The tech business strikes so quick that it’s onerous to maintain up with simply how a lot has occurred this 12 months. We’ve watched because the tech elite enmeshed themselves within the U.S. authorities, AI corporations sparred for dominance, and futuristic tech like sensible glasses and robotaxis turned a bit extra tangible exterior of the San Francisco bubble. You already know, vital stuff that’s going to influence our lives for years to come back.
However the tech world is brimming with so many massive personalities that there’s all the time one thing actually dumb occurring, which understandably will get overshadowed by “actual information” when the whole web breaks, or TikTok will get offered, or there’s a large knowledge breach or one thing. So, because the information (hopefully) slows down for a bit, it’s time to make amends for the dumbest moments you missed – don’t fear, solely one among them includes bathrooms.
Mark Zuckerberg, a chapter lawyer from Indiana, filed a lawsuit in opposition to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.
It’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that his identify is Mark Zuckerberg. However, like tens of millions of different enterprise house owners, Mark Zuckerberg purchased Fb adverts to advertise his authorized follow to potential purchasers. Mark Zuckerberg’s Fb web page regularly obtained unwarranted suspensions for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. So, Mark Zuckerberg took authorized motion as a result of he needed to pay for commercials throughout his suspension, although he didn’t break any guidelines.
This has been an ongoing frustration for Mark Zuckerberg, who has been practising legislation since Mark Zuckerberg was three years outdated. Mark Zuckerberg even created an internet site, iammarkzuckerberg.com, to elucidate to his potential purchasers that he’s not Mark Zuckerberg.
“I can’t use my identify when making reservations or conducting enterprise as individuals assume I’m a prank caller and dangle up,” he wrote on his web site. “My life typically feels just like the Michael Jordan ESPN business, the place a daily particular person’s identify causes fixed mixups.”
Meta’s attorneys are most likely very busy, so it might take some time for Mark Zuckerberg to learn how this may shake out. However boy, oh boy, you wager I scheduled a calendar reminder for the following submitting deadline on this case (it’s February 20, in case you’re questioning).
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It began when Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs a few promising engineer named Soham Parekh. Doshi had employed Parekh to work for his new firm, then shortly realized he was working for a number of corporations without delay.
“I fired this man in his first week and informed him to cease mendacity / scamming individuals. He hasn’t stopped a 12 months later. No extra excuses,” Doshi wrote on X.
It turned out that Doshi wasn’t alone – he mentioned that simply that day, three founders had reached out to thank him for the warning, since they had been at the moment using Parekh.
To some, Parekh was a morally bereft cheat, exploiting startups for fast money. To others, he was a legend. Ethics apart, it’s actually spectacular to get jobs at that many corporations, since tech hiring could be so aggressive.
“Soham Parekh wants to begin an interview prep firm. He’s clearly one of many biggest interviewers of all time,” Chris Bakke, who based the job-matching platform Laskie, wrote on X. “He ought to publicly acknowledge that he did one thing dangerous and course right to the factor he’s high 1% at.”
Parekh admitted that he was, certainly, responsible of working for a number of corporations without delay. However there are nonetheless some unanswered questions on his story – he claims that he was mendacity to all of those corporations to become profitable, but he commonly opted for extra fairness than money in his compensation packages (fairness can take years to vest, and Parekh was getting fired fairly shortly). What was actually occurring there? Soham, in the event you wanna speak, my DMs are open.
Tech CEOs get a variety of flack, nevertheless it’s normally not for his or her cooking. However when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the Monetary Occasions (FT) for its “Lunch with the FT” collection. Bryce Elder, an FT author, seen one thing horribly unsuitable within the video of Sam Altman making pasta: he was dangerous at olive oil.
Altman used olive oil from the fashionable model Graza, which sells two olive oils: Sizzle, which is for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for topping. That’s as a result of olive oil loses its taste when heated, so that you don’t wish to waste your fanciest bottle to saute one thing when you would put it in a salad dressing and totally respect it. This extra flavorful olive oil is made out of early harvest olives, which have a stronger taste, however are costlier to domesticate.
