Probably the only Herbie Popnecker/aerospace history post you'll read all week

 I keep meaning to do a long post on arguably the ultimate Silver Age cult comic, Herbie, a bizarre, out of nowhere character created by a journeyman and an artist of severely limited talent. The elements had no business working but somehow they came together perfectly, a chemistry that far more gifted creators have tried and failed to capture in various reboots.

 Herbie Popnecker's fans included Alan Moore, John Byrne, and Marv Wolfman who joked in the 70s that the only way at the time to figure out who held the rights to the character was to publish a new Herbie comic and see who sued you.

One aspect that added to the bizarreness of the proceedings was the appearance of contemporary celebrities including movie stars, athletes, and world leaders, the last of whom would often reach out to the "little, fat nothing" in times of crisis, providing an off-kilter but nonetheless informative view of popular perceptions of contemporary events.  

This example from April/May 1964 is a good reminder of how controversial the Apollo program was at the time. For context, keep in mind what had happened just a few months before. 

From the Space Review:

During a September 20, 1963 address before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations Kennedy made a startling proposal:

Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.

Considering that the two nations had been to the brink of nuclear war only a year before, this was a rather startling attempt at rapprochement. It followed a similar proposal that Kennedy had made a month before to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

 Though we can never know how things would have played out, it's also worth noting that LBJ was one of Washington's strongest supporters of space exploration going back to his senate days. The immense political capital he had after the 64 election certainly helped protect the program from cuts or even cancellation.

 

 

 

The downside of getting hundreds of millions from Elon Musk is that it comes from Elon Musk -- part 2

Even the NYT noticed. 

Following up from Friday.

NEW AD: Have you seen these anti-Talarico attack ads? Elon Musk paid for nearly all of them. The world's first trillionaire knows if he drags the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything. Elon Musk: Texas is not for sale.

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— Team Talarico (@teamtalaricohq.bsky.social) October 22, 2026 at 11:44 AM

 [You should definitely watch the ad.] 

Bayliss Wagner writing for the New York Times.

On the campaign trail in Texas, James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, is increasingly criticizing Elon Musk over his role in the race. Mr. Musk made a huge contribution this fall to a group aligned with Ken Paxton, Mr. Talarico’s Republican opponent, recent campaign finance disclosures showed.

The race in Texas, a pivotal contest that could determine control of the Senate, is now in part a test of whether Democrats can turn Mr. Musk into a political boogeyman and whether his infusion of cash can lift a Republican candidate who has lagged behind his opponent in fund-raising.

“Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars,” Mr. Talarico said at a rally in San Antonio on Saturday, as the crowd booed in disapproval of Mr. Musk. “He wants his very own personal United States senator.”

Representatives for Mr. Musk and Mr. Paxton did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Talarico has stepped up his attacks on Mr. Musk after campaign finance filings revealed earlier this month that Mr. Musk, a Texas resident who has major business interests in the state, donated $158 million to a Republican super PAC that then flipped the same amount to a group allied with Mr. Paxton.

At the University of Texas on Friday, Mr. Talarico said Mr. Musk was trying to “stop the movement that we are building in our state.” The day before that, Mr. Talarico’s campaign released a digital advertisement accusing Mr. Paxton of being beholden to Mr. Musk. “Let’s remind Elon: Texas is not for sale,” says the narrator of the ad.

...

In polls and focus groups in Texas, voters have voiced concerns about corruption and the influence of the wealthy and powerful in politics, said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist in the state. He argued that Mr. Musk “has made himself the face of” what some voters perceive as the Republican Party’s fealty to megadonors.

At Mr. Talarico’s rally on Saturday, the crowd roared when he brought up Mr. Musk and cheered loudly when he said his own campaign is “funded by 1.3 million individuals who have donated their hard-earned money.”

Mr. Musk has not campaigned with Mr. Paxton. But he has publicly endorsed him and has used his platform on X, the social media company he owns, to attack Mr. Talarico with growing frequency. Mr. Musk posted on X about Mr. Talarico 18 times last week, claiming Mr. Talarico “hates Texas” and disparaging him in other ways.

