ai video
Limerick council used AI to sell a Christmas it has not built
The council turned off the comments when Limerick pushed back, and a councillor says the video cost €4,000.
Based Boomerstein
Prada
Prada's hand-drawn Christmas ad makes craft the pitch
Prada's Holiday 2026 campaign pairs Glen Luchford's live-action film with frame-by-frame animation led by John Pomeroy, as AI holiday ads draw their own backlash.
Opinion
Google's CRT ad, and the rate limits that made me an Argon man
Gemini 4 Argon scripted the Blender boot animations and the SuperCollider audio, and a Raspberry Pi fed a real vintage television. I set out to do the same thing on Claude and OpenAI. This is the breakdown, and my conversion.
Svedka
Svedka lost the Ad Meter and sold more vodka anyway
The 2026 spot ranked 53rd of 54 in the USA Today Ad Meter and lifted Svedka sales about 23%, so the brand is handing its 2027 ad to a fan contest.
Opinion
Based Boomerstein: I drew Proton's AI manifesto in ten boards
The CTO's manifesto, the CEO's "loser thinking", and the re-interviews that were canceled the next day — told in ten panels, one for each idea that got an engineer called a loser.
pika
Pika H3 Flex ships open weights under a license that bars the US
Pika post-trained MiniMax's open H3 down to six sampling steps and published the weights under a community license that excludes the United States, the EU, the UK and South Korea.
Opinion
Meta's Quest filmed everything, and I want the tapes
A parody broadcast says the hack's haul was video Meta's customers had shot of themselves. Meta's own page says the Quest cameras record the room, a jury just ordered $25bn, and the columnist would like his footage released.
Valve
Valve will not police AI games, and it never policed the tools
Steam peaked at 43.5 million concurrent users and South Korean revenue grew 126% in five years, but Valve told Busan developers it will not gatekeep what they build.
open weights
Open weights is becoming a license tier, priced by revenue
ComfyUI is paying $25,000 for open-source rebuilds of Higgsfield's apps while Nvidia, whose cards are the prizes, backs Higgsfield.
ai video
Based Boomerstein: an AI made the week's newsreel, so I broke out the rhyme book
An AI newsreel covered nine stories in three minutes and ordered them by scale, from a car at 10⁰ meters to a nucleus at 10⁻¹⁵. I checked every card. Then I wrote a rap about it.
viggle
Viggle built a 3D village in one second, and I am sick with envy
A Toronto company taught a machine to put a boy in a village and walk him across it, physics built in, for less than a cent a scene. I have been typing for fifty years, and I cannot do it in six weeks.
interpretability
Based Boomerstein: don't open the black box, it's my only edge
Researchers have started reading individual neurons inside real models, and the famous cat-and-car tangle turned out to be a shape detector. Everyone is calling it a win for safety. I am calling it the end of my career.
comfyui
Shots fired: ComfyUI pays $25,000 to rebuild Higgsfield in the open
Comfy says Higgsfield promised to open-source its platform and never did, so it put up $25,000 with NVIDIA and RunPod underwriting the fight. The question underneath is the one worth asking: is Comfy all you need?
advertising
Advertising's new premium pitch is work AI did not make
An Ipsos study with Syracuse University found human-made ads scored 14% higher on short-term sales effectiveness and 17% higher on brand health than AI ads.
epic games
Epic said no more handwritten code, so I hand-drew Lord of the Flies
Sweeney put a thousand people out of work, then told the studio to retool for maximum AI acceleration. So I finished the browser game I have been drawing on graph paper for two years: an island where the conch is the gate and the fire is the only way home.
Epic Games
Epic says no more handwritten code, so I applied as the idea guy
A director told the team there would be no more handwritten code and all art would come out of AI workflows. So Based Boomerstein rewrote his CV and pitched them a game about boys on an island.
reverse engineering
Based Boomerstein: I reverse engineered Minecraft and it was my life
A viral thread says an open-source agent tool can take any app apart and hand you its features. I pointed it at Minecraft and got my whole life back, minus the resale value.
Fanta
Fanta's AI Halloween ad is marketing for the marketing
Coca-Cola put Fanta's AI Halloween campaign into 50 markets on the back of a 10 billion-impression year, and almost every comment it drew was negative.
Tavus
Half of Tavus's testers mistook its AI for a real person
Griffin is the first system to pass a video Turing test, and the company that built it says it is not safe to sell yet. Based Boomerstein has not stopped pacing since.
Ben Affleck
Everything you need to know about Ben Affleck and AI
He writes Python, has worked with GPUs, and used his name to get into Google's and OpenAI's labs. Based Boomerstein on how the man knows more than us. We love him.