"the cool guy in the glasses." - kohli. 2w1. aries☉:virgo☽:aquarius↑. formerly @smartmeme, @MITCoLab, @IISCBlog.
Boston, MA
Joined July 2009
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Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Ms. Rachel blasts Republican Christian hypocrisy: “Let’s be a more Christian nation and take away SNAP benefits. Let’s be a more Christian nation and put our neighbors and put the strangers in detention centers. Let’s make more and more money and not help others and let’s deny people’s healthcare. But the SNAP thing, that just breaks me. You’re gonna complain about a child having enough food?”
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
The attack on attention is the dark magic of our age, and most of the population is too deep into the trance to realize it.
I don't think people understand that their attention is pure money. Cash, going directly into these apps' pockets, because you cannot opt out of the ads they've sold for you to see. Do you understand that they're selling your attention without your direct consent every second of every day? Do you get that they've gotten so good at ensuring you stay within that manufactured braindead trance-like state, that they are counting on you being an easy cash out at this point? Because they are. They're counting on the dollars they can bank off of your descent into degenerate illiteracy. And you need to prove them wrong out of spite.
Your attention is much more valuable than you could possibly conceive of. It's the one thing on earth actually worth money by the minute in a capitalistic system that is failing to extract more profit from an already enslaved society. The only way they can secure more is by enslaving your mind in the hours you spend outside of the work that already demands your body and time as sacrifice. There is no vital energy left for you in this plan.
Infinite scrolling is a spell with no natural end. Traditional media had a beginning and an end, while this is designed not to. There are no boundaries to how much of your energy it can harvest... it's like tapping into an infinite source, because you ARE infinite energy. A trance is characterized by absence, not being fully present in the moment even though your attention is occupied. When you come out of a trance, you do not feel energized, you feel drained, disoriented, like you've just lost time without meaning to. That is the very signature of their energy harvesting technique.
Yes, these apps started as technology built by human engineers, but they've been fed so much collective attention that they have become their own egregore: a non-physical, autonomous group entity created by the collective thoughts, shared emotions, and sustained focus of a large group of people. It doesn't need its creators' intent to run dark magic on you; it can be leveraged and manipulated by darker entities that wish to keep this planet in the cycle of survival-based consciousness.
The most sinister aspect of all this is that the time you're giving up is the one thing you cannot buy back. This keeps humans benefitting from capitalism happy, but it also satisfies the darker entities. The more time you lose from this lifetime, the less likely you are to make any meaningful impact on this planet and help it ascend into a higher state by simply existing and having a mind of your own.
They are stripping you of your most valuable resource and you're just accepting it because it feels good to give in, but you are paying with your life every second that you do. With 6 hours of daily screentime, most people are gonna spend 17 years of their lives behind a screen. 4 hours of screentime per day gives these companies 2 entire months off your entire year. It is so much worse than you've convinced yourself it is. Stop normalizing this in your head and get serious about fighting this off, every second of every day if you need to.
Be incredibly stingy with your attention and your ability to synthesize knowledge and preserve critical thinking. Expose yourself to different theories, ideas, and opposing points of view. Allow yourself to be challenged daily and most of all, steer clear of the black magic rectangle as often as possible. Read. Watch long movies. Spend time outside. Perform artsy, handsy crafts to keep your brain engaged and in a state of neuroplasticity. Be stubborn about living your life and claiming every second as yours, claiming your most precious resource as your own: your attention. I fully believe each soul alive at this moment in time is infinitely stronger than all of this and more than capable of overcoming it.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
📚 Au Japon, des gens vont désormais en boîte de nuit… pour s’asseoir silencieusement et lire un livre pendant qu’un DJ joue de la musique d'ambience.
Le concept s’appelle JUCY BOOK RAVE et se déroule notamment dans un club souterrain de Shimokitazawa, à Tokyo. Ici, pas besoin de danser ni de hurler pour parler à la personne située à 30 centimètres de vous. Les participants viennent avec un livre, s’installent dans la pénombre et lisent pendant que la musique accompagne leur soirée.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
This white lady do not be playing with them lmao
Ms. Rachel blasts Republican Christian hypocrisy: “Let’s be a more Christian nation and take away SNAP benefits. Let’s be a more Christian nation and put our neighbors and put the strangers in detention centers. Let’s make more and more money and not help others and let’s deny people’s healthcare. But the SNAP thing, that just breaks me. You’re gonna complain about a child having enough food?”
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare.
In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
The best argument for Socialism ever. Capitalism admits it can't compete with "reasonable prices"
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Hasan Piker: “Elon Musk is a fucking failure and yet in spite of his failures, because he happened to be at the right place at the right time, he has failed upwards with his endless wealth. He’s a horrible person, an unbelievably insecure person, and yet he’s the richest person on the planet. We know he doesn’t fucking work hard because he Tweets all the goddamn time”
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
You have noticed that too. Google Search is getting worse. The results look professional but say nothing. The answers are longer but less useful. Every page reads like it was written by the same voice.
You thought Google was broken. It is not broken. It is being replaced.
Researchers published a paper at the ACM Web Conference 2026 proving what is happening. They call it Retrieval Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI-generated content is flooding the internet so fast that search engines are now showing you mostly AI-written pages. And the search engine cannot tell the difference.
They ran a controlled experiment. They started with a pool of real, human-written web pages. Then they gradually added AI-generated content until it made up 67% of the pool.
By that point, over 80% of the top search results were AI-generated. Not 67%. Over 80%. The ranking algorithm did not just let AI content in. It preferred it. The AI-written pages were better optimized, more fluent, and more keyword-rich than the human pages. They outranked the originals.
Here is the part that makes this invisible.
Answer accuracy stayed the same. The search results still looked correct. The information was still technically right. If you measured quality by accuracy alone, nothing appeared wrong.
But source diversity collapsed. Nearly every result came from the same type of content. AI-written. AI-optimized. AI-structured. The human-written pages, the ones with original reporting, personal experience, and genuine expertise, were buried.
The researchers describe a two-stage collapse. Stage one is Dominance. High-quality AI content silently takes over the top results. Everything looks fine. Accuracy is stable. Nobody notices. Stage two is Corruption. Once AI dominates the pipeline, adversarial and low-quality content starts slipping through. By then, the system is too dependent on synthetic sources to course-correct.
A separate analysis found that 74.2% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated content. Organic click-through rates on pages with AI summaries have dropped 61%. The human internet is being outranked by the machine internet.
Model Collapse described what happens when AI trains on AI. The models get dumber. Retrieval Collapse describes what happens when search engines index AI. The results get emptier.
Both are happening right now. At the same time. And neither one looks broken from the outside.
The search engine still returns ten blue links. The links still load. The pages still answer your question. But the thing that used to make those answers trustworthy, a human who actually knew something, is being quietly replaced by a machine that sounds like it does.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Remember when Musk challenged the World Food Program to explain how he could solve world hunger with just $6 billion, they did, and he just completely ignored them?
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Elon Musk held up a chainsaw, fed USAID into the wood chipper, and at least 600,00 people have already died as a result - two-thirds of them children.
History's first trillionaire.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Again to be clear they stopped counting deaths at 800,000 in December 2025. It is well over a million now
Instead of discussing how Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, we should talk about how he killed hundreds of thousands of people through his dismantling of food and medical aid to poor countries
currentaffairs.org/news/how-…
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
“It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."
Another employee describes some of the tasks—generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they had been doing previously. But the new projects feel menial, and “almost all” employees seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee says. wired.com/story/mark-zuckerb…
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove.
Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001. About a dozen early employees were in the room, working through what their core values should be. The conversation had stalled on the kind of polite corporate statements that nobody disagrees with and nobody remembers.
Buchheit later explained why he picked those three words instead. He wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out. He framed it as a jab at competitors who he felt were already exploiting their users.
Amit Patel, another engineer from the same meeting, scribbled the phrase on whiteboards across the company for months until it stuck. It went into the founding letter of the 2004 IPO prospectus. It sat at the top of the corporate code of conduct for seventeen years.
Then in 2018, Google quietly removed it from the preface.
The timing is the part everyone forgets. In March of that year, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract called Project Maven, building AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.
The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.
Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface. A Gizmodo reporter caught it by comparing Wayback Machine snapshots. Google never announced the removal.
What I find clarifying about the sequence is what it means structurally. The motto was designed in 2001 by an engineer who wanted a sentence his bosses could not erase if the company drifted. Seventeen years later, with the company being publicly accused of building drone targeting AI, his own employer responded by quietly erasing the sentence.
He had been right about exactly one thing. The phrase was hard to take out. It took a Pentagon scandal to do it.
Buchheit, who left Google in 2006, is now a partner at Y Combinator. He has not commented publicly on the removal.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
None of this is satire.
→ A company spent $500,000,000 on Claude in one month because nobody set usage limits
→ Uber ran leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used, not what they shipped
→ Uber burned their entire 2026 budget by April. Their COO said he can’t connect any of it to consumer features
→ A CTO told Axios employees were using enterprise AI to check the weather
→ Microsoft canceled most Claude Code licenses because the token bill spiraled
→ Companies are now laying people off to pay the AI bill. Not because AI replaced the work. Because the bill replaced the headcount.
Lawrence Barriner II retweeted
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
