Mark Robinson

Product Manager and entrepreneur.

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@mattyp Thanks for this @mattyp - nice summary - they are a bit confusing until you have a play with them.

Are we going to get bot-to-bot soon? E.g. my bot reaches out to ask the bot of a teammate something, or checks in with my wife’s bot on something. Still feels single player mode.

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@tferriss @bot @Muse @OpenAI @claudeai @instinct I use them all but I find myself gravitating to @bot - especially for personal and household tasks. I like that I can personalize the agents for specific roles - it fits my mental model.

It’s also super fast and consistently good.

[Mark Robinson @markr]

This is so familiar and so true

[Derek Devicemanager @IT_unhinged]

Security called me at 6:12 AM today.

"Patch every PHP server immediately."

I asked what happened.

"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."

Cool.

How many PHP servers do we have?

According to inventory: 12

According to reality:

Nobody knows.

We found one running WordPress.

Three running old internal tools.

One under someone's desk.

Two inside vendor appliances.

A forgotten employee directory from 2016.

And a server named:

PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH

Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.

Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.

I asked who owned it.

The documentation said:

BRIAN.

Brian left in 2019.

We called Brian.

He said:

"Oh wow, that's still running?"

Excellent.

By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.

CEO:

"Can hackers actually get in?"

Security:

"Potentially yes."

CEO:

"Without a password?"

Security:

"Yes."

CEO:

"Then why do WE need passwords?"

Not the lesson.

Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.

Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.

Finance asked for a cost comparison.

At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.

Marketing refused.

"Our campaign is live."

So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.

We finally patched everything we could find.

Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.

Hostname:

TEMP-PHP-2014

Uptime:

4,512 days.

Nobody knows what it does.

Nobody owns it.

Nobody can shut it down.

But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.

Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.

It is running PHP 5.4.

The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.

The emergency patch took four hours.

Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.

The internet isn't held together with code.

It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@mattyp @bot @bot remind me to watch the full video

[Christian Minich @Cnolanminich]

Feeling anxious about the changes AI is bringing to work? Listen to @lennysan interview with @molly_g

Feeling like you are fully AI pilled? Also! Listen to the pod.

Truly the podcast I didn’t know I needed to hear

https://t.co/VB94cYfaGm

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@lennysan So grateful to have been a part of this awesome event! Thanks for organizing it and everyone’s hard work @lennysan

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Still processing from yesterday's event (one of the most meaningful days of my life)— more to come—but a few quick things for now:

1. Thank you to everyone who came. You are what made it special.

2. There's so much need for IRL community. I've rarely felt this kind of pull for anything I've done. Wow.

3. All of the talks will be posted to my YT channel in the coming weeks. Get excited.

4. An unbelievable thank-you to the @Stripe team for helping me put this event on. It takes something special to create an event with 1,000+ PMs that has such great vibes. If you think they're great at payments infra, they might be even better at design and event production. High talent density over there. It's no coincidence that I've had more people from Stripe on my podcast than any other company. Thank you, Stripe.

(A few photos from the event, more to come.)

[Mark Robinson @markr]

The questions I’m bringing:
1) If AI makes it possible for almost anyone to build almost anything, what is a product team for?
2) How do we make each person’s work reusable by the team so its capability compounds over time?

https://t.co/hlQk7lCu7x

[Mark Robinson @markr]

I’m going to Lenny & Friends Summit in September to meet people whose work has taught me product for years.

It feels like a reunion for a school I attended through books, articles and podcasts. So I made an unofficial yearbook.

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@BlobfishViking I love this stylized version of Ralph McQuarrie's production painting for Empire Strikes Back!

[Tree @BlobfishViking]

Little art dump because I haven’t posted anything in forever, anyway here’s what I’ve been working on

[Mark Robinson @markr]

Watching these awesome helicopter teams fighting these fires. #NSFire

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@scott_affleck I thought it was some sort of real estate marketing ploy

[Mark Robinson @markr]

How many chaos monkeys can Twitter sustain at once?

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@BlobfishViking @fuzbalkng So cool to see the evolution of these characters.

[Tree @BlobfishViking]

@fuzbalkng Yes

[Mark Robinson @markr]

@BlobfishViking Wow - that’s tots frogger!

[Blake Emal @heyblake]

Still can't unsee this