefthook.substack.com

The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali | Substack

A political, cultural, and intellectual playground for the rest of us with writer Wajahat Ali. Click to read The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscr...

thelefthook.substack.com

Consulting for a while has mostly been excellent, particularly working on messaging with the teams @HypurrFi, @spruceid and @HalbornSecurity. But my god, it's incredible how optional actually paying for services rendered apparently seems to lower-quality clients.

It’s finally happened. After 18 months. Finally, a media merger you can root for.

Twitter is down, but the one engineer whose passport they keep in a safe in Elon's empty office is working as hard as he can on it

The deal where Perplexity would pay Snap $400M to add their search to Snapchat is dead. This deal never made any sense as there was no way Perplexity could afford this deal and they get very little out of it.

Snap reportedly set for major layoffs as Perplexity deal falls apart - PiunikaWeb

Snap is set to announce layoffs that could cut 15–20% of its workforce, while the $400 million Perplexity deal has reportedly fallen apart entirely.

piunikaweb.com

Happy Jackie Robinson Day! “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.” Jackie Robinson, Stamford, Connecticut 1972

A lot of my readers these days are not crypto natives. So today's Dark Markets is a normie rundown of the hilarious feud between @justinsuntron and @worldlibertyfi. For a crypto fraud watcher, this is basically the Superbowl. davidzmorris.substack.com/p/how-the-tr...

👁️ How the Trumps Scammed Crypto's Dumbest Scammer: Justin Sun and $WLFI

As a great man once said of far more impressive creatures: Let Them Fight.

davidzmorris.substack.com

CEOs when the CFO suggests blaming the layoffs on AI instead of the economy or declining sales.

A point I almost never see made: If we get rid of just a few of the billionaires, we'll get a whole lot more millionaires.

Humanity did that. Science did that. Publicly-funded research did that. Excellent universities did that. Diversity did that. International cooperation did that. Artemis II is a perfect example of what we can do at our best. Welcome home, Integrity crew!

“True story. I was at a public meeting a few weeks ago and went slightly over my speaking time and got thrown in the slammer there in China, I mean Rogers county,” Blanchard shared at another public event. Here's what went down: www.404media.co/farmer-arres...

It’s wild that the biggest threat to world peace and the global economy is the president of the United States of America.

The Great AI Leap Forward draws parallels between the corporate rush to adopt AI and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It laments people building with AI without knowing how to use evals or the domain knowledge to vet the results. Creating value for customers falls by the wayside to chase AI adoption goals

After two weeks of digging, I think there's a verrrrrrry real possibility that OpenAI's planned IPO for late 2026 crashes and burns. A few points: - OpenAI's $122b raise was co-led by Softbank and Masayoshi Son - the same guy who told WeWork's Adam Neumann that he "wasn't crazy enough." 🧵follows

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵 (1/5) www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

EFF is Leaving X

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.

eff.org

@davidzmorris.bsky.social on the "scary parallels" between OpenAI and WeWork. What part of this #AIBubble story also applies to Anthropic, CoreWeave, and other major AI players with no strategy other than repeating the very dubious narrative about the world-changing properties of LLMs?

OpenAI is Just WeWork With Extra Steps

It's the same picture.

substack.com

People who say gambling makes things more fun have never truly committed themselves to standing on the sidelines, making fun of the people gambling

Tesla getting nuked by a JPMorgan analyst report would objectively be the funniest possible outcome Therefore . . .

JUST IN: JPMorgan warns Tesla could drop 60%, giving TSLA a sell rating with a $145 price target after Tesla missed Q1 deliveries by 7,600 units and built a 50,000-unit inventory surplus.

Ever wonder how to get rid of a mattress? Or how to find resources for a neighbor in need? Call 311.    311 is contacted 100,000 times every day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. No call is too small.    So on the anniversary of 311 (3/11), I decided to answer some of those calls myself.

Y'all there is a woman and a black man circling the moon and NASA's mission control+ science teams are so diverse and people are nerding out about science and exploration this is all a gigantic middle finger to the stupid and hate and grotesque ghouls running our country

Enjoying @davidzmorris.bsky.social’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried & the philosophy he used to justify his scams and that still today motivates a lot of both crypto and AI proponents. In short, they think they’re philosopher kings who can predict the future with math and logic, and that democracy is bad