Erikk Geannikis
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erikk38.bsky.social
Erikk Geannikis
@erikk38.bsky.social
270 followers 110 following 350 posts
podcast producer (@relentlesspicnic.com); (formerly @vox.com, @yahoonews.com); philosophy ex-professor
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erikk38.bsky.social
a shot that I took at the abolition of time dinner, which took place on XXXXXXXXXX
a banquet type affair with a dozen or two people visible, white tablecloths, lots of apples, and then an inscrutable triptych of projections on a white wall: from left to right: two leopards (or are they cheetahs?); the words "Abolition of Time"; then a man using a 90s-era computer with a woman looking at him by his side.
November 14, 2025 at 10:58 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
baby shoes never worn, a challenger has emerged
Unlimited Golf for One
November 9, 2025 at 10:57 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
@cjosephbea.bsky.social don scott appearing on msnbc with don scott on msnbc on in the background, care to comment sir
November 5, 2025 at 5:32 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
i guess this is my occasional reminder that falling in love, for some people, is issuing forth a kind of organized cruelty
San Francisco Chronicle The best stairway city in the world? 17 epic San Francisco climbs that will make you fall in loev with the city again
November 3, 2025 at 3:54 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
pretty insane detail to slip in 90% of the way through your big reported piece on why harvard kids aren't going to class

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/u...
"Harvard may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences, with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time. Dr. Laibson tells his students that in-person learning is better than learning by video. But he also defends the double-scheduling practice because so many classes at Harvard meet at overlapping times."
October 8, 2025 at 11:00 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
i mean, jesus fucking christ. plato's gorgias is the political text of our age. poli sci people fumbling over the question of what an authentic acting performance is. I got a play for you motherfuckers to see and it's called "the mouse trap"
October 7, 2025 at 2:11 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
· Why it matters: The U.S. is betting its economic fortunes on the belief that OpenAI's Sam Altman, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and other AI leaders are wizardly innovators dreaming up novel financing vehicles to drive a golden future — rather than salesmen juggling billions and praying the music never stops.
September 25, 2025 at 3:26 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
"Christine Matthews — the pollster for former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s reelection campaign, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ two campaigns and the president of Bellwether Research — first saw women wearing weighted vests all over her upscale neighborhood in Alexandria. Matthews’ [sic] wanted answers to two simple questions: How many women were wearing weighted vests? And what were their politics? So she commissioned a poll of 1,000 women across the U.S., the results of which she shared exclusively with POLITICO."
September 19, 2025 at 3:45 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
this, despite the fact that a few pages later we get the acknowledgement that just cuz genAI has shown up doesn't mean it's had much effect on market dynamics.
plus, as is the case so often with all sorts of supposed professional rulemakers: judge mehta doesn't know what the motherfuck is going on.
Judge Mehta said in his ruling Tuesday that he lacked expertise in the business of search engines and A.I., and that “unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future.” “Not exactly a judge’s forte,” he added. But he allowed Google to continue to pay for that prime placement in many cases. He said new A.I. developments meant that Google might have a harder time using its financial clout to keep competitors from becoming the built-in search engines on smartphones and browsers. “The money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing,” he wrote. “These new realities give the court hope that Google will not simply outbid competitors for distribution if superior products emerge.”
September 3, 2025 at 1:00 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
it's really kind of insane. the court's position is that genAI chatbots came along and delivered the first meaningful blow to google's "global search engine" (GSE) business in more than two decades; therefore "Google cannot be permitted to leverage its dominance in general search to" genAI.
