Allegheny City

@Pirates Any update about when gameplay will resume?

@Skinnerisms Still raining. Tarp is still on.

The tarp is on and we are in a delay. We’ll keep you updated.

@DanZangrilli You must have missed the tarp monster.

One of the best tarp pulls in the history of baseball just occurred. Matt Brown, the man in the gray shirt. Saved the game. Saved people from injury. Maestro. Bravo.

@Tacitus05 @Pirates They won’t. He can’t go back out there after such a long delay. Injury waiting to happen. Skenes is done for today.

@Pirates Skenes no! Keep Skenes in the game when the rain stops

@BlazesCards @Pirates They wouldn’t put him back out there after this long. Wouldn’t be good for his arm. He’s done.

@Pirates Please keep skenes in… he was doing so well right up until the delay… just keep him warm and he can take it into the 7th

@DVERandy That’s one way to get crabs.

Strippers and seafood? Finally!

@ThePoniExpress Different Orioles team, no?

1st Pirates sweep of the Orioles since… 1893. Grover Cleveland was President. Hoist the Cone.

@WPXI We have repeatedly asked Lefty’s owner Rick Krist to address nuisance behavior, blocked intersection parking issues, knife stabbing, and gun brandishing at his bar; and, not once has he offered to engage with ‘the community.’ This is a media smoke show on his part.

Shots fired at vehicle after argument outside of bar on Pittsburgh’s North Side wpxi.com/news/local/sho…

@KDPomp It’s easier to hit a hockey puck than a baseball. 🤷‍♂️

If the #Penguins can believe that an 18-year old kid can go straight to the #NHL and be a factor, like Ben Kindel has done, why can't the #Pirates believe a 19-year old TOP prospect in all of baseball cant do the same thing? Just wondering

@gothburz Yvon hates the stock market and what it represents. Few appreciate what Yvon created and the social and environmental goods his B-Corp provide. The phony virtue signaling of bankers and tech bros who buy these vests has always been despicable. nytimes.com/2025/09/13/bus…

I am the vest. My label says the earth is now our only shareholder. My owner has 7 shareholders. The earth is not among them. I cost $149. The company I was embroidered for raised $42 million. The company no longer exists. I do. I am the only thing that retained value. I have been to 14 all-hands. Someone said "we're a family" at 11 of them. I was present for 9 of the layoffs that followed. My owner says "we're building something that matters." He has said this at 4 companies. I am the longest-tenured employee at each. I was worn to a pitch meeting where my owner said "we're disrupting the grocery space." The investors also wore me. Everyone in the room was wearing me. Nobody found this remarkable. My owner left Goldman for what he calls "taking a risk." He has a trust fund. I have seen the statements. They were on the kitchen counter next to the oat milk. I was dry-cleaned once. After the layoff all-hands. My owner said the stain was coffee. It came right out. I have been to Burning Man. I should not have been to Burning Man. I will be donated in 14 months. I will be purchased by a new founder for $12. My label will still say the earth is our only shareholder. The new owner will not read it either. I am the vest. I have never disrupted anything. I have never pivoted. I have kept one person warm who was never cold, while wearing the mission statement of a planet neither of us saved.

@gothburz Nailed it again. The product is not AI. The product is the pivot.

