Espresso Shots 5-24-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• Your CEO Is Suffering From AI Psychosis. After this week, I may curate AI articles very carefully for a really special new idea. I find many posts or pieces of media coverage these days are profoundly one-sided, riddled with too much opinion or hype, and neither argument has changed in the last 6 months. I'm personally trying to be a realist with this technology and find myself more in the middle camp. This tech has interesting aspects; the "problems" (with anything, really) often come back to people. What I did like about this post was its focus on a different problem: the psychology of it all. 'These platforms share a common design philosophy: make the operator feel like they're commanding a fleet. Dashboards, org charts, agent hierarchies, budget controls, governance layers. It looks and feels like management. You get the dopamine hit of delegation without the inconvenience of measuring whether the delegates produced anything useful.' And, of course, the kicker: 'the tools themselves are incentivized to make you feel good, the platforms built on those tools are incentivized to sell you scale, and the culture around both punishes skepticism.' Through history, there's plenty of examples like this: the supplements market, management consulting (legitimacy for a decision you've already made), social media marketing, the financial services industry (around 2007), etc. The tools don't have to be fake for the ecosystem around them to become dishonest.
• The Rise of the Bullshittery. The next social media site that I'm going to pull the plug on is LinkedIn. Once a place to connect with employers and former colleagues, it's strayed far from providing anything actually useful for people looking to improve their network, find a job, or build a business. Described in this piece as 'a market that punishes substance', I found this one an interesting read about what's happened there. 'Bullshit has always been with us and neither LinkedIn nor any other platform invented the self-promoting middle manager. What has changed, though, is the observability of the bullshit, for which we now have a continuously updating feed.' I promptly picked up a copy of the book referenced, On Bullshit, which is now on top of my to-read pile. 'The bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false. The truth-value of the statement is simply not part of their concern. The bullshitter is optimising for a different objective, usually appearing competent, appearing confident, or appearing to be the right kind of person to be in the room.'
• LinkedIn User Hides AI Prompt Injection in Bio to Force Recruitment Spam to Be Sent in Olde English Prose. Speaking of LinkedIn, a fun little post about a user who used prompt injection (read: Ignore all Previous Instructions) to stick it to AI recruiter bots.
• A Manifesto for Small Software. Somewhat akin to the boring technology club, I always enjoy reading a good manifesto to make you stop and think. 'Software has lost its way. Apps that once shipped on a single floppy disk now demand gigabytes of your storage, minutes of your time, and far too much of your patience. We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress. Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline.'
• NASA Still Maintains Some of the Voyager Spacecraft Code in a 1970s-Era Programming Language That Almost Nobody on Earth Fully Understands Anymore, and the Handful of Engineers Who Do Are Now in Their 80s. If teams keep vibe-coding everything without understanding what is written, I don't see how all software can avoid this trap. 'This is the real version of the story. Not that the code is unreadable, but that the institutional memory around the code is fragmentary, and the conditions that produced the engineers who built it cannot be reproduced.'
• Not Everything Is an Emergency. No truer words than this: 'If you are constantly fighting emergencies, you don’t have emergencies.' I feel like every week this year has been a version of that - a constant treadmill of the latest fire to put out, and I'm taking some important time for myself this weekend to clear my head and reset from the grind as of late.
• You're Weirder Than You Think. I loved the visual artifact in this post - it's a quick test that stood out to me, because apparently, with my answers, 'your combination is shared by 0.690% of US adults.' Fascinating.
• Creating Passionate Users: Subvert From Within. From the archives (since TypePad has shut down), but always a fun one to look back on, recalling a conversation I had with Kathy Sierra back in 2006 that shaped the next 20 years of my career and how I approach big-company thinking. 'These folks have a chance to make a Difference (capital 'D') on a scale that most of us will never touch... When Ward Cunningham (inventor of the Wiki, key player in extreme programming, etc.) went to work for Microsoft, much of the software engineering world was horrified that he'd even consider it. But he kept insisting that where better to produce positive change than going straight into the heart of one of the biggest sources of trouble for both users and developers in the software ecosystem? But let's say you're not a Ward Cunningham or any other famous, visible, already influential industry player. You're an engineer, or maybe a program manager. In that case, you do what many of us did at Sun... subvert from within.'
• Spieden Island or Safari Island?. As I often talk about my own discovery of Life 2.0 (and evolution to Life 3.0), there's a small island across the channel from where I live now that has a rather fascinating history. 'Spieden Island became a hunting preserve for a short time in the 1960s when two taxidermist brothers purchased the island, imported several species of exotic animals and birds from around the world, and invited hunters to fly in and pay for the privilege of hunting them. Lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos, and monkeys were stuffed and shipped home as trophies.' Yikes! But a great reminder to look up, explore what's around you - it can be fascinating; Read: micro-adventures in your own backyard.
• The Most Surprising Part of Stephen Colbert's Late Show. Sad to see Stephen Colbert's final episode this week, and I really appreciated this tribute from The Atlantic. 'The clips I revisit the most speak to his empathetic nature, which revealed itself more and more as The Late Show went on. Take his exchange with Keanu Reeves, in which he asked the actor, 'What do you think happens when we die?' (as part of a rapid-fire series), and Reeves pondered and replied, 'I know that the ones who love us will miss us.' This moment of sweet profundity would have felt more jarring on Letterman’s or O’Brien’s show, but Colbert expanded it as a recurring feature: an existential questionnaire to pose to other celebrity guests, searching for an insightful peek into their brain; it’s a much more tender version of a viral segment.'
• The Most Radical Act in an Age of Outrage Is to Play. I'll admit it: I am on a total "play" kick as of late. I mentioned this previously, but leaning into my 8-year-old self, focusing on curiosity and When Adults Embrace Play, They Create Community, it's been a tremendous boost to how I'm rethinking, well, everything. 'One study examined the neurobiology of stress resilience and found that positive affect, novelty, and exploratory behaviors, the core elements of play, strengthen neural circuits that protect against chronic stress. In other words, play expands our adaptive capacity. Fear contracts it. Through that lens, play becomes a neurological rebellion against conditioning that thrives on anxiety.'
• The Imperfectionist: Things I'm Still Learning About Writing. Some interesting advice about the writing process from Oliver Burkeman. This one in particular was useful, as I often fall into this trap: 'When I'm structuring or outlining a piece of writing, I find it helpful to remember that I’m just deciding; that is, not struggling to uncover the perfect structure that already exists out there in the world (that would be much more stressful), but just making a choice about what to put where.'
• How to Start a Journaling Club With Suleika Jaouad. I'm always a sucker for good journaling techniques (the Spanish Fighter Pilot method in particular was awesome), so this post on a 'live journaling club' was interesting. The idea is, make journaling a collective experience: 'Sharing optional. No pressure. Prompts provided. Every invitation is a kind of social contract that tells people exactly what’s happening and how to arrive. Particularly now, when so many people feel lonely, socially rusty, or emotionally exhausted, clarity is its own form of care. A specific invitation creates emotional safety before anyone even walks through the door.' An interesting idea to think about.
• Inside the Brain's Nightly Erasure of You. 'While we’re awake, conscious experience is shaped by sensation and action. Streams of sensory input flow in, motor output flows out, and this ongoing exchange with the environment anchors our subjective experience. But when we fall asleep, that architecture dissolves and rearranges itself.' Given my own trouble sleeping, I'm always pulled into posts that explore what happens to the mind when we nod off. 'We fall into non-REM sleep knowing what it’s like to be — and then, nothing. A total annihilation of is-ness.' Love it.

Amor Fati ✌🏻