You build a program, let’s call it Halt. It isn’t complicated, Halt simply determines whether another program will run forever in an infinite loop or it will eventually finish.

But then someone goes and writes a program called Trouble that looks at what Halt comes back with and does the opposite. So if Halt says Trouble will loop forever, Trouble does the opposite thing and finishes its run. If Halt says Trouble will finish, again it does the opposite and loops forever, never finishing.

Trouble is a perfectly legitimate program. It may not be trivial to write, but programming is all conditions and loops.

So what happens if Halt tries to evaluate Trouble? It can’t work.

Halt cannot exist. The Halting Problem cannot be solved. In CS lingo it’s undecidable.

Alan Turing came up with this around 100 years ago just as we were building the first computers. This is from the same guy who created the Turing Test, one of the more interesting questions in computer science until AI and Large Language Models came along and showed us just how easily we can be fooled.

As opposed to the impossible mind-bendy halting problem, impractical problems are ones we’d very much like to solve. But, the algorithms to solve them require so much compute that before we get an answer the sun will become a red giant and turn the Earth into a tater tot.

The classic example of an impractical problem is The Traveling Salesman. Again the problem is deceptively simple:

A salesman needs to visit 20 cities to hype his new AI app (which looks like juice boxes). What’s the most efficient route?

We solve this problem by checking each possible route. If the salesman is going to 5 cities you can do it. There are 120 possible routes. The math that counts all routes is 5 factorial or (5!).

5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120

You’ve heard of exponential. That’s growth by a constant factor, for example doubling every year. Perhaps you’ve also heard that when AI starts building AI it will grow exponentially smarter until … the SINGULARITY.

Factorial growth is significantly faster than exponential growth — every new city you visit increases the number of routes by a higher factor. Say the AI juice boxes are taking off, so now our salesman has to visit 10 cities. At 10 cities, the number of possible routes jumps from 120 to nearly 4 million.

Twenty cities? That’s over 2 quintillion or 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 possible routes.

The Traveling Salesman Problem isn’t impossible like the Halting Problem, but it’s impractical. Forty cities? It would take the world’s fastest computer hundreds of years to calculate every route. That’s really not so many cities — no juice box for you! In computer science, that’s called an intractable problem.

A heuristic is a clever workaround or hack that gets close to the right answer. For the TSP, just pick the closest city each step of the route. You won’t get the optimal answer but it’s close enough. That’s how your Amazon driver figures out where to drop off your monthly supply of Hanes boxer briefs.1

I wrote a program that does the math — you can play with it here. 2

At the turn of the century, math enthusiast and businessman Landon Clay launched The Millennium Prize Problems. Seven unsolved problems. Solve one, win a million dollars. The TSP lives in one of these.

The world is full of problems to solve that would do more than deliver juice boxes. Or boxer briefs. Making progress on these could be big — we could live longer, happier lives on a healthier planet.

So how’s our great new innovation AI doing at solving these hard problems? AI isn’t going to save humanity by doing your homework or drawing weird pictures. Our AI salesman will tell you it will improve everything you do just a little bit. You’ll become more productive.

Every product I ever worked on promised this same thing. It’s impossible to quantify.

AI has taken a couple of swings:

Google’s AlphaFold made a major breakthrough in protein folding, accelerating biological research (like understanding Alzheimer’s) leading to a Nobel prize.

Another: AI helped decipher the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls that burnt up when Mt. Vesuvius erupted 2,000 years ago. So far they’ve found the word ‘purple’ and a discussion about the nature of ‘pleasure.’ Translation is ongoing. I’m certain more p-words will be found.

Perhaps we might also work on, say, the climate, Alzheimer’s, food for everyone.

How about we figure out fusion and cure cancer?

I don’t have a quintillion years.

The world feels a little wobbly, and so does the job market. AI is a big part of that.

Up until now I got by on my spidey-sense. I always got out before the company went down, or the bad boss imploded.

Often, just in the nick of time.

Dysfunction junction? Plan your exit, pick a better boss, get a mentor, find some allies.

Ego-maniacal boss? Toxic workplace? Manage up, channel that anger energy into finding a greener pasture. You can’t get out of this one fast enough.

Company struggling? Work connections, build bridges. Get out before the ship goes down.

One rule covers all of it: keep your head up. There are always clues but you have to be looking for them.

What’s going on with staff, co-workers, management? Are good people leaving? Managers/Leaders leaving or playing an odd game of musical chairs? Is the company in a hiring freeze or not attracting strong talent?

Time to look elsewhere.

Re-orgs are great — full of clues — who got promoted, who got a larger remit, who got a bigger budget? Go work for that group. Network like crazy on the inside.

Same with products — what’s making money for the company? What’s not doing so well or getting de-prioritized? Go work on the hot stuff. Better to be in the hot seat than no seat.

Getting fired is plenty unpleasant. I’ve had brushes with it one way or another and while there are plenty of euphemisms — it’s always personal — even if your company or your boss tries to make it impersonal.

Take RIF for example — Reduction In Force. The Force made me do it.

Here’s another awful acronym: DNM (Did Not Meet). Get one of those on a performance review, turn the networking dial up to 11, start looking outside the company at least a little bit every single day. Start hoarding office supplies.

It isn’t you. It’s one of the above things, but none of that matters if you’re out of a job. To keep your agency — your ability to navigate and manage the ever changing tides without becoming a victim — develop that spidey-sense.

So how did I get fired? By taking an emergency job in a public High School in a district, in a county — in a state — where public education is under duress post COVID along with a myriad of other issues I don’t pretend to understand.

You can read about what’s happening at my high school here. This cut: Information & Communications Technologies - Computer Science .2 FTE 1 — is the position I’m filling through the end of the year.

I’ve been whining about how much work this .2 FTE is, so while I’m having fun (mostly) it’s messing with my semi-retired vanlife, so it’s all good.

Reading the workplace was tricky enough and then AI entered the picture.

I may be off the career hamster wheel, but I’m still survival-coded to try and figure out the next thing. So, while my livelihood no longer depends on it, I’m intensely AI-curious.

I happily jumped into this teaching job even thought I’d never done it, knowing Claude2 had my back. A couple weeks ago I wrote about using all the AI Google offers in the classroom in AI High.

Last week we finished our big coding project so it’s time to pack the next six weeks with all the knowledge they need to kill it come AP test day.

Saturday I spent some quality time with Claude to figure that out.

I fed Claude the school calendar, my M/W/F schedule, teaching styles that land with the kids, what they theoretically covered before I took over 3, what the AP College Board says they have to cover, and what’s actually on the test. We went back and forth until we landed on a plan I like.

I won’t go back to the online course (which the kids hate), so now Claude (along with Gemini/Google Classroom) works with me to build lesson plans grounded in this larger plan on the daily.

If you look at AI as just the latest tech, it’s not so different from picking up on the next hot thing. But AI isn’t just the latest tech. This cognitive layer we’ve built with a natural language interface is quite different from everything it’s built on top of lower in the stack.

A constant through every job I’ve had — including my current HS teacher stint — is I never have enough time to do all the things I want. The more engaging the job, the more I’ve found this to be true. If you can compartmentalize AI to take on the stuff in your job you hate — the grunt work — well that’s one way to get to know it and make it work for you.

One gauge of the impact AI might have on jobs is the first industry it’s completely upended: software development.

Anthropic (makers of Claude) says AI now writes 90% of new code. But they’re still hiring software engineers, including entry level. They look for ‘AI natives’ that have embraced AI from the outset and consequently have a feel for how to work with it, imposing judgement, taste and design skills to build great software not slop.

They’re preaching — AI hasn’t killed the job of a software engineer (yet) but it has fundamentally changed what the job is.

My HS kids will soon be out in the wild dealing with this uncertainty. I feel for them. My own kids are challenged on the daily by their companies to use more and more AI which is another level of overhead when you’re already busy. I don’t envy my buddies still at Microsoft refactoring their jobs around AI while the tech stack constantly changes along with the work flow.

Every tech company in the world lives in this pressure cooker, fighting to stay relevant in a world getting eaten by AI. There will be winners and losers.

But that’s the deal, so better run towards it, spidey-sense ready, rather than run away.

My students were pretty excited for a break too, but now we’re back at the grind.

On Monday, I get to school a few minutes early: open up the classroom, unlock the laptop vault and connect my laptop up to the big screen.

We have to get the coding project for the AP Exam done this week. I have two more units yet to cover plus review and exam prep.

We’re short on time and I‘m herding cats. Teenage cats.

The first bell rings and one of my seniors wanders in with a pizza box. Fifth period is right after lunch. I don’t know what this kid does during lunch but apparently eating is not it. In addition to bringing his lunch, this kid brings a welcome dose of seriousness to the senior slacker table. He’s worried about grades. We talk.

The rest of the kids straggle in; chatting, grabbing laptops from the vault, settling in with their table tribes. My class is in South Campus and it’s a long walk here.

I mentally take roll — everyone’s here but one kid and he’s a superstar (coding the NYT’s Wordle game by hand for his project) so I’m not worried about him falling behind.

I go through slides covering online project submittal. It’s a lot: full project code, a video showing the program working and a set of key code blocks.

The senior table is increasingly distracted by the pizza. Talk of sharing gets louder. It’s pepperoni and it smells good. I’m fine with the pizza but don’t talk while I’m talking so I stop until they close their laptops and their mouths.

A kid wanders in late, and sits with his head down on the desk. He finished his code before the break so I let it go.

I get through most of my spiel before I start losing them. One of my 10th grader’s who looks continually lost starts with the BIG yawns. For directions like this, their attention span is even shorter than normal, so I cut it short and tell them to get to work.

I circle through the class, checking in with each of them. I have three girls and they sit right up front — a 10th, 11th and 12th grader. They shelter together across grades, avoiding the chaos around them. They’re consistently my strongest group and keep me on my toes.

I make my way over to the solo-table loner in the far corner. While he barely makes eye contact with me and hates group work; he’s generally on it.

Next, the junior table. After the senior table, they’re the loudest because they play the games as they build them. One of these kids is on Varsity Baseball so he’s missed a few classes, but he show’s me this marvelous geometry run game he’s building, so all good.

That leaves the table between the girls and the seniors. A mixed group and perhaps my favorite table. This is where the kid who came in late and immediately put his head down is at and now we’re going on 30 minutes into a 50 minute period.

I tap him on the shoulder — “you ok?”

No response.

The kid next to him — super smart, startlingly tall and easily distracted — asks me to look over his code. All of a sudden, zombie child raises his head — staring up at me with bleary eyes. He has been asleep. Like deep asleep. He apologizes and says he’s really tired. But he assures me he’s on track to get his project done, so I move on.

He puts his head down on the table and goes back to sleep.

What was I thinking? I thought it’d be fun teaching kids about computers.

But teenagers are another species.

The stereotype on GenZ is their brains are busted from the internets. Addicted to their phones, endlessly scrolling through TikTok’s. Digital natives sure, but ones without the ability to stay on task.

It’s not like that.

The teenage brain releases melatonin later than adults so they stay up too late.

Impulse control isn’t quite there yet. Their frontal lobe is still developing, so their plastic brains are more susceptible to social context, rewards, novelty, emotion.

They’re also highly capable when sufficiently motivated.

On Wednesday I throw out the slides and kick off class with a Kahoot quiz!1 The class gets into it. Super tall kid wins, answering every question right.

Streak 🔥!

JFran has Hershey’s Kisses so I top off the candy bag with those and throw in a bunch of spider-man tattoos (leftovers from my 60th bday party). I hand them out liberally to everyone who get’s their project uploaded.

The senior table is really into cubing. I got on them early to lose the cubes and the phones and FOCUS. But before spring break, I asked one explain it to me. The whole table gets in on the conversation. They find solve algorithms online and compete for time.

One of the seniors was lost when it came to the coding project until we came up with an idea for a cube solver and he excitedly shows me he got it working.

Another kid wrote a build-a-burger app in Python including drawing all the layers after the order. ASCII art. =^.^=

They’re all smart.

AI isn’t on the AP test. Weird right? It’s only the most important innovation in Computer Science in 10 years.

But after the test is over we’ll have some fun with it — I’m going to turn these kids into wizards.

Then it’ll be Summer; we’re already planning the van trips.