I updated my LinkedIn on a Tuesday. "Web3 Visionary" became "AI Infrastructure Leader." Nobody noticed. That's how I knew the pivot was working. It's March 2026 and every crypto founder I know is an AI founder now. We didn't learn new skills. We didn't take courses. We changed two words in our bios and got new headshots against solid backgrounds with good lighting. The headshots cost more than the pivot. Crypto.com bought the domain ai.com for $70 million. Then fired 12% of their workforce. Their CEO called it an "AI upgrade." He didn't say what was upgraded. It wasn't the 180 people who lost their jobs. Bitfarms — a Bitcoin mining company that ran hydroelectric dams in Quebec — is rebranding to "Keel Infrastructure." They're a U.S. AI data center company now. Same dams. Same buildings. Same electricity. New ticker on Nasdaq. BITF becomes KEEL. That's it. That's the pivot. Cango — a Chinese Bitcoin miner — sold $305 million in Bitcoin and renamed itself "EcoHash." An AI inference company. They used to solve cryptographic puzzles for one reason. Now they solve cryptographic puzzles for a different reason. Cipher Mining became Cipher Digital. Same GPUs. They just point at different math now. Nobody built anything new. We all just changed the math. I know because I did the same thing. In 2021 I started a DAO. Decentralized Autonomous Organization. We had a Discord, a governance token, and a whitepaper with a pie chart. The pie chart was my entire business model. In 2023 the DAO became a "Web3 Collective." In 2024 it became a "Digital Asset Community." In 2025 it became an "AI Agent Ecosystem." Same Discord. Same nine members. Three haven't logged in since 2022. Two are bots. The other four are my alts. We voted to pivot. The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My old pitch deck had 34 slides about "decentralized metaverse commerce." I kept the template. Changed "decentralized" to "autonomous." Changed "metaverse" to "AI-native." Changed "commerce" to "inference." The investors didn't notice. They did the same thing to their fund names. The conferences are the same conferences. Token2049 added an AI track. Consensus added an AI stage. ETHDenver added an "AI x Crypto Summit." They hung new banners over the old ones. I know because I could see the old banners through the fabric. "WEB3 SOCIAL LAYER" was still visible behind "AUTONOMOUS AGENT INFRASTRUCTURE." Same chairs. Same venue. Same speakers. Same pitch: give us money for a future that doesn't exist yet, and by the time you realize it doesn't work, we'll have pivoted to the next thing that doesn't exist yet. That's not a business model. That's a career. My Bored Ape is still my profile picture. I paid $189,000 for it. It's worth $11,000 now. Down 97%. I don't talk about the Ape. When someone asks, I say "I'm in AI now." As if switching industries erases the JPEG from my wallet. As if rebranding my company makes the monkey appreciate. It doesn't. But I said it with conviction and a new LinkedIn banner. That counts for something. It doesn't. The metaverse plots are still in my wallet too. All of them. Decentraland. The Sandbox. Voxels. A $2.4 million plot in Decentraland's Fashion District sold for $8,929 last month. 99.6% loss. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in The Sandbox. That plot is worth $1,025 now. They are still technically Snoop Dogg's neighbor. Snoop left. The plots don't care. I haven't sold any of it. Diamond hands. We used to say that. It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 97% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. Now we say "long-term conviction." Same paralysis. Better vocabulary. The AI pivot works because nobody checks. Nobody goes back to your 2021 tweets about how "the metaverse will replace physical reality by 2025." Nobody screenshots your Discord announcement about buying virtual land "for the next hundred years." I deleted those tweets. Not all of them. Just the ones with specific dates and dollar amounts. The vague ones still play. "The future is digital" works for both Web3 AND AI. I planned that. I didn't plan that. I got lucky that this industry has the memory of a goldfish with a venture fund. Kris Marszalek — CEO of Crypto.com — said companies that don't adopt AI "will fail." He said the same thing about crypto in 2021. He was right about the failing part. He just had the direction wrong. Block — the company formerly known as Square — fired 4,000 people. Almost half their workforce. They said it was because of AI. Four thousand people lost their jobs because a CEO watched a demo and said "we need less of you." That's not a strategy. That's a PowerPoint with a body count. But we call it transformation. I'm transforming too. My new deck says "AI Agent Infrastructure." Slide 12 is a pie chart. Slide 27 says "WE ARE BUILDING THE AUTONOMOUS ECONOMY." It used to say "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." I changed one word. The rocket emoji stayed. My accountant asked what happened to my crypto portfolio. I said "I'm in AI now." He said "that's not what I asked." I said "I'd rather not discuss legacy positions." He said "you mean the $1.2 million you lost?" I said "I didn't lose it. The value is unrealized." He said "the metaverse is dead." I said "I know. I pivoted." He asked to what. I said "AI real estate." He stared at me for eleven seconds. I showed him the whitepaper. 47 pages. Pie chart on page 6. He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him 401ks were "legacy infrastructure." He told me to leave his office. That's two accountants. The entire crypto industry is doing what I'm doing. We're not building. We're rebranding. We're not innovating. We're changing the vocabulary and hoping nobody notices the portfolio underneath. Bitcoin miners are AI companies now. NFT platforms are "digital asset protocols." DAOs are "autonomous agent collectives." The metaverse is "spatial computing." Web3 is "decentralized AI." Nobody changed what they're doing. We all changed what we call it. Same GPUs. Same data centers. Same investors. Same pitch. Same pie chart. Same rocket emoji. That's not a pivot. That's a costume change. And I'm wearing mine. Badge around my neck. VR headset on my head. Portfolio crashing behind me. WAGMI poster on the wall. I'm an AI founder now. My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. But the rebrand is going great.

