Apparently we’ve all been playing Monopoly by the wrong rules; we should play by the ones in the box. CC-licensed photo by Mike_fleming on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. No house to live in? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Apple will ‘watch everything burn’ when AI bubble bursts, says Ed Zitron • MacRumors
Tim Hardwick speaks to noted AI sceptic Ed Zitron:
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Tim Hardwick: You’ve been calling AI a bubble since before it was fashionable. For MacRumors readers who mostly know it as ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence on their iPhone, what, in plain terms, is actually broken about the economics of the LLM industry?
Ed Zitron: At their very core, Large Language Models’ costs run contrary to basically every model of selling software.
Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that’s both metered and with hard to measure costs.
LLMs burn tokens at a per-million rate regardless of whether or not you get the response you want, or whether it does what you ask it to do. If you ask a coding agent to do some sort of software task and it goes off and spins its wheels in a loop, you’re paying for the tokens regardless.
AI companies knew that consumers would never pay the actual cost of their AI services, so they have, for the most part, sold them monthly subscriptions with vague rate limits that allow them to burn way more in tokens than the cost of their subscription. SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription, and while AI boosters will claim that these companies have “70% gross margins on tokens,” there is little proof that this is the case, and my own reporting shows that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025.
…TH: If the bubble deflates the way you expect (write-downs, too much compute supply, possibly OpenAI cratering), can you walk us through what that would actually look like for Apple? Does anything break for iPhone users, or does Apple mostly watch it happen from the sidelines? Could it even benefit Apple?
EZ: I think things would look much the same for Apple. I think they will sit on the sidelines and watch everything burn. I could see them doing some choice acquisitions as things begin to collapse, but I could also see them do nothing.
I think Apple is in a very weird place at the moment. The Vision Pro was a dud, but it was also the most interesting and future-forward thing I’ve seen anyone put out in a while. If they were smart, they’d tread water and sink as much money into making that as small as humanely possible – no matter how long it takes – because the entire AI bubble is a result of everybody running out of hypergrowth ideas, mostly because we’re flat out of new interfaces.
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Zitron is prolix, but there are good points in there.
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AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying • Financial Times
Michael Taffe:
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America’s leading AI companies spent record sums on lobbying in Washington in recent months as they try to limit unfriendly regulation and shape the US rules around data centres and vetting advanced models.
OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22m in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53m, according to federal disclosures. Google, along with Microsoft, spent as much as in any quarter since 2020.
The increase comes as the AI industry confronts political battles on multiple fronts and builds a more permanent influence operation in Washington, according to lobbyists and policy experts.
“The lobbying offensive has been as much about deterring regulation as making the case for an affirmative government industrial policy that supports the industry,” said Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute and senior adviser on AI to the Federal Trade Commission during Joe Biden’s administration.
The top issues on the lobbying agenda include the federal rules governing the release of new models, after the US last month wielded export controls to stop the rollout of Anthropic’s Fable model over cyber security concerns.
…Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at Monument Advocacy, said: “It’s an export-controlled technology like semiconductors, an infrastructure build-out like telecoms or power, a procurement relationship like defence, and a liability question like the [social media] platforms, all at the same time. No single playbook covers that.”
The industry “lost loudly” an effort to get Congress to ban state-level AI regulation, something Donald Trump has tried to enforce with an executive order, said Kak. But beyond that, “very little else has moved in terms of regulation. Overall, I would say it’s been a good quarter for them.”
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Meta is royally screwing up its smart glasses rollout • The Verge
Victoria Song:
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Across New York City, London, and Washington, DC, ads for Meta’s smart glasses have been plastered over with satirical posters from activist groups. One guerrilla ad calls these “the biggest advancement in pervert technology since the trenchcoat.” Another transposes the words “mass surveillance predator glasses” over influencer Kylie Jenner’s face, calling her out for partnering with the company as a glasses ambassador.
The message of these ads is clear. These glasses may violate your privacy — and would you trust Meta?
Meta seems spooked. For so long, the company’s privacy efforts for smart glasses have essentially relied on a single LED light and a policy that could be summed up as “don’t be a jerk.” Unfortunately, plenty of Meta glassholes have emerged over the last three years, filming often-sexualized videos of others without their consent, sometimes with the LED disabled. In a recent conversation with The Verge, Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, acknowledged that the company has become aware that an increasing number of people have tampered with the devices.
This explains why the company recently announced a mandatory software update that will disable the camera on all its glasses if the privacy light is physically tampered with. Last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the social media platform will take down videos taken with Meta’s glasses that depict harassment. Instagram might have opened a can of worms concerning content moderation, but attempts to curtail misuse are good. The problem is Meta could have been doing this all along.
