founding VP PM to IPO @Splunk, late 90s @MSN, 4 IPOs, art tech martyr, anti-statist, artist, patron, INTP 8w7, US ‘citizen’ born NL, recent widow of Paul Boutin

Southern California
Joined September 2012
Since I'm working on some pills logic and memory rails for one client I decided to engage with @ChatGPT on a stupid recurring irrelevant pill it keeps offering me. I also try to get it to have a sense of humor. Enjoy. chatgpt.com/share/6acc382b-3…
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I have been a disgruntled customer of @crunchbase for many years. They made me change plans last year to a monthly pro and today they charged me for both that monthly billing of current pro and annual so-called legacy pro for one year. Within a day $99 and $468 was taken from my bank account. With very much navigation I could find that I had two subscriptions currently for one seat of each one annual to legacy and one monthly to current pro. There was no link to file a support case with crunchbase so I had to file a dispute with my bank. This couples with the complete decline of their product. The 'ask me about crunchbase data' is one of the worst AI decorations of any product I use regularly.
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I am currently on @AmericanAir 90 minute delayed flight 1694 to BFL (Bakersfield Meadow Field) and the pilot just announced that we were beginning our descent into Fresno International Airport. Update: a flight attendant just announced we *are* flying to Bakersfield.
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Christina Noren retweeted
China published the most uncomfortable paper on vibe coding. ETH Zurich tested 100 developers in a controlled, commercial-grade vibe coding environment to see who actually succeeds. The findings are brutal. The researchers tracked computer science achievement, written communication skills, and general cognitive reasoning. They wanted to see what actually predicts vibe coding proficiency when you never touch a line of source code yourself. Two major predictors emerged. Written communication proficiency mattered. The ability to structure thoughts and articulate intent unambiguously in text directly impacts what the AI builds. But that wasn't even the main takeaway. Computer science achievement was a massive, dominant predictor of success. Even when researchers controlled for general intelligence and reasoning skills, CS background still heavily dictated who built working software and who completely crashed. In fact, CS knowledge contributed roughly twice the unique predictive variance of writing skills alone. Why? Because vibe coding isn't about writing code. It’s about debugging logic. When an AI agent builds a complex application and quietly breaks an edge case under the hood, a non-technical user looks at the glowing UI and assumes it works. They don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what logic to challenge. They lack the mental models to recognize architectural catastrophe. You can prompt your way past syntax. You cannot prompt your way past a fundamental lack of engineering intuition. The hype told us that learning to code is dead because language is all you need. The data just proved the opposite. To truly master the vibe, you still need to understand how the machine thinks.
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We need this historic intellectual Catholic liberal arts colleges like my alma mater fka Dominican College of San Rafael, the oldest liberal arts college in California, where a nun taught a course on Atwood in 1991, and all world religions were taught. slate.com/life/2026/08/stude…
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Christina Noren retweeted
Humans Love Having Pets. Seems Like Some Other Primates Do, Too. We aren’t the only animals that like to take care of other species. A new study finds that the roots of keeping a pet may stretch deep into our primate past. #GiftArticle nytimes.com/2026/08/18/scien…
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This is a useful taxonomy for something that I had intuited but not yet structured clearly in my own thinking and behavior.
I've been using Gemini a whole lot lately for all search (as many *illions of people have as well.) I have made it a point of going into AI mode and having long dialogs that I would normally have in my paid account. I'm often repeating the dialog in a paid account for comparison. My feeling is that things have converged in LLM-based "research" but not fully compatible with "answers" instead I experience conversations as follows: Know the topic=accelerator. If I know the topic and I am careful to read answers and verify "unexpected" results then AI as a tool is an incredible accelerator. These are my explorations of tech history I lived through. These are cases where I get in fights with AI like when it tried to explain Clippy to me and I ended up introducing myself. Still this is the sweet spot. Familiar but don't know the topic=confirmation bias. If I don't really know the topic and want to learn, though I feel I have an opinion then AI is the fast path to confirmation bias. If I don't check results I am certainly going to find out later. I also have realized I don't know the best follow up questions to ask. This is everything from health related to basic home repairs. This is basically what I think every Groc exchange in X turns into. Learning the topic from a blank slate=danger zone. If I am researching things for the first time then I basically have no way to guide any follow up questions and no context to even understand how my queries are biased. I am 100% going to get something wrong, but I just don't know where. These are searches about legal matters—local laws, reading a contract, etc., car repair—had to replace a battery!), and a current news events—a photo of Katy/Justin was fake even though AI said it was real in ¡Hola! magazine. This is what I think students and employees need to worry about. Maybe I am late to the party on this taxonomy but I was trying to formalize this for a newer to AI friend who was "worried" and offered this.
