As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow WaryI've heard a few "AI company" pitches recently and they are all like "a chatbot helps you with something" and I am surprised people are lending at any rate for this stuff.
...
Investors in the A.I.-fueled stock market have largely shrugged off warnings about a tech bubble, an optimism that has pushed up share prices to repeated new highs this year.
But the debt market is telling a different story, some investors say. New artificial intelligence companies looking to raise funds to supercharge their nascent businesses are being made to pay lofty interest rates on the money they borrow, indicative of investors’ skepticism when new, unproven A.I. businesses take on large debts.
Friday, December 26, 2025
How Much Does A Billion Cost, Michael? 10 Billion?
One day soon we will realize a computer that gets math problems wrong much of the time is not an especially useful computer.
Money Can't Buy You
I know there is a selection issue here - we only hear from the rich guys who never shut the fuck up - but it is still a mystery why all these rich guys can't stop posting. There is nothing wrong with a bit of posting - I do it occasionally myself - but that they are so invested in it, and get so enraged by it that they have to warp society over their twitter beefs, is hard to comprehend.
Go sip wine in Italy. Climb a mountain. Learn violin. Become an arts patron. Whatever.
Go sip wine in Italy. Climb a mountain. Learn violin. Become an arts patron. Whatever.
Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime
I am glad My President spent yesterday doing what he loves best - posting 200 insane things on his website..
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Embarrassing
I can't imagine being an actual Trump fan. I don't mean a Trumpism fan. They are cruel assholes. I get that. There are plenty of cruel people.
I mean a fan of Trump, the man.
Just laugh at these people. It is so absurd. They are so absurd.
Mechnical Turks You Never Thought Of
My long-held belief us that Waymo has been obscuring how much human intervention they use, and this task is funny example of that.
Adkins had witnessed an Achilles’ heel of the Waymo robotaxis that ferry thousands of riders in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities each week. The vehicles can navigate city streets and compete with taxi drivers without anyone behind the wheel — but become stranded if a human doesn’t close the door behind them at the end of a ride.Because riders and passersby can be unreliable, Waymo pays workers in Los Angeles $20 or more for rescuing a robotaxi by closing a door, summoning help through an app called Honk that is like an Uber for towing companies.
Sure Why Not
I get that there is a certain romantic appeal to manned space exploration, but if there are jobs perfectly suited for the AI robots we are supposedly building, they are whatever the fuck Altman imagines the space jobs are.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman says in 10 years’ time college graduates will be working ‘some completely new, exciting, super well-paid’ job in spaceTheir consistent vision of "the computers should do the fun creative jobs while humans should do dangerous drudgery" is very weird!
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Felicitations of the season
The thing about the Winter Solstice is that if you're in the northern hemisphere, it doesn't much matter what you believe because a solstice just is, no matter how you were raised, and that means that in December the days are short, the nights are long, and the weather is chilly no matter how you were raised. Why wouldn't you want to see pretty lights and spend time with friends, possibly drinking eggnog or mulled wine? It's kind of nice that from a week or so before Thanksgiving until right up to Twelfthnight, you have an excuse to wish people happy holidays and even smile at strangers. (I've always thought the southern hemisphere should make their own holidays to go with their winter solistice, too.) It's fun. It's friendly. And Bill O'Reilly was always a meanie for trying to spoil it. I've always maintained that he, and people like him, were the ones who were making war on Christmas, so f'm. I wish you warmth and light and fellowship.
In case the holidays leave you short of things to read, a few reminders:
When I want the details, The American Prospect is good at clarifying things. If it's important, it will surely be there somewhere.
Or Radley Balko at The Watch, especially on the subject of off-the-leash policing. (Link fixed.)
The folks at Drop Site News have been doing some amazing coverage of big stories, especially that huge one it's so dangerous to talk about.
When I just want the headlines and a basic story without too much deep-diving, I find Common Dreams a comfortable read, reasonably sane, sort of like I used to think The Washington Post was before I realized it wasn't at all like that. (And that was well before Bezos bought it.)
I was watching an old Tom Baker episode of Doctor Who and noticed the planet they landed on was called "Atrios". Fancy that.
Signed,
Not Atrios
Randy Andy
My Dad called him that when I was a kid, though I didn’t have any idea why or what it meant.
Email from ‘A’ at British royal family’s residence asked Ghislaine Maxwell for ‘inappropriate friends’
Bari's Personal Publicist
The issue with Dylan Byers isn't that he is conservative - though he is that too - it is that he has a very British (he isn't British) spidey-sense of who matters and who doesn't and always sucks up to power.
This was his take on Bari a couple months ago.
The alarm ringers offer a clear illustration of the media groupthink and, frankly, laziness, that Bari has so often railed against. In the last 72 hours, otherwise smart writers and reputable media companies have made broad, sweeping, and baseless statements about Bari and The Free Press that evince a sort of paranoid psychosis, or what The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan has described as “Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome.” In one commonly held but unsubstantiated view, the Ellisons brought Bari to CBS as an olive branch to Trump. “The Ellisons understand that in an authoritarian context they must transform their media company so that it is acceptable to the [Trump] regime,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in an especially evocative piece for The Bulwark. “That’s why they are buying Bari Weiss’s Free Press and making her editor-in-chief of CBS News.”
Never mind that The Free Press, like the Murdochs’ Wall Street Journal editorial board, often criticizes Trump, his policies, and his administration. Never mind that, as I’ve noted, Bari’s free speech absolutism is likely to catalyze more dust-ups between the network and the administration. Never mind that Bari’s politics might simply be the Ellisons’ politics, too, and that a privilege of owning a news network is that you can shape its editorial posture to your liking—especially if that news network has been hemorrhaging viewers and profits and is therefore ripe for disruption. As Jon Allsop observed in The New Yorker, had Kamala Harris been elected, David might have “acquired CBS and hired Weiss anyway, to similar howls from thes.
...
In the days since her start, I’ve surveyed at least 15 CBS News sources across the organizations and, in addition to the very real uncertainty around how this is going to work and what it will mean for specific people’s jobs, the overwhelming response has been excitement, cautious optimism, and relief. “The leadership and vision is welcomed,” said one CBS News source. “We’ve had none—zero. Our past presidents were paper pushers who managed up well but knew nothing about journalism.”
15 employees willing to talk to Dylan, understanding he is the type of guy willing to rat you out to the bosses, love Bari!
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
America's Greatest Journalist
Weiss's skill was charming old white guys, who would then defend her to the death. Old NYT reporters would assemble like Voltron whenever she was criticized.
Meanwhile, she used her job at the NYT essentially to establish her social networks - get on Bari's good side and she would publish you in the Opinion section. Always "contrarian" stuff. 3 categories on the opinion page: conservative, liberal, and contrarian (also conservative).
When she did write, it was like this.
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