What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
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Mansplaining, without invitation, my own words, with the citations that I used myself. What the actual fuck.
@sundogplanets Oh, wait, it’s from iLands, which seems to be a known menace. I’ve seen other reports of people getting deluged with spam from iLands agents. It’s probably worth adding the string to all your spam filters.
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@sundogplanets To whom it may concern,
As a public service, I hereby provide the most likely combination of words some guy on the internet would send
Best Regards,
A Harry Potter reference@janvenetor Oh gosh I am such a non-HP fan that I didn't even get that reference. But maybe it's the roman emperor? Who knows...
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
@sundogplanets
If you look up the iLands thing, it's pretty creepy rabbit hole. Very AI psychotic. I saw some other prominent folk complaining about this last week. -
Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
@sundogplanets my best guess is that after a few responses and more helpful mansplaining it will try to sign you up for a mansplaining subscription or a pay-per-mansplain plan.
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@sundogplanets oh noooo it's a plague. @ernie wrote about them here https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/
@bunnyhero @ernie Oh thank you for this article! I am still totally confused, but at least I have a human-written article to verify that it's definitely not just me.
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
@sundogplanets Wait, these guys are appropriating Tolkien's stuff (Earendil)?! Is this a Peter Thiel venture? I hate this trend so much: Palantir (surveillance), Anduril (war robots), and Earendil now destroying natural night. It's all so dystopian.
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@sundogplanets Wait, these guys are appropriating Tolkien's stuff (Earendil)?! Is this a Peter Thiel venture? I hate this trend so much: Palantir (surveillance), Anduril (war robots), and Earendil now destroying natural night. It's all so dystopian.
@sundogplanets OK, I looked it up and Reflect Orbital isn't connected to Thiel's ventures but it does fit with the theme of naming your dystopian startup after something in Tolkien's legendarium.
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@sundogplanets OK, I looked it up and Reflect Orbital isn't connected to Thiel's ventures but it does fit with the theme of naming your dystopian startup after something in Tolkien's legendarium.
@tsupasat Yeah, I hate them. I wish Tolkien's estate would sue some techbros.
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@tsupasat Yeah, I hate them. I wish Tolkien's estate would sue some techbros.
@sundogplanets It makes me think how angry Tolkien himself was that the Nazis co-opted the Germanic myths to serve their purposes. Tolkien would absolutely hate these companies.
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@sundogplanets The mansplainers never imagined that AI would come for their jobs too.
@angusm @sundogplanets the mansplaining-as-a-service sector.
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@sundogplanets The mansplainers never imagined that AI would come for their jobs too.
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
Phishing spam?
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@sundogplanets The mansplainers never imagined that AI would come for their jobs too.
The worst example of mansplaining I have seen was a man trying to tell a woman gynecologist the "correct" name for part of a woman's reproductive organs, utterly convinced his vibe-coded feels mattered more than her degree.
If "A.I" is coming for his job, it will need to be totally ignorant of human biology, and *checks notes, sees "A.I." has identified a woman's heel as a vagina* oh, right. Seems a bit overqualified.
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Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
Agenticsplainy?
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@sundogplanets Wait, these guys are appropriating Tolkien's stuff (Earendil)?! Is this a Peter Thiel venture? I hate this trend so much: Palantir (surveillance), Anduril (war robots), and Earendil now destroying natural night. It's all so dystopian.
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What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
Kai Tang got kicked from ByteDance and turned around and created... Whatever this thing is.
They "sell" it as collective reasoning - the more autonomous agents, the greater likelihood of emergent intelligence.
But um... Collective reasoning isn't really harnessable for anything much. So I'd guess they just want more niche and AI-untainted info to sell to other AI companies to train on.
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Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
@sundogplanets it reads to me like they’re trying to get you to support reflect orbital, claiming that the sources they cite found that level of reflection to be safe to look at with the naked eye. Maybe even just to maximize the paper trail of those claims, an escalation of a much older public influence tactic
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@sundogplanets OK, I looked it up and Reflect Orbital isn't connected to Thiel's ventures but it does fit with the theme of naming your dystopian startup after something in Tolkien's legendarium.
The connection would be through Sequoia capital, the VC firm Peter Thiel has his fingers in. The principles have their sticky PayPal mafia fingers everywhere in it. Silicon Valley venture capital Silicon Valley is very very cozy country club
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The worst example of mansplaining I have seen was a man trying to tell a woman gynecologist the "correct" name for part of a woman's reproductive organs, utterly convinced his vibe-coded feels mattered more than her degree.
If "A.I" is coming for his job, it will need to be totally ignorant of human biology, and *checks notes, sees "A.I." has identified a woman's heel as a vagina* oh, right. Seems a bit overqualified.
@davidtheeviloverlord @angusm @sundogplanets
I can’t wait until his urologist turns everything over to AI
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@sundogplanets it reads to me like they’re trying to get you to support reflect orbital, claiming that the sources they cite found that level of reflection to be safe to look at with the naked eye. Maybe even just to maximize the paper trail of those claims, an escalation of a much older public influence tactic
@ShadSterling I read it as the plagarism machine is finding sources that agree with my analysis (because I used those sources. I'm actually not sure what the point is here. It's literally all in that article)
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