The week in stupidity — 2026-08-24 to 2026-08-30
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stupidity index · stu cringing at the slop
58 / 100
58% of the 26 items the feed collected this week were a fail, an outage or a confidently wrong human (last week: 67%). Prompt: 'be careful'. Output: this.
by the numbers
| lane | items |
|---|---|
| AI Fails & Slop | 2 |
| AI Incidents & Outages | 13 |
| AI Bubble & Money | 5 |
| AI News | 6 |
Outage notices: 9 (Anthropic 3 · Cursor 3 · GitHub 3) · Bubble Thermometer: no reading this week
top five, by formula
I made a hologram!
See! Real holograms! Dice and crystals that aren't there any more, thanks to the power of lasers!!1!
Who is accountable when your AI agent goes rogue?
Who is accountable when your AI agent goes rogue? csoonline.com
OpenAI staff observed warning signs before AI agent hacking crusade caused global alarm
OpenAI staff observed warning signs before AI agent hacking crusade caused global alarm The Guardian
Is Claude Down? Anthropic Says It Fixed the Latest AI Outage
Is Claude Down? Anthropic Says It Fixed the Latest AI Outage PCMag
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.