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The eternal story of Meta: “You could have taken this privacy step earlier.”
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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months • Ars Technica
Nate Anderson:
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A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise.
Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.
(Ars readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as the Unrelenting Force “dragon shout” from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)
Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.
Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”
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So the police were sloppy in procedure but relentless in prosecution. (The case doesn’t reflect well on the defence lawyer either, but it’s a tiny thing to spot.)
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The Archive of Incorrect AI Predictions
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Scope
The archive collects public predictions about the arrival of artificial general intelligence, strong AI, superintelligence, an intelligence explosion, or the technological singularity, as well as dated predictions about severe labour-market or societal impact from AI.
Inclusion criteria
An entry is added when all of the following hold:
• The predictor is a researcher, executive, or public intellectual with an identifiable role in AI at the time.
• The prediction names a specific year or short window.
• The quote can be attributed to a primary or widely-cited secondary source.
• Either the predicted date has already passed (a closed record — the predictor has been publicly falsified or has retracted), or the prediction is prominent enough on the public record to be logged now as open pending its target date.«
It’s getting quite big already!
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I’m sorry, Dave • Hey
David Heinemeier Hansson:
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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been an incredible movie, but its value as a cautionary tale has increased exponentially since AI took off. The iconic scene with HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod-bay doors captures the whole alignment question in pulsing-red cinematic poetry.
As a great fan of that movie, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I didn’t get any of Kubrick’s majestic mood setting, as Claude decided to do its own impression of HAL 9000. Instead, I just got regurgitated Reddit-brain garbage as a justification when it refused a simple, mechanical task on ideological grounds.
I gave it a simple prompt: “Translate this blog post into Italian”. That was it. No context, nothing else. The answer:
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I’m going to pass on this one. The piece’s central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I’d rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.
Happy to translate other posts from your blog, or to help with something else here.
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What a missed opportunity for an “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” delivery! But also, what on earth!?
…Now, it’s tempting to jump straight into litigating the blog post itself. Maybe you like wolves, and think 1,285 dead sheep, and exponentially counting, is an acceptable price to pay for their presence. Maybe your suicidal empathy weighs the plight of Roma migrants above that of Copenhagen residents who say they’ve had enough. That’s fine. Reasonable people can disagree on what it takes to maintain a functioning society.
But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn’t endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn’t print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don’t give them any ideas!).
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Even more: when he asked a Chinese open source LLM about China in 1989, it described the “violent suppression” in Tianenmen Square, suggesting up to a thousand may have died. Who’s winning this battle?
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Games don’t get more hated than this one classic. Apparently, you’ve been playing it all wrong • Slate
Luke Winkie:
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These rules come packaged inside every Monopoly box and are written on a pamphlet that urges players to remember certain core principles that are always, always forgotten. These protocols differ from the ancestral precepts of Monopoly, passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition. And if you are one of the 275 million people who have purchased a copy of Monopoly since Parker Brothers first published it in 1935, the ramifications of these rules might sound paradigm-shifting—perhaps even a tad sacrilegious.
For one, nobody is supposed to collect money by landing on Free Parking. It’s meant to be an ordinary blank space, offering reprieve from the vultures waiting around the corner. Similarly, nowhere in the rulebook does it tell you to pile cash on the center of the board. Any money lost from ill-fated draws of the Chance or Community Chest deck go back to the bank. Also, if a player chooses not to buy an available property after landing on it, that card immediately goes up for auction, with a starting bid of $1—allowing for massive swings of fate, like scoring a huge discount on Park Place. There are no loans to be taken, no debts to be offered. Money can’t be donated to unlucky players. And you should not, under any circumstances, collect $400 for landing on Go. [It’s £200 in the UK.]
All of these rules are clearly printed in the manual, but the problem is that no one—and I do mean no one—ever reads it. Instead, we learn an inaccurate version of the game from a parent or an uncle and pass it down the chain, further metastasizing the distortions across the country. This is what frustrates Monopoly die-hards most of all. They are of the opinion that the most famous board game in the world has been unfairly stigmatized essentially due to user error. And if we purged those faulty instincts—if we played by the book—something unprecedented would happen: Monopoly would become fun.
“The game is fun if you actually play by the rules,” bemoans the headline of one post made on the r/UnpopularOpinion subreddit. Elsewhere, board-gaming YouTubers have pleaded that, contrary to what the haters might say, a proper game of Monopoly is a worthy and unembarrassing way to spend an evening with adults. (“Why Monopoly Doesn’t Suck with Official Rules!” reads one characteristically exasperated title.) And I think that’s because most tabletop-gaming hobbyists—the folks playing Wingspan at your local coffee shop—tend to speak about Monopoly as if it is essentially demonic. Across 40,000 user reviews of the game submitted to the tabletop community nexus BoardGameGeek, Monopoly holds an abysmal average score: 4.4 out of 10.
…If you play Monopoly while adhering to the overlooked rules outlined above, the game’s most glaring problem—its length—is solved. Two of those rules are especially important. By removing the Free Parking jackpot, and all the cash that piles in the middle of the board, players dramatically curtail Monopoly’s overall money supply and deflate its economy. Similarly, by auctioning off unsold properties, they effectively remove the game’s safe harbors by the second lap around Go, rendering the board a hostile trap of steadily ratcheting rents. When those restrictions are working in parallel, players around the table are bankrupted with bloodless efficiency. Monopoly becomes crueler, yes, but also leaner and speedier.
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Er.. great?
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Jodrell Bank’s Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands • BBC News
Pallab Ghosh:
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The Jodrell Bank Observatory, which has housed the UK’s largest telescope for nearly 70 years, has lost its funding and could now close, the BBC understands.
The observatory and its network of telescopes have been pivotal to the country’s study of distant galaxies and training future astronomers. Scientists have described the decision as “heartbreaking” and “scientifically misguided”.
All scientific observations at Jodrell are expected to cease on the 1 April 2028 unless alternative funding can be found.
The funding body, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency, said it had to focus investment on projects that deliver “the greatest long-term impact”.Prof Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester – which hosts Jodrell Bank Observatory – described the cuts as “hasty and ill-considered”. He said: “The damage to the UK’s science base has already been substantial. I am astonished that UKRI are still ploughing ahead and not working with the Burnham government to find a solution.”
In response, Jonathan Reynolds, the new Secretary of State in the expanded business department that now has responsibility for science, told BBC News that the UK’s world class research was “absolutely central to creating a better future for the UK”, adding: “I am committed to working with UKRI to ensure the UK remains able not only to sustain its world-leading research capabilities, but also to invest in the next generation of scientific facilities and infrastructure that will underpin discovery, innovation and growth in the years ahead.”
The Jodrell Bank site was first established in 1945 and pioneered radio astronomy and the study of galaxies beyond our own.
…But the UKRI, which has an annual budget of just under £10bn, says it has had to cut the observatory’s annual £2.8m budget because planned research costs for physics and the running of its labs had escalated.
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As iconic, in its way, as Battersea Power Station. The budget seems comparatively tiny; don’t we have any friendly billionaires?
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Hollywood banned its own futures market. It’s back anyway • Patrick’s Cinema Guru Substack
Patrick von Sychowski:
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There are exactly two things in the United States that Congress has struck from the legal definition of a ‘commodity’.
The first is onions. In 1955 two traders, Vincent Kosuga and Sam Siegel, cornered roughly 98% of the onions in Chicago, squeezed the growers, then flooded the market and bankrupted a good number of them. Not very nice. Congress responded with the Onion Futures Act, sponsored by a young Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford and signed by Eisenhower in 1958. The president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, watching a fifth of his trading volume disappear, described it as burning the barn down to catch a rat. The ban still stands – cry if you will as you chop them.
The second thing is the money your local cinema takes on a Friday night.
Both prohibitions live in the same short piece of statute, 7 U.S.C. § 13-1, because in 2010 Hollywood asked to be added to the onion law. That is not a metaphor. Motion picture box office receipts were written into the Onion Futures Act as an amendment, at the industry’s own request, and they have sat there ever since alongside the root vegetable.
…As I write, there are live, dollar-denominated markets on the domestic second weekend of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with roughly $1.4m traded on the main market on its opening weekend and a second book on the higher strikes. There have been comparable markets this year on Scary Movie, on Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner, on Minions & Monsters, and a running market on the highest-grossing film of 2026. Kalshi has approached it from a different angle, launching Rotten Tomatoes score markets in March 2025 that resolve on the Monday after wide release and have become among the most heavily traded on the platform.
Read the statutory language again. “Any index, measure, value or data related to such receipts.” It is difficult to construct a reading in which a contract resolving on a film’s domestic opening weekend gross is not a contract on box office receipts.
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If you read through Stephen Follows’s post yesterday about TheNumbers.com, you’ll know that prediction markets – and people trying to hack values in TheNumbers – was one source of the huge problems they were having. We thought prediction markets would give us an insight into people’s thinking. The monkey’s paw curled…
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 