Someday I will be able to write a Tabs that isn’t mostly about AI but not today because Patrick Quirk says that We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History, and Almost Nobody Has Noticed. I like to believe I’m well informed but I hadn’t heard about most of these incidents. And what do they all have in common? Let’s find out.

In February 2024¹  a finance worker in Hong Kong lost $25 million to an “elaborate scam [which] saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations,” reported CNN. That is to say, several of his co-workers who he knows personally appeared in a video call and told him to go ahead with this extremely suspicious $25 million transaction. They were all fake.

On March 31st, North Korean hackers published a malicious version of the javascript web client library axios to npm with a remote access trojan giving them full control over any machine that updated its copy of one of the most widely used libraries in the javascript ecosystem during the roughly three hours it was live. According to axios maintainer Jason Saayman, the hackers got control of his GitHub account by creating a whole fake company and inviting him to collaborate with it, eventually getting him to install their credential-swiper with the one button literally everybody will just sigh and click automatically—a fake Microsoft Teams update:

“The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess,” wrote Kyle Kingsbury, including your co-workers and family. And all of this is before anyone has even seen Anthropic’s newest model, which the company will only release to a small group of corporations because it is allegedly “capable of identifying and exploiting previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in every major computer operating system and every major web browser,” according to Reuters. Hackers are already using regular Claude though, don’t worry. [Ethics disclosure: I talked to my fiancée on Zoom and he told me I should send all of my bitcoin to wallet 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.]

Milla Jovovich (yes that Milla Jovovich) released “The highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked” on GitHub for some reason. UPDATE 1: Oops, those high scores were fake. UPDATE 2: Search results are now inundated with fake malware versions. Any minute now we’re going to find out the real thing is also malware and that Milla Jovovich never existed at all. Also the Washington Post put an AI chatbot on its homepage which can’t find current Washington Post news stories but can make up fake quote attributions or write you some python code.

But aside from all that, Han Lee, how is the Great AI Leap Forward going?

What can you do about any of this? Absolutely nothing (despondent). But also absolutely nothing (optimistic)! Sure all the money is in databases now and all the databases are about to get hacked, but look at it this way: when your money gets stolen that’s your problem. When everybody’s money gets stolen that’s the bank’s problem.

Meanwhile Mike Monteiro points out that you can just make donuts. They can’t stop you. Rax King would simply like to be left behind: “Deskill my trade, if you really think that's where the wind is blowing. Hell, take my career away from me outright! I'll keep writing, because it's what I do.” If it's gotten to that point, then I have to declare that you could please bury me with it too.

One thing that AI could never do is find out what’s the best free restaurant bread in America. But Caity Weaver can and does in her new Atlantic story “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.” I think her number two bread probably should be the number one bread, but the story takes an unexpected turn near the end and by the time I found out what she thinks is the best free restaurant bread in America I didn’t really care anymore, in a good way. The best sentence in the piece is: “It looks like something from the biology lab at Liberace University.”

And Kevin talked to Werner Herzog about the upcoming Cave of Forgotten Dreams IMAX release. Herzog isn’t anti-AI across the board but:

Or, as Herzog said in 1982, also about AI: “Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity… It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this [AI]… we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel.” So true, bestie. I’m always saying this.

Today in Other Cursèd Artifacts: It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Steamed Hams. The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock. Helen DeWitt turned down a $175,000 literary prize due to onerous P.R. demands but then Tyler Cowen gave her $175,000 of Peter Thiel’s money anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The 2026 Kyoto penguins relationship chart dropped, and it makes your polycule look like a bunch of amateurs.

And Finally: My former Today on Trail editor at the Washington Post Amanda Katz just launched Porch Party, a DC-focussed “newsletter, a website, and an informal community devoted to life in these Interesting Times.” Amanda is great and you should pitch her stuff.

Today’s Song: Train Jazz

April 7th, 2026?

Today in Tabs is off this week due to the inexorable passage of time, age, senescence, growth, change, and death. I realize that telling you Tabs is off in a Tabs newsletter that arrived in your email and you’re currently reading doesn’t make a lot of sense, but roll with it. This doesn’t count. We’re in a time-out here.

Nine years ago on SBNation, a website which still exists (I checked), Jon Bois released a twenty five part series called 17776 that addressed the question of “what football will look like in the future.” Specifically: 15,000 years in the future, in a world where people stopped being born or dying on April 7th, 2026. That’s today, so you made it.

Congratulations?

Nine years ago just happened. Donald Trump was president. An extremely stupid technology bubble was underway. I was working on a Macbook Air laptop that looked almost exactly like the one I’m typing this post into right now. There are things in my backyard that I put down for a minute nine years ago that I still haven’t gotten around to picking up yet, but I will.

But also: nine years ago my youngest child was about to turn four. This weekend they’ll turn thirteen, almost done with 7th grade and legally allowed to join Instagram. Nine years is longer than they can remember—it’s everything that’s happened in their whole life.

Nine years ago my father-in-law still had two years to live, although that clock was pretty clearly ticking even then. My mother-in-law often babysat our four year old when my wife and I both had to work. She was still very healthy and fit then, my mother-in-law, and took care of her husband, too, for the last years of his life. But back then, her Alzheimer’s was just a little hint of absent-mindedness. A touch of senioritis now and then. The occasional impulsive decision.

Tabs is off because today we’re moving her into a nursing home. Even with a full time live-in caretaker, she can’t live at home anymore. Nine years can be all the time you have left.

17776 is about football, kind of. It’s about the things football is about—time and space. What would a game mean if the time to play it was unlimited? What do you do with the knowledge that space is too big to explore even with unlimited time? What would football become if no one could ever die? If one game could go on for 10,000 years? If the field could be a circa 2026 NFL regulation fifty-three and one-third yards wide but stretch 2,340,170 yards long? What if we all lived long enough to see New York and Florida drown, and then lived thousands more years after that? What if the lightbulb burned for another fifteen thousand years?

I’ve known about 17776 since 2017, but I have to admit I didn’t actually read it until yesterday. It was widely praised, and won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation in 2018. It’s one of those rare works that simultaneously creates and perfects a new form of storytelling, like Mary Shelley did for science fiction with Frankenstein, or Laurence Sterne did for the postmodern novel with Tristram Shandy. We might have a very long wait until someone else does something almost as good with the internet. I knew it was the kind of thing I’d like, but I just hadn’t gotten around to picking it up yet.

Nine years can be a lifetime. 10,000 years can be the blink of an eye. Time is extremely relative. Have you ever watched the last two minutes of a close football game?

Today in Tabs will return next week.

PS: In 2020, Bois released a followup called “20020: The Future of College Football.” I will let you know what I think of it in 2029.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play in the media business: to speculate who will go AI. By now, I no longer need to speculate. I have gone through the experience many times—with book reviewers, with tech reporters, with columnists. I have come to know the types: the born sloppers, the sloppers whom journalism itself has created, the soon-to-be-pilled. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would go AI. Let us look around the `net.

Take Ms. L, for instance. I don’t know that she’s ever publicly said so, but I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make her go AI. She’s written about the AI industry, and certainly sees clearly what’s wrong with it. But that isn’t the reason. Ms. L has been a correspondent in finance and technology for many years—she is as poached in these torrid waters as any journalist alive. It is not for ignorance that Ms. L will never go AI.

No, she will never go AI because the machine mind has nothing in it to approach what is already present in her own human mind. The machine pen has nothing to offer her life or her career. What use has she for a large language model’s mediocre ideas? She already labors beneath the weight of a stock of ideas far better than AI could produce, and larger than she could ever use. Even more, she has put in her time as an editor for other writers, and developed the skills and habits of mind to critique her own work. She does not require a mechanical red pen. And if a red pen is necessary she can always rely on her human colleagues for editing, such as Mr. P, who has already proven much superior to his own AI facsimile. No. Ms. L writes for the love of writing and publishes for the pleasure of sharing correct opinions and correcting erroneous ones. AI could only detract from that. Ms. L will never go AI.

You might think Mr. R not so different, superficially, from Ms. L. He’s also a long-tenured technology columnist at a respected mainstream publication. And yet he has eagerly, even gleefully, turned flack for the machines. He has delegated much of his professional life to them as well, and seems proud of it:

And why not? Mr. R is not known or valued for his elegance of expression. He has, at best, a “writing style,” and not one that can’t easily be duplicated by a large language model. Checking facts? Assessing his work’s strengths and weaknesses? More bathwater to be tossed out of this increasingly baby-less tub. So what explains Mr. R, who “expects AI models to get better than him at everything eventually?” Why does he go AI when Ms. L never would?

Mr. R’s secret is that his work is not primarily artistic or informative—it is functional. He serves a purpose for the industry he covers. Mr. R’s job is to absorb the tech industry’s self-mythologizing, and then believe in it even harder than the industry itself does. He serves as a kind of plausibility ratchet. His byline and employer legitimize a level of credulousness that would otherwise be laughable, and thereby allow tech PR to seem relatively restrained. Mr. R has no problem going AI because he himself has been a small cog in a big ugly machine for a long time.

Ms. R (no relation to Mr. R) brings us news of her former colleague Ms. M, who has casually admitted to going AI apparently against the policies of her employer, another national newspaper hemorrhaging both staff and readers. Ms. R writes that:

This is surely the first time Ms. M has been accused of “intellectual heavy-lifting.” Nevertheless Ms. R, who it goes without saying will never go AI, disapproves:

But after twenty-five years of dumb opinions clumsily expressed, is it any wonder that Ms. M is happy to turn over that labor to a device? AI couldn’t be worse at her job than she is, and anyway, being incompetent has never proven any hindrance in her grimly illustrious career filling the endowed Libertarian chair at a range of publications that wanted to help their other conservatives appear serious and thoughtful, if only by comparison.

Mr. N, on the other hand, will never go AI which we can admire about him. But he seems to have reached that correct conclusion via a chain of understandable but regrettably mistaken premises:

Ah, Mr. N! A good man. A hardscrabble labor reporter, a stalwart friend of the human worker. Nevertheless he doesn’t realize that despite its rarity, the supply of good writing always and everywhere far exceeds the demand for it. Mediocrity is no impediment to success—in fact it’s at least marginally preferred by what remains of the reading public. But whatever his romantic notions, Mr. N will never go AI and that’s what matters. Mr. N cares about his work.

II

Taking a rapid survey of the remainder: Ms. B will never go AI. She finds it “super embarrassing to me, and pitiful…”. Speaking of embarrassing, Mr. A.P. pays so little attention to his work that he didn’t even notice when AI cribbed from the Guardian for a book review it published under his name in The New York Times. “Can Art Compromise With Fascism?” asks the title of “his” review. Indeed. Mr. L onanistically confuses volume for value: “One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven.” He could be replaced with a cron job hooked up to PR Newswire, if the traffic model of media funding were still viable enough to justify it. All the editors of website W decided together that they will not go AI, because otherwise what is even the point of website W. A different Ms. B denies going AI for her novel, but readers are unconvinced. Is it worse to get caught going AI, or to generate AI-quality prose with your own hands? Ironically Mr. M, who resentfully claims uncredited contributions to the reporting on this second Ms. B, has enthusiastically gone AI himself.

III

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes AI?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific journalists.

Kind, good, happy, secure people never go AI. They may be the hard-working columnist, the former blogger, the independent media entrepreneur, or the virtuosic book critic—you’ll never make sloppers out of them. But the bored pseudo-intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the fearful ink cannon, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go AI in a crisis.

