Staring into Silicon Valley's soft-focus mirror [Image via Gemini]

Every few years, Silicon Valley decides traditional reporters just don't get it and builds a friendlier stage of its own. The latest flashpoint is Andrew Fedorov's look in The San Francisco Standard at Colossus, the latest venture-backed pub featuring adoring profiles of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders. Kara Swisher compared the magazine to "Vaseline mirrors" for fragile executives, while Nilay Patel of The Verge quipped that the tech bubble is welcome to its own "in-flight magazine." First of all, I've never heard of it. Sometimes it's good to be in my focused bubble. But it's all going to be okay.

Back in 2009, I wrote that bloggers and PR aren't automatic enemies when everyone understands the transaction, and during the 2011 spat around over investor-backed tech blogs, I said being genuine is the best disclosure of them all. Insiders who fund companies will typically understand how those businesses operate better than outsiders do, and content marketing can be valuable if it gets a story that couldn't have gotten out otherwise, so long as it owns its perspective. It's the final stage of access journalism, for better or worse.

Readers aren't fooled by what they see. Just like our debates around AI-generated content or if ads have value, they know what promotional content smells like. Where this fluffery actually causes damage is inside the corner office itself - reinforcing these execs' hot takes that they lack any issues. Last month, I wrote about how filtertainment eviscerated our informed monoculture, letting every slice of society retreat into comfortable spaces populated entirely by people who agree with them. Founders and billionaires are just as vulnerable to that comfort loop as anyone scrolling apps on their couch.

The best Silicon Valley products get better because they survive contact with skeptics and users. Tough questions from beat reporters, teardowns on independent blogs, and grumpy user threads expose blind spots that boardroom peers don't dare to say - lose the fast track to shares or other privileges. When leaders trade that messy friction for curated profiles that treat every strategic pivot like destiny, they quietly dull their own product instincts. Even my own new Webnerd.ai app has already benefitted from user feedback or bugs that got through my queue.

Print a shiny mag if you want to leave it on the coffee table in the lobby or frame it on your wall. Enjoy the friendly banter that comes from knowing no gotcha questions are coming your way. But don't forget the purpose of an in-flight magazine: keep the passengers relaxed at thirty thousand feet while somebody else checks the instruments. The trouble starts the moment the pilot starts using it as a navigation chart.

Disclosures per always: I have always appreciated Kara. What. You wanted more disclosures?

Even in an AI world, the human filter provides value. [Image via Gemini]

The web has always been about discovery and sharing. Whether it was from blogrolls or a bullet list item of links on our blogs, we have acted as curators, showing our audiences what we found valuable, and inherently filtering out the noise. In the peak of Web 2.0 experimentation with classic RSS, I could add an item to Delicious and it would flow through Friendfeed to Twitter, or I could share an item I found in Google Reader and have it show up downstream in Buzz. What a time.

Building one-click sharing directly into Webnerd.ai brought that muscle memory back. Every story I flag lands on my public shared page, syndicates to LG Stream on Bluesky, and publishes its own dedicated RSS feed anyone can subscribe to in their reader of choice. In the meantime, old school bloggers like Dave Winer have continuously posted links to share the best of the web on their domain. I respect it. I used to do a better job of highlighting individual blogs, so let's bring that muscle memory back too.

It seems wacky to think Anthropic's IPO filing was just this week. CNBC (via Techmeme) highlighted the company's more than $131 billion in cash and short-term investments, while Timothy B. Lee said its business was surprisingly strong. Latent Space highlighted how Anthropic uses Claude itself, and The Verge focused on how Anthropic can keep Wall Street pressure at bay.

But the week wasn't by any means totally bullish. Like many other companies, Microsoft is continuing to optimize spending by reducing headcount, offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees. Tom Warren and Azeem Azhar at Exponential View connected the dots plainly: when capital spending continues to accelerate, payroll cuts make room for machines. Meanwhile, long time Google watcher John Battelle put a rattled Friday market selloff in long-term Silicon Valley perspective.

Beyond the money line, Sean Goedecke published a pair of excellent posts, arguing that getting good at AI takes deliberate practice, and reminding developers that you can just ask AI to do things when agency becomes your bottleneck. Go subscribe to Sean right now.

