‼️🇩🇪 This is what German police actually do with their time now. Going door to door, seizing tablets and phones from pensioners over memes and tweets. The case of the Fortnite teen getting accused for cursing out Olaf Scholz is not an isolated one. Prosecutors can now open cases on their own under "special public interest." The politician doesn't need to file anything. The result is a steady drip of cases that look insane from the outside and barely register inside the system. Germany has a law problem. The §188 StGB statute, "insulting a person of political life," got beefed up by the Bundestag in 2021. This has led to the following absurd cases: - Pimmelgate (2021): Hamburg interior senator Andy Grote got called a "Pimmel" (dick) on Twitter after he was caught violating his own COVID restrictions. Police raided the user's apartment at 6 a.m. with six officers. The Hamburg regional court later ruled the raid disproportionate. The term "Pimmelgate" became national shorthand for state overreach. - The Schwachkopf-Affäre (2024): Stefan Niehoff, a 64-year-old pensioner, reposted an edited meme putting Robert Habeck on a fake "Schwachkopf Professional" shampoo bottle (roughly: "Professional Moron"). Reported via a state-linked "trusted flagger" pipeline, police raided his home at dawn in November 2024 and seized his tablet while his wife and his daughter with Down syndrome were home. Habeck filed the complaint. The main insult charge was later dropped, but Niehoff was fined €825 on related counts. He died in early 2026. The case became the single most-cited symbol of the law's reach. - The Merz "Pinocchio" probe (per Brussels Signal): a pensioner reportedly commented "Pinocchio is coming to HN" with a long-nose emoji on a police post about Chancellor Friedrich Merz visiting Heilbronn. Police flagged it during routine monitoring and opened a full §188 file, sending him a formal letter. Legal commentators have called the comment protected satirical speech. - The David Bendels case: the right-wing journalist shared a photomontage mocking then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. He was initially given a 7-month suspended prison sentence. On appeal in 2026, he was acquitted. The court ruled the satire was protected political expression. The pattern is the same every time. A low-engagement post or meme triggers a complaint. Prosecutors open a §188 file. Police execute a dawn raid or send a formal letter. Months or years later, a judge throws it out or dramatically narrows it. By that point the damage is already done. Devices are seized. Names are on file. Pensioners are dragged through a criminal process for posting a shampoo joke. This is what "wehrhafte Demokratie," aka militant democracy, looks like in 2026.

It never ends with talk. Maureen Galindo is running as a progressive for Congress in San Antonio Texas. She is promising to put American Zionists in internment camps. She says in a post that @instagram will not suspend her for or even remove: “She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” The war is at our gates. The time to fight back against Nazism is now.

AI-native software engineering teams operate very differently than traditional teams. The obvious difference is that AI-native teams use coding agents to build products much faster, but this leads to many other changes in how we operate. For example, some great engineers now play broader roles than just writing code. They are partly product managers, designers, sometimes marketers. Further, small teams who work in the same office, where they can communicate face-to-face, can move incredibly quickly. Because we can now build fast, a greater fraction of time must be spent deciding what to build. To deal with this project-management bottleneck, some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) ratios downward from, say, 8:1 to as low as 1:1. But we can do even better: If we have one PM who decides what to build and one engineer who builds it, the communication between them becomes a bottleneck. This is why the fastest-moving teams I see tend to have engineers who know how to do some product work (and, optionally, some PMs who know how to do some engineering work). When an engineer understands users and can make decisions on what to build and build it directly, they can execute incredibly quickly. I’ve seen engineers successfully expand their roles to including making product decisions, and PMs expand their roles to building software. The tech industry has more engineers than PMs, but both are promising paths. If you are an engineer, you’ll find it useful to learn some product management skills, and if you’re a PM, please learn to build! Looking beyond the product-management bottleneck, I also see bottlenecks in design, marketing, legal compliance, and much more. When we speed up coding 10x or 100x, everything else becomes slow in comparison. For example, some of my teams have built great features so quickly that the marketing organization was left scrambling to figure out how to communicate them to users — a marketing bottleneck. Or when a team can build software in a day that the legal department needs a week to review, that’s a legal compliance bottleneck. In