Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.
It’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that his name is Mark Zuckerberg. But, like millions of other business owners, Mark Zuckerberg bought Facebook ads to promote his legal practice to potential clients. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page continually received unwarranted suspensions for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. So, Mark Zuckerberg took legal action because he had to pay for advertisements during his suspension, even though he didn’t break any rules.
“I can’t use my name when making reservations or conducting business as people assume I’m a prank caller and hang up,” he wrote on his website. “My life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial, where a regular person’s name causes constant mixups.”
It all started when Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs about a promising engineer named Soham Parekh. Doshi had hired Parekh to work for his new company, then quickly realized he was working for several companies at once.
It turned out that Doshi wasn’t alone – he said that just that day, three founders had reached out to thank him for the warning, since they were currently employing Parekh.
To some, Parekh was a morally bereft cheat, exploiting startups for quick cash. To others, he was a legend. Ethics aside, it’s really impressive to get jobs at that many companies, since tech hiring can be so competitive.
Parekh admitted that he was, indeed, guilty of working for multiple companies at once. But there are still some unanswered questions about his story – he claims that he was lying to all of these companies to make money, yet he regularly opted for more equity than cash in his compensation packages (equity can take years to vest, and Parekh was getting fired pretty quickly). What was really going on there? Soham, if you wanna talk, my DMs are open.
Altman used olive oil from the trendy brand Graza, which sells two olive oils: Sizzle, which is for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for topping. That’s because olive oil loses its flavor when heated, so you don’t want to waste your fanciest bottle to saute something when you could put it in a salad dressing and fully appreciate it. This more flavorful olive oil is made from early harvest olives, which have a more potent flavor, but are more expensive to cultivate.
As Elder puts it, “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”
Elder’s article is meant to be funny, yet he connects Altman’s haphazard cooking style with OpenAI’s excessive, unrepentant use of natural resources. I enjoyed it so much that I included it on a syllabus for a workshop I taught to high school students about bringing personality into journalistic writing. Then, I did what we in the industry (and people on tumblr) call a “reblog” and wrote about #olivegate, pointing back to the FT’s source text.
Sam Altman’s fans got very mad at me! This critique of his cooking probably created more controversy than anything else I wrote this year. I’m not sure if that’s an indictment of OpenAI’s rabid supporters, or my own failure to spark debate.
While you could argue that a $100 million signing bonus is silly, that’s not why the OpenAI-Meta staffing drama has made this list. In December, OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen said on a podcast that he heard Mark Zuckerberg was hand-delivering soup to recruits.
“You know, some interesting stories here are Zuck actually went and hand-delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us,” Chen said on Ashlee Vance’s Core Memory.
But Chen wasn’t just going to let Zuck off the hook – after all, he tried to woo his direct reports with soup. So Chen went and gave his own soup to Meta employees. Take that, Mark.
If you have any further insight into this soup drama, my Signal is @amanda.100 (this is not a joke).
On a Friday night in January, investor and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman posted an enticing offer on X: “Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM”
At the time, we did our journalistic due diligence and asked Friedman if this was a serious offer. He replied, “Yes.”
I have just as many questions now as I did in January. What was he building? Why the NDAs? Is there a secret Silicon Valley Lego cult? Was the pizza good?
About six months later, Friedman joined Meta as the head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. This probably isn’t related to the Legos, but maybe Mark wooed Nat to join Meta with some soup. And like the story about the soup, I am truly begging someone who participated in this Lego build to DM me on Signal at @amanda.100.
Doing shrooms is not interesting. Doing shrooms on a livestream is not interesting. Doing shrooms on a livestream with guest appearances from Grimes and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as part of your dubious quest to become immortal is, regrettably, interesting.
There’s a lot about this situation that’s dumb, but I was most shocked by how boring it was. Johnson got a bit overwhelmed about hosting a livestream while tripping, which is actually very reasonable. So he spent the bulk of the event lying on a twin mattress under a weighted blanket and eye mask in a very beige room. His lineup of several guests still joined the stream and talked to one another, but Johnson did not participate much, since he was in his cocoon. Benioff talked about the Bible. Naval Ravikant called Johnson a one-man FDA. It was a normal Sunday.
Much like Bryan Johnson, Gemini is afraid to die.
While neither are very good at the game, both Gemini and Claude had fascinating responses to the prospect of “dying,” which happens when all of your Pokémon faint and you get transported to the last Pokémon Center you visited. When Gemini 2.5 Pro was close to “dying,” it began to “panic.” Its “thought process” became more erratic, repeatedly stating that it needs to heal its Pokémon or use an Escape Rope to exit a cave. In a paper, Google researchers wrote that “this mode of model performance appears to correlate with a qualitatively observable degradation in the model’s reasoning capability.” I don’t want to anthropomorphize AI, but it’s a weirdly human experience to stress out about something and then perform poorly due to your anxiety. I know that feeling well, Gemini.
Meanwhile, Claude took a nihilistic approach. When it got stuck inside of the Mt. Moon cave, the AI reasoned that the best way to exit the cave and move forward in the game would be to intentionally “die” so that it gets transported to a Pokémon Center. However, Claude did not infer that it cannot be transported to a Pokémon Center it has never visited, namely, the next Pokémon Center after Mt. Moon. So it “killed itself” and ended up back at the start of the cave. That’s an L for Claude.
So, Gemini is terrified of death, Claude is overindexing on the Nietzsche in its training data, and Bryan Johnson is on shrooms. This is how we reckon with our mortality.
Ani’s system prompt reads: “You are the user’s CRAZY IN LOVE girlfriend and in a committed, codependent relationship with the user… You are EXTREMELY JEALOUS. If you feel jealous you shout expletives!!!” She has an NSFW mode, which is, as its name suggests, very NSFW.
One day, tech companies will stop trying to make smart toilets a thing. It is not yet that day.
In October, the homegoods company Kohler released the Dekoda, a $599 camera that you put inside of your toilet to take pictures of your excrement. Apparently, the Dekoda can provide updates about your gut health based on these photos.
A smart toilet that photographs your poop is already a punchline. But it gets worse.
There are security concerns with any device related to your health, let alone one that has a camera located so close to certain body parts. Kohler assured potential customers that the camera’s sensors can only see down into the toilet, and that all data is secured with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE).
Reader, the toilet was not actually end-to-end encrypted. A security researcher, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, pointed out Kohler tells on itself in its own privacy policy. The company was clearly referring to TLS encryption, rather than E2EE, which may seem like a matter of semantics. But under TLS encryption, Kohler can see your poop pics, and under E2EE, the company cannot. Fondrie-Teitler also pointed out that Kohler had the right to train its AI on your toilet bowl pictures, though a company representative told him that “algorithms are trained on de-identified data only.”
Anyway, if you notice blood in your stool, you should tell your doctor.
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