AI‑crafted Spam Emails Masquerade as Human Outreach
My email inbox is filling up with AI-generated emails: an example. I get an email from seemingly a human, asking for a link insertion to promote a company that is their client. Except this is not from a human. It's with AI/automated: the domain is an automated marketing co. https://t.co/jndAFTv32V
AI Audits Reveal Real Errors, but Also Hallucinate
I used AI to double check my annual closing statements of my company - fed it bank statements, accounting statements etc, parallel to my accountant going thru it as well. It found some good stuff, but also hallucinated a bunch of...
Clipping Videos Profits Agencies, Hidden Influencers, Not Others
My two cents is that "clipping" (creating short clips from videos, then paying accounts to post them as it was organic, and get views on it) is amazingly good business for agencies selling this service, OK business for influencers doing...
Publicly Seeking Feedback Marks Elite Engineers
There are few things as lame as dunking on an engineer asking for feedback, esp in public. Honestly, a dev that has asked for feedback *once* in their lives, *in public* is already top 1% or above. Doing it regularly is...
Supply Chain Attacks Surge; Explore Mitigation Strategies and Vendors
Supply chain attacks are happening left and right with npm, PyPI and so many other places. It seems to be getting worse, everyone agrees. But what can you do about it? Some thoughts on possible approaches (all have tradeoffs). What did I...
SRE Wasn't Google Search’s Silver Bullet
We like to say there is "no silver bullet" in software engineering: a technology or management technique that by itself promises an order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." So tell, me what was SRE for Google Search...
Europe’s Career Ladder Forces Engineers Into Unwanted Management
A good read and unfortunately rings true for too many EU-HQ'd companies: "the expectation that in Europe the transition from individual contributor to a managerial track is the "natural" career progression" For a standout tech company you want SOME eng > managers...
Google Cloud Run Provides Built‑In Zonal Redundancy
OK this is a superb characteristic of Google Cloud Run I just learned Building zonal redundancy is a bunch of work… when a platform offers it, it’s worth paying attention to (don’t know of many platforms that do) Thanks @steren
Founder’s AI‑generated Pitch Fabricates Credentials, Still Promises Product
Founder outsourced reachouts to AI. Sent me a fully AI + hallucinated message (claiming eg I invested in Retool, Notion, GitLab - all false) and closed with “The product is real. Public beta in a few weeks. I just need...
Coinbase Outage Not Caused by Non‑technical Code Releases
When the CEO of Coinbase said "non-technical teams are now shipping production code" I assume it's things like marketing now makes copy updates to a small site w/o a dev or similar. But now half the internet thinks this caused the...
Paid Trial Days Boost Hiring Fit and Retention
It’s hard to be mad at @artman or @linear for this :) Also, Linear has a very unique hiring process: it includes doing the work as paid trial days. Lots of time invested on both sides, but in return...
AI Adoption Mirrors Cloud: Hidden Costs and Integration Hurdles
So many things about AI infra and AI adoption today reminds me of Cloud adoption in the 2010s. Cloud is assumed to decrease business costs but later can start to actually increase it; has a years-long adoption + integration curve; the...
Coinbase Outage Exposes Risky AWS Reliance and Sloppy Deployments
Unfortunate optics for Coinbase to have an hours-long outage when customers could not trade, a few days after their CEO said how non-technical teams are shipping code to production. This outage is because Coinbase seems to have a hard dependency on...
Coinbase Managers Doing IC Work Can't Boost Falling Trading Revenue
Remind me how every manager at Coinbase doing IC work, some with 15+reports will help generate more revenue, when revenue is fully dependent on trading volume, and trading volume is falling? unless these managers code up new businesses not dependent on...
AI Won’t Kill Software or SaaS—Demand Is Rising
Remember these predictions? “Software engineering will be dead because of AI” —> we’re seeing more demand for sw engineering (good part thanks to AI) “SaaS will be dead because of AI” —> SaaS businesses growing massively (in part thanks to AI) Be careful...