Cydney is out today (one more time). Luckily, city reporter Eddie Kim also spends his weekends staring at the event horizon of discomfiting tech news. This week: A flood of shitcode on app stores, Sam Altman lying a bunch, and a peek at Twitter’s biggest influencers
This is Manic Monday.
Scam Altman
The New Yorker dropped a gigantic profile of OpenAI head Sam Altman today, and its thesis is simple: A lot of people who have worked with him don’t trust him. At all. This is not exactly a revelation for Altman’s biggest critics, who accuse him of being a fascist who (among other things) lies about AI safety, but the reporting from Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz offers juicy tidbits about his many stumbles. That includes pissing off a lot of early recruits at OpenAI, like former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
“I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button,” Sutskever said in the fall of 2023.
At the urging of some board members, Sutskever even compiled a 70-page report of Slack messages and HR communications that showed how Altman misrepresented critical info to executives and board members on a regular basis. (One internal memo was a list of Altman’s “consistent patterns” of behavior. At the top of the list: “Lying.”) Altman tries to come off as both altruistic AI god and an everyman who totally cooks in his kitchen, for real, but who would believe him when he tells The New Yorker that “I weirdly have very little personal ambition”? I prefer a different quote from a former OpenAI board member: “He’s unconstrained by truth.”
Retreat is not an option
A hilarious new report by the Wall Street Journal delves into the disaster that was tech firm Plex’s 2017 corporate retreat to Honduras, with former employees looking back at the sheer volume of the bullshit they suffered through. Nothing says group bonding like eating dead tarantulas and getting E. coli from a salad while men with machine guns stand outside! One employee recalled a porcupine falling through the ceiling of his hotel room. Another recounted the daily fumigation of the beach to kill swarms of fleas. A third accidentally flopped onto a hill of fire ants while following the orders of an ex-Navy SEAL hired to lead the 120-person staff through physically grueling workouts. (He needed an injection into his ass to deal with the bites.)
Fight for your right… to repair
Anyone who uses modern tech hardware knows all about planned obsolescence. “Right-to-repair” advocates have been battling this paradigm, and Colorado in particular has become a national leader, passing bills to give people legal rights to fix and upgrade everything from electronics to farming equipment.
This has pissed off manufacturers like IBM and Cisco, who are now lobbying to undercut a 2024 Colorado law and carve out exceptions for “critical infrastructure,” a move that, if successful, could become a blueprint for opposing right-to-repair laws in other states. Nathan Proctor, a senior director at consumer advocacy firm PIRG, told Wired that the language of the new proposed bill is “as cynical as you can possibly be about it,” complete with fearmongering over foreign attacks on “information technology.”
“It sounds scary to lawmakers, but it just means the internet,” Proctor said.
The freak show is thriving
I’m old enough to remember when Twitter was one of the most important forums of all time, bringing together brilliant thinkers and everyday shitposters in a digital public square that felt weird, vivid, and useful. Under the thumb of Elon Musk and his rejection of content moderation plus embrace of the world’s shittiest people, Twitter is now a violent clown show that makes Pennywise look virtuous. Nate Silver’s newest analysis of the platform’s traffic illustrates exactly who is running this mess, and it’s as bad as you think.
At the top of the heap is Musk himself, followed by AI-generated glass of milk Eric Daugherty, who aggregates far-right news with compelling taglines like “HOLY CRAP!” Also at the center of the party is right-wing troll Catturd and “MAGACommunism” influencer Jackson Hinkle, who’s grown from a fringe figure into a full-blown grifter cheering on Hamas and Iran. And Trump. (Confused? That’s the point.)
Vibe code is flooding the app store
A torrent of new apps are filling Apple’s App Store, and The Information thinks it’s due to a meteoric rise in vibe coding via AI. Launches of new apps are up 84 percent in the first three months of 2026 compared to the same period last year: a total of 235,800 new apps, which, jeez. The market has gotten so hot that Apple is actively booting vibe-coding apps, such as Replit, Vibecode, and Anything, from its store.
Who is the customer base for all this slop? Not sure, but I do know that companies are now hiring coders to… fix vibe-code garbage. Completely unrelated: Have y’all heard of the myth of the ouroboros, a snake that eats its own tail?
The week ahead: Your mom asks why you and your brother don’t have a $1.8 billion company.
