goopthink
When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”
The site has been upgraded to 6.44 to close the vulnerability, I rotated every API key and account credential, and both manually and programmatically scrubbed every instance I could find of the code injection across the database. I think we're clear now!
Sorry to anyone caught by this and thank you to folks for flagging it (and thanks to the HN team for letting me follow up on this after comments were closed). I'm seriously mortified. X_X
[1] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/security/advisories/GHSA-w... [2] https://www.securityweek.com/ghost-cms-vulnerability-exploit...
> “[Companies with a good trajectory] give your resume (and career) a pedigree and an opportunity to work alongside some of the top talent or top operational structures in an industry. They also offer great paychecks that compensate for whatever issues may be present.”
Companies with a good trajectory can be awful to work for but their trajectory — and subsequently their ability to allocate value (pay, headcount, interesting challenges) to teams to make them more competitive — in my view compensates for whatever drawbacks come from them. There is some benefit to working for them. For a bad company, there is often little explicit value for working there unless you’re personally passionate about the work/industry or you need a job.
Said differently: a good company delivers value to you. In a bad company, you have to drag personal value out.
Good Careers at Bad Companies
Somewhat ironic then, to not make this more explicit in an article about solving a combinatorial problem.
The way people use AI is the opposite of focus. It’s throw as much as you can against the wall because it is fast and cheap and possible. It is peanut buttering. Companies today mandate AI use so indiscriminately that you might as well call it a comparative disadvantage. It’s not that the AI is bad, but that people haven’t figured out that the core competency of an organization is focus and coordination to achieve a goal, and that victory is external — users, customers. But AI is used to unfocus, to spread, and to meet internal goals - build more, etc. The challenge was never writing more code or creating more content (all of which is ultimately a long tail of debt that needs to be cleaned up and managed by someone else), which can be done cheaply enough with other paths. It was figuring out what is worth doing, and aligning everyone around that. So in a sense, I welcome company AI mandates today because they are so misdirected as to make “doing things they inefficient way they were done before” a relative advantage.
A Year in Reading, 2025
Learning Without Certainty
- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)
- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.
- Priority inbox rules seem reset
- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected
Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...
Ask HN: Gmail Spam Filtering Suddenly Marking Everything as Spam?
Almost all transactional emails are being marked as suspicious even when their SPF/DKIM records are fine and they’ve been whitelisted before. Did Google break something in gmail/spam filtering?
There are no lessons here
There Are No Lessons to Be Learned Here
Https://errorstates.com
GM Deprecating In-Car App Store for Models as Recent as 2020
So You Want to Lead with Integrity
Mary Meeker's Report on AI Trends
Identifying Signals of Expertise in Interviews
Are you treating ChatGPT better than your coworkers?
Identifying Signals of Expertise
Field Testing Claude vs. ChatGPT for Marketing Strategy and Advertising Analysis
Field Testing LLMs for Marketing and Advertising
Using Risk to Drive Outcomes and Innovation
What Healthcare Has Learned About Risk and Incentives that Marketing Hasn’t
But OpenAI has the best brand recognition and the largest user base, and they have the core tech powering all of this. Whats the number on “tons” of customers, given that these VSCode-spinoff/plugin GPT wrappers are sprouting around like mushrooms after a rain?
If this is a build-vs-buy decision, $3 billion? Is that worth 1/3rd of the money in the bank when they’re burning cash at insane rates just running servers, and the rest of the $30b fundraise is tenuous and there may not be a followup? I’m skeptical of the financial decision here.