Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part III

Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays return!

I was kicking around doing another AI Roundup piece towards the end of the year; there was a pretty thread of people realizing that, no, GenAI really doesn’t actually work for anything useful, and people really, really hate it. I wasn’t gathering links, exactly, more like accreting them. I ended up not, because I realized I didn’t have much to say beyond pointing back at the eight thousand words worth of Why Is This Happening I’d already written and going “yeah!” If you squint at the pile of tabs, though, you can probably imagine what the shape of that would have been:

• OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further – Pivot to AI
• The thought doesn't count - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
• Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO
• Pinocchio director Guillermo del Toro on the joy of hand-crafted animation | BFI in Conversation - YouTube: Includes a great zing on AI halfway through, but fascinating on it’s own right
• David Slack: "The reason AI grifters push their product so hard in creative fields is that untrained eyes can’t tell how badly the output sucks. For anything with an objective standard of success, their climate-destroying plagiarism machine just straight up doesn’t fucking work. www.cio.com/article/3540..." — Bluesky
• Dan Johnson: "Can it code as well as a human? Well, no. But can it increase implementation speed? Also no. But does it reduce overtime? Not as much as NOT using it does. But does it write less buggy code? Quite the opposite, actually! But does it save money? In the long run, almost certainly not. But is it more e" — Bluesky

That said, don’t miss Ed Zitron’s piece from this morning on the “recent developments”: Deep Impact

An Interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth About Orion and Reality Labs – Stratechery by Ben Thompson: I’m on record as being “skeptical” about Space Glasses as the form factor of the future, but this was an interesting view, pun intended.

Word of the week: Tonic masculinity - by Nancy Friedman: I meant to link to this back in August and never got around to it; now if feels like a transmission from another dimension, a perfect time capsule of “August, 2024,” and everything that implied.

‎www.wetasphalt.com/content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock: the website loads strangely on desktop, but this is a great list.

Why you should care if movie theaters survive: ruminations on what the future of “movies” might even be.

The Perils of Pauline | Renata Adler | The New York Review of Books: And related, in retrospect, the fact that the most powerful movie critic of the 20th had really weird taste (derogatory) might not have been a great idea?

Suicide Mission - The American Prospect: “What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane”; I could have sworn I posed this but instead I think I just dropped this link in every group chat I was in back in march

The story of VaccinateCA - Works in Progress: Again, I think I must have just slacked this to a bunch of people, great read.

Returning to Monkey Island - Noclip Documentary - YouTube: Fantastic documentary on Ron Gilbert’s return to Monkey Island.