The week in stupidity — 2026-08-31 to 2026-09-06
)(*)( .---+---. | O O | | o | '---+---' __|__
stupidity index · stu watching prod burn
82 / 100
82% of the 61 items the feed collected this week were a fail, an outage or a confidently wrong human (last week: 58%). It's not an outage, it's an unplanned reflection period.
by the numbers
| lane | items |
|---|---|
| AI Fails & Slop | 2 |
| AI Incidents & Outages | 48 |
| AI Bubble & Money | 3 |
| AI News | 8 |
Outage notices: 25 (Anthropic 7 · Cursor 6 · OpenAI 6 · GitHub 3 · Perplexity 3) · Bubble Thermometer: no reading this week
top five, by formula
Laser Jeans
Apparently they use lasers to put the wear marks in jeans now? Amazing.
All the Major AI Chatbots Are Experiencing Outages Right Now
All the Major AI Chatbots Are Experiencing Outages Right Now Gizmodo
EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring
EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring reuters.com
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 . .
1039 items over the last four weeks, by weekday and UTC hour; darker is busier (. : - = + * # % @ from quiet to loud). Counts, not judgement.