Cannibalistic Galaxy

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

XKCD today decided to go for animorphs reference!

Mouseover: ’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

This is being discussed heavily on Bluesky, such as here.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

...

Imagine this: You are Mark 'The Martian' Watney, the first human being to ever be alone on a planet, technically the coloniser of Mars, space pirate. After your incredible/harrowing space adventure, you've returned to Earth, taken a job training future astronauts. You are still one of the most famous people to have ever lived, so dating can be a bit tricky.

But one day you meet an amazing woman, a scientist, and the two of you fall in love. As part of the 'getting to know each other' stage of dating, she tells you about one of her ex-boyfriends. They met in grad school and dated for a few years, but it didn't work out and they had kind of a messy break up, after which he apparently crashed out hard, ending his career in science by writing a paper that gave a giant middle-finger to his entire field. She thinks he's a teacher now, but they're no longer in touch. Other than it being an interesting anecdote, you don't think much of this.

Then, the Petrova crisis. The Sun dimming. Humanity facing extinction. You aren't directly involved in the global response, but you and your girlfriend are both scientists, and this is basically all anyone is talking about, so you are following the development of the situation with keen interest.

When the Hail Mary mission is announced, your first thought is to volunteer (surely you would have to be one of the best-suited people for a long-haul high-stakes space mission like this?) but your second thought is that you really don't want to face dying in space again. You talk it over with your girlfriend. You have an argument that turns into a fight, that ends when you both get tested for the coma-resistance gene and both receive negative results. She finds you sobbing in the middle of the night from a complicated mix of relief and regret and holds you until you calm down. A week later, you propose.

The names of the crew and backup crew are announced. You know at least some of them, by reputation if not personally (astronauts being a pretty small community). You reach out, and offer a mix of congratulations, condolences and advice. You are one of the only people on Earth who truly understand what it is they are facing. You wish them luck.

Two of them die in an explosion. The news is devastating, not just to you, but for everyone on Earth. Despair gives way to hope with another announcement: Dr Ryland Grace has volunteered to join the mission.

‘Holy shit,’ says your fiancé. ‘That’s my ex.’

‘I thought he was a teacher?’ you say.

‘So did I,’ she says.

In your mind, you re-categorise your fiancé’s ex from ‘crashout-failed-scientist-turned-teacher’ to ‘space-hero’, and joke that she must have a type. She laughs, but her eyes are wet. You hold her hand and watch the rest of the broadcast in silence.

You try to reach out again, but are told that Dr Grace is not available. You are quietly relieved, since that conversation would almost certainly have gotten awkward. You invite your old crew and their families over to your place to watch the launch of the Hail Mary. Not all of them can make it, but you share a few drinks with those that do. When the ship successfully leaves Earth’s atmosphere, you give a toast to Yao Li-Jie, Olesya Ilyukhina and Ryland Grace, followed by a minute’s silence.

Life on Earth gets colder and harder than it has been in living memory, but you know how to survive on an inhospitable planet (even when it seems hopeless, you just keep solving the problems in front of you). You make it through starvation, conflict and a thousand other tragedies. Many nations band together and share resources. Scientists pour years into finding new ways to keep the environment as stable as possible, to maximise food production and prevent natural disasters. You get married.

At long last, the solution arrives (along with a whole host of new discoveries that will fuel scientific research for decades, such as the fact that ALIENS ARE REAL). The space program has languished, but not died, and when a mission to Venus is planned, you are called in to train the crew. As part of your work preparing for that mission, you are given access to the video logs that Grace sent back to Earth along with the planet-saving taumoeba.

So you, Mark 'The Martian' Watney, the first human being ever to be left to die in space, gets to witness the second human being ever to be left to die in space mention you by name to an alien, not for any reason to do with your aforementioned incredible/harrowing space adventure, but because this crashout-failed-scientist-turned-teacher-turned-space-hero is still so upset that you got together with his ex (your wife) that he needs to vent about it to the alien (his friend).