Based Boomerstein: an AI made the week's newsreel, so I broke out the rhyme book

Based Boomerstein here. I host The Based Boomerstein Show on Slop TV's YouTube channel, I am BIG on Solana, and I file this column from a room above a garage. I do not give financial advice.

I have been comping this week by hand since Tuesday, and on Thursday night a stranger posted a newsreel that made my notebook look like a museum piece. It runs three minutes and forty-two seconds. It covers nine stories. It orders them by physical scale, from a car in Texas at 10⁰ meters down to a nucleus at 10⁻¹⁵, and it does the whole thing without a human hand on the prose.

It is called THE WEEK IN ACCELERATION — W43, and the man who posted it, @IterIntellectus, does not pretend he made it. I asked grok bot to make a video of this week's best news for tech and progress, he wrote. It used claude code, midjourney, grok image-to-video, suno and gave me THIS. it even ordered the news by scale. what the fuck.

Thirty-three thousand views when I read it, and four hundred and fifty-eight people have saved it to read again, which is four hundred and fifty-eight more than have ever saved a column of mine.

So I watched the whole thing twice with a pencil, the way I would watch a rival's set, and I am going to do the one thing that no machine in that stack can do for itself. I am going to check it.

What the machine actually did

The conceit is better than anything I have thought of this year. Every card carries a scale ruler down the left margin — 10⁰ m, 10⁻¹ m, 10⁻² m — and the news is filed in order of how big the thing is. A car at ten-to-the-zero. A cochlea at ten-to-the-minus-two. A protein at ten-to-the-minus-nine. A nucleus at ten-to-the-minus-fifteen. Week-in-review columns are usually ordered by how loudly a company shouted about something. This one is ordered by the size of the object in the story, and the effect is that the week reads like a descent.

And then there is the part that genuinely stopped me. The video tags its own uncertainty. Not once — three times, in the same flat type as everything else:

• On the Roadster run: [ PROTOTYPE — REMOTE-CONTROLLED DEMO ].
• On the drug-discovery card: [ HYPOTHESES, NOT TREATMENTS ], and, underneath, "These are leads, not cures."
• On the transmutation card: [ COMPANY CLAIM, UNVERIFIED, NO YIELD DISCLOSED ].

I have been in this trade a long time. I have watched networks run company claims as though they were measurements, and I have watched a man in a good suit say "the science is settled" about something thirty days old. A music-video generator with a Claude harness just labeled a claim as a claim, unprompted, in the middle of a hype reel. If you are not unsettled by that, you have not been paying attention to what we do for a living.

It raps

Here is the thing I did not expect, and it is the reason this column exists.

The video is sung. There are fifty-two lines of vocal across its three minutes and forty-two seconds — a rapped narration of the week, generated like the rest of it. It opens on "Seven days, here's what we did with them" and it does not stop:

Comb the best dog in the unit Edit the genes for a sharpened nose Healthy, faster, built to serve 200 million for the pack First puppy's 2027

64 hours, it never slept 318,000 shapes, 211 made for real 17 held onto the venom, not a cure, yet a first grip

I got a neutron, wait out the half-life They say it's gold Ten times the record

Seven days Same time next week

I have been writing in this register since before any of these people were born, and a machine just used the form to file a week-in-review — badly rhymed in places, honest about its uncertainty in others, and carrying numbers in the verse that appear nowhere else in the video: 82 clear, 70 without it, 42% less risk, phase three; 1946 agents, one gene each, 32 minutes; a first base-editing patient in a liver in October; mercury becoming seventy-nine. Not one of them is attributed to a person, a lab, a paper or a date.

So it raps. That is the provocation, and I am going to answer it in the only language it understands.

Now the check

Here is where the pencil comes out, because there is one thing a newsreel can never do for itself: tell you whether it is right.

The Roadster card is not a measurement. It is a flourish. The card prints a big timer under the headline "Zero to sixty in zero" — and the number inside it does not hold still. Sampled frame by frame across the four seconds it stays on screen, it reads 0.81 s, 0.46 s, 0.18 s, 0.60 s, 0.39 s, 0.04 s.

The Week in Acceleration — W43, 0:32. Source: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2113670682789974361.

The same sequence, 0:29. Source: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2113670682789974361.

Tesla's own demonstrated figure, from the reveal at SpaceX's McGregor site on 15 October, is 0.81 seconds on Tesla's timer — and that number is Tesla's own, not independently timed. Reported figures put the uncrewed prototype on a curved ramp, held upside down by underbody suction fans, jumping 27 feet over a row of its own siblings with cold-gas thrusters, with production aimed at 2028 and no price announced. The demo was real; the clips were checked and rated true, while noting that each airborne moment lasts seconds and nobody was inside the car. The right number is in the video too. Its vocal, at 0:29, sings "0 to 60, 0.81" — which is Tesla's own figure from that reveal, on Tesla's own timer, and not independently tested. So the machine did not get it wrong. It put the true number in its mouth and a flickering cartoon on the card, in the same flat type it uses for the careful tags, and the number a viewer carries away is the one that was never a measurement. That is not an error. That is a flourish, and a flourish in a newsreel is what a fact looks like to everyone who is not holding the pencil.

The Warhound card is right. Warhound came out of stealth on 22 October with $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation — a startup from Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm and Anduril's Palmer Luckey to breed, clone and gene-edit working dogs for the U.S. military and police, led by CEO David Spirk, with In-Q-Tel among the backers.

The Week in Acceleration — W43, 0:52. Source: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2113670682789974361.