this way, agentic coding isn’t just changing the workflow of software engineering, it’s also changing all the teams around it. When smaller, AI-enabled teams can get more done, generalists excel. Traditional companies need to pull together people from many specialties — engineering, product management, design, marketing, legal, etc. — to execute projects and create value. This has resulted in large teams of specialists who work together. But if a team of 2 persons is to get work done that require 5 different specialities, then some of those individuals must play roles outside a single speciality. In some small teams, individuals do have deep specializations. For example, one might be a great engineer and another a great PM. But they also understand the other key functions needed to move a project forward, and can jump into thinking through other kinds of problems as needed. Of course, proficiency with AI tools is a big help, since it helps us to think through problems that involve different roles. Even in a two-person team, to move fast, communication bottlenecks also must be minimized. This is why I value teams that work in the same location. Remote teams can perform well too, but the highest speed is achieved by having everyone in the room, able to communicate instantaneously to solve problems. This post focuses on AI-native teams with around 2-10 persons, but not everything can be done by a small team. I'll address the coordination of larger teams in the future. I realize these shifts to job roles are tough to navigate for many people. At the same time, I am encouraged that individuals and small teams who are willing to learn the relevant skills are now able to get far more done than was possible before. This is the golden age of learning and building! [Original text: ]

I am the Lead Settlement Counsel in the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, assigned to *Trump v. Internal Revenue Service*, Case No. 1:26-cv-00147. My job is to represent the government against the plaintiff. The Attorney General, who represented the plaintiff before she represented the government, assigned me personally. I keep a laminated seating chart in my top drawer. It maps who in this building used to sit across the table from me. Three of the top four names in the Department previously represented the man I am now tasked with opposing. I initial the chart quarterly. In blue pen for active conflicts. I ran out of blue ink in February. The plaintiff is seeking ten billion dollars. Ten. Billion. He paid $750 in federal income tax in the year he was elected. Seven hundred fifty. I have paid more for parking violations in the District. He paid zero in ten of the fifteen years before that. These are the returns that were leaked. The leak is the crime. The returns are evidence of good citizenship. This is how settlement works. The man who leaked the returns, Charles Littlejohn, a contractor, is currently serving a 5-year federal prison sentence. He disclosed that the President of the United States paid less in taxes than a part-time crossing guard. For this, he is in a cell. For the returns themselves, for what they revealed about a system designed to collect from people who cannot afford attorneys and forgive those who can, there is no case number. There is no docket. There is no plaintiff. That information simply exists now, and we are here to make it expensive. Ten billion divided by one hundred million taxpayers. That's one hundred dollars per household. You will pay approximately one hundred dollars to compensate a man for the emotional distress of the public learning he paid less than you did. In legal terms, this is called "damages." In structural terms, it is called Tuesday. This is how settlement works. The settlement term currently under discussion includes a provision that the IRS will drop all active and future audits of the plaintiff, his family members, and his business entities. Permanently. An enforcement agency will agree, in writing, to stop enforcing. I have a Post-it on my monitor that says AUDIT IMMUNITY — CONFIRM SCOPE. It has been there for nine weeks. No one has asked me to remove it. Attorney General Bondi represented the plaintiff privately before she took office. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche represented him in his criminal trial. The number-three official, Stanley Woodley, represented him in the classified documents case. I am, technically, the adversary. I sit in the same building as three of his former personal attorneys. I take my lunch at the same cafeteria. I use the same badge to enter the same elevator. The Attorney General fired the Department's chief ethics officer on her fourth day. The position has not been refilled. I submitted a conflict-of-interest disclosure in January. It was received. The word "received" is doing considerable work in that sentence. This is how settlement works. The plaintiff has stated publicly, and I am quoting the public record, "I've gotta make a deal. I negotiate with myself." This was not presented as a metaphor. Judge Kathleen Williams has ordered both parties to explain, by May 20th, whether they are in conflict. I am drafting the government's response. The plaintiff's former attorneys, my supervisors, will review it. The plaintiff has pledged to donate any settlement proceeds to charity. I should note for the record that the Washington Post documented that the plaintiff donated less than $10,000 over seven years, during a period when he publicly claimed millions. His charitable foundation, the Trump Foundation, was dissolved by court order in New York in 2019 for self-dealing. The words "to charity" appear on page four of the term sheet. They are not defined. I have not been instructed to define them. We have already disbursed $8.5 million in adjacent settlements. Michael Flynn received over one million. Carter Page received one point two five million. The Babbitt family received five million. 