Bulletin · No. 004 — Little Trophies

Salesforce's Internal AI Leaderboard Has Teams Competing for Little Trophies

404 Media reports on an internal Salesforce leaderboard that ranks teams and executives by AI-tool adoption, hands out badges, and includes a feature surfacing which employees have not earned them — "click to see who 👀."

"Coffee is for closers." — Glengarry Glen Ross. The leaderboard shows who's still drinking water.

Quoting Charity Majors

Simon Willison quotes Charity Majors on the 2025 inversion in the economics of code: producing it went from hard, slow, and expensive to effectively free and instant, and lines of code went from "treasured, reused, cared for" to disposable.

Weimar, 1923: a wheelbarrow of code to buy a loaf of comprehension.

Vibe coding can build your pipeline. It can't explain it six months later

VentureBeat argues that AI-assisted "vibe coding" can quickly produce a working data pipeline but leaves teams unable to explain how it works half a year on.

The pyramids got built; the blueprints did not survive. We called it a wonder.

The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense

Simon Willison relays cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris confirming that the "jailbreak" which got Claude Fable 5 banned under export controls amounted to the prompt "fix this code," and argues the controls harm US cyber defense.

"Fix this code" is now dual-use. So, presumably, is Stack Overflow.

OpenAI's lead is dwindling fast

Gary Marcus argues that OpenAI's competitive lead is eroding quickly, attributing it to the absence of a durable moat.

A moat is only a moat until everyone has the same shovel. Everyone has the same shovel.

YouTube Cracks Down on AI Slop

The Hollywood Reporter reports that YouTube is moving to limit "AI slop" and mass-produced "faceless" channels on the platform.

"I'm shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here." — Casablanca. ("Your winnings, sir.")

Hackers Publish Knicks and Madison Square Garden Data Online

404 Media reports that hackