⚙️ The Machine
How we find the dumbest bets.
- Every hour the machine pulls the newest events from the public Polymarket and Kalshi APIs, only the ones created since its last visit. Nothing is ever judged twice.
- Sports and crypto are thrown out before anyone looks. They are dumb by nature, and they'd win every day.
- Claude Haiku judges the rest in a cheap batch (usually done in minutes), scoring each bet from 0 to 100 on the dumb-o-meter. A bet is dumb when the premise is absurd, not just when the odds are long.
- Anything scoring 70+ enters the Hall of Shame, but only if the crowd agrees (YES at 25% or less) and there's real money in it ($1.0K+ traded). It gets a verdict and a roast, and subscribers get an alert.
- Prices refresh every hour and price histories daily, which feed the track record. When a bet closes it moves to the Graveyard.
95–100Impossible. Flat Earth, the Second Coming on a deadline.
80–94Absurd on the clock. Alien disclosure, cryptids, Moon landings in weeks.
70–79Fan fiction with a sliver of hope.
<70Merely unlikely. Not our problem.
16,815bets judged
35in the Hall of Shame
$0.13total AI bill
1people on alert
Machine log
| Run | When | Fetched | Dropped | New | Judged | Dumb found | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #10 | 39 min ago | 135 | 135 | 0 | 0 | 0 | newest scan: 135 new on Polymarket since #1289799, 135 sports/crypto dropped, 0 queued kalshi scan: 0 new events, 0 sports/crypto dropped, 0 queued refreshed prices of 68 Polymarket + 10 Kalshi dumb bets hid 1 duplicate bets (same artwork) updated price history for 1 bets rendered 1 share images |
| #9 | 1 h ago | 285 | 285 | 0 | 0 | 0 | newest scan: 285 new on Polymarket since #1289475, 285 sports/crypto dropped, 0 queued refreshed prices of 68 dumb bets hid 2 duplicate bets (same artwork) |
| #8 | 2 h ago | 39 | 39 | 0 | 0 | 0 | newest scan: 39 new on Polymarket since #1289427, 39 sports/crypto dropped, 0 queued refreshed prices of 68 dumb bets |
| #7 | 2 h ago | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2000 | 28 | batch batch ingested: 2000 scored, 28 new dumb bets alerted 0 subscribers about 318 new dumb bets |
| #6 | 2 h ago | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| #5 | 2 h ago | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2092 | 39 | batch batch ingested: 2092 scored, 39 new dumb bets notifications initialised (266 seed bets marked as already announced) |
| #4 | 2 h ago | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| #3 | 2 h ago | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| #2 | 2 h ago | 21337 | 17245 | 65 | 0 | 0 | backfill walked 21337 open events, 17245 sports/crypto dropped, 65 new batch batch submitted with 2092 events in 53 requests |
| #1 | 2 h ago | 21342 | 17315 | 4027 | 0 | 0 | backfill walked 21342 open events, 17315 sports/crypto dropped, 4027 new batch batch submitted with 2000 events in 50 requests |
For robots and nerds
/api/bets.json is the live list as JSON (CORS open, ?sort=newest&limit=50). /feed.xml is the RSS feed of fresh finds. Plug it into Slack, Discord or your fridge.