goopthink

Steam, not iron.

I ordered it because when one superpower fails you, eventually you have to try the other one before they eventually ruin the thing that was working perfectly well before they tried to improve it in order to make enough money to be a trio of planets.

When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”

Looks like the site got hit by the CVE-2026-26980 exploit right shortly before I posted this. This was helpful in identifying the malicious code that was added to the footer of every page, thank you!

OP/author here! Apologies about the malware and captcha. It looks like my site was exploited by CVE-2026-26980 affecting all Ghost sites pre v6.19 [1][2] An API key was hijacked to inject malicious JS into every page that looks like a cloudflare captcha; it seems that the JS only targeted windows users, so I didn't catch it before I shared the post widely.

The site has been upgraded to 6.44 to close the vulnerability, I rotated every API key and account credential, and both manually and programmatically scrubbed every instance I could find of the code injection across the database. I think we're clear now!

Sorry to anyone caught by this and thank you to folks for flagging it (and thanks to the HN team for letting me follow up on this after comments were closed). I'm seriously mortified. X_X

[1] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/security/advisories/GHSA-w... [2] https://www.securityweek.com/ghost-cms-vulnerability-exploit...

Agreed!

“[Companies with a good trajectory] give your resume (and career) a pedigree and an opportunity to work alongside some of the top talent or top operational structures in an industry. They also offer great paychecks that compensate for whatever issues may be present.”

Companies with a good trajectory can be awful to work for but their trajectory — and subsequently their ability to allocate value (pay, headcount, interesting challenges) to teams to make them more competitive — in my view compensates for whatever drawbacks come from them. There is some benefit to working for them. For a bad company, there is often little explicit value for working there unless you’re personally passionate about the work/industry or you need a job.

Said differently: a good company delivers value to you. In a bad company, you have to drag personal value out.

A quick reminder to all commentators that in addition to Turbotax and Quickbooks, Intuit also owns MailChimp for (nowadays pretty broad) marketing, CreditKarma for your credit scores/analysis (and pitching you credit cards), and professional enterprise tax prep software. There’s a lot of red-queening happening in AI for marketing and financial assessment software. Individual tax prep, maybe not as much?

An interesting takeaway is that heretofore most of that advances have been not from “invention” but from a breadth of visibility. LLMs have been able to be “creative” because of the volume of work that they cover and can draw lines and associations between, not in discovering things that did not exist previously (though an argument can be made that something like AlphaFold was “discovering” and “intuiting” associations that were not explicit anywhere previously, uniquely found by the AI… but I’d argue back something about the bitter lesson and we’d go on for more than a few threads).

Somewhat ironic then, to not make this more explicit in an article about solving a combinatorial problem.

“I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards”… only to discover that problem was the managers and workflows designed for their legibility (not engineers), not the technology or software itself, and that the tech itself could be rebuilt in a weekend nowadays?

Somewhat buried in the post — “focus”.

The way people use AI is the opposite of focus. It’s throw as much as you can against the wall because it is fast and cheap and possible. It is peanut buttering. Companies today mandate AI use so indiscriminately that you might as well call it a comparative disadvantage. It’s not that the AI is bad, but that people haven’t figured out that the core competency of an organization is focus and coordination to achieve a goal, and that victory is external — users, customers. But AI is used to unfocus, to spread, and to meet internal goals - build more, etc. The challenge was never writing more code or creating more content (all of which is ultimately a long tail of debt that needs to be cleaned up and managed by someone else), which can be done cheaply enough with other paths. It was figuring out what is worth doing, and aligning everyone around that. So in a sense, I welcome company AI mandates today because they are so misdirected as to make “doing things they inefficient way they were done before” a relative advantage.

As a recipient.

- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)

- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.

- Priority inbox rules seem reset

- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected

Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...

