is the world really such a terrible place? yesterday i asked if oat milk was extra and the barista said yes so i said ok just regular milk then and when she gave me my chai latte she whispered “i used oat milk ;)” doesnt that make u want to live another day?
here is my life philosophy: next week there might be someone ahead of you in line at the store who’s short a quarter and you have a quarter and you can give it to them. if you weren’t there, they’d have to put something back. the week after that you could be getting lunch and the waiter might ask if you want some pancakes someone else ordered and never picked up. you could find someone’s lost cat. you could watch someone’s bag while they go to the restroom. there are so many ways you are going to touch other people’s lives and they are going to touch yours and there’s no way to know when it’s going to happen. so you have to keep living!!! i wouldn’t want to die knowing that tomorrow the barista will give me free oat milk just to be nice.
When I was 11 years old - we went to Sea World for my birthday. This was to avoid the realization I had no friends, and no one to come to a birthday party and probably because someone gave my mother free tickets at work. It was kinda a shitty day despite being at a theme park full of cute animals. There was a new roller coaster there that had just opened so we decided to go on. I was nervous. I’d never been on a roller coaster.
A group of 6 college kids were ahead of us in line and started chatting with me. Full on just having a fun conversation with someone literally going through the beginning of a very awkward middle school period. I was so shocked they wanted to talk to me. I think my mom mentioned it was my birthday. They were very nice about it. When we got on the ride they told us to go ahead of them so we could sit at the front of the car since it held 8 people.
Now the ride (called Journey to Atlantis - I believe it is sadly no longer there) started with a slow ride of beautiful visuals of dolphins and oceans and computerized images of this imaginary Atlantis before going up the hill to the beginning of the coaster, where it paused for about 30 seconds, and then the ride started. The college kids must have known there would be a pause. Maybe they’d ridden it before I’m not sure.
But as we sat there on that peak, 6 people I’ve never known, and will never know again, sang a very very lonely 11 year old happy birthday. Loudly. And with gusto. They were happy and laughing and joyful. And it made me feel less alone in the world.
I am 29 years old this year, and I still remember them. I still remember that kindness. It is so important. It doesn’t go into a vacuum. It exists beside me in my daily life. And I love the idea that I have been that person to someone else too.
It’s stunningly lovely to be human when we’re kind to each other.
I was not the guy in khaki shorts and a golf polo who threw a Subway sandwich at an FBI officer on U Street last night and is now being charged with a felony. But free my mans
Godspeed sandwich man 🫡
Brett is in court today for this walk-by sandwiching of what turned out to be a Border Patrol agent, not an FBI agent, and the trial reporting is full of amazing quotes. [link] #freebrett
Big day at U.S. District Court in D.C. where Sean Dunn Brett Afloweroutofstone, the D.C. Sandwich Guy, is on trial for misdemeanor assault of a federal officer. Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore is on the stand narrating surveillance video of the sammie toss. ’Now he’s struck me with the sandwich,’ Lairmore says.
Border Patrol agent Lairmore testifies that he was not injured by the sandwich, but he felt the impact through his ballistic vest. The sandwich came apart and “kind of exploded” on his chest upon impact, he says. “I could smell the onions and mustard.”
Defense tells judge they want to question Lairmore about ‘gag gifts’ he received from fellow officers after the alleged assault, including a Subway sandwich plush toy and a patch that (unless I misheard) said 'Felony Footlong.’ Prosecutors object. Defense argues they reflect CBP 'state of mind.’
Defense is now questioning Lairmore on cross-examination. They show a video still of the sandwich and wrapper on the ground, post-throw. “Do you recognize that sandwich?” the attorney asks. Lairmore won’t confirm. “I did not go back to collect it,” he says.
The defense team presses Lairmore on whether the sandwich really 'exploded.’ They return to the photo of the sandwich and wrapper on the ground. “That sandwich hasn’t exploded at all, has it?” defense asks. “It looks like a little bit is coming out towards the bottom,” Lairmore replies.
Lairmore testifies that other agents gave him a plush sandwich toy, which he placed on the shelf in his office, and a patch that said “Felony Footlong,” which he put on his lunch box. Lairmore has chuckled with the rest of us at times. Defense really trying to underscore the unseriousness of it all
Not guilty! Feds had to downgrade his charges and they still failed to get a jury to convict #I’mFree
Subway sandwich thrower found not guilty in D.C. jury rebuke
A bystander’s video captured Sean Charles Dunn in August calling federal officers racists and fascists. He thought they were about to do an immigration raid at a gay nightclub on Latin Night.
an absolutely humungous update they just keep getting better
I think this needs an important addendum:
Not only did Billie Eilish donate $11.5M, she also called out a room full of billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, directly to their faces, saying “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but, yeah, give your money away, shorties.”
The $11.5M she’s donating is about ¼ if her net worth. Imagine if a billionaire did that? If Mark Zuckerberg donated ¼ of his net worth, it would be about $55 BILLION… and he’s still have over $100 billion left.
And, yet, unsurprisingly, people are mad at Billie Eilish for what she said and not at the billionaires for hoarding all the money and resources
Image text of Reddit post by u/shallow-pedantic on r/Artificialintelligence:
I used to be all-in on large language models. Built automations, client tools, business workflows….. hell, entire processes around GPT and similar systems. I thought we were seeing the dawn of a new era. I was wrong.
Nothing is reliable. If your workflow needs any real accuracy, consistency, or reproducibility, these models are a liability. Ask the same question twice and get two different answers. Small updates silently break entire chains of logic. It’s like building on quicksand.
That old line, “this is the worst it’ll ever be,” is bullshit. GPT-4.1 workflows that ran perfectly are now useless on GPT-5. Things regress, behaviors shift, context windows hallucinate. You can’t version-lock intelligence that doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing.
The time and money that go into “guardrailing,” “safety layers,” and “compliance” dwarfs just paying a human to do the work correctly. Worse, the safeguards rarely even function. You end up debugging an AI that won’t admit it’s wrong, wrapped in another AI that can’t explain why.
And then there’s the hype machine. Every company is tripping over itself to bolt “AI-powered” onto products that don’t need it. Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini—they’re all mediocre at best, and big tech is starting to realize it. Real productivity gains are vanishingly rare. The MASSIVE reluctance of the business world to say something is simply due to embarrassment of admission. CEO’s are literally scrambling to re-hire, or pay people like ME to come in and fix some truly horrific situations. (I am too busy fixing all of the broken shit on my end to even think about having the time to do this for others. But the phone calls and emails are piling up. Other consultants I speak with say the same thing. Copilot easily being the most requested to be fixed).
Random, unreliable, and broken systems with zero audit requirements in the US. And I mean ZERO accountability. The amount of plausible deniability massive companies have to purposely or inadvertently harm people is overwhelming. These systems now influence hiring, pay, healthcare, credit, and legal outcomes without auditability, transparency, or regulation. I work with these tools every day, and have from jump. I am confident we are at minimum in a largely stalled performance drought, and at worst, witnessing the absolute floors starting to crumble.
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My follow-on response:
The worst part is when this thing finally does implode, nobody will admit fault. They’ll just pretend they never heard of AI, just like how blockchain got memory-holed after it proved to be simply too inefficient to use distributed ledgers for a lot of things.
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