PayPal's Bathwater

May 28 2024 Correction: The Spotify Car Thing was released in 2022.

Listen to today's episode on the Stuff Keeps Happening podcast

AI Bullshit, Continued, Continued

The tidal wave of AI bullshit continues.

Last week's online discourse was virtually dominated by the Scarlett Johansson / OpenAI situation. Here's a quick recap:

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is a weird little creep who is obsessed with the movie Her (the one where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson). He also for some reason thinks that The Social Network was an inspirational film for tech founders, so, let that paint a picture of his judge of… anything.

Quick reminder, this is the same dude who wants to scan people's retinas as data to fuel a cryptocurrency.

Anyway, a little while back he just tweeted "Her" right before OpenAI showed off their demo of ChatGPT's new voice, which was creepily flirty and sounded near-identical to Scarlett Johansson's AI character in Her.

Then it came out that he had actually asked Johansson to do the voice, to which she said no. But they went ahead and basically used that as their guide anyway.

They must've actually realized they're in some shit because they've since pulled the voice entirely.

So then while all that was going on, Google decided to roll out their AI search results to everyone, which then proceeded to suggest mixing glue into your pizza and gasoline in your spaghetti.

The Millennial Saint

We may very well see the first Millennial to be elevated to sainthood.

Carlo Acutis, born 1991, unfortunately died at age 15 from leukemia. All my homies hate cancer. But during his life, he maintained a website which indexed miracles. More recently, the Pope has deemed that Acutis himself performed a miracle; the first step towards Sainthood. His miracles (which, full transparency, I don't believe in miracles but I'm not about to be a downer about it) involved healing brain bleed, and curing a child's pancreas.

More than I've done, tbh.

So he meets the requirements and the Vatican seems keen to make him a saint. No notion of if this is a "this year" or "maybe eventually" kind of thing, but we may very well have an avocado toast-eating saint boppin' around heaven soon.

No Baby, All Bathwater

Back in 2019, influencer Belle Delphine took over headlines with her announcement that she'd be selling bottles of her bathwater to fans. "Gamer Girl Bathwater" is a concept that I'd bet will remain in internet history for quite some time.

However, it recently came out that she actually got kinda screwed over from the whole thing. In a recent post, she revealed that at the time, although she did about $90,000 in sales, she never got the money. PayPal froze her account and kept all of the money, then stonewalled her when she tried to reach out for customer support. Ostensibly, her account violated some policy, but the means of her sales didn't seemingly violate a policy. Or at least, not directly.

Ultimately, she lost money on the situation, as she had to pay for shipping for the product, while not getting the income from her sales.

After posting about it, PayPal finally—like, these 5 years later—paid out her earnings. Probably could have thrown some interest on top, imo.

51 Nifty United States

The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel and Hamas for war crimes. This is because of the war crimes they have done.

Despite that, the United States' official stance is: "well, uh, what if instead we let Israel keep doing what they're doing, but like, hope they stop killing civilians?" as well as a reiteration that Biden has very mixed feelings on it all.

As we look around, our position is increasingly isolated. Ireland, Spain and Norway recently recognized Palestine as its own nation. The UN and ICC are like "hey uh, that's genocide." Meanwhile, the US is digging in its heels, plugging its ears, and shouting "nyah nyah nyah!" — only in reality, the "nyah nyah" is like, thousands of tons of munitions.

Gaming News

• Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake is out on Switch go play it
• WB's Multi-Versus Smash Bros-like platform brawler comes out this week
• Bungie won a court case against a cheat developer, marking a legal first

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• Spotify will be bricking their in-car hardware device and is not refunding purchases
• The creator of the "Super Size Me" documentary has died of cancer at age 53 (he was kind of a piece of shit but also fuck cancer)
• The Chicago Rat Hole is officially gone, the city replaced it due to apparent damage
• A city had to pay out nearly a million dollars to a man who cops brutally interrogated for 17 hours, claiming he killed his father, despite his father being alive. "In my 40 years of suing the police I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty"
• Shocking! A hotel developer has been seemingly receiving kickbacks from NYC Mayor Eric Adams after gifting free rooms and other gifts to his campaign
• The average on-the-road car age in the US is now 12.6 years old, a new record
• There was an Amazon shareholder vote on proposals tackling climate change and workers rights. Shareholders rejected every proposal.
• Despite nobody asking, YouTube is continuing to roll out their new desktop website design
• The Euclid telescope got some good good pictures
• A staggering number of Tory MPs in the UK wont be seeking re-election
• ICQ is finally shutting down. RIP to a real one.

New Merch!

There's a few new items up at my merch store! One of them is even reasonable! Perhaps you may be interested in jotting down the shape of a world in the "A World Of My Own" notebook!

thanks 4 readin' :)