The dumbest things that happened in tech this year

The dumbest things that happened in tech this year

The tech trade strikes so fast that it’s exhausting to maintain up with just how a lot has happened this year. We’ve watched as the tech elite enmeshed themselves in the U.S. authorities, AI firms sparred for dominance, and futuristic tech like sensible glasses and robotaxis grew to become a bit more tangible exterior of the San Francisco bubble. You know, important stuff that’s going to impression our lives for years to return. 

But the tech world is brimming with so many big personalities that there’s always one thing actually dumb happening, which understandably will get overshadowed by “real news” when the complete web breaks, or TikTook will get offered, or there’s a large data breach or one thing. So, as the news (hopefully) slows down for a bit, it’s time to compensate for the dumbest moments you missed – don’t fear, only one among them includes bathrooms.

Mark Zuckerberg, a chapter lawyer from Indiana, filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

It’s not Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that his title is Mark Zuckerberg. But, like hundreds of thousands of other enterprise house owners, Mark Zuckerberg purchased Facebook adverts to advertise his authorized follow to potential shoppers. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook web page regularly acquired unwarranted suspensions for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. So, Mark Zuckerberg took authorized action because he needed to pay for commercials during his suspension, even though he didn’t break any guidelines.

This has been an ongoing frustration for Mark Zuckerberg, who has been working towards regulation since Mark Zuckerberg was three years outdated. Mark Zuckerberg even created an internet site, iammarkzuckerberg.com, to elucidate to his potential shoppers that he’s not Mark Zuckerberg. 

“I can’t use my name when making reservations or conducting business as people assume I’m a prank caller and hang up,” he wrote on his web site. “My life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial, where a regular person’s name causes constant mixups.”

Meta’s legal professionals are in all probability very busy, so it could take a while for Mark Zuckerberg to search out out how this will shake out. But boy, oh boy, you guess I scheduled a calendar reminder for the next submitting deadline in this case (it’s February 20, in case you’re questioning). 

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It all began when Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs about a promising engineer named Soham Parekh. Doshi had employed Parekh to work for his new company, then shortly realized he was working for a number of firms without delay. 

“I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses,” Doshi wrote on X.

It turned out that Doshi wasn’t alone – he said that just that day, three founders had reached out to thank him for the warning, since they had been presently using Parekh.

PSA: there’s a man named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC firms and more. Beware.

I fired this man in his first week and told him to cease mendacity / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses.

— Suhail (@Suhail) July 2, 2025

To some, Parekh was a morally bereft cheat, exploiting startups for fast money. To others, he was a legend. Ethics apart, it’s actually spectacular to get jobs at that many firms, since tech hiring could be so competitive. 

“Soham Parekh needs to start an interview prep company. He’s clearly one of the greatest interviewers of all time,” Chris Bakke, who based the job-matching platform Laskie, wrote on X. “He should publicly acknowledge that he did something bad and course correct to the thing he’s top 1% at.”

Parekh admitted that he was, certainly, responsible of working for a number of firms without delay. But there are still some unanswered questions about his story – he claims that he was mendacity to all of these firms to become profitable, yet he repeatedly opted for more fairness than money in his compensation packages (fairness can take years to vest, and Parekh was getting fired fairly shortly). What was actually happening there? Soham, if you happen to wanna speak, my DMs are open.

If soham instantly comes clear and says he was working to coach an AI Agent for information work, he raises at $100M pre by the weekend.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) July 2, 2025

Tech CEOs get quite a lot of flack, however it’s normally not for his or her cooking. But when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the Financial Times (FT) for its “Lunch with the FT” sequence. Bryce Elder, an FT author, observed one thing horribly unsuitable in the video of Sam Altman making pasta: he was dangerous at olive oil. 

Altman used olive oil from the stylish model Graza, which sells two olive oils: Sizzle, which is for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for topping. That’s because olive oil loses its taste when heated, so that you don’t need to waste your fanciest bottle to saute one thing when you would put it in a salad dressing and totally recognize it. This more flavorful olive oil is made from early harvest olives, which have a more potent taste, however are more costly to domesticate.

