Lawrence Barriner II

"the cool guy in the glasses." - kohli. 2w1. aries☉:virgo☽:aquarius↑. formerly @smartmeme, @MITCoLab, @IISCBlog.

[Lawrence Barriner II @lqb2]

this.

[Louis Evans @louisevanswrite]

Ask yourself:

Could this meeting be a zoom?
Could this zoom be a phone call?
Could this phone call be an email?
Could this email be a text?
Could this text be unsent?

Could we in silence retreat to the forest?
Could we, by game trails & forgotten paths, vanish into the trees?

[Eshan @eshanbuilds]

The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove.

Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001. About a dozen early employees were in the room, working through what their core values should be. The conversation had stalled on the kind of polite corporate statements that nobody disagrees with and nobody remembers.

Buchheit later explained why he picked those three words instead. He wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out. He framed it as a jab at competitors who he felt were already exploiting their users.

Amit Patel, another engineer from the same meeting, scribbled the phrase on whiteboards across the company for months until it stuck. It went into the founding letter of the 2004 IPO prospectus. It sat at the top of the corporate code of conduct for seventeen years.

Then in 2018, Google quietly removed it from the preface.

The timing is the part everyone forgets. In March of that year, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract called Project Maven, building AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.

The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.

Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface. A Gizmodo reporter caught it by comparing Wayback Machine snapshots. Google never announced the removal.

What I find clarifying about the sequence is what it means structurally. The motto was designed in 2001 by an engineer who wanted a sentence his bosses could not erase if the company drifted. Seventeen years later, with the company being publicly accused of building drone targeting AI, his own employer responded by quietly erasing the sentence.

He had been right about exactly one thing. The phrase was hard to take out. It took a Pentagon scandal to do it.

Buchheit, who left Google in 2006, is now a partner at Y Combinator. He has not commented publicly on the removal.

[Mark Ajzenstadt @mardehaym]

None of this is satire.

→ A company spent $500,000,000 on Claude in one month because nobody set usage limits

→ Uber ran leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used, not what they shipped

→ Uber burned their entire 2026 budget by April. Their COO said he can’t connect any of it to consumer features

→ A CTO told Axios employees were using enterprise AI to check the weather

→ Microsoft canceled most Claude Code licenses because the token bill spiraled

→ Companies are now laying people off to pay the AI bill. Not because AI replaced the work. Because the bill replaced the headcount.

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Me using Claude Opus 4.8 to rename a file

[Erika Guevara Rosas @ErikaGuevaraR]

Generative AI doesn’t run on magic. It runs on massive data pipelines built on privacy violations by design.

Our new @Amnesty report exposes how big tech’s AI systems are powered by surveillance, data extraction, and abuse of people’s rights, at scale.

We researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

This is not innovation at any cost. It comes at a high price: our human rights.

Read the report: https://t.co/MGRonqai7o

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Completely insane!

[Yoshik @AskYoshik]

The AI numbers are starting to look very ugly.

Even under "best case" assumptions, FT's own data shows Microsoft AI ROI at -9%, Google at -15%, Meta at -28%, Oracle at -35%. Only Amazon barely comes out positive.

This is exactly why I keep comparing this to the dot-com era. Incredible technology does not automatically mean sustainable economics. The internet survived. Most internet companies didn't.

Right now hyperscalers are spending trillions hoping future demand catches up to present capex. That's not certainty. That's a leveraged bet.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Campos: While I want to thank CBS news for funding this generous gift towards my education, I want to acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.

If at any time you hesitate to utter the word genocide or remain silent in the face of blatant lies, remember to ask yourself: who is this for?

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

🚨 do you understand what happened to Stephen Colbert..

24 hours after his final Late Show, Colbert hijacked a tiny public access channel in Monroe, Michigan with Jack White, Eminem, Jeff Daniels and Steve Buscemi.

Now Paramount - the company that just cancelled his show - is mass-blocking every reupload worldwide via Content ID. And the deeper you dig, the worse it looks:

- The finale pulled 6.74M viewers - a weeknight record over 11 years
- Eminem cameoed as "Marshall, the fire marshal" to greenlight torching the set
- The same day Trump posted an AI video of throwing Colbert into a dumpster, Colbert aired footage of himself burning a real one
- Mayday Network and verified journalist Matthew Keys both got blocked globally - for sharing a community access show

Paramount cancelled his show to silence him. Instead they handed him a Streisand-effect comeback 10x bigger than the show ever was.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

NOBODY FUCKING ASKED FOR THIS WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE COMPANIES OH MY WORD

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Noah Hawley attended Jeff Bezos's private Campfire retreat in 2018. His wife broke her wrist. He told Bezos directly - not as complaint, just as human information from one husband and father to another. Bezos looked horrified, an aide materialized instantly, and he was whisked away.

No "I'm so sorry." No "do you need anything." Just escape.

Hawley's thesis in The Atlantic is not that the ultra-wealthy are evil. It is something more precise and more unsettling: that moral reasoning develops through consequences, and the environment of extreme wealth systematically removes consequences from a person's life. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, fire anyone who disagrees with you, and exist in a social circle entirely composed of people who need something from you - the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

This is different from classic narcissism, which typically masks insecurity. What Hawley is describing is something rarer: a self-definition in which the individual has genuinely grown to the size of the universe and the universe has contracted to fit. Elon Musk calling empathy "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Trump asked about checks on his power saying the only thing that could stop him was his own morality. Peter Thiel concluding that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

These are not poses. They are the logical endpoint of a psychology shaped by years of operating in a world that never pushed back.

The Bezos encounter is the piece's sharpest detail because it is so small. He was not cruel. He was not contemptuous. He simply could not locate, in that moment, the impulse to respond like a person who understood that another person's wrist hurt.

[Clarence Thomas the Tank Engine @TheRealJChubby]

He's not wrong and it's not even close.

[NOT A WOLF @SICKOFWOLVES]

I HOPE THIS E-MAIL DOES NOT FIND YOU

I HOPE YOUR CHAIR HAS GROWN OVER WITH MOSS

I HOPE A PLEASANT BUT UNOBSERVED BEAM OF LIGHT HITS YOUR DESK PERFECTLY THROUGH THE COLLAPSED CEILING

I HOPE THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING

[The Millennial Snowflake 🇵🇸 @Teh_Snowflake]

IMPORTANT:

As a U.S. citizen, you are under NO OBLIGATION to comply with ICE agents, UNLESS they have a warrant.

AND that warrant must be signed by a federal judge.

[Lawrence Barriner II @lqb2]

lqb2weekly #203 is out https://t.co/qyciWV2CYp

[Claire Penis @ZeroSuitCamus]

The first line of Pinocchio is so funny

[TrendUso @TrendUso]

everyone is too busy nowadays | TrendUso
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[Lawrence Barriner II @lqb2]

lqb2weekly #193 (21 feb 2024) is out! https://t.co/23AgTgvfaG