Better Offline

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with the Wall Street Journal’s Caitlin Ostroff and Katherine Long about how Polymarket is working with influencers to show videos of fake bets cashing out - and how the prediction markets have grown into a large, barely-regulated operation.

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They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real - https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5?st=57dR12&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Caitlin Ostroff
https://x.com/ceostroff
https://bsky.app/profile/ceostroff.bsky.social
https://www.wsj.com/news/author/caitlin-ostroff
Katherine Long
https://bsky.app/profile/klong.bsky.social
https://x.com/ByKLong
https://www.wsj.com/news/author/katherine-long
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how organizations are freaking out after having to pay the real cost of AI tokens, and how the surge of competitive open weight models could lead to the post-bubble locally-run future of LLMs.
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley monoculture, and a monument to the cargo cult desperation of a tech industry that celebrates mediocrity and has run out of ideas.
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about AI companies “doom trolling” consumers using scary stories about conscious computers, and how we need to make fun of the scare-mongering and ridicule the executives peddling in it.

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Cal Newport’s “Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs To Stop https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html
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In a special exclusive episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron digs into the audited financials of OpenAI from 2024 and 2025.

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