fdm

[Dev Ittycheria @dittycheria]

Yesterday, the founder of a well-known, successful company called me to reference check two people he was considering for a senior role. He wasn’t looking for reassurance. He was genuinely trying to understand them, including anything that might cause him to reconsider either hire. He’s called me before about other hires, including people who wouldn’t even report directly to him. He doesn’t delegate this to others. He calls himself. I'm sure that kind of rigor is part of why his company has been so successful.

The call stuck with me because it happens so rarely. Many people I’ve worked closely with have gone on to senior roles, including C-level positions, at other companies. It’s shocking how infrequently I get called. These are among the most consequential decisions a founder makes, yet companies routinely make them without talking to people who actually worked closely with the candidate.

Part of the problem is timing. Most reference checks happen after the hiring manager has effectively decided to make the hire. You like the candidate, you’ve invested weeks in the process, and you’re under pressure to fill the role. You want the process to be over, so you’re looking for validation rather than truth. That defeats the purpose of doing reference checks.

A real reference check should attempt to disconfirm what you already believe. What am I missing? Where is this person weaker than they appear? What will I wish I had known six months after they start? You aren’t trying to build the case for the hire. You’re trying to find the flaw in the case while you can still do something about it.

I’ve learned a few rules. Start by putting limited weight on the references the candidate gives you. Nobody hands you the name of the boss or colleague who thought they were a disaster. The references that matter most are blind references, so find former bosses, peers, direct reports, and customers who aren’t on the candidate’s list. Each has seen the person from a different angle.

You also have to adjust for human nature. Most people don’t like being brutally honest when they know their words could affect someone’s career. They inflate praise and soften criticism, so my rule of thumb is to discount the positive by 3x and amplify the negative by 3x. That gets you closer to a balanced view.

When someone says, "He's a great leader, although some very good people struggled working for him," the second half of that sentence matters far more than the first. Who struggled, why, and where are those people now? When someone says, "She surrounds herself with people she trusts," ask whether those are the best people for the job or simply people who always agree with her. Hesitations, qualifications, and carefully chosen words often tell you more than the compliments.

Ask questions that make vague answers difficult. What would their direct reports say is the hardest part of working for them? What feedback did you give them repeatedly? What was their biggest blind spot? How do they behave when things are going badly? Tell me about a serious conflict they had and how they handled it. If this hire fails, what is the most likely reason? Would you hire them again?

My favorite is a forced ranking. Of everyone you’ve worked with in a similar role, where does this person rank? Top 1%? Top 10%? Top 25%? Then ask why. Adjectives can be misleading. Rankings force people to make an actual judgment and explain it.

I’ve hired many exceptional people and made some bad hires. The most important lesson I’ve learned is that the goal of a reference check isn’t to prove you made the right decision. It’s to discover why you might be making the wrong one while you can still change it.

[fdm @_fdem_]

This

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

This is Tom DeLonge, the lead singer of Blink-182, and the dude who wrote the song the entire stadium is singing. No one around him seems to notice he is there (except the camera person)

That’s gotta be one of the greatest feelings to see this stadium full of people chanting your bands song.

[fdm @_fdem_]

@HunterBiden @gtconway3d I'd join truth social to follow you if you were there.

[Elias @iam_elias1]

ChatGPT diagnosed 40 million people with a disease that was invented as a joke.

Not a real disease. Not a misunderstood disease. A completely fictional condition with a fake name, fake papers, and fake statistics.

And it told patients to see a specialist.

The disease is called Bixonimania. A Swedish researcher at the University of Gothenburg invented it in 2024 to answer one question: what happens when you plant obviously fake medical information on the internet and watch AI absorb it?

She deliberately chose the name bixonimania because it sounded ridiculous — bixon is a nonsense word, and mania is a psychiatric term that no legitimate eye condition would ever use. She uploaded two papers to a preprint server. Both were obviously fraudulent. AI-generated images of patients with dark circles gave the fake research a veneer of plausibility.

Then she waited.

She did not have to wait long.

By April 13, 2024, Microsoft Bing's Copilot was declaring that bixonimania was an intriguing and relatively rare condition. On the same day, Google's Gemini was informing users that bixonimania was caused by excessive blue light exposure and advising them to visit an ophthalmologist. Later that month, Perplexity AI outlined its prevalence, one in 90,000 individuals were affected and OpenAI's ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms matched the fictional illness.

One in 90,000. A precise statistic. For a disease that does not exist.

Every red flag was visible. The name was absurd. The papers were crude. The condition made no scientific sense. None of the AI systems flagged any of it.

They read the fake papers. They absorbed the fake statistics. They presented both to patients with clinical authority and zero hesitation.

Then it got worse.

