It’s a good example of how AI can be used to fix a problem and do something new: fan out good design more. Well, “do something new” as in “do it in the first place.”

We can always use more and better design in software Even the designer’s tools are poorly designed:

most of them are hard to use and nearly impossible to discover, to an extent which would have embarrassed us all five years ago. Capabilities hide behind prompts. Features are released without being announced and change without being documented. The interface is a text box and an expectation that you will work out what it can do. So designers don’t adopt a tool, they assemble one. Each person keeps the pieces that worked for them and drops the ones that didn’t, and the result is a toolchain for one, multiplied by the number of people doing the work.

And, then on doing things differently: instead orbit publishing a reference for widgets and, like, the philosophy of the house-style, how can you make more of a living design system?

Take a corporate design system. Covering branding, physical product design, wayfinding, digital products. Multi discipline. One brand. What this documentation typically covers is fundamentals and examples. These fundamentals are represented at level of abstraction. The examples point the way, but are often out of date before they are published. The truth is, the work in the wild is the truest representation of any system in practice. A context layer would hold this information. Updated in realtime.

🔗 Is The Future of Design Systems In A Context Layer?

Related, I talked with the Tanzu design team recently about how they’re using AI. Design systems came up a lot, much along the same lines as the above:

[O]ver the last half-decade or so, the idea that there’s been a spiraling mental health crisis among teens has become so widely accepted we’ve moved on from freaking out about the pattern to debating its causes. One popular hypothesis, advanced by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, is that the rise of smartphones has done most of the damage. Which makes it notable that during this same period, the standard measures tracked by the C.D.C. and the Department of Health and Human Services — in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health — have been getting better. Discussing the survey’s results with my newsroom colleague Azeen Ghorayshi, Twenge herself called the improvements “very striking.” This isn’t just because of a brief pandemic rebound, either: According to Twenge, one of the great Cassandras of teen mental health in America, the current trajectory is now best described as a “longstanding trend in improvement.”

🔗 Teen Mental Health Isn’t in Crisis. It Is Actually Improving.

• France blames Iran for supermarket hack meltdowns
• “A Linux Foundation survey of 492 practitioners scheduled to be released today found that VMs account for 53% of production applications, with most respondents expecting that proportion to remain stable. Among organizations expanding their VM deployments, 34% cited AI and agentic workloads as contributing factors.”
• Using AI just to lay people off has poor ROI . It’s better to use it to make your business run better and do new things. Who knew?!
• “None of the restaurants involved in the chicken sandwich war had an enduring competitive advantage over any of the others, and all of them had to deal with potential customers choosing to just cook at home instead, but it was still highly profitable for everybody involved.”
• “If you’re feeling in a rut at work, then yeah, a year long vacation is going to feel good, because YOU’RE NOT WORKING”

For more links and original content, check out the weblog. Also, you can subscribe the waste book in email here. Or, of course, there is RSS.

But, perhaps, the alternative is chocolate priced at what it really costs, which would leave real chocolate to the rich. A sweet quandary!

🔗 Chocolate Is Getting Worse: Blind Test Scores Today’s Reese’s Cup Below Vintage Re-creations as Hershey Insists Nothing Changed

Original: The AI backlash needs a plan by Casey Newton, Platformer, November 5, 2026.

Summarized by AI.

There comes a time in all enterprise new technology where this point has to be made. The most valuable technology doesn’t let you improve how you’re currently working, it allows you to change how you work and what the business does to make more money, and accomplish new goals. Sure, it does that by speeding up and optimizing existing processes, sometimes. But making a shit-product faster and cheaper still ends up in a shit-product.

The latest data-exhaust of this point:

• 44% of CEOs said it is difficult to demonstrate AI-driven financial returns to stakeholders.
• 75% of CEOs planned to increase technology investment, even as pressure grows to demonstrate measurable business outcomes.
• 63% of CEOs identified radically redesigning the operating model as a top move for accelerating tangible financial returns from AI.

AI must move from bolt-on to built-in, redesigning workflows and decision-making rather than simply making existing tasks faster.

🔗 Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2026 Barcelona: Day 1 Highlights

All around me, I see people creating software using LLM-powered code generators. They are doing it differently than traditional software developers. These people are not thinking about launching an app or a service or a platform. They do not have VC dollar signs in their eyes. They are just making software when they need it, and then throwing it away when they’re done.

