Elizabeth Lopatto

I wrote about that — and other Catholic concerns — at my friend Rusty’s newsletter while he took the day off.

Verge favorite Matt Levine weighs in on the New Allbirds Thing. The financing is the crucial part — so some “institutional investor” is “essentially buying $50 million worth of stock at the old, defunct-sneaker-company price, and selling it at the new, AI-neocloud-company price,” maybe. Neocloud market looking frothy, imo.

I haven’t been keeping close track of the AI set’s various perversions — maybe they’re into chatbots, idk — but swinging, orgies, and open relationships were a major thing among the Gen X and older Millennial sets out here. Anyway, here’s an anonymous look back at sex in the Valley during the rise of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement that followed.

A long, and at times funny, report in The New Yorker on Altman’s will to power, people-pleasing, and alleged pattern of deceit, compiled from notes, memos, and more than 100 interviews. Altman’s reputation has given rise to grimmer rumors – hiring sex workers, the sexual pursuit of minors, even involvement in murder – that The New Yorker found no evidence for. Increasingly, the question is not whether computers are intelligent but whether OpenAI’s leadership is.

A fascinating profile on litigator Jay Edelson, a longtime tech adversary who’s been filing cases against OpenAI and Google over their LLMs. “Courts are fed up with these companies, and juries are kind of sick of big tech for doing a lot of damage to society,” Edelson says. Sam Altman has called him a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter,” and Edelson says Altman is “Lex Luthor.”

The abrupt closure of a tuition-free private school founded by Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, will dump extra students into a local school district, increasing expected enrollment by 20 percent.

Twenty-four days after lying his face off to Joe Rogan and whining about government censorship, Zuckerberg “proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.“ Siri, play my leitmotif.

Econ writer Kyla Scanlon notes that a lot of society’s current obsessions — peptide stacks, prediction markets, the manosphere — have all the hallmarks of people coping with feeling out of control. “The reason we can’t solve our problems is not lack of tools or information — it’s that the dominant method (add, optimize, measure) is the wrong method for the problem (figure out what’s poisoning you.)”