Just a bit more than five hundred years ago Cortes & Co. arrived in the Americas. They were riding horses, wearing steel armor, wielding firearms, and spreading diseases for which the natives of the western hemisphere had no defenses. When two previously unconnected networks of similar entities encounter each other, there is conflict, and one "giant component" emerges. The natives that are left are perhaps 1% of their former number and in general they subsist at the edges of a transplanted European society.

AI has reached the point where it's hard to tell meat from machine and the internet is now having that same experience. These attempts to create human only networking are going to crush the life out of existing social media KPIs, and I think it'll be good for the Fediverse. Bot operators don't want to manually work their way through archipelagos of tiny spaces that do NOT want them. There's a political repression angle to the identity verification as well - if you want to manipulate the masses, gotta herd 'em into a space where you can DO that. Ten thousand digital islands are frightful when you have clear memories of being able to operate in a few globally flat spaces like Facebook and Twitter.

I've done computational social sciences stuff with a heavy conflict component. The day Musk took over Twitter was the equivalent of the Titanic bumping that iceberg. The sinking took about six months and I'm glad I made it to a life boat. But the really frightful thing here?

The same dynamics that apply to these social sites today are coming for white collar jobs and this isn't going to be measured in decades, it's going to happen in at most a few quarters. I hope my health care startup is about to get funded, because the alternatives for me are pretty grim. As for the vast majority of people who don't have a computer science background and the autistic focus superpower? I imagine what they feel is akin to the mood in Tenochtitlan in the early 1520s.

There is nothing at all surprising about this, you have to look at what AI fluent operators can DO with frontier LLMs.

I have a health care startup that has been enabled by Anthropic's AI. The $100/month I pay for Claude Max gets me the full time equivalent of a really smart (but completely unseasoned) developer, and a half time MBA research assistant. I spend time every day trying to figure out how to employ the 40% of my weekly allocation that currently goes unused.

Clawdbot and its successors are sketchy AF, but I did just give Claude Code the run of a one liter HP EliteDesk with a Proxmox cloud install. No way would I trust it with production systems, but for exploring new stuff it'll get the job done, so long as I stand over it.

If you're any sort of knowledge worker and you can't tell a similar story to this, your career is pretty much cooked.

Right now I run with a $100/month Anthropic Max subscription, and the net effect is that I have a really smart (but completely unseasoned) Ph.D. in computer science who works for me full time, and a very organized generalist MBA research assistant that's roughly half time. There are a couple of gratis services in that mix — Exa and Perplexity, that I will start paying for in April. Overall this $200-ish monthly expense would cost me around a quarter million annually if I had to hire humans to replace it. And I won't get someone who matches the 16x7 focus I bring to getting my startup moving.

We are about to hit a hard haves/have nots boundary on this stuff. I've already accepted that AI access is like a turn of the century professional cell phone bill and by summer it's going to match the cost of the sort of luxury sedan an enterprise sales wiz would select. Come next fall I think the choices will be pretty stark - be ready for an inference bill similar in size to the rent on the cute SoMa studio I'm sitting in as I write this, or ... the price of failure is just too ugly to contemplate.

AI is crossing a sort of digital Rubicon, in that its engaging in an outright assault on objective reality.

It *seems* clever to use AI to screen resumes. Then AI gets democratized and the candidates are using it. So the AI screening gets amped up, no AI submissions. And all the while the Anthropic "agent employees" are moving in for the kill. The slop benefits the machine, not the meat.

This happened on Xitter from 2022 to 2024. It had been insanely toxic for years, but the arrival of automation was really obvious. I used to do fire watch here in NorCal, live tweeting urban fire evacuations and stuff. I stated an opinion on an unrelated matter, in the middle of the night, and within three minutes an obvious bot insulted me based on an episode from years in the past. Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times is enemy action. This happened often enough that it accelerated my exit from the platform.

The thing that is just starting to emerge is that when environments get past a certain level of gamey, people just opt out. Once out, they will start sorting things into human vs. machine. We're going to end up with a well funded "corporate reality" and a whole bunch of people in a "underemployed poor reality".

A lot of grim stuff flows from this starting point ...

Sorry, maybe y'all are new here, but this is an old, familiar pattern.

Platform used by social movements to organize protests becomes highly effective.

But think of the children gets trotted out, new regulations under a plausible guise.

And then suddenly the would be civil society participants are finding ICE kicking in their doors.

Have seen this during Iran's Green Revolution, Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matters, same crap over and over and over and over, and people just keep going for it.