🔗 BEN PREDICTS

Following good security practices requires trust and believe in the system you’re protecting:

Because they’re too ignorant, corrupt, and victictive to believe in having a functional federal government, they don’t put much stock in stuff like multi-factor authentication (MFA) or Common Access Cards (CAC) / PIV verification."

And:

Until then, U.S. government IT infrastructure should probably be considered completely compromised by foreign actors. Fixing it will require a total audit and rebuild that will be going on long after Trump is dead. You will, of course, also be footing the bill for that. With much of that money going to the same tech companies that personally helped bring Trump to power in the first place.

🔗 U.S. Government IT Systems Are Completely Compromised And Will Require A Total Rebuild

• “what I believe Musk wants most is power. Not so much power in the traditional political sense, but the power to bend the world toward the future he envisions.”
• “Least agency.”
• “Joy-scrolling.”
• “everything being ‘priced to perfection’ means any surprise that is not to the upside is probably to the downside.”
• “I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work. You might not know who those people are, but you can feel their perspective in the product.”
• Datacenter in Amsterdam : “Protesters from Geef Tegengas, a Dutch direct action group, clashed with police while breaking into a construction site at Westpoort, Amsterdam, where some members climbed a crane, lit flares and tied helium balloons to equipment.”

For more links and original content, check out the weblog. Also, you can subscribe the waste book in email here. Or, of course, there is RSS.

[A]fter decades of slowing productivity growth, AI is likely to be a game changer. The question is not so much whether it will show up in the statistics, but when. In 1987, Robert Solow quipped that you could see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. It took about a decade to prove him wrong."

But:

AI is not firing people; it is quietly not hiring them. Still, none of this points to mass displacement. Yet. And with ageing populations and persistent labour shortages, the real question may be whether shortages or AI turn out to be the bigger problem.

🔗 AI in 2027: 20 questions for the global economy

An enterprise cannot secure, govern, or operate at scale a hundred bespoke agent integrations. It can govern one consistent standard that every vendor builds to in the same way. Buying leverage now sits upon the standardized connector layer, and then governs what agents reach and can do through that layer.

🔗 The CIO’s New Leverage: MCP as the Shared Door Into the Enterprise

• “Texas may never be the same.”
• Normals hate AI.
• Apple is Putting Employees on an AI Budget: Down from $300 to $100 to $200 a day. I mean, probably a good benchmark for the high end. // As my robot put it: “$300 a day for one engineer over about 230 working days is $69,000 a year in tokens, more than many companies pay a junior developer.”
• IDC: 89% hit unexpected ai costs after go-live and 91% will raise private cloud spend in 2027, so run production ai on a unified private cloud with finops in scope.
• Training your replacement: Companies that relegate people to residual tasks surrender the learning, governance, customer relationships and proprietary knowledge to tool vendors and competitors, and turn their own staff into trainers of someone else’s advantage.
• Recommenders trained to minimize prediction error pull everyone toward the average, so more personal data produces more sameness, on high streets, in film-watching and in synthetic survey panels.
• It still can’t copy and paste sanely, but it feels like something I should use more.

For more links and original content, check out the weblog. Also, you can subscribe the waste book in email here. Or, of course, there is RSS.

That is an almost impossible metric to measure and connect up to a developer’s efforts, let alone the ops person who made it all happen.

So, instead, you measure activity and sentiment, hoping it is a proxy: if those metrics are good, the business must be good…

🔗 Why DORA wasn’t enough, and what came next

“When I am governor I will issue a moratorium — a ban — on all data center approvals until laws can be passed by the Legislature to protect Texans.”

The governor-elect during her campaign outlined a slate of priorities for lawmakers that included requiring data center operators to hire union workers, protecting communities’ water supplies and stopping data center companies from using nondisclosure agreements that make it harder for the public to track project developments.

And, beyond Texas:

out of 44 measures across 10 states seeking to restrict data centers, 38 passed so far.

🔗 Under Hinojosa, Texas data center approvals could stay paused

• “…you’ve got your ass screwed on backwards.” // That’s a new one.
• “AI Compute Campuses”
• AI using developers discover product management: “…structured intent. It records how we think the system should work, why, under which assumptions, and how we assess it.”
• “Long context is a scam. You really need to be mindful of that.”
• ”According to IDC’s August 2026 Intelligent Cloud Survey, ‘91% of organizations planning to increase private cloud investment in ”027.’”
• Discord opening up D&D chats for AI training
• Strategy and governance for working with enterprise AI vendors
• “I intend to retire as Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation in 2027.”

For more links and original content, check out the weblog. Also, you can subscribe the waste book in email here. Or, of course, there is RSS.

The cause isn’t secrecy or ignorance but maintenance maturity: backporting is manual, small teams spend their time on features, and many maintainers judge cutting a patch release to cost more than leaving users exposed. Josh Bressers draws the bigger conclusion: AI has made finding vulnerabilities nearly free while fixing them is as expensive as ever, and nobody yet knows how to add weight to the fixing side.

Yup%2C%20%5Bfree%20beer%20now%20a%20bad%20idea%5D%28https%3A//cote.io/2026/11/02/its-no-longer-safe-to-drink-the-free-beer.html%29.?utm_source=cote&utm_medium=blog

Original: “Finding missing security backports with Roi Nisimi”, Josh Bressers with Roi Nisimi (Orca Security), Open Source Security podcast, November 2, 2026, 31 minutes. Above is the AI’s take on what is being argued in the interview. May not reflect the original.

All official things come through email — documents, confirmations, receipts, that thing you need to prove you actually paid for something three years ago.

And there’s another thing nobody tells you about email: it’s how you talk to people who matter. Any time I read a book I love, and if the author is still alive and available online, I try to find their email and write them a thank you note. Most of them reply.

🔗 How to Actually Use Email (And Why It Still Matters)

The cyberattacks on commercial refrigerators and freezers in Europe continue, as a slew of grocery stores in Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Sweden report widespread food wastage as a result of miscreants raising the temperatures to highs of 50ºC (122°F).

Those devices are not always under the security group’s care:

“You can’t protect a system that you don’t know you have. You can’t scan for exposures on a connection that you don’t know exists,” he pointed out. “Sometimes that inventory requires somebody physically going into the telco closet at the locations and asking pointed questions about equipment that’s present. In this day and age, having devices of any type hanging off a public internet connection and accessible is asking for trouble.”

🔗 European supermarkets that failed to act after French freezer attack are now feeling the heat

Enterprises have been drinking the free beer of open source for decades, and most of the people maintaining it are volunteers who can’t keep up with this, so I think it’s time to start paying for the beer. Here’s the case Oren and I make:

1. AI models can now turn a published fix into a working exploit within hours, and find new vulnerabilities at a scale human teams can’t match.
2. “Patchmageddon” – the median time from disclosure to first exploitation went from about a year in 2021 to about a day in 2026, with one minute projected by 2027.
3. Open source takes the first hit. Of 530 high- and critical-severity findings Anthropic reported to maintainers by May 2026, 75 had been patched.
4. Enterprises should rely on professional open source, backed by a vendor or foundation with funded maintainers, staffed security response and an SLA, and move off dependencies with no identifiable maintainer.
5. With exploits arriving within a day, the unpatched system is a bigger risk to keeping the business running than the patch.
6. Pointing an existing artifact proxy at a supported source changes where open source comes from without changing build files, pipelines or developer habits. The proxy can also serve the nearest patched version automatically.
7. Measure the time from disclosure to a deployed fix for your top 50 dependencies, record who maintains each critical one, and use AI to propose fixes while people review the merge.

We’ve seen this over the past year, first in Spring, and then over everything. And thanks to our long history with Bitnami, and some new work, we’ve got something to offer, some better beer than free beer. TrueSource Beer! (Also see the docs on it if you prefer that.)

• “S&P 493”
• “From an investor’s point of view, Apple is essentially the only consumer investment worth considering.” // Much of the rest of the big companies are B2B.
• “Then came Ozempic, and body positivity icons including Lizzo, Trainor, and Oprah lost weight on GLP-1s. Fans read this as proof that everyone had secretly wanted to be thin all along.”
• Fonts: Antique Fonts Collection, Restored 19th Century Typefaces, Geist Serif, Timeless Type Family

• “Hunger beats tenure.” – A million ops engineers just grabbed their chest and yelped out “This is the big one, Elizabeth! I’m coming to join you!”
• “CLAUDE_CODE_EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY_SKIP_PERMISSIONS.”
• “Meta is, ultimately, in the personal entertainment business.”
• “A human hesitates at data that looks wrong; an agent acts on it anyway”
• Asianometry on How TCS, Infosys and Y2K Built India’s IT Export Industry, and Why Claude’s First Jobs Look Like Theirs – “I am struck by how similar the early jobs done by Claude are to those ones done by the IT exporters: Porting software, 24-hour development cycles by submitting a long-running job before going to bed, and other knowledge work.”
• “Amsterdam had the most beautiful street furniture in the world.”
• “Finding a toilet in Amsterdam can be surprisingly awkward when you are already walking, cycling or sightseeing.”

And, fat bikes are problems in the US too.

Meanwhile, also in America: “bike infrastructure, particularly physical barriers that separate bikes from speeding cars as opposed to shared or painted lanes, significantly lowered fatalities in cities that installed them.”

Here’s what I’m worried about: the monoculture that took over browsers is now consolidating the server. Every major server runtime borrows its engine from a browser. Node, Deno and Cloudflare’s runtime all run on Google’s V8, the engine inside Chrome. Bun runs on Apple’s JavaScriptCore, the engine inside Safari. This is bad.

🔗 The Web Can’t Afford a JavaScript Runtime Monoculture

Earlier this year, Evernote, a note-taking app, changed its subscription tiers, forcing some users to go from paying $130 per year to $250. The highest tier now costs more than 3.3 times as much as the most advanced tier did in 2023 and 10 times more than what Evernote charged for annual subscriptions from its 2008 launch until 2016.

🔗 From cheap tool to premium subscription: When a beloved app’s price skyrockets

• Crows can evaluate visual info twice as fast as mammals – While we worry about robots taking over, the crows are patiently biding their time until the inevitable crow takeover.
• John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Complete Works
• “At scale, absolute autonomy is toxic.”
• “Nearly broke, Mr. Anderson split the travel costs with a friend who had a credit card. They camped in the Sonoran Desert and subsisted on frozen fish sticks that they cooked over fires fueled by lead-painted wood, a culinary mistake that resulted in gastric trauma.”
• OS 27.2: “A whole lot of practical, small things that make big differences things.”
• Cultural appropriation and institutional capture in mathmastics.

At Salesforce, Stewart was baffled by the breadth and depth of operational inefficiency. He witnessed executives green-lighting high-priced celebrity appearances while making cuts to things like inter-office employee travel. He saw VPs overhiring by thousands of people, then laying off thousands in subsequent quarters. An annual event for tenured and executive staff named Laulima (Hawaiian for “many hands”) cost millions to fly everyone to Hawaii and put them up in fancy hotels.”

And, the usual GTM conflict:

many of the processes and cultural norms around our teams began to inevitably shift toward Salesforce’s expectations.

This was felt most immediately in Sales. Salesforce makes targeted products for business units and sells to leaders of a single function, usually sales or marketing. Slack makes an inherently cross-functional product that needs actual buy-in from an entire executive team to be successful. Salesforce sells dedicated purpose-built databases for managing information; Slack sells an open canvas for any and every department in a company to collaborate more effectively. The resulting DNA of the two go-to-market teams couldn’t have been more different.

🔗 Salesforce – Part Two

Yes, but: most of those people that I’ve encountered in corporate environments are in positions of power: they can ask questions and get other people to give them answers.

In a large company, there are many stupid questions. But not stupid because the question is dumb, but stupid because it creates more work and reputation loss for the questioner. A “stupid” question can result in lose of power and value to the large organization. It can damage your stability and rewards.

As an underling, you learn two things: don’t ask questions that you don’t know the answer to, and the one who asks the question upward is often asked to work on the answer in addition to their assigned work. That is, you are giving yourself extra homework.

Asking questions in a big co is risky. It’s more like a gamble that the house usually wins.

However, I am realizing that this has had a negative affect on my learning. I should ask clarifying questions more: what is the thinking behind this new idea? How can I help? How does it work? Learning questions are fine, but questions how things work is risky.

Also, I should ask people outside of the BigCo more questions. There is no risk of assigning myself homework there: if someone answers, I just get new information, and maybe meet someone new!

Tech companies work like this. Everyone who’s worked at one for long enough knows that it’s very hard to predict what work will be high-impact. The project you slaved over for months will often get a ‘nice, now what’s next’ reaction, while the tool you built in fifteen minutes (or the question you answered in a Slack channel) will sometimes get wild praise and recognition. This can drive engineers a little mad.

This is “cynical,” but a valid tactic that usually works. This mindset will also keep you sane. Related: I have a whole, ten part course in surviving and thriving in a BigCo.

🔗 Don’t anthropomorphize big tech companies

it’s day 2, and day 2000, where the money and the risk actually live: patching it, upgrading it, proving it still does what security needs, killing it off cleanly at the end. Every template you run is one more thing someone now owns forever, usually with no safe way to change it once, and for a lot of our customers, there are thousands upon thousands of those things! 

🔗 Day 2000 Doesn’t Care How Fast You Shipped

• How the TrueSource team responded to that PHP freakout this week.
• “I can’t find a lot of information whether this was effective in any way, but I just liked this visual of a non-digital speedometer mounted atop an old police car
• “Am I being unfair when I flip the AI voice bit when I read/listen to them?” – Short answer: yes. Annoyingly clever answer: good things are good, and bad things are bad. Do you like the AI writing? As in, does it “work” for it’s goal – communicating, education, entertainment, etc?. If not, then it is bad. (And, yes, I have read and get the Honeycomb policy.)
• Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation – The skills spec goes open standards, moving to the Linux Foundation.
• Revealing Questions
• Gartner: Only 13% of CIOs Say Their Enterprise Has Realized Significant Value from AI
• “It’s bad. You can’t even eye dropper by pressing alt. You can’t change the layouts much beyond the static presets. I could go on and on but after 2 minutes with the app it is very clear this isn’t a photoshop replacement at all.”
• 1Password for Agents lets personal AI agents log in without ever seeing the password.

”The FDE engagement, generally, is that a company has an AI product and goes to the end user site, and part of the deal is they’re going to be learning things as they implement. They’re going to take back certain knowledge that makes the product better. But there’s a fine line."

There is a risk that those benefiting are the users’ close competitors, as FDEs share information.

Could an FDE be taking the user’s competitive advantage and passing it on to others? Saha said: “That would be a complete violation of the IP, right? That’s how fast things are moving. This is a concern I hear as I interact with end user clients.”

Then there is the risk of vendor lock-in. Gartner has warned that if FDEs become indispensable — because only they understand the workflows they built — keeping them full-time as consultants is neither economical nor strategic.

“We’re actually advising clients to understand the use cases they are going to be implementing well before FDEs come on site. If you’re doing an FDE engagement, figure out the exit strategy. Customers should figure out how they’re going to be taking over once the FDE resources go,” Saha said.

🔗 Vendors asking forward deployed engineers to make good on trillion-dollar AI bet

Getting lost is what tourism looked like before GPS. Notes about oxygen tanks, girl with torn jeans, is what attention looked like before someone else controlled it. …

Something unfamiliar appeared on the buildings.

My attention moved toward it, and I wrote it down.

John Dickerson, Navel Gazing, s2e2.

Gartner’s latest forecast calls for worldwide IT spending to reach $7.35 trillion in 2027, up 15% from 2026.

More interestingly, from normie watch:

“By 2029, 80% of new applications will be intentionally disposable—used for less than one year.”

“AI is making application development so accessible that employees will increasingly create temporary applications to meet short-term business needs. Organizations face new governance, security, compliance and records management challenges, particularly when they influence decisions or access sensitive data,” Gartner stated.

🔗 Gartner forecasts 15% global IT spending growth, recaps top tech predictions

in the US you can form your company in Delaware and have access to 340 million people in 48 hours. You can’t do that in Europe. … What we’re trying to advocate for at EU Inc – and I think the proposal is outstanding in its ambition – is that if you’re a founder and you’re trying to start a company in one country because you’re German, [that] that enables you to build your company and sell your products and services across any of the 27 member states. That’s not possible today.

🔗 Why is Brussels seemingly so hellbent on making sure that EU-Inc can’t compete with the US?

First, cf push lands on Kubernetes: workloads run on vSphere Kubernetes Service or VMs chosen by platform policy, developers keep manifests and buildpacks and never see YAML, Helm or kubectl, and rolling updates, canaries, sidecars, tasks and app security groups survive. Second, an agent runtime: disposable deny-by-default sandboxes with no shell, an MCP gateway that brokers tool access so agents never hold raw credentials, a managed memory service, RBAC and rate limits on MCP servers, and tracing of prompts, tokens, latency and tool calls. Third, TrueSource, a new Broadcom offering of maintainer-verified cleanroom builds of Spring and its dependencies plus curated Java, Python and Node libraries. Fourth, “environmentally adjusted CVE scoring” that rescores a CVE for the platform’s actual controls, with Spring4Shell’s 9.8 cited as a score that would drop in place, and a restage that rebuilds and rolls an image without a developer commit. Multi-region becomes first-class with capacity rebalancing across foundations, and data services get decoupled lifecycles so PostgreSQL 16 and 17 or Kafka 4.2 and 4.3 can run side by side.