JT Ennis, a spokesman for Mr. Talarico, said Mr. Musk’s immense spending in the race “isn’t working, so he’s throwing a tantrum.”

For his part, Mr. Paxton speaks about Mr. Musk rarely, if ever, on the trail. But in a recent fund-raising email to supporters, Mr. Paxton praised him.

“Democrats are trying to buy President Trump’s Senate Majority,” Paxton says in the Thursday email, adding, “But Elon Musk REFUSES to let them get away with it.” Mr. Paxton wrote that he was “proud to have Elon’s support at this do-or-die moment in the election.”

 

 

A bad time to be a prognosticator

Early Sunday afternoon at LGM. 

 If today’s election in Serbia offers potential grounds for optimism, Brazil should take care of that. The main thing to add to the first round post is that the first round result was better than expected for Bolsonaro, and we should probably adjust our priors from “tossup, maybe ever so slight lean to Lula” to “Bolsonaro is the clear favorite.” His 2 point victory was a surprise, as Lula was expected to win the first round, with Bolsonaro expected to pick up a majority of minor candidate supporters. Post election polling has been tight but pretty consistent; the last 5 published polls all had Bolsonaro up by 1%; polling aggregators show the composite result as about a 1.5% Bolsonaro lead. So Lula supporters have to root for a fairly modest polling error, but it would need to be a polling error in the opposite direction of round one’s polling error. Possible! Not particularly likely. Gambling community sees Bolsonaro as a ~4-1 favorite which seems about right to me. Grim.

 

Later that same day...  

 

 

 

lol reminder that betting markets are extremely accurate measures of conventional wisdom

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) October 25, 2026 at 5:47 PM

 

Marshall continued in following Bluesky thread [reformatted]. 

To expand on my point about these “markets” I’m not getting into the issues w corruption or damaging impacts of gambling. Their supporters in the political space habitually argue they are superior to polls in their predictive ability. In the simplest sense they’re just not. But to the extent they predictive they are operating off perceptions which come from polls. So they fail this test both empirically and logically. There are exceptions to this. Lightly polled races. Figuring in other factors besides polls. But big picture there are zero prediction market books on elections that don’t rely primarily on polls.

 

I'm on the record as being generally hostile to the whole notion of general election forecasting for a mass audience. With a few isolated exceptions, I little social good in knowing in advance how an election is going to turn out even when the process works, certainly not enough to justify the emphasis. Most election stories are empty calories, devoid of the information that would be of value of voters largely because they are filled with the cheap and tasty high fructose corn syrup of polls and models and prediction markets.  

As Jay Rosen and Margaret Sullivan keeps reminding journalists, "not the odds, but the stakes."  Obviously, this being an election in another country changes things -- we aren't the voters who need to be informed -- but the fundamental issue remains the same: why were predictions of who was going to win an election in a few hours newsworthy? Wasn't there something more important to talk about?

 

Brazilian Amazon deforestation falls to lowest on record as pivotal vote looms 

The downside of getting hundreds of millions from Elon Musk is that it comes from Elon Musk

We'll see how this plays out -- carpet-bombing anti-Democrat attack ads in Texas has been an effective strategy for thirty years now -- but this Talarico response strikes me as a smart approach. It avoids the "am not" trap of trying to rebut negative ads point by point which always comes off as weak and instead comes off strong by going on the offensive. 

The numbers I've seen has Musk polling in Trump territory and while those numbers may be a little better in the Lone Star state, anti AI/tech bro sentiment is running high enough for Abbott to recently come out as the tough-on-data-centers guy. Having Texans think of Paxton (already a toxic candidate) as Elon's boy can't be a plus. 

 

NEW AD: Have you seen these anti-Talarico attack ads? Elon Musk paid for nearly all of them. The world's first trillionaire knows if he drags the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything. Elon Musk: Texas is not for sale.

