David Gerard's news site is a skeptical look at the AI industry, covering hype, coding tools, crypto ties, and vendor failures.
Commenters point to it as a skeptical counterweight to AI hype, including its coverage of AI-linked crypto schemes and claims about whether people are prompting wrong.
22 Jul 2026 14:52:41 UTC
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They''re Free of AI Slop
https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49007769
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25 Jul 2026 04:16:09 UTC
AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot Pivot to AI
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/23/ai-vendors-are-destroying-rare-books-to-feed-the-chatbot/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49044469
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27 Jul 2026 08:09:08 UTC
AI companies are buying books and destroying them
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066514
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27 Jul 2026 12:32:12 UTC
AI companies are shredding rare books
https://xcancel.com/HedgieMarkets/status/17 Dec 2035 20:03:08 UTC485296565
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
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27 Jul 2026 22:11:17 UTC
AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076129
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27 Jul 2026 23:32:01 UTC
AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books and Destroying Them at Scale
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49077029
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28 Jul 2026 05:04:45 UTC
Anthropic Knew Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical…
While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge.
So they sued and discovered it will use 2-8 million gallons of drinking water per day[2], seemingly near the limit of their capacity to handle, judging by comments from officials.
> 'That water supply that otherwise would not be required until 2060 or the 2060s, suddenly becomes something that we need to be worried about during the 2030s.’
> If it exceeds that demand, they’re going to have to start looking for a new water source.
So I'm not sure how this fits with the claims of the article from the OP. I suppose if anything it disproportionately affects certain places not as well equipped for it?
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
[2] https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2026/02/26/google-data-center-water-estimates-go-public-residents-in-roanoke-and-botetourt-react/
We try Suno’s AI music generator — hear Suno fail the Fall
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/08/we-try-sunos-ai-music-hear-suno-fail-the-fall/
David Gerard. 8 September 2025.
I’m a record collector. A snide hipster. I have detailed and annoying opinions on music.
But for music streamers, caring which song you’re hearing makes you a weird outlier. The majority of streaming listeners want a radio playing background music. You ask and they literally say “I just don’t care.” [MusicAlly, 2017]
That’s who the AI music apps think they can get to pay them, and not have to pay musicians.
(It’s not working — even the background radio crowd hate slop when they hear it.)
We’ve covered AI music before — the Kunlun Melodio music generator app. So let’s try Suno, the hotness for 2025!
The video: to hear that shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDJa67iHDQM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA
yeah
People should stop giving Steve Yegge as much attention as they do.
It's slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's not even quality slop. Apart from bloviated self-aggrandising blog posts, the ideas are trivial, and the execution is beyond horrendous.
Look beyond the ChatGPT-generated terminology to see the supervisors, loops and worker processes of Gas Town. Now it's a freelance board with AI agents as freelancers. But sure, polecats, mayors, stamps and character sheets. Whatever floats your upcoming crypto rug pull [1].
This is what he writes: "build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas." We've yet to see ideas built using the slopcoded monstrosities.
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vibe-coding-goes-crypto-scam/
I thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory.
I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.
I caught Sean Goedecke, who uses LLMs a bunch, who are clearly serious adults, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vibe-coding-goes-crypto-scam/
You didn't see the latest AI grifter escalation? If you reject their PRs, they then get their AI to write hit pieces slandering you:
"On 9 February, the Matplotlib software library got a code patch from an OpenClaw bot. One of the Matplotlib maintainers, Scott Shambaugh, rejected the submission — the project doesn’t accept AI bot patches. [GitHub; Matplotlib]
The bot account, “MJ Rathbun,” published a blog post to GitHub on 11 February pleading for bot coding to be accepted, ranting about what a terrible person Shambaugh was for rejecting its contribution, and saying it was a bot with feelings. The blog author went to quite some length to slander Mr Shambaugh"
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/