THIS IS NOT THE 21ST CENTURY I’D BEEN HOPING FOR: HustleGPT is a hilarious and scary AI experiment in capitalism.

The internet is overflowing with examples of what GPT-4’s advanced intelligence can accomplish. It can write usable lawsuits, build websites from text prompts, automate online dating, and is generally freaking people out about all the jobs it can replace. Hall has taken this a step further by harnessing its capabilities into an age-old ambition that’s the backbone of capitalist society: making money with as little effort as possible. At a time when people are wondering whether AI will work for us or against us, this experiment is showing in real time how get-rich-quick schemes will look in the future.

The business plan proposed by GPT-4 was to set up an affiliate marketing site for content about eco-friendly products. It found a cheap domain name called greengadgetguru.com(Opens in a new tab) that Hall promptly bought for $8.16. Next, Hall asked it to generate prompts for DALL-E-2 to make a logo.

Then, Hall asked it to design a full site layout in detail. With some help from Midjourney, GPT-4 wrote an article listing ten eco-friendly kitchen gadgets, finding actual sustainable products. Hall shelled out another $29 for hosting, and with that, the website was live.

Hall had $62.84 leftover over so he asked GPT-4 what he should do with it. Like any good hustler, GPT-4 knew that its product needed visibility so it suggested allocating $40 for Facebook and Instagram ads. All of this Twitter hype had investors drooling over getting in early on the next great affiliate marketing site viral GPT-4 experiment. By the end of day one, Green Gadget Guru had $100 in investment from an undisclosed party.

A few hours later:

“After four days, Green Gadget Guru has $7,812.84 in investment, a growing team, and content in the pipeline. But it still hasn’t made any revenue.”

Getting investors without a product has a very dot-com era feel to it.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Yale Law School — EXPOSED.

Elite law schools have become training academies not so much for effective and competent lawyers, but instead for militant transformational radicals with a law degree.

Mainstream consumers of legal services, otherwise known as paying clients, would be shocked by the evolution that has taken place in the nation’s elite law schools. Instead of producing lawyers capable of helping clients, these schools now turn out leftist activists who are most competent at using transformational designs to upend centuries of legal traditions and institutions, including, ultimately, the U.S. Constitution itself.

This problem isn’t new. But the shocking behavior at Stanford by rude, belligerent proto-totalitarian students shouting down a federal judge laid bare this rancid evolution for everyone to see.

The next generation of lawyers at these schools isn’t focused on learning contracts, torts, civil procedure, and evidence as much as they are learning how to destroy treasured American institutions such as tolerance, liberty, and free speech.

This is the first of a ten-part series.

IT CERTAINLY LOOKS LIKE DEMS MEAN TO GO THROUGH WITH THE NEXT STEP IN OUR BANANA REPUBLICAFICATION: NYPD and Capitol Police Putting Up Barricades, Expecting Riots When Trump Is Arrested.

PISTOLS: 1911 vs. 2011. “That is the smoothest gun of all time. It doesn’t move. Like it literally doesn’t move, there’s no recoil.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Iraq War: 20 Years Later. “The debate over toppling Saddam was public, passionate, detailed, and lengthy. The result was an un-rushed and broad consensus for the Iraq War. The consensus was largely international, too, with more than 40 countries — including our British cousins — coming along. But just because the consensus was broad doesn’t mean we got it right.”

Read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE: ‘Natural Killer Cells’ deliver spectacular results as new cancer therapy.

WELL…: Chris Rock Asks Democrats, ‘Are You Stupid?’ for Wanting to Arrest Trump.

EVERYTHING IS RACIST: Is coffee racist? How drinking coffee perpetuates white supremacy. “Coffee first came to North America and Europe between 1650 and 1700. But coffee was an important, almost religious, part of Black culture going as far back as the 1400s in Ethiopia. After the whites got the first sip of the Black delicacy, they brutally enslaved people of color to keep up with demand, turning a ritualistic drink into another consumer product in the colonial capitalist machine.”

