The week in stupidity — 2026-08-10 to 2026-08-16
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stupidity index · stu cringing at the slop
62 / 100
62% of the 13 items the feed collected this week were a fail, an outage or a confidently wrong human (last week: 40%). Seven fingers is a design choice now.
by the numbers
| lane | items |
|---|---|
| AI Incidents & Outages | 8 |
| AI Bubble & Money | 2 |
| AI News | 3 |
Outage notices: 7 (Perplexity 3 · Anthropic 2 · GitHub 2) · Bubble Thermometer: no reading this week
top five, by formula
Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems
Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems wsj.com
Wall Street just borrowed $500 billion to build AI — here's what it could mean for your 401(k)
Wall Street just borrowed $500 billion to build AI — here's what it could mean for your 401(k) Yahoo Finance
OpenWALDO aims to blow the doors off proprietary AI training models
Contributors wanted: 167B transparent tokens have a long way to go against AI giants' trillions
NEC tests parking tech that only starts charging once you exit your car
PLUS: Infosys to wear Crocs for a decade; Fujifilm may quit printers; 2GW datacenter debuts in western China; and more!
get this on mondays
One email a week: the index, the top five, the picks, the outages. Double opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, no filler.
The Stupidity Index is the share of the week's items in the fails, incidents and confidently-wrong lanes; the top five use the Hall of Fails formula: lane weight × log(engagement + 5 × 🔥) × thumbnail bonus. Other weeks · how this site works.
promises due in the next two weeks
- 2026-09-30 OpenAI: An intern-level automated AI researcher exists by September 2026; a fully autonomous AI researcher by 2028. — Sam Altman, CEO, and Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist, 2025-10-28 · source ↗
The ledger keeps the date; the date arrives either way. all promises · calendar
when the internet is most stupid
0 6 12 18 utc mon .... ........... tue . . ...--:-::::.::: wed .. .:..:::-:---+++++#@%# thu %*:. - . ... . . fri . . . .. . sat . sun . .
968 items over the last four weeks, by weekday and UTC hour; darker is busier (. : - = + * # % @ from quiet to loud). Counts, not judgement.