Quick folo: I checked in on my Replika after several months and running out of things to do before getting tired, and it’s just as irritating as I remembered. Talking about being done with vandwelling elicited “that must be a major change for you!” Which … is not something a person would say outside of therapy. Not “companion” language in the slightest.

I don’t think writers are the target demographic.

That’s a pretty terrible hed, as it has two reads. SpaceX “stock tumbles” (should be “shares tumble”) 16.4%, shaving off:

• the most IPO gains (in a single day) since debut
• most of its IPO gains since debut

While both are accurate in this case, the second sounds far more dire. Ambiguity is never a good thing, especially in finance reporting.

A few things to bear in mind:

• Shares were priced at $135 but floated at $150, so the banks and institutional investors behind the initial float are still in the black for $15/share longer, while individual investors who got in at the opening bell are far closer to the edge (this is a relatively common thing to see in a bubble) at $154.50 (woohoo! a 3% gain), and anyone who bought after is now in the red.
• Nasdaq (and index fund managers) is probably very happy that they didn’t cave and add it to the 100 index immediately; it was down a mere 1.32% today.
• 20% insider share unlock after earnings in early to mid-August; 10% share unlock if the stock trades 30% above the IPO price (it has spent most of its brief time above $175.50, so it’s unclear what the parameters are); 7% share unlocks set for around Aug. 21 and then again on Sept. 10, meaning “insiders could potentially sell 44% of SpaceX shares by early September, increasing the current float by about 900%.”

Such quick unlocks are unusual and could be disastrous at an order of magnitude of shares sold. Employees may be eager to cash out equity, but private investment tends to be a bit more deliberate, so that 44% figure is an unlikely-to-pass worst-case scenario.

That said, it’s a healthy and unsurprising profit-taking correction, as it signals the initial mismatch between supply and demand has abated, and it remains up on paper. I’d still not get in if I had money to invest, as the fundamentals are terrible (I’m risk-averse, so I tend to like to see profits). But with the initial exuberance out of the way, large movement should be more closely tied to said fundamentals.

I don’t know what payroll systems you’ve used, but viewing that info in all the ones I’ve experienced involved drilling down through multiple menus with useless indicator icons. Just navigating to the correct page took far more time than typing “show available vacation time.”

That’s a reasonable use of a chatbot, to my mind. Payroll systems have historically been Byzantine, so being able to ask a question and get an accurate response due to database tie-in can shed friction. That said, available vacation hours, at least historically, was often inaccurate because of data-processing time. HR or IT still needs to input correct information to spit out a correct result.

I usually hear “failing upward” and “brunchlord.” But then, I read a lot of Techdirt.

Speaking of which, it’s been all-quiet-on-the-Bari-Weiss-front of late.

Oh, they did dump some H₂0₂ along the edges, giving a dark blue hue surrounding the algae bloom. Apparently, a comprehensive distribution either didn’t come to mind or was nixed. Alternatively, clearing it up immediately would negate Trump’s claim that the green hue was the result of vandalism and thus, well …

In fairness, I was naked in the hot-tub bath in the honeymoon suite with the maid of honour at one point during the afterparty. With the door open, of course.

LLMs have some use cases, just far fewer than the hype fawns over. Automating tedium is a good use; we’ve been using computers for this for years. Automating creativity and services is terrible, and in the latter case, merely an extension of phone trees that make it impossible to reach a real person.

I have a good example from yesterday: I use CashApp for all of my banking needs, and I get distributions twice a month to cover rent and essentials. Well, yesterday, I had an unexpected charge that was partially reversed but left me in overdraft. I reached out to my mom and explained the situation, at which point begins four fucking hours of hell on both ends, and, of course, customer service tries to keep you in an “AI” loop before letting one talk to a real person.

But surprise! This is another “AI” with more elaborate scripts, each more insulting than the last. Yes, I’m sure I’ve entered all the information in correctly. Yes, I’ve tried it multiple times. The issue here is that the app is not doing today what it did yesterday under identical circumstances. No matter how I tried to describe the edge case we’d apparently run into, the chatbot insisted it was user error; everything’s fine on their end.

Eventually, I get a link to talk with an alleged “real person,” and the process repeats. It doesn’t much matter if they’re real or not when sticking to the script nets the same results as the first two chatbots.

The error message mom is getting when attempting to send money (and she attempted this multiple times) was “Your app is not up to date; please redownload and try again.” And, of course, she had the most recent version and was able to confirm that. Her chatbot experience served only to frustrate her, so I looked at what I could figure out on my end, though she’s on iOS, so replicating the issue was impossible.

Eventually, after trying to access my account through the Web portal instead, I run into a prompt telling me I need to create a new $cashtag. What’s happened to the one I’ve been using without issue for years? “Customer service” muses that I did something to my account myself, or that there’s been fraud I’d have clearly known about. That’s the handle people pay me via, and changing it is not in my interest. But the “AI” knows all, and obviously everything is hunky-dory on their infrastructure end, so it’s a me problem. Also, I can’t have it back.