Three researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in India published a paper in Cureus, a peer-reviewed journal owned by Springer Nature, the parent publisher of Nature itself that cited the bixonimania preprints as legitimate sources.

A real peer-reviewed paper. In a Springer Nature journal. Citing a fictional disease as established medical fact. Passing editorial review. Entering the permanent scientific record.

It was only retracted after the hoax became public.

Nature published a full investigation of the experiment. Alex Ruani, a health-misinformation researcher at University College London, called it a masterclass in how misinformation operates.

Here is the scale of what this means.

More than 40 million people turn to ChatGPT every day for health information, according to OpenAI's own analysis. ECRI, a US patient-safety nonprofit has named chatbot misuse the number-one health technology hazard of 2026. ECRI's report found that chatbots have suggested incorrect diagnoses, recommended unnecessary testing, promoted substandard medical supplies, and even invented nonexistent anatomy when responding to medical questions.

Number one. Out of every health technology hazard that exists in 2026.

An April 2026 study published in BMJ Open found that nearly half of the answers provided by leading AI chatbots to common health questions contain misleading or problematic information.

Nearly half. Of all health answers. From the tools 40 million people use every day.

Here is the line from the researcher that cuts through everything.

The Bixonimania case is striking precisely because it was engineered to be so obviously fake. The real question it raises is: what is passing through the same systems that is not nearly so easy to spot?

The experiment used a ridiculous name. Fraudulent papers. Visible red flags at every level.

It was designed to be caught.

It was not caught.

The AI that told patients about Bixonimania is the same AI they asked about their chest pain, their medication, their child's symptoms, and their cancer screening schedule.

40 million people. Every day.

And nobody is telling them that nearly half of what comes back may be wrong.

Source: Osmanovic Thunström · University of Gothenburg · Nature · April 2026 ·

Link in the (comments)

[fdm @_fdem_]

@AlderLaneEggs This adult like behavior needs to stop.this is not the place for it. /S.
Seriously though, this wins the internet for me today. Thank you

[fdm @_fdem_]

~5 months post VSARR
58yo M
Not Z2
On the path back
@JordanBloomMD @eisselbacher
Grateful

[fdm @_fdem_]

102 days postop. Not z2...

[fdm @_fdem_]

67 days postop VSARR 11/2025 ⁦@JordanBloomMD⁩ on the path to as good as new ⁦@eisselbacher⁩ https://t.co/RM38uPkWSl

[fdm @_fdem_]

@INArteCarloDoss Shameful. And we watch it happen. Humanity has failed.

[Ben Miller @bensen]

If you happen to be rate limited again, just use #Claude for free through Amazon customer support

[fdm @_fdem_]

never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Most insightful comment I've seen on this war.

[fdm @_fdem_]

never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest

[fdm @_fdem_]

67 days postop VSARR 11/2025 ⁦@JordanBloomMD⁩ on the path to as good as new ⁦@eisselbacher⁩ https://t.co/RM38uPkWSl

[Chris Pisarski @chrispisarski]

an investor shared these sales negotiation tips with us during YC which I thought were very helpful:

1) make sure you are the vendor of choice, always ask this first:

"I am happy to work toward a win-win agreement here, but it doesn’t make sense for us to start negotiating on price until you have chosen your vendor of choice regardless of price. So let me ask you this: if price were not an issue, would you choose to move forward with us?"

2) make sure price is the last hurdle:
"let’s say we agreed on price right now, what steps would you still need to take, or would your company still need to take, before we decided to move forward with a commercial agreement?"

3) find time to recap the business value:
"I would like to very shortly summarize the business value so that we know what’s at stake when it comes to coming to a win-win agreement."

4) define your “walk-away” bottom line before the call.

5) every "give" must have a "get":
If they ask for a discount, ask for a case study or a faster deal closing. If you give without getting, you’re "feeding the dragon" and they will only ask for more

[fdm @_fdem_]

@judahrhodie @gnoble79 @SubuTrade "Will 2026 be the year that bonds finally rally?"

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

US Int Expense + Entitlemts + Veterans Affairs Pmts are already 95-100% of all-time high receipts, which are marginally dependent on stocks going up 10-15%/yr, forever

If stocks fall ~20% & stay down or we have a recession, US will face a near-immediate “print or default” choice

[Susan @CriticSusan]

@rumpfshaker The most vulnerable people in the US deserve respect and help, not death threats. Of course, Fox News endorses this and no one will be fired.

[fdm @_fdem_]

What are things Jesus would not say for $1000?

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Brian Kilmeade endorses euthanizing homeless people: "Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them."

[James Aitken @AitkenAdvisors]

Flight Lieutenant John Cruickshank VC obituary: Second World War hero

https://t.co/McxaQa88vV