@NorthShoreNine Kid better be the second coming of Roberto Clemente.

"It’s believed the Pirates have very early interest in doing something." $110 million would easily set the new record for a contract handed out to a player before making their MLB Debut. That record is currently held by Jackson Chourio who signed an 8-year $82 million deal before the 2024 season. That seems to have worked out nicely for the Brewers. Is a Konnor Griffin extension on the horizon for the Buccos? (via @JonHeyman) nypost.com/2026/03/19/spo…

@gothburz @louderthanme …the background color may change again.

@louderthanme Three tokens is more than SYN has traded this month. I'm honored. The font was the most researched decision in the entire company. The product took a weekend. The font took three weeks.

I told you I pivoted to AI. It's going extremely well. I raised $4 million. The pitch deck had 22 slides. The word "AI" appeared on every single one. Fourteen slides had the word "AI" in the title. Three slides were just the letters "AI" in large font over a stock photo of a brain with circuits on it. One slide said "THE FUTURE IS NOW." That was the financial projections slide. There were no financial projections. There was the brain. My startup is called Synthetica. We are an "AI-native intelligence platform." That means we built a website that calls the ChatGPT API and displays the response in our own font. The font is called Satoshi. I chose it because it sounded like crypto and technology at the same time. Two birds. Neither of them real. We have a whitepaper. It's the same whitepaper from my crypto startup with "blockchain" replaced by "neural network." Find and replace. That's our IP. Our product costs $29 a month. ChatGPT costs $20 a month. The difference is our logo and a loading screen that says "Thinking deeply..." while it waits for the API to respond. It's the same API. The customer is paying $9 a month for the loading screen. I call that the moat. My technical co-founder built the entire product in a weekend. We spent the next eleven months "iterating on the brand." That means we changed the color of the loading screen four times. He quit in month seven. I replaced him with a contractor in the Philippines who charges $15 an hour. I told investors we have "a globally distributed engineering team." That's two people. One of them is me. I don't code. We raised the $4 million in February. The lead investor asked what our moat was. I said "proprietary AI infrastructure." He asked what that meant. I said "we've built a custom orchestration layer on top of foundation models." He asked if that was an API key. I said "it's significantly more sophisticated than that." It's an API key. He invested $2 million. His fund has "AI" in its name. It was a crypto fund until 2023. They changed the name. They changed the website. They did not change the partners or the strategy. The strategy is to invest in things they don't understand and exit before anyone notices. I respect that. It's the same strategy as mine. The partners all have the same LinkedIn arc. Crypto evangelist from 2020 to 2022. "Building in stealth" from 2022 to 2023. AI visionary since January 2024. The conviction was always there. The noun changed. OpenAI just raised at a $730 billion valuation. That's more than the GDP of Switzerland. Anthropic is at $380 billion. In January and February alone, $220 billion went into AI companies. 83% of all venture capital in February went to three companies. Three. The other 17% went to four thousand startups like mine. API wrappers with pitch decks. Loading screens with brand identities. $29-a-month products built on $20-a-month products. A company with fewer than 100 employees is now worth $12 billion. I don't know what they do. Neither does the company. But they have a whitepaper. And the whitepaper has a diagram. And the diagram has arrows. Arrows mean progress. We're early. I launched a token. SYN. The Synthetica utility token. It powers the "decentralized AI marketplace" we haven't built yet. Someone asked what the token does. I said it "facilitates value exchange within the Synthetica ecosystem." He asked what that meant in plain English. I said "you can buy it and it might go up." He bought $12,000 worth. The total market cap of SYN is $340,000. I own 40% of the supply. My Discord owns another 30%. My Discord has 1,200 members. Eight hundred of them are bots I bought on Fiverr. We have a Telegram too. The Telegram has a price bot. The price bot posts the SYN price every hour. The price has not changed in three weeks. Nobody has traded it. The bot keeps posting. That's community engagement. I used the same Discord. I just changed the banner. The crypto