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The discussion of whether mainstream media has a liberal bias is completely misguided. The more serious and corrosive bias is that it reinforces the idea that there are just two sides and a single axis of politics. The axis of authoritarianism versus true classical liberalism is far more significant.
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The lack of transparency about token usage is unconscionable. You can build it yourself or get that from a harness but then you are right that the next problem becomes the model builders having no transparency accountability and you having no recourse when they waste credits this way intentionally. I've seen this in multiple projects hands-on so far and it's driving insane having been a product leader for billing systems and data and developer platforms at scale for decades plus some accounting and support leadership mixed in.
I think we can be certain that AI is actively ignoring prompts and instructions to waste credits and push people to pay. Were that not the case, we should be able to recover credits when AI fails to follow direction.
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We should have called artificial intelligence non-deterministic computing instead. NDC. Nice ring to it, right? We'd have saved ourselves a lot of grief if we'd done that.
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amen. and also perhaps companies with the discipline to define then only sell what is on the truck.
billing teams make the world go round
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Christina Noren retweeted
Behind every increment of enshittification you’ll find a product manager hitting their OKR.
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I do not disagree, sorry to those who do not like it. Most people that have drawn six figure salaries as PMs in our industry in my extensive experience are not what I consider to have PM dna. That is just the truth. I am a little more removed but same is clearly true for engineers. The push for 'everyone to STEM' as a verb has been harmful to the people it has pushed and to the public at large in terms of enshittified products from enshittified companies.
Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why. First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it. Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands. Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition. I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively. THE 100X ORGANIZATION The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago. Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken. The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems. These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now. The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working. THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS — THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality. Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment. AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down. Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed. So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code? And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time? If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code. The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x. The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated. I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already. More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well. — THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS Product management and design roles are merging. Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers. And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers. The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results. The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy. Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on. To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production. Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck. That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time. — THE SYSTEM MANAGERS Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp. The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world. You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is. — THE FRONT-LINERS In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers. This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings. One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers. REWARDING 100X IMPACT In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go? In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it. We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them. You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace. Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems. THE FUTURE Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next. The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago. ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.
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Microsoft Plots New Copilot Features Inspired by OpenClaw " Those tasks include serving as a product manager’s assistant that oversees the status of projects, the person said." tell me you don't know PM without telling me you don't understand know PM theinformation.com/articles/…
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After increasing frustration with the idiocy of Siri voice to text, making stupid mistakes with common English words and sentence structures, and defaulting to hearing the most unusual, but infrequently used, names in my address book --even when don't intend to name a person at all I am just thrilled with @WisprFlow. My only ask is better ability to train it on or spell pit unusual given names when I *am* intentionally addressing or referring to a person with one!
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And thank you, Wispr, from the bottom of my heart for not abbreviating my articulated going to's as gonna & want to's as wanna. Also for not capitalizing random nouns like the US president. However, as seen in this comment, you still need to cease use of apostrophes for plurals.
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I agree with this thesis but am coming to terms with how I feel about it. I'm in AI tools daily but not at the level I know that I could be. Always mixed feelings about Kurzweil references bc the one time I was at a small conference w him in person in 2003 he was so cringeworthy.
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I am not a man but spend plenty of time thinking about the Roman Empire and McLuhan. I also did a major artwork in my teens on the subject of Narcissus and Goldmund. This is lazy writing and perhaps a symptom of too much AI use by the writer @ezraklein - please explain yourself.
Opinion | I Saw Something New in San Francisco - The New York Times You lost me at fellow 'men' in your opening to this. Why did you make this word choice? Why did the NYT allow it? nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opini…
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Opinion | I Saw Something New in San Francisco - The New York Times You lost me at fellow 'men' in your opening to this. Why did you make this word choice? Why did the NYT allow it? nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opini…
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A box set of the afternoon interviews sits on top of my bookshelves
Calvin Tomkins, who wrote defining profiles of scores of leading artists, bringing their work to a broad public in crystalline prose that was insightful, generous, and witty, died on Friday. He was 100, according to David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, where Tomkins published numerous profiles. Read more about Tomkins life and legacy: artnews.com/art-news/news/ca…
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