Opinion
Arguments about where this is all going.
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.
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 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.
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.
Simulon's mammoth is 3D in your room, finished on a server
A three-dimensional asset placed in a scanned room, then finished by a cloud render. The demo that 180,000 people shared has no video model in it.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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'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 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 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.
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'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.
Chess shows machines win closed games, not that they want to
Deep Blue beat the world champion with a bug that Kasparov read as genius, and twenty-nine years on the engines rate 768 points above the best human who ever lived. The doom argument borrows chess for evidence it cannot supply, because a chess engine wants nothing at all.