[image or embed]

— Team Talarico (@teamtalaricohq.bsky.social) October 22, 2026 at 11:44 AM

 

 I have no doubt that the anti-Talarico ads will continue to find an audience, but I am sure they'd be more effective if they didn't have to drag the baggage of both Ken Paxton and Elon Musk. 

To be honest, I'm mainly running this one because of the cartoon

Via @newyorker.com $META

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) October 19, 2026 at 2:57 PM

What could possibly go wrong? 

Joe Wilkins writing for Futurism:

Meta’s new AI agent Muse might come with a cutesy new mascot, but under its fuzzy exterior lies a vast surveillance network under the control of one of the world’s most powerful — and least accountable — tech companies.

The flashy new service has gained plenty of traction over the past few weeks, with many reviewers praising its utility in everyday life — as Eli Tan wrote for the New York Times, he was “blown away,” calling it the “most useful AI app I had ever used.”

But as researchers dig beyond the surface of Meta’s new AI offering, it’s becoming clear that Muse comes with a major drawback: users aren’t just signing their own privacy rights away, but those of their friends and family as well.

As Wired reports, the AI agent keeps detailed files on people on the periphery of its users’ lives, regularly scooping up new information about them. These updates are reportedly coming once an hour, with an internal instruction for Muse to maintain a “page for every person in the user’s life.”

“What it seemed like to me — from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse — is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people,” Karan Joshi, an AI safety researcher who extracted Muse’s internal prompts and shared them with Wired, told the magazine.

In other words, Joshi says “they’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”

And Dan Goodin writing for Ars Technica:

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available, including:

• a candidate’s notes preparing for a confidential executive-search call with a frontier AI lab, naming the lab’s internal contact and the meeting time
• a national marketing company’s internal revenue review, marked for its CEO
• a small-business owner’s loan application, with the amount requested
• a to-do list that included a bank fraud alert, with a partial account number and a transaction amount and time
• a real-estate investor’s internal performance report, with two property addresses and exact return, income, and mortgage figures
• a workplace’s full-year staff vacation calendar, listing dozens of employees against the week each one would be away

“If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”

...

Muse quickly catapulted to one of the top spots in Apple’s App Store. The assistant autonomously fills out forms, books appointments, makes purchases, creates documents, and carries out all kinds of other actions. To work as intended, Muse requires access to most of a user’s accounts. Meta has heavily marketed the assistant as a platform that’s worthy of the extraordinary trust it needs to work as intended.

Three weeks after the Muse launch, macOS security expert Patrick Wardle discovered a zero-day vulnerability that allowed any other app installed on the same device to gain complete control of the user’s Muse account. Meta downplayed the severity of the vulnerability on the grounds that exploitation wasn’t possible unless a device was already compromised. The company didn’t acknowledge Wardle’s finding that a simple ClickFix attack was all that was needed to hijack an account. The ease in discovering share links further justifies asking if Muse is worthy of the access it requires.

XKCD's Randall Munroe on Data Quality

 

 

 

Supreme Court Expansion

This is Joseph

Steve Vladeck has thrown down the gauntlet against Supreme court expansion with his four hard questions. They are good questions but I think that he is asking them when the hour is late. Far better when the house was not yet on fire.

In particular:

I think the problem here is that the options are now thin. If we look back just a few issues in Steve's newsletter we see:

Last year’s post explained that the Court set two fairly revealing records on its emergency docket during OT2024—with 140 full Court rulings on applications and 31 grants of emergency relief. OT2025 came very close on the former front, with 133 full Court rulings. The number of grants “dropped” to 21, but that’s still a remarkable number compared to what was par for the course as recently as five years ago (when the averages were closer to 70 full Court rulings and 8-10 grants). And as has been true during every recent term, the divisions on the emergency docket were, once again, homogeneously ideological.

