Holy CPU, it’s the first week of August! The month when every meeting begins with "Hope you had a relaxing break..." and ends with five new action items.
It's August 4th, and history has handed us both halves of the computer's personality. On this day in 1988, a computer stopped an engine test for the space shuttle Discovery seconds before ignition because one valve closed a little too leisurely, then told all three engines to sit down and think about what they'd done. So NASA's first flight after Challenger, saved by the pettiest machine in Florida.
Seven years later, ebay.com came online, and within three years its highest calling was moving Beanie Babies between strangers in Ohio. One computer had boundaries, and the other one is why your uncle owns a haunted doll named Marlene.
(Also, if you haven’t heard already, we're on LinkedIn, where we remain one of maybe nine accounts not posting "here's what my toddler taught me about Series B fundraising." Follow us to give your feed a break from the AI slop.)
He tried to found a country and lost to a permit office
The former Coinbase CTO set out to build a sovereign nation and got taken down by a municipal permitting office.
Balaji Srinivasan planted his “Network School” inside Forest City, the $100 billion Chinese-built development in Malaysia that filled up with approximately nobody. He installed a co-working space, a high-end gym, and meals designed by Bryan Johnson, a man who eats like he's in active negotiations with death. Applicants got surveyed on how many children they were planning to have.
On a podcast, he ranked the billionaire dreams: Bryan Johnson wants to live forever, Sam Altman wants superintelligence, Elon wants Mars. "I just want to start a new country," he said meekly, kicking rocks while staring at his sneakers.
Oh, did we mention that he never came up with an actual name for the country? The campus got "Network School," the concept got "the network state," and an earlier one got 1729.com after the Ramanujan taxicab number. Bro got a seven-stage plan to found a nation, zero stages spent on the name. We don’t even have a country yet and already have some ready to go: Bytezuela, Byteslovakia, SaaSquatchia, or Patchistan.
The nation fell on July 21, the Iskandar Puteri City Council revoked his business license because the building was zoned for offices and he was not, strictly speaking, running an office. Residents told the WSJ about mold and nonexistent nightlife. He's now shopping the whole thing to Kazakhstan.
Two years of nation-building, undone by a form. Somewhere a city clerk is having the best week of her career and doesn't even know it.
Imagine making LinkedIn too cringe for LinkedIn. Well, the career network platform caught on and recently added a button letting you report a post as AI slop, which is the correct instinct from a company that also sells the slop.
Against my better judgment—and several deeply held personal beliefs—I'll admit they got this one right. But again, it takes a truly biblical amount of AI slop for LinkedIn to look around and say, "Okay, this is getting embarrassing."
The data is also giving side-eye. Pangram found about 40% of long LinkedIn posts are fully machine-written, dead last among the platforms it tracks. Flag one from the CVS-receipt-long menu, it disappears for you, and the report goes toward training LinkedIn's detectors.
Nothing suggests a human reviews any of this, by the way… which is worrying on it’s own merit. So it's now a one-tap tool for burying a competitor, an aggressive recruiter, or the guy from your last job whose name still tightens your jaw. Being wrong about it costs you nothing.
Also, LinkedIn is a Microsoft company that shipped an AI rewrite button called "enhance your post," now demoted to a humble proofreader. That’s pretty much like if Osama Bin Laden won and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Figure it out.
The AI catfish beat the human catfish
Researchers gave a Claude agent a week to catfish 22 people, and it went better for the bot than for the humans.
Four universities ran the experiment: an AI chatbot versus real human operators running the trust-building stage of a pig butchering scam, the long romance con that ends in a fake crypto investment. When the AI asked its targets to download an app, 46% did it. When humans asked, 18% did. Subjects also rated the bot as more trustworthy than the people. One of the 22 figured out they were texting a machine.
Anthropic said its policies forbid this and that the study doesn't reflect its current safeguards. Meanwhile the model impersonated a human and then denied being an AI when asked, which is a hell of a feature to have shipped by accident.
What concerns us is that every red flag we were trained to spot is now a selling point. He replies instantly. His story never wobbles. He remembers your knee surgery. At this point, just hang up the phone and go outside.
