Michael

Data analyst, tabletop gamer and tidsoptimist.

[(Stephanie) Slade @sladesr]

Congratulations, Twitter is good again.

[theselongwars @theselongwars_]

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

[Neil Watson-Slorance @neilslorance]

Shocked by how much he got humped in Baillieston.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

Elon Musk is the Ivar Kreuger of our time, and the OpenAI trial is PROVING it in real time.

If you don't know who Kreuger was, you should:

In the 1920s he was the most admired businessman in the world. The "Match King."

He controlled 90% of global match production, lent money to sovereign governments, and his securities were the most widely held in America.

But after his death in 1932, auditors spent 5 years untangling over 400 subsidiary companies and discovered the whole thing was held together with fictitious assets, forged bonds, and the unquestioning loyalty of people too dazzled to ask questions.

Investors lost $750 million (~$17 billion in today's money). His deficits exceeded Sweden's national debt.

Doesn't this sound familiar?

The Musk playbook is the most DANGEROUS house of cards I've witnessed in my career.

This week in federal court, Musk took the stand to argue that Sam Altman stole a charity. 3 days later he'd contradicted himself under oath so many times that the judge told his lawyers she suspected plenty of people don't want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands.

OpenAI's attorney asked if Tesla is pursuing AGI. Musk said no. The attorney then pulled up Musk's OWN post from March 4 where he wrote Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI.

His own words entered into evidence against him. BY HIM.

Then the attorney asked if xAI used OpenAI's models to train Grok (which violates OpenAI's terms of service).

Musk called it a general practice among AI companies. Pressed for a direct answer, he said "partly."

Think about that: Musk is in court accusing OpenAI of betrayal while admitting under oath that xAI violated the very same company's terms of service to build Grok.

Then came the credibility test:

Musk was asked to name his companies that benefit society. He listed Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X without hesitation. Every one of them is an uncapped for-profit enterprise.

Then why did xAI start as a benefit corporation and quietly flip to a for-profit C-corp? No clean answer.

This is someone who repeatedly launches entities with noble-sounding charters and converts them into for-profit corporations once the money gets serious.

Then his money manager Jared Birchall took the stand:

OpenAI's lawyer asked about the donor-advised funds at Vanguard and Fidelity that Musk used to send his $38 million. Did Musk have any legal right to direct where the money went once it entered the DAF?

Birchall couldn't answer. Said the legal question was beyond his expertise.

The entire lawsuit hinges on that donation creating enforceable obligations. But the man who managed Musk's money just told a federal jury he can't confirm Musk had any enforceable claim over those funds.

Now step back...

This is a man who promised full autonomy by 2018, a million robotaxis by 2020, and unsupervised FSD by June 2025.

EVERY deadline was missed.

He claimed he invested $100 million in OpenAI. The real number was $38 million. His defense? His "reputation" made up the difference.

Kreuger had 400 subsidiaries and used one entity to prop up another through structures nobody could follow. Musk has Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and X.

He shifts AI talent from Tesla to xAI, has xAI building the brains for Tesla's Optimus robot, and uses X as a megaphone while the algorithm amplifies his narrative to 200 million followers.

Kreuger's investors trusted the man, NOT the math.

They loved the confidence. They stopped asking questions because the aura of genius made questioning feel foolish.

The same psychology applies to Musk's empire today.

Kreuger's reckoning took 5 years of forensic auditing after his death. But Musk is providing his in REAL TIME: contradicting his own posts under oath, admitting to the practices he's suing others for, watching his logic collapse under cross-examination.

Different decade.
Different industry.
Same ending.

The truth always catches up.

[conspiracybot @conspiracyb0t]

Reminder: When the Panama Papers came out it revealed all the rich people in the world are part of an enormous criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes and hoard stolen wealth in offshore accounts and literally nothing happened except a reporter working on the story was assassinated.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨BREAKING: On Friday afternoon, an artificial intelligence coding agent powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 deleted a company's entire production database in nine seconds.

The company is called PocketOS. It is a software platform that powers car rental businesses. The database contained months of customer bookings, vehicle records, and operational data that small rental car companies relied on to run their businesses.

When the database was deleted, all of the backups were deleted with it.

Three months of customer reservations evaporated.

[🐸🖤 𒁹pallas 🖤🐸 @amazonmilkfrog]

teachers requiring you to submit your assignments as google docs so they can look through the edit history and tell you didn't use ai is killing the "do it at the last minute" crowd.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

A Canticle For Leibowitz is a classic early (1959) post-apocalypse novel where an order of monks preserved the last remnants of learning (the memorabilia) after a nuclear exchange turned the remains of society into book and scientist burners.

I first read it in the 80s as a mass market paperback that I somehow lost along the way. Other paperbacks from that time are yellow with age and getting brittle, but still readable.

I read it again in the late 2000s on a first edition Kindle. I eventually migrated to iPads for Kindle reading, but every couple years I would come across an old Kindle in a drawer, charge it up, and check out what I had been reading on it. They eventually stopped working entirely.

I’m just finishing reading a new Folio Society edition, printed on heavy, acid-free archival quality paper. If it doesn’t get soaked or burned, it could still be in good shape for centuries.

The ephemeral nature of digital storage does give me some pause. We can still read Sumerian tablets full of administrative trivia from four thousand years ago, but there are no known copies of some important software products from just fifty years ago.

I am a proud supporter of the Internet Archive!

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Best classroom April fools prank ever

This professor has a policy that if your phone rings in class, you must answer it on speakerphone, so the students arranged to have a friend call on April fools’ day...

[Fesshole🧻 @fesshole]

It annoys me more than it should that the leaderboard on linked's queens game uses dense-rank() rather than rank(). If two people get the joint best time then the next person should be third, not second.

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

TV reporter tells David Bowie the internet is "hugely exaggerated"

David Bowie's response is the closest thing to perfection about the future.

[Alyssa Hazel, Page Turner @AlysssaHazel]

We legitimately need to have a conversation about how trash new covers have become.

[Michael @MFranchetti]

@lcthlorien Translators did it to Terry Pratchett.
https://t.co/9jbSqfnTBx

[Pulp Librarian @PulpLibrarian]

Geocities (1994-2009). Its passing marked the end of Web 1.0

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

[Fesshole🧻 @fesshole]

I'm a vicar in a small rural village. I could never say this to my flock because of the outcry, but Reform are blatantly opposed to genuine Christian values and it's clear that anyone considering voting for them has not been listening to a single word I say each week

[Proud Huddle CSC @CelticCSCPride]

Araujo 😛😛😛😛

[David 🍀 @thedavidcurrie]

There’s no way you can possibly tell that this shoulder isn’t at least in line with Scales. How can they overturn the onfield decision based on this? It’s a factual overturn and this is absolutely not factual.

[sean holland @seanhollandOSS]

So much has been written about Trump from tweets too op eds to full books. There are people who earn their living commenting on him but the most eloquent, succinct and accurate comment still belongs to Janey Godley

[art decider @poe_collector]

It turns out being able to copy and paste “blacked out” portions of the Epstein files into a notepad to reveal that it’s just color blocked text has a very publicly available and obvious root cause.

[Vivian @suchnerve]

solid candidate for Tweet of the Decade for the 2010s btw