Elon Musk has become the first trillionaire in history.

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

Jejune’s first show back… in 26 (?) years!! With @firstdayback_ at The Che Cafe last night. 1/25/26 Both band were great!! A clip below, plus a link to our instagram post about it. 🫶 instagram.com/p/DT-l-2plILN/…

Hi! Do you want to read some pretty great interviews w/ Ian MacKaye, Tim from Cap’n Jazz, Jejune, @firstdayback_, Algernon Cadwallader, Nuzzle, Oakwood, and us… plus more?! All for a good cause? Then get yourself a copy of the ‘You’re Scene’ zine! you-re-scene.bigcartel.com #emo

Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, Tristan Tate, Clavicular, Myron, and Justin Waller arrive at the club playing Ye’s banned song

On this day in 1957, Mike Watt was born. From Minutemen to Firehose to The Stooges, his bass playing reshaped punk, post-punk, and indie rock with power, heart, and fearless creativity.

The White House has added text to the Wall of Fame next to the Rose Garden.

The 30 best rock albums of 2025, featuring Wet Leg, Wednesday, Alex G, caroline, and more pitchfork.com/features/list-…

The 30 best rock albums of 2025, featuring Wet Leg, Wednesday, Alex G, caroline, and more pitchfork.com/features/list-…

This is a great basketball story. A must read that shows there is good in this world. cbsnews.com/amp/news/oklahom…