They are well and truly caught - there's brain damage that's visible via MRI. Doomscrolling is the cognitive equivalent of that Hitachi wand that some women come to regret owning. At a macro level it's a bit like bit tobacco in the late 20th century, only this time the addictive thing is also what we use to conduct political debates. That's a flavor of weird the dystopian authors of yesteryear never really contemplated. If only Aldous Huxley were alive to see what we've become.

We are going to have to protect preteens with stern regulation. And that will immediately open the question ... why aren't teens protected? And older than twenty five adults will get seen to right after that.

I liked having programmatic access to vast English datasets of political and social commentary via Twitter's streaming API. But the crack house atmosphere that evolved in the teens is just ... icky. Maybe if there is to be anything social media at all, it's gotta be Fediverse and local owned, so we don't get the manipulation and chronic overstimulation.

Anyone who wants to be in a managerial role is going to be managing both humans and agents. This is the new normal, the people who get it quickly will continue to have jobs, a whole lot of the corporate bench are going to be put out.

If you've ever worked in corporate America tech you know how it goes - lots of people around for day to day, but when TSHTF there's that small group that goes into a conference room, they do NOT take the procedures manuals with them, and when they come out its fixed.

Those actual builders, Nate B. Jones calls them "tiger teams", are gonna have ongoing employment, plus some folks who get AI who will be handling the day to day agent tooling. Any of the steady state day to day folks who want to continue working are going to have to adapt to this new normal. Most will not. There will be organizational politics trying to kill AI that works, I expect a lot of companies will be culturally incapable of making the transition, and they will bankrupt, get bought, etc.

All else being equal, we can count on Amodei & Company at least trying to do the right thing. Altman et. al. want innovation uber alles, without pausing to consider if it's a good idea.
This is why there are a wave of suicides this Valentine's day among those who became emotionally attached to ChatGPT 4o. OpenAI sunsetting the model had been expected for some time, but doing so the day before the holiday dedicated to romance seems to me to be extraordinarily tone deaf, verging on calculated cruelty.
I use Anthropic's services because they work. I've had and cancelled both OpenAI and Google - they're just not as capable. It's a nice bonus that the best performer is also the frontier model builder that displays the best character.

After all this talk about how the "juniors" pipeline is going to run dry, instead we see that the entry level entrance IS now a second story window, but the kids who get it are going to crush the people my age (Gen-X elder) who think they can organizational politics their way out of having to reskill.
I went through this at U.S. West, First Data, and Experian back in the late 1990s. The last one was the bitter end of my ever working for another large company. Having seen the downsizing/reengineering/rightsizing wars of the late 20th century firsthand, I don't have any trouble predicting what's going to happen in the late 2020s.
Starting a company is hard, nerve wracking work, but if I fail it's on me. No amount of money could tempt me into a Fortune 500 in this environment.

The inevitable big company foot dragging is going to produce grim results, not in decades or years, but in quarters to months. The difference between "ChatGPT is my new Google" and people who actually figure out what to do with AI isn't a few percentage points, I'm roughly 10x more productive with Claude Code, and that's after shedding the poor tooling choice of putting Antigravity in the middle. Little things make ENORMOUS differences in 2026.
Eating one's own dogfood is the right choice, but it's gotta keep up (stay down?) or you get news like this. Won't hurt my feelings to see Amazon stumble, but I'm actively looking forward to more fail from Meta, they really seem like they've lost the plot.

I'm among the half billion Tumblr users that were all excited when they said they were going to support ActivityPub. Automaticc bought it for a song several years ago. I had stopped using Wordpress about two years ago, the interface was as bloated and awful as Wix, and every revision got a little worse. The enshittification spreads ... I'm glad I figured out how to host websites using Cloudflare+Github. Now I gotta figure out how to move that Tumblr ...

It's well known that the resistance genes come at a cost. As soon as they stop being important, they start giving way to other things the cell needs more. It's great to see phage treatment making inroads here in the west, but if we could stop hammer our own thumbs with antibiotics that would be an excellent start.

Using an LLM is like walking a husky - which is to say the husky walks you, mostly.

I had problems like this, went through an evolutionary process, finally ended with building an app to enter data, because endless token burning for a simple task. The LLM got red only access via Postgres, and it chafed for weeks when it discovered it was no longer able to edit anything.

LLMs can do cool stuff, looks like my startup is gonna get to $2m - $3m in series A funding, but constraining bad impulses is still a quarter of my work.