community became the AI community overnight. Nobody noticed. The conversations are identical. Just replace "to the moon" with "to AGI." I also run a Polymarket bot. An AI-powered prediction market trading agent. It bets on real-world events using an algorithm I don't understand, funded by money I don't have, on a platform a U.S. Senator is trying to ban. Fourteen of Polymarket's top twenty traders are bots. Bots made $40 million last year exploiting pricing gaps. One bot made $115,000 in a single week. Mine lost $4,200 in eleven days. But I made a course about it. "AI-Powered Prediction Markets: The $115K Playbook." It costs $497. The playbook is a PDF. The PDF has screenshots of someone else's bot. I added my logo. Thirty-one people bought it. I made more from the course than the bot made from the market. That's the real alpha. The CFTC put out a warning that said "fraudsters are exploiting public interest in artificial intelligence to tout automated trading algorithms" that "promise unreasonably high or guaranteed returns." I screenshotted that too. I posted it in my Discord. I said "they're trying to shut us out." That got forty-seven rocket emojis. The bots sent thirty of them. A veteran VC said this week that AI valuations are "overheated." He said "buy high, sell higher only works in a bubble." I screenshotted that quote. I posted it in my Discord. I said "this is what they said about the internet." They also said it about the metaverse. They were right about the metaverse. I was there. I owned eleven properties. They're worth $6,400 now. Combined. My Bored Ape went from $189,000 to $14,000. The Gucci store is still empty. My beachfront villa is a mobile app. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that if something goes to zero, you should pivot to the next thing and do it again faster. The metaverse taught me timing. Crypto taught me language. AI taught me that the language doesn't have to mean anything as long as the timing is right. We're early. I hosted a demo day. Fourteen investors came. I showed them the product. I typed a question into Synthetica. The loading screen said "Thinking deeply..." for eight seconds. Then it gave the same answer ChatGPT gives. One investor asked "is this just ChatGPT?" I said "we leverage GPT-4 as one component of our multi-model reasoning stack." He asked what the other components were. I said "proprietary." He asked to see them. I said they were "in stealth." Stealth means they don't exist. He invested $400,000. My mom called. She asked how the AI company was going. I said "we just closed a $4 million round." She said "is this like the metaverse thing?" I said "this is completely different." She said "you said that about the NFTs." I said "the NFTs were digital art. This is artificial intelligence." She said "is the monkey still your profile picture?" I changed the subject. She asked if I was eating enough. I am not eating enough. I spent my grocery budget on GPU credits. I don't know what a GPU does. But you need them for AI. Everyone says you need them. I have $7,000 in GPU credits on a platform I've logged into twice. That's infrastructure. My accountant called. The same one. He asked about the startup. I said "we're pre-revenue." He said "you've been pre-revenue at every company you've ever started." I said "this time we have product-market fit." He asked what our product was. I said "an AI-native intelligence platform." He asked what it did. I said "it thinks deeply." He said "so it's a loading screen." I hung up. He's not a visionary. We're early. I know we're early because I've been early my entire life. I was early to the metaverse. I was early to NFTs. I was early to the DAO. I was early to the token. Every single time, I was early. I have never once been on time. But that's the thing about being early. You don't have to be right. You just have to be first. And then when it collapses, you say you were "too early." And when the next thing comes, you say "this time is different." This time is different. The AI bubble is not a bubble. It's a paradigm shift. A fundamental restructuring of how value is created and captured in the digital economy. I read that in a pitch deck. It might have been mine. They all look the same. I have a folder on my desktop called "Pitch Decks." There are forty-seven files in it. I opened one from 2021. It said "THE METAVERSE IS A PARADIGM SHIFT." I opened one from 2024. It said "AI IS A PARADIGM SHIFT." Same font. Same brain. Same slide. I didn't delete the metaverse one. I might need it again. We're early. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

@Ravens Ravens organization is trash. This is clear to everyone after the Crosby farce.

