Don’t ask ChatGPT to tell you what time it is
State of the Union: 11/30/25
State of the Union is an experiment. This is the first of an ongoing series attempting to chronicle How Things Are right now, one link at a time.
Happy Thanksgiving Eve. I’m writing to you all from suburban New Jersey in the house where I grew up. Do people still go out with their hometown friends the night before Thanksgiving? I’ve never felt the need to do this personally, but I’ve been hearing about it less and less lately—perhaps because Americans spend less time together, but more likely because I am pushing 30 and people my age have jobs and lives and partners.
Things are supposed to slow down during the holidays but it seems like there’s more news than ever, which some people on the internet would probably call a “recession indicator”.
Two National Guard members were shot in Washington D.C. A suspect is in custody, but the cause is still unknown.
A network of new Super PACs is trying to elect candidates who are pro-AI regulations. They plan to raise about $50 million, primarily from Anthropic execs and employees. This is a fraction of what the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Super PAC Leading the Future has raised to fund House candidates who are friendly to the industry. Anthropic has been trying to position itself as the “good” AI company as opposed to the rest of the “bad” AI industry for a long time, and bankrolling pro-regulation House candidates explicitly in opposition to a16z’s Super PAC furthers its reputation as the foil to the rest of the industry. I don’t think this reputation is wholly unwarranted, but Anthropic is still a $350 billion company with ties to the defense industry.
Language learning models can’t tell time. Researchers suspect there are real deficiencies in models’ ability to determine spatial orientation. Out of curiosity, I tried this out with Claude by uploading a photo of an analog clock at 8:19, the hour hand very clearly pointing above 8 and the minute hand very clearly pointing just above 4. First, Claude told me the time on the clock was 4:20. Then when I said that was the wrong answer and asked it to try again, it apologized and told me the time was 8:20. Not ideal.
Gen Z men are connecting on and offline over their shared love of the quarter zip. Whatever solves the male loneliness crisis, I guess. Anecdotally, I have been seeing more of these around my usual North Brooklyn haunts, but I had assumed it’s because I live around a lot of tech people.
Another way to solve the loneliness crisis: do paperwork with your friends. The practical result of companies outsourcing customer service functions to AI chatbots is that people have to take on the administrative work employees once handled, and it’s affecting everyone’s quality of life. I really like this idea.
An Israeli startup wants to fight climate change by blotting out the sun. That sounds like a really good way to accidentally kill everyone on Earth.
Depending on who you ask, Ozempic may or may not be ruining Thanksgiving. The Times reports that more and more Americans aren’t doing the whole turkey thing anymore because of curbed appetites, while the Wall Street Journal reports that more and more Americans are skipping doses so they can fully indulge at Thanksgiving. No one at my Thanksgiving is on a GLP-1 so I can’t issue a verdict, but maybe some of you can.
Either way, GLP-1s are an unprecedented cash cow. On Friday, Eli Lilly became the first ever pharmaceutical company to hit a trillion dollar valuation, showing investors have more confidence in Eli Lilly’s forthcoming oral obesity drug than they do Novo Nordisk’s offerings.
Rising electricity prices are leaving more and more Americans in the dark. Electricity bills have risen at three times the rate of inflation, as customers struggle to keep up with utility bills. Nearly 1 in 20 households nationwide have utility debt so high it was reported to collections agencies this year. In his meeting with Zohran Mamdani, Donald Trump agreed that Con Edison was price gouging New Yorkers. It remains unclear whether this will mean anything.
A new browser tool wants to turn back the clock to the internet before generative AI. Slop Evader filters web searches to only show results from before November 30, 2022, the day ChatGPT was released. Creator Tega Brain said of the project: “For me, the purpose of doing this work is mostly to act as a provocation and give people examples of how you can refuse this stuff, to furnish one’s imaginary for what a politics of refusal could look like.”
A new Abundance agenda has hit the discourse. I like this one.
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