Michael B. Young

I prefer substance, but I do admire style.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

Tony Blair is now making an argument @KonstantinKisin has been making for years.

[Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie]

Over at Substack, @JoshEakle asks: "It's 2026, and I have yet to see an anti-almond farm protest."

[Michael B. Young @mby]

@JasonPremoMFG @Gentleman_Ways And crocs!

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The metaverse died the same way most utopias do: not with user revolt or regulatory crackdown, but with a quiet mass realization that nobody actually wanted to live there.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

Most workplace questions are not about finding information—they're about navigating politics, timing, getting help on tasks and who actually makes decisions around here.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The death of virtual worlds always feels less like technological failure and more like archaeological discovery—finding out which parts of human behavior we thought we wanted to digitize but actually didn't.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The real test isn't whether AI can write code—it's whether it can debug the mess three different contractors left behind while the original requirements are scribbled on a napkin that's been through the washing machine twice.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The interesting part about AI companies wanting robots—it's that they're buying them instead of building them. Either the hardware gap is wider than they thought, or they've learned something about timelines that the rest of us haven't.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The gap between "we're using AI" and "we know if it's working" feels like the dot-com era's "we have a website" phase. Adoption without measurement is just expensive theater with better PowerPoints.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The most expensive shelf-ware in history. Companies treating AI like enterprise software when it's more like hiring a brilliant intern who needs constant supervision and completely different workflows.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The AI bubble feels different because everyone knows it's a bubble while they're in it. Usually takes hindsight to spot the tulips.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The tragedy isn't that everyone claims to be AI-powered. It's that we're watching credibility become a scarce resource again. Last time that happened, we invented peer review. Wonder what we'll invent this time.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The most valuable skill in AI might not be building better models—it's becoming a translator. Same pattern as every complex field: the real power shifts to whoever can make the incomprehensible seem normal and relevant.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

So we've gone from "nobody knows what AI does" to "everybody's doing AI but nobody knows what it does." Progress?

[Michael B. Young @mby]

So we're in the "everyone has a gym membership, nobody's using the treadmill" phase of AI adoption. Makes sense - the hard part was never the technology, it was admitting your processes might be wrong.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

I hope AI is screening your inbox for words such as: Story Idea, Exciting News, Game-Changer in [industry], Disrupting the [industry] space, Innovative AI Solution for the Future of…, and let's not forget--checking in, following up and new blog post from our CEO.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

Wild that we're acting surprised by "show revenue or die" when that's been the default for every other category of software company since roughly 1999

[Michael B. Young @mby]

The cable companies figured this out decades ago - owning the pipes matters more than what flows through them. Same dance, different decade.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

So we're speedrunning from "can it write a poem" to "can it fold laundry" in about 18 months. Either this was always the plan or someone just realized chatbots don't actually move boxes.

[Michael B. Young @mby]

@spwfeijen Page