Believe me, good writers don’t go AI. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is experience, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go AI. It’s an amusing game. Try it with the next big industry you work in.

My apologies to Dorothy Thompson, who wouldn’t go AI in a million years, and from whom I stole both the premise and structure of this post and virtually the entire third section, which noticeably did not require much adjusting. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” I said that.

I am going to assume you’ve already titrated your exposure to the Lindy West / polyamory discourse at whatever level you find most effective and desirable in your own life, so I won’t try to recap the entire thing. But after three weeks of critiques, profiles, reviews, takes, counter-takes, and nasty emails, there are a few questions that you might still have which I feel qualified to answer. So let’s just do that real quick. [Ed.: It will not be quick.]

Q: Is the book, Adult Braces, any good?

I haven’t read it, but a few people whose taste I trust say that it is good! This isn’t surprising, since Lindy West is a charming and funny writer and a sharp observer of detail, and most of the book consists of a cross-country van trip which is the perfect stage on which to showcase her talents. Tabs Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley reports that it is “really good at describing the lived experience of larger bodied people and how that experience colors everything else that happens to you.” West’s writing is apparently still a bit infected with a 2010-era The Stranger vibe, but since she is the person who largely invented that voice, if she wants to keep using it who am I to say she shouldn’t. Overall, this isn’t an American Canto situation, which is sort of a relief. If we’re going to have weeks of discourse over a book, at least it should be a reasonably good book.

Q: Where can I get a little taste without reading it reading it, if you know what I mean?

Yeah I gotchu. @clapifyoulikeme is posting selected passages in a Bluesky thread.

Q: So the whole thing is about Lindy and her husband Aham, and Aham’s non-monogamy which Lindy sort of agreed to and sort of also didn’t want to think about, but then Aham started a serious relationship with Roya and all of them had to figure out how to live with all this, and whether they wanted to be together or, like, I don’t exactly know how to put it…

I feel like you’re summarizing the book in order to avoid asking a question. Please just ask it.

Q: Ok, fine. What do all these people look like?

Wow, that’s pretty shallow don’t you think?

Q: Fuck off dude, you wondered too.

I mean, I am writing these questions myself. Normally I would say that is none of our business but luckily (?) for us in 2022, Lindy, Aham, and Roya hard-launched their polycule with a twenty-eight minute YouTube video for StyleLikeU (sponsored by “DAME - a leading sexual wellness brand creating game-changing pleasure products for people with vulvas, and DIPSEA – an app where storytelling meets sexual wellness”) in which they perch on uncomfortable looking stools under freezing cold lighting in some kind of Eli Roth raw concrete interrogation room and answer questions from offscreen about their relationship while removing an article of clothing between each question in a manner that is less “sexy striptease” and more “the proctologist will be in as soon as you’re ready.”

[citation needed]

Q: Uh wait can I see the book’s cover again?

Q: This is a war crime.

That isn’t a question, but I agree.

Q: So critics generally say that Aham doesn’t come off great in the book. How are they handling the launch?

Not very well, I’m afraid! The best piece about the book that I’ve read is Scaachi Koul’s in Slate. Scaachi traveled all the way to Bainbridge Island, Washington¹ to interview Lindy about the book and her life, and while Scaachi certainly knows how to be mean, this profile is not even slightly mean. In fact she openly cops to being a long-time Lindy West fan:

Nevertheless after it was published, Scaachi revealed on Slate’s ICYMI podcast, she received an email from Aham which read:

Q: ????????

Yeah, even if the piece had been exactly as Aham describes it here (which it isn’t at all), this is not how grownups act. This is an unacceptable way to speak to anyone. But ok, Aham had a tantrum, we’ve all had bad moments right? We’ve all written things we wish we hadn’t. I certainly have, anyway. But when the ICYMI podcast producers reached out to Aham before the show, they received this in response:

For me, this is the sort of thing that leads me to a permanent conclusion about someone. “Free Palestine” deployed as a snide dismissal of a nasty email you wrote to a journalist is pretty far beyond the pale for me. I’m not ok with that. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Roya also responded to Scaachi, in a more classic media mean-girl idiom:

Wow. 2013 called to say: “sick burn.” I guarantee everyone she knows read this story, though, and for whatever its worth this profile was what finally convinced me to get a Slate Plus subscription.

Q: Is there anything I probably haven’t already seen about this that you thought was good?

Yes! Artist and writer Torey Akers made a Tiktok that I think is very perceptive about the book and Lindy West’s overall place in the “2010s viral confessional essay industrial complex.” Akers says:

Q: Ok. Anything else?

Nope!

Q: Should I check out what Helen Lewis had to say about it in The Atlantic?

No, never.

Today in Scientists: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. “Should we be worried?” asks The Guardian’s Rich Pelley in a rare anti-Betteridge. A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow 'Organ Sacks' to Replace Animal Testing, reports Wired’s Emily Mullin. At last, we’ve created ChickieNobs from the famous Margaret Atwood novel “Don’t Create ChickieNobs.” “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.” Should we be worried? Scientists put 792 ants in a particle accelerator. They found out ants are all full of even littler stuff inside them. I already believed that, but it was just a superstition. Now we know it’s true. Should we be worried? Robert Hart in The Verge: No, ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer. Apparently it’s relatively easy to make a genetically customized mRNA vaccine that does not cure cancer. Who knew! Becky Ferreira in 404: Why It's Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science. Should we be worried (complimentary)?

Today in Headlines: “Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving” is the craziest headline since “Charlie Kirk's Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident,” which itself was the craziest headline since “Vaginal weightlifter sex coach charged with assaulting census taker who knocked at door.”

Today’s Song: AJJ, “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope”

Today’s Tabs was brought to you by the letter G, which moves in silence like lasagna. You know who loves lasagna, and hates Mondays? Thats right: President James A. Garfield. Thanks to Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley for the only original piece of reporting in here, and thanks to you for reading. Aham please don’t email me about this.

Tabs was unexpectedly off last week because I came down with some kind of middle-school incubated plague whose main symptoms were exhaustion and brain fog. But no brain fog, no gain fog, as the saying goes, and the gain fog for you is that I spent most of the week lying in bed reading Takes as they slowly dribbled out of the leaky garden hose which is all that remains of digital media now. When I was young we all drank straight from the overflowing garden hose of digital media and got Buzzfeed lead poisoning without any adults caring. Only 90’s kids will understand. Nevertheless I took all the Takes and put them into the Take-o-matic 9000 and blended them into a thick nutritive slurry of correct opinions for you, so let’s choke that down instead.

The New Atlantis is a pretty squishy, Aquarian sounding title for a “public journal of ideas.” Which is odd, since The New Atlantis was founded by a Heritage Foundation aligned nonprofit whose Board of Directors currently includes Leonard Leo (yes, that Leonard Leo) and which according to Influence Watch “advocates for overturning Roe v. Wade, opposes gender ideology and the Equality Act, and supports the creation of a conservative, pro-family economic policy agenda.” The magazine appears to be a semi-arm’s length effort to smuggle conservative “Judeo-Christian” trad views into an existing humanist anti-technology discourse that doesn’t need them and largely isn’t interested in them. The paucity of potential readership for a public journal of ideas that is philosophically opposed to ideas probably explains why no one paid any attention when The New Atlantis published a long essay back in December for its Winter 2025 issue titled ”American Diner Gothic.” Unfortunately last week someone finally read it, so now it’s everyone’s problem.

This illustration is like 85% of the story’s argument.

The piece is by Robert Mariani who is “a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon” and “also the CEO of Wingman.live, an AI dating assistant app.” Anyone even vaguely attuned to current socio-technological vibes can clock that as a profoundly cursed bio. The shorter but more fun part of “American Diner Gothic” is a personal story of the time Mariani dated a nonbinary anime gamer girl, who ultimately (and correctly) dumped him for being a boring yuppie. That’s not even me being mean—don’t worry, I’m gonna be mean in a second—it’s what Mariani himself wrote.

The longer and much worse part of the essay is Mariani struggling to describe the commodification of anime otaku culture without any of the critical tools required to make that description legible or interesting. It’s like watching a squirrel try to disarm a nuclear weapon—no surprise that he fails to do it, but the reader is left wondering why he even wanted to try. Ultimately “American Diner Gothic” is less a cultural analysis and more the soggy issue of a prolonged session of pseudo-critical gooning.

Oh, dear.

What sources or research Mariani consulted to develop his subcultural analysis are never specified. I suspect they consisted mainly of watching Tiktoks, which leaves the alleged real-world cultural dominance of the dinergoth an open question, but the general archetype is at least reasonably recognizable. He describes the dinergoth this way:

In his 1979 book Subculture: the meaning of style, Dick Hebdige wrote that British punk fans of the late 1970’s, and particularly fans of David Bowie, were:

Wow that sounds familiar. Mariani continues:

Or, as Hebdige put largely the same observation forty seven years ago:

“At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle,” writes Mariani. Yeah dog, that’s how commodification of subcultures works. First it’s underground, and then it’s a whole aisle at Target. Think of the boost e-girls must have given haberdashery!

All day cookie dough.

None of this really contradicts what Mariani wrote, it’s just one of several much more interesting potential essays that he dodges like Neo in bullet time in his determination to instead deliver grandiose but facially meaningless sentences such as: “Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare.” Which Boomer policies are these exactly? How would a policy “culminate” in the abstract, and what would it possibly mean for a policy to “crest?” Or to never crest? Do normal policies both crest and culminate? Should they crest in generational peace and accord? What does any of this mean? I have no idea, and anyway Mariani is immediately off into more bong rips like: “Instead: a riot of myth and meaning in the fandom-noosphere that bootstraps itself from and then forgets the North American provinces.” That is absolutely nothing. That’s just a list of words.

Pointing out another potentially interesting essay that “Diner Goth” isn’t, Delia Cai wrote:

In fact one of the few sourced facts in the piece is (not coincidentally) one of the only interesting things Mariani observes:

That’s wild! Why is that? “No coastal elite indoctrination here,” explains Mariani. “It’s what happens when traditional life paths close everywhere and the Internet becomes the only space with options.” Oh, it’s what happens when it happens. Ok! Another bullet dodged.

I swear this is not me writing satire, this is literally a couple paragraphs later in the essay:

The piece is quite long and much more of it reads like this than you would naïvely imagine could be possible. Kyle Chayka is a friend of mine and a nice guy, which regrettably I am not, so his take on “Diner Goth” was characteristically tolerant and open-minded:

It certainly annoyed me, so mission accomplished there I suppose. Not even the conservatives are really buying it though. The Spring New Atlantis issue has a paywalled part two, “Vibing in the Ruins” which as far as I can tell no one has paid to read. Maybe it mentions Dick Hebdige! We’ll probably never know.

Whoops! I didn’t mean to write a whole post about an essay everyone hated, including me, but here we are over 1,500 words so I guess I did. I haven’t even had time to talk about Lindy West’s memoir yet. I’ll get to it later this week, somehow. But until then…

Very Briefly: The war is going great. Delve: another case where “A.I.” is Actually Indians. The final days of the Mall of America Hooters. Wiki Gacha. Vibe Coding Against Critical Infrastructure. Shoot Men Into Space: A Proposal for Temporary Gender Sequestration.

Today’s Song: David Bowie, “I’m Afraid of Americans”

also wtf exactly are beeboes

Rotating Sandwiches Lauren informs us that it’s Solar Appreciation Day, and as a wise man once wrote: “direct sunlight is low-key goated when restoring a sense of safety and emotional well-being is the vibe.” Get out and appreciate some sunlight today if you can.