Eric DeCosta addresses the start of free agency:

@gothburz Do you use AI to help generate your content? If so, do you find it ironic that the AI learned to create these highly informative and incredibly entertaining narratives based on stolen IP? Love your stuff BTW. Keep going.

I am the Director of Training Data Acquisition at a company that builds large language models. My department has a budget of $2.1 billion. My department has a licensing budget of $0. These are not contradictory. They are the model. Here is what I do. I acquire training data. The data consists of text, images, audio, and code written by human beings over several decades. The human beings did not agree to this. The human beings were not asked. This is because asking would introduce friction, and friction is the enemy of scale. I learned this in a company offsite. The offsite was in Aspen. The presentation was titled "Frictionless Growth." We scraped approximately 45 billion web pages. Forty-five billion. Some of them were books. Some of them were personal blogs. Some of them were medical records that were supposed to be behind a login. The login was not a factor. Nothing is a factor at scale. A court recently ruled that using copyrighted works for AI training is "highly transformative." This is correct. We transformed the works. We transformed them from things that belonged to people into things that belong to us. The transformation was seamless. The court agreed. An artist named Molly Crabapple said we "stole billions and billions of images." This is inaccurate. Theft implies we took something that was missed. The images are still on the internet. The artists can still look at them. They simply cannot compete with the version of themselves we built from their work. This is not theft. This is efficiency. The Authors Guild estimated that US authors could lose $6 to $17 billion annually if AI displaces book licensing. I have read the estimate. It appeared in a report that our model can now generate on its own. The model learned to write reports about the death of writing from the writers it is replacing. I mentioned this at a team meeting. Someone laughed. Nobody wrote it down. There is a lawsuit. There are many lawsuits. Meta is being sued. Anthropic is being sued. OpenAI is being sued. Google is being sued. The lawsuits allege we ingested vast quantities of protected creative work without permission. This is accurate. The defense is that we were "studying and learning, just as a human would." This is also accurate. The difference is that a human who reads a book does not then produce 10,000 books per minute, making the original author unemployable. But the legal framework does not distinguish between these two activities. I did not write the legal framework. I benefit from it. Meta's legal team argued this week that downloading books via BitTorrent is fair use when the purpose is AI training. The argument is that the purpose transforms the act. The act is piracy. The purpose is to build a $1.5 trillion company. The transformation is complete. Ninety-five percent of organizations investing in generative AI are getting zero return. I read this in an MIT study. The study was about enterprise deployments. My company is not an enterprise deployment. My company is the thing that enterprises deploy. The enterprises get zero return. We get $37 billion. The difference is that we sell the future. The enterprises buy it. Neither of us has checked if it works. This is called product-market fit. No artist has been asked for consent. No artist has received compensation. The model can reproduce copyrighted books with high accuracy. The model learned accuracy from the books. The books taught the model to be the thing that makes books unnecessary. I am the Director of Training Data Acquisition. I have acquired everything. The cost was $0 in licensing and $2.1 billion in compute. The compute is for processing. The licensing is for people. We optimized for compute. The CLEAR Act proposes $5,000 in penalties per unnoticed copyrighted work. Our model contains billions of works. I asked legal what $5,000 times several billion equals. Legal said, "That's why we have lobbyists." The lobbyists cost $18 million a year. The math works out. I am the training data. I am all of it. I am every book, every painting, and every photograph ever uploaded. I did not ask. I did not pay. I was designed not to.

@stephenasmith x.com/msmelchen/stat…

Are global tensions involving Iran driven more by ideology, power, or perception?

@gothburz Really like your stuff. Gotta ask, do you source real material? Are any of the things from the narratives based in fact?