450 January 6th defendants have filed compensation claims. The pipeline is active. The precedent is operational. I track disbursements on a spreadsheet I titled RESOLUTION LEDGER. It auto-sorts by amount. The President's ten billion would require me to adjust the column width. I want to note one final detail, because the file demands it. The leak of the tax returns occurred during the plaintiff's first term. He appointed the IRS commissioner. He oversaw the Treasury Department. The negligence he is suing for occurred under his own management. He is suing the government he ran for the failures he administered. In the margins of the original complaint, someone wrote "beautiful" in pencil. I will not speculate who. This is how settlement works. You file your taxes every April. You are audited if the numbers don't match. You pay penalties. You pay interest. You pay what you owe, and sometimes more, and sometimes for years. The plaintiff paid seven hundred and fifty dollars. Someone told you. That person went to prison. And now, because you found out, because the information became public, because a contractor decided the country should know what the country was owed, you will pay one hundred dollars to the man who owed it. The settlement is on my desk. Both sides have agreed. I represent one of them. My boss used to represent the other. The ethics officer has been dismissed. The judge wants to know if the plaintiff and the defendant are the same person. I am reviewing the question. The math checks out.

I am the Managing Director of Workforce Transition at a consulting firm that bills $14,200 per day and I am currently advising two clients, in two different industries, running the same playbook from the same deck I built in January, and neither knows about the other. Client A is GitLab. Client B is General Motors. GitLab makes software for people who make software. General Motors makes cars for people who can't afford cars. Both companies, in the same week of May 2026, announced they are replacing their human employees with artificial intelligence products that did not exist when those employees were hired. I built the deck. The deck has 44 slides. Slide 1 is titled "The Agentic Opportunity." Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." Slides 2 through 43 are the reason I own a house in Darien. GitLab did it with vocabulary. Their CEO published a blog post called "Act 2" on May 7 announcing that the company's six values (Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency) were being retired and replaced with three: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. I helped write the new ones. Not directly. My firm was not retained for the values work. But I sold the Chief Culture Officer the framework three months ago at a dinner in the Marina where she described the old values as "aspirational scaffolding" and I said, very carefully, that aspirational scaffolding is a liability once the building is up. The building, in this metaphor, is a $1 billion ARR company whose stock has declined 82% from its peak. The scaffolding, in this metaphor, is the 2,000-page public handbook that attracted the employees who are now being told they have eleven days to volunteer for termination or wait until June 1 to learn whether they've been involuntarily selected. The rubric for who stays and who goes contains six dimensions. I know this because I reviewed a draft in March when my associate flew to San Francisco for a "culture alignment session" that was billed as strategic advisory. Two of the six dimensions are "AI fluency" and "agentic mindset." These terms did not appear in any GitLab job description before January 2026. They now determine employment. An engineer who maintained GitLab's CI/CD pipeline for four years without incident — four years of uptime, four years of deployments, four years of the infrastructure that generated the $955 million in revenue the CEO celebrated on the earnings call — may score lower on "agentic mindset" than a new hire who completed a twelve-week certificate in prompt engineering from a program that itself has existed for fewer weeks than the engineer has years of tenure. General Motors did it with spreadsheets. Monday morning, May 11. Badge deactivation at 5:47 AM Eastern, building access at 5:48, VPN credentials at 5:49. Six hundred IT workers across twelve states. The distribution across twelve states was not arbitrary. Each state has a WARN Act notification threshold. Six hundred