Unasked: How other parts of the world would be doing without the creations of Western civilization, like electricity and medicine. But I’d much rather we all just get along over a cup of coffee.

JUSTICE: False Rape Accuser Gets 8 Years in Prison in the UK for Making Up Attack by ‘Asian Rape Gang.’

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse?

Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!

It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”

I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.

“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.

He has a point: The headset is decidedly antisocial. Once the Meta Quest is strapped on, it’s adios to the real world, so much so that the headset prompts you to demarcate a “play area” by spraying a virtual boundary line on the ground. This is to stop me from crashing into real-world furniture, walls, spouse, etc., when I’m in the middle of my VR adventures.

Technology’s job is to solve problems, not create them. Or at least solve more problems than it creates. Meta Quest isn’t there yet.

BREAKING: DeSantis Rips Soros-Funded DA Who May Indict Trump.

PERHAPS MORE RESPECTFUL THAN SOME OF THEM DESERVE: Elon Musk Sends Automated Poop Emoji To All Reporters Emailing Questions To Twitter. “If you’re a reporter reaching out to Twitter’s press department, you’ll now be greeted with an automated response in the form of nothing but a poop emoji. Twitter CEO Elon Musk proudly announced the change in a tweet on the social media site Sunday morning and I confirmed it was true by seeking comment over email.”

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Here’s What We Saw in East Palestine. “My fiancée Jessica and I, with the help of friends and patriotic folks who listen to my radio show, loaded up Jess’s SUV with water, pet food, Gatorade, V8, and Capri Suns and headed to Ohio.”

GREAT POWER GAMES: Xi’s embrace of Putin dents his chances of playing peacemaker on Ukraine.

China President Xi Jinping will deliver a strong message of support for Vladimir Putin with his three-day visit to Moscow this week, even as he pitches Beijing’s proposals for brokering an end to the Russian leader’s war in Ukraine.

Xi’s trip marks his most ambitious effort yet to weigh into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Second World War and will be followed by his first conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since Putin’s February 2022 invasion. It comes on the heels of China’s successful efforts to help Iran and Saudi Arabia patch up years of discord.

But while Xi’s “rock solid” backing of Putin ensures a warm welcome in Moscow on his first trip abroad since securing a third term as president, it also makes him a harder sell as an honest broker to mediate an end to the war. Both Moscow and Kyiv have been cool to China’s vague peace proposals, which Ukraine’s allies in the U.S. and Europe dismissed outright.

The longer Putin’s stupid war drags on, the more dependent Russia becomes on China. That might matter much more to Xi than playing peacemaker.

THE US ALONE USED TO KEEP THAT MANY IN WEST GERMANY, ACROSS THE BORDER FROM THE GROUP OF SOVIET FORCES IN EAST GERMANY: NATO Looking to Send 300,000 Troops to the Russian Border.

CHANGE: Dutch farmers’ party secures landslide victory.

Some analysts saw the election as a fight between two ‘moods’ in the Netherlands: a mood of (Right-wing) discontent, echoed also across other countries, versus the traditional consensus-driven Dutch mood. With 18 parties in parliament, politicians have typically found a way to muddle along, but this election was different thanks to the thorny issue of nitrogen compound pollution, which is tying the country in knots before a bill has even passed through parliament.

EU rules, Dutch laws, and court verdicts mean the country must reduce emissions of ammonia, nitrogen oxides and nitrous oxide from farming, transport and building machines. The question is who takes the hit — and whether 30% of productive farms should be shut, forcibly if necessary. The Netherlands, which feeds the world with its intensive farming and livestock-heavy agriculture, is at the sharp end of the international climate debate.

