2024

This month I want to highlight an article, Social Engineering Game Exposes AI’s Achilles’ Heel, by PYMNTS. This article details a fascinating social engineering game where users paid to send an AI game bot (Freya) instructions, creating a pool of funds, with the AI explicitly instructed to never transfer any of the funds out. Users were…

This month I want to highlight a video, The Problem with Time & Timezones, by Tom Scott on the Computerphile YouTube channel. This video is 10 years old, and a fun descent into madness explaining how programmers might deal with the complexities of earth’s time zones. The reason this video is relevant once again is because…

This month I want to highlight an article, Crypto Brothers Front-Ran the Front-Runners by Matt Levine. Matt’s newsletter, Money Stuff, covers a plethora of topics from the financial industry point of view (free to subscribe, highly recommend, not a paid endorsement). Occasionally a financial topic touches on technology in very interesting ways. In May, 2024, the Justice…

This month I want to highlight an article, Things You Should Never Do, Part I, by Joel Spolsky. The author describes why rewriting code is often a bad idea, with real-world examples of the practice causing businesses to fail. This article is over 20 years old, and yet the advice remains as valid today as…

This month I want to highlight an article, Planning Vs. Action: Why a Product Team’s Best Bet Is Real-world Evidence, by Todd Lankford. The author describes common product prioritization weaknesses, namely that the best laid plans don’t survive contact with real-world complexities. While the author describes familiar pitfalls, the author’s wisdom is in his three…

This month I want to highlight an article, The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down, by Brian Merchant. The author gives a brief history of Luddites in 19th century England and describes how they were demonized as anti-progress, when instead Luddites were focused on responsible progress. Past technological revolutions deeply parallel today’s AI explosion. Today, generative…

This month I want to highlight an article, Dread Hunger: A Post Mortem, by Alex Quick. Dread Hunger was an indie social deduction game that became a viral hit in the Chinese market. Dread Hunger was created and run by a handful of developers; they were not staffed to appropriately handle the responsibilities that come…

This month I want to highlight a video, Debunking Devin: “First AI Software Engineer” Upwork lie exposed!, by the Internet of Bugs YouTube channel. Devin was announced on March 12th, and was pitched as the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. This video deconstructs a Devin demo and describes in meticulous detail how Devin…

This month I want to highlight an article, Turning Goals into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms, by Jim Collins. Catalytic Mechanisms empower people closest to the work to drive meaningful, outsized outcomes, at the expense of leadership control. Catalytic Mechanisms create an environment that drives innovation and change, as opposed to the typical route of…

This month I want to highlight an article, ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything, by Cory Doctorow. Cory coined the term ‘enshittification’ in 2023 to describe how online platform businesses start awesome to attract customers, degrade over time as they chase durable business value, and eventually become devoid of customer obsession. As we mature alongside…