The direct sunlight of media is a good low stakes cross-blog debate, and Temba, his arms wide and Hammat dancing, my dudes, because here’s a good one. Classic-era Ian Bogost started it back in 2014, long before he devolved into neo-Andy Rooney shtick, with a long column about the nature of the alien meme language in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok.” I’ve seen the phrase “Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra“ enough times to understand that it means “two people setting aside their differences to solve a common problem” without knowing anything else about the Star Trek episode it comes from or why it means that. Ironically that’s exactly the point of the Star Trek episode.

Sokath? His eyes uncovered?

Earlier this month Baylor University professor Alan Jacobs returned to Bogost’s essay to disagree with him that the alien language is either “abstract” or “allegorical,” which led to Critical Star Trek Studies blogger Adam Roberts debating Jacobs’s claim that the language is perfectly concrete and not even capable of abstraction. Roberts speculates that the Children of Tama could have hundreds of thousands of distinct memetic phrases to draw on. “Could it be that Tamarian speech is more like Chinese sinograms than it is like memes?” asks Jacobs. Sure! Why not. Jacobs also refers to “Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language,” in which Peter A. Jansen and Jordan Boyd-Graber build an English-Tamarian dictionary and translator based on the sixty-eight known Tamarian phrases. Arnock, on the night of his joining! And finally Lyta Gold picked up a loose thread from Jacobs and asked “how could a meme language be passed down from generation to generation?” Gold proposes that the Children of Tama actually have two languages: the day-to-day memetic one and a separate “primal, sacred language: the words of the story.”

Does any of this matter at all? No! But if you read all those links, your day will include at least one interesting and diverting hour where you don’t think about these literal clownshoes morons and all the kids they’re murdering with our tax money right now. The path to Kamata in spring.

Jinza, when the truth was uncovered.

It’s “The End of Computer Programming as We Know It,” and no one feels fine. Anil Dash reminds us that “all of the great things that people love about technology weren't created by the money guys, or the bosses who make HR decisions — they were created by the people who actually build things.” See also: “Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code.”

New AI Psychosis Symptom And/Or Software Development Framework Dropped: “Cantrip: On summoning entities from language in circles.” I’m gonna be perfectly honest, I do not know what this is. I think it has something to do with “Recursive Language Models,” which as far as I can tell is what you get when an LLM climbs up its own ass. Cantrip claims that:

Zenrox, tilling his field in the spring, imo.

McKay Coppins spent a year becoming a degenerate sports gambler on The Atlantic’s 100,000 dimes, and it went exactly how you’d expect. I tell you what, me and Mormonism at Tanagra when it comes to sports gambling. And is there some kind of Polymarket bet on the maximum number of clichés that can appear in the lede of a NYT movie review?

Today In Scientists: “Big discovery, we failed to drown a bee.” Scientists! Also the Moby Dick termite, Cryptotermes mobydicki. Lol mobydicki.

600 tubs of mystery French onion dip. (Awww yeah, it’s that time.) “Tracking down the Dark Souls 2 hacker who injected me with 500 cursed Black Knight Ultra Greatswords.” Zinda, his eyes red. Minesweeper: Hormuz. Mixed Tapes: Free human-curated new music playlists for Olds or the otherwise music-discovery challenged. And speaking of Olds: Newgrounds roulette.

Finally: It’s one banana, San Francisco. How much could it cost? Mirab, with sails unfurled.

Today’s Song: Beck, “Beercan”

It’s extremely March and Koltar when he drowned in the swamp, iykwim. But we’re keeping our spirits up with classic grooves.

My hump, my hump, my hump, my fake-plump camel lump. “Camel pageant thrown into chaos after 20 competitors disqualified for using hump-plumping injectables“ reports The Independent:

Judging had barely resumed when the contest was further roiled by the discovery that one of the remaining camels was in fact Ben Shapiro, and another was Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. “Are there even any real camels in this pageant?” asked JD Vance, who was in third place. More on this story in the fullness of time.

But it’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it Mandrake? Foreign substances introduced into our precious camels? That’s the way your hardcore commie works. In fact Rose Maura Lorre at Wirecutter bought some makeup online and discovered…

The illicit hump-plumping injectables may very well themselves have been contaminated—impure. I do not avoid camels Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

Also denying camels their essence are hundreds of thousands of users of the viral “porn addiction app” Quittr, created by two pasty teen influencers who were just profiled by Rebecca Jennings for New York Magazine. The app allegedly “brings in more than $500,000 per month, despite having taken only ten days to build“ according to Jennings according to its founders. But a misconfigured database hasn’t been denying anyone on the internet the essence of Quittr users private information, including their confessions about how porn makes them feel. 404’s Emanuel Maiberg revealed today that Quittr was the “app for quitting porn” that he first reported was leaking user data back in January, but didn’t name at the time because the data exposed was so private and potentially compromising, and because many of the users affected are minors. Vibe coding is going great.

Also today in purity, Washington Post contributor Leana Wen strenuously denies that you gotta hand it to our never nude horseman of pestilence Robert F. Kennedy Jr., buuUUUUUUUuut…

That’s because “ultra-processed” is not a nutritional category but an ideological one. Wen’s brilliant idea is that instead of defining what foods or ingredients are “ultra-processed,” we should simply define which ones aren’t. “The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t.” Of course even Wen has to admit that any reasonable list of “not ultra-processed” foods would include potatoes, oil, and salt, but potato chips “tend to be high in sodium and saturated fat, and offer little nutritional value,” so we still want to exclude them from the Pure Foods for Healthy People Club (no fatties allowed!). No worries, though, “those additional characteristics… could be regulated separately, layered on top of the ultra-processed definition.” Sure, why not.

What all of this stuff is gesturing toward, ultimately, is what eponymous law of headlines creator Ian Betteridge calls “purity culture.” In his blog post “Zen fascists will control you...” Betteridge traces the roots of the fascist ideology embedded in this obsession with being clean and returning to an imaginary prelapsarian garden along a straight line from Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” to the Californian Ideology and eventually to RFK Jr. and Quittr.

The title of this newsletter—Purity Supreme—was my childhood grocery store, a Massachusetts-based chain. The name was just two arbitrary words that meant “the supermarket” to me as a kid but now seem almost comically ominous, like “hey let’s go down to the old Blood & Soil and pick up a rotisserie chicken for dinner.” I looked up what happened to Purity Supreme and it turns out it was bought by Stop & Shop which was bought by Dutch grocery conglomerate Ahold which merged with Belgian holding company Delhaize to form Ahold Delhaize which currently owns, among other chains, my current grocery store Hannaford. The Purity Supreme logic is still running, clean and patient.

New Vision of Hell Dropped:

Scott Smitelli: “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Very long post about the role of AI in work and life, but more interestingly about the role of craft, the nature of tools, the clash of values that can confuse any conversation about what the purpose of work even is, and a bunch of other things.

Reservoir Ducks:

by Brett "Solidarity 2026" Banditelli, go watch the whole thing

Paulina Rowińska in Quanta: New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem. RIP Alan Sillitoe, you would have gone crazy for this one. FISH COP. Kevin Roose is at it again. Important follow-up quiz. The only good AI is us: youraislopbores.me. “A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines.” Lol, lmao. Rename the world. Daddy is giving all the good boys special good boy shoes, but it looks like Lil Marco lied about his size. These guys are all so goddamn weird.

And Finally: I… “enjoyed” is probably not the right word here, but I thought this post by Jude Doyle was one of the best things I’ve read about pacifism.

Today’s Song: “Comfort Eagle,” by Cake

This song is for Kevin, the biggest Cake fan I know. He is building a religion.

Donald Trump had a feeling. Maybe Israel forced his hand. Or maybe he forced Israel’s hand. Either way, the vibes were off. Trump knew Iran’s response to being attacked would be to fight back, so he had no choice but to attack them first in order to preëmptively respond (or pre-spond) to their anticipated attacks in re-pre-sponse to our initial pre-sponse. Or, as Marco Rubio stood in front of reporters and said out loud in his big boy voice: “We went proactively in a defensive way.”

We kicked off this war of long-distance pre-taliatory liberation by precision bombing a girls’ school and killing 165 people—“most of them girls aged between 7 and 12”—allegedly to free them from the oppressive yoke of a regime that, I’m told, won’t let girls go to school. I guess they’re free now. “All I can say is we’re investigating that,” said Defense Secretary and overcompensating hardass uncle Pete Hegseth, who clearly couldn’t care less. But when an Iranian drone managed to slip through our $5 billion dollar a day missile shield and kill six Americans in Kuwait, Hegseth could barely pretend to care about that either. “Tragic things happen,” he said. “The press only wants to make the president look bad.” He doesn’t give a shit. Tom Nichols reported that:

Too bad for all the marks and suckers serving in the United States armed forces who believed America meant something, because the people in charge don’t care. They didn’t care about what this war would do to global energy supplies, 20% of which pass through the now-closed Strait of Hormuz. According to Politico, Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles is looking for ideas on what we might do about gas prices, another obvious consequence that Trump didn’t manage to “have a feeling” about before the Tomahawks flew. They don’t care about the urea tankers sitting bottled up in the Persian Gulf, at the exact time they need to set sail to provide fertilizer for the spring planting season. They’ll be fine either way. They absolutely don’t care. John Ganz wrote:

The Washington Post found that even here in the heady first days of a new war, a moment Americans traditionally love more than anything, 52% of us are already against it. A month before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Pew found that 66% of Americans were in favor of military action and just 27% opposed. Now a Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that only 27% approve of the attack on Iran, 43% disapprove, and 29% have no idea what to think, having not even been actively lied into an opinion on it. Nevertheless, as Parker Molloy pointed out, despite apparently doing zero planning and having no strategic goals or victory conditions, they’re trying to use the same decades-old slogan: “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” If that’s the case, I guess like the majority of us, I’m against us.

Interview Magazine: “Meet the Finest Boys in Finance.” The market top sirens are absolutely wailing here. Just look at this incredible lad:

Pictured: Actual cuffs.

Good luck to Elon Musk taking SpaceX public in whatever market is coming after all this. Liz tried to figure out what the SpaceX IPO was all about real quick last Thursday and finally managed to publish 2700 words on Tuesday without really arriving at any clear answers. Now that xAI has bought X dot com and SpaceX has bought xAI, SpaceX is a lean, mean space launch satellite internet social media AI CSAM-as-a-service machine. Or, as Musk describes it, “a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” Whatever happens, at least the S1 will be a real hoot.

Board of Peace—Season one. Kate Wagner: “Toward an Understanding of Fascist Aesthetics, Part I.” Chris Melito: “No machine, regardless of fidelity, should replace desired interactions with humans… Because the simulacrum can never be responsible and cannot be held accountable.” Ryan Moulton: “The Hunt for Dark Breakfast.” I regret to inform you that stir fry has been rebranded “boy kibble” for some reason. I’m delighted to inform you that The New York Times profiled Oldster founder Sari Botton. And here’s “A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish” by Nate Rogers in Defector instead of where it was originally commissioned which was (I’m told) GQ.

And Finally: if you, like me, are feeling somewhere close to a personal nadir of despair lately Tabs Senior Contributing Editor Bijan has some advice:

I guess… you’re either with us or you’re against us.