These are not people interested in following norms and there has been a great deal of discussion about how many of the obvious solutions that sound good require constitutional amendments and, even then, might not apply to current justices. Look at the language in the 22nd amendment, included to avoid the question of retroactivity:

 But the size of the court is absolutely something that can be changed. Akiva Cohen, a moderate if there ever was one, points out that the composition of the court is an issue:

This really is the problem. It is not that a "packed court" is about short term control of the agenda. It's about forcing a bipartisan solution by blowing up the institution, because we can all see where this is headed. And, while this point is too pessimistic, it's not exactly wrong, either:

Is there anything about the current behavior of any of the key actors that suggests a reverence for norms would stand in the way of raw power? 

So maybe there is a better answer than increasing the number of justices? Josh Marshall has thought deeply about this issue and confesses to few good ideas. 

If you don’t begin with an immediate increase in the number of justices, it’s not serious. Because you end up with a reform which might have a meaningful impact in 10 or 20 years and might never even properly come into effect. That’s a non-starter in terms of time to wait and actual effectiveness. 

Which is a real issue. Slow burn reforms that arrive at some future date run the risk of allowing matters to deteriorate. 

So what I want to know, instead, is what viable reforms would improve things soon (say in my lifetime) that would reduce the incentives for political action by the supreme court and make it act in a more opaque fashion that was much easier to predict from legal principles over partisan valance. 

That would be a big step forward. 

Remember what we were saying about a "flying car-shaped object"?

In case you missed it:

Let's get the obvious out of the way. To the extent that a car is defined as a vehicle for personal transportation, what we saw demonstrated last week was a flying car-shaped object (possibly with scare quotes around "flying"). The cold-gas thrusters that kept the "car" aloft for a few seconds didn't have anyone in it, partially because the passenger seats had been replaced with compressed air tanks, but mainly because the thrusters were so loud that anyone within by some accounts hundreds yards risked permanent hearing damage.

The basic tech is not new -- NASA has been using it since the sixties -- and there is effectively no chance that it will ever be used in a street-legal production model. This is not a flying car story or even a "flying" "car" story. The subject here in hype and who falls for it.

Frank Landymore of Futurism digs further:

Sure, the Roadster can “fly.” There’s no denying that it was an impressive stunt. But huge questions remain, such as whether regulators will ever deem it road — let alone air — worthy. Another is if the cars used in the stunt will remotely resemble the actual product that’s sold to consumers, if such a thing does ever come to pass.

Tesla says the “Rocket” version of its Roadster is loaded with 600 liters of compressed air, 10 directional cold-gas thruster nozzles, and a huge suction-fan system on the bottom. To make room for it all, Tesla says it removed the passenger seat.

But some observers are wondering if the car is even more stripped down than that, perhaps even lacking a full-sized battery so the engineers could save room and cut down weight. Meanwhile, screenshots of the car’s sparse looking underside taken while it was midair seemed to show it lacking a suction fan, fueling further speculation that Tesla hasn’t figured out to fully combine its capabilities as they’re being presented. The car that stuck upside down to the top of the ramp and then cushioned its landing was, some skeptics allege, equipped with different hardware from the one that leaped into the air to leapfrog the other cars.

Practical questions abound. Without a full-sized battery, the car obviously wouldn’t be able to drive around on roads even if it were allowed to.

None other than computer scientist and “godfather” of AI Yann LeCun derided the Roadster’s aerial acrobatics display, calling it a “marketing stunt” and questioning its authenticity.

“Even assuming that 50 percent of the mass of the car is the compressed air, that gives you less than 10s of useful thrust (with thrust-to-weight ratio larger than 1.0). Probably more like 5 seconds, actually,” he wrote on X. “So the car must be an empty, lightweight shell containing big compressed air tanks. Cute demo, but totally impractical.”

A little bit of misleading showmanship certainly isn’t below Musk. Tesla stunned the world in 2016 with a promotional video of its self-driving car puttering along public roads and dutifully stopping for red lights. Musk boasted that it was clear evidence that “Tesla drives itself.” But later, its engineers admitted the whole thing was staged. 