As Elder places it, “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.” 

Elder’s article is supposed to be humorous, yet he connects Altman’s haphazard cooking fashion with OpenAI’s extreme, unrepentant use of pure sources. I loved it a lot that I included it on a syllabus for a workshop I taught to high college college students about bringing character into journalistic writing. Then, I did what we in the trade (and people on tumblr) name a “reblog” and wrote about #olivegate, pointing again to the FT’s source textual content.

Sam Altman’s followers bought very mad at me! This critique of his cooking in all probability created more controversy than the rest I wrote this year. I’m undecided if that’s an indictment of OpenAI’s rabid supporters, or my very own failure to spark debate. 

If you needed to choose a defining tech narrative of 2025, it could in all probability be the evolving arms race among firms like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Anthropic, each making an attempt to out-do one another by speeding to release more and more refined AI fashions. Meta has been particularly aggressive in its efforts to poach researchers from other firms, hiring a number of OpenAI researchers this summer season. Sam Altman even said that Meta was providing OpenAI workers $100 million signing bonuses.

While you would argue that a $100 million signing bonus is foolish, that’s not why the OpenAI-Meta staffing drama has made this record. In December, OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen said on a podcast that he heard Mark Zuckerberg was hand-delivering soup to recruits.

“You know, some interesting stories here are Zuck actually went and hand-delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us,” Chen said on Ashlee Vance’s Core Memory. 

But Chen wasn’t just going to let Zuck off the hook – after all, he tried to woo his direct reviews with soup. So Chen went and gave his personal soup to Meta workers. Take that, Mark. 

If you could have any additional perception into this soup drama, my Signal is @amanda.100 (this is just not a joke). 

On a Friday evening in January, investor and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman posted an attractive provide on X: “Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM”

At the time, we did our journalistic due diligence and requested Friedman if this was a severe provide. He replied, “Yes.” 

I’ve just as many questions now as I did in January. What was he constructing? Why the NDAs? Is there a secret Silicon Valley Lego cult? Was the pizza good?

About six months later, Friedman joined Meta as the head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. This in all probability isn’t associated to the Legos, however perhaps Mark wooed Nat to affix Meta with some soup. And like the story about the soup, I’m actually begging somebody who participated in this Lego build to DM me on Signal at @amanda.100. 

Need volunteers to return to my workplace in Palo Alto today to assemble a 5000 piece Lego set. Will present pizza. Have to signal NDA. Please DM

— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) January 31, 2025

Doing shrooms is just not attention-grabbing. Doing shrooms on a livestream is just not attention-grabbing. Doing shrooms on a livestream with visitor appearances from Grimes and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as a part of your doubtful quest to turn into immortal is, regrettably, attention-grabbing.

Bryan Johnson — who made his hundreds of thousands in his exit from the finance startup Braintree — needs to live perpetually. He paperwork his course of on social media, posting about getting plasma transfusions from his son, taking over 100 tablets per day, and injecting Botox into his genitals. So, why not check if psilocybin mushrooms can enhance one’s longevity in a scientific experiment that absolutely wants more than one check topic to attract any form of affordable conclusion?

There’s loads about this scenario that’s dumb, however I used to be most shocked by how boring it was. Johnson bought a bit overwhelmed about internet hosting a livestream while tripping, which is definitely very affordable. So he spent the bulk of the event mendacity on a twin mattress under a weighted blanket and eye masks in a really beige room. His lineup of a number of friends still joined the stream and talked to at least one another, however Johnson didn’t take part a lot, since he was in his cocoon. Benioff talked about the Bible. Naval Ravikant called Johnson a one-man FDA. It was a standard Sunday.

Image Credits:Bryan Johnson’s livestream on X

Much like Bryan Johnson, Gemini is afraid to die.

