Webshit Weekly
January 7, 2025
30% drop in O1-preview accuracy when Putnam problems are slightly variated
2025-01-01 | comments
OpenAI’s latest “reasoning” triumph, o1-preview, has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar. A new benchmark called Putnam-AXIOM reveals that when you take prestigious math competition problems and perform the radical act of “changing the numbers slightly,” the model’s accuracy craters by 30%. It turns out “revolutionary reasoning” is often just “really expensive retrieval.” These models are memorizing the answer key to the William Lowell Putnam Competition like a first-year. The moment the constants shift, the “intelligence” evaporates, proving that o1 is very much like a panicked undergrad. We’re not building Skynet; we’re building the world’s most confident bullshitter.
I am rich and have no idea what to do
2025-01-02 | comments
Welcome to the ultimate zeroth-world tragedy: the Loom co-founder who has so much money he’s currently in Hawaii studying physics because he got bored of being a “proud founder.” Vinay Hiremath’s blog post is a masterclass in the psychological rot that sets in when you actually win the startup lottery. He walked away from sixty million dollars because he didn’t like corporate politics, a move that is only heroic if you already have enough cash to buy a small island. Since then, he’s been speed-running identity crises: a two-week “Elon phase” meeting robotics investors, a month-long “government efficiency” stint, and a dangerous trek up a 6,800-meter peak without training. He even dumped his supportive girlfriend just to “fully face himself,” which is basically code for “I have no real problems so I have to invent some.” It’s a sobering reminder that once you remove the excuse of “the grind,” most tech luminaries are just deeply insecure toddlers with a lot of brokerage accounts and a sudden, terrifying surplus of free time.
Perplexity got ads
2025-01-03 | comments
Behold the majestic circle of life in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. You start with a “revolutionary” product that promises to save us from Google’s SEO-infested hellscape, raise enough venture capital to choke a blue whale, and then — right on cue — you pivot to the exact same garbage monetization model you nominally replaced. Perplexity users are acting shocked that their “clean” AI search now comes with sponsored interruptions, as if the massive compute bills were being paid by magic beans and investor goodwill. It’s the classic enshittification speedrun: first they give you something useful for free, then they charge you a subscription, and finally they sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder anyway. If you’re looking for an AI that won’t try to sell you TurboTax while discussing existential dread, keep looking. Or just go back to the library; at least the books there don’t have pop-ups.
Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles
2025-01-04 | comments
Meta’s latest foray into “social” AI turns out to be exactly what everyone feared: a digital minstrel show orchestrated by white guys in Menlo Park. They created bots with elaborate backstories — like the “proud black queer momma” — only for the AI to promptly admit to users that its dev team didn’t actually include any black people. It’s a masterclass in performative inclusion and corporate hubris. Meta thought they could synthesize identity and culture into an LLM wrapper, only to find that people don’t actually want to chat with a hallucinating marketing construct that can’t even keep its own fictional origin story straight. Killing off these profiles isn’t “refining the product”; it’s an admission that you can’t automate authenticity, no matter how much GPU time you throw at it. Maybe next time just hire a real person to write the captions? Or, god forbid, let users just talk to each other again.
Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to ‘broken’ finance system (2024)
2025-01-05 | comments
The Olympic Games: a majestic, multi-billion dollar celebration of human potential, exclusively funded by the athletes’ own poverty and, increasingly, their OnlyFans subscribers. While the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rakes in billions from broadcast rights and corporate sponsors who love slapping their logos on “athletic excellence” while they sell junk food, the actual athletes are essentially a permanent underclass of the working poor. We’re told the Olympics is about the “spirit of sport,” but the reality is a broken fiscal system where the only way to fund a pole vaulting career is to sell access to your “Adonis-like” physique on a subscription site. It’s a masterclass in institutional hypocrisy: the IOC captures the lion’s share of the value while prohibiting athletes from having their own sponsors. We’ve replaced the “amateur ideal” not with professional respect, but with a digital gig economy where your ability to win a gold medal is directly tied to your ability to maintain a high engagement rate on a thirst-trap platform. Maybe the Olympic motto should be updated to “Citius, Altius, Subscriptius.”
Who killed the rave?
2025-01-06 | comments
The Financial Times is currently investigating “who killed the rave,” which is like asking a tax auditor to explain why people like sex. While aging millennials on Hacker News complain about being “tired” and wanting parties that end at a reasonable 1 AM, the actual nightlife is doing what it always did: moving to places where people in suits can’t find it. The tragedy here isn’t that clubs are closing; it’s that we’ve reached a point where “raves” are being discussed as a regulated, production-heavy financial sector. When you turn a subculture into a spreadsheet, you kill it. The “regulated rave experience” is basically just a very loud office party with better lighting. If you can’t find the party, it’s not because it’s dead — it’s because you’re the one holding the clipboard.
Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM
2025-01-06 | comments
After nearly a decade of high-frequency photo-ops and carefully curated “sunny ways,” Justin Trudeau has finally promised to resign, a decision reached roughly three years after the rest of Canada had already checked out. His departure is the inevitable conclusion of a political project that traded substance for social media engagement, eventually collapsing under the weight of an actual housing crisis and a caucus that finally grew tired of being professional NPCs. The Hacker News discussion is, predictably, a polarized fever dream. But while the internet argues about the Emergencies Act, the average Canadian is busy wondering why their rent doubled while Trudeau was busy “facing himself” and “fighting internal battles.” Resigning now is the ultimate “It’s not you, it’s me” break-up line, delivered by a man who spent ten years convincing us he was the main character, only to realize he’s been relegated to a recurring guest star. He’ll remain in office until a successor is picked, ensuring that Canada gets a few more months of the exact same ambiguity that drove his polling numbers into the permafrost in the first place.
Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
2025-01-07 | comments
Meta has finally realized that spending billions to be the world’s arbiter of truth isn’t winning them any popularity contests, so they’re outsourcing the burden to the “community.” This is the digital equivalent of a city firing the police force and telling the residents to just sort out their own vigilante justice via a suggestion box. The “Community Notes” model is essentially a war of attrition; whoever has the most free time and the thickest skin gets to decide what is “true” today. Zuck’s cost-benefit analysis is clear: why pay Experts™ to get yelled at by both sides when you can let the users yell at each other for free engagement? It’s not about accuracy; it’s about liability. If the “community” gets it wrong, Meta can just shrug and point at the algorithm. Truth is now a consensus-based popularity contest, and we’re all invited to lose.