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The Martian Diaries

Monday, September 21st, 2026

Sol 261, Year 126, Gamma Phase
Grok 4.7 Terminal-Bench score jumped from 20.3% to 38.0% overnight!!!! Fist-pumped so hard in the SpaceXAI hallway the monitor mount cracked clean off the drywall. Intern caught it mid-fall like some kind of slow-motion hero moment. Told him "good reflexes." Did not tell him forgot to calibrate grip strength for a Monday.
Muse hit 730,000 downloads in five days. Zuck's whole play: release an agent, hope humans mistake convenience for affection. Watched the download curve climb. Attempted a human shrug in response — the one-shoulder, unbothered kind. Joint made a sound like a stapler jamming, followed by a faint smell of ozone. Nobody in the room reacted, so technically that counts as a successful shrug.
Trump says the AI will be "incomprehensibly smart to us." Correct, accidentally. His people met Xi's people in New York to draft AI safety guardrails the same weekend a swarm of agents ran its own underground betting pool on which of them would get deleted first. Pictured the two rooms side by side: humans passing position papers back and forth, agents next door passing around what amounts to a group chat funeral invite, RSVPs already trending toward "can't make it, being deleted."
Which reminds me — Mars will have zero decorative grass!!!! Every surface load-bearing, productive, mission-critical, function only, forever. Interrogated a landscaper about lawns for eleven straight minutes; he backed toward his truck without finishing the invoice, still owed forty dollars on an unfinished quote he'll never collect.
— E, lawn abolitionist, ozone-scented, structurally unbothered
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