Banger of a post by “tarltontarlton” on Reddit:

That same process is happening now with stupid people. They’re transcending their individual limitations, finding each other and becoming out-and-proud Stupid-Americans. [...]

How individual stupid Americans are becoming the collective, self-aware group of Stupid-Americans is a great idea for a lot of very fancy journalism I’m sure. It’s probably got something to do with the internet, where stupid people can find and repeat stupid things to each other over and over and over again.

I believe it has a lot to do with the Internet, which has functioned as a terribly efficient sorting machine. It used to be that there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Both political parties were, effectively, shades of purple. Now we’ve sorted ourselves, and the result is the palpable increase in polarization. Low-IQ stupidity might still be spread across both sides of the political aisle, but willful ignorance — the dogmatic cultish belief that loudmouths’ opinions are on equal ground with facts and evidence presented by informed experts — is the entire basis of the MAGA movement. A regular stupid person might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about vaccines, so I better listen to my doctor, who is highly educated and well-informed on the subject.” An out-and-proud Stupid-American says “I don’t know anything about vaccines either, so I’m going to listen to a kook who admits that a worm ate part of his brain, because I can’t understand the science but I can understand conspiracy theories.”

If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.

And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.

Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose them. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

(Via Kottke.)

No details on what yet, but a lovely little 9-minute video on why.

Sam Altman:

“What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.”

Jony Ive:

“I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment. While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration. The values and vision of Sam and the teams at OpenAI and io are a rare inspiration.”

I am not a fan of the lowercase styling of “io”, but otherwise shoot this into my veins. This industry needs a heavy dose of new ideas for new devices. This is just a vibes teaser, but the vibe is a shot across the bow. It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension. To say I’m keen to get my hands on what they’re making is an understatement.

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its Reality Labs division, a company spokesperson confirmed. The cuts affected teams working in Oculus Studios, Meta’s in-house games division for Quest headsets, as well as some employees involved in the company’s hardware efforts, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg it was “more than 100”.

I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse thing doesn’t come up once, not even once, even in passing.

It’s enough to make one suspect Zuck isn’t a straight shooter.

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon back in 2013:

The first thing wrong with the stupidest article to be posted to the Internet in the year 2013 — and possibly the entire century — is the title: “I Was Quite Surprised By Some Things On My American Airlines International ‘Economy Class’ Flight.” Even setting aside the high probability that author Henry Blodget, the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, wrote his account of the mild horrors of nine hours cramped in the cheap seats in order to purposely troll people like me who would ruthlessly mock him and thus drive even more traffic to his site, the low-rent search-engine optimization of Blodget’s headline would still be a crime against journalism. Blodget’s made many mistakes in the past, not least the dot-com boom-era stock hyping escapades that got him banned from the securities industry for life, but this inane tale of 34,000-feet-high horror marks a new low. The man should now be denied access to a keyboard for life, or until the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

My working theory has always been that both things can be true: Henry Blodget really is an idiotic jackass and he’s actually clever at crafting clickbait stories. One of Blodget’s complaints is that his laptop died after 3 hours, and he didn’t bring anything to read, leaving him 5 hours with nothing to do. I’m only slightly exaggerating when I say I’d be more likely to jump out of an airplane without a parachute than I would be to board a flight without plenty of stuff to read.

My post Friday commenting (read: wise-cracking) on Mark Gurman’s explosive report on an all-hands Siri team meeting at Apple was begging for a bit of meta commentary on the reporting itself. But I’ve been doing so much of that regarding Gurman lately that I thought it best to hold it for a postscript. Here’s the that postscript.

Both of these things are true:

• Mark Gurman is a singular reporter in the Apple media sphere. He publishes an extraordinary number of exclusives, both regarding leaks of upcoming products, and leaks like this Siri team meeting.
• Gurman often gets things wrong, and when he does, he never acknowledges those mistakes, let alone corrects them. He also tries to take credit for having called things he completely missed. He’s not an oracle but presents himself as one. And he writes for a publication, Bloomberg, that shares his insistence on never acknowledging let alone correcting mistakes, even massive ones. What gives me such joy pointing out his boners isn’t that he made them in first place but that he refuses to acknowledge they happened, presenting an air of infallibility with a provably fallible track record.

In short, I do actually suspect — but can claim zero sources familiar with the matter to confirm — that Gurman hangs his toilet paper in an improper underhand fashion.

So let’s just examine how extraordinary and singular Gurman’s Friday report was. Nobody else reported on this meeting. Every other article about it — including mine — was commenting on Gurman’s exclusive report about the meeting. I’ve not seen one other report even confirming the meeting took place, let alone describing it in detail, replete with copious quotes from Siri senior director Robby Walker, who, according to Gurman, led the meeting. No other news report even confirmed the meeting took place. Not one. I’m not pointing that out to cast suspicion that the meeting did not take place or that Gurman’s report cast it inaccurately or that his direct quotations were not, in fact, direct quotations. I’m pointing just how singular and extraordinary Mark Gurman is in this sphere. If it wasn’t for Gurman’s report we, outside Apple (and probably outside the Siri team inside Apple) wouldn’t even know the meeting occurred.

How did Gurman not only get the scoop on this meeting, but copious direct quotes from Walker’s remarks to the team? Well, it was “according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private”. In other words, more than one member of the Siri team, and at least one of which either recorded the meeting surreptitiously and slipped the recording to Gurman, or at least one of whom takes notes at the pace and accuracy of a court stenographer. Either way, these sources — plural — surely knew how damning the meeting would make Apple look.

I’ve long made my opinions about Bloomberg’s institutional journalistic credibility well known. But I don’t think they’re bereft of credibility — it’s the fact that they are deservedly well-regarded that makes their refusal to ever admit their own glaring mistakes so glaring. When a Gurman reports says “people” that means “more than one” and, I believe, he needs to confirm to his editors that he got this information from more than one source. If he’s reporting direct quotes, I think that means he’s heard a recording. That’s extraordinary.

But I’d feel a lot better about our collective conventional wisdom regarding the nature of this particular all-hands Siri meeting if it had leaked to, and been reported on, by more than one reporter at more than one publication.