The Onion
Article
The Onion is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 29, 2024 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Troll source here is literally the Onion”; “The Onion, in its twenty year retrospective for the doomed comestible”. It most often appears alongside Israel, Jesus Christ, New York Times.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 29, 2024
- Last seen: January 16, 2026
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Israel (2 shared issues)
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- Jesus Christ (2 shared issues)
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- New York Times (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- @ElytraMithra (1 shared issues)
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- Aaron (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adams (1 shared issues)
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- Adderall (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AK-47 (1 shared issues)
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- Alec Stapp (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Troll source here is literally the Onion, see here. I don’t know what happened to this one, and Google gives very different (but consistently wrong) answers each time you ask it. People have been taking this as a parable about the limits of AI, but Claude and GPT wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes. Some AI people I know think this is probably a result of Google putting impossible demands on their AI in terms of how it deals with search/cache/memory. Still, it’s surprising that they let it out of testing in this state.
Okay, “I am cleverer than everyone else”, got it. His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”. The Onion, in its twenty year retrospective for the doomed comestible, called it a frustrated groping towards meal replacements like Soylent or Huel, long before the existence of a culture nerdy enough to support them. Adams himself, looking back from several years’ distance, was even more scathing: “the mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.”