According to initial results, the BBB, headed by sole MP Caroline van der Plas, will be the largest party in the Senate — polling at more than 30% in some regions. Meanwhile, support for the Government has been slashed. The result is a direct challenge to Dutch PM Mark Rutte, who has been embroiled in a number of scandals, such as gas mining in Groningen at the expense of citizen safety, punishing innocent (often dual-national) citizens for childcare benefit fraud and ongoing Dutch farmer protests about nitrogen emissions. Small wonder, then, that 46% of voters said they were specifically voting against the current national administration.

The protests aren’t over nitrogen emissions, but about the Dutch government forcibly shutting down 30% of the world’s most productive farmland.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats’ Daddy Issues With Trump Aren’t Going to Work Out Well for Them. “They’re blinded by rage and won’t stop until they get some red meat footage for the 14 viewers who still watch MSNBC and CNN.”

COMMUNIST CHINA IS A BULLY: Chinese ships ‘swarming’ Vietnamese waters, think-tank says.

According to the SCSCI, the number of Chinese vessels in the economic zone increased measurably in the first two weeks of March, almost tripling the number observed at the end of February. An EEZ gives a state exclusive access to natural resources in the waters and in the seabed.

The data was collected using automatic identification system (AIS) signals transmitted by the ships.

“The Chinese vessels have also been operating deep inside Vietnam’s EEZ, up to just 60 nautical miles (111km) from the Quang Ngai coast,” Van Pham, SCSCI’s manager, told Radio Free Asia, referring to a province in central Vietnam.

The fishing and militia vessels often are accompanied by the China Coast Guard.

Beijing figures no one will stop them from doing or taking what they want, so they do or take what they want.

HOLD EVERYTHING: Now Trump Will Likely NOT Be Arrested, at Least on Tuesday.

Related: Surprise Trump Grand Jury Witness Revealed.

HMM: How non-profit OpenAI became $30 bn profit-making firm, questions Musk.

Musk had donated $100 million to OpenAI. He stepped down from OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 and no longer owns a stake in the company.

“I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated $100 million somehow became a $30 billion market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he quipped.

He has also paused OpenAI access to Twitter database.

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company in 2015.

Its research director was Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning and CTO was Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe.

OpenAI’s co-chairs were Sam Altman and Musk.

The Twitter CEO in February this year also raised the same question, saying OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), a non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google.

“But now it has become a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” he posted, criticising Microsoft for making profits via OpenAI.

Then there’s this tag below the story: “Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.”

I don’t know how OpenAI became closed, but I can tell you why.

There’s just too much money to be made with auto-generated content.

BANANA REPUBLIC: FBI Whistleblower Claims FBI Is Now a ‘Weaponized Apparatchik’ of the Biden Administration.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Naked Visitor from Another Earth. “This week we have the man who lost his shirt (and everything else), the curious case of the one-armed drummer, and Colorado Man going full Home Alone.”

THE INMATES REALLY ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM:

CHUTZPAH: Hunter Biden Sues the Laptop Repairman.

EVERYTHING IS RACIST: Professor Denounces Cleanliness as Sexist and Racist.

There was a time when cleanliness was viewed as “next to godliness.” That clearly has changed. It is now apparently next to white supremacy. While it would be impossible to discuss all of the wacky scholarship being published today, Loyola (Chicago) Professor Jenna Drenten is a standout with a new theory that “cleanliness” is a “cultural gatekeeping mechanism” with “racist,” “sexist” and “classist” roots. It turns out that the sweet spice rack that your kid brought back from shop is actually a stratified, structural vehicle for white supremacy and male dominance . . . unless you keep it messy. Otherwise, you are pushing racist, sexist “pantry porn.”

Professor Drenten has struck out at a social media trend of posting videos showing off different ways to organize pantries. Where many see neatness, Drenten sees racism and sexism. She notes that these video creators, “predominantly white women,” have created “a new status symbol” to replace the old one of “nice houses,” “nice yards” and “nice neighborhoods.”

This, I guess, is why we can’t have nice things.