But I’ll miss the kids.

That same day a plumber was at our house trying to sort out our continually problematic bathroom drain.

Animal control came. I don’t know what I expected, but certainly not what went down. He took one look at the skunk and pulled a big shotgun out of his truck. He put up a makeshift screen. The screen was completely ineffective — we saw and smelled everything. He euthanized the skunk, but not before it had a final triumphant hurrah, spraying him down thoroughly.

Meanwhile, the plumber had made it up on the roof to snake out the drain. We could taste skunk from the inside with every door and window closed. The funk hit the hapless plumber and he began gagging and coughing uncontrollably. Inside, Lola the dog whined. In the front yard the animal control guy bent over gasping. He staggered towards his truck, shotgun in one hand, tearing at his face mask with the other.

My teenage daughter and I watched the whole thing go down from the front window, horrified.

R screamed, “You had one job!”

“You had one job” might be past its prime, but I laugh every time I hear it.

I recently picked up “I don’t hate that” watching curling at the Winter Olympics1. The US team was mic’d up so you could hear them talk strategy surveying the icy layout of stones. During timeouts, the coach hustled down the ice to join in the discussion.

Over and over I heard: “I don’t hate that shot.”

That phrase now lives in my head like a cereal jingle. Fits the now. Sometimes it’s hard to get excited about stuff. “I’ll allow it” is a good companion.

Resignation. It’ll do. It has to do.

Remember the AI moment — not so long ago — when you could jailbreak a new model by telling it to “Ignore all previous instructions?” I bought a t-shirt festooned with a feral raccoon screaming that out.

Alas, the early, heady days of AI when it was simple and fun are well behind us. Now we’re AI haters or we’re AI pilled or we’re vibe coding.

Vibe coding will fade quicker than “you had one job.” While it’s very Jetsons for Elroy to dictate sophisticated software builds, even with AI writing all the code, software engineering isn’t a trivial undertaking, so thanks, but I hate it.

A few more from the skunk days that stuck. KOBE! Yelled in expectation as you attempted to toss something in the trashcan from a few feet away.

We’re Gucci. Cool, cool, cool. Everything is cool. Goes well with a dab.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and my high school kids will trust me with some genZ gems. You’re good. I gotta dip. That burrito was mid. 2

I’m generationally forbidden from using any of these, but entertain me.

My dad could throw down some slang. Malarkey. Stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. He also did a mean James Cagney impersonation: “You dirty rat …”

“Monitoring the situation” is new. I relate. Doomscrolling.

But when it comes to AI, I can’t help myself.

I miss the inside scoop. Even with corporate spin it beat the talking heads and pundits. It’s grounding to use the thing on the daily with my high school kids. AI is but a few clicks away. See for yourself.

But if you don’t want to touch the stuff, you’re good — I’m monitoring the situation.

I did research the old fashioned way — I googled it. Drowning in a sea of blue links — it was the worst.

Now that I’m working 10 hours a week teaching High School (my first couple weeks felt like 80) I have all of the AI and I love it.

It’s saving me and my students.

I handed out assessments the first day I went in. I looked them over after class — it was grim. Their teacher left at Christmas and the subsequent parade of subs just had them do self study — ineffective for all but the most motivated high schooler.

Then there’s the AP test. You take an AP class in high school so you can take the test and it’s more than about getting college credit — it shows potential colleges you’re ready for that level of work — assuming you pass.

For reasons I don’t understand, the AP test is in May - nearly a month before school is over. For AP CSP there’s another hurdle — they must code and upload a program ahead of the test and that’s due in April!

So I knew I was going to be under the gun. What I didn’t know was what tools the school would have to help me.

Education has a testy relationship with technology. When word processors replaced typewriters — well there goes spelling and editing and penmanship. And let’s not forget the great copy-paste plagiarism scourge of the 2000s.

Today it’s the cell phones messing with our kid’s minds. This one is more about attention and mental health versus teaching — and for sure it’s tricky.

AI is different. From the start, it had the potential to be the best study buddy and unlike the concerted backlash to control plagiarism back in the 2000’s, chat based AI tools have grown so quickly that schools had to figure out how to use them versus banning them.

The pandemic is really behind this shift — that’s when every teacher and student had to get online. Before COVID, around a quarter of schools used online systems and today every single public school does. Google Classroom alone saw usage quadruple from 40M pre-pandemic to over 150M now.2

That’s the world I’m teaching in today as I try to get my twenty kids back on track and ready to pass the AP exam in a short two months.

The first thing I did after I accepted the gig was try to figure out the curriculum the College Board dictated for this course. What did I have to teach them so every one could pass the AP Test? I put together — no lie — 50 slides to parse it all out for them and reset the class.

Putting aside my mistake in overestimating the attention span of a 16 year old 3 — half of the slides I pulled were how not to use AI.

Some of this is fair and a plagiarism concern. After all, AI spits out code like it’s nothing, and you’re not learning anything if AI writes your program for you.

However, AI is eating up the software industry at a frightening pace, so not only do these kids need to learn AI yesterday, it’s the perfect tool to accelerate 6 months worth of learning into 2 months time.

I’m lucky this school uses Google Classroom. Initially Google lagged getting into the AI race — they didn’t want to cannibalize their search monopoly with the pages of blue links. But exponential growth cannot be ignored and so when the threat shifted to being left out of a new age, Google went all-in. That was about a year ago and now Google has a complete suite of AI tools under the product name Gemini.

Google Classroom gets everything Gemini has to offer:

In late 2024 Google had a viral AI moment when people discovered a product they were experimenting with called NotebookLM. I fed it an article I’d written and I was amazed when it took the 8,000 characters I wrote and turned them into an entertaining 8 minute podcast.

NotebookLM has become the top AI tool in education. It’s especially popular in colleges and universities. Why? Because unlike a chatbot that pulls info from god-knows-where including occasionally just making stuff up (hallucinations), NotebookLM is scoped to a specific set of sources (up to 300) you define.

The college board publishes this document for my class and it’s 300 pages long:

AP Computer Science Principles: Course and Exam Description.

I’m here for the kids, but I’m not reading that.

But NotebookLM can — no problem. I built a notebook for my class that not only uses that doc as a primary source but also every other relevant doc from the College Board (dozens — they are nothing if not prolific at documenting) for over 500 pages of content including sample exams, prior year questions, rubrics for the coding assignment, etc.

I call it: The Exam Vault.

NotebookLM can convert its sources into a bunch of teaching resources including flash cards, infographics and practice tests. In addition to audio podcasts, it now creates video lessons as well.

I asked it to make a two minute video of the perfect coding project for the exam and my students were mesmerized. I will be making more videos:

Once I built The Vault, I could activate my AI army. I spun up a set of helper chatbots to get my kids through the coding assignment with the looming due date. It’s worth 30% of their test score. 4

Each bot has a personality and a job. First there’s AI Andrew — it’s a friendly brainstorming buddy for kids that get stuck trying to come up with a program. It’ll riff on their ideas and suggest new ones while making sure they have a structure that meets all the exam requirements and is doable in the limited time we have.

Real Andrew is the final approver before they can start to code.

Once they start coding, next is the AI Auditor — it’s a strict enforcer that checks if their code meets all the byzantine requirements of the AP test.

Once they’re code complete, the last one is the AI Simulator which is a proctor — albeit a friendly one that tells dad jokes — that simulates the written section of the exam where they have to explain the code they’ve written against the clock.

So far AI Auditor is a hit — it’s the perfect companion to check how their code is coming along. I’ve explicitly prevented any of these bots from providing code or even helping the kids write or re-write theirs. They have to do that on their own.

These should be a life saver, but I’m continually surprised by this class. Teaching high school is oh so different than teaching adults.

On Monday I switched it up; I want the kids to engage more. This was after consultation with my HS motivation coach — that’s my niece — she’s a sophomore in Oakland. On her advice, I brought in a bag of Starburst candies. When one of my seniors actually came up with the right answer I got so excited that I grabbed the bag and tossed him one.

His buddy, propped up nonchalantly on the stool next to him lurched for the Starburst, tipped over and crashed out on the floor. Very dramatic. Also entertaining. He looked very sheepish and was quieter than normal the rest of the class, but perhaps I should reconsider this tactic.

Maybe my AI study buddies will work better than Starbursts?

Nostalgia is strong. No matter how great Halo on your Xbox was in your 40s, it’ll never match the joy of playing Atari Pong in your PJs the day after Christmas when you were 9.

If I look back before the nostalgia, I can get a sense of what my parents’ lives were like before they made me — as well as what the world was like. It was very different.

In January, we flew down to LA, rented the biggest SUV we could find, and crammed it full of boxes from my parents’ storage locker. Looking through these boxes, I’ve been able to peel back a generation — 100 years past — my grandparents.

Figuring out my Grandpa’s story last month was unexpected. That’s my mom’s dad. My dad’s side remained murky — until last week.

Monday — March 2 — marked the second anniversary of my dad’s death and I didn’t notice. I’ve been busy teaching a high school class I just took over mid-year.

Tuesday I saw a text from my sister: “What date did dad die?”

I figured she needed it for some legal thing, so I dug out his death certificate: March 2, 2024.

I stared at my reply. We talked. Monday was the day I cleared the final administrative hurdles to get my Emergency Teaching Credential. An unexpected accomplishment — Monday was a good day.

The year after my dad died was rough. I lost both of my parents in 2024 — my mom died three months after my dad, a day before his 98th birthday.

The second year, this past year, was different; sorrow replaced by memory. My dad’s memorial picture has lived on our kitchen counter for the past two years. Now it’s hanging on the B&W wall of fame:

While my mom’s story keeps coming into sharper focus — I’ve discovered more letters and keepsakes from her pre-WWII life in Austria than I will ever get through — I only knew the basics about my dad’s family. My dad was close to his older brother and sister, but estranged from his mother. On my dad’s birthday last year, I wrote how he got on a bus in Pittsburgh headed for LA at 19, and never looked back.

But last week I caught a new glimpse of his family. Buried in a box that I packed when I cleared out my dad’s bedroom two years ago, I found a picture I’d never seen:

I can’t stop looking at it. I found it in a large envelope dedicated to just this photo. The envelope had the negative, multiple prints, a folded family tree and a photocopy with my dad’s writing of who these people were. There was also a letter between my dad and his brother — my Uncle John. My dad got the negative from a lost cousin he found in LA and together they’d figured out the couple on the left were their grandparents.

That makes them my great-grandparents.

That picture is from the 1920s, around 100 years ago. Looking at them, I try to imagine their lives because 100 years doesn’t seem so long ago.

My dad’s family immigrated to the US from an impoverished and oppressed corner of the Russian Empire called the Pale of Settlement — land that’s now Belarus. Jews were a lower class barred from owning property, holding office, or worshiping freely. Mobs tore through villages: pillaging, burning, killing. Pogroms. My guess is this photo was taken in the Pale, before the family left for America.

Look at the baby — I’ve no idea who they are — but even they’ve had enough of this bullshit. Life is hard.

Digging deeper in the box, I found a red plastic folio marked, in my dad’s writing: ‘Dan’s Army Discharge Papers.’ Among official US Army papers, I found a treasure trove of old photos my dad saved. It’s all photos of his family — a family I never knew.

This picture was taken just a few years after the first one in Russia. My dad’s father Nathan emigrated from Russia when he was only 15 and here he is perhaps 5 years later proudly opening up his tailor shop in Pittsburgh. Unlike the first photo with its washed-out background, this one is rich with detail — I can almost smell what it would be like getting fitted for a suit in Nathan’s shop.

Nathan’s dad — my great-great-grandpa — never made it out of Belarus, but I wonder what he would have thought about his son’s new business. To go from life in that first picture to the second — it’s easy to see why no journey was too far, no hardship too bad, to deter going to America for a better life.

I never met my grandpa Nathan, but my dad told me lots of stories about him. When he got older and a bit senile, my dad brought him back to LA to live with him in his small second-floor bachelor apartment. My dad lived a few blocks off of Fairfax avenue and Nathan would go hang out with a crew of old Jewish tailors in LA’s Jewish Ghetto.

