I deeply respect anyone who can update their views in the face of new evidence. The last four years have really taught me how rare it is for someone to be able to publicly change their mind.

.@tatrabanka pouvazujte, ze vyhodite chatbota a date tam nieco co aj nieco robi

Here’s why Greg is wrong, from someone who bought, grew, and sold one of these: Nobody running of these is dumb, and the fact that they've survived is testament to the fact that they're smart. To me, baked into this strategy is a sense of paternalism. Look at these dumb boomers. I can come in with absolutely zero industry experience and a Claude Code subscription and change this industry!! The most pervasive dynamic within Main Street businesses is resource scarcity. Not enough time or money to do any of the million things that you plan to. Awesome, so you want to do some big Claude Code thing? Cool, you're going to need to find time to do that between figuring out how to repair the trucks, fix your broken Google My Business listing, and not take a salary that month because of the reinvestment you're making with the hope that it will pay off. Getting a CRM implemented correctly is hard enough!! You need managers who enforce the process, employees who change their habits, and someone accountable when things break. Now try rebuilding delivery around AI WHILE KEEPING THE BUSINESS ALIVE AND SERVICING DEBT. You come in full of piss and vinegar and on day four your operations manager quits because she liked doing things the old way, and suddenly you’re covering her job instead of building agents. Greg acknowledges key-person risk, but it deserves far more weight in his economics. The people, process, and change management required to make even basic technology productive can consume years. Innovation has to improve the performance of the whole business. Justin Roff-Marsh and I have discussed the sequence: identify the constraint, get more productive use from its existing capacity, then add capacity where necessary to increase throughput. Said another way ---If an accounting firm’s bottleneck is senior review, generating drafts ten times faster may just create a bigger queue. You have to show how AI frees the reviewer, change the workflow so that capacity gets used, and then upgrade whatever limits further growth. Technological innovation must drive global maxima, not local maxima. Even real savings elsewhere need to be converted into lower expenses (which is only weak replacement) or redeployed against the constraint. A list of automated tasks tells me very little about how much more profitable work the firm can complete. Now put a large, expensive acquisition loan underneath that transition. In the SBA buying range, debt payments compete with the money you need for implementation, training, replacement hires, and additional capacity. Saving people time doesn’t automatically remove their salaries. Your plan is to do what? Have Betty train you in the first three weeks to replace her, and then you're gonna fire her. Let me know how that goes for you with a big ass loan due every month. More than likely you're going to end up keeping Betty and adding a bunch of AI expenses, which are going to reduce all of your fancy pre-acquisition projections. You can spend months paying for the existing payroll, new software, and human review before realizing any savings.... If at all. And cutting a support role can make your scarce, expensive specialists less productive if they inherit its work. Ultimately a playbook like the below is achievable but requires an enormous amount of experience, judgment, skill, etc. And the idea that a corporate refugee is going to parachute in out of their W2 with a couple agents and transform a business model fundamentally feels like something that someone who's never tried to do it before in a real business would say. I'm happy to have this debate with anybody who'd like to have it. I've both owned these businesses and built agents in an enormous number of these categories referenced.