🔗 VMware Tanzu Platform 11.0: The Agent Platform for VMware Private AI Cloud

[The study] found that the average PR time to review increased by 49%, the number of comments per PR rose by 53%, and the share of PRs requiring changes doubled. Additionally, the share of workers performing code reviews increased by 14%, with no improvement coming from the adoption of AI to assist with the reviews

…developers promoted into management without training.

🔗 Study Finds AI-generated Code Fails to Boost Productivity Due to Downstream Bottlenecks

“Barclays has revealed it is cutting five percent of its workforce – 5,000 people – and blaming crediting AI for it, even as it turns in a quarterly profit of £2.3 billion, up 12%.”

Meanwhile:

“ABN AMRO which announced plans to axe 5,200 jobs by 2028 and cited AI as the reason this would be possible without impacting service levels” and “Standard Chartered bank where the plan is to nuke 7,500 jobs and replace ‘lower-value human capital’ with AI by 2030.”

🔗 How “Barclays-onomics” adds up – profits up 12% to £2.3 billion, workforce down five percent to cut costs. AI is the icing on the cake, it seems…

• Jan, an Open-Source ChatGPT Replacement
• The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists – When mindfulness/meditation makes you crazy.
• Hasbro Raises 2026 Outlook Again as Magic Breaks $600 Million in Q3 – Wow. Who knew Magic was such a money maker! ”Magic: The Gathering remained the heavyweight. Revenue for the brand jumped 34%, fueled by The Hobbit and Reality Fracture, and topped $600 million for the quarter for the first time. Monopoly Go! kicked in another $41 million, bringing its year-to-date contribution to $127 million.”
• I should call my mom more: ”If you’re an adult, you may see them less than 100 or 50 or 10 more times before they die. Talk to them. ”
• Why were Victorian elites so effective?
• “Competition is not working well,” says UK CMA concluding cloud market investigation – From the cloud lock-in desk: “In total, the investigation found that less than one percent of customers move cloud providers yearly.”
• HSBC Group CTO Mario Shamtani on rationalising container platforms and “hollowing out” mainframes – The bank runs about 7,000 Kubernetes clusters, 2.4 million containers, nearly 65,000 namespaces and more than 1,900 IT services across public and private cloud, alongside mission-critical COBOL on mainframes. Some 60,000 engineers; 57 countries; over $3 trillion in balance-sheet assets.
• Musk’s Fake Flying Car And ‘CEO Said A Thing!’ Journalism – “Data indicates that between 59 and 75 percent of people never read past the headline, so it’s particularly important that journalists try to, you know, avoid lying in the headline.”
• 1900 – “Because most users do not use dates before March 1, 1900, this problem is rare.” // Before everything is a DNS problem, everything was a DST problem.
• “Process is documented culture.”

Maybe the biggest mistake I’ve made in my career is falling in love with this company. I put my heart and soul into building it, and tried my best to keep the fire inside of it lit for the better part of 13 years. Looking back, I was far too loyal to the company and the idea of “making it work”. I stayed longer than I should have. I stayed believing that I was helping even though the people in charge didn’t want my help. Watching the company slowly decay has been a grind on my soul. The closure of it “being over” is helpful and welcome and cathartic. I don’t regret any of my time at Foursquare, though I do regret never letting myself “move on” from it (which has certainly held me back from exploring other paths over the years).

🔗 Some final words on Foursquare.

Like many people, I have an uneasy relationship with attention, so it wasn’t clear to me that ‘professional writer with a platform’ would actually appeal to me as a lifestyle. But what I realized was that my envy was not about the attention (which I am still weird about), but about the way the world seems to open up to people who put themselves out there, successfully. They become like magnets for interesting people living thoughtful lives. I always disliked the way working at a company can warp your world around that company; people become obsessed with things like leveling and scope and other things that really, in my mind, do not matter. Being in conversation with the world felt like an antidote.”

🔗 Writing to fill your social needs

Related: AI writing closes it the chance to meet new people.