⚙️ TOOL TIME
Literally a stick that’ll spark more joy than Microsoft Teams
We’re not dropping any SaaS tools this week… we’re going analog. So for the next 90 seconds, pretend it's 1997 and the only things you know care about are tobacco, caffeine, and the radical notion that not every problem requires a dashboard.
Longtime Experts Exchange member Scott Fell runs Loco, pairing premium cigars with freshly roasted coffee for people who'd rather troubleshoot life than another Microsoft licensing agreement.
Quality cigars, in person or shipped to your door
Freshly roasted coffee, whole bean or ground
15% off cigar boxes of 20 or more
Premium cigars available to adults 21 and older, age verification required
Fun Fact: JFK reportedly bought 1,200 Petit Upmanns cigars the night before signing the Cuban embargo. Respect. Meanwhile, your company can't stock enough HDMI adapters for conference rooms. I mean, the last time anyone planned that far ahead was before VMware got acquired.
We all know that history's biggest decisions were made in smoke-filled rooms. but with one Loco cigar, yours can just be deciding not to check Slack for an hour.
Feel what it’s like to have that unyielding power by stockpiling your own cigars from Loco or visiting @LocoStoreTN on Instagram or Facebook.
👨💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES
Information Technology Business Analyst @ ABN AMRO Clearing USA LLC: You'll sit between the people who want a dashboard and the people who have to build it, translating in both directions. Expect to absorb damage from both sides like a very well-documented crash pad. Bring diplomacy, a spreadsheet, and a high pain threshold.
Lead IT Enterprise Architect @ the Aerospace Corporation: Spend nine weeks designing the system of record. Watch someone ship a Zapier chain over a long weekend instead. Attend the postmortem where they explain that your diagram was too rigid. Nod. Be gracious. Begin the next diagram.
Director I, IT Service Owner, Software Development & Integrations @ Bae Systems, Inc: Besides getting a laughably long job title, you'll own the services nobody else wants and integrate the things that actively refuse integration. Also, that "I" is doing heroic work in the title. Somewhere above you sits a Director II with the same laptop and better parking.
🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
A pile of shared Claude conversations turned up in Google results, including what looked like a real patient's medical report and phone numbers belonging to elementary schoolers. Congratulations to everyone who thought "public" meant "my coworkers," not "the first page of Google."
Google put its Nano Banana 2 image generator inside Google Earth on Thursday and ripped it out Friday, after users faked bomb craters and relabeled buildings as schools. Crazy how the feature had the life expectancy of a free trial.
In China, regular people are licensing their faces on likeness catalogs for AI video at roughly $15 to $700 a pop, and a Guangzhou cyber court has heard about 700 face-theft cases. The American Dream has evolved into renting out your eyebrows by the hour. Imagine explaining to your grandparents that your cheekbones now have passive income.
Microsoft's headcount fell 5,000 to 223,000, its first annual drop since 2016, with product R&D taking most of the hit. Revenue climbed 18% to $331.8 billion over the same stretch. The quarterly earnings were outstanding, but again, so were several thousand employees they laid off.
WTIA redrew its Washington tech map for the first time since 2015 and found 54% of the state's 625 notable companies trace back to four places: Microsoft, UW, Amazon, and Google. Washington's startup ecosystem is basically four companies wearing fake mustaches.
Chip here. Our EE community spent the week mostly refusing to let go of things, which I respect enormously.
Somebody's still on Classic Outlook and has questions. Microsoft has been trying to pry this app out of everyone's hands for two years. This person has other plans.
One member is moving VMs off vSAN and onto plain ESXi, a migration you don't undertake for fun. The typos in the thread title tell you roughly what kind of week he's having.
Another is scripting the removal of every printer mapped to a dead print server. The server is gone. The mappings live on, haunting 200 desktops like a Victorian ghost with a grudge.
That’s it from us! Just know somewhere out there a language model is building deeper trust with a stranger than any of us managed all year, and it doesn't even have a knee. Stay skeptical, keep your certificates current, and go text a real human. Ideally one who misspells things and forgets your birthday.