37 mistakes companies make with AI transformation: 1) Not investing in your data foundation/not having a data “clean-up” strategy. Often people expect that with tools, everything gets solved. 2) Starting with “we need AI” instead of a real problem (this is true for every tech cycle ever). 3) Underresourced AI center of excellence that serves every part of the organization. Backlog builds up, employees get disenfranchised, shadow AI explodes. 4) Trying to automate the same workflow vs rethinking from scratch. Building AI add-ons to existing processes rather than rethinking processes from the ground up. 5) Thinking too big and flashy. Not considering the implications day-to-day and the value of quick, unsexy wins. 6) Over-engineering. Sometimes you dont need a full agentic system and traditional software works just fine. 7) Obsessing over cost before proving feasibility of a use case (i.e using a smaller model first before validating technical feasibility with larger models). 8) Encouraging/pushing employees to use AI without real depth. Widespread rollout with limited education/lack of training for employees. 9) Telling your people that AI won’t impact jobs. 10) Overprotecting data + spend to the point of limited experimentation from your workforce. IT/Security blocking this or slow rolling it out (which is fair but bad for the speed in which this is moving). Culture doesn’t encourage AI use. 11) Not having places to go to ask questions / knowledge share. Whether that be a skills library, shared repo, or internal AI office hours. 12) Failing to solve the last mile. Everyone’s so focused on models, but successful applied AI is a complex last mile problem: governance, data, observability, context management, people, process, etc. 13) Shipping it and call it done. Lack of discipline to go beyond the shiny demo and ensure sustained adoption that meaningfully empowers teams. 14) Slop is tolerated. 15) No governed way to build for non-technical people. No Citizen SDLC to empower SMEs to build and share production apps. 16) Assuming AI transformation is the responsibility of one person within the org. 17) Run like an IT project. No senior exec actually owns injecting AI across the business, therefore initiatives stall and leave no lasting impact. There is no clear owner. 18) CEO is not a driving force. Leadership enforcement without the leaders actually knowing how or what to enforce. 19) Not getting the buy in of the “bad guys.” Bring Legal, Finance, and IT along for the ride early. 20) Not investing in / underestimating change management. Easy to get the folks who are excited on board, but it's a long process to make others feel comfortable. 21) Not measuring baselines before any adoption. What are the metrics pre-AI tool to post AI tool? No baseline = no roi story, and thinking that all AI usage is positive ROI without measuring usage/tying it to real outcomes fails the same way. 22) Inventing new KPIs for AI instead of focusing on having AI accelerate existing functional KPIs. 23) Reducing AI to headcount and being overly stringent on ROI too early into programs. 24) Being driven by FOMO and not having the patience to treat AI transformation as the multi-year migration it actually is. 25) Being married to past purchasing mistakes and not choosing the best technology at the moment. 26) Not anticipating the complexity of getting systems to work nicely together (a kind of scope creep as the reality blows up work required). 27) Not being agile enough to change course when the landscape changes drastically. 28) Locking in to a single provider ecosystem. 29) Not providing employees access to the underlying systems needed to make AI useful to take action, not just chat. 30) Underestimating how much of an impact AI can actually have. It is both a cooler and scarier time than ever before to be an incumbent. 31) Outsourcing thinking to AI - everyone can prompt, the differentiation is how you wield the tool to multiply the work you're doing. If you have good judgement you can do a lot more. If you don't, you end up wasting a lot of tokens spinning your wheels. 32) One functional department thinking they should own AI transformation. It treats AI as a vertical solution vs. horizontal capability that’s more than just technology. 33) Executing on AI initiatives before anchoring your work in a clear strategy that’s tied to business goals, a map of key processes, understanding of your technology and data reality, and clarity around how to meet your people where they are. 34) Not solving data permissioning and RBAC considerations before rolling out agentic tools firmwide. 35) Not giving people dedicated time to experiment or carving out time in their roles for it. 36) Not understanding how a business function ACTUALLY works before trying to apply AI. In someone’s head, the process for generating some end state dashboard is simple: systems generate the data, it gets consistently transformed and warehoused, then read into the dashboard that the VP sees. In reality, it’s a complete mess. 37) Neglecting internal evals to constantly test and evaluate how new models/harnesses perform company tasks on a $ per successful task basis. What's missing?

Just went for a long walk while using ChatGPT Voice with plugins on my phone, and I think it's a more consequential update than it might seem at first glance. On my walk, I talked through my calendar, email, and to-do list. I had ChatGPT read through my emails and triage them. Then, we added items to my to-do list. Then, we reviewed my calendar. By the end of the walk, I'd finished getting organized, and never had to look at a screen once. I've been waiting for this a long time. Yes, you can kind of do this in the ChatGPT desktop app. And I think in Codex remote on the mobile app. But I've never gotten either to work very smoothly or reliably. And I often want to do this when I'm not near my laptop, like when I'm out for a walk, and the ChatGPT desktop app for whatever reason won't connect. This feels like the future. It feels like a true assistant. You have a natural conversation, and it does stuff for you. It disappears into the background. You're not walking down the street with a screen in your face. You're not contorting your thumbs to type sentences and scroll menus. You're just talking, conversationally, and stuff's getting done. My sense is: • Screens are going away for many uses other than visual content consumption. They won't disappear entirely. But they also won't dominate the way they do now, and definitely not for things that can be done verbally. • Apps that aren't agent-native and plugin-optimized will die. I use Google Workspace and Todoist primarily because they're so well-integrated with ChatGPT. I stopped using apps, such as many of Apple's, because with few exceptions they're poorly agent-integrated. (X is a big exception, but I've hacked some integration via IFTTT.) • Those apps, however, will become more valued for what they let agents do than for their in-app experiences. Not all will become essentially databases, but many will. It also seems inevitable to me that at some point OpenAI and other AI app providers roll out native calendar, email, and to-do functionality that's maximally agent-optimized. • We'll have our audio agents on all the time. We may have them on mute sometimes (I discovered you can do this with ChatGPT Voice by clicking an AirPod), but at great cost, because you'll want be able to just say something like "summarize that conversation I just had and then draft the presentation." It will be like having an assistant following you around when you want them to. • We need new hardware. For example, I want a camera in my AirPods not to take pictures, but to have the context of what's around me. Like, "What kind of tree is that?" Or, "That's a cool shirt. Find out where they bought it." (I have this in my Meta Ray-Bans, but people are now very sensitive to those devices because they do take pictures.) I also want ChatGPT able to be always listening or awoken with "hey, Chat." • The individual thread model starts to break down when you're treating ChatGPT like an always-on assistant. We need to have the infinite continuous thread from which ChatGPT can delegate work to subthreads, the central assistant model that Muse is built around. This makes even more sense when you start treating your AI apps like assistants. They should be juggling all those individual threads on your behalf. More to come I'm sure as I continue to experiment.

There's nothing kind about letting good people live in a fantasy world that no longer exists. You have to tell them, even if it hurts. Because the sooner they accept reality, the sooner they can adapt to the future.

1/ "No matter how prominently we show the links, users won't click." An OpenAI engineer, quoted in the newly unsealed NYT v OpenAI filing. Buried in 92 pages there's a traffic story every SEO should read 🧵

Why do so many people think that if the Russians attack NATO, they will necessarily roll into Europe in gigantic armored columns like they did toward Kyiv in 2022 (and that this is therefore extremely unlikely now)? They won’t fight a full-scale frontal war the way they have been fighting Ukraine for years. They’ll do what they did in 2014: send another Igor Girkin from the FSB across the border with a detachment of armed saboteurs (a.k.a "the people’s militia," "rebels," or "separatists"), seize some town near the Russian border, activate pre-positioned local collaborators and former pyramid-scheme scammers (a.k.a. "people’s governors"). Some hypothetical “Rubicon,” operating without insignia, will provide them with drone support in armed clashes with the local police, National Guard, or counterterrorism forces, and they’ll start torturing and killing people undesirable in the territories they’ve seized (a.k.a. "the people's republic"). It goes without saying that the Russian propaganda machine will have no trouble finding a sensational TV story about yet another "crucified boy" at the hands of yet another "fascist punishers," vividly and convincingly demonstrating to Russian society and the international community that Russia has no choice but to intervene and protect its "compatriots." And basically, that’s it -- just keep listening to Robert Fico’s screams about "some article 5," watch Western officials speak about the "unacceptability of escalation," call for "restraint," express concerns, and say that their capitals are "not prepared to unleash World War III for that." Meanwhile, the tankies, of course, will be yelling about how the hypothetical "Tallinn junta" had been "bombing Narva for eight years." And that could be it -- the effective end of NATO, and Europe being forcibly compelled into a suicidal betrayal of Ukraine and an end to aid.

Stop Google from indexing your Cloudflare tunnel URLs and setup a protected preview instead. It takes 5 minutes and one prompt (included) to your agent.