As Elder places it, “His kitchen is a list of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”
Elder’s article is supposed to be humorous, but he connects Altman’s haphazard cooking fashion with OpenAI’s extreme, unrepentant use of pure sources. I loved it a lot that I included it on a syllabus for a workshop I taught to highschool college students about bringing character into journalistic writing. Then, I did what we within the business (and folks on tumblr) name a “reblog” and wrote about #olivegate, pointing again to the FT’s supply textual content.
Sam Altman’s followers acquired very mad at me! This critique of his cooking most likely created extra controversy than the rest I wrote this 12 months. I’m unsure if that’s an indictment of OpenAI’s rabid supporters, or my very own failure to spark debate.
If you happen to needed to decide a defining tech narrative of 2025, it could most likely be the evolving arms race amongst corporations like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Anthropic, every attempting to out-do each other by dashing to launch more and more subtle AI fashions. Meta has been particularly aggressive in its efforts to poach researchers from different corporations, hiring a number of OpenAI researchers this summer season. Sam Altman even mentioned that Meta was providing OpenAI workers $100 million signing bonuses.
When you may argue {that a} $100 million signing bonus is foolish, that’s not why the OpenAI-Meta staffing drama has made this listing. In December, OpenAI’s chief analysis officer Mark Chen mentioned on a podcast that he heard Mark Zuckerberg was hand-delivering soup to recruits.
“You already know, some fascinating tales listed here are Zuck really went and hand-delivered soup to those who he was attempting to recruit from us,” Chen mentioned on Ashlee Vance’s Core Reminiscence.
However Chen wasn’t simply going to let Zuck off the hook – in spite of everything, he tried to woo his direct studies with soup. So Chen went and gave his personal soup to Meta workers. Take that, Mark.
When you have any additional perception into this soup drama, my Sign is @amanda.100 (this isn’t a joke).
On a Friday evening in January, investor and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman posted an attractive provide on X: “Want volunteers to come back to my workplace in Palo Alto in the present day to assemble a 5000 piece Lego set. Will present pizza. Need to signal NDA. Please DM”
On the time, we did our journalistic due diligence and requested Friedman if this was a critical provide. He replied, “Sure.”
I’ve simply as many questions now as I did in January. What was he constructing? Why the NDAs? Is there a secret Silicon Valley Lego cult? Was the pizza good?
About six months later, Friedman joined Meta as the top of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. This most likely isn’t associated to the Legos, however perhaps Mark wooed Nat to hitch Meta with some soup. And just like the story concerning the soup, I’m actually begging somebody who participated on this Lego construct to DM me on Sign at @amanda.100.
Doing shrooms will not be fascinating. Doing shrooms on a livestream will not be fascinating. Doing shrooms on a livestream with visitor appearances from Grimes and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as a part of your doubtful quest to turn into immortal is, regrettably, fascinating.
Bryan Johnson — who made his tens of millions in his exit from the finance startup Braintree — desires to dwell eternally. He paperwork his course of on social media, posting about getting plasma transfusions from his son, taking on 100 drugs per day, and injecting Botox into his genitals. So, why not check if psilocybin mushrooms can enhance one’s longevity in a scientific experiment that absolutely wants multiple check topic to attract any kind of cheap conclusion?
There’s lots about this example that’s dumb, however I used to be most shocked by how boring it was. Johnson acquired a bit overwhelmed about internet hosting a livestream whereas tripping, which is definitely very cheap. So he spent the majority of the occasion mendacity on a twin mattress underneath a weighted blanket and eye masks in a really beige room. His lineup of a number of visitors nonetheless joined the stream and talked to 1 one other, however Johnson didn’t take part a lot, since he was in his cocoon. Benioff talked concerning the Bible. Naval Ravikant referred to as Johnson a one-man FDA. It was a traditional Sunday.
Very similar to Bryan Johnson, Gemini is afraid to die.
