A hackernews sells an AI powered toy to let kids "talk to Santa." $100 for 60 min, then $1 every additional minute.
Available at walmart dot com
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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hi peeps! the first episode of the podcast i posted about last week is up now. it's called odium symposium and it's about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts. i don't know how long until i get to one of our favorites but its inevitable
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
rss:
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So they made an AI restaurant! It has a manifesto!
It’s… a printer for QR codes. That a guy who is reallly not equipped for sticking QR codes to bowls has to peel and stick onto bowls. And then they get filled by hilariously imprecise cereal dispensers.
They’re building an empire, yall.
(Via Jonty)
Most restaurant origin stories involve someone sharing their favorite taco recipe or whatever. These guys start off with a bad pop-history explanation of the battle of Alesia. That's how you know their food is great.
There's more where the founder of the company talks about how he really hated working at his family's restaurant while growing up (good sign). Knowing that his family came from China adds another layer of weirdness, in my opinion. The characters where the company name comes from (改革) can be read in both Chinese (gǎigé) and Japanese (kaikaku) and mean the same thing (reform) in both languages. It just feels so weird that he talks so much fluff about Julius Caesar, mentions his family from China and then, out of the blue, uses a Japanese name for the company. What is with these people fetishizing ancient Rome and Japan so much?
Yeah, one is tempted to search for a historical throughline here, an axis if you will
Alesia was the turning point. With the fall of Gaul, Julius Caesar became the most powerful man in the Roman world.
We conveniently forgot about all the civil wars that happened afterwards that resulted in the dismantling of the Roman republic and Caesar taking absolute power. Oh yeah, I see it now.
There's also a village in ~~aquitaine~~ Armorica that he never properly conquered...
Translator's note: kaikaku means flan
Also the random Bernard Arnault mention (CEO of LMVH occasionally the richest man in the world depending on how strong the stocks are) at the end is a bit odd, I'm guessing added by an LLM because of the Alesia (~Paris) angle.
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So this is literally a rehash of Spyce, a CambridgeMA based startup whos first restaurant was in the old chipotle in harvard square. They had a similar setup but one that was able to make actually-hot food instead of salad bowls which were decent. (they ironically sold to sweetgreen in 2021)
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a very “oh no. anyway,” kind of post
turns out the rest of the owl is the hard part! what a surprise!
To provide some good news for this week, the Fediverse is reporting a spike in users (thanks to David Gerard for finding this):
Whilst accurate fedi stats are pretty difficult to get, I'm inclined to believe the influx is genuine - after the CEO Meltdown on Bluesky, its clear people are jumping ship.
Apologies in advance for the infohazard
Tucker - Every Tech Billionaire Is Having the Same Haunting Vision. Demonologist Explains Why
Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson
WTF. how is he going mainstream.
e
LAND: I mean, I'm obviously skeptical of the fact that large chunks of Silicon Valley are engaged in occult rituals involving involving a numogram. But I mean, it's not something I guess I have any authority to to talk about. Well, I mean, I can only say that they they certainly aren't in contact with me if if that is happening. They're they're doing it very, you know, if not privately at least. It's my involvement is is actually zero in that.
Insert gif of lemurs here.
The $10K Existential Hope Meme Prize: A celebration of creativity, optimism, and big-picture thinking.
And none other than friend-of-the-pod Steven Pinker is a judge!
(Via)
Nothing screams "celebration of creativity" like a nice heaping tablespoon of AI slop images.
this has been previously sneered on, but only now i've clocked this: AI2027 is another name for, or elaboration* of "san francisco consensus", from april this year or so, "named so because everyone who believes in it is in san francisco", more precisely timeline roughly matches and it hinges on iterative self-improvement
* which might just mean it was laundered through chatbots to bulk it up initially. what i mean to say is even openai's dooming might not be original
so if anyone's counting then this thing is a couple of months older
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fresh openwashed proprietary license hell just (well as of 2 years ago, but I’m sneering at it now) dropped:
Harmful free-riding is the sort of free-riding that leads to the free-rider problem
[…]
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature. Free riders are a problem for common pool resources because they may overuse it by not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes).
from the fucking asshats who made Sentry proprietary under the BUSL but wanted an even more nonsensical license:
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later we switched to the Business Source License (BSL or BUSL)
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature.
This is literally railing against the concept of altruism, kill this license with hammers (and sickles)
That Wikipedia article is cursed:
For instance, in discussions on climate change mitigation, countries with lesser contributions to greenhouse gas emissions might still benefit from global efforts to reduce emissions, enjoying a stable climate without proportionally shouldering the costs of emission reductions.
fyi: some fellow forked all of the sentry stuff from when it was bsd and made it less shit to run yourself. I'd been running sentry as self hosted since it came out effectively and they made some real ~~questionable~~ outright bad architecture decisions over the years that made running sentry super annoying to get you to use the saas product. Like yes I want to use Cassandra and elastic search for my one user error logging
regardless https://glitchtip.com/
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I did not know how much right-wing media is outrage-farming wikipedia. With AI slop invasion, UK Safety Act nonsense and US government probing I'm getting worried