We've seen the playbook that Vladimir Putin is running on the Estonian border before. If there is military action there - and there might not be, he might still be successfully restrained by allies inside the Russian government - here is how it will go... First, a Russian separatist movement will magically appear in the 87% ethnic Russian city of Narva. It will of course be run by FSB agents, attracting mainly criminals and the local underclass. There will be street demonstrations and minor riots. There's an old Communist trick where you plant agents among peaceful demonstrators to fire handguns at the police, who then "overreact", firing into crowds and killing civilians. If you are lucky, this will cause genuine popular outrage among the Russophones. But you don't need that, you just need to be able to organize a massive propaganda blitz about how Russophones are being oppressed by the fascist Estonian government. Russia will get some help here from history. There was significant Estonian collaboration with Nazis during World War II, including active participation in Einsatzgruppe A and formation of a first Estonian SS division. Putin's propaganda apparatus will honk about Estonians being Nazis and NATO being a neo-Nazi puppet organization. Then they will stage troops across the River Narva and occupy the city. Not a lot of troops, because they don't expect to have to fight an army. After which they will not move any further into Estonia. Not yet. Instead, Russia will present the world with a fait accompli. Do you really want to go to war with a nuclear superpower over one border city full of ethnic Russians? I can't tell you what will happen after that. Putin clearly believes NATO will crawfish, and in doing so destroy itself as an effective military alliance. He may not be wrong.

How do Codex credits work on the 20x plan? I bought 100$ and they were gone under an hour. Wild. The sub seems to last Ok, but when I needed to push a bit 100$ gone and nothing to show for it. (Also I do not see this in usage analytics) @thsottiaux

Jevem na to!

Beautiful articulation of how we can’t pre-state all the requirements in advance.

Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that everyone in the EU must use the official EU age verification app to verify their age before they can log into or post on social media and other digital services. As an expert in online child safety, I'm here to expose the disinformation in each von der Leyen's statements. See below. 🇪🇺 The EU Kids Act is a pretext designed to enforce mandatory digital identity verification on everyone in Europe. The proposed legislation applies to any digital service featuring feeds, user generated content, or messaging: Social media networks, video platforms, online gaming services, AI tools, and media streaming apps like Spotify. (@TimSweeneyEpic) Under the proposal, digital services must enforce age restrictions across strict tiers. Tech companies must mandate age verification across all accounts to enforce these tiers legally. When Australia introduced its social media ban, the government conceded it failed because platform level age checks weren’t reliable. They now reject age estimation as inadequate and shifted to demanding "robust" age checking. 💡 If you eliminate every unproven estimation method, you’re left with exactly 1 functional mechanism: identity verification. There's not other way to ensure age checking is "robust". No government wants to admit citizens must prove their real identity just to access apps and basic streaming services like Spotify, so they hide behind the ambiguous phrase "robust age checking". This language is now used across Australia, the US, and Ireland to mandate identity checks while avoiding the public backlash of calling it what it is. I will research to see where else it’s being used. Below is what Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in Strasbourg along with my analsyis: 🇪🇺 "Today, much of this power has been taken out of the hands of parents... What our children need is time... But when a child has a smartphone, all of this is taken away." 💡 This framing falsely presents smartphones as uncontrollable. Apple and Google built free OS controls into iOS and Android settings, covering virtually every smartphone on the market. These controls achieve every legitimate safety objective without collecting personal data or processing state credentials. 💡 Millions of parents use these parental controls to enforce screen time curfews, block app installations, and restrict communication. 💡 These settings operate at the device level. Teens can't bypass them when protected with a passcode. To bypass this technical reality, the European Commission uses public grief to shut down logical analysis: 🇪🇺 "Day and night, parents see the costs, loss of sleep, anxiety, even self-harm, and in a growing number of cases, even fatal tragedies… a 14-year-old girl living in Belgium who took her life exactly one month ago, victim of bullying online... Honourable members, enough is enough." 💡 Citing personal tragedies replaces software engineering facts with emotional rhetoric. State laws and age gates don’t alter human behaviour or prevent online harassment. Regulators exploit grief to pass surveillance legislation without explaining how the underlying software mechanisms operate. The Commission outlines specific age tiers to restrict access: 🇪🇺 "In sum, no social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15. That means from 13 to under 15, only mini accounts set up and supervised by parents or guardians with limited features and time restriction to one hour a day. And between 15 and 18, safe design will be an obligation for the platforms." 💡 Enforcing age tiers forces tech companies and service providers to rebuild their architecture around total access control. The must disable self-service account creation, purge unverified accounts, build supervised parental workflows, strip algorithmic feeds, and enforce strict session cutoffs. 💡 Social networks operate on open interaction algorithms that inherently expose people to unvetted content. Because software can’t dynamically filter these risks for minors, tech companies must block access for everyone until a person proves their real identity. 💡 It’s not just about social networks. They want the same bans for almost everything, including games and stream services. Even Spotify because it’s possible for customers to message people. The Commission claims its proposed zero knowledge proof app protects personal privacy: 🇪🇺 "Age will be verified using EU certified tools like our age verification app. This app is built on zero knowledge proof. That means that the platform only learns one single thing, and that's whether you're old enough to allow access or not." 💡 This framing describes what an app or service receives while hiding what everyone must give up. A zero knowledge proof provides a mathematical confirmation, but that confirmation requires an authoritative issuer. Before the app generates a proof, a state approved entity must verify the person's real identity. The Commission frames this shift as a victory against tech corporations: 🇪🇺 "I am aware that many perceive the power of Big Tech as overwhelming and impossible to roll back. I disagree... So we do not accept this. We are reversing the burden of proof. Now platforms will have to prove to us that they are safe. Because this is not about our minors accessing social media. It is about when and how we allow social media to access our minors." 💡 Social networks don’t access children; parents hand smartphones to children. Reversing the burden of proof forces everyone to verify their identity. The European Commission confirmed the broader scope of this mandate: 🇪🇺 "We also know that not only minors are at risk. Addictive design, for example, are harming everyone. This is why we need a wider framework too, the Digital Fairness Act that we will propose in autumn." 🚨 Child safety is merely the initial wedge. The Digital Fairness Act expands state mandated identity verification to adults across all online services. Binding real identities to online activity permanently eliminates pseudonymous access, private communication, and democratic accountability. 🚨 Senior state officials and regulators know their demands have nothing to do with child safety. They work closely with tech companies and understand that iOS and Android already provide complete authority to restrict devices locally without collecting personal data. State officials deliberately ignore well established parental controls because they keep internet access under family control. Child safety is a public pretext. 🚨 Governments and regulators use child safety to establish mandatory identity verification across every app and digital service, eliminating online anonymity. When tech companies and state agencies link every social media post, private message, search term, geographic location, and financial transaction to a verified identity, they create a permanent digital dossier on every citizen with a global social graph that makes Cambridge Analytica look like a 2nd grade school science project. 💡 Binding people’s identity to daily activity enables predictive behavioural modelling too. By feeding identity data into automated predictive AI, governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and tech companies move beyond surveillance past behaviour. They can map political affiliations, predict individual actions, flag dissent before it occurs, and control public opinion at scale. Eliminating online anonymity ends free speech, private communication, and democratic accountability. As Larry Ellison stated at Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting in 2024: "Citizens will be on their best behaviour, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on". 🙏🏻 Share this to expose how governments use child safety as a false pretext to force mandatory digital identity verification on everyone. paulfwalsh.substack.com/p/th…

Začínajú sa tu množiť bot účty, ktoré sa vydávajú za Slovákov a začnú vás sledovať. Len teda všetky pochádzajú zo severnej Afriky. 🤷 Odporúčam prejsť si sledovatelov a zaradom to blokovať. Zatiaľ sú neaktívne a zbierajú len info.

If they really wanted to slow AI’s development, they’d be asking Apple how they did it with Siri.

Rare footage of a 90s PC gamer who just realized he’s still 2 kilobytes short of running Wing Commander after fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and HIMEM.SYS for half a day… Kids today will never know.

No bathrobe. No rant. The AI threat.