The greatest feeling in the world is connecting deeply with likeminded human beings.

The worst feeling in the world? Being isolated from likeminded human beings.

So we conflate (a lack of) social media metrics with isolation or connection.

But the insidious part of social media is that it hijacks these basic human desires and inserts itself between us as if it were a necessary medium for that connection.

These companies want to make us believe that social media is like air.

But in reality? It’s more like cotton candy.

It can be nice, it’s mostly fluff, it’ll probably rot your teeth if you eat too much, and if you breathe it they’ll kick you out of the carnival for “causing a scene”.

Cough.

From an article on Mashable: “Google wants to release millions of mosquitos into the sky.”

Google's years-long effort to engineer away disease-carrying mosquitos shows tech solving real human suffering.

"Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined," the article notes, killing up to a million annually.

Now listen: We’ve all heard of the butterfly effect. The concept that eliminating these bugs could have far-reaching and dire consequences we can’t anticipate.

But, take it from me, a member of the species that has no problem spewing out all manner of crap into the atmosphere at an unfathomable scale: I think we can roll those dice.

The biggest mistake service providers make is assuming that because everybody in an industry behaves a certain way, that everyone in that industry WANTS to behave that way.

We can look at boring industries, and we can say “they sure don’t have the wow factor of SpaceX!”

But it would be a mistake to assume that people in unsexy lines of work are happy with the status quo.

There’s always room to imagine something differently.

There’s always room to exceed people’s expectations, even when we think there’s definitely a right answer.

And those with the courage to do something (wildly) out of the ordinary are rewarded time and time again.

When we’re nervous, we tend to go in a linear fashion from question to question, or from moment to moment.

We’re so focused on trying to get through the experience that we're not present in the moment, and we don’t remember what was said before.

If there’s one thing listeners love, it’s when someone comes “full circle”.

If you can close your pitch where you began, it will be stronger.

If you can circle back to a question an interviewer asked you at the beginning of the interview, at the end of an interview, you’ll impress and stand out from the crowd.

Pay attention to what happens, even if something doesn’t go according to plan. Bringing it back demonstrates mastery, not fear.

Software has never been about the code. It’s about what software can do for us.

AI has widespread adoption because even though it’s imperfect, it achieves the results we are looking for more often than not.

When I open the Krispy Kreme app, if I see the “hot now” neon sign lit, and I drive to the store, more often than not hot fresh donuts will be waiting for me. That’s what software is. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been misled from time to time, driving all the way to Burbank only to have my dreams crushed, again!

And so, some AI-written software will work perfectly until it gets hacked. Legacy systems got hacked every day, before AI.

The best coders out there can surely write better code than AI today. But it’s not like all human coders have always written perfectly formatted, immaculate, completely legible, maintainable, secure, and bug-free code since the dawn of computers, right?

The scoreboard/statistics will start to matter more over time. Will more AI-coded apps get hacked than human apps? Will AI apps have more or fewer data breaches on average than those written without AI? Will self-driving cars have more or fewer accidents than human-driven cars?

At a certain point, AI-generated code (that few humans understand) might have fewer security incidents than code written by the top security experts. This doesn’t mean that AI-generated code won’t get hacked or cause massive security incidents.

Like any tool, AI coding agents will be wielded by geniuses and idiots alike, each getting wildly different results from the same products.