zerotolerance

Outbound is over. RIP

I have no faith that this would have any impact whatsoever. The thing is, it also isn't my problem. It has absolutely ruined outbound sales. I'll never answer my phone or accept a text from anyone not in my contacts. I basically don't read email. I'm unreachable to people who I'm not expecting outreach from. And I'm fine with it, only because I'm not the one trying to make a living cold calling people.

When the courts have no power or are complicit then legality is irrelevant.

We've gone fully offline with our code and artifact storage. No need for a social network with vestigial low-quality dev tooling. Our devs don't even need a web UI. Bare git repos on SSH are plenty for agent workflows.

Now that we don't have to worry about people and weak git skill getting in the way, agents can use git without needing all the emergent centralization.

Meta glasses are already officially banned in our office and in front of our laptops.

On the other hand here we have an amateur that could accelerate their learning and experimentation faster than ever possible before.

Feels like a tag-along solution looking for a problem.

How conditioned am I? I thought the title was a play on "em dashes" and when I got into the second paragraph and saw em dashes I immediately flipped to assuming I was reading a story from some never-lived life manifest by a diffusion model. I don't think it is. But that is irrelevant. The point is if our content cannot avoid or ultimately pass the sniff test it won't have the impact we hope.

Management consultants exist as a liability shift. Boards or exec management pay them money, the consultants interview them in private, the consultants give them their ideas back. This provides two things: cover, and political lubricant. Worth every penny when the alternative is completely dysfunctional management teams, or when it is your reputation or job on the line.

Because they're valueless and trivial to produce, but trends are gonna trend.

Another outcome is that none win.

Experimenting with your "scalability?" mean?

I just don't like the idea of an AI company saying that they've added a secret signature that isn't verifiable by any third party to all responses. And we're supposed to both take them at their word, and feed them all the content we want to check so they can continue gobbling up a bunch of fresh works. What is to stop them from saying "Oh yeah, that is ours. We signed it. Trust us."

The obvious conflicts here are wild.

This is an excellent question and the answer is maybe not too surprising. Where mechanics buy their own tools and nurses have little tool purchasing power, developers produce machinery that is costly to change and if they struggle to use something (activation risk) then we can't get that lock-in to stick. DevRel isn't for the individuals, it is for influencing the aggregate so they get their companies stuck with the solution.

I cannot consume any content anywhere without being slapped in the face with an unending stream of OpenAI ads and paid plugs. I'd guess most of that money is going directly to Google and Facebook.

It is AI generated.

Should have renamed the company xGoodwill.

Your comment could have been, "I've never agreed with the design philosophy behind Go." I've always appreciated the apparent Go design philosophy and feel like it most matches my lessons learned from 20 years in software. Feature minimalism is a feature for languages targeting organizations with thousands of programmers. If by 21st century language, you mean one that has become unrecognizable through multiple generations of fashionable feature and ecosystem thrash then I'm all for Go not becoming a 21st century language. Language should be boring if the target environment is large teams with varied skill sets. Plain speak. Low jumpy behavior. No cream, no syntactic sugar. Get the job done.

I feel like this post and most (if not all these comments) are an ad.

The other "real reason" is the solution will end up looking like a super cookie and enable machine-level tracking across every app.

The best way to protect citizens of the UK from material online might be to sever their international network connections.

"will" being the operative word here. High school level Econ makes no promises about WHEN prices adjust. Price setting is a whole science highly susceptible to collusion pressure. Prices generally drop only when the main competition point is price (commodities). In this case the main issue is that AI is commoditizing many if not all types of labor AND product. In a world where nothing has value how does anything get done?

The children are a distraction. They're a secondary justification. Don't lose the plot. This law serves only one outcome: enablement of further authoritarianism.

We do not have a supply side issue. We have a worsening discovery and discoverability issue. People publish on platforms because that is where they might be FOUND / or pushed by the algorithm into the feeds of others. RSS is subscription, not discovery. Search / suggest / IR requires scaled centralization. Then there are the network effects and activation cost to moving.

Yeah, sure we need this. The time for it was back in like 2005 at the latest.

The real issue is more existential. Right now we're about to lose the war that requires digital connectivity to live and use modern services. We're going to lose cash payments. If you're going to fight a fight, that is where the effort matters in 2026.

"Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.

They're an ads company now. Not a store. Not a device vendor.

Yes. Right wing.

There is a lot of "my" floating around in this article. I always love getting peeks into experiences with this sort of thing, but I think the "mys" highlight something I've seen every day. These agents are really great at bespoke personal flows that build up a TON of almost personal tribal knowledge about how things get done if there is any consistency to those flows at all. Doing this in larger theaters is much more difficult because tribal knowledge is death for larger teams. It drives up the cost of everything which is why individuals or extremely new small teams feel so much more productive. Everything is new here and consistency doesn't matter yet.

Apple has some of my favorite vulnerabilities, most notably GOTO Fail: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html

But today people can just vibe code their own sudo "with blackjack and hookers!"

/s

Really though, it is remarkable just how high we've built this towering house of cards on the selfless works of individuals. The geek in me immediately begins meditating on OSS funding mechanisms I've seen in the past, and what might work today. Then I remember that I don't believe it can work, but hope desperately that people like Todd can keep paying rent and continue getting some satisfaction from the efforts.