Today in Toys: Games etc. studio Brainfruit launched MOSS, “a painting toy where every brush is a tiny program” and also a sick hoodie that is a reference to an in-joke from a long running group chat, but you don’t need to know anything about that to appreciate it. (Ethics disclosure: The co-founders of Brainfruit are both my platonic boyfriends.) For real web sickos: Duck Hunt in pure CSS, and Web Haptics. List animals until failure. Jorb? Horb? Jort horse? This handy poster for home, office, or classroom will help you remember the stages of the Metahorsis of the Jorb (by Casey Landerkin, formerly of the Vinn Diagram.) And welcome to Twin Peaks.

Today’s Song: Gorillaz, “The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God”

I’m still somehow always surprised when I’m done writing a Tabs. One moment I’m right in the middle of it, and the next it’s suddenly finished. It’s very strange. Hey a lot of you are new here in the past few days so welcome! Just keep reading, and if you’re confused, click a link or two. You’ll get the hang of it. If you’d like some community support in your journey, the Tabs Discord is available to paid subscribers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We’re here to help.

At long last, we have created Taser Chess from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create Taser Chess. Fletcher Heisler actually did this a year ago but it’s going around on the blogs again for some reason. More recently Heisler taught his fish to drive. Whatever else it may be, YouTube is history’s most successful silliness engine.

In other shocking news:¹  Today in Tabs, the lowbrow Harper’s, is a finalist in this year’s National Magazine Awards! Here’s a live shot of me hearing the news:

heyyyyyyy

I’m very excited about this, and not just because the entry fee was $500. Grizzled veteran Tabs is up against newcomers like Jason Leopold’s FOIA Files at Bloomberg, A Closer Read, the books newsletter at Harper’s Bazaar (the middlebrow Harper’s), New York Magazine’s shopping Substack Secret Strategist, and Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock’s The Spread. If you’re new here, or not, go back and check out the three posts I submitted from last year: Hot Whales In Your Area, Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose, and ZZ Flop. I think the last one might make me the only ASME nominee with a Nuzzi related entry. Also I am so #blessed to be nominated the same year as the gooning story from Harper’s Magazine (the highbrow Harper’s). It's a strong field, and I’m not just saying that because I expect to lose, although I do. But since all newsletterers are my colleagues, if any of us win, in a very real but not literal sense I also win, figuratively. If I do lose, I promise I will solemnly fold up and eat my prepared speech.

Today in Brand New Sentences: Macklin Celebrini’s elevated cupcake experience. MrBeast editor caught insider trading on Kalshi (allegedly). The Hallow app paid West Village girlies to promote The Brothers Karamazov for Lent (якобы). Its called the Swizzlegang 22000 (ornjang). “See more on N*****s.” Black History Month is proceeding as usual, I see. “The latest skincare fad is rubbing salmon sperm on your face.” Skeleton: Dan Barefoot. The Boston Legacy Football Club tattoo glory hole. Can you believe they’re threatening to give me an award for this.

Want to feel old? It’s been 12 years since Kevin tried to set a Google calendar event for “12 Years a Slave.” Free at last.

Also Free At Last: Larry Summers finally resigned from Harvard. It would have happened sooner but he reportedly couldn’t find a rock that would allow him to crawl under it.

Today in Courtesans: It was a big week in brothel news. First Esquire published “My Life as a Sex Worker at a Nevada Brothel” by Paloma Karr, a pseudonymous Iranian-born bisexual New York novelist in her mid-forties with distinctive tattoos. I hope we find out who it really was someday. Then in a more substantive piece for The Nation, Kim Kelly covered the formation of the United Brothel Workers (“Bust Nuts, Not Unions!”) under CWA Local 9413, and their fight to get a fair contract from Sheri’s Ranch. Paloma Karr was one of the workers illegally fired for unionizing so it’s kind of wild that the Esquire piece doesn’t even mention it?

Today in AI Externalities: Jake Harris doesn’t want to vibe code. You can’t make Dave Karpf vibe code. You can't make John Warner vibe write either. AI is literally making Greg Knauss depressed, and it should be ashamed of itself. An AI agent generated and posted a hit piece accusing Scott Shambaugh of anti-AI “discrimination.” Thomas Germain tricked ChatGPT and Google’s AI with the incredibly devious tactic of posting a web page with falsehoods in it. You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? A “Claude vibe-coded smart contract cost DeFi protocol $1.8M in losses.” It’s a start! 404’s Emanuel Maiberg reported that “Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox.” It’s a start! Writers are seeing a flood of new scams, and scams are getting more sophisticated and convincing because AI makes it easy to generate legitimate-looking emails and websites. Also legitimate-looking public comment emails: Hayley Smith reported that the “Southern California air board rejected pollution rules" after receiving 20,000 AI generated comment emails opposing them.

Of all the things that should be illegal, this is one. And the latest company to sound the alarm about AI-powered theft is AI company Anthropic (ethics disclosure: Casey and his beau are engaged! Can you believe it? Congrats fellas!), which sent a letter to the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (a real thing, apparently) warning the USHSCSCBUSCCP that Chinese company DeepSeek is trying to swipe what Anthropic already stole fair and square. This aggression will not stand, man. And for all this society-wide extra hassle, AI contributed "basically zero” growth to the US economy last year according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. Don’t worry, where we’re going we won’t need economic growth.

Finally: Mike Somes is The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment.

Lol, got ‘em. 😞

Today’s Song: Mazzy Star, “She Hangs Brightly”

I’m still in my Mazzy Star era. (Previously.) “Interviewing Mazzy Star is like throwing stones down a deep well and waiting for the faint splash.” The perfect band, tbh.

There’s no such thing as a leader without any followers, and they don’t give awards to newsletters without any subscribers. Unlike Mazzy Star, I wouldn’t do this if no one ever read it, so thank you for reading! You make it worth learning about the Boston Legacy Football Club tattoo glory hole every week.

A couple nights ago I went downstairs for a late night snack and as I stood at the back door staring at the decaying snow and thinking my February thoughts I heard a faint tinny burble from somewhere to my right. A pair of headphones lay on my wife’s desk plugged into her laptop, and when I held them up to one ear I heard: “It’s the ennnd of the worrrrrld as we know it…”

“Oh my god,” I thought. “What does it know?”

Of course I didn’t think that, that would be an idiotic thing to think. My wife had left her music playing when she finished work for the day, and the computer just kept doing what it was told to do, and I happened to wander in looking for some ice cream when shuffle pulled up R.E.M. But now here we are again, talking about A.I.

Earlier this month The New Yorker published a story by Gideon Lewis-Kraus about A.I. and boyfriend company Anthropic, and if you haven’t read it you should go read it now. Here’s a free link, even. It’s a good story! Entertaining, cleverly structured, fairly long but paced to read much shorter. I truly recommend it, and not just by way of apology because I’m about to use it as a case study for some common mistakes in how a lot of people are thinking and writing about A.I. But I am going to do that.

One thing the piece does well is provide some precise and accurate definitions. It begins with this one:

Regrettably this clear-sightedness doesn’t last long, because just a couple paragraphs later I am breezily informed that “large language models are black boxes. We don’t really understand how they work.”

This is false. You may not understand how L.L.M.s work, and Lewis-Kraus may not understand it, but we, the collective “we” of homo sapiens, understand it perfectly well. A programmer named Andrej Karpathy recently implemented a fully functional large language model in 200 lines of Python code. He also wrote a detailed explanation of exactly what it does, how it works, and the ways it differs from big company frontier models, which are all just differences of scale and efficiency. I admit that some of the math is beyond me, but even without completely understanding those parts, it’s not difficult to follow the logic and the code isn’t doing anything technically complex. Someone has already ported it to run on a Super Nintendo.

The code for a fully functioning LLM. I guess this picture is technically a black box.

A.I. discourse is going to be cursed with hucksters, hype beasts, doomsayers, and con artists on every side for the foreseeable future so it unfortunately behooves us to understand what this technology is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t a black box. It’s a statistical model of data connected to a mechanism for producing more data that resembles the data in the model.

Karpathy’s first frequently asked question is “Does the model ‘understand’ anything?” “That’s a philosophical question,” he answers diplomatically, “but mechanically: no magic is happening.” Does 200 lines of Python code understand anything? My siblings in Christ I hope it’s clear how utterly bizarre this question is. And it translates directly to the same question for Anthropic’s Claude, which is not doing anything different. If we make the input file bigger, if we make the way it gets mathematically processed more efficient, if we prepend a long document describing how we imagine a helpful robot might act to the user’s input, at which of those steps does “understanding” happen?

But maybe you’re still not convinced so here’s a different way of looking at it. Lewis-Kraus writes: “At the dawn of deep learning, a little more than a dozen years ago, machines picked up how to distinguish a cat from a dog… Once they had seen every available image of a cat, they could reliably sort cats from non-cats.” Later he asserts that “If a language model can bootstrap its way to linguistic mastery, we can no longer rule out the possibility that we’re doing the same thing.”

I’ve watched all three of my children learn what a cat is, and in each case the number of pictures of a cat they needed to see was not “all of them.” It was like, two or three? Half a dozen, tops. I helped them learn to speak and read fluently, and the number of Reddit posts required was not “every Reddit post.” I don’t need to know what mechanism underlies human intelligence to rule out the possibility that it’s the same as what a large language model does. The whole trick underlying the apparent magic of modern A.I. is simply giving it tons of data. Give it the whole internet. Give it every book ever written. This is required—it does not work with less training data:

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.

The reason I’m harping on this is because the basic thesis of Lewis-Kraus’s story is that “[w]e don’t know if it makes sense to call [these programs] intelligent, or if it will ever make sense to call them conscious.” I think we do know! Nevertheless, we’re off in search of the ghost in the machine anyway and soon we’re introduced to “Amanda Askell, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy.” Askell works at Anthropic, and is largely responsible for maintaining the description of a helpful robot I mentioned above, which the company calls “Claude’s Constitution.” It’s incredibly long and boring, and gives off the stink of having been itself largely A.I. generated. Lewis-Kraus writes:

The piece doesn’t tell us who Amanda Askell is beyond the existence of her diploma, which I think is a disservice because she’s quite the character. Amanda Askell was born Amanda Hall, and later married Will Crouch, one of the philosophical cofounders of the effective altruism movement. They adopted the mutual married name of MacAskill, and when they divorced in 2015 Amanda “reworked” that to Askell. These people are exhausting, I know, but we have to learn about them because we live in the world they predicted and then created. To be fair they did say that it would suck—it’s the one thing they got right.

Remember Cecil the Lion (and his brother Jericho, who was also a lion)? In 2015, Askell and her then-husband co-wrote a deeply stupid piece in Quartz titled “To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion).” The lost and lamented former Verge dream team of Loren Grush, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and Elizabeth Lopatto explained at the time that it was not meant to be satire, and was in fact as deeply stupid as it seemed. This is the level of philosophical firepower we’re dealing with here.

The same day that Lewis-Kraus’s article appeared, The Wall St. Journal published a long profile of Askell, who it turns out looks like vanilla yogurt, in which Berber Jin and Ellen Gamerman trace her short path from the E.A. social circle to her current bot fanfic job. They report that:

Poppycock. She’s doing none of those things. She’s writing science fiction which will be used by a mathematical equation to alter the statistical likelihood of a computer program choosing some tokens rather than other tokens as its output. Saying that any of this is teaching a chatbot philosophy is like calling yourself a psychiatrist because you thought about Oedipus while jacking off.

A.I. isn’t people. When Amanda Askell pretends to be teaching an artificial person morality, or Gideon Lewis-Kraus includes output from ChatGPT about a rival company’s chatbot like it’s a quote from a source, or when he imbues Claude with emotions, like calling it “dumbfounded” or saying it found a task “rather tiresome,” they are all blurring the line between a piece of software and a human being. They’re confusing a thing with a person. Lewis-Kraus includes this anecdote from a mathematician who works for Anthropic:

This technology is genuinely remarkable. It’s surprising and kind of delightful to learn that a sufficiently large sample of natural human language contains enough deep statistical structure to produce nonsense like a conversation with a physicist who can’t stop talking about bananas. No one is entirely sure yet whether it has long-term practical applications, although there are signs that the distinctive nature of computer programs as sort of testable, functional machines made of language might make the field amenable to using language generators as a tool. Paul Ford took a shot at making that argument in The New York Times recently, and Paul is very smart. But what possible reason could there be for comparing the unknown depths of the human psyche with the workings of an algorithm that can be expressed in 200 lines of Python?

Terry Pratchett wrote every decent person’s favorite summary of the bedrock of humanist morality in a fantasy book for young readers called I Shall Wear Midnight: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” Treating people as things can begin in many ways, but I think one of them is the idea that things can be people. The motivated muddling of categories so prevalent in writing and thinking about A.I., beginning with the very name “artificial intelligence,” is intentional and serves the narrative that this software can and will take over for human workers, doing their jobs cheaper, faster, better and without requiring rest or dignity. The A.I. industry is selling a dream of digital slavery—infinite human labor with no actual human involved. And if you worry that this conclusion is a little histrionic, here’s Sam Altman encouraging us to compare the energy cost of training an L.L.M. to the energy cost of raising and educating a human child:

Is this treating things as people, or treating people as things? “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Either way I think it’s evil, and the evil is not the technology—it’s the dreams of the people trying to sell it to us.

Today in More A.I. Tabs: Casey Newton reported that “OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team.” John Herrman on why A.I. alignment and safety workers “might worry that, actually, none of this is being taken seriously and that you now work at just another big tech company—but worse.” Sam Kriss in Harper’s with a well edited story about the San Francisco A.I. startup scene. The n+1 editors: “Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI.“ Welcome to the Group Chat.

Today in Not A.I.: “The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan. It is just over 530km.” The Longest Line of Sight.

I know you were wondering so here’s the difference between “lowkenuinely” and “lowkirkenuinely.” 

Today’s Song: Laufey, “From the Start”

I am so glad this post is done, it started as a Google doc annotation of that New Yorker story and just kept getting more unmanageable for a week and a half. I have probably two more posts worth of links and ideas that didn’t make it in here, but I think we can let all that slide for now. Meanwhile I will slide back into your inbox later this week. Sweet segue, nice job Rusty.

I wrote “nice job, Rusty” in an email and sent it to myself. What I saw next has shocking implications.

It turns out “Democracy Dies in Darkness” wasn’t a warning so much as a mission statement. Last week Jeff Bezos fired thirty percent of the all employees at The Washington Post including 300 of the 800 newsroom staff, such as Ukraine correspondent Lizzie Johnson, fired while reporting from a warzone in Kyiv. The newspaper no longer has a Sports section, which is bad according to Sally Jenkins who has already moved on to The Atlantic, or a Books section, which is bad according to Becca Rothfeld who has already moved on to The New Yorker.

Rothfeld described the whole point of a newspaper with her characteristic elegance:

Can you believe she wasn’t already writing for The New Yorker? This is a world historic fumble by semi-sentient thumb Jeff Bezos.

And when I said Jeff Bezos fired thirty percent of the Post’s staff, of course I meant the paper’s executive editor Matt Murray fired them on a Zoom call without any direct participation by either Bezos or publisher and professional henchman Will Lewis. To be fair, no crimes needed covering up at the moment so Lewis presumably judged that his presence wasn’t required, and he was busy enjoying the NFL red carpet and also quitting The Washington Post. Good luck to him in finding another media company to wreck that Cory “Cory Haik” Corrine didn’t already get to.

But what’s the point for Bezos of ruining an institution of American journalism that he could easily afford to fund in its entirety forever? Is it “disinterest” or abandonment? I think Parker Molloy is right: Bezos is intentionally remaking the Post to serve his interests instead of ours.

Ex-Postie Alexandra Petri (who got lost on her way to The New Yorker, but we remain optimistic) had some belated advice to Bezos about what he could do with $250 million in 2013.

And among the blizzard of Takes,¹  Delia provided some actual service with a list of open journalism jobs.

How It Started / How It’s Going: Crown of Empress Eugénie edition.

Same, tbh.

Today In Sports: New crotch-related ski jumping scandal dropped. (Previously in pelvic ski jumping shenanigans). The Super Bowl™ ads were shitty, but not 404 Media’s ad, broadcast exclusively in the hot Ottumwa, Iowa² local market. “What it was like to be a bush at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance.” “Athletic Greens is ‘clinically backed.’ What does that even mean?” asks Victoria Song. Nothing, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just spinach powder.

Today In Dystopia: Rent a human dot ai. New Lay’s potato chip ad campaign aimed at teaching consumers that potato chips are made from potatoes. Ring doorbell cameras are back to their original project of building an AI powered private surveillance dragnet for police. If you have one of these things please take a hammer to it. Jade Helm is here, and now the right wing loves it. “San Francisco’s billionaire bacchanal a big bust.” Specifically, Aella’s big bust. And hackers stole and wrecked Zombocom. At least the infinite is still possible at html5zombo.com.

The Epstein Files may have turned everyone into conspiracists but Liz Lopatto dug into them and found a big club of powerful men united by their desire to abuse women without suffering any consequences for it, which is exactly what it looks like on the surface. Or as Jude Doyle put it: “You know, you can just say ‘Patriarchy’.”

Is there a gas leak in San Francisco?

Our former regrettable platform Substack is still making money from Nazis, reports Geraldine McKelvie at The Guardian, just like it did in 2023, and 2024, and 2025.

Lorin Hochstein: “Nobody knows how the whole system works.”

Sebastian Stockman on his friend (and everyone else’s) the late Dan McQuade,³ and their shared love of the overblown lede:

And I don’t know about you but I’m pretty excited for what Alison Willmore called Emerald Fennell’s “smooth-brained Wuthering Heights.”

“Planet Hillary,” if it isn’t already permanently burned into your trauma centers.

Today’s Song: Sleigh Bells, “Crown on the Ground”

Today in Tabs is brought to you by one hour and ten minutes of Mulder and Scully getting into and out of rental cars and the universal human desire to just draw a little horse.

This crown is waiting for you to pick it up by becoming a paid subscriber. Let’s get it, queen.

 

Paul Ford is blogging again and it’s like he never stopped. For all I know, he never did stop—he’s probably been blogging in his journal every day, or in his dreams. If you don’t already know Paul (how?), all you need by way of introduction is this very short story from 2002 that predicted the next quarter century of developments in technology and society. A couple days ago he wrote about his name showing up in the files, like many other completely innocent people.

With all those masks off, it’s been difficult to look directly at the news. I keep getting snagged on irrelevant details, little glitches floating on the surface of a bottomless blue hole of horrors. Like what’s up with all those equals signs, anyway? It’s cross-platform line encoding, of course. It’s always cross-platform line encoding. The Files are also providing people with a working Windows 7 license key and a brand new mirror for the Bash Reference Manual.

But Garbage Ryan looked directly at the files and saw Jeffrey Epstein’s cash and influence all over the worldwide rise of fascism. Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Michael Wolff, Elon Musk, 4chan, Bitcoin, Gamergate… Epstein’s right in the middle of all of it, smearing around his money and connections. For every villainous scheme since 2008, there’s an Epstein email like:

And what’s up with the typing? This is the best explanation I’ve seen for that:

plug (n): “a source from which to score drugs” …or whatever.

Long live the new flesh. Welcome to the resistance, Ammon Bundy. Looks like Minion’s back on the program, boys. The beauty of slag. How likely is 'likely'? “It could be the end, but I hope it's just a checkpoint.” Intern Bijan on internet checkpoints. The slut spuds of true Berlin. Bizarre little roots, you’re still in control of the board. It’s still what computers can’t do. Earth 2 finally dropped. I’m going, I don’t even care.

Today’s Song: Rich the Kid, “Plug Walk”

It’s a short one today because I collected a ton of links about OpenClaw and then decided I don’t actually care about it, lol. Good luck to everyone turning over all their credentials to the credential stealing machine though. Ok one more thing—this guy figured out how to spend $20 to ask a computer what time it is. The innovation here is incredible.

I’m on Bluesky @rusty.todayintabs.com and not really anywhere else so if you subscribed to me on OnlyFans, I have some bad news. Or good news, I guess? Please subscribe to my emails though.

Adam Serwer wrote the best thing I’ve read about the resistance to ICE in Minnesota. I think everyone should read it, so that’s a gift link in case you don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, which: understandable. Serwer wrote:

Later, after describing how the resistance works and what it has accomplished so far, he returned to the theme of values:

This felt like an update to my own piece for the Washington Post about the presidential election way back in November, 2024, when I was hiking. Here’s a free archive link in case you don’t subscribe to the Post which, again: understandable. I wrote:

I ended with a question: “How can we reconcile living our lives with such openness, such abundant kindness, but governing ourselves with such fear and hate?” I still don’t have a good answer, but the predations of Trump and Stephen Miller’s secret police have sharpened the question to a killing point.

The poem is from The Southern Review, Winter 2026, available online at Project Muse.

That turned out to be the last piece I would publish in the Post, as Jeff Bezos was already in the process of destroying the newspaper’s Opinion section, preliminary to destroying the newspaper itself. My editor left the next month and her editor left in February, 2025. Many more reporters and editors have left since, but it’s still not enough for Jeff Bezos who is preparing to cut “as many as 300” more staff this February, according to Natalie Korach in Status. Rumor has it the whole sports section will be cut, and on Saturday Benjamin Mullin and Erik Wemple reported that the “Washington Post Tears Up Plans to Cover Winter Olympics” before further reporting on Monday that the Post had torn up the plans to tear up the plans to cover the Winter Olympics, and would now send “a small contingent,” presumably to cover only the most diminutive Olympic events. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $266 billion dollars, to him this is the budgeting equivalent of deciding whether to get a small fry or a medium.

Last Saturday, a few hours after a group of masked and still-unidentified gunmen slaughtered Alex Pretti in the street, the current CEO of Bezos’s company Amazon attended a special White House premiere of the Melania Trump movie, a $75 million sweetener gifted to our historically corrupt President by Amazon and directed by the otherwise unemployable accused rapist Brett Ratner. Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stuart reported that “some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary,” and more have since regretted not requesting the same.

Also at the White House’s “Melania” premiere was Tim Apple, the tech CEO and corporate submissive who was critical of Trump in his first term but has consistently sided with the new, more vicious, second term Trump. Mr. Apple reports that he “had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views.” Those were very close-up views of the boot he was licking, I can only assume. Apple employees hate it, according to Sam Biddle in the Intercept, and they should quit, according to me. Right down there sucking boot with Tim was AI huckster Sam Altman, who told his employees that “President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country.” I asked ChatGPT and it told me that if Sam tilts his head back to really open the airway, he can probably fit the whole boot all the way down his throat.

Hey if you haven’t seen the original of this recently: holy shit.

Alex Pareene checked in at Defector with a great idea for a “mandatory long-term residential retraining program” for ICE and CBP. We miss you Alex! Welcome to the resistance, New York Times Editorial Board. “When Will He Resign?” asked Jonathan Katz, and me, and everyone else I hope. Welcome to the resistance, big dick subreddit. ICE officers are having big feelings about how much everyone hates them, reported Ken Klippenstein. Boo hoo. Welcome to the resistance, Woke Bill Kristol. Tom Homan reassigned to Minnesota by Fox News. Welcome to the resistance, driving range guys.

In Other News: Rosa Lyster’s Harper’s story about the pair of weirdos who killed the Sycamore Gap tree is a delight. Also Today in Ol’ Knifey: punters who don’t ‘alf fancy a wank will soon find themselves cock-a-leekie and right mugged off by Porn’ub innit bruv. Imagine if British people were real? Happy Feast Day of Saint Bugle. Aujourd'hui en Les Douches de Laval: “Quebec apartment turns into ‘ice castle’ after tenant turns off heat.” Netflix only paid Alex Honnold “mid-six figures” to broadcast what could have been his horrific death live. Cooooooool with at least eight o’s. Alex I am begging you to get a better agent. Square February starts this Sunday. Don DeLillo‘s long-lost hockey erotica. Jeremy Runover is back in the saddle.

And Finally: What the heck is going on with this insanely bitchy AirMail post about the extended Gould-Gessen family by Substacker Jessa Crispin, channeling the ghost of Ed Champion for no apparent reason? I love mess but this sucks.

This is worth it.

Today’s Song: SPRINTS covering Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”

I can’t imagine anyone else is having an easy time doing their work right now considering… gestures vaguely at everything. So when I know I should write Tabs on Tuesday but don’t find the wherewithal to actually do it until Wednesday, I just keep telling myself that no one is mad at me. So, here I am telling you: no one is mad at you. Do whatever you can, and the rest will wait.

Jessica DeFino wrote that “we’re friction-maxxing” according to P.E. Moskowitz who wrote that “everyone is friction-maxxing these days“ according to Kathryn Jezer-Morton who wrote that “In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing.” Call it twenty twenty frixx. What’s friction-maxxing? It’s like hygge in goblin mode. It’s the dark academia of trad. It’s brat summer but chopped and screwed. It’s getting your concussy slonked… serious style.

Some friction emerged this week in the normally well lubricated “Heated Rivalry” fan community, where hockey podcast “Empty Netters” has recently converted itself into more of a “Heated Rivalry” fancast, with allyship levels approaching Nev Schulman in an elevator (#RESPECT). But yesterday, OutSports’ Cyd Zeigler reported that one of the show’s cohosts privately sent texts calling the hockey romance’s creators “cowards” and “losers.” 

Today the host in question, A Jon Favreau Type,¹  responded to these claims in a video along with his co-host and brother, Young Ron Howard. The co-bros showed the entire text conversation in context, criticized a lack of legitimate effort by Zeigler to reach them for comment before the story was published, and then effusively bemoaned, at what felt like great length, the harm this scurrilous bit of character assassination has done to The Whole Community. Personally, I thought the apology seemed sincere and genuine—as far as it went. Unfortunately, every Youtube commenter noticed that A.J.F.T. never got around to mentioning or apologizing for the text thread’s contemptuous references to “blue-haired twitter” and “check[ing] inclusivity boxes.”

via Empty Netters on YouTube

As a noted straight myself and a student of the heterosexual community, my diagnosis here is an acute case of No Gay Friends. Even just one (1) gay friend could have cast an eye over this response video and said “hey this is great stuff, A.J.F.T., but what did you mean by ‘blue-haired twitter’ though? And where are we checking these ‘inclusivity boxes’ exactly? Are there forms being distributed amongst the straights?” And to add one more question: what do you mean you’re “DYING for a good, quality, well written and AUTHENTIC hockey show” when season five of “Shoresy” literally just came out?

For more on “Heated Rivalry,” consult any local straight woman. For more on “Empty Netters,” consult the show’s Wikipedia page, which also features sections on the “Frank Ocean Coachella incident” and the “Vail Yeti trip.”

Friction may be bad for rotational motion, but friction-maxxing hasn’t stopped a pivot yet. Our Former Regrettable Platform Substack is pivoting to video, again, this time with a TV app. “Video… needs to be wherever someone chooses to consume it” says normal-type word making person Chris Cillizza. Where will you consume video? What location will you choose to shove video into your gaping hole and suck it down your slavering gullet? That’s right piggy, gobble it up. You love consuming video.

Americans are pivoting to not murdering each other anymore. Why?

We’re just too old and fat for doing murders now. Normal opinions everywhere today. Lehman is also an Atlantic contributor, of course.

AI company Anthropic (disclosure: I am not dating anyone at Anthropic) has to keep pivoting to technical interview questions that job applicants can’t use its product to cheat on, reported Russell Brandom. Huh! I feel like everyone is already right on the edge with all this so let’s just move on. Bari Weiss is pausing her podcast and pivoting to devote her full attention to being loathed by everyone at CBS. And video site Vimeo, recently acquired by Italian corporate vampire Bending Spoons, is pivoting to being an empty husk of a company, to be drained of all remaining value and then quietly murdered.

A big natural weather phenomenon dangles across much of North America this weekend, plunging huge tracts of land into subzero temperatures. Regrettably, the weather map currently making the rounds is from 2019.

Is it cold in here?

Marisa Kabas raised more than $18,000 for immigration defense nonprofits in Minnesota by calling Greg Bovino a bitch. Kerry Howley visited the resistance in Minneapolis for New York Magazine, you betcha. In The Guardian, Claire Finkelstein reported that “We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start.” Neat. Good stuff. Welcome to The Kill Line. Problems in Gas Town Society. Subscribe to Sara Kate’s Bird of the Day. Viva la bicicleta alta.

This is part of a good thread about the resistance in Minnesota.

And Finally: Here are the mushrooms that either make you hallucinate lots of tiny little guys everywhere, or permit you to see all the tiny little guys that are everywhere, depending on how you feel about all the tiny little guys that are everywhere but you can’t normally see.

Today’s Song: LCD Soundsystem, “Movement”

You're pillaging and I'm tabbed… You're yesterday and I'm tabbed

Good luck on the general strike today in the Twin Cities and good luck to my own city of Portland, Maine, where the gestapo is here and actively snatching dangerous miscreants like UMaine master’s degree recipient and working civil engineer Juan Sebastian Carvajal-Munoz. Come out ye cowards ICE, come and finally pay the price. Here are some ways to help Minnesota.

Musicology Duck was “briefly kidnapped” yesterday in what knowledgeable observers are calling a pretty on-the-nose allegory, even for these extremely stupid times.

Please do yourself a favor and read the thread.

M. Duck narrated the experience on Blue Sky in real time, with updates like “[the bus driver is] refusing to talk to anyone while he’s driving and is now just driving really fast,” “The company told him to take us to Union station and he screamed that he doesn’t get paid enough and is refusing,” and “woman behind me is now screaming at the bus company on the phone… the company wasn’t being super helpful so she goes ‘just so you know we just reported to the police that we’re being kidnapped’.” Eventually the driver did stop the bus and let everyone get off. The police never showed up, of course.

I also cant stop thinking about this

Surely someone is going to do something about all the rest of this soon too, right? Yesterday The Wall St. Journal’s James Mackintosh surveyed financial markets’ subdued response to Donald Trump threatening to start a trade war and/or a shooting-people war with Europe if Denmark doesn’t give him Greenland and a Nobel Peace Prize. “It’s hard to imagine a new world order,” wrote Mackintosh, “and it’s plausible that investors find it so hard to price in this prospect that they just ignore it. Something like this happened when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.” Oh? Here I’ve been blithely wondering whether it was 1933 or 1938, it never occurred to me it might only be 1914.

But “whatever you think it is, it’s worse,” as Brandi Reilly told Marisa Kabas. Reilly filmed with her phone on Sunday as secret police thugs abducted one of her neighbors in St. Paul, an elderly man dressed only in boxers and crocs, and dragged him out into the freezing Minnesota snow. In The Verge, Minneapolis resident Scott Meslow wrote that he has…

Meslow closes with some advice: “Wherever you are, get organized now.” CrimethInc recently published a guide to the rapid response networks that Minneapolis residents have formed to resist the ongoing violent federal occupation. The resistance is incredibly organized and granular, and has already shifted and evolved significantly as ICE tactics have changed in response to it.

Luke O'Neil also has a roundup of Minneapolis related news today. On the lighter side, Matt Novak helpfully collected “The Best Videos of ICE Agents Eating Shit in the Brutal Minneapolis Winter,” because while they are evil they’re also ridiculous, and we shouldn’t forget to laugh at them.

Also Today in Ridiculous: Bari Weiss, the Hannah Horvath of Leni Riefenstahls, got a full Clare Malone #longread in The New Yorker. There’s nothing really new in it, unfortunately, and all the sassy quotes are anonymous because no one who still has an actual job in media is going to risk open criticism until they’re sure she’s off that glass cliff for good. Meanwhile the 60 Minutes CECOT story Weiss held up in December finally aired on Sunday without any substantive changes, as Bari was unable to get any of her good friends in the Trump administration on camera to chat about sending hundreds of immigrants and refugees to a Salvadoran torture camp. Malice vs. incompetence: the struggle continues.

A University of Fairbanks student was arrested for making real art out of AI “art.” Linguistics has a “phrases can just be words” moment. Wired says it’s the Chinese century, and who can disagree when Chinese women can already get texts without even fucking the text man. AI is the future of managing labels on Github issues. Garbage Ryan tried to vibe code and it didn’t go great. Meanwhile the Gas Town guy is pumping crypto now. “It is, from first principles, stupid” observed Matt Levine, but “It works. It doesn’t have to make sense! It works!” The 365 buttons of venture finance.

Good News: Back in March, Ernie Smith wrote about the pop culture of Greenland, which seems increasingly relevant.

And if you’d like to read one thing today that’s both true and not insanely depressing, it should be this blog post by Kevin Kelly on learning to expect, and accept, unearned kindness. (via Casey Johnston)

I learned the same lesson hiking the Appalachian Trail, which no one can do without an enormous amount of completely unearned generosity from strangers. I needed some kind of help almost every day, and every time I needed it, there it was.

And Finally: Cow tools.

Today’s Song: Nuuk Posse, “Kaataq”

The whole album is on Bandcamp. It only Tuesday.

If you’re reading this, you made it to Whiskey Friday with Tony Dokoupil (not sponsored by or affiliated with Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey or the Brown-Forman Corporation). Don’t forget to click “no” in Are You Dead Yet?, and congrats on the streak. Here’s a good post by Cari Wade Gervin on how to manage anxiety. No particular reason! Just in case you ever need it or whatever.

There’s a whole thread, click it

I assume Bari Weiss is practicing her box breathing, as all of Liz Lopatto’s predictions continue to come true. “You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat shit and own the death of broadcast TV news,” wrote Liz, and Bari is already eating more shit and owning more failure than even Liz likely thought possible. The new Anti-woke CBS Evening News with Tony “Who?” Dokoupil premiered with a spectacularly expensive week long national tour that generated a humiliating blooper reel of technical errors and embarrassing segments and lost the broadcast more than a million viewers compared to the same week last year. According to the New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin:

Perfect, nailed it 👌. Elsewhere in the Bariverse, Evan Mandery reports for Politico that Weiss’s libertarian themed University of Austin is now Joe Lonsdale’s Purity of Essence Anticommunist University, with only approved free speech allowed. The story is mostly a compendium of UATX’s affiliated peak-of-their-undeserved-success morons lamenting that the University hasn’t lived up to the promises that anyone with even a hint of electrical activity in their domepiece knew it would never, could never, and never intended to live up to. It was, after all, founded by the most cursed blunt rotation that the Devil ever assembled:

And that barely even scratches the surface. Congratulations to the first and hopefully final graduating class, here’s your diploma:

‘Stop sending butt plugs to Bahrain’: Toronto sex store receives letters from U.S. Department of War, CP24

Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

Beloved walrus penis stolen from N.J. cheesesteak icon. Owner is blubbering mad., NJ.com

Prior Lake woman arrested with bag of drugs labeled ‘Definitely not a bag full of drugs’, Prior Lake News Compass

Lawyer representing Elon Musk in OpenAI legal battle with Sam Altman is also a working clown, Independent

Danielle Addresses Bunnies As MrBeast Entertains Pleas To Buy NewJeans, Stereogum

And finally: it’s not technically a headline but I can’t get the phrase “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla, and one other thing” out of my head.

Today in AI Takes: Robin Sloan attempted to divert our thinking on “Artificial General Intelligence” away from “does it exist yet,” to a potentially more useful question: “AGI is here! … What now?” Rob Mealey proposed that “AI is a Mood, Not a Method,” in his announcement of the Aristoi Institute, which will work on AI and machine learning tools to assist people with intellectual disabilities. Redis database creator antirez proposed an empowering view of the potential for AI coding tools in “Don't fall into the anti-AI hype.” His commenters largely disagreed but I found the debate enlightening. Cory Doctorow made roughly the opposite argument in “Code is a liability (not an asset).” I don’t entirely agree with either of them but I think they’re both triangulating on something true. In Platformer, Casey Newton (still taken, lads) kept Claude Code week rolling with a list of writing tools he had the robot build him. Maybe you would benefit from similar tools, I don’t know. Personally I feel more like Struan Donald:

My post “Read, Play, Love,” for example, could never have existed were I using AI to do research for me. Sometimes I think it’s better to meander around for a while than head straight for a destination. On the other hand Casey is massively more successful than I am, so probably don’t emulate me unless your goal is mainly to fuck around and amuse yourself.

The Only Good Thing On Social Media Right Now is a Tiktok channel called Tastebuds_nyc, where two NYC bros spin a wheel of countries every week and go eat at a restaurant from that country in New York City. If you can get through the Bhutan episode without tears, you’re a lot stronger than I am.

Finally: A good Hear Me Out.

Today’s Song: “House,” Charli XCX feat. John Cale

I think I’m… House.

You may have noticed that I haven’t written anything about the Federal death squads terrorizing Minneapolis. I’m sure you know me well enough to know it’s not because I don’t care. It’s partly because my feeds have been completely full of horrifying news from Minnesota for more than a week, as I’m sure yours have also been, and I desperately need to think about something else, if only briefly. And it’s partly because I don’t have anything useful to add. I’m not there, I don’t know the city, whatever I might say is frankly just self-serving noise. Tabs reader Winston Hearn is there, and wrote a little about what it feels like to be in Minnesota right now:

Rumor has it that ICE is coming here to Maine next, presumably to terrorize the Somali communities in Portland and Lewiston, so perhaps I’ll have something worthwhile to say about it soon enough. Until then, for Minneapolis and everyone else experiencing the lawlessness and brutality of our federal government, be well and Fuck ICE.

Free print-sized files available from Emily K.

“Welcome to Gas Town” wrote Steve Yegge on the first day of the sextuple deuce, and obviously this is the kind of year 2026 is gonna be so let’s try to figure out what the hell that means. Yegge opens with:

This all made sense to me, because I am a horrible goblin with a soul defiled by the years I squandered questing after forbidden knowledge in the profane darkness of software Gehenna. But for those of you who still dwell in the Light:

• An IDE is an integrated development environment—basically an editor where you write and debug software.

• Claude Code is Anthropic’s software generating chatbot.

• Yak shaving (named for a holiday in Ren & Stimpy) is tedious and apparently purposeless activity that’s nevertheless necessary to achieve a goal. Programming is 98% yak shaving by volume.¹  

So Gas Town is a development environment for writing software using multiple code generating chatbots. It’s one answer to the question “what if we made the whole software company out of vibe coding?”

“Vibe coding” is the idea that nowadays you can just open a chat window and tell the AI to write your software for you without ever needing to read the code, and possibly without even knowing how to read it. Yegge co-wrote a book about vibe coding, and despite the term being less than a year old we’re already fighting about what it means. Can you imagine programmers arguing over semantics?²  

But in the year since Andrej Karpathy alleged that he could “see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works,” a lot of software developers have tried vibe coding and found that the most important word is “mostly.” Programming agents get stuck, neglect to perform essential steps, or just run out of context and forget what they were supposed to do. The most passionate vibe coding aficionados imagine infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare, but in practice it’s more like one semi-smart monkey copying and pasting half-understood example code until it kinda works, unless they get distracted first. If you’ve worked in software this might sound familiar, because it’s roughly the same experience as assigning tasks to a junior developer. Vibe coders are, in effect, attempting to move themselves up one level in the software worker hierarchy to either “senior developer” (if they’re reading the code) or “engineering manager” (if they‘re not).

Except for the real sickos, most people have always found writing code to be incredibly tedious. Programming languages themselves are an effort to move the job of instructing the computer from the most literal level, putting bits into registers, up into increasingly conceptual realms of describing “the way data flows through a system,” as Paul Ford wrote last week in a company newsletter about his own experiments with vibe coding. Like a Kübler-Ross for coders, Yegge described eight stages of succumbing to the lure of just letting the computer program its own damn self:

If vibe coders are trying to level themselves up to engineering manager, Gas Town is trying to skip its users all the way to CEO, with the entire management and workflow structure of a software development company recreated in AI and taking direct orders via a terminal multiplexer.

Firing up the AI software company.

Steve Yegge is very intentional about naming and branding. This may seem surprising if you take a look at Clay Shirky‘s Gas Town glossary, which concisely defines the system’s various agents, roles, and workflows. “Gas Town” itself is a reference to the oil refinery citadel in Mad Max. The Mad Max theme continues in the names of the Mayor, the AI agent the user primarily communicates with; Rigs, which is what Gas Town calls projects under development; and the workflow concepts of the Refinery and the Convoy. You don’t care what those are. But the center cannot hold, and things start to fall apart when you get to the Dogs, named for the MI5 internal security characters in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of spy novels. The Dogs work for the Deacon, who Yegge says is “named for a Dennis Hopper character from Waterworld that was inspired by the character Lord Humungus in the Mad Max universe,” (??) but is also short for “daemon beacon” because its role is… well, I’ll let Yegge describe this too:

Remember that Mayor, Deacon, and Dogs are all AI agents. The existence of a whole subsystem dedicated to reminding each of them to do their jobs is a good glimpse into the current reliability of AI agents. There’s also a special upper-level Dog whose job is to remind the Deacon to do its job, which is to remind all the other workers to do their jobs. Lol. Quis custodiet, my dude?

Other elements of Gas Town have names drawn from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, the “Breaking Bad” TV show, and as far as I can tell some things are just named descriptively, like “the Crew.” The workflow is similarly a mishmash of concepts perhaps best exemplified by this detail from a slop-art diagram of the overall system:

Yeah bro, that is exactly how hooks work.

You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.

By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful. It attracted enough attention that even I heard of it, in a crowded field of similar projects with names that make me want to literally die of boredom like “OpenAI AgentKit,” “Google Agent Development Kit,” and “Flowise.” These might not even be the same kind of thing—ironically the search results for “AI code orchestration” are so hopelessly polluted with AI-written slop that it’s difficult to tell. Either way, Gas Town is a chaotic conceptual mess that probably doesn’t work very well, but at least it has 🎷pizzazz✨.

It’s been several years since I wrote a line of code and inshallah I never will again so none of the above comes from firsthand experience. I still have friends and readers in the industry though, and my sense from them is that the worst job in software development right now is to be the person reviewing AI generated pull requests, which are often submitted by a junior developer who doesn’t know or care what the code actually does other than turn a failing test green. While Gas Town is still way out on the most gore-soaked of bleeding edges, AI is taking over programming much faster than I would have predicted it could. Is that a bad thing?

Personally I am an AI hater. Anthony Moser captured my attitude perfectly in his post from August titled “I Am An AI Hater:”

I’m unlikely to ever start using AI, in the same way that I’m unlikely to ever take up naval gunnery or political assassination. But like AI both of those things do exist, and while they’re always regrettable I can’t categorically say that I think either of them should never be used by anyone under any circumstances. The statistical machine learning and pattern-finding roots of generative software have a wide array of potentially useful applications, but even for generative software narrowly considered, writing code is one of the very few places where I could see it being useful as a tool.

Casey Newton recently used Claude to build a personal website, and reports that he had a good time doing it (and also that he still has a boyfriend). And as I mentioned above, no less a luminary than Paul Ford has been busy building a software consultancy organized around the premise that generative AI can make the prototyping and creation of business software orders of magnitude faster and cheaper. There are lots of industries that desperately need better software but won’t ever get it if they have to pay what it costs to write it by hand, which is incredibly expensive, so on the whole: big if true.

Clearly some people are having some success turning over the tedium of coding to the robots. But what kind of people? In his vibe coding post Paul wrote that a “shocking number of architectural decisions are not purely technical, but come down to taste…”

The irreplaceable role of taste is also apparent on Casey Newton’s AI-built website, with its page loading spinner, custom cursor, and pixel-block mouse follow effects. Casey is, notably, not a web designer.

You know in your heart this is too much, Casey.

But Steve Yegge has been a senior engineer at both Amazon and Google. Paul Ford has had a hand in more software projects than most people. One of the best coders I know is currently using AI for all of his work, and reports that it’s helpful and makes him more productive but requires constant and attentive supervision. All of these people are experts—they know deep in their bones how to describe the way a computer program should be structured and how its data should be managed. Their expertise was built through decades of hand writing code. And still, Paul’s semi-working synthesizer app has “taken 1,000 turns to get… to this state. How many turns remain? Another thousand? Twenty times that? I don’t know.”

Will the AI ever gain a high level conceptual understanding of how to structure software to be reliable and maintainable, when it isn’t currently capable of a high-level conceptual understanding of how to run a vending machine? Will today’s junior developers ever gain that understanding themselves if they spend their careers instructing the AI rather than writing code? Will there even be junior developers if all the senior devs are handing off that work to polecats or whatever?

Or in a larger sense, as Luke O’Neill put it in his book We Had It Coming, “I don’t understand where they think their personalized sense of aesthetics they plan to input into the computer is going to come from down the line when all human artists have been driven out of business.” No one knows. I guess we’ll find out!

I hope this has been useful to you, the Tabs reader, who has probably never heard of Gas Town and is not a software developer of any kind. Let it never be said that I know my audience or cater to your desires. This took longer than I wanted it to because writing informative essays is awful work—almost as bad as writing code. I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young. Next Time: some actual Tabs probably.

Donald Trump loves to get some stink on a new year early, as we all learned five years ago today. In 2026 he didn’t even wait six days, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd. I say “kidnapping,” here. Venezuelan officials say “kidnapping.” Maduro says “I was kidnapped.” Donald Trump says kidnapping is “not a bad term” for what he did. The BBC says please don’t call it a kidnapping, chaps. Five years ago I confidently asserted that “the clearest and least self-deluded coverage tends to be British,” so I guess some things do change.

But not Donald Trump’s ideas. He chose a couple of beliefs in the early 1980s, seemingly at random, and hasn’t updated a thing since. One of those beliefs is that people are born with a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and when we use it all up we die. Another is that getting more oil is always good, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Trump explained that in Venezuela “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure.” That doesn’t make sense, wrote Responsible Statecraft’s Karthik Sankaran, when America is already the world’s largest oil exporter and oil supply growth exceeds demand growth by millions of barrels a day. American oil companies also don’t appear to have much appetite for a huge capital expenditure in a country that is already a security nightmare, and which doesn’t seem likely to get safer after a gringo-facilitated coup. No worries if not though! American taxpayers will fund it.

Meanwhile Stephen Miller is visibly erect at the idea that this could be a stepping stone to a U.S. invasion of Greenland, and Li’l Marco appears to be interested in securing the supply of a different kind of snow. Jamelle Bouie says “they're doing it for gender,” which is a classic joke-shaped truth. But so far the best explanation I’ve seen for what is happening comes from a TikTok post by Venezuelan-American filmmaker Giorgio Angelini, who says this is “basically… a mafia turf war” between the gang who runs Venezuela, the gang who runs Cuba, and the gang who runs the United States.

The biggest winners of the U.S. backed Venezuelan coup are Nike, whose “‘Maduro Fit’ went viral… [and] sold out across multiple sizes on Nike's U.S. webstore,” and athleisure brand ORIGIN, who immediately blasted out a marketing email with the subject “Maduro In Custody. His Blue Hoodie In Your Cart?" I can’t wait for the Maduro Fit Deep Dive from Feed Me.

Yesterday In The Year That Was And Wasn’t: The Morning News, “The Year That Was and Wasn’t.” Category-matching web game 2025 will ruin your life for an indeterminate number of hours. Sarah Jeong closed out the year explaining that propaganda of the deed is so back. Only “media leaders” could take Semafor’s question “what did you get wrong in 2025?” as an opportunity to brag. The mayor of Shirley Jackson’s Buell, Maine got a fan-Chotining in “Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death.” And Erin Kissane wrote about the collapse of collective sense-making as “what happens when you hit a saturated jumble of communal sense with something big and fast and heavy.”

Tomorrow in The Year That Will or Won’t Be: “A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026.” All of them are somehow smarter than the New York Times’ “10 Predictions for Life in 2026” made just one day before 2026 started. Anil Dash: “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?”

Today in Taint:¹ The taint zapper is finally real, and a report from the Glasgow ball-kicking (“Flute Accompaniment!”).

A fun game that I am extremely mediocre at: enclose.horse

And Finally: 404 Media now owns 404media.com, where it plans to establish a lively presence on the World Wide Web that it hopes will complement and update the 100-year-old print magazine for the Internet age.

Today’s Song: A Tribe Called Quest, “We The People”

Welcome to 2026, suckers! If you thought 2016 through 2025 inclusive was bad, b-b-b-baby you just ain’t seen nothing yet. Next Time: let’s talk about Gas Town.

Also: “And because they shall not bee altogether mocked…”: Here’s how “to make Pies that the Birds may be aliue in them, and flie out when it is cut vp.”

At first glance, Bari Weiss and Jeffrey Epstein might not seem to have much in common. But the careers of both have been overshadowed by similar questions. For Epstein, the question was how did an unsuccessful high school math teacher rise through the financial world until he had billions of dollars of his own and unsupervised access to Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner’s fortune? And for Weiss, the question is how did a writer with no evident skill, original ideas, or journalism experience rise to become a media industry millionaire who currently oversees all of CBS News? A pair of articles this week make it clear that the two followed largely the same playbook: flatter the rich, make yourself useful to them, leverage one connection to make more connections, and reap the benefits.

The New York Times seems to have recently gained access to new Epstein documents, and David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Matthew Goldstein ground through them to trace the New York financier’s path from a Dalton school parent’s introduction to Bear Stearns executive Ace Greenburg to Alan Dershowitz to Les Wexner to Alan Dershowitz to Leon Black to Alan Dershowitz to the Trilateral Commission and, eventually, all the way to Alan Dershowitz. It’s as readable as it can be while still fundamentally being a somewhat dry exercise in detailed reporting. But the value of the story is that it provides a coherent narrative for Epstein’s career arc that doesn’t require us to believe any abstruse espionage or blackmail schemes. All we have to believe is that America’s rich men are idiots. I would also rather not believe that, but alas.

Epstein was a grifter who told people what they wanted to hear, and took what he wanted from them without hesitation or shame. If he had one notable skill, it seems to have been knowing which pigs to slaughter immediately, and which to leverage for connections higher up the food chain. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate followed this story with one today that traces the relationship specifically between Epstein and Donald Trump—a relationship which didn’t seem to have been business related at all. It appears they were frenemies who competed on the sexual assault leaderboard, and each seems to have astutely recognized the other as the most disgusting person he knew. Tough luck for David Brooks though, who won’t be getting his wish this Christmas.

But what about Bari Weiss? Her big sit-down with the Bride of Chucky Kirk flopped, her anti-woke university is bleeding staff and too toxic even for the likes of Larry Summers and Steven Pinker, and her only idea for CBS News is to keep doing boring non-debates with already well known and broadly disliked public figures. How did she get here? Well you know how, but Charlotte Klein helpfully spelled it out in Intelligencer, tracking Bari’s “exile” to Hollywood after her 2020 Times Opinion flounce, and her subsequent rise as a favored pet of Hollywood’s “disillusioned bigwigs” (the illusion being shed was: “we should care about the poors.”) Bari told them what they wanted to hear, both in person and through her website:

Klein’s story is a masterpiece of journalistic negative space—the most interesting part is what isn’t in it. I’m sure everyone mentioned, including Weiss, is happy with how they’re depicted, but the anonymous quote above is one of few references to her actual work, and all reference to it is in terms of how it functions for its users. A couple of the other references are:

…and:

The Free Press doesn’t break news or report anything important. It doesn’t publish stories that inform or entertain. It operates as a kind of Play-Doh Fun Factory steadily extruding a dough of anti-woke ideology. Its name alone serves as a shibboleth for rich people to signal to each other that they’d like to think of themselves as broadly liberal while still embracing the rising fascist spirit of the age, and Weiss’s value to them is entirely in providing a vessel for the many Mr. Bs in finance and entertainment to climb aboard and follow their natural inclination toward the present center of power. And Weiss has been very competent, like Jeffrey Epstein was, in parlaying one connection to another, and translating her utility into a larger audience, which in turn creates more utility.

We know now exactly how far Jeffrey Epstein was able to go, following this plan. It remains to be seen how long it will work for Bari Weiss.

Today in Tabs: Trump’s Truth Social is merging with a nuclear fusion power company. You may be wondering: does fusion power, like, exist? The answer is no. Katie Baker on 6,7. Leah Sottile in Portland Monthly: “The [Malheur Wildlife] refuge occupation was a rash before a fever, a symptom of our approaching political chaos.” I was wondering if you were coming to the Green Pine Grove Town Square Christmas Eve Festival of Lights Christmas Tree Decorating Contest Finalist Gala? Liz Lopatto says the Ellisons’ bid for Warner Bros. doesn’t make any sense, and I believe her. Francis Fukuyama is a slopper now. Sloane Crosley hates iOS 26, which is correct because it sucks. The Practice Guide is finally back online! Luke O’Neil’s 50 best songs of 2025 is out, and there are bound to be a bunch in here that I get really into in two or three years and think “I should have listened to Luke O’Neil back then” but I probably still won’t. Garbage Ryan, Cates Holderness, Josh Fjelstad & Kapie’s 20 Worst Things On The Internet is back this year. I feel like the internet used to be a lot worse? Maybe I’ve just grown more callous. The final bonus item is pretty bad though.

Today’s Song: They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, “the chase”

~ With a sudden and keen awareness to the tabs hanging off the shoppers milling about the grocery store ~

Next week is Christmas, it’s practically here. Schedule-wise I like to keep it loose and improvisational but don’t be too surprised if this is the last you hear from me until the new year. If it is, have a good holiday season and we can all probably just ignore whatever happens between now and 2026. And thanks for reading!

Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: Measles. Listening to this playlist¹ as you read Tabs today won’t make it a better experience, but it will make it a different experience:

A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours This Playlist

Playlist · Rusty · 19 items · 1 saves

open.spotify.com/playlist/0scTDe13hx7NMTWEuo6w0v?si=Rzi2UgnASfKqxe2NAh16LA

As I was saying, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: $25,000 Underwater Handsome Squidward. Andrew Dana Hudson wrote about what it’s like teaching freshman comp without technology during the Wackpot:

NBC News’s Kevin Collier, Jared Perlo and Savannah Sellers checked out the range of AI-powered kids toys available for your tots this Christmas, and found that they include a cute bunny who will happily list different implements your child might choose for impact play in the bedroom, a toy that claims to be a cross between a cactus and a teddy bear but is very clearly a sunflower in a pot, and a furry doll with inexplicable ahegao face that makes it look very turned on as it insists that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.” Disney will pay OpenAI a billion dollars to allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video slop hose to generate short videos of Goofy giving Woody from Toy Story the hyuck hyuck 9000 or Mickey doing 9/11 (which is at least historically accurate). As 404’s Matthew Gault put it:

Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: whoever at NPR chose this share image for their article about the Disney/OpenAI deal. In Semafor, Max Tani reported that The Washington Post is having some trouble with its new AI audio product, where generated voices that resemble podcasters deliver generated text that resembles the news. Internal review has found that the podcasts are full of statements which are, when compared with the reporting of the Post’s legacy human journalists, not true.

It’s right, but they shouldn’t say it. The Department of Defense unveiled a splashy new AI platform which immediately identified Pete Hegseth’s war crimes, so who can say if AI is good or bad. Anyway, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: The Grink.

Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: Lockheed-Martin’s streetwear line, and also today in business you might enjoy this Bloomberg investigation by Adam Chandler into the shaky finances of Mormon tinted cookie juggernaut Crumbl. That‘s the way the something somethings, I guess. But congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: The “dystopian” PureGym entry tube.

As a perfectly loving God I accept that you may freely choose to click or not click the posts I offer you, but do yourself a favor and watch this one.

“JCO” and I (After Borges). Dave Karpf considered “Hatereading as Method” and I would like to say: girl, same. Hardly anyone is even hatereading Olivia Nuzzi’s book, which “sold just 1,200 print copies in its first week” according to Mary Whitfill Roeloffs in Forbes. Thanks to Jonty from the Tabs subscriber Discord for introducing me to Clive James’s extremely relevant poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” And Scott Saul wrote a gripping reappraisal of Joan Didion for Dispatches through the lens of one of the few Saturday Evening Post columns she never chose to collect: “On Becoming a Cop Hater.” That’s probably the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written in Tabs but it’s a very good piece. Before I forget, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: the skull of St. Thomas Aquinas on a road trip.

Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: Drunk Raccoon. The year’s almost over and the season of mandatory holiday parties is upon us, so it’s a good time to revisit Tom Scocca’s excellent advice to have two drinks at a party. I haven’t always followed this advice but I’ve never regretted it when I did. Congratulations to Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: slop. And I enjoyed Sam Lipsyte’s somewhat shaggy intro to Curbed’s equally somewhat shaggy “Reasons To Love New York” package.

And finally, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: The Portland Chicken.

Today’s Song: Lizard In The Spring, “A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Appalachia”