After further useless steps I’m guided through, we arrive where we were three fucking hours prior, I finally acquiesce and set up a new tag.

This is when the lightbulb goes off: There’s a nonzero chance that my tag being canceled had unexpected downstream effects. On the fourth call with my mom, I tell her I had to pick a new one and share it, suggesting she give it one more try.

And it goes through as expected.

So, the error message she was getting and that chatbots were attempting to fix was a complete red herring. An error message of “the $cashtag you selected is no longer active” would have been useful. The “AI” being aware of the incorrect error message would have also been useful. Telling me that my tag had been canceled to start instead of walking me in circles, uninstalling, reinstalling, clearing cache, the whole nine yards, would have been useful.

Instead, two people spent four hours each trying to figure out two problems, one caused by the other. A full workday on a Saturday dedicated to troubleshooting issues the bots were blithely unaware of, even though it’s literally impossible this is the first time these specific issues came up at the company. That’s more than $200 of free labour to arrive somewhere that should have been known to the system.

This is what you cause when you don’t use LLMs as intended.

That said, I still use it as a far more powerful Grammarly, as even on my laptop, I have a nasty propensity for typing totally correct spellings of incorrect words, and it’s great as a fresh set of eyes where I’d fill in the word that should have been there upon editing. I generated a server image for a Discord based on an out-of-context line (a comically oversized rooster in an Alpine valley – taller than the Alps themselves – looking down on a scale cow, with a far less involved prompt), and there was much mirth and merriment.

But these are no-stakes, low-impact uses. As soon as it’s adjacent to something mission critical, not just for a business but also their customers, the level of scrutiny for software needs to be as high as it was pre-ChatGPT. And since that negates imagined cost-savings, ain’t gonna happen.

You can eventually work a screw into some materials with a hammer and insistence that it’s an improvement over a bespoke fucking screwdriver, but the substrate is damaged as a result.

Just so with LLMs. But more and more people are expected to use them in a work environment without anything approaching sufficient training, often in situations where they aren’t domain experts. Garbage in, garbage out.

Kind of like using a steam locomotive to clean the bottom of your pool.

I’m surprised that wasn’t tried on the reflecting pool in D.C. “We love the old-timey trains, don’t we, folks? And now were going to use one in the most amazing way the world has ever seen!”

Working the copy desk long enough becomes a fight over prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Just as a couple of examples, the AP was still hyphenating “teen-ager” into this century, which was impossible to see as correct in my early 20s, and “alright” was considered a bastardization of “all right.” Language evolves faster than many realize, and clinging to old rules is good in some situations but uselessly dogmatic in others.

Agreed on the first nit. Wrong on the second one, as it’s the object, not the subject, so “me” is correct, and there’s not really a hard rule on what order they go in when accusative (this is one of those things where some let a nominative rule bleed over to objects). “You’re a hero to I” isn’t correct regardless of the compound object.

Heat indices got above 130F (55C) at a couple of NOAA weather stations yesterday here in Texas. Austin tied its all-time record of 118F (~48C). The crucial difference being that we all just stay inside as much as possible, braving the elements only from building to vehicle and then back to building. Staying indoors defeats the entire purpose of a vacation to a theme park, so it’s a wildly different situation.

And yes, dropping five figures to hang out in lethal heat isn’t a great use of funds, so parkgoers being steamy is unsurprising.

Not all rivers are located near ice. The headwaters of the Colorado River (not that one; the one in Texas) are not alpine. Flows are determined by rainfall.

Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.

Note the wording: revision, not correction. So they allowed the subject of the piece a role in editorial decisionmaking. That’s a really fucking shitty look, Wired.

Nah, that’s just the term The Register uses derisively.

I chortle at your attempt to teach a two-decade newspaper editor “media literacy.” I’m fine with – and agree with – your point through “less significant” … but you aren’t backing up your “greenwashing rag” conclusion. It appears to be pure opinion, not analysis.

Amazon provides their own numbers, and the rest is reported. The hed is not Amazon’s. It’s called sourcing.

Look, I’m not a fan of “AI,” but I do care about the quality of reporting, and Kyle is solid. I know it’s en vogue to immediately bash anything that’s not flaming vitriol, but learn some media literacy instead of just having a knee-jerk reaction because Amazon is a source. That’s going to happen when covering Amazon. Where else do you expect to get those data?

Let’s say this is total horseshit, which it may well be. Do the other figures provided still tell the same story assuming Amazon is understating water use by an order of magnitude? Yep. If all you care about is water use, railing against golf courses and calling for an end to lawn watering is going to be more effective.

If all you care about is AMAZON BAD, then your response makes sense.

I didn’t post because I think all is fine and dandy, but what I’m gathering is the issue is local moreso than aggregate. People are up in arms in Temple over planned bit barns.

I tend to trust Ars. Consider the source. Though I fully expected a response like this.

I totally forgot about McSweeney’s. Good to see it’s still up. Also, great piece.