Joseph

Interdisciplinary raging maniac, zen lunatic, idea playboy, the last catbender

[Joseph @shfrmn]

*Consciousness-altering beauty has entered the chat*

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

The highlight of my literary life was meeting Jorge Luis Borges in the early 1980s. He recited Shakespeare soliloquies from memory and told a group of about 5 or 6 of us how he would improve them. Then he recited the improved versions. They were better.

From this we were supposed to learn not to be intimidated by legendary writers. They were imperfect, he told us.

Strangely, I was intimidated anyway.

True story. Trinity College, Oxford University.

[Joseph @shfrmn]

who said I do vibe coding the wrong way

[CEO.Funny @CeoFunny]

Absolutely delicious, a meal enjoyed with the family.

[Tripdee @iamtripdee]

@augmentaltech My dev team

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@feldiswyth [Another moment of silence. Claude skedaddling seven times. Silence. Claude schlepping three times. Silence. Claude not shenaniganning.]

[Joseph @shfrmn]

I used to think reading blog posts out loud on youtube was cringe, but apparently people are narrating tweets for instagram reels.. i just can’t

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@johnsmithyson0 Tastefully rewriting nothing in rust for the sake of a billion dollar brouhaha with @theo

[Joseph @shfrmn]

Accidentally took this amazing screenshot of @rickbeato

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@usgraphics “Free China” here is Taiwan, in case anyone is confused

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@tsoding “If it freezes it’s not a computer, it’s a fridge”

Why is tsoding contemplating the nature of coldness so much recently? Video about caching incoming?

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@qualiascript thoughtful garbage reply 1

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@sflorimm Just publish your env variables — easy

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

I have a theory that anger at AI-generated content scales with how strong a sexual selection signal that content is.

Most upsetting: dating profile photos and bios, music, art, long-form writing. All of these are courtship displays.

Least upsetting: legal documents, code, customer support replies. Nobody cares because no one is choosing a mate based on these.

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@aramh Kind of

[Joseph @shfrmn]

Beautifully written

[Dan Shipper @danshipper]

We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents.

And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.

I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.

After Automation: https://t.co/Lb7SUCduAg

[tominoski @tominoski]

@bluewmist they give themselves away in every narrative where zero is not a true zero. these people don't know what zero is. i can't help but laugh when i see "starting from scratch" hashtags under photos of an empty apartment with just a mattress on the floor.

[Joseph @shfrmn]

My ultimate contrarian take on this

social acceptance of masturbation happens to be a good proxy for each country’s startup score

[CTC @CacheThatCheque]

In a “what feels the best survey” from Tenga, Japan is the only country that ranked “having sex” as its 5th top choice.

“Eating delicious food” was the #1 choice for Japan, which actually makes total sense if you’ve ever watched more than 5 minutes of Japanese television

[Joseph @shfrmn]

Say “Oh my god”

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

Oh my god

[Joseph @shfrmn]

@fresheyeball :q!

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.