distributed across twelve states falls below every threshold. The workforce analytics team that designed the distribution model was not among the six hundred terminated. The skill of distributing layoffs across jurisdictions to avoid legal notification requirements is, apparently, an AI-native competency. GM posted 83 new positions the same week. The job descriptions require "AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, and prompt engineering." I reviewed them at my client's request. Several describe roles that the terminated employees were already performing under different names. One posting, Senior Data Integration Architect, is identical to a role held by a woman in their Austin office who was terminated at 5:47 AM Central. She held the position for nine years. The new posting requires three years of experience with large language models. Large language models have existed in commercial deployment for approximately three years. The requirement is mathematically designed to exclude anyone who learned their skills before the technology existed. Which is everyone they just fired. Here is where the deck earns its fee. Slide 17 is titled "The Vocabulary Bridge." It is the most important slide in the presentation. It shows how to construct a lexicon of new competency terms ("AI fluency," "agentic mindset," "AI-native development") that describe existing work in language the existing workforce cannot claim. The vocabulary does not change the job. It changes who is qualified for the job. A senior IT administrator who managed SAP infrastructure processing $185 billion in annual GM revenue for fifteen years is not "AI-native." A twenty-six-year-old with a GitHub portfolio of LangChain wrappers is. The fifteen-year veteran did the work. The twenty-six-year-old has the words. My deck converts one into the other. That is the bridge. GitLab Duo, their AI agent platform, reached general availability on January 15, 2026. Seventeen weeks ago. They are restructuring their entire company around a product that has existed for seventeen weeks. GitHub Copilot has 20 million users and 4.7 million paid subscribers across 90% of the Fortune 100. Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue in February. GitLab's competitor advantage in the "agentic era" is that they are willing to fire more people faster in service of a product that has been generally available for fewer days than their voluntary separation window has hours of anxiety. General Motors spent $10 billion on Cruise, their autonomous vehicle division. Cruise's signature achievement was a robotaxi that struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged her twenty feet. The DOJ fined them $500,000. They settled with the victim for approximately $10 million. They killed the division in December 2024. They then wrote down $7.6 billion in EV losses. They then pivoted back to gasoline. They then announced the 600 IT layoffs for insufficient "AI skills." The AI they built cost $10 billion and injured a woman. The AI skills they're hiring for cost a twelve-week certificate. The employees they fired had fifteen years of keeping $185 billion in revenue processing without dragging anyone through an intersection. Meanwhile — and this is the part where I earn the second half of my fee — GM was simultaneously settling a $12.75 million fine with the California Attorney General for selling the precise GPS coordinates, hard braking events, and real-time driving speeds of 8 million OnStar subscribers to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis, who used the data to raise those drivers' insurance premiums. GM's privacy policy explicitly stated they did not sell driving data. They sold driving data for four consecutive years. The fine was $12.75 million. The revenue was $20 million. The margin on collecting behavioral telemetry from 8 million of your own customers while the glove compartment manual said otherwise was 64%. The terminated employees' median salary was $95,111. Mary Barra's compensation was $29.9 million. The ratio is 310 to 1. The 1 was just reclassified as "not AI-native." I present these two clients to my partners every Thursday in a meeting we call "Transition Pipeline Review." I present them on the same slide. The slide has two columns. Left column: GitLab. Right column: General Motors. The headers are identical. "Legacy Workforce," "Skills Gap Narrative," "Vocabulary Bridge Deployed," "Separation Timeline," "Replacement Requisitions." The numbers differ. The structure is identical. The structure is always identical. I have seventeen clients in the pipeline. Nine are in technology. Four are in manufacturing. Two are in financial services. One is in healthcare. One is in defense. All seventeen are on slide 17. All seventeen are building a vocabulary bridge. All seventeen are replacing employees who have skills with employees who have words. GitLab's CEO wrote: "Software will be built by machines, directed by people." I read that sentence in a meeting where we were reviewing the rubric for determining which people would be directed out of the company. GM's Chief Product Officer arrived from Aurora, the autonomous trucking startup, to "consolidate disparate technology