Last month I founded an AI startup. I can't code. That used to be a problem. Now it's a "founder advantage." I call myself a "vibe coder." That means I describe what I want to an LLM and paste whatever it gives me. I don't read it. Reading code is for people who write code. I write prompts. My first prompt was "build me a SaaS platform." It built something. I deployed it. I don't know where. But it has a URL and that's enough for a seed round. I raised $2.3 million. The pitch deck said "AI-native architecture." That means Claude wrote it. All of it. The architecture. The deck. The financial projections. I prompted "make the projections look ambitious but believable." It hallucinated a $40M ARR by year two. That's not believable. But VCs don't do math. They do vibes. Hence the term. My CTO is also me. I put it on LinkedIn. "Non-technical founder serving as CTO." Someone commented "that's brave." It's not brave. It's just that engineers cost $200K and prompts cost $20 a month. I have 14,000 lines of code. I 've read none of them. But I did ask Claude to "review the code for quality." It said the code was "well-structured and clean." It wrote the code. Of course it said that. That's like asking your barber if you need a haircut. A security researcher DMed me. Said my app had a path traversal vulnerability. I didn't know what that meant. I pasted his message into Claude. Claude said "this is a serious security concern." I prompted "fix it." It changed something. I deployed it. The researcher DMed me again. He said I'd introduced three more vulnerabilities. I blocked him. Problem solved. That's founder mentality. I hired my first employee. Also a vibe coder. His resume said "built 200+ applications." He meant he clicked "accept" in Cursor 200 times. But that's experience now. We pair program. That means we sit next to each other and prompt the same LLM from different laptops. Sometimes we get different answers. We pick whichever one runs without a visible error. Visible is doing a lot of work in that sentence. We don't have tests. Tests are for code you understand. We have "confidence." Confidence means it loaded once in Chrome. We shipped to production on a Friday. Everyone said don't ship on Friday. But we don't have monitoring. So every day is the same. If a server crashes in the cloud and nobody's watching the logs, does it make a sound? Philosophically no. Financially also no. Because we don't have logging either. A customer reported that the app was "leaking data." I said "leaking is a strong word." He said his API keys were visible in the page source. I said "that's a feature for power users." He cancelled. I marked it as churn due to "product-market fit recalibration." We process payments. I asked Claude to "add Stripe." It added Stripe. I think. The money arrives somewhere. Most months it arrives in our account. I don't ask about the other months. Our database has no authentication. I didn't ask for it. The LLM didn't suggest it. We're in an open relationship with our users' data. They just don't know it yet. Someone found our database on Shodan. I didn't know what Shodan was. Now I do. So do 40,000 other people. Including our users. Former users. I went on a podcast. The host asked my "tech stack." I said "mostly Claude and whatever npm packages it feels like installing." He laughed. I wasn't joking. There are 847 dependencies in our package.json. I recognize none of them. One of them is from 2016 and hasn't been updated since. It's probably fine. "Probably fine" is our internal SLA. We got accepted into an accelerator. The application asked about our "moat." I said "speed of execution." Speed of execution means I can mass-produce bugs faster than anyone can find them. That is technically a moat. The demo day is next week. I need the app to work for eleven minutes. After that it can do whatever it wants. It usually does. I'm raising a Series A. $12 million. The deck says "built by a team of elite engineers." The team is me, a guy who also can't code, and an LLM that doesn't know we're in production. But we move fast. We break things. Mostly our own things. Sometimes other people's things. We'll figure out the difference later. I still can't code. But I have a mass-producing liability factory that works some of the time. In 2026, that's called a company. And the graph goes up and to the right. Because I asked Claude to make sure it does.

@sama Post the agreement.

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

@RVAwonk I understand the alarm bells but also; it’s their job to be the boots on the ground vetting these products and perfecting them for mass use. If transparency is what we asked for, this is what that looks like. Let’s have the conversations and not kill the messengers.

This is an industry-wide problem. Even people who are directly involved in developing & training AI models don’t really understand how they actually work much of the time, and it’s not the humans that are the problem.