We have another Podish Sortacast coming up this weekend, and the theme is “problematic favorites.”

Uh-oh. This could be bad. Can it be myself?

Quick, make some suggestions in the comments, to spare the world an hour of me talking about wicked me.

I’ve been in my office all day, talking to no one. Instead, I’ve graded two sets of lab reports, prepared two lectures for tomorrow, and am nearly done grading an exam. There are a few million things I’d rather do today, but at least I’ve cleared that annoying pile of work.

If I’m a good boy and get some more done in time, I’m going to the movie theater tonight — I hear that the Dungeons & Dragons movie is entertaining…but I also see that it’s 2 hours and 14 minutes long. It’s fluff! It shouldn’t be that long!

I also shouldn’t be spending my whole weekend working, either.

Adam Conover sums up the state of AI.

I agree with him, mostly. What all the AI hype is about is finding a way to sneakily glean the products of human intelligence from their babbling on the internet, scrape it up into a goulash without paying any people for it, and use it as a marketing tool — a bad marketing tool. Tell me, does anyone seriously believe that claiming there’s “AI” in your search engine is a great selling point? People are starting to catch on that it’s all annoying nonsense. It’s “the algorithm,” that excuse marketers were using previously to justify unwanted behind-the-scenes rules on Twitter or Facebook that they claimed were there to increase the likelihood you would see stuff you wanted to see, but was actually an excuse to make sure you got served up lots of ads and spam.

The only advantage to AI is that it does cut out direct human intervention and gives the companies the means to circumvent paying authors and artists, so it might be cheaper. For now. Until the companies kill off their competition and starts gouging customers again, as they inevitably will.

Behind the AI facade, of course, is the real villain of the story, capitalism. Skynet isn’t going to kill us all, we’re instead going to be drowned in a glurge of computer-generated bullshit that will temporarily bring great profit to the techbros of silicon valley, all the Elon Musks of the world.

I admit, I’m impressed. Elon Musk has thrown away $24 billion in less than half a year. That takes real money savvy.

Elon Musk has revealed that he believes Twitter is currently worth $20 billion, or less than half the $44 billion he purchased it for just five months ago.

In a companywide email Friday obtained by the New York Times about employee stock grants, Musk admitted that the company’s value since going private, in his estimation, is roughly $20 billion; in the aftermath of Musk’s acquisition, many advertisers — the social network’s main source of income — fled the service, and as Vox reported earlier this week, haven’t returned.

That’s not the punch line, though. This is the punch line:

Elsewhere in the email, Musk said that at one point Twitter was four months away from running out of money, which sparked the need for mass layoffs and other cuts. However, an optimistic Chief Twit also told the employees that still remain there that “I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation,” and that he now views Twitter as an “inverse start-up.”

As ever, Elon Musk is the master of hype and self-delusion. No, he doesn’t have a plan to increase the value to $250 billion. Right now, he’s playing games with checkmarks that people can buy. I never saw the point of getting verified and getting blue checkmark on my twitter account back in the day, when the company was run by only semi-incompetent management, and now that Musk is imposing weird arbitrary rules to get people to pay for it, I have even less interest. He thinks this will help him increase the value of the company by $230 billion? That’s nuts.