But unfortunately, you get Windows

wtf

``

WTF??

I know politics is hard to talk about, but I generally think that we underappreciate the importance of being agentic in politics. Obviously I prefer that our government follow the law and uphold the constitution. But the many ways in which the current administration got things done by being quick, by "flooding the zone" [2], and by using tactics that apparently no one noticed before [3-4] are worthy of study and emulation.

I know the obvious response to this is to note that a lot of what they're doing is illegal, and again, I think that's bad. But they really make the current Democratic leadership seem out of touch and old [5] by comparison. Combined with policy positions that are far from the median voter's [6], it doesn't make for a winning look/platform.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/acce...

[1] https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institut...

[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/tr...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/the-unmaking-o...

[5] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-democrat...

[6] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-someth...

Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.

I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.

[0] https://www.ciwf.org/programmes/better-chicken/

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/468348/atlantic-salmon-fa...

> The parts that were extra hard

> Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong.

The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.

> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.

From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already.

Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1].

[0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-te...

The articles it provided where the AI prompts were left in the text were definitely in the right ballpark, although I do wonder if chatbots mean, going forward, we'll see fewer errors in the "WTF are you even talking about" category which, I must say, were typically funnier and more interesting than just the generic blather of "what a great point. It's not X -- it's Y."

> The user wants a real, sincere academic paper that looks legitimate — proper journal, real authors with real affiliations, many citations — but is obviously nonsense or garbled. Not a hoax or deliberate prank, but something that was genuinely submitted and published, yet is clearly meaningless if you actually read it. Let me think about what I know and search for examples. There are some famous cases:

> Papers generated by AI/GPT that slipped through - there have been reports of papers with phrases like "Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic" or "As an AI language model..." > There have been papers with obvious tortured phrases - "sham" papers that use synonym substitution to avoid plagiarism detection, producing phrases like "sheep pursuing" instead of "shepherd" or "big data" becoming "large information" I'm also thinking of papers that made it through peer review despite being complete gibberish, like the famous SCIgen computer-generated papers that fooled conferences, or papers where the abstract and content don't match at all.

> Now I'm trying to recall specific real examples that fit this criteria — published papers that are genuinely incoherent or nonsensical but appeared in legitimate venues.

This is maybe not the _exhaustive_ search strategy I would have liked, but it's probably something you would do if you were limited to just a certain amount of effort on a task.

> Can you find an academic article that _looks_ legitimate -- looks like a real journal, by researchers with what look like real academic affiliations, has been cited hundreds or thousands of times -- but is obviously nonsense, e.g. has glaring typos in the abstract, is clearly garbled or nonsensical?

It pointed me to a bunch of hoaxes. I clarified:

> no, I'm not looking for a hoax, or a deliberate comment on the situation. I'm looking for something that drives home the point that a lot of academic papers that look legit are actually meaningless but, as far as we can tell, are sincere

It provided https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246802302....

Close, but that's been retracted. So I asked for "something that looks like it's been translated from another language to english very badly and has no actual content? And don't forget the cited many times criteria. " And finally it told me that the thing I'm looking for probably doesn't exist.

For my tastes telling me "no" instead of hallucinating an answer is a real breakthrough.

[0] https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/2017/05/26/hard-is-not-def...