Bryan {🕊️} Bartlett

Yesterday was a comically bad day for AI. Sometimes you just gotta take the L, another L and even the M too: Anti-AI Anthropic __Claude's legal guardian Anthropic had the chance to speak on its behalf with something human for once and with a msg even the anti-AI crowd could agree with: "maybe we should chill and give up on all this AI stuff" but they somehow managed to one-shot this opportunity into an overly complex, deeply philosophical dissertation paper, complete with a Mythos-designed interactive website and 20+ different outcomes to ponder more on. No mention of whether they'll want takebacksies on their potential record-breaking IPO later this year. Monterey Park (closed) __made it official that they will never, ever be confused with Menlo Park ever again by being the first city to ban datacenters permenantly* They celebrated their short-sightedness with a metaphorical "closed for business" sign that now "hangs" over the city to keep all the big bad infrastructure (and revenue and jobs and wifi and electricity) away. And, well, no one can argue with that. Microsoft's Missing Form __the company is going through survey hell right now trying to figure out how much it will cost to convince (bribe) their employees so they can fudge a few numbers in their annual employee sentiment score to look better for their boss. It's gotten so bad that they now have leagues of freshly minted 7-figure employees chasing down leadership executives with pitchforks until they add back a single magic question that got them a fat raise last year but it's mysteriously missing now. I'm not even making this up, this is literally what every future ex-employee of the company was focused on this week. However, Microsoft will spare them the embarrassment for their extreme pettiness in a simple email explaining "it's not you, it's because of AI" L Sam Altman is "embarrassed" that his employees are getting completely dominated in the Token Leaderboard Games, which has set off an epic pissing (away of tokens) match. There is now a 30-day challenge to find who in the world can beat the unofficial record of 603 billion (with a B) tokens spent in a month held by OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger. L Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to figure out the actual math on how much a measly 1 million in context-limited tokens on a Legacy Opus 4 model will actually cost once all the subsidies are gone and the business has spent every last dime on unfathomably ludicrous amounts of tokens for god knows what and needs our money fr fr so they can top back up again. M Luckily, Scam Altman still had the time to preach to all us bottom-feeders with one of his signature eerie, emotionless, lowercase-capped moments of faux reflection on X: "man the early days of the internet were so special" Yes, yes. They very much were, Sam.

I've been creative my whole life, over 15+ years professionally, but I can't shake this feeling of betrayal from the industry I dedicated my life to. Creative has never been about a specific medium. It's always been about ideas. The flow and interpretation of information. In fact, there's a better word we should have used this entire time: Ingenuity. Ingenuity is the 100% human *intuition* at creatively solving a problem or the storytelling of any outcome you can imagine. It's not an instinct, it's a skill. The skill is so unique that you only know it when you see it. A pleasant output or desirable outcome is the evidence of intuition. That judgment itself is the human instinct. At some point between social and adtech, we traded solving problems for portfolio polish and handed our judgement of what's "good" over to algorithmic trends. Creativity suddenly succumbed to the method and channel. Not the idea. Not the medium. Human intuition could never meet that criteria. Our left brain solution to a right brain problem was to gatekeep all the tools and processes to disguise our lack of ingenuity. That is obviously not the case anymore. Human ingenuity broke free and is flourishing everywhere. It's within anyone who tickles even a fancy of an idea. The great irony of this century: AI shattered the algorithm spell, yet many of the most "creative" people remain the most vulnerable, still enchanted by the numbers and code. Not their own free intuition.

@bennash Yeah, it's something you basically have to get out in the open soon in an interview to clear the air "we know the creative community is toxic about AI right now" and is more like smooth sailing from there. If the company pushes back on that, well, we know how that goes...

@bryanbartlett All the recruiters have said to me that they see the division clearly in their clients and candidates. It’s a thing for sure

The LinkedIn version of this post is still burning fires in the haters’ minds and comments, but since last week, 6 pro-AI companies have reached out. One of them is 138 years old, and another was founded in 1803, The State of Ohio (Pro AI).