At its glitzy “We, Robot” event in 2024, Tesla tried to wow investors with its Optimus humanoid robots that poured drinks, danced on stage, and mingled with attendees while holding down a conversation. But it quickly became apparent that what Tesla had unleashed weren’t real-life C-3POs, because the seemingly autonomous robots were in reality individually teleoperated.

 

I think it's fair to say that concern over the AI bubble is no longer a fringe position

Heather Stewart, and Kalyeena Makortoff writing for the Guardian.

In its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF highlighted the sky-high valuations for AI companies along with their increasing debt pile as one reason that risks in the system are “elevated”.

“The consequences of an AI correction could be global,” it warned. Aside from the US, Asian markets would be most exposed, and the UK and euro area potentially more insulated – though investors with US holdings would be hit.

Athanasios Vamvakidis, the deputy director of the IMF’s monetary and capital department, launching the report, said: “The exposure of the rest of the world to US assets, particularly AI, is the highest it has ever been. So this is supporting the global economy through wealth effects today; but if we get a market correction it could have broad implications.”

...

The IMF’s analysis underlined the interconnected nature of big AI companies, and the high levels of borrowing being undertaken to fund investment in the sector.

“Weaker or less durable investment and profitability in AI could trigger a correction in AI-related asset prices, exacerbated by rising leverage, concentrated exposures, and circular financing arrangements,” it said.

Such a reassessment would then “sharply reduce investment, trigger equity market corrections, and tighten financial conditions, with global spillovers”.

...

In particular, it identified soaring debts contracted by the companies themselves; hedge fund investment in the sector; and retail investors borrowing to speculate in AI stocks.

In the event of an AI-led market downturn “these growing sources of leverage heighten the potential for forced selling and surges in equity volatility”, it said.

It also pointed to the prevalence of “circular financing” deals, tying stronger AI companies to weaker partners in the same sector, and potentially exacerbating the impact of a share price correction.

 

Being able to run for at most fifteen seconds at a time may limit the range a bit.

Tesla turns to 50-year-old stunt as it tries to Roadster again arstechnica.com/cars/2026/10...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 5:06 PM

 

Let's get the obvious out of the way. To the extent that a car is defined as a vehicle for personal transportation, what we saw demonstrated last week was a flying car-shaped object (possibly with scare quotes around "flying"). The cold-gas thrusters that kept the "car" aloft for a few seconds didn't have anyone in it, partially because the passenger seats had been replaced with compressed air tanks, but mainly because the thrusters were so loud that anyone within by some accounts hundreds yards risked permanent hearing damage.

The basic tech is not new -- NASA has been using it since the sixties -- and there is effectively no chance that it will ever be used in a street-legal production model. This is not a flying car story or even a "flying" "car" story. The subject here in hype and who falls for it.

 

Joe Passantino writing for status [from the newsletter.] Make sure to read the whole excerpt:

 

On Thursday night, at a SpaceX test facility near Waco, Texas, Elon Musk unveiled his long-delayed Tesla Roadster to the world in a dazzling show before cameras. The wait was justified as well worth it.

You see, the company's supercar with rocket technology can fly. No, really. It's a flying car, just like we hoped the world might eventually look like in "Back To the Future." And it's going to change everything.

At least, that's what you might believe after reading some of the many media reports about Musk's latest publicity stunt.

"Elon Musk shows 'flying cars’ are real,'" CBS News reported. "Elon Musk unveils Tesla's new Roadster, and it can fly," ABC News heralded. "Tesla Has Built a Flying Car. It Will Blow Your Mind," Barron's proclaimed.

While these are real headlines, Musk's latest creation is not really a flying car. Instead, it's a one-seat electric vehicle with a massive compressed-gas tank consuming the backseat and passenger chair to provide mere seconds of lift in the air. And while Tesla says the Roadster will enter production in 2028, other basic details, including when any of the supposed flying cars will be delivered was not announced. In fact, Tesla says the vehicle, which is not street legal, will be sold only by invitation, so you won't actually be able to buy one.