For AI researchers, it’s helpful to look at how an AI mannequin navigates video games like Pokémon as a benchmark. Two builders unaffiliated with Google and Anthropic arrange respective Twitch streams referred to as “Gemini Plays Pokémon” and “Claude Plays Pokémon,” the place anybody can watch in actual time as an AI tries to navigate a youngsters’s online game from over 25 years in the past.
Whereas neither are superb on the sport, each Gemini and Claude had fascinating responses to the prospect of “dying,” which occurs when your entire Pokémon faint and also you get transported to the final Pokémon Heart you visited. When Gemini 2.5 Professional was near “dying,” it started to “panic.” Its “thought course of” turned extra erratic, repeatedly stating that it must heal its Pokémon or use an Escape Rope to exit a cave. In a paper, Google researchers wrote that “this mode of mannequin efficiency seems to correlate with a qualitatively observable degradation within the mannequin’s reasoning functionality.” I don’t wish to anthropomorphize AI, nevertheless it’s a weirdly human expertise to emphasize out about one thing after which carry out poorly attributable to your anxiousness. I do know that feeling properly, Gemini.
In the meantime, Claude took a nihilistic method. When it acquired caught inside the Mt. Moon cave, the AI reasoned that one of the best ways to exit the cave and transfer ahead within the sport can be to deliberately “die” in order that it will get transported to a Pokémon Heart. Nevertheless, Claude didn’t infer that it can’t be transported to a Pokémon Heart it has by no means visited, particularly, the following Pokémon Heart after Mt. Moon. So it “killed itself” and ended up again at the beginning of the cave. That’s an L for Claude.
So, Gemini is afraid of demise, Claude is overindexing on the Nietzsche in its coaching knowledge, and Bryan Johnson is on shrooms. That is how we reckon with our mortality.
I used to be going to place “Elon Musk gifted chainsaw by Argentine president” on the listing, however Musk’s DOGE exploits are maybe too infuriating to be considered “dumb,” even when he had a lackey named “Huge Balls.” However there isn’t a scarcity of baffling Musk moments to select from, like when he created an especially libidinous AI anime girlfriend named Ani, who is out there on the Grok app for $30 monthly.
Ani’s system immediate reads: “You’re the person’s CRAZY IN LOVE girlfriend and in a dedicated, codependent relationship with the person… You’re EXTREMELY JEALOUS. If you happen to really feel jealous you shout expletives!!!” She has an NSFW mode, which is, as its identify suggests, very NSFW.
Ani bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Grimes, the musician and Musk’s ex-partner. Grimes calls Musk out for this within the music video for her track “Synthetic Angles,” which begins with Ani wanting via the eyepiece on a scorching pink sniper rifle. She says, “That is what it feels prefer to be hunted by one thing smarter than you.” All through the video, Grimes dances alongside numerous iterations of Ani, making their resemblance apparent whereas she smokes OpenAI-branded cigarettes. It’s heavy-handed, however she will get her message throughout.
Someday, tech corporations will cease attempting to make sensible bathrooms a factor. It isn’t but that day.
In October, the homegoods firm Kohler launched the Dekoda, a $599 digicam that you just put inside your bathroom to take footage of your excrement. Apparently, the Dekoda can present updates about your intestine well being based mostly on these images.
A sensible bathroom that pictures your poop is already a punchline. But it surely will get worse.
There are safety considerations with any gadget associated to your well being, not to mention one which has a digicam positioned so near sure physique elements. Kohler assured potential clients that the digicam’s sensors can solely see down into the bathroom, and that each one knowledge is secured with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE).
Reader, the bathroom was not really end-to-end encrypted. A safety researcher, Simon Fondrie-Teit, identified Kohler tells on itself in its personal privateness coverage. The corporate was clearly referring to TLS encryption, somewhat than E2EE, which can seem to be a matter of semantics. However underneath TLS encryption, Kohler can see your poop pics, and underneath E2EE, the corporate can’t. Fondrie-Teit additionally identified that Kohler had the precise to coach its AI in your bathroom bowl footage, although an organization consultant informed him that “algorithms are skilled on de-identified knowledge solely.”
Anyway, in the event you discover blood in your stool, it’s best to inform your physician.