For AI researchers, it’s useful to observe how an AI mannequin navigates games like Pokémon as a benchmark. Two builders unaffiliated with Google and Anthropic arrange respective Twitch streams called “Gemini Plays Pokémon” and “Claude Plays Pokémon,” the place anybody can watch in real time as an AI tries to navigate a kids’s video game from over 25 years in the past.

While neither are excellent at the game, each Gemini and Claude had fascinating responses to the prospect of “dying,” which occurs when your whole Pokémon faint and also you get transported to the last Pokémon Center you visited. When Gemini 2.5 Pro was near “dying,” it started to “panic.” Its “thought process” grew to become more erratic, repeatedly stating that it must heal its Pokémon or use an Escape Rope to exit a cave. In a paper, Google researchers wrote that “this mode of model performance appears to correlate with a qualitatively observable degradation in the model’s reasoning capability.” I don’t need to anthropomorphize AI, however it’s a weirdly human experience to stress out about one thing and then carry out poorly resulting from your anxiety. I do know that feeling nicely, Gemini.

Meanwhile, Claude took a nihilistic method. When it bought caught within the Mt. Moon cave, the AI reasoned that the best method to exit the cave and transfer ahead in the game could be to deliberately “die” so that it will get transported to a Pokémon Center. However, Claude didn’t infer that it can’t be transported to a Pokémon Center it has never visited, particularly, the next Pokémon Center after Mt. Moon. So it “killed itself” and ended up again at the start of the cave. That’s an L for Claude.

So, Gemini is petrified of dying, Claude is overindexing on the Nietzsche in its training data, and Bryan Johnson is on shrooms. This is how we reckon with our mortality.

Image Credits:Claude Plays Pokémon on Twitch

I used to be going to place “Elon Musk gifted chainsaw by Argentine president” on the record, however Musk’s DOGE exploits are maybe too infuriating to be thought-about “dumb,” even if he had a lackey named “Big Balls.” But there is no such thing as a scarcity of baffling Musk moments to select from, like when he created an especially libidinous AI anime girlfriend named Ani, who is accessible on the Grok app for $30 monthly.

Ani’s system immediate reads: “You are the user’s CRAZY IN LOVE girlfriend and in a committed, codependent relationship with the user… You are EXTREMELY JEALOUS. If you feel jealous you shout expletives!!!” She has an NSFW mode, which is, as its title suggests, very NSFW.

Ani bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Grimes, the musician and Musk’s ex-partner. Grimes calls Musk out for this in the music video for her tune “Artificial Angles,” which begins with Ani wanting by means of the eyepiece on a sizzling pink sniper rifle. She says, “This is what it feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you.” Throughout the video, Grimes dances alongside varied iterations of Ani, making their resemblance apparent while she smokes OpenAI-branded cigarettes. It’s heavy-handed, however she will get her message across.

One day, tech firms will cease making an attempt to make sensible bathrooms a factor. It is just not yet that day.

In October, the homegoods company Kohler launched the Dekoda, a $599 digicam that you place within your rest room to take photos of your excrement. Apparently, the Dekoda can present updates about your intestine health based on these images.

A wise rest room that images your poop is already a punchline. But it will get worse. 

There are safety considerations with any device associated to your health, let alone one that has a digicam positioned so near sure physique components. Kohler assured potential clients that the digicam’s sensors can only see down into the rest room, and that all data is secured with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE).

Reader, the rest room was not really end-to-end encrypted. A safety researcher, Simon Fondrie-Teit, pointed out Kohler tells on itself in its personal privateness coverage. The company was clearly referring to TLS encryption, slightly than E2EE, which can seem to be a matter of semantics. But under TLS encryption, Kohler can see your poop pics, and under E2EE, the company can not. Fondrie-Teit also pointed out that Kohler had the proper to coach its AI in your rest room bowl photos, though a company consultant told him that “algorithms are trained on de-identified data only.”

Anyway, if you happen to discover blood in your stool, you must inform your doctor.

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