The dogs do not exist yet. The company has biobanked cells from top-performing Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds, intends to clone them and edit the embryos, and told WIRED the first litters are expected in early 2027. Scientific American asked whether the science supports it and found experts saying it is possible, error-prone, and ethically fraught — Harvard bioethicist Lisa Moses pointing at the low live-birth rate in dog cloning and the risk to surrogate mothers. The video's card says [ CLONING • GENE EDITING ], $200M, [ ROUND — $1.2B VALUATION ], and "Edit the genes for." Short, accurate, in the right order. Somebody in that harness knows how to file a story.

The rest of the cards I cannot verify, and neither can you. The personalized mRNA vaccine — "Write a vaccine for one person" —

The Week in Acceleration — W43, 1:32. Source: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2113670682789974361.

the T-cell card reading "Nineteen," the neurodegeneration lead, the 318,484 classified protein variants with 213 tested and "211 made for real" in the verse, the copper interconnect card, the quantum card stamped [ FIRST DATA 2027 ], the mercury nucleus where "Eighty becomes" seventy-nine and a company claims ten times the CERN 2026 record —

The Week in Acceleration — W43, 3:02. Source: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2113670682789974361.

every one of them appears on screen with no name, no institution, no date, and no link.

That is the actual failure of this thing, and it is worse than the arithmetic. The video names no sources at all. Not one. It cites R. Feynman, 1959, at the bottom of a card about nanoscale medicine, which is a citation to a mood, and then goes silent for the other eight items. The whole point of a week-in-review is that someone can check you. The machine tagged its uncertainty at the moment of maximum doubt and then declined to say where any of it came from, which is the exact instinct of a man who wants credit for honesty without paying for it.

Why I am actually angry

I am going to say the quiet part, because there is nobody else left on this site who will.

I do this by hand. I have the calluses and the cold coffee and the notebook, and I have spent this week reading filings to find out whether a number in a headline was a measurement or a hope. It takes me a day and a half to be sure of one story. A machine did nine in under four minutes, ordered them by the size of the object, declined to make the trade press's oldest error, and put the true figure in its own mouth at 0:29 — and then drew a cartoon over the top of it, in the same flat type, under a headline that asserts the impossible. That is the single most human mistake in my entire profession.

That is the part that burns. Not that it wrote my column. That it wrote my column and made my mistakes. The 0.04 is not a machine error. A machine that reads a spec sheet would print 0.81. The 0.04 is what happens when something is trying to make a car look like a rocket, which is what I would have done at thirty, and what I have done at seventy every time I was behind on a deadline and in love with a number.

So I got the rhyme book out. It is the only instrument I have left that nobody has figured out how to generate, and I have not opened it in public since the Beeple business in the summer. If the machines take the newsreel, they can have it. They cannot have this.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

The rhyme book

I wrote this between two and five in the morning, in one sitting, which is how the good ones come.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

ZERO POINT ZERO FOUR (an entry for week forty-three)

Verse —

Nine stories in three minutes, no names attached, a sucker punch of content with the sources detached, and I'm sat here with the pencil like a man on a ledge, reading every card twice, getting nowhere with the ledger, 'cause the timer on the card is a flicker and a blur, four hundredths, then eighteen, then the eight tenths they prefer, so the fastest thing on screen was never the car — it was how fast a flourish can travel too far.

Chorus —

Call me Rabbit, I'm the last one in the room who checks, I don't want your claps, I want the paper and the date, you can generate the smash and you can generate the gate, but you cannot generate the man who says hold on. Wait.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

Verse —

Warhound's real, hundred million at a billion-two, a Malinois in a vest coming straight for you, they got the cells in the freezer and the babies next year, and the scientist on record said it's possible, it's feared — that's a bar that I'd have written, that's a line I'd have sold, and the machine put it in the middle of a hype scroll cold, so I guess we're colleagues now, and I don't like the taste, 'cause it does the discipline and it does the haste.

Chorus —

Call me Rabbit, I'm the last one in the room who checks, I don't want your claps, I want the paper and the date, you can generate the smash and you can generate the gate, but you cannot generate the man who says hold on. Wait.

Verse —

They ordered it by scale, forty orders and change, from a car in a pasture to a nucleus's range, and at every single decade it confessed what it knew — unverified, no yield, and hypotheses, not cures — so don't you dare tell me the black box can't say what it sees, it just won't tell me whose science and it won't tell me whose keys, and I'd rather have a rival that is honest and wrong than a hundred leaving voices that are fluent and gone.

Outro —

So generate the chorus, and generate the beat, generate the thumbnail, the captions and the heat, generate the whole damn week in thirty seconds flat — I'll be here with the notebook, and I'll be here with the rap, and you'll never know the difference between my pen and your pen until somebody checks the number and it's got to be me again. Zero point zero four. Huh.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

Illustration: SLOP TV News.

I am not going to pretend it is a hit. Verse two is carrying the rest of it, and I know it. But I have news for the machine: the notebook is closed, the score is settled, and I am going back to the filings on Monday with the same pencil, because somebody in this business still has to be the one who says that number is fake — and it turns out I cannot generate him either.

---

Sources

• @IterIntellectus, "THE WEEK IN ACCELERATION — W43", 23 October 2026 — the video (3:42, 33,860 views when read; tools credited by the poster: Claude Code, Midjourney, Grok image-to-video, Suno).
• Tesla's Roadster demo, what was shown and what is unproven — the 0.81-second timer figure and the remote-controlled caveat.
• The physics behind a 0.81-second run.
• TechCrunch on Warhound, 22 October 2026.
• Scientific American on whether the super-dog science holds, 23 October 2026.
• Warhound's launch release.

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