That builder energy showed up across the product beat too, from Simon Willison testing webframe as a headless browser sandbox, to Google shipping Gemini 4 Carbon and Genie 4, pricing the Google Xreal Aura glasses at $1,099, and Waymo tapping Toyota's bZ4X for Tokyo robotaxis. Yes, I work at Google, but we're a big enough company that sometimes seeing this news is like being happy for your cousins. Go team and such.

Like I said last night, AI is impacting just about everything, and humans need to adjust. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology captured burned-out security teams enduring "Black October" as AI uncovers software flaws faster than defenders can patch, and Molly White traced why a $6.4 billion Binance heist pointed straight back to North Korea. Add Reddit forcing everyone to log in just to read human answers, and the open web lost another front porch. Algorithms optimize for lock-in, not discovery. Curating links by hand, and tapping share in Webnerd.ai so good writing travels further, is a great way for us to help discovery continue.

AI writes, AI scans, and the human chair stays empty. [Image via Gemini]

We're in a funny spot with AI at the moment. As people debate its value, with one side arguing it's the greatest invention since fire, all while the other calls anything it touches pure slop, AI is actively finding a foothold in evolving how business is done, in all facets. To claim otherwise is ignorant at this point.

Software is being written more quickly with AI. Security gaps are being both exploited and solved more quickly. All matter of communication is being authored and adjusted more quickly. As I said in my first post after multiple years' hiatus, we will need to find out the best place for AI and humans to coexist, and I truly believe the discussion of AI will eventually fade to the background, just like our flareups about social, mobile, local, and whatever transformative buzzword at the moment happened to be. This is not to undercut the actual value and impact of AI, but to optimistically suggest we as humans are great at adjusting.

Our eyes and our minds have been trained since the day we were born to understand what humanity looks like. Since we all first started to learn to read or watch TV, we have absorbed what it means to be "real", and we visibly react when something feels synthetic. We all have a visceral reaction when special effects seem too special, an ad seems too perfect, or a visual defies comprehension. Something feels "off". But as the models train and get better, learning through feedback and continuous reinforcement, their images and video get better, and so does their writing.

Techmeme is aflutter this weekend about a Bloomberg report that shows where we are in this particular cat and mouse game. As AI writing becomes more human, more humans can get outed for sounding too much like AI. The end result is predictable, with people intentionally making mistakes, and writing in a way that bots won't, so they don't get accused of shortcutting their work, or leaving the hard work to an LLM. If you think the bots can't adjust to make typos on their own, or to follow instructions to sound even more human so even the bots will fail the AI detection test, well, you haven't thought this through. Maybe you've even seen the viral posts that say Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein would be considered full AI generated because the models themselves were trained on the book.

Since kicking off my first posts here two decades ago, I've had more than 3,000 posts and countless words hand typed into a myriad of open CMS windows. I've written buckets of emails or social posts and Slack messages all over the place. But I also know that in 2026, it might make sense to let the bot do a first draft, especially when it solves the blank page problem. What I do worry about, eventually, is if the AI is doing the writing, and the AI is doing the distilling and the summarizing, what if no actual humans consumed and fully took in the content? We are all very busy people, and if not, we all prefer to be seen as such, and we fill the edges of our time with things we'd rather be doing than reading text slop.

Running a script against your content to hide em dashes or add typos to seem fallible isn't going to automatically flip the lever that confirms you're a human and the AI is not. It takes an entire body of work, a corpus that no machine has, with a real personality that's adjusted through experience. 

Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote that your blog is your brand, and later, that blogging remains the foundation for who you are online. The latest generation has grown up with blogs being too slow, perhaps, with TikTok and Instagram being more visual quick hits of dopamine and long form being less valuable. Now Gen Z is approaching college and a daunting workforce where AI has always been expected and accepted, even as its place is evolving and being debated. Some of them are definitely writing their course papers with AI. Some aren't. But the reckoning won't come from somebody getting outed for asking ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to be their scribe. It will come when everyone is distracted by something more exciting and nobody was reading anyway.

Disclosures per always: I work at Google and use our Gemini and Antigravity tools a lot. I wrote this post by hand. But how would you know?