Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to)

Amazon Prime Video is going from 3 minutes to 6 minutes of ads per hour.

While this is far less than the 15 minutes of ads per hour on TV, it shows the relentless march of enshitification of streaming video isn’t stopping even when you pay $8.99/month.
https://www.adweek.com/media/amazon-doubles-prime-video-ad-load/

Elon’s learned the same thing Chinese tech billionaires learned a few years ago.

In an authoritarian system, billionaires can’t go head to head with the government and expect to win. All they have is money. The government has the power to ruin them overnight.

Now he’s sobered up and contrite.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna212259

The Overton Window has shifted all the way to ban all non-white people from coming to America. It was never about illegal immigration.

Apple’s published a research paper claiming LLMs outperform large reasoning models on simple tasks, LRMs outperform LLMs at medium complexity tasks and they both fail at handling very complex tasks.

Their research shows LRMs don’t seem to reason and instead may be doing sophisticated pattern matching which breaks down at certain levels of complexity.

The optics of Apple publishing a paper saying LRMs don’t work when they’re far behind in AI has been the common response
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

The optimism shown by Google’s DeepMind CEO that we will reach AGI in five years and it will solve every human problem is fascinating as this seems to be a sincere belief.

Reminds me of the optimism that connecting the world would create world peace from increased global empathy.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-deepminds-ceo-demis-hassabis-thinks-ai-will-make-humans-less-selfish/

I expect claims that AI will usher in miraculous breakthroughs like a cure for cancer will fall by the wayside for practical reasons similar to claims of UBI as a panacea for AI driven job loss.

We are cutting science funding and driving scientists out of the country. We can’t ChatGPT our way to scientific breakthroughs without scientists or science research.

This is totally unsurprising but still telling that the country’s official AI Bro has poured cold water on the idea of UBI being used to backstop job losses caused by AI.

With states also banned from regulating AI for a decade, it’s going to be an interesting few years for white collar workers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-ai-czar-david-sacks-universal-basic-income-ai-jobs-2025-6

Slowly coming to the conclusion that being informed about what’s going on in America is bad for my mental health.

It’s hard to miss how much the vibe has shifted in eight years. Trump institutes a Muslim travel ban affecting almost twice as many countries as 2017 and it’s barely news.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgqwyxxpzgt

It’s funny how all the AI bros got really quiet about UBI now that displacement of white collar workers due to AI is no longer hypothetical.

This was always the problem with UBI. Americans won’t raise taxes to give the unemployed a middle class life. We kick people off of Medicaid for tax cuts.

6 million followers and quote tweets Sesame Street with a mash up of homophobia and a white supremacist dog whistle.

The pendulum swing that’s normalized this degree of hate is truly despairing.

My favorite description of the term “privilege” is who gets the benefit of the doubt and who doesn’t.

We see it every day in who gets the rules rigorously enforced against them and who gets a slap on the wrist or warning when the rules say there are heavy consequences for their actions.

Business Insider laid off 21% of staff and as part of the announcement said 70% of employees are using their Enterprise ChatGPT subscription and the goal is 100%.

Whether or not layoffs are due to productivity gains from AI or not, companies are definitely sending this message. This creates layoff peer pressure.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/business-insider-ai-laying-off-staff-20353086.php

Today’s announcement by the Trump administration has been a long time coming.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-disgusted-asian-ceos-silicon-valley_n_582c5d19e4b0e39c1fa71e48/amp

The same sort of anthropomorphism that made humans ascribe human traits to natural phenomena like the sun, weather, volcanos, animals, etc and worship them as gods is happening with AI.

The fact LLMs are unreliable makes this trend worse because this unreliability is treated as a personality trait

This is the future Republicans stole from us with tax cuts and endless wars.

In less than three years we’ve gone from making fun of the fingers in AI generated images to AI generated videos and audio that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. And it’s only going to get better.

This is fundamentally going to reshape both professional and influencer content.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/23/google-ai-videos-veo-3

Elon Musk comes to the “obvious conclusion” that saving billions by randomly firing government workers and slashing science funding won’t fix the deficit when tax cuts for the wealthy will cost trillions.

Truly a boy genius at work.

Despite people’s misgivings about generative AI, like the internet and smartphones before it, this technology won’t just change how we work and consume entertainment but also will reshape society itself.

The world would not be the way it is today if not for the internet and phones. AI will have similar impact.

We wouldn’t have Trump without social media and podcasts. No one could have predicted the social trends that would come from ubiquitous internet access and phones.

My pet peeve with AI assisted writing is having to read content that the author hasn’t even read themselves.

If you can’t put in the effort to read what you supposedly wrote, why should I?
https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-prompts-in-their-novels/