It was true eventually!!!
06.03.2026 16:18
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It was true eventually!!!
Tried to capture how Anthropic became the vibe king of A.I. in the past 3 months.
*Claude became so good at coding that some programmers feel irrelevant.
*Anthropic can move the stock market on vague product news
*Won popular support & buzz in the Pentagon feud. wapo.st/4rfU71h
"It felt like interacting with a synthetic bridge troll haranguing me until I said the magic combination of words."
How many years do we have to hear repeated failed promises of "THIS MAKES A SMART HOME EASY" before we give up? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/t...
I hesitate to mock this because a lot of AI scams are extremely believable and will only get better but ...yeah, this one is not.
I had forgotten this! Somehow.
Maybe it is! Maybe this is from the same guy who bought Jay-Z's streaming business for reasons.
Apparently a good way to get the stock price to go up if your stock price has fallen by 75% in 5 years is to slash the workforce nearly in half and say it's because AI is changing everything.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
It's fun that every few years we discover that YouTube recommends wild garbage to young kids.
See also: The 2017/2018 scandal over awful kids videos like a knockoff Peppa Pig being tortured at the dentist. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/u...
I admire the ingenuity of children figuring out how to bust open those locked phone pouches. I think? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/s...
Yup, I hear you! The cheating finding from Pew was based on students' beliefs about their peers. Perception is not reality, but it's also not meaningless.
When I wrote about this topic in 2023, even Google said broad law enforcement search term and location warrants “pose particular privacy risks." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Great question! Yes, there was a Stanford study 2-3 years ago that doubted cheating would increase with generative AI, because technology has been used to cheat for a long time.
Sal Khan, founder of the education technology nonprofit Khan Academy, said schools should assume that students are using AI to cheat on schoolwork done out of class. He suggested that teachers should have students do writing assessments in class, to prevent AI use, or quiz students on assignments done at home to prove that they’ve learned essential material. But Guilherme Lichand, a professor of education at Stanford University, said cheating is not AI’s novel or most serious harm. In a recent research experiment with middle school students, Lichand and his collaborators found that those who initially had access to AI assistance on a creative assignment, and then had it taken away, performed far worse than their peers who didn’t have access to AI on a subsequent word-association task. Lichand said the research, which hasn’t yet been published, suggests that young people who grow dependent on AI may lose faith in their abilities without it. “These kids started believing less in themselves,” he said. A recent Brookings Institution report found similar harm from students’ dependence on AI.
Findings from Pew's survey of U.S. teens:
*Half use AI chatbots for schoolwork help
*59% believe their peers are cheating with AI
*Teens are less pessimistic about AI than adults
Most experts I spoke to believe AI makes students dependent. It's a "crutch," one said.
wapo.st/4s8sWWT
It is very very hard to know the prevalence of these "reverse" search keyword warrants.
However you feel about this particular investigation, it's a reminder that a handful of giant tech and telecom companies are the gatekeepers of our constitutional rights.
To note the contradictory signals from stock investors:
*The AI boom is unsustainable, we must sell when Big Tech says it's spending zillions on AI investments.
*The AI boom is going to eat all jobs, friends and industry so sell any stocks in AI's kill zone. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
The smartest person in New York City:
"As the bus approached Green-Wood Cemetery, Mr. Ayala slowed for traffic in the roadway: a man on cross-country skis."
www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...
AI is a big deal to the economy! If this boom goes bust it will hurt!
But let's slow our roll about blaring AI IS THE BIGGEST THING EVER.
Two lessons here:
*Data is subject to revision and interpretation. Everyone I talked to calculated the GDP impact from AI in different ways.
*We're going to have infinite fights about numbers show AI is/isn't hitting jobs or economic growth.
That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP. A collapse of AI investment could nonetheless weigh on GDP growth. The end of previous investment booms was associated with a slowdown in GDP growth of more than 1 pp on average (Graph 4.B). Notably, the largest contraction was after the US dot-com boom, even though the boom was small relative to GDP. Moreover, there is little evidence of investment booms translating into a sustained increase in GDP growth over the medium term, even if, like the US dot-com boom, they are driven by technological advances
You know those comparisons between the current AI building boom and historically epic build-outs like the interstate highway system?
The central bank for central banks said eh, this is about half the relative spending of the dotcom boom: www.bis.org/publ/bisbull...
Prominent economists, including from Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, calculate that the AI buildup was directly responsible not for 92 percent or 39 percent of gains to the U.S. economy in 2025, but as little as zero. “It was a very intuitive story,” said Joseph Briggs, who jointly leads global economics investment research at Goldman Sachs. “That maybe prevented or limited the need to actually dig deeper into what was happening.” Briggs and his Goldman Sachs colleagues recently said that investment spending on AI made “basically zero” difference in U.S. economic growth last year. It’s clear that the huge spending on AI is adding to the U.S. economy, but the available economic data doesn’t neatly capture its effects. The debating economists and the slippery data suggest that if the technology does start to reshape the economy, it may be challenging to detect and clearly measure.
It became conventional wisdom that the massive AI build-out was propping up the U.S. economy last year.
Nothing is that simple.
Some prominent economists are saying AI investment had "basically zero" impact to economic growth in 2025.
wapo.st/4kT3oLl
How many coyotes are there in Manhattan??? www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...
A coyote that is apparently NOT one of the pair who live in Central Park tried to curl up by a space heater at the Brookfield ice rink and got darted.
www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...
So excited that the amazing @shiraovide.bsky.social will join me at NYU for the the US launch of Evan Selinger's and my new book: Move Slow and Upgrade! Free tickets for the March 4th event here: www.eventbrite.com/e/funtime-bo...
Sorry it's an email newsletter (Dinner Party by New York magazine) and I don't think it's published online. But: nymag.com/promo/dinner...
And a useful PSA about why this is different from filming everyone and everywhere with phones: www.404media.co/whats-the-di...
Last summer, Tom Wong was working at the Chubby Crab, his family’s seafood boil restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, when a regular approached the counter. She ordered a combo — steamed clams instead of sausage, please — and ate it at a table near the door, muttering to herself in between bites. Mr. Wong, 32, didn’t think anything of it. But a few days later, another customer came in and asked for a selfie. Then the asks kept coming. He had been recorded without his knowledge using a lentil-size camera embedded in a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses. The resulting video had been viewed more than two million times on TikTok, turning Mr. Wong and the restaurant into unwitting stars. “At a certain point, I stopped working in the front of the restaurant,” he said. “It was really uncomfortable.”
Why are we doing this?
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/d...
