I don’t like ads.

The newspaper site which I was trying to read, however, seemed to be glacially slow in loading literally anything, I wondered if it was somehow intuiting the presence of my ad-blocker and then hustling to give me that slow-walk treatment. So I turned the ad-blocker off, and indeed the site — greatfully replete with annoying cascades of ads — leapt to electrified life.

A particularly insistent banner ad from a household-name tech company was persistently winning the auction for an option on my attention. It was pushing weird AI-generated clip-art graphics with anodyne figures and light bulbs and geometric shapes. As if some corporation had overpaid for a curated after-hours holiday party in an Apple Store.

It wasn’t really clear what the ad wanted me to do. The copy was a bland mash of statistics, as if oklo.org’s preoccupations with computation, bit operations and energy costs had been given an MBA makeover.

This situation — the spend, the group-think, the blandishment — it’s clearly ripe for disruption. There’s clearly an opportunity, afoot, but how does one cut in and clean up?

It occurred to me that the Jesus and Mary Chain (who are experiencing something of a revival forty-odd years on) provide a template. I’m feeling too lazy to work up my own prose to telegraph this insight, so in the spirit of the ad above, I’ll let an LLM tilt its dull glow toward elaboration. It’s my blog, after all.

With that background, check out this fabulous YouTube video. I’ve watched it about ten times already.