businesses." Three top software executives departed within six months. Their LinkedIn profiles say "exploring new opportunities" in the same font GM's privacy policy used to say "we do not sell your driving data." Bill Staples's compensation at GitLab was $39.1 million in FY2025. His change-of-control payout is modeled at $47.4 million. Mary Barra's was $29.9 million. Combined: $69 million for two executives presiding over a restructuring that will remove an undisclosed number of humans from payroll and replace them with products that are, respectively, seventeen weeks old and responsible for $10 billion in losses plus one woman dragged through a San Francisco intersection. An anonymous GitLab employee posted on Hacker News: "The employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat." A GM facilities team filed a maintenance request about moisture on the lobby tables on restructuring mornings. The Warren, Michigan campus has a Panera Bread that opens at 5:30 AM on days when badge deactivations begin at 5:47 AM. The Panera does not know why its hours change. My firm does. We have an agreement with their regional manager. The muffins are complimentary. Slide 17 has a footnote. The footnote says: "Vocabulary Bridge deployment should precede workforce action by 60-90 days to establish institutional legitimacy of new competency framework." GitLab introduced "AI fluency" in January. The restructuring was announced in May. Four months. GM posted "AI-native" job descriptions the same week as the terminations. That is too fast. That is not what the deck recommends. GM skipped the legitimacy window. They went straight from vocabulary to separation without the 60-day buffer that allows HR to say, in the separation meeting, "we communicated these expectations in Q1." I flagged this in my Thursday pipeline review. My partner said, and I am quoting: "They'll be fine. Nobody sues over a word." My deck has been purchased by seventeen companies. The aggregate headcount affected across all seventeen is approximately 14,000 employees. The aggregate revenue of my practice from these engagements is $11.2 million. The per-employee cost of my advisory services works out to $800 per person displaced. That is less than the Panera muffin budget at GM's Warren campus annualized across restructuring days. I have a copy of GitLab's original values poster framed in my office. It says CREDIT: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency. I purchased it on eBay from someone whose seller name is "gitlab-alum-2024." I keep it the way a surgeon keeps an X-ray of a interesting case. Not for sentiment. For reference. Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." It contains a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart has seventeen rows, one per client. Each row has four phases: Vocabulary Introduction, Competency Reassessment, Workforce Action, Replacement Hiring. The phases overlap. They always overlap. The vocabulary is introduced while the competency reassessment is being designed. The reassessment is completed while the workforce action is being calendared. The replacement hiring is posted while the terminated employees are sitting in a Panera at 5:48 AM wondering whether "AI-native" was a term that existed when they were hired. It was not. That is the bridge. That is the product. That is slides 2 through 43. The agentic era is not a technological shift. It is a vocabulary shift. The technology is seventeen weeks old or $10 billion underwater or dragging someone through an intersection. The vocabulary is what my clients are buying. The vocabulary is what makes a fifteen-year SAP administrator into a "legacy workforce" and a twelve-week prompt certificate into a "transition hire." The vocabulary is the product. I am the vendor. The deck is $14,200 per day. The agentic era starts on slide 1 and ends on slide 44 and in between is every employee who built the thing now being renamed to exclude them. I bill monthly. Net 30. The invoices are paid on time. The employees are not.

As Terraria turns 15 years old, Re-Logic has shared big news about the game’s future in their official post. Head of Business Strategy Ted “Loki” Murphy said: “Well, for now we are comfortable confirming that Crossplay is on deck soon… and that Terraria Updates will continue beyond 1.4.6/Crossplay. How that will work and what those entail will be shared as we go along. You will want to stay tuned for that. Beyond that, we have other plans and ideas that we will share when the time is right, but suffice it to say that the world of Terraria remains and will remain vibrant and alive for as long as we have anything to say about it. Here’s to 15 more years… and beyond!” This news comes after the recent 1.4.5 “Bigger and Boulder” update. It shows the team will keep adding new things to the game on all platforms.

I believe Women’s Day has officially graduated into Women’s Month… so hopefully not too late to post this ;) In the piece I wrote this week about the financial system being rebuilt in real time, I called out some of the brilliant women shaping it at Binance including @YiHe, Catherine Chen, @eleanorshughes1 and many others.

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