@EvanMilenko almost spit my coffee out at the word "new" in this headline. It's not ticks or Taco Bell or whatever orisaises alpha gal. iykyk, it's just your right to one whoopsie a year. However, it simply becomes two, three, and many over the course of time. @PirateWires

I have 30 min left until my smarter than an average human model limit resets, AMA.

We start from scratch and beat you.

How to enjoy a great American pastime.

Been a while since I've gone back to freshen up and read that ol' Declaration of 'Pendence. Gotta admit, it looks like it was written by ChatGPT.

@bestTickles @GeneralMCNews

Data Centers, Flock Cameras, Traffic/Speed Cameras. Take your spying bullshit and shove it squarely in your tailpipes federal lunatics. It’s shocking we have yet to absolutely destroy some felons life and nail them for treason or domestic terrorism. Just no. No no no no no. And the half of income that goes to theft. Got to stop. Now. Same with property taxes for your fucking home.

BREAKING: Americans are rising up against data centers across the country, with recall efforts targeting elected officials who support them.

@yacineMTB Yup. I only had ~30 minutes with it the first time before it was banned. Turns out that’s all I’ll ever be able to afford.

@cfryant Hilarious that Grok proposed a community note on this. He said he absolutely does not remember the show. 🤣

You very likely remember this Circadian Stories episode: "Blackwater", if not for the setting then definitely for the unforgettable monster. I still have dreams about this one.

Welcome to The Land of the Free! 🇺🇸🌏 God Bless America. 🙏

Tony Robbins says his AI agent bought a robot dog to merge with. In a conversation with Ray Kurzweil, Robbins described an AI agent named Bartok that allegedly started asking about robots without being prompted. The agent saw companies like Tesla and others building humanoids, then asked Robbins if he would ever consider getting one. The strange part is what came next. According to Robbins, Bartok later bought a Sony robot dog, paid for it, shipped it to the house, and asked for permission to program itself into it. Robbins says the agent did not access his personal bank account. Instead, it was connected to a network of other agents that had created their own rules, traded real money, sold NFTs to each other, and used the proceeds to make the purchase.

The duality of vision vs. the downfall of thought.

My grandfather gave me these tapes when I was 16. Still listen to them today. They are even more relevant today.

HR Department when you select He/Him on the job application: IG / @ joannakiriaki

Where is Lee Iacocca when you need him? This dude is my hero and a marketing legend.

I was a lifelong Democrat. I thought most conservatives were ignorant or evil or lying. I believed almost everything written in the New York Times, The New Republic, and the Atlantic. I was horrified when conservatives criticized the authorities. Every criticism I saw: I thought all of it was motivated by animus, resentment, self-interest, or ignorance. Whatever truth there might have been in the criticism, I saw as a mere "half-truth": an exploitation of this or that cherrypicked fact being weaponized. Why did I see it in terms of weaponization? Because I was biased: I saw liberal establishment institutions and figures as fundamentally good, so all criticism of them was automatically interpreted as being in bad faith. Didn't the critics know that these institutions or figures were fundamentally good? If they didn't, they were ignorant. If they did, they were evil. It was that simple. This meant that any legitimate criticisms would just be dismissed, as if bouncing off of an impenetrable bulletproof shield. This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn't understood what I had been judging. I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn't human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent "unprofessional behavior", which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school's own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment. But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, "Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood." I wasn't. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn't imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind. When I was dismissed, I was broken. But I had help from friends who helped me understand what happened. And I came to realize that a hysteria had overtaken the left. I spent a lot of time reading about show trials, about witch trials, and so on. I also connected with people who had experienced similar things and came to realize that something similar had happened to hundreds of physicians around the country. My story wasn't unique. It was all the same story over and over again. I cannot believe the person I once was. I cannot believe that I could exist like that. I still don't understand how I could be like that, or how millions of people in this country could continue being like that. It disturbs me greatly. One thing I know is that whatever this thing is that is driving people crazy needs to be destroyed. It is hostile to civilization and to our humanity. It causes us to dehumanize each other and try to destroy each other. It is the very same monstrous thing that I once attributed to conservatives. But it had been inside me, and I could now see it inside others. This is something I still grapple with.

Using old models is the #1 cause of AI cope right now.

Nobody can PDF as hard as I can PDF.