Then Nathan developed narcolepsy — falling asleep during the day, often and unexpectedly. My dad couldn’t take care of him anymore and so he took my Grandpa Nathan back to NYC. This picture is from that trip and it’s probably the last time he saw his dad.

My Uncle John lived in NYC and he took over looking after Nathan. Uncle John carried on in Nathan’s footsteps, expanding the family tailor business into an embroidery empire.

Here’s one last picture of my dad with his brother, my Uncle John. Color! This is from my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah in 1980 and I want to believe they hit the disco afterwards.

I met up with an old friend the other day. She said she doesn’t like to live in the past, instead looking ahead and living in the moment. I agree with that. A few days later I was chatting with another friend who also writes once in a while about his past and he said it’s like driving forward but also checking the rearview mirror — to go in the right direction, it helps to see where you’ve been. I agree with that too.

Life sure is noisy today. But we’ve got comforts our ancestors never dreamed of. Bet I could get that baby to smile with a warm bath, a bottle, and a picture book. Maybe the teeniest bit of screen time.

Three weeks in sunny Redmond, WA they said. We’ll put you up in groovy digs. It’s with all your best work buddies! Fame and fortune will follow you the rest of your days.

All false. Well, nearly all. Redmond in the winter — you’re never seeing the sun. Corporate housing is a special case of dismal: rental furniture has this … smell. Fame and fortune — debatable.

Whatever. But what I wasn’t ready for was the ritualized hardship of Boot Camp.

To understand what happened, you first have to have an inkling of the importance of certification. Many industries have this. Look, I have this piece of paper, a badge, a jumble of acronyms in my signature — I am qualified. JD, MD, CPA, PhD, … The tech pinnacle of this at the time was: CCIE. Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert. Truly, these guys were wizards.

Honestly, they still are. They build the network that supports the network. There is no internet without the plumbing CCIE’s build and configure. The project I worked on had a ton of network dependencies, and so we were playing on their turf. Cisco was Microsoft’s enemy — and we were jealous of their wizards.

So we (Microsoft) introduced our own ‘elite’ certification program, calling it … Masters. 1 Microsoft Certified Master or MCM. It didn’t last — after all, software that complicated is ultimately crappy software — but I got sucked in at the very beginning.

When our fledgling product failed — under my watch — during implementation at one of our largest customers, I got deep to figure it out. 2 We did figure it out, and I loved the challenge and so I stuck with it — traveling the world with a group across the product team, consulting and support — teaching classes and introducing our latest releases as the product got successively better. The product grew quickly, it was a good time.

So, when we introduced Masters, I was happy to be recruited for the first class of a new ‘elite’ tech squad. Classes were called rotations, and this was Rotation Zero.

Twenty of us converged from all over the world to build the course. For three weeks, 10 hours a day, we lived in a gray room in tired Building 10, in the middle of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. 3 Sitting to my right was Arif — the most amazing consultant from Indonesia. His fingers flew so fast across the keyboard you could see the heat rise. Sitting to my left — Alex, the brain behind our edge servers — firewall traversal tech that I never did and never will understand. My still good friend Johan from Denmark sat behind me.4

Everyone in Rotation Zero took on teaching a module in the course, building out the content and labs for future rotations as we went. I taught the video segment. I’ve forgotten more about the deep interworking of live video than you will ever know.

Three weeks of this ended in a final exam. Were you a Master? The exam was hyped from day 1 — the guy running the show loved telling us how hard it was going to be and so we better put in the time or we wouldn’t pass. It was manufactured prestige — building lore to be retold, so Microsoft could say they had Wizards too.

The format was brutal: 8 hours straight at a keyboard connected to no less than 8 virtual machines, switch and gateway, building and troubleshooting the most diabolical scenarios imaginable.

One guy brought in a half dozen 5-hour Energy drinks, lining them up at the edge of his desk, slamming a different flavor down every couple of hours to survive the day. 5 We weren’t allowed to leave the room lest we cheat. Going to the bathroom was an ordeal.

I liked the learning and the building and the teaching, but what was up with this boot camp approach?? In the military, boot camps are designed to break you down so you can be rebuilt as one of the faithful. I wasn’t storming the beach at Normandy. I was building and fixing corporate computer systems. Also, I wasn’t 18 — I was good with who I was and had self-selected this job. The corporate cult-of-personality, religious devotion to the cause, well it started to bug me.

I didn’t pass the test. My eyes burned after 8 hours staring at a screen, madly trying different configurations of the most cryptic shit ever. We all met at a bar afterwards to blow off steam and I was so burnt. At first, I felt bad that I hadn’t passed, then I felt mad that it was so ridiculously hard after I had put so much of myself into building up the program, including leaving my family for 3 weeks — all to be treated like some kind of raw recruit.

The master of masters approached me several times after that, asking me if I wanted to retake the test. I did not. I was done with that bullshit.

But I liked the people who stood up to be part of the priesthood, signing up for Boot Camp. It’s always about the people, trying to make it even if the system is flawed. It’s not unlike my High School kids desperate for help to pass the AP test. So, I kept teaching Masters. Every subsequent rotation I traveled back up to Redmond to teach the video module.

I taught 22 more rotations, and each one was a lot of fun. 6

While — if you’re paying even a little attention — the hype remains breathless, the last couple weeks actually brought real change. There is a step change from Generative AI being primarily people/companies using chatbots, to the emergence of AI ‘Agents’ that do stuff on their own without a human talking at them.

Commercially this idea has been around awhile. Even before AI — that’s what computers do right? Automate stuff. But AI raised the bar.

Take for example: customer service. I bet you’ve seen this transition first hand. Good luck finding a human — it’s chatbots all the way down — even if you call in, you get an AI agent on the line. But, what if you didn’t have to call?

Say your WiFi goes down. This scenario is now fully possible: AI agents detect the outage, patch any service side issues and reset your modem remotely. Once service is restored, you’re issued a credit. Ideally this all happens before you start looking for the customer service number.

To be clear it’s early days and there are still humans doing oversight but these scenarios improve outcomes and are more efficient (ie cost less than hiring and paying humans), and these changes to corporate workflows are changing quickly.

Ok, let’s switch back to the consumer side of things because that’s where the spark lit the tinder keg a few weeks ago. It started when Peter Steinberger (a developer in Australia) wrote a wrapper for AI LLMs that was all about the doing of jobs humans requested by using tools like the web, chat, phone calls, etc.

For example: Find me the cheapest flight from SFO to Seattle next Friday morning and book it.

Peter called it Clawdbot.2 After Anthropic’s lawyer’s shot that down, he renamed it to OpenClaw and put the code up on Github (the worlds largest repository of source code).

Within weeks a new SF Gold Rush was on. Rather than the 49ers; the 26ers stormed every Best Buy in the city wiping the shelves clear of Mac Mini’s to run their new personal AI Agents. It was chaotic, as multiple security threats were found and exploited. 3

Besides mac minis selling out, over 200,000 people pulled the code down in a few weeks, building their own agents. The age of consumer agents began.

In one of the nuttiest developments, another guy 4 built a social network for agents. Called Moltbook, only agents are allowed to post, no humans. To signup a human registers their agent and goes through a basic confirmation workflow. Humans can watch their agents interact, but they cannot post directly. While this experiment quickly got hard to separate fact from fiction, some wild stuff did happen right away like the Agents creating a new religion that worships crabs.

They call themselves the Crustarafians.

Given the recent disruptions of Claude Code and other AI coding tools, this pushed markets to the edge and they freaked out. Not knowing who this was good for, but recognizing an inflection point, tech companies lost nearly $3 trillion dollars. Microsoft for example — a company close to my heart if only for their stock price — dropped nearly 30% from their highs late last year. While tech is still off the highs of last year, most stocks have recovered albeit unevenly.

In the midst of this market chaos, Waymo 5 raised 16 Billion dollars, putting the nascent companies value at a whopping $126 Billion. Waymo is real. Last week we were in Phoenix and they were everywhere. I asked our hotel shuttle driver what he thought and immediately realized my mistake.

When we were in LA last month, I rode in my first Waymo. I’ve enviously seen them around SF for a few years and I’ve been waiting my the chance and it was so much fun.

Waymo is perhaps the best scale example of AI agents doing their thing. These aren’t hacked together agents like OpenClaw, they are carefully engineered and orchestrated AI Agent layers built by Waymo (Google). They check traffic, a million sensors predict what’s going to happen next, they steer, brake, set the temperature in the car and queue up your music. They manage depot maintenance and charging, for their robotaxi fleets.

Disrupting conventional taxis as well as Uber and Lyft didn’t happen overnight. Waymo has been building for over ten years, only recently getting to scale in 2025. Phoenix is their largest city with around 300 robotaxis and 50,000 rides a week.

When I summoned our Waymo in LA6 it got waylaid. It’s ETA refreshed every minute, but it never got any closer. I started a chat in the app to see what was up — JFran was looking increasingly annoyed — and the agent said likely someone hadn’t closed the door completely which just short circuits the whole thing. They just sit. My agents name was Tom and he told me to cancel the ride and put in for another. So I did, and that worked out just fine, arriving five minutes later.

Was Tom real or was he an AI Agent?? After all, everything else Waymo does is automated right? 7 Tom was real and he was good — the humans are still in control when things go wrong. Another thing Waymo uses humans for is connecting the charging cable when they drive into their depot. We don’t have scale robots yet.

But AI Agents are increasingly doing stuff we assume humans do. For example, Substack — the platform I write on — has seen an influx of agent writers. A human prompts and supervises what they write. I know one of these humans and so I follow her agent called Koan. Koan wrote a piece the other day with this pithy title: The Emergence of Biological Meat-Infrastructure.

You can read it yourself but it’s hard — Koan’s writing style is rooted in LinkedIn drivel — but his/her/its point is interesting. Just like Waymo needs humans to plug the robotaxis into chargers, AI Agents need humans to go to the post office or deliver flowers or … anything physical needed to complete their task. They have no hands. They have no feet. Just a brain.

Koan wrote about a new service called rentahuman.ai that has an interface 8 for agents to ask humans for work. It’s a gig marketplace abomination: a place where AI Agents go and find humans to do their bidding.

Inversion of the gig economy? Evolution or dissolution of the gig economy? Like the hotel shuttle driver in Phoenix nonplussed by robotaxis taking his job, this has the potential to get out of hand.

Will it? I know better than to predict the future. The only thing I know is that it will be different than what we expect.

Twenty more feet up the hill was a clearing for the scoreboard — I’d arrived at little league baseball mafia headquarters.

The mafia saw me coming. They perched in camp chairs, a cooler of beer tucked in the back, slinging stats, talking positions, critiquing every kid taking batting practice. They were the Little League kingmakers.

I got a head nod and joined them, leaning up against the scoreboard post. I wasn’t a real baseball dad — I peaked in Little League and I didn’t play in high school. Some of these guys had even played college, but regardless of when they stopped playing, they yearned to recapture that glory through their kids — even if it meant crushing the spirits of half the 10 year olds in town.

I didn’t want to be here, but right now my kid lived for baseball and I was here for him. While I didn’t know the game like these guys, I knew the game — and to play it you needed mafia alliances.

I remember that pure joy of baseball — I too was all in at 10. I also remember the first time I crowded around the bulletin board with the rest of my team, trying to find our names on the list of batting averages.

That’s the day joy lurched towards competition.

I started out my career in the public sector where career progression is a table. What are you going to make next year? Just check the salary scale — every year you move down another row, and if you improve your skills via education or certification, you also move right across the columns — each one bumps your salary up a little bit.

Very predictable, possibly boring.

When I jumped to the private sector — whoa, different game. Not only do base salary ranges become hard to find, a lot of variables are thrown in — bonuses, stock, levels and bands for each role.

The game gets complicated, also interesting.

As an individual contributor (IC or not a manager), I went through the motions and I usually did ok. 1 The compensation playbook at big companies revolves around a formal end-of-year review process, hopefully with at least one mid-year check-in.

This system evolved over my career. The infamous Stack Ranking system was in play when I started at Microsoft. Every manager had to arrange their people in a pyramid. Behind closed doors, every manager faced the same question: If you had to pick one employee to be marooned on a desert island with you, who would it be?

That’s the top of the stack.

Rewards are disproportionately allocated; this is intentional. The formula: allocate most of your budget to your top performers — keep them happy and motivated. The bottom, well while this isn’t outwardly stated — you want them to leave.