Https://sharedphysics.com

Https://errorstates.com

This. I encouraged my team to use a templated (standardized) ADR for any big decisions that don’t have an obvious answer or complete consensus and it had reduced the second guessing and relitigation of decisions to nearly zero. It also gave is a good snapshot of where we were when we made that call so historic decisions weren’t disparaged.

No disagreement, I think developer augmentation is an amazing productization of LLMs, and will likely be better at converting enterprises so paying customers.

But OpenAI has the best brand recognition and the largest user base, and they have the core tech powering all of this. Whats the number on “tons” of customers, given that these VSCode-spinoff/plugin GPT wrappers are sprouting around like mushrooms after a rain?

If this is a build-vs-buy decision, $3 billion? Is that worth 1/3rd of the money in the bank when they’re burning cash at insane rates just running servers, and the rest of the $30b fundraise is tenuous and there may not be a followup? I’m skeptical of the financial decision here.

Is $3 billion the right price? That might be what Windsurf is being valued at (cue the “selling to willing buyers at currently fair market prices” meme), but that’s like saying “it would cost OpenAI more than $3b to staff from zero, build a competitor, and acquire a comparable volume of paying users” … and that feels like an insane statement given the implications therein?

Especially given that Windsurf (and I think Cursor too) is a VSCode fork and OpenAI is cozy enough with Microsoft? It’s not even a zero to one build.

Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor? (Serious question).

OpenAI is a technology company constantly in search of productization (ChatGPT, Sora, Dall-e), and they’ve been really good at creating product interest that converts to acquisition. An IDE is much more complex than a chat app, but given their literal billions of dollars and familiarity with developer tooling, this is a down-stack build that they could dogfood off their own tech. And especially given that some of these tools were built by tiny teams (Cursor is what, 10 people?), is this like Google and Facebook’s implicit admission that they can’t “build and grow” anymore, and need to turn to acquisitions to fuel growth?

To be fair, this is already a very real and annoying problem for unfortunately named folks, predating any DOGE work: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...

In 1964, Joe Weizenbaum created a chatbot called "Eliza" based on pattern matching and repeating back to users what they said. "He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program." People are notorious for anthropomorphizing and attributing to things attributes (including human-like attributes) that they do not possess. [1,2] LLMs are a "statistical next token predictor" by their design. The discovery that coherent and interesting communications are relatively easily statistically modeled and reconstructed if given enough computing power and corpus of training data does not therefore imply that these programs have latent thinking and understanding capabilities.

Just the opposite: it calls into question if _we_ have thinking and understanding capabilities or if we are complicated stochastic parrots. [3] The best probing of these questions is done at the limits of comprehension and with unique and previously unseen information. I.e., how do you comprehend and process to previously unseen/unfelt/not-understood qualia? Not about how you deal with the mundanity of reactions between people (which are somewhat trivial to describe and model). [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism [3] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/sketchbook/is-my-toddler-a-s... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

ACDSee

I also work in healthtech, and nearly every vendor we’ve evaluated in the last 12 months has tacked on ChatGPT onto their feature set as an “AI” improvement. Some of the newer startup vendors are entirely prompt engineering with a fancy UI. We’ve passed on most of these but not all. And these companies have clients, real world case studies. It’s not just not very far away, it is actively here.

I tried it a few months ago and most of the articles it linked me to or suggested were paywalled, each with their own subscriptions. In Apple News, you pay one subscription and get all of them unlocked. It was a no-brainer which reader to use.

But also:

He has a deep understanding of Twilio’s business, operations and culture, having most recently served as President of Twilio Communications, and previously as Twilio’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.

“The Silent Transformations” by RANÇOIS JULLIEN tackles this head on by highlighting western thought’s roots in ancient Greek concepts of determined forms of being and Aristotilian logic, compared against the fluidity of non-Western thought and emphasis of change over time from ancient Chinese philosophy.

To put it glibly, the Ship of Theseus problem goes away when you stop thinking of identity as discrete points and instead as a process of change and movement through time. I.e., We are not the same people we were as children, and that’s okay. Or Emerson: “I contain multitudes.”

