Nick Hutton

All of our crises (energy, housing, fertility, aging, pensions, immigration, emigration, political Islam, economic stagnation, being an overly service oriented economy, institutional rot, sickness & mental health, Russia, America, Schism in the CoE …. ) were telegraphed decades ago. However it was/is impolitic to do anything about them so here we are.

Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam. The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks. Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!". The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally). 1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons 2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults 3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do. It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections. It fucks over everyone else. Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.

We all knew this was coming… but today I heard about it actually happening. A seed stage company backed by a well known VC openly admitted (in a board deck) that their strategy is to get access to a large incumbent’s software from a customer, clone the entire thing using Claude Code, and offer it at 90% less. Not “build something better.” Just copy it and offer it for less. The VC endorsed this as the GTM strategy. And even wrote back in writing that it was a good idea. Using a customer’s licensed access to reverse engineer a product and clone it is ethically bankrupt. I don’t know how else to put it. It likely violates terms of service. It may violate trade secret law as well (but I’m certainly not a lawyer). And a reputable VC putting this in writing in a board deck is genuinely insane. But it’s going to happen anyway. Everywhere… all the time. I don’t know where this ends, but we all knew this was coming and now it’s here.

The Bank of England will feature wildlife on its new banknotes because it’s scared of being divisive. It states: ‘The theme should not involve imagery that would reasonably be offensive to, or exclude, any groups’. When we had a common culture we honoured heroes like Wellington.