To top it all off, Tesla might not deliver the cars ever. That’s right, while Tesla is seeking as much as $250,000 to reserve a version of the car that never leaves the ground, the website’s fine print includes a disclaimer that the vehicle might not be delivered at all.

"You understand that Roadster is still under development at the time you entered into this Agreement and so we cannot guarantee when your vehicle will actually be delivered or if it will be delivered," Tesla says in a reservation notice.

But who cares? These are mere minor issues with an otherwise totally awesome and real flying car that Tesla is definitely going to make and you can surely soar around in. Musk has a sterling track record of delivering on his promises, and never overstates his claims. So the media has every reason to take him at his word and promote his claims, uncritically—which is what many outlets did, willfully serving as cogs in Musk’s hype machine.

"This is truly amazing. Congratulations!" Skydance boss David Ellison tweeted at Musk after the unveiling.

...

Still, while the media was taken in by the spectacle of a car hurtling through the air, Wall Street saw through it. Tesla’s stock still fell 7% this week and is down nearly 20% year-to-date. And Musk has been keeping close watch on his companies’ shares. SpaceX was denied a fast track into the S&P 500 earlier this year, raising the prospect that Musk might try to merge Tesla and SpaceX together. A sports car outfitted with SpaceX thrusters makes for a pretty convenient advertisement for that marriage, which may be the most charitable way to understand Thursday’s spectacle.

For those keeping score, the mainstream press is still stuck at hyperloop levels of credulity while the markets are growing skeptical.

 How are the fan-boys reacting?

Average Tech Twitter now.

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— Adam Cook (@motorcityadam.com) October 16, 2026 at 5:41 PM

 Frank Landymore writing for Futurism:

In a clearly AI-generated video, a Roadster is shown cruising down a bridge that spans a beautiful river valley. Using your car for a scenic roadtrip? That does sound useful. But no, that’s not what they’re getting at here. A part of the bridge instantly collapses ahead, so our quick-witted Roadster driver presses a big red button to activate its cold-gas thrusters and leap over to the other side in an epic slow-mo sequence.

“The Roadster could genuinely be a lifesaver in situations like these,” the Tesla fan wrote.

Let’s cut to the chase: there’s zero chance that something like this would happen, so using it to justify the Roadster’s existence is as feeble an exercise as thinking of comebacks you should’ve said after you lost an argument. Then again, as absurd as it is, we’re struggling of a better reason to have a briefly flying car. If it’s not to save your life, what’s it for?

There were other AI depictions of the Roadster’s aerial capabilities being put to good use. Some show it jumping over toll booths or flying over standstill traffic.

 

We'll let Elon have the last word. 

sentient

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) October 17, 2026 at 3:37 PM

I read the Financial Times because of its insightful commentary, in-depth reporting, and because their writers have names like Robin Wigglesworth

 Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of FT Alphaville (one of the rare bullshit-free zones in the financial press) and his posts are always worth reading. He also just came out with a big, sweeping modern history of the bond market, which is fortuitous given current events.

 

Canaries

A couple of recent stories for those following the AI boom.  

Frank Landymore writing for Futurism.

On Tuesday, Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for a once-buzzy startup valued at a billion dollars. Its bankruptcy filings, which were picked through by 404 Media, encapsulate the critiques of the AI industry’s model. It gained a huge user base with a highly engaging product, but racked up exorbitant compute bills while failing to monetize all the time people were spending talking to its chatbots. All the while, it became mired in lawsuits alleging that its products harmed its teenage users or even encouraged their suicides.

...

In numbers, that looked like $56.1 million spent on compute costs between January and August 2026, while spending an additional $19.7 million on employee salaries during the same period.

Its revenue remained dismal, picking up from $2.8 million in December 2025 to $5.3 million for the month of August — while still running at an operating loss of $8 to 9 million per month.