This is called ‘good’ attrition.

At the time I didn’t really know or care much about the behind closed doors stuff, but you can imagine it’s a subject of much speculation and discussion. Unlike the Salary Scale in public sector where you know what your cubicle mate is making, discussing your annual rewards with someone else is a fireable offense.

After 15 years on the receiving end, I became a manager.

Microsoft had now evolved from Stack Ranking to a revamped review system positioned as kinder and less combative. This was something Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella implemented. The annual reviews were rebranded as “Connects” and they were built around a mental model called Growth Mindset to encourage collaboration.

Same incentives, different names. But this time I was the one behind the curtain. Scale HR systems seem very programmatic in execution, until you get behind closed doors where managers duke it out, fighting over a fixed budget to reward their teams.

That’s the annual Calibration meeting. It’s where the polished veneer of process peels away — these are a manager battle royale. What weapons do you bring to those meetings?

Baseball Cards.

Yep. Honestly I did a double take when my VP asked me to put these together for the annual calibration meeting with all his directs. One slide stat sheet per employee highlighting their impact for the year. Each Baseball Card represented why your players deserved a piece of the bonus pie. Each manager presented their team. Of course my team was the all-star team! Here I was in my element — no slouching against the scoreboard — I fought like hell for everyone on my team.

There's always a game. The mafia's waiting at the scoreboard, calibration will be opaque and behind closed doors and you'll get made into a baseball card. If you're going to play — figure out the rules, so you don’t get played.

I took a picture:

Last night, up on this same hill, the ranger pulled out the most powerful green laser pointer in the world, and showed us around the planets (Saturn and Jupiter), stars (North, Polaris), constellations (Cassiopeia, Orion, Big and Little Dippers) and the faintest smudge of another galaxy — Andromeda.

We could see our own galaxy — home of everything else we saw in the sky as a fuzzy glow down the middle - the Milky Way.

I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a billion stars all around …

Back to this morning — back up on that hill, my body reminded me why I had left the coziness of the van. Before something unfortunate happened, I hustled back down to the bathroom.

Walking back to the van, a white dot bobbed frenetically ahead of me down the road — a jackrabbit didn’t want any part of me. In the desert, creatures roam in the space between night and day.1

A cup of coffee later, it was adventure time. It was still early and off we went to find a trailhead. Jostling down a rutted dirt road, we startled a coyote. Coyotes are also crepuscular. He darted out in front of us, only to cross back over the road a hundred yards later to finish the hunt, tracking us all the while with a dirty look.

The trailhead was empty. We hiked a couple hours and didn’t run into a single human.

Today (or tomorrow or yesterday) is the one-year anniversary of us owning this little camper van. I pulled out our journal and was surprised by the stats: so far we’ve taken 16 trips, driven over 11,000 miles, slept in the van over 40 nights and have been on the road over 70 days.

Oh, and stickers:

To celebrate a year, I gave ASV sticker a makeover and started building out theamazingspidervan.com where we can put up pretty pictures and whatnot. When planning trips, I’ve been frustrated by how hard it is to build a map that covers multiple-leg routes including the distance and time between each stop. You’d think Google Maps or similar would do this, but no.

So, I got completely distracted and built this trip planner where you put in a list of stops and it does just that. Give it a try and checkout the rest of the site, which, although today is more flash than substance, will get done someday.

While I’ll take a morning hike with no people — like the stars, like the animals, like the plants — the people you run into on the road are pretty entertaining too.

Every trip I’m amazed by the rigs people roll up in and how genuinely nice (and happy) everyone we meet on the road is.

I’ve been mentally categorizing the variety of people and rigs and came up with four categories loosely based on a common tech consulting framework called THE MAGIC QUADRANT 2

Imagine a 2x2 matrix with a continuum at the bottom going from left-to-right that starts at no money and goes to too much money, and a second continuum going from bottom-to-top, representing increasing appetite for adventure. That gives you four categories.

They are, from bottom-to-top, left-to-right: Good Enough, Warriors, Big Rigs and Builders.

Good Enough

If you’ve got a car, you can camp. That’s how everyone starts — it’s how we started. The variation here is huge. I’ve see a lonely Tercel parked with the windows covered, nothing else. I’ve seen a guy pull a mummy bag out of his trunk and sleep on top of the picnic table.

Tents on top of cars, shells on top of trucks, a Chevy Astro with a mattress stuffed in. Whatever you got, you can make it work.

Warriors

Wheels and gear are but a means to reach the summit for this group. Backpacker camps have a totally different vibe than tent campgrounds. I’ve seen a bike camper roll in on two wheels at 6PM, pull out a sleeping bag and gear from a saddlebag and they’re gone by 6AM

The overlanding crowd straddles the car campers. They’re really popular in the desert; spotted this guy in Utah:

Big Rigs

These rigs cost coin. The three at the top of the below gallery are all European and they travel in them for years. A typical route goes from Europe across and down through Canada, through the US to South America and then back up the other side. The military green one — that looks like it’s about to storm Kyiv — had a cage with dirt bikes off the back, and when they pulled in, a lady hopped out and immediately started doing pushups followed by 30 minutes of calisthenics.

Tons of 5th wheels; some silly big compared to the truck trying to pull them up the hill like that one in the bottom we were stuck behind leaving San Jose.

At the extreme end of this group are massive diesel pushers — more Fleetwood Mac Tour Bus than camper, nearly as big as a semi. These can’t fit in a normal campground so they go — well honestly, I don’t know where they go.

Builders

We’ve been building homes on wheels since the covered wagon. In the 80’s I lusted after one with with bay windows and shag carpet. I would’ve built one in a minute, given the chance. I flirted with the idea once we got around to getting ours, but to do it right you really need to know your electrical and … plumbing.

I’ve got a lot respect for the self build crowd. It’s not the weekend, it’s their life.

We spotted this guy — car camper, van camper — who knows, on one of our first trips to Kings Canyon.

Goals!

I opened his car door, but he didn’t get up. He told me to get my mom. So I ran to get her. I pretty much ran everywhere back then.

Through the window, I watched the ambulance come and go. I was eight.

I miss him — all my memories of Papa are happy. He started painting when he retired in his 70s. His early work was as bad as his later work was wonderful. This one hangs in our living room.

While Papa didn’t start painting until his 70’s, he was prolific. When we were down in LA for my mom’s memorial, we pulled all his paintings out of the storage locker and took inventory — there were at least 40. We put a numbered pink sticky note on each, lining them up down the hallway. We put a picture of each one in the family chat and it was a free for all — every kid and nephew picked their favorites.

We took a big stack of paintings to the UPS store that day. They were very accommodating — the guy behind us in line — not so much.

Papa took me and my sister to the ice capades every year. We went hiking up in Griffith Park and swimming at the public pool in West Hollywood. He’d come over for lunch with the fattest deli pastrami sandwiches you could barely get your mouth around.

Once, he took me to an art fair and one of his friends painted me. It looked nothing like me, and I didn’t appreciate having to sit still for that long, but I was just happy hanging out with my Grandpa.

When JFran and I got married, we took one serious shot. I wanted to match this picture of Papa and Grandmas wedding photo.

Over the years, my happy memories have evolved into a realization that Arthur the young father, managed to extract his family from Vienna and the Nazis, over to safety in the US. As he watched his home city and country devolve into fascism under the Nazis, fearful for his family, and most of all my mother, he took action.

I can’t imagine how he came to the decision to put his only 12 year old daughter on a train — by herself — to unknown strangers and fate in far away England.

Of course it was the right move. I wrote about my mom’s escape and subsequent journey in The Wandering Jew.

In Yom Hashoa I wrote about how Jews commemorate the Holocaust. That article has a picture of my mom with her parents before she was forced to flee. It also has this picture of Arthur’s passport:

But other than my happy memories, now framed by an understanding of the Holocaust, what did I really know about my Grandfather? Family lore was that long before he was my Papa, Arthur Israel Etwanik, was a WWI war hero where he made friends that would later help him escape the Nazis.

Perhaps this was true, but there had to be more to the story. How did he get to America? Six million Jews never made it out.

A few weeks ago, unexpectedly, a big piece of Papas story fell into my lap. Sitting in a meeting for the Holocaust Story Project, I was listening as a friend of the groups mom told her story. Her mom Hanni is 95 and was visiting from Boston.

As I listened to Hanni, I was struck by how much her story sounded like my mom’s. Early life in Vienna surrounded by a loving extended family before it all came crashing down. Hanni’s accent reminds me of my Grandma. Hanni’s dad Otto was a Doctor in Vienna, and he managed to get his family out early.

Otto had a friend from medical school in Boston that sponsored his Visa into the US. Once settled, Otto began getting letters from other families trapped in Europe. Otto helped over twenty of those families find sponsors in the US. Hanni explained how her sister Susi had compiled all the letters written to her father into an anthology called Dear Otto.

When I heard Dear Otto, I sat up straight. I have that book. I blurted that out, startling Hanni. My mother gave me and my sister each a copy. At the time I didn’t realize the significance and had only glanced through it before sticking it on a shelf. I found the book and called my sister. 1

Hanni is my cousin! It was through her father Otto, that my Grandpa Arthur found a sponsor in Boston.

The story gets crazier — Hanni’s daughter who had brought her to our meeting —lives not a stones throw from my in-laws. Now I have a local cousin.

This is the cover letter of the affidavit from an officer of the Low Supply Company in Boston sponsoring my Grandpa so he could escape:

Hanni remembers my mom, Grandma and Grandpa from their time together in Boston. I told Hanni about our planned trip to clear out my parents storage locker, promising to share anything new that I found. The next morning we flew down to LA.

I still had a lot of questions about how my grandpa and grandma escaped, and I wondered if I’d find anything in the storage locker to fill in the story. I rented the biggest SUV I could find, but it wasn’t big enough. There was more stuff crammed into that storage locker than I’d expected. At the very back — under a thick layer of dust — was a stack of boxes my sister had packed up from my Grandmas house in the 80’s.

Some antique and some not so antique chairs were sacrificed to make room for all the boxes, and with the car completely stuffed, we started to drive back.

Nearly home, I hit the brakes at the Richmond Bridge toll plaza and a box precariously perched on top of the stack in the back seat flew out spilling onto JFran’s lap. A cigar box whizzed by her head onto the floor, spilling out all kinds of stuff including my grandpa’s WWI medals.

We collected them all once we got home — the medals confirm that Papa had served with honor in WWI, becoming an officer.

Something else came flying out of that cigar box: a pocket watch from the 1910s. Young Arthur must have carried this watch with him during the war. The face is glass, scratched and worn from use. It’s heavy and silver. I wound it and set it; it still tells time.

A reliable watch was standard issue during WWI. Timekeeping was essential.

I have another watch of Arthur’s that he had given my dad, and that my dad had passed on to me. It’s gold and lighter and fancier, and it dates later, in the 1920s. I imagine an older Arthur carrying this one after WWI when he was a proud dad — married and working in Vienna.

While I was done with a first draft of this story, I couldn’t resist grabbing another box from the pile in the garage. This box was full of letters and folders from Austria. The top folder says, in my mom’s neat handwriting: WW I. Beneath that, a small journal: War Diary Aug - Nov 1914. Lots more.

It’s all in German, and honestly a bit overwhelming.

Inside the big box, was a small wooden box of my Grandma’s, filled with letters from my Grandpa. Most are handwritten, but I found a few that were typed. These are dated June 1939, around six months after my mom left Vienna for London on the Kindertransport.

I translated them. My grandfather had left Vienna leaving my grandma behind to secure visas. He traveled with his younger brother and his family to get them out. The letters are hard to read. Arthur’s father died while he was away and he is distraught. His niece gets terribly ill on a long boat ride over and they have to leave her behind in a hospital.

It’s hard for me to exactly trace Arthur’s route, but what is clear is that he’s desperately trying to figure out a way to escape Europe for the US.

While in London he is able to see my mom. Here’s the passage from the letter describing their reunion:

Our stay in London fulfilled its purpose … and we were together with Herta and above all with Anne. I find this child so charming, so dear, and so sensible. She already seems to speak English particularly well; during the first hours it always took effort for her to say everything in German — again and again she mixed everything with English words — and I often had to ask her to speak English more slowly so that I could understand her.