Nevertheless, the capacity “to fulfill a broad array of informational needs” constitutes a defining feature of both products, as Google implicitly acknowledges. Google, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 110–11 (discussing the “peculiar characteristics and uses” of GSEs when defining the relevant product market for purposes of determining liability); see Google’s RPFJ § VI.N (defining “ThirdParty General Search Service” to include “a web search service that can respond to a broad range of search query categories and offers functionality that is substantially similar to Google Search”); id. § VI.O (defining “Third-Party Generative AI Assistive Service” to include “a stand-alone mobile software application that is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that has among its principal functions answering information-seeking prompts across a wide variety of topics using a broad range of publicly available information”). And it is that capacity that renders GenAI a potential threat to Google’s dominance in the market for general search services. Indeed, Google’s own witness, Apple executive Eddy Cue, testified that the volume of Google Search queries in Apple’s Safari web browser had declined for the first time in 22 years likely due to the emergence of GenAI chatbots. Rem. Tr. at 3818:20–3819:4, 3827:23–3828:11, 3846:24–3847:3 (Cue); see also FOF ¶ 63. And when asked what it would take for a competitor “to provide genuine competition to Google for Apple’s default on Safari,” Cue replied, “I don’t think the incumbents can do it . . . . The people that have the opportunity to do it are” those “leveraging the new technologies, . . . the Perplexities, the OpenAIs of the world . . . .” Id. at 3845:15–3846:2 (Cue); see id. at 3848:5-15 (Cue) (“[I]f AI had not come about, I don’t know what [one] could do” to “aid in the competitive landscape.”). As further evidence of how these products are shifting the competitive landscape, Cue revealed that Apple is “actively looking at” adding a GenAI product as a search option in its Safari web browser and expects to do so in the coming year. Id. at 3834:213835:10 (Cue). Such optionality is particularly meaningful in the present moment. GenAI products have emerged as a competitive threat to the traditional GSE, and Google cannot be permitted to leverage its dominance in general search to the GenAI product space.
September 3, 2025 at 12:54 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
@edzitron.com has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever
External Communications Manager, Search Google 4.3⭐ San Francisco, CA $165,000 - $245,000 a year Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 10 years of experience in communications within technology. 4 days ago
August 25, 2025 at 4:15 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
"The community's two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in."
August 19, 2025 at 6:59 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
perfect. what I hate most is knowing anything about what the fuck is going on, or any endeavor thereto
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE I Watched AI Agents Try to Hack My Vibe-Coded Website by WILL KNIGHT
August 1, 2025 at 7:31 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
one day I will meet you, owner of this nearby wi-fi network... you jocund sprite, you veritable bridegroom of whimsy
A wi-fi network, on a list of nearby wi-fi networks, called: "Internet surfing. Wheeeeeee!"
July 28, 2025 at 6:47 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
July 23, 2025 at 5:33 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
incredible that yudkowsky just comes out and says this.
"This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat," mused Yudkowsky. "Yes yes, I'm sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager," he continued. "It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them."
July 23, 2025 at 2:48 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
everyone has gone fucking insane.
"Mr. Mamdani is a clever self-marketer and has never come off as a scold. He could be telling New Yorkers: Let’s save money by forgoing all the brand name products, like Baleine sea salt from France and Snyder’s pretzel sticks, both in the background of his TikTok video. Or he could make videos on cooking whole chickens to save money and eat healthfully. But he wants to give New Yorkers capitalist consumer-brand choice at socialist prices. Mr. Mamdani’s brand of socialism is not collective, cooperative sacrifice but individualist, no-cost, no-tradeoff socialism."
July 23, 2025 at 2:21 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
"I haven't quite cracked why, but generative AI also brings out the worst in some people. By giving the illusion of labor, it excites those who are desperate to replace or commoditize it. By giving the illusion of education, it excites those who are too idle to actually learn things by convincing them that in a few minutes they can learn quantum physics. By giving the illusion of activity, it allows the gluttony of Business Idiots that control everything to pretend that they do something. By giving the illusion of futurity, it gives reporters that have long-since disconnected from actual software and hardware the ability to pretend that they know what's happening in the tech industry."
July 23, 2025 at 3:55 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
in @theinformation.com's daily AI newsletter, which is always hella credulous, @martinpeers.bsky.social cites another newsletter, which wrote that the AI bubble now is bigger than the 90s dot-com bubble was.
"BUT IS IT TRUE?" our man asks.
and he concludes: yeah probably.
god this is so funny to me.
THE BRIEFING by Martin Peers Greetings! Here’s a sobering thought. Today’s AI bubble is bigger than the tech bubble of the 1990s, according to Torsten Slok, the chief economist for Apollo whose brief daily emails are widely followed. He bases that statement on his analysis that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 are today “more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.” If this is true, then tech investors should be bracing for the mother of all market crashes. Anyone above the age of, well, 45 remembers the tech winter that followed the 2000 market crash. Lots of dot-com companies disappeared, and it took a few years before the sector got back on its feet. The most recent parallel might be the crypto slump of 2022 that triggered the collapse of numerous crypto firms. But is Slok’s analysis correct? Not necessarily. AI has definitely lifted tech valuations, likely to unsustainable levels. But it's hard to prove this situation is worse than the dot-com bubble.
July 17, 2025 at 3:09 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
"We’re not just competing against large-scale publications and AI slop, we are competing against the entire rest of the internet. We were publishing articles and AI was scraping and republishing them within five minutes of us publishing them,” I said. “So many publications are leaning into ‘how can we use AI to be more efficient to publish more,’ and it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work because you’re competing against a child in Romania, a child in Bangladesh who is publishing 9,000 articles a day and they don’t care about facts, they don’t care about accuracy, but in an SEO algorithm it’s going to perform and that’s what you’re competing against. You have to compete on quality at this point and you have to find a real human being audience and you need to speak to them directly and treat them as though they are intelligent and not as though you are trying to feed them as much slop as possible.”
July 14, 2025 at 3:18 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
July 5, 2025 at 1:19 AM
erikk38.bsky.social
ok, opposition party.. let's see some crafty shenanigans, right?? hakeem? put the bat down and read this politico thing
The problem is deep in the weeds, a drafting issue on a procedural document — the “rule” governing the megabill’s floor consideration. But there are real consequences for Speaker Mike Johnson if it doesn’t get fixed. “It has a mistake in it,” said Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Rules Committee Democrat, on the floor Wednesday. He said Republicans “don’t have an escape hatch if they start it and realize they don’t have the votes” as the key consequence. As currently written, the rule does not “order the previous question” nor does it prohibit “intervening motions.” Long story short, that means once the House begins debate on the procedural measure, Johnson doesn’t have a ripcord he can pull to delay or reschedule voting. Moreover, Democrats would be free to deploy a variety of delay tactics, including motions to adjourn or table the measure.
July 2, 2025 at 10:13 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
Near the end of the conversation, Roberts offered additional insight into his relationships with his colleagues when asked about how the Supreme Court is addressing cybersecurity issues, including ones caused by artificial intelligence. He said Justice Clarence Thomas is “the most technologically sophisticated of the justices” and helps keep everyone aware of potential threats. “I do what he tells me to do,” Roberts said. Diaz wrapped up the conversation by asking Roberts to reflect on work-life balance and share how he unwinds during his limited downtime. “I like to read a lot, but … it’s all usually crime mysteries and things like that, nothing elevating in any way other than you want to find out who did it,” Roberts said. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
June 30, 2025 at 7:00 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
boy that last graf sure looks different today, @nytimes.com, and no correction noted
On private text chains and WhatsApp groups, Jewish voters circulated mock ballots showing Mr. Cuomo ranked first to stop Mr. Mamdani’s rise. Social media influencers with large pro-Israel followings circulated Mr. Mamdani’s past statements about Israel, saying he would threaten Jewish safety in the city. “I feel like last night’s NYC election result is like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK,” posted Jill Kargman, a Jewish writer and actress who has also shared inflammatory content about Muslims and supported Mr. Cuomo.
June 26, 2025 at 7:49 PM
erikk38.bsky.social
i am a 4th generation new york jew, and let me speak directly to my fellow ny Jews on these whatsapp threads, or whatever. do you not have a fellow jew in your life who holds literally *all* of the views on Israel that zohran does? there are lots of us. that you don't know any is a problem you have.
On private text chains and WhatsApp groups, Jewish voters circulated mock ballots showing Mr. Cuomo ranked first to stop Mr. Mamdani’s rise. Social media influencers with large pro-Israel followings circulated Mr. Mamdani’s past statements about Israel, saying he would threaten Jewish safety in the city. “I feel like last night’s NYC election result is like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK,” posted Jill Kargman, a Jewish writer and actress.
June 26, 2025 at 1:06 AM