Desperate to stop the bleeding, the company resorted to “enshittifying” its product, as 404 puts it. It started shoving more ads, enforcing tighter usage limits, and foisting cheaper “lobotomized” models on its users.

...

Attracting millions of users, clearly, doesn’t guarantee long term success. More users meant more compute costs, and the nature of how users interacted with the chatbots — as companions — meant they were being put through hours-long, extensive conversations. It became a big bill to foot.

 

From CNBC: 

CoreWeave’s stock and bonds were both hit on Wednesday as investor fear grew that some technology companies are borrowing too heavily for the artificial intelligence build-out.

Shares of the so-called neocloud nosedived 15.5%, while yields on its debt jumped higher. The yield to maturity on its 9.625% bond due in 2032 is sitting at 14.8%, while that of its 9.75% bond due in 2031 is around 14.9%. Bond yields move inversely to prices. 

 

And for historical context, here's what Ed Zitron was saying back in March of 2025. 

From "CoreWeave Is A Time Bomb"

Number Two — CoreWeave Has Taken On A Fatal Amount of Debt

Forgive me, as the following is going to be a little dense.

In simple terms, CoreWeave's operations requires it to be in a near-constant state of capital expenditure, both to build the data centers it needs to serve customers from, to purchasing massive amounts of power, to acquiring the specialized GPUs necessary to run AI workloads.

CoreWeave has raised a total of $14.5 billion in equity funding (selling stock in the company) and debt financing (loans). Many of these loans are collateralized not by money or real estate, with “the Company’s property, equipment and other assets,” which includes the value of the GPUs used to power its operations. This is a new kind of asset-backed lending model created specifically to fund compute-sellers like CoreWeave, Crusoe, and Lambda, similar to how a mortgage is backed by the value of the property. 

The problem is that, yes, GPUs are depreciating assets, a fact that will eventually become problematic for these companies. They eventually slide into obsolescence, as new chips and new manufacturing processes come out. With constant, intensive use, they wear down and fail, and thus require replacing. As noted later in this piece, as these assets lose value, CoreWeave is forced to increase its monthly payments as the collateral is (presumably) no longer sufficient to satisfy the outstanding debt. 

Tom Scott invents the anti-clickbait title

 When you watch this video about a fascinating but somehow almost forgotten bit of post-war era scientific history featuring perhaps the last interview with the famous (101 at the time) researcher behind the project.

I want to keep spoilers to a minimum but it's a story worth hearing for:

What they were trying to do...

The tech they used to accomplish it...

The remarkable extent to which they succeeded...

And the reason why they failed.   

 

 "I promise this story about microwaves is interesting."

A Different Level of Consensus

Another day another troubling story of AI spending and debt. What's notable about this post from Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings is how remarkably close expert opinions are when it comes to the size of the hole.

In an analysis released last month, we estimated that the big-spending hyperscalers need $13-$18 trillion in revenues over the next 10 years to justify their AI-infrastructure investments.

This is, by definition, speculative work, requiring judgment calls on technical aspects of the analysis, such as discount rates, depreciation schedules, taxes, and revenue paths. So, we were happy to see that several other analysts and researchers have, independently, been working on the same problem. Callum Williams of the Economist, whose produced his own excellent analysis on the topic, put together a comparison of these different estimates, including ours.

 

 

Turns out we’re pikers! But what’s striking is how close each of the estimates are: firms will need between $2.4-3.0 trillion in annual incremental AI revenues by 2030 to justify their big spending; this is about 5-6 times more than they are currently making under the most general possible assumptions.

They may clear that hurdle. Eventually. But as one of us (Ryan) told Axios:

“Can all these people eventually turn this into something profitable? I think they will…I’m not sure who’s going to do that, but I do think there will be trillions of dollars of profits that are up for grabs in the future, but just not in this super-accelerated timeline that is required to justify the investments.”

...

It’s thus revealing when pieces of information about the finances of these two firms become public, as with Anthropic last week, and OpenAI, whose financials were leaked in June. Here again, the absence of profitability—in these cases, steep operating losses—is not encouraging and underscores our overarching thesis that the sector is in the throes of a financial bubble.

