The week in stupidity — 2026-08-17 to 2026-08-23
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stupidity index · stu cringing at the slop
67 / 100
67% of the 12 items the feed collected this week were a fail, an outage or a confidently wrong human (last week: 62%). A hallucination is confidence without a source.
by the numbers
| lane | items |
|---|---|
| AI Incidents & Outages | 8 |
| AI News | 4 |
Outage notices: 6 (Anthropic 4 · Cursor 1 · GitHub 1) · Bubble Thermometer: no reading this week
top five, by formula
Microsoft’s GitHub Hit by Major Outage as AI-Driven Demand Strains Infrastructure
Microsoft’s GitHub Hit by Major Outage as AI-Driven Demand Strains Infrastructure DevOps.com
Slack Code taps into collective vibe, puts AI agents into the group chat
Developers can now invite the whole team along for their quality time with the coding bot
Mozilla adds ad blocking to Firefox for iOS
Experimental feature to block some, but not all, ads
Microsoft blames AI for delayed Exchange update, can’t say when it will arrive
Dealing with machine-made bug backlog makes it hard to find a moment to deliver promised subscription service
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
1129 items over the last four weeks, by weekday and UTC hour; darker is busier (. : - = + * # % @ from quiet to loud). Counts, not judgement.