Hiring for top talent is overrated when most of the services/products offered are pretty straightforward technical implementations. For most of the companies, what's need is competent engineers, good management, and exceptional sales/growth teams. Top tier hiring for engineers in commodified businesses where engineering isn't the market differentiator is a quick start down the path of lighting money on fire.

https://archive.ph/gLxWV

Thanks, and that’s an interesting idea! What do you mean when you say economic framework? I’ve been wary of economic models because they tend to oversimplify and become “confidence artifacts”, so I’ve thought of this more as a toolset for thinking through problems (meant to add some templates for putting it into practice but it was getting quite long, maybe next post!). Looking into “Product Flow”, any other framework examples to look at?

At my last company, this was so common and painful that towards the end of my tenure we started using a “No” roadmap, which was a list of things we would explicitly not do. Shooting down an idea is hard but sometimes people would go around and try to get a team working on it anyway as hidden work.

“When Everything Is Important and Nothing Is Getting Done” -> https://sharedphysics.com/everything-is-important/

Traditional prioritization is a broken process for most people.

I've worked in a company where this was the explicit hiring strategy pursued by new leadership. Two different leaders came in from two different companies (both of which had been acquired and were now seeing a lot of turnover).

In the first case, the new leadership was outside of my department but they were pressuring me as the hiring manager for a role to bring on their people, who "were known 'good' folks". When I interviewed them, the whole interviewing team agreed not to hire them because their skill set may have been good for the company they were at but a complete mismatch for the problems we had. While we didn't ultimately hire them, there was a lot of pressure and lobbying to do so.

In the second case, the new leadership stepped in as head of the department/unit I was running. They took a look at the team we had and our current operating patterns, and decided that it would be faster to replace the team with new people who fit their existing operational model than to transition the existing team over to a new way of working. No one was fired, but it was a "either they fit in with the new model, they quit on their own, or they get performance-reviewed out". The new leader explicitly said that when doing rapid turnarounds, it was easier to bring in a full transplant of their former team than to figure out new patterns of leader-employee collaboration (Not unlike Twitter right now, I'd guess). While I was still a hiring manager for the role, the final approval for a candidate no longer lay with me and many of that new leader's former colleagues were hired. While they had a lot of existing patterns of working with the new leader, their skill sets were again a mismatch for the challenges our team was facing and ended up being a series of net-poor hires who received a lot of air cover from new leadership to not lose face.

That's not to say that you can't have effective recommendations for hiring. Some of the best candidates I've hired have been through personal recommendations or bringing along former team members. My experience has been that this pattern is best tempered by a careful hiring process. It's a great way to put someone into the funnel and ensure they get some visibility, but it's an awful way to accelerate someone through and out of the funnel and onto a team.

Insofar as board members are compensated by stock grants, they are incentivized to increase the stock price. But if a board member starts trying to do independent verification of what the CEO/team is telling them, that's a sign of mistrust. Because the board primarily interfaces with the executive team, would they know where to start?

That said, I've seen some board members try this out by offering to help/chat with some under-performing teams that they have expertise working with and asking light questions/giving advice... but having been on the receiving end of a conversation like that, it often feels like there is a lot of politics going -- you don't know if someone genuinely wants to be helpful, is vetting your capabilities and fit for the role (based on the trickle-down responsibility), or is trying to do independent fact finding (trickling it back up).

The company board’s sole job is to hire and fire the CEO when appropriate: https://reactionwheel.net/2021/11/your-boards-of-directors-i...

However, having been on a team that prepares board materials and also having presented to a company board, I can tell you that the information they receive is extremely carefully managed in a way that allows responsibility to seem to flow downwards rather than upwards. What you see as an IC or as a manager or ever director is extremely different from the cause and effects a board sees in a monthly or quarterly update. Hence they often come to different conclusions than the people in the trenches would. That said, I’m sure this is true for any large organizational unit (government, military, corporations, nonprofits, etc).