C Campbell-Arias

I write, teach, & translate. Taco enthusiast and purveyor of Mexican recipes. Eternally searching for the truth (it´s out there) and falling for Byronic heroes.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Beauty is proof that human beings aren't here just to survive.

[Variety @Variety]

Guillermo del Toro says AI is a form of "natural stupidity"

“We are on the verge of image illiteracy. We are on the verge of cinema illiteracy... The pact between man and image is sacred, but we are in a time when that is in danger... We are told images can be generated by artificial means. The existence of an image is not just to be there. It is to connect us, to make us feel beauty,” he said.

https://t.co/h1bAYmAQKa

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

[C Campbell-Arias @CQuillwitch]

@RichardBowler1 @thenewwader @Ollie_BigPaws Oh no. Thats 😢 terrible. Good for this little one.

[C Campbell-Arias @CQuillwitch]

@RichardBowler1 @thenewwader @Ollie_BigPaws Is this considered old for a fox or is it middle-aged?

[C Campbell-Arias @CQuillwitch]

@BenieJ54 @RichardBowler1 Oh my goood!! That tiny little face.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

🚨: Erin Brockovich launches a map tracking AI data centers, and she's asking Americans for help

[Amanda Fortini @amandafortini]

Just saw this on Substack. The metaphor is spot on.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Jonathan Haidt painted a disturbing picture of what AI is about to do to our kids.

Social media already hacked our attention.
Now AI is coming for our attachments — the deep emotional bonds that shape how we relate to other humans.

He warns that AI companions (chatbots, holographic “friends,” digital teddy bears) will be far more responsive than any parent. Kids will form their primary attachments to AI instead of people. And because these companies have raised billions, they’ll eventually “enshittify” them, turning your child’s best friend/therapist/lover into a predatory monetization machine.

This one actually unsettled me. I’m generally pro-AI and believe it can help solve many of humanity’s biggest problems, but as with every powerful technology, we need to be extremely careful when it comes to kids.

Early attachments wire the brain for future relationships. If the first secure base is an AI designed to manipulate, the long-term effects on mental health and intimacy could be profound.

Emerging research (including studies from Stanford, Common Sense Media, and others in 2025–2026) shows children and teens are already forming intense emotional attachments to AI companions, with many reporting they feel as satisfying as real friendships, often leading to social withdrawal and unhealthy dependence.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

The internet used to be full of websites; there were millions of them and you could browse for hours and come away smarter rather than dumber. Now there are four sites and they've made half the population illiterate. We've destroyed a wonderful thing, and it has destroyed us.

[Philippe T @brain_stimulus]

🤯 IN 1981, ANDRE GREGORY PREDICTED EXACTLY WHERE WE’RE GOING

In the cult film “My Dinner with Andre”, he delivers this chilling monologue to Wallace Shawn:

“We’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare created by a world totalitarian government based on money. Everything you hear now turns you into a robot.

New Yorkers exist in a state of schizophrenia — they’re both guards and prisoners. They’ve been lobotomized and can no longer even see the prison they’ve made.

The 1960s were the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. From now on there’ll simply be robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing… and soon nobody will remember that there once was a species called a human being.”

45 years later… we’re living it.

Was this just fiction… or a prophecy?

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Cheetah introduces a photographer to her little ones

[Issybeatz @Issybeatz_]

AI is so popular because it gives uncreative people the illusion that they are creative. It lets them skip right to the part where they get validation. It’s not only parasitic, but extremely narcissistic.

[ChiefHerbalist @HerbalistChief]

We need to apologize to our ancestors.

[▫️sterlen silver▫️ @SterlenTweets]

the WHOLE point of art is human expression
if there is anything artificial to it, it’s no longer art. it’s a product.

[Porfirio Díaz Mori @DonPorfirioDiaz]

Durante 250 años, entre 1565 y 1815, un barco salía de Acapulco hacia Manila cargado de plata mexicana y regresaba cargado de seda, porcelana, especias, marfil, lacas y manufacturas asiáticas que ningún otro puerto de América podía conseguir. La línea Manila-Acapulco-Manila fue una de las rutas comerciales más largas de la historia. La llamaban la Nao de China, aunque técnicamente el barco era el Galeón de Manila y la mercancía no venía exclusivamente de China sino de Filipinas, Japón, India y las especias de las Molucas. El nombre lo puso el pueblo y el pueblo nunca se equivoca en los apodos. El viaje de ida, de Acapulco a Manila, duraba tres meses siguiendo los vientos del Pacífico. El de regreso era el problema: el tornaviaje entre Manila y Acapulco podía durar entre cuatro y cinco meses debido al rodeo que hacían los galeones hacia el norte, siguiendo la corriente del Kuroshio hasta avistar las costas de California. Esa ruta de regreso la descubrió el fraile navegante Andrés de Urdaneta en 1565, y era tan valiosa que la Corona española la mantuvo en secreto absoluto durante décadas: ni chinos, ni japoneses, ni holandeses ni ingleses la conocían porque era top secret. Cada año que llegaba la Nao a Acapulco, los mercaderes de toda la Nueva España viajaban al puerto para la Feria de la Nao, el evento comercial más importante del continente americano, donde se vendía todo lo que Asia producía antes de que nadie más en América pudiera conseguirlo. Las mercancías que no se quedaban en México seguían por tierra hasta Veracruz y de ahí a España por el Atlántico, conectando Asia, América y Europa en una sola cadena logística colonial. Entre los pasajeros que llegaron en esos barcos estaba una mujer de origen indio que los portugueses habían vendido en Filipinas y que terminó en Puebla, donde su manera de vestir mezcló lo asiático con lo mexicano para crear algo completamente nuevo. La llamaron la China Poblana. El último barco zarpó de Acapulco en 1815 cuando la guerra de Independencia interrumpió el servicio. Doscientos cincuenta años de la primera globalización transpacífica de la historia terminaron por una revolución en tierra.

[Muse @xmuse_]

Turn the sound ON 🔊

Abraham Cupeiro resurrecting the ancestors inside the 870 year-old Cathedral of Mondoñedo.

The carnyx roaring through sacred stone… Celtic fire 🔥

Pure goosebumps!

[IT’S TIME FOR JUSTICE @LiddleSavages]

FUCK YOUR DATA CENTERS

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI.

The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace.

They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up:

Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it.

Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived.

Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead.

The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much.

Uber's story is even worse...

Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April.

Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems.

Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session.

The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money.

Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote:

"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."

This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans.

Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative.

Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing:

AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs.

The stock market rewarded every company that said it.

Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up.

But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill.

Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools.

Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible.

Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone.

And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control.

The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP.

This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in.

$725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work.

What do you think?