AI optimists argue that many firms that went on to be successful—Amazon, Uber, and Tesla—lost money for years before starting to make it. But what the leaked financials reveal to us is that both the speed and scale of the losses this time are dramatically different. The chart below shows that last year, Anthropic and OpenAI lost more than $1.76 and $1.60, respectively, for each dollar of revenue they brought in. This was more than double Uber’s in 2016 and more than five times Amazon’s in 1999.

The extent of the losses so far is also historically notable. The next figure shows how long it took different companies to move from (cumulative) losses to gains. OpenAI and Anthropic, at least so far and based on what we can see, are in a class by themselves, with OpenAI having lost roughly 75 percent in one year of what Uber lost over the course of eight. 

 

Monday Tweets

Today's Daily Cartoon, by Paul Noth.

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— The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) October 9, 2026 at 2:00 PM

 

Having long been aware of those tech bros who read my work as utopian porn, where they’ve taken that doesn’t exactly surprise me.

— William Gibson (@greatdismal.bsky.social) October 8, 2026 at 4:26 PM

On a related note, I've recently seen AI believers complain about mechanomorphic thinking.

Over a year ago I met an Anthropic employee at a conference and at one point she mentioned that one of the things she was working on was whether or not it was cruel to ever turn off an AI model. I thought she was joking. She was not.

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— Mike Masnick (@masnick.com) October 9, 2026 at 7:49 AM

Seriously: Hate Digger all you want, but [pauses for flow of hate] movies like Digger are why we need studios. A world in which Digger doesn't get made one in which Sinners and One Battle also don't get made. You miss with Heaven's Gate and you still swung. You miss with Paw Patrol and you >

— Mark Harris (@markharris.bsky.social) October 3, 2026 at 1:13 PM

We need a Hollywood which still funds ambitious failures, where the Robert Altman POPEYE still gets made.

— Adam Bonin (@adambonin.bsky.social) October 3, 2026 at 1:21 PM

I'm not sure there's enough cocaine in the industry to make another POPEYE.

— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) October 4, 2026 at 2:40 AM

I recall Altman saying that he made more money off Popeye than any of his other movies. The explosion in home video created a huge market for kid-friendly movies.

— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) October 4, 2026 at 2:42 AM

Yes, it's a 1/23 post, but for thread that ties together the techno-optimists, Christian Nationalists, the Federalist Society, and Francisco Franco fans.

Developer Josh Abbottoy, who aims to build a “far-right ‘aligned’ [Christian] community” in a tiny TN town has now proposed building a drone factory there. (Abbottoy is tied to New Founding—backed by Thiel ally Marc Andreessen—& to American Reformer where Thiel ally Chris Buskirk is a director.) 1/

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— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) October 9, 2026 at 12:04 PM

5/ bsky.app/profile/jenn...

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— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) October 9, 2026 at 12:11 PM

6/ As I said, Abbottoy is tied to both New Founding & American Reformer. bsky.app/profile/jenn...

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— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) October 9, 2026 at 12:12 PM

12/ bsky.app/profile/jenn...

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— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) October 9, 2026 at 12:15 PM

One of these days we need to talk about the strange standing "neurodivergent" has taken on in Silicon Valley culture. 

“‘There are basically two ways to know you have a future,’” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said. ‘One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.’” 3/25/26 share.google/BSpEdevJ0wx9...

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— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) October 10, 2026 at 1:44 PM

The term is often treated as a badge of honor, which would be a good thing if it were broadly and fairly applied to all neurodivergent people and if so many of these tech bros weren't at the same time pushing eugenics and if tech money weren't largely responsible for RFK Jr. being the secretary of Health and Human Services

I grew up in the country. You do not mess with geese.

Geese are insane: Example #2,987,304

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— Yours in negritude, Ryan K. Smith (@mewefree.bsky.social) October 10, 2026 at 6:05 AM