Thanks to the New York Times for alerting me to something more odious than a yacht: a yacht with a snow room.

As the changing climate wreaks havoc on the four seasons, some people with means are fashioning their own. They are equipping their homes (and even their yachts) with indoor winter wonderlands, aided by companies like the Italian snowmaker TechnoAlpin, which blasts snow onto ski mountains, and an American company, the Spa Butler.

I’m sure these snow rooms are lovely places to relax and wait for the lower classes to come with the pitchforks.

As a pilot, Ryan Pettit understands that having a single point of failure in an aircraft would be a very bad thing. Through hard experience, he’s now preaching the perils of a single point of failure in digital systems as well.

No aircraft I have ever flown is permitted a single point of failure: every critical system carries a backup, and often a backup for the backup, so that no single fault can bring the plane down. Redundancy is the first principle of any system that cannot be allowed to fail. And yet millions of people carry their entire financial and personal identity on exactly one such lock, and think nothing of it.

This is a horrifying read, one that has me reassessing my own digital security.

Way back in the mid-2000s, Neil Strauss’s book “The Game” shone a spotlight on the so-called seduction community. One of the book’s main characters was pickup artist Erik von Markovik, who goes by “Mystery”. Uncharitably, I would describe Mystery as a creep who has made both a life and a business of manipulating women.

In the year of our LLMs, 2026, it seems Mystery is now the one being manipulated. Specifically, his A.I. girlfriend Miss Shira Always has really messed with his head. It’s a disturbing situation, but the upside is that only one human being will be hurt by this “relationship”.

Previously in A.I. paramours: Something to Fear and Embrace

Lawyers are in trouble for citing imaginary legal cases.

A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.

Two of the lawyers have been barred for two years from appearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi for their conduct, while all four were removed from the case and fined.

It’s not the first time. A.I. can provide useful first drafts, but you really, really need a human checking its work.

Author Steven Rosenbaum used A.I. to assist him in writing a book about artificial intelligence. That’s natural enough. Perhaps so too is the fact that the final product contains numerous quotes A.I. hallucinated. Most horrifying of all is the book’s name: “The Future of Truth”. Let’s hope this isn’t it.

Amazon has introduced targets requiring their developer workforce to use A.I. tools, and tracking usage on internal leaderboards. The fine readers of One Foot Tsunami can surely guess what happened next:

Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to run unnecessary, low-value tasks — not because the work needs doing, but because the activity inflates their scores on a company leaderboard tracking artificial intelligence usage.

Yes, workers started tokenmaxxing.

Previously in -maxxing: At Least AC/DC Would Be Proud

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick writes about how the existence of A.I. detection tools is turning students into worse writers. The particular concern here is not students using A.I. to avoid writing things themselves. Instead, the problem is talented writers being forced to dumb down their writing as a defensive act. Masnick opens with this awful example:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

Revising writing to avoid false positives from A.I. detectors is just an outrageously poor use of time.

The purpose of school isn’t to have a bunch of completed assignments, but rather to learn. The creators of an A.I. agent named “Einstein” which does your homework for you seem to have missed that.

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

Yup, horses are all just out there living their best lives. Pursuing their passions. Knitting. Writing the great American novel. Playing baseball.

What?

Today in out-of-touch billionaires, it’s OpenAI’s Sam Altman talking about the resource usage of A.I.:

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he said. “It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart.”

Ah, sure, yes, that’s a very interesting comparison. I wonder exactly how the numbers shake out vis-à-vis the energy used in training A.I. vs. raising a child to adulthood. I also wonder if Sam Altman realizes that “training humans” is rather the point of our existence.