May 28, 2026

FACE, MEET PALM: Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it.

In a recent interview on the Rapid Response podcast, Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said it’s hard to draw a connection between the company’s rising use of Claude Code and innovations meant to serve consumers.

“That link is not there yet,” he said. “Maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and ‘Okay now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features.’”

The comments follow reports that the firm had already burnt through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in just four months after incentivizing employees to adopt the technology through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage. It’s the latest development in a complex quandary arising in enterprise AI adoption: increasing AI use comes with higher costs, even as per-unit AI pricing falls.

“If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how [many] useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify,” Macdonald said.

Do I understand this correctly? Uber incentivized employees to burn through AI tokens regardless of outcome, and wonders four months later how the company wasted so much money?

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Bidens Really Need to Shut Up and Go Away. “Jill Biden and the rest of the Democrats aren’t going to stop trying to do retroactive damage control on the unmitigated train wreck that was Joe Biden’s unfortunate occupation of the Oval Office. Perhaps they figure that, if given enough time, a lot of people will forget what a bumbling moron Biden was while he was pretending to be president. Dr. Jill’s decades in public education have greatly contributed to making America dumber, so it just might work.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

NO. WAY.

That thing that never happens sure seems to happen a lot.

Posted at 8:52 am by Stephen Green

STUART BROTMAN: Eisenhower’s D-Day Lesson for America at 250: Make the Problem Bigger.

This month, American moviegoers will watch Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in “Pressure,” alone in a storm-lashed Portsmouth headquarters in June 1944, weighing weather reports, casualty estimates, and the fate of the free world. The film’s power lies in what Eisenhower refuses to do: Narrow the decision, delegate the doubt, or pretend the problem is smaller than it is.

Eighty-two years later, as America approaches its 250th birthday, we are doing precisely the opposite.

In Philadelphia this spring, interpretive panels describing the enslaved people who labored in George Washington’s President’s House were quietly removed, then partially restored, then contested again. A few blocks away, a school group’s history tour was canceled after parents on both sides objected to what their children might hear. In Washington, D.C., two federal commissions, each claiming authority over the semiquincentennial, are issuing competing guidance on how the nation should commemorate its 250th birthday.

A republic anchored in the First Amendment cannot agree on how to talk about itself.

The instinct, on every side, is to make the argument smaller: Strip the panel, cancel the tour, narrow the commission, silence the other camp. Eisenhower would have recognized the impulse and rejected it. “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve,” he told his staff. “I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

Eisenhower’s enlargement principle has never been systematically applied to free expression. It should be.

Indeed. And do read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

PRATT SUMMER:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: DNC Insults Trans Community in Vulgar Response to Stephen Miller Post About James Talarico Making History.

Yes indeed, decency is back on the ballot!

That ad hominem caught the attention of Larry O’Connor and others:

Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

Related:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

FIRST VENEZUELA, NOW SPAIN? The Heat Is Turning up on the Most Corrupt Party in Europe.

“Most corrupt party in Europe” is quite an achievement.

UPDATE: Way out in front.

“ZAPATERO HAS A GOLD MINE IN VENEZUELA — THE UDEF CONFIRMS IT
And what’s inside is devastating 👇
⛏️ What the UDEF found in the front man’s notebooks:
▪️ The “Colombia mine” — one of Venezuela’s largest gold deposits
▪️ Located in the Orinoco Mining Arc — controlled by Maduro
▪️ 60,000 tons of raw gold negotiated
▪️ Plans to market the gold in the Emirates — codenamed “the Yellow”
▪️ Transported to China through companies in the network…”

Posted at 7:48 am by Charlie Martin

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS DISAVOW NATIONAL SOCIALIST: Dems cut ties with scandal-plagued Graham Platner, warn of ‘civil war’ in party.

Top Democratic officials and lawmakers are breaking with Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner as his past blunders and online history stack up.

Platner’s ascendency to the top of the ticket in Vacationland broke with the Democratic establishment in Washington, D.C., and since Maine Gov. Janet Mills exited from the race, questions about whether he is the right choice to take on Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, have exploded.

Much of that is fueled by scandals that have cropped up seemingly week after week, be it a tattoo on his chest of a Nazi symbol or inflammatory posts online.

Some in the Democratic Party warn that it’s spurring a “civil war” between the moderate and left wings of the party.

Melissa DeRosa, former New York Mayor Andrew Cuomo’s chief of staff, told Fox News’ Bret Baier that Platner’s rise and ensuing questions of his fitness as a candidate are demonstrative of the bubbling conflict within the Democratic Party.

I guess America’s Newspaper of Record finally got a story wrong:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

TURNAROUND: Boeing CEO says company met requirements to increase 737 Max production to 47 jets per month.

In Boeing’s most recent earnings report last month, Ortberg said he expected the company to ramp up the production of its bestselling aircraft to 47 a month this summer. On Wednesday, he said Boeing is “highly confident” that it’s ready to meet that rate.

While Boeing has previously seen production as high as 57 aircraft a month, Ortberg said he doesn’t believe the company can currently sustain that rate with its safety and quality processes.

“We’d like to get someday to a 63-a-month rate, and so we’re looking forward to that,” Ortberg said. “The market will support those higher rates.”

Still, he acknowledged Boeing has “work to do” to get to a point where the company can further ramp up its production rates of the 737 Max aircraft. As the company looks toward reaching a 52-per-month production rate, Ortberg said that process could take at least six months, if not longer, if the newly approved rate goes into effect in July or August.

Progress is slow, but at least it appears to be real.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

DEVELOPING:

Tweet concludes, “How does this even happen???”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

WHENEVER THEY TRY TO BE NORMAL, THEY FAIL.

Posted at 7:12 am by Glenn Reynolds

IN MANY FIELDS, THEY WERE DRIVEN OFF BY HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENTS: Honey, Where Did All the Male Workers Go? As so often, it’s a bit complicated. But for sure we need more men in healthcare.

I think the advice for men to go into healthcare jobs is going to turn out like ‘learn to code’ — justified by current numbers but bound for destruction by technological change. Though the job loss will probably start at the top and work down, until we get robots that can handle bedpans. And it’s well known — and reinforced by interviews in the InstaWife-s book — that men in, say, nursing are treated badly because of their sex.

Related: Doctors, This Is Why Our Patients Are Using ChatGPT.

Several months ago, I got the results back from some routine blood tests, and let’s just say several numbers were a tad too high. My doctor advised “continued diet and exercise” and signed off on the results.

For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.

So, I did what everyone does in this day and age: I turned to artificial intelligence. With low expectations, I typed my lab results into ChatGPT.

As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would. . . .

The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow.

When I sheepishly asked a silly question — if eating my vitamin gummies after my post-meal walks would raise my blood sugar — it asked me to upload the link to the specific product, and it did a close analysis of its ingredients. (No, it would not.)

I felt comfortable telling it that there was no way I was taking some of its suggestions — consuming Metamucil drinks or another psyllium husk powder concoction, no thank you — and it responded with understanding and offered me alternatives. (No offense taken.)

Of course, as a doctor, I know when to question the chatbot and when to ignore it. Many other patients don’t. . . .

As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.

I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.

Yes, that kind of think can be seductive.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds