Harry and M3GAN

Prince Harry’s memoir “Spare” is out, and nestled among revelations about frostnip to the Royal todger and how many Taliban fighters he personally killed is this bizarre passage where everyone is pretty sure he’s talking about former Sun tabloid editor Rebekah Brooks:

I didn’t entirely believe this clip was real but Gawker’s Claire Carusillo confirmed it. Brooks was charged in 2011 with a crime which she was eventually cleared of in 2014, whose name I’ve committed to memory but in the years since then I’ve avoided speaking it. But can it possibly be a coincidence that the name of this crime is a perfect anagram for: “peach honking?” Is the universe not saying something there? Brooks herself “will take the reins of a remarried News Corp and Fox Corp if and when the much talked-about deal is complete,” according to The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Cartwright. It’s good to know her commitment to doing evil in the world continues undiminished by her troubled past.

Reading the rest of Harry’s memoir, Marina Hyde wondered “If this is Britain’s first family, what are the others like?”

Of course when you think of Harry you immediately think of M3GAN, a new “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus” AI-flavored update to the murder doll genre of horror film which was clever enough to have titular robot murder doll M3GAN do a little TikTok dance and has therefore become a smash hit and a viral sensation.

Mia Mercado wrote down “Every Thought I Had While Watching M3gan” for The Cut: a total of twenty two thoughts, or an average of one thought every four minutes and thirty six seconds through the film’s relatively brisk one hundred two minute runtime. She’s doing better than me, I tell you what.

In the real world, the only way our AI robots will kill us is with cringe. Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti reported that Microsoft, ever alert for a newer, worse, and much more expensive iteration of Clippy, “has been in talks to invest $10 billion into the owner of ChatGPT,” valuing OpenAI at $29 billion post-money. At the moment OpenAI’s business plan is to give away expensive cloud compute time on a staggering scale to anyone who’d like to see Garfield as a Rodin statue, but:

Semafor couldn’t resist adding a “THE VIEW FROM CHATGPT” section to the semaform where the text generator was invited to “write a story about Microsoft investing $10 billion in OpenAI from the point of view of a Wall Street analyst.”

I am begging you, please stop doing this. You’re making the computer embarrass itself, and for what? It’s just cruel.

Also Cruel:

What happened was it sucked end everyone hated it. Update: you absolutely do not gotta hand it to them.

DoNotPay’s CEO Joshua Browder is also fully AI-pilled, promoting his company’s “AI lawyer” and offering to “pay any lawyer or person $1,000,000 with an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says.” I challenge any AI to parse that sentence correctly. The robot lawyer will reportedly argue a speeding ticket case in a venue that allows earpieces as a hearing aid, which even Browder admits is “technically within the rules, but I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the rules.” All we need now is AI judges hearing the cases to pave the way for a full Fun City future of massive legal supercomputers settling all contracts between themselves with no human involvement.

Here’s a Guy Eating Monkey Chow:

Bees get the jab. Coinbase adds 950 more employees to the 1,260 it has subtracted since June. The Prime Minister vanishes. Jacob Stern explains who came up with “Kraken” for the new Covid variant and why they should maybe stop. Surprise: Slack doesn’t make anyone want to buy Salesforce. Is there a name for the business-brain disease that made someone think it would? RIP Diamond of pro-Trump huckster team “Diamond & Silk.” #SuddenDeath?

Finally: Hari Kunzru in Harper’s on how the techno-libertarian dream of societal exit soured from its mid-nineties Wired optimism to today’s Thiel-funded populist accelerationism:

Today’s Song: Man or Astro-Man?, “Television Fission”

I know I said there would be more Tabs news but then I ended up writing a lot today. Don’t worry, it’s not urgent, I’ll get to it. Meanwhile there are still a few shirts left, but not many.

Also the new year is a good time to subscribe. Someone recently emailed me to say:

This is my ideal “why I subscribed” story, and the reason almost all of Tabs is free. Would you be really sad if Tabs went away? Think about it…