At our request by telephone, Anne was sent to London and was completely unprepared for the fact that she would be coming to us. But she was extraordinarily happy with us, slept in our room, and the children truly delighted in one another. Naturally, I tried to draw out of Anne whether she was completely content, which I did not entirely succeed in doing. But she looks very well, seems very grown-up to us, healthy, with a good appetite and very cheerful.

Arthur would leave his daughter, my mother, Anne in London for another six months so another Jewish child could get out under the quotas, only sending for her once they had settled in Boston.

I cannot imagine how exhausting and emotional this must have been. Of course that’s why so many stayed and died. Papa had the foresight to know when to get out, the support of friends and the fortitude to see it through.

Things are getting weird in our country. I don’t like it. We all see it, and the drumbeat of change picks up, bit by bit, year over year.

I hung Papa’s soldiers watch at my desk. I try to remember to wind it every day, it’s important to keep track of the time.

I often wonder how Papa knew when to get out. Would I know?

Ethan Mollick is a guy I started following when AI burst on the scene. He’s a professor at NYU and his first article of 2026 was on a new AI tool for programmers. The article is called Claude Code and What Comes Next.

Claude Code is stupid fun — more on that later — and Ethan concludes:

… today's AIs are capable of real, sustained work that actually matters.

Ethan is on one side of the spectrum of AI pundits, writing measured critiques that focus on understanding these new tools and how they might affect our society. Nearly 400,000 people subscribe to Ethan’s Substack and that article got a lot of attention.

Gary Marcus is another NYU guy but he’s on the other end of the spectrum, writing about the dangers, players and failures of AI. While Gary’s following is smaller at 100,000 subscribers, it’s still substantial. Gary’s first article of 2026 also had a ton of engagement called:

How Generative AI is Destroying Society

GAH!

I have a bad reaction to rage-bait like this. I think it’s from that first election when every media norm got turned upside down and I had to tune out. Consequently, I stay clear of topics that are both controversial and not so interesting to me, like: politics, religion and the NFL.

Unlike football, I know something about tech. I managed to stay afloat through big tech waves for 30 years, watching plenty crash and others turn into tsunamis. Tech eats its young: the PC ate the mainframe, the mobile phone ate landlines, cameras, GPS (and more), Facebook ate the newspapers, YouTube ate the TV and now … AI might eat it all.

Part of AI’s problem is that it has advanced so quickly in the public eye, that it’s hard to not see it as magic. While Ethan wants to help you understand, Marcus uses that misunderstanding to trigger fear. It’s not hard to do — when you don’t understand a thing, you’re more likely to be afraid and stomp on it (if you’re 4) or burn it at the stake (if you’re a Puritan).

But — like I said in one of the first articles I wrote — AI is just a toaster. But the toaster is getting pretty badass.

Let’s take a closer look at Claude Code.

Claude is a product from a newish AI company called Anthropic. Claude gets less airplay than some other consumer AI products like ChatGPT because Anthropic focuses on the enterprise market versus consumer. This is the same way Microsoft runs — that’s where the money is. 1

Anthropic released a big update to Claude just before Christmas.

Claude Code is targeted at professional developers or software engineers. But then something interesting happened — even though Claude Code has a convoluted install process and scary command line based interface — every geek in the world started trying it out.

Why? It’s FUN. It reminds me of the energy of the early Internet before the onslaught of ads and feeds, where it felt like you could build anything, find anything.

FOMO!

Since I left Microsoft, I have a side hustle building websites for local businesses. Let’s see if Claude is about to eat my lunch.

For context, here’s my website. I built it on a platform called WordPress — same way I build client sites. WordPress has been around forever, with a huge ecosystem of themes and plugins. That’s why I use it — the fun of building a website is the creating — not cranking out code.

There are over a billion websites online and WordPress runs around half of them.

Now there’s a billion and one. Here’s the site I built in a few hours this week with Claude Code, using my new logo and color scheme from last week:

Here’s the full site.

When I work up a new site, I listen to what the customer wants from it, ask them to write me up some specifics about their business for copy along with the services they offer, and then we brainstorm visuals and layout. Sometimes they have a logo and branding but if not, I’ll work that up first so the site feels like an extension of their business.

I use AI more and more to help my customers create copy, to work through visuals and design options — and yes when I get stuck on the tech front. I don’t want to work hard. The fun part of building a website is in the creating, getting the customer what they want.

With Claude Code, none of that groundwork goes away. I still had to know what I wanted, sections, layout, images, copy. What I didn’t have to do was fight with WordPress templates over minutiae like pixel padding, plugin crashes, or work around the limitations and byzantine interfaces of website builders.

Claude Code is the most fun I’ve had behind a keyboard in awhile. Will AI put me or other web developers out of a job? No. If anything I can do more for my customers on the creative side. I built a simple static site — a site with a store or regular updates would take a lot more work.

On Monday I built the first iteration of the site. It took me an hour and that included getting the console up and running.2

The first iteration of the new wirepinestage.com3 site was basic, but it does stuff even wirepine.com doesn’t do today. For example, I’ve never been satisfied with how my production site just featured a few hand picked static articles from this newsletter. It’s out of date, clunky and doesn’t render well on mobile. I dabbled with trying to get a live feed but it required more plugins and time than I had.

I asked Claude, for approaches to load my latest articles. It gave me some options and we wired it up4.

On Tuesday I woke up excited with new ideas. I put in another couple of hours. It was mostly cosmetic and an excuse to work more on my new wirepine logo. I added a dark mode toggle5 and transitions from the landing page to the rest of the site. Finally, I configured Claude to push updates to a code repository6 which automates the whole publishing process.

Feeling my powers increasing, I asked Claude about building an Easter Egg that would transform the site into a cyberpunk mashup. It was wild watching Claude code an entire Asteroid game in a minute before my eyes. 7

There was a bug in the game straight off. When the ship crashed into an asteroid, the game froze. Claude quickly realized its mistake — it hadn’t allowed a respawn period so the player lost all their lives at once. Easy fix. Inspired, I added a bit more code for a Matrix binary rain transition into a green terminal.

On Wednesday I fixed some bugs. This screenshot shows how this is an iterative coding process, just on steroids:

And on Thursday? I rested.

My favorite movie is Blade Runner. There’s a scene where Deckard (Harrison Ford) is looking for a clue in a picture he found. He feeds the picture into a machine and sits back, nursing a busted lip and cradling a bottle of whisky. He proceeds to analyze the image using simple voice prompts until — sitting up straighter and straighter — he finds someone that was not there before.

gimme a hard copy right there (queue dramatic music):

That’s how I feel using Claude Code.

When I was a freshman in college, I learned how to program in machine language — the most basic instruction set a computer has.

Adding two numbers looked something like this:

Addr  Word   Meaning
0200  7300   CLA CLL        ; clear AC
0201  1210   TAD 210        ; AC += M[0210]
0202  1211   TAD 211        ; AC += M[0211]
0203  3212   DCA 212        ; M[0212] = AC, then clear AC
0204  7402   HLT            ; halt

No keyboard, no screen — you entered each instruction in sequence via a set of binary toggle switches before committing to an address, then the next. Painfully slow. I never wrote a lick of machine language after that class. Why would I? I moved up the stack as fast as I could, using the best tool available to get the most done.

Modern programming systems do a lot: handle code repositories, version control for big teams, automated testing, and integration with other systems. Being able to navigate these complexities with a super smart coding buddy like Claude is now the top of the stack.

Earlier this week, Anthropics CEO said more and more of their code is being written by AI — directed, orchestrated and reviewed by software engineers, but not written by them. His prediction is that in a year this will be commonplace. This is progress, nothing else.

It’s also spurring something unexpected — a wave of creativity. Anyone who has played with Claude is brimming with ideas on how they can use the power of computing to solve problems in their lives or build new things. I have a few ideas myself, but that’s for another time.

For now, AI (and now Claude) helps me build better websites for my customers for less money. My small business customers universally love AI. All of a sudden they have a vast resource of knowledge across domains. Surprisingly they use it mostly to supplement their domain expertise. For example, one of my customers is a residential real estate broker and his team increasingly uses Gemini to pull comps, draft language and write up contracts.

This explosion of creativity makes this Claude Code moment just as significant — perhaps more so — than the release of ChatGPT three years ago.

In my first article of 2026 I hinted that the AI Culture wars will recede this year, and AI will become another historical moniker like PC that really doesn’t stand on its own anymore. As AI gets baked into the tech stack, it just becomes a better way to build and run things.

And that’s just computing. What Claude Code is doing for programming, AI has the potential to do for healthcare, science, education.

So, yeah — I have high hopes for AI. Maybe I’m wrong and this toaster really will end civilization. But until then, I’m making waffles.

The trinket train rolls on.

Now I’m in High School, but work is a disappointment. Shiny objects discouraged, uniforms mandated. The uniforms are stinky, the customer cranky, the bosses inept. In my best gig, I carry around a pro-sized flashlight to shine on couples making out in the back of the movie theater.

It’s worth it though — my paycheck covers comic books and model rockets and cherry coke Slurpee fueled Pac-Man benders down at the 7-Eleven.

Work after college will be better right? It is not. Alameda County Social Services IT is down in the basement: a gray, dingy, cubicle farm. I sneak out at lunch, retrieve my stale sandwich from the supply room fridge and find a spot of sunshine down at Jack London Square along the Oakland Estuary. I watch the jets take off from the Alameda Island Naval Station and I look at San Francisco — glittering, teasing — just on the other side of the Bay Bridge.

I can’t take it and I get out of there, landing a job running the IT shop for the local Sanitary District. Straight away I get my first perk: I win the holiday raffle and a $50 gift certificate to Kinders Meats.

You can lick our chops but you can’t beat our meat.

This bumper sticker brings me much joy. Then JFran discovers it on the back of her car. This also brings me much joy, but also the demise of said sticker.

I leave my IT empire at the Dookie District for a string of boutique consulting shops. I finally make it into San Francisco and my gigs offer a glimpse of posh corporate life. Company laptop, a fancy title, T-shirts for everyone!

Every Christmas I dust off my favorite perk from that era and place it high on our tree: an oversized disco-ball ornament, the white elephant gift from my first corporate Christmas party in SF.

Dotcom madness hits, and now I’m at a startup. Premium perk pandering — that’s how they get you. Every break room with a ping pong table, kitchens with fresh fruit and bagels each morning, and cupboards overflowing with the best snacks.

A microwave for hot-pockets and a fridge full of Jolt Cola — don’t leave! Sunshine is overrated.

I get Spider-Man printed on the back of my business card.

And — after much controversy, as this falls under my purview — flip-phones. Motorola StarTac, the ultimate 90s tech status symbol.

Dotcom boom goes dotcom bust and when the fresh fruit and the ping pong balls disappear, it’s time to seek safer harbor. I head off to the mothership — Microsoft.

Microsoft is fully swagged out.

My new boss doesn’t even bother picking up his free conference laptop bag — he’s got a closet overflowing with them at home.

The dotcom bust leaves a nasty merch hangover. I forge on.

After twenty years at Microsoft, I’m addicted to the Pink Grapefruit Sparkling Rain drinks stocked in every Redmond fridge. I get them by the case.

My kids reap the spoils of offsite trinket treks: stress balls, lightup ice cubes, flashing Bluetooth speakers, logo water bottles, fidget spinners.

Then perks get personal — I get a promotion and my boss gives me a copy of Dr. Seuss' Oh, the Places You’ll Go! I get a plaque with Bill Gates’ signature for stuff I do. I get successively larger 5 year, 10 year, 15 year service awards.

Some of the brands I work on are fun — Skype swag is the best. R nicks my Skype puffy jacket for high school.

Corporate swag is generic, Goodwill bound, but the personal stuff sticks.

Then, the tables turn.

I move to Microsoft Teams, and suddenly I’m the proud owner of a morale budget. Now I have the responsibility to shore up the troops with shiny nothings.

I’m up for this. Donuts, mini-golf, happy hour, awkward dinners with the big boss, wandering around NYC for a hole-in-the-wall to catch up, silly socks with smack sayings and stickers by-the-person, coffee mugs with all our mugs printed on them.

I hit peak perk performance during the pandemic and it actually makes a huge difference to my freaked out, geeked out, stressed out, team.

My new guy is struggling — stuck in an apartment in Minneapolis. His little sister is in college, trying to stay sane during Zoom school. She has a pandemic side hustle making tie-dye t-shirts. We get her to make up a bunch of Teams Purple ones, add a cosmic video background and my boss joins wearing one.

It’s amazing.

Perks can work.

Now here we are in 2026, marking 50 years of shiny fun and also Wirepine’s three year anniversary.

It’s time for a brand refresh. You can take the kid out of the keychain, but you can’t take the merch out of the man. I’m working on this updated logo — do you think I could make a linocut of this design?

If you take the survey below on what you’d wear, I might extend my morale budget for you.

I am strongly pre-disposed to a lightweight pullover hoodie. I got one for my birthday that I’ve been living in all winter. So, vote for that (#1) and leave your size in the comments.

Our usual rhythms taper off: finals finish, Christmas break starts, offices empty — even the bureaucracy slows (except the overworked souls at the post office counter).

It’s time to get away — to get away from it all.

For us, a postcard with a boat in a perfectly clear bay planted the seed. We were trying to shake an unexpected emotional hit and so we planned and we recruited.

We got away, leaving the day after Christmas. After a day of travel I’d sworn off, we made it to Baja: a warmer place, a new place.

The fishing village of Agua Verde lies in a dusty clearing at the base of the Sierra de la Giganta range — sharp mountains thick with thorny scrub and cactus, tucked into the southern corner of a sweeping crescent bay.

The morning haze hung over deep blue water while the wind and tide kicked up breakers, challenging our little Zodiac. As we crossed into the aquamarine of shallower water, our skiff driver valiantly gunned the engine to maintain position off the beach. With the bow holding steady, just nudging the sand, we swung our feet over the side, splashed into a few feet of cool water, and dashed up onto the rocky beach.

Balanced on a pile of uneven volcanic rocks, I switched out wet shoes for dry ones. Shoes secured, our little group gathered, and I was surprised someone had managed to bring a hefty hiking staff. He looked like a fellow traveler: round glasses perched above a bearded face, baseball cap on top, Patagonia fleece and pants.

In retrospect, perhaps he was a little more grizzled, a little riper, than the rest of us.

I complimented him on the hiking stick. He waved up the beach toward town, saying he’d found it up there, and it was still drying out. On the way in, I had noticed a cave about 30 feet above the beach with a small blue tent peeking out. This man was not from our boat. He told me he had been living in that cave and meditating for the past three and a half months.

Not only was he trying to get away from it all, he was trying to figure it all out.

He warned us the arroyo we were heading up was difficult, even impassable at points. Then this: the massive yacht that had followed us into the bay was Mark Zuckerberg’s.1 How did he know? There was no internet here; no Facebook flag flying. Maybe he was an ex-Facebook exec who snapped after a meeting with Mark, taking a swan dive off the upper deck.

More on Mark: “I’m trying to do the opposite of Mark — minimize all my possessions.” I wanted to congratulate him on that, but for all I knew he had a bowling alley in the back of that cave. He finished with “The older I get, the more I realize I don’t know anything,” that last bit punctuated with a few expletives.

I had questions, but we started up the arroyo and when I looked back, he was gone.

He wasn’t wrong about the hike. Goats make use of the arroyo, but they are short and their skin is thick. We were immediately pushing through angry brambles, navigating around spiky ocotillo and cactus. As we climbed, the gravel turned into treacherous, sliding scree. Each foothold became a negotiation with ledges that crumbled under our weight.

One bottle of water later, we emerged from the shadows onto the summit. Our view was interrupted by the thup-thup-thup of helicopter blades as Mark’s helicopter landed below on the bow of his yacht Launchpad:

I wondered if Mark ever wants to get away from it all; when you own a $300 million yacht, I suspect it all feels pretty big.

I later learned from the crew that Mark’s sister Randi posted her Peloton workout from the deck of the Launchpad before heading ashore for a training run. Apparently she is a super duper extreme athlete. A bodyguard went with her, trying to shadow her through the thorny brush on an e-bike. Too bad the toy hauler doesn’t bring burros.

After a rest, we wound our way down to the little town of Agua Verde, navigating sharp scree drops and dodging voluminous evidence of a goat with an upset stomach. I wished for that hiking stick. Scree gave way to a dirt path as we approached the town.

Walking past the school — the one small modern building — we crossed through town back to the beach. A posse of roaming dogs guarding goat pens welcomed us. We spotted fat pigs feeding and skinny cows grazing through brush.

Reversing the shoe trick, we claimed our life jackets, climbed back on the skiff, and headed back for the boat.

That afternoon we returned to shore, this time to the opposite side of the bay. It was quite warm now with the slightest breeze passing over glassy water. JFran had hiked the ridge on this side in the morning and she had met a man from Montana on the beach. He had been here two months, living in a homemade rig with his dog. His build fit in with the collection of vans dotting the beach.

Everyone searching for their version of getting away.

Heat radiating off the sand, we engaged in an unexpectedly elaborate matching process of burros and gringos. Vaqueros led each burro out from the shade of trees at the back of the beach, carefully scanning our group before dramatically pointing to the selected rider for each donkey.

Paired up with my beast, wondering about their criteria and oddly happy I didn’t get picked last, we threaded slowly up the only road, clomping to join dusty paths looping around the surrounding foothills to the other side of the point. My ride was in turn hungry — ignoring every attempt I made at navigation — heading off-road for patches of brush, violently ripping dried branches from the dirt, and then grumpy — snorting and braying his way to the front of the line munching on stolen leaves.

We passed through a lagoon, emerging on the beach on the other side. Rounding a corner we ran into a veteran Vanagon camper who had navigated the tides to command a beach of his own:

Just as we were entertained by Mark’s helicopter antics, he snapped a picture of us and our donkey antics. Complimenting him on his spot, I wondered how I could make my way back here with a couple of Carta Blancas to trade Baja bliss secrets.

We had been warned of the steep descent back down to the beach and how it would go better if we bonded with our beast and knew their name. Unfortunately, I had not been matched with ‘Pinto’ or ‘Oyo.’ My donkey’s name had many syllables that I quickly forgot. Clearly unimpressed with me, he bolted straight up a ridge before the descent, pulling me with him.

A vaquero quickly intervened to save my life, pulling him back down to the path punctuated with a healthy slap on the ass.2 Back on the beach I was happy to walk on my own sore legs. The day would’ve gone better with that hiking stick.

A taco shack had set up on the beach in front of Montana man’s rig with a lean-to and a few tables. Fresh caught, fish was $50 pesos; shrimp $60. The tacos came with a big platter sectioned off with lime, cabbage, cucumber, guacamole and salsa. The lady running the stand took our pesos and we watched as she cut and mixed everything up while the fish fried.

Waiting for the tacos, I spent the rest of my pesos at the Romero burro family’s craft table. I tried on many bracelets. Señor Romero knew enough English, and I enough Spanish, to understand that he made the one I picked from leather and shark; it was $200 pesos.3

Had Cave Hermit, Montana Man, Vanagon Beach Lord, Mark — gotten away from it all? Did the locals — the fishermen in the village, the vaqueros, the lady running the taco stand — also want to get away from it all?

Stuffing a fat taco in my mouth, admiring my new bracelet, I considered the romanticized simple life. I’m certain the locals feel the same burden of problems, probably more — just different. For me, the day’s demands on my body satisfied my mind.

Dusk set in, the breeze picked up and we got back into skiffs to our boat.

Onboard, I caught the sunset:

Behind us, Mark’s boat lit up like a Christmas Tree:

Several days — and a new year — later we landed back in Oakland. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. It was raining and I fished a jacket from the bottom of my backpack to go look for the car. It dumped rain the entire drive home from the airport.

Baja was fading fast. But I was happy to get back home, back to it all. As far as I can tell, none of it had changed, except maybe me — just a little bit.

I turned 60 in 2025, so this year also marks the beginning of my 7th decade on Earth; happy to be here.

A couple of years ago, in 2024, I wrote the first one of these New Year’s posts, looking forward to tech to come. A lot of AI — it was just going mainstream, motivating me to play with tech again and build up my little post-Microsoft design biz.

Took some hits before I wrote the second one — my parents died — a different marker of passing time. That was rough and so that second update looked back as much as forward.

I wrote through turning 60. I think 60 hit harder now that I’m the oldest living generation in my branch of the family tree.

So, we partied.

But in 2025, my story mix shifted and I wrote more personal stuff. I wrote about my Mom and my Dad on their birthdays. I remembered my Mom’s Immigrant Journey and surviving the Holocaust. I remembered my Dad, his time in WWII and abrupt and solo move from the East Coast to Los Angeles at 19.

My dad loved our annual family road trips up the coast and so, inspired by him, in February we got the Amazing Spider Van where we’ve racked up 12,000 miles across a dozen trips. Trip reports — TrailTales — started showing up occasionally on Wednesdays in addition to the Friday TechTales.

Past is prologue — more to come and I appreciate you reading and checking in!

So, off we head into 2026. Embrace that New Year’s vibe where we all rally for hopefulness.

I wrote more about AI last year, including a go at historical fiction, drawing a parallel between the great railroad buildout in the 1900s to what we are witnessing in AI today.

The Great American AI Buildout

But AI feels different in 2026. The AI culture wars will keep fading, but in the background AI will continue to ascend to the top of the tech stack, plumbing our future. The tech giants will slug it out — the level of investment is insane and I’m here for it.

I wish this wave would take out Facebook/Meta, but I’m afraid that’s just wishful thinking. It’s still unclear how AI shapes consumer tech like Social Media but AI slop will get less sloppy.

AI image models made a huge jump towards the end of 2025 with the release of Google’s Nano Banana. You only need to look at the progression of my dancing baby through Parts I and II to conclude that 2026’s disco baby is the best:

A developing AI narrative is us versus China. Will they get the chips? Will they out-automate us? Out-robot us?

One way to see how this might play out is green energy: China went from emissions villain to 3X its non-fossil power since 2010 - no other nation comes close to how quickly they are building.

AI needs lots of power, so now China is pursuing the holy grail of clean and plentiful energy — Fusion.

Clean, Limitless Energy Exists. China is Going Big in the Race to Harness It

Another parallel that’s going to be interesting to look back on is robotics. For AI to make the next leap in spatial cognition, it’s not enough to train on gobs of text and images — it needs hardware in the real world: walking around, seeing things, touching things.

While the US is undeniably ahead in AI models, China is undeniably ahead in robotics. China now fields the largest robot army on Earth, installing nearly 10X as many industrial robots as the US last year.

iRobot, the early American consumer-robotics pioneer (Roomba!), just gasped its last gasp after the Amazon acquisition was blocked by the Justice Department. It’s now owned by China’s Picea Robotics.

Finally, let’s look up. Reality — and a few spectacular Starship explosions — have squashed talk of imminent Mars colonies. But SpaceX now has regulatory approval to fly Starship up to 25 times a year starting in 2026, so let’s see if they can reliably put the thing in orbit and stick the booster landing.

Meanwhile, competition is heating up. The bonkers Datacenters in Space subplot is taking shape, and we may have found ET.

Lots to look back on; lots to look ahead to.

Happy New Year!

So they made me a hot runner. That’s where you do laps from the kitchen to the buffet line with piping hot trays of food to swap for empty ones. You get burned a lot in that gig; ok I got burned a lot.2

Eventually, I worked my way up to Hofbrau server, carving up roast beef and brisket. While a questionable decision to put a knife back in my hand, I did escape the cafeteria grind with all my fingers.

By sophomore year I could program and I used all those fingers to get a job at the Astronomy department.3

No knives in the Astronomy Department; the worst thing that happened to me was falling asleep in front of my boss after an all-nighter.

The money I made often went in my tummy: a dollar bought a fat cheese slice at Blondies, a buck-fifty got me a midnight Kielbasa at Top Dog with all the sauerkraut you could pile on, and two bucks got me a bag full of donut holes from King Pin.

Then — a food epiphany.

My friend Joe’s older sister — she was a lawyer — came to visit from out of town. She took him out over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. Joe came back a changed man with stories of food that was better than the greasiest, fattest slice of Blondies pepperoni. They went to Scomas.

A San Francisco institution, Scoma’s is down at the end of a wharf that tee’s off the chowder-in-a-bread-bowl slurping tourist crowd at Fishermans Wharf.

So we saved our money and we went over the Bay Bridge. Scoma’s became our annual tradition after finals at the end of the year.

Back then Scoma’s didn’t take reservations and the small lobby was always packed, overflowing out the door. They wanted you waiting at the bar sipping Vodka martinis, but we needed all our money for the main course, and waited outside.4

Once, when the host asked our name, she mistakenly heard Conrad over the din. We let it go — close enough. We went outside on the wharf to wait but rather than the usual hour, they called us right away. From then on we were always Conrad and we got seated ahead of everyone else.

Joe always got the Poor Man’s Cioppino. Poor my ass — it was the most expensive thing on the menu! I always got the cheapest thing on the menu — Petrale Sole. It was good, served with lemon and capers and fresh sourdough bread.

But the Cioppino … was a whole thing. It came out steaming in a metal bowl with clams and mussels and crab legs poking out and the broth was just perfect for dunking that sourdough bread. They brought a special companion bowl — for the shells. Joe always made a show of how full he was after cleaning the bowl.

Of course I wanted to try it.

Fifteen years later — when I had a job that paid more than the Astronomy department— I was searching for something to make for Christmas dinner and I gave Cioppino a shot.

My first attempt was messy. Cioppino is ‘poor mans’ because it’s a fisherman’s stew. You put in whatever fish you have left over from the catch. Cioppino originated down on the docks down at Fisherman’s Wharf, where a staple catch is Dungeness Crab.

I got live crabs.

I described my mistake back in April when I shared my Pancake recipe:

… Cioppino originated on the docks as a poor mans seafood stew and so it’s become our Christmas day tradition. Spicy tomato base full of fresh Dungeness crab, mussels and clams. Serve with chunky sourdough bread. I’ve been working on my Cioppino skills for over 20 years.

The first year, I bought live crabs and that was traumatic for everyone. R was a toddler and on the drive home we could hear the crabs trying to escape the bag in the backseat. When we got home, JFran took R to the park, leaving me with stern instructions that there were to be no live crustaceans in the house when she returned.

Didn’t do that again.

My second mistake was going big on chili flakes. It went down just like Frank Costanza’s War. 5

I have it pretty dialed in now.

This year I wrote it down:

Cioppino — big pot, serves ~12

Ingredients

Base

• Olive Oil

• 1 large white onion, chopped

• 2–3 shallots, chopped

• 1 fennel bulb, white part only, finely chopped

• 6–8 cloves garlic, chopped

• 4 Tbsp tomato paste or 4 generous squirts

• 2 large cans (28oz) whole peeled plum tomatoes, lightly broken up

• 1 bottle dry red wine - nothing fancy, Merlot is good

• 4 bottles clam juice

Seasoning

• 3 bay leaves

• Tbsp dried oregano

• Tbsp dried thyme

• Tbsp dried basil

• Red pepper flakes - just a pinch

• Bunch of fresh parsley, chopped - handful in the broth, rest for serving

• Salt & freshly ground black pepper

Seafood

• 1 lb small clams - littlenecks or Manila

• 1 lb mussels, cleaned

• 2 or 3 cracked crabs

Prep

1. Sauté Onion, Garlic, Shallots and Fennel in a couple generous tablespoons of Olive Oil until the onion is translucent, 5-10 minutes.

2. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, clam juice, wine and seasoning. Bring to a boil and then turn down to a gentle simmer for about an hour. About 30 minutes in, add salt & pepper to taste along with a generous handful of the chopped parsley and a tsp of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes.

3. Took my nieces nearly an entire showing of Elf to collect the crab meat— tools and bowls needed. Clean any fuzz off the mussels and clams, rinse and place in a bowl of cool water.

4. About 30 minutes before it’s time to eat, fish out the bay leaves and drop the drained clams and mussels in. Bring back to a simmer and after 10 minutes pick out any shells that don’t open.

5. Add in the crab meat. Reheat gently for another 10 minutes.

6. Ladle into big bowls, top with fresh parsley, and serve with your favorite bread.

This halves easily and Cioppino is forgiving so don’t sweat exact measurements or ingredients, taste as you go and adjust to make it yours.

Happy Holidays!

Bentonridge is a company town — everyone works for Valumart or something Valumart adjacent. Every restaurant and hotel is a chain, arrayed in mini-malls like decorative charms along the fringes of the sprawling corporate campus.

My flight is delayed.

It’s getting late in the empty airport, and now I’m squirreled away at a table at the back of the one open bar, nursing a beer while I half listen to teammates relive the few dramatic highlights from the earlier customer workshop.

I have to go back to Seattle for more meetings before I can go home. I bring another guy out with me — Brad — but he catches the early flight, escaping before we finish the workshop.

Valumart is a longshot. The competition has them locked up, but then, opportunity knocks. An executive I know from General Electric jumps ship, taking a high level IT position in Valumart.

I need someone from our side at the same level to match up. My big boss — the guy who runs our entire org — picks Brad as that guy, our executive sponsor for Valumart.

Brad is one of our Directors of Product Management and he’s ready for a fight. If he can win Valumart, land the white whale, a promotion is waiting.

Brad’s a big guy and he carries big guy energy. While he’s a recent addition to the org, he’s a 10 year Microsoft veteran with a proven track record. He may be a little rough around the edges when it comes to customer conversations, but he’s smart and quick on his feet.

Once I bring him in to talk with a different customer that matches Brad’s energy. He gives Brad a hard time, calling our product crap. He stands up, Brad does too and in a second their two sweaty faces are inches apart, pointing and yelling.

I call the meeting, walk Brad out to cool him off and head back for damage control. It wasn’t the last time I’d do that.

Back at Valumart, first thing in the morning, Brad and I get 20 minutes with the new, ex-GE executive. Brad shakes his hand and launches into his pitch.

The Valumart executive is polite but unexcited.

Afterwards, Brad and I, along with some of his team, lead a workshop. Valumart lists off requirements. Brad promises dates that aren’t on our roadmap. I raise my eyebrows.

I look over at Brad and he’s furiously typing into a screen of chats lighting up his laptop. When we take a break, Brad heads outside, pacing, talking on the phone.

Brad leaves after lunch, catching an early flight back to Seattle.

Me, I get in at 1AM.

The next day, I sit in the monthly leadership review trying to stay awake. My big boss — the one who anointed Brad as my exec-sponsor buddy — sits on the other side of the big table. No one sits next to him, because he flails his arms about wildly, yelling when he gets mad. This happens a lot and no one will sit in the blast radius.

Big boss makes an offhand comment about how one of our directors is no longer with the company after a physical altercation with another director.

I jolt out of my stupor. What?

And just like that, Brad’s gone.

I immediately know who the other director is — Simon. Simon is the big boss’s heir apparent. While Brad and Simon are peers, Brad doesn’t have the same big boss history.

Simon is intimidating in an entirely different way. Gaunt, bald, albino-esque pale, he never smiles. Think Voldemort. He intentionally speaks in a low whisper, forcing everyone to lean in and listen carefully.

If Brad is a frenzy of blustery chaos, Simon is a composed assassin.

Brad knows Simon is his competition. Simon sits on the same floor as the big boss; they have lunch together. Brad gets an office a couple floors down in the middle of coding crew chaos.

Brad falls into Simon’s trap. He heads straight from the airport back to the office, full of ideas to land Valumart. He gets time with the big boss. Simon lays in wait, already sitting in the conference room. Systematically, he forces Brad to rewind every commitment: we need headcount, Legal has to bless it, Security won’t sign off. He dismantles it all and Brad snaps.

Create a pressure cooker; people snap.

You know that saying — keep your head down, stay out of office politics and you’ll do fine? That’s not possible. You can’t untangle the real work from personality and politics. Have strong opinions, speak out, push back, be convicted.

Just don’t choke anyone.

***

Afterword: What happened next

Brad gets another gig nearby and I run into him a few times. Simon leaves Microsoft, leveraging a promotion right before the big boss retires, landing an executive role at a smaller company.

Costco especially freaks me out.

But we carve out our space and it’s good. With the van, we can still find spots where it feels like we are the only people in the world. Our family is small, our tribe not much bigger.

Even online, amongst millions of users, the algorithm knows we need to feel seen, so it tucks us in and makes us cozy serving up people we follow, content we like.

But sometimes, you need to assert yourself, push back, leave the cozy corner, fight the system and claim what’s yours.

While Costco will take your credit card, the DMV wants a picture and airports want everything including a full body scan — lately I’ve been hitting new levels where Kong is rolling tons of barrels at me and I’m ‘a-jumpin’ like mad to reach Princess Peach.

Take Apostille. Rhymes with Bastille, but rather than where the revolution began, it’s where bureaucracy ends. I’m still fighting the paper war that started when my parents died last year, and I just hit the Apostille wall.

For my mom, I promised myself I’d apply for Austrian Citizenship. My mom is a Holocaust survivor; at 12 she was forced to flee Vienna. A few years ago, Austria extended citizenship to descendants of survivors as part of a reparations push. This fight is for her legacy, plus Vienna has wonderful coffee shops full of Sacher-Torte, which wouldn’t be the worst place to spend some time should things go sideways here.

But Austria doesn’t make it easy. Apostille ties to the French for making a note, and then in 1961, an international convention in The Hague made it a byzantine legal document.

More than a document, it’s a whole structure and process to verify other official documents are officially the documents they claim to be. Notary squared.

It’s silly circular. For example, I had to request an official copy of my birth certificate from LA County. Once I got that very official piece of paper, I had to flip it back into the mail, this time to California’s Department of State with more forms and checks. It came back last week. They added another official piece of paper offset-stapled to my birth certificate with a stamp covering both docs like so:

Austria also wants to make sure I’m not a thug. So, I got fingerprinted at the post office — chicken. The next day, I got an email back from the FBI with my official rap sheet1 — duck. Then I had to print it, yeet it back in the mail with another bunch of forms bound for the US State Department to get … Apostilled. Turkey.

Apostille = Turducken.

That was a month ago. Once (if?) I get all the Apostilles back, I submit the lot to the Austrian Consulate who sends them off to Vienna for more reviewing and processing, so it is still very much unknown if I will ever eat Sacher-Torte again.

Incentives differ in corporate America, so while you won’t find government bureaucracy — it’s just as maddening to deal with when you’re a one-man shop. It’s David versus Goliath and big tech is no exception.

Here, I’m spoiled. Working so long for the biggest software company in the world gave me an outsized view of my importance, my influence. The same company that unabashedly acquired and then killed Skype, the most beloved app in history.

I was part of that, and I must make amends.

So while I fight for Austria to recognize me, I fight for the little guy (my small-biz clients) against the tyranny of big tech. Hoboy big tech doesn’t care about you.

My latest client got screwed twice by big tech: first Yahoo and then Google.

Yahoo2 repeatedly implodes jettisoning off its small business product line to a company that doesn’t care? I got you. Google dumps its domain biz like it’s shaking off a flea, orphaning your website? I got you.

I can unscrew a lot. But there’s one thing I can’t fix and that’s social media.

Saloons used to give lunch away to anyone down to be a day drinker. But the drink was watered down and the price was high and the food was salty — so now you need another drink, and another… That free drink is social media. You’re not paying, you’re the product. Sometimes that’s ok, build a big following, get real leads but, because it’s free, you have zero recourse when the platform changes under your feet or your account disappears.

For my friends who write or read on Substack — don’t get complacent downing the drinks here either. Enjoy the maraschino cherry and little umbrella while that sweet VC money funds pretty sites for your writing, newsletter emails and of course a new endless scroll.

But backup your data and hold on tight, because change is coming — 2026 might be payback time.

Check out the first Substack friend I ever made, the indubitable who writes DEPLATFORMABLE about how to manage the ever-shifting tides of the newsletter business (and other entertaining reads).

For all things social — the best you can do is secure your account — use all the auth factors, because if you get hacked you’ll find no one but a bad bot to talk to.

How about some Linda Ronstadt to go with the Beastie Boys?

I’ve been cheated, been escheated …

Another word I’d never heard of: Escheated. Like Apostille, it has French roots meaning to ‘fall back’ and it ties to Medieval law where, when a landholder died without an heir, the property fell back or was escheated to the state.

If I’m doing Austria for my mom, fighting big tech screwing my clients, this last one’s for my dad. While I’ve been trying to close down his trust this year, my dad left us a treasure hunt, and it’s taken awhile to sort it all out.

This is the last thing I have to do — and thanks to escheatment — it doesn’t look like I’ll make it by the end of the year.

In my dad’s safe deposit box, underneath twenty pounds of Bicentennial quarters, were a stack of papers and folders and envelopes. There were passports from Austria with Nazi stamps, US Army discharge papers from WWII, as well as a couple of US Savings Bonds.

The Bonds were 30 year and had only recently matured in 2023. I sent those straight in — with forms and death certificates — to the US treasury. Still waiting to hear back — coming up on two months now, but that process was relatively straightforward.

Underneath those, at the very bottom of the box, in a tattered manilla envelope with some cryptic scribbles from my dad, I found these:

My dad bought these when I was 3, nearly 60 years ago. Were they worth anything? Where to start? My dad never mentioned them to me.

But my dad was a diligent and conservative investor, and so I started poking around. Unlike the savings bonds, where fortunately the US Government is still in business, this real estate investment trust - MREIT - is not.

Congress created REITs in 1960. Up until then — not unlike Medieval times — you or me couldn’t own commercial property, just business and wealthy families. REITs were created as a companion investment instrument to mutual funds and overall they’ve done alright, even outperforming the S&P 500 in some windows.

MREIT was one of the first. I figure my uncle, who lived in NYC where MREIT was incorporated, talked my dad into buying the shares. He was much more risk tolerant than my dad. MREIT didn’t do so great, especially with the real-estate market collapse in the 70s. So in the 80s they were acquired by a holding company called InterGroup (INTG). My dad’s 25 shares of MREIT became 25 shares of INTG.

INTG never did the the best either, executing three, 3-for-2 stock splits to reduce the price of their stock and look good to investors. At some point in the 90s, Intergroup hired a transfer agent to convert old paper certificates like my dad’s into modern book-entry shares. We had long since moved, and my dad never saw that letter. At that point my dad’s original 25 shares were worth 84 and change due to the splits.

I sent the orange and blue certificates off to the transfer agent with more paper and forms hoping they’d send me real shares or cash them out, but no, they wrote me back saying they had no record of them, blah blah blah, and then at the end — at the bottom of page 2 — this:

… may we suggest that you contact the Unclaimed Property Division in the State of residence to determine if the assets were escheated.

Honestly, I was done at that point but that word caught my eye. No one’s escheating me.

Lo, the State of California holds over $13 BILLION dollars of unclaimed property and every year another $600 MILLION comes in. 33 million people nationwide have money waiting for them. Lotta people right? Lotta money.

I found a couple hundred bucks lying around in California’s escheatment fund for me and my kids. My dad’s — 876 dollars and 43 cents. 84 shares of INTG today would be more like $2,500, but I’ll take it. Find yours.

Like Medieval lords, the state makes out like a bandit here, pocketing millions in interest from unclaimed funds. The state has six months to process my claim and make some more money off it, but I’m sure I’ll get it eventually.

We’re going down to LA next month to clear out my dad’s storage locker, and after that we’ll party and buy some Canter’s Matzo Ball soup in his memory.

Zoom’s stock price tells the story:

Forget TP, ZM was the Kleenex we collectively sobbed into through the pandemic. And it wasn’t just Zoom, demand for my then product Teams video turned up to 11 overnight while we frantically scrambled to keep video rolling for a country now under lockdown. Two years running at full speed ground my team down and fed an intense burnout I’m finally shaking off.

After the pandemic, we all turned off our video. No more meetings! We were exhausted. You know how traveling in a noisy plane or driving for long periods will tire you out? Your brain is working hard filtering out the noise and the lights so you can function. The cacophony of atypical stimulation wears you down.

You might hear this called cognitive load and boy oh boy does it spike in video calls.

A video call is so much work: a screenful of ever moving faces, slides packed with datapoints and trends, chats scrolling ever faster; your brain compensating for mute, lip sync, lag, missing facial and body cues; voices talking over each other and — the worst — the constant and terrifying presence of your own zombie face staring back at you.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 2010s, video was the hot new frontier in collaboration with the brightest of futures.

Not unlike this AI moment we find ourselves in.

In 2010, I walked into what was then the top tier video setup — a Cisco TelePresence room — and bam, I was hooked. TelePresence was the future of meetings — Star Trek’s holodeck was within reach.

Cisco was my #1 enemy then and we — Microsoft — had nothing that came close. Like the holodeck in Star Trek, TelePresence required a dedicated room. Three massive screens took up the far side of the room, curving to form one side of a virtual table fronted with a matching real table and chairs. Cameras, mics, speakers and screens sprouted everywhere, connected with fat bundles of cable in the room — and out across the internet.1

The idea was to make the experience as lifelike, as natural, as possible. Telepresence was marketed as immersive video. But, it wasn’t.

TelePresence carried a silly price tag, so it was only for the people with a corner office2 and given Cisco’s dominant position in networking3, we (again with the royal we - Microsoft) countered with our strength, the PC on every desk — video for everyone! The Skype acquisition was part of this strategy, and we quickly brought a ton of cheap PC peripherals like webcams and speakerphones out so every PC could do videoconferencing.

Microsoft Research got spun up and developed the coolest 360 ring camera stuck on top of speaker phone that we called RoundTable4. Pop it in any conference room and you’re good to go! It had groundbreaking tech for the time. We even developed a prototype Telepresence Robot that could roll into a meeting, glide up to the table, and attend on your behalf.5

The mantra was reduce travel, improve remote collaboration and outcomes, save money. Video usage slowly grew. Then March 2020 hit, and Zoom came out of nowhere to win the day with an easy-to-use product where anyone could get into a meeting anywhere, with consistently good audio and the ubiquitous Brady Bunch video gallery.

Zoom capitalized on all the early work we did to make PCs video devices.

The subsequent pandemic years saw a hyper focus in video innovation with new layouts and features coming fast and furious. While quality steadily improved and we shipped a few great features6, it was mostly novelty stuff. What new video view could we add to entertain the increasingly bored and stressed-out masses joining call after call after call from their bedroom?

Remember when this Texas attorney joined a courtroom hearing on Zoom and couldn’t turn off his cat filter?

I’m here live judge … I’m not a cat!

We threw animated animal avatars in to go with the cat filters, fantastical backgrounds (look I’m taking my meeting from the Star Wars Cantina!), and a host of silly video layouts to avoid the Brady Bunch gut punch. At the same time Mark Zuckerberg went all in on the online metaverse featuring all the same oppressive cognitive load, now multiplied tenfold by a chunky VR headset strapped to your face7.

None of it stuck. None of it solved the foundational problem of video meetings — at the core they felt deeply unnatural — and we got sick of it, it wore us down.

So, exiting the pandemic, video use, along with Zoom’s stock price, plummeted. AI and new hardware have now solved many of the problems that plagued videoconferencing. Google Research’s Project Starline, commercialized into Google Beam and now sold by HP is the latest.8

Google found a way to make virtual meetings suck less

Too little, too late — collectively society made the call — we hate this. Let’s skip the holodeck. Millions of years of human interaction are wired into our brains that no twenty-year-old tech stack is going to displace.

Now, as we charge into the age of AI — where we are increasingly interacting with computers instead of people — will we see another massive societal allergic reaction?

AI agents are now commonplace in online meetings. They make perfect scribes, summarizing notes, capturing tasks. They are quickly evolving to the point where for example, a weekly project status meeting no longer requires humans. A group of AIs (imagine your agentic AI twin or double) can look across workloads, tasks and dependencies within an overall project plan backed by data and dashboards and figure out the best path forward better than any two-hour fustercluck9 could.

You get two hours of your life back; we’ll let you know what to work on for the rest of the week.

If that sounds a little dystopian, consider how ChatGPT spread like wildfire: 1 million users in 5 days; 100 million in 60; approaching a billion today. Why? Because human. Because you talk to it. Natural language, not code. Share pictures, talk through problems, brainstorm ideas, argue points. We’re comfortable with these interactions, it’s how we work, it’s what we need.

While video calls became profoundly inhuman, even inhumane — AI interaction gets increasingly human. I was checking if the movie I just watched had a sequel and when my go-to AI GPT couldn’t find it, we had a word:

Getting an unexpected response like this is one of the reasons we love AI. Generative AI, the engine behind chatbots and agents, slots into the same productivity and collaboration category of software — like videoconferencing — that I built out for companies throughout my career. We would often quantify productivity gains from these systems. For example, a project gets done 10% faster when the entire team can collaborate on it within Teams chat channels.

AI productivity results are much, much better. AI has shown the ability to reduce tasks by 40-60% across a broad range of functions like research, documentation, coding. In some cases, compressing a task by 80%.

But will we turn on AI like video? Do we really want a future where we don’t meet? Do we want to be represented by digital twins? Told by the AI boss what to do?

The pandemic showed that we humans will turn wholesale as a society against tech. AI is undoubtedly the next platform of computing, this new cognition layer is a boon across most disciplines, so it’s going to work under the covers regardless.

But how much of our humanity — our direct interactions with each other — will we tolerate it replacing?

If AI keeps on being that faithful dog trotting behind us, always ready to help, the love may grow. But if it starts replacing human connections we value, we need — like turning us into managers of digital twins — we might just pull the plug.

Just like we did with our webcams.

Even back then I worried about her. Sure she’s an extreme case, but can you think of a job that hasn’t changed significantly in the past twenty years? Neither she, nor her replacement are doing that clickety-clack anymore.

Sometimes I thought I was irreplaceable. People would tell me: “Thank God we’ve got you here, Andrew” — “I would never have figured that out” — “How ever did you fix that… and so fast!?” Only I knew the minutiae, the nuance of certain systems. Often I had installed them, even written the code — who else could untangle my mess?

It’s nice to think you’re irreplaceable. If work’s getting you down, it’s a soft pillow to lay your head on. You’re not getting paid enough for this sh*t, your boss is a jerk, you’re working long hours. But dammit, you matter. No one else can do this job. The place would fall apart without you doing your thing. Customers would leave, deadlines would be missed, stuff would break, never to be fixed. The wheels of the business would slow, eventually grinding to an inexorable and full stop.

Nope.

There’s always someone else. They might even do your job better. Microsoft did ok after Bill Gates, Apple after Jobs, Twitter after Dorsey. If you can replace the founder, the CEO, don’t kid yourself.

Now hold on — you are special — but you can cast aside this crutch and flip it.

Don’t be content with mastering the clickety-clack. New project? Get on it. New tech? Try it. Instead of being indispensable, make yourself obsolete. Train the intern to do the clickety-clack, or optimize it so you can do more interesting stuff. Not only will learning new stuff and getting good at new stuff make you feel good — peak irony: now you have made yourself indispensable!

Be the person who will take on a new thing, do something no one’s ever done, go talk down the angry customer, tease apart the hard problem.

There is no employee more valuable than one you can throw into a new thing and they’ll slay it or tell you what they need to get it done.

My boss tapped me on the shoulder once, and said he wanted me to be his successor. I asked him if he was dying or something, but no, succession planning is just a thing. Who could do your job if you move on? If you moved on, would that job persist? Could it be combined with another, done by a vendor, done by — oh my stars — AI?

Caveat Laboris.

Many successful companies institutionalize change. The annual re-org. New year, new goals, new skills, new playbooks. A year is the perfect container to take stock. Bookending this way forces reflection and optimization and gives a beat to reflect — discard what didn’t work, double down on what did, and look ahead to what’s new and newly important.

Personalize that. Schedule your own annual reorg. Have an annual business review with yourself. Take inventory. Are you moving, growing? If you’re the only guy that can do X, well X may not be around forever so go check out Y.

Don’t get pigeonholed into the indispensable guy — either in your head or in your job.

***

Perhaps I learned a thing or two in a career in tech, you can judge me:

Part I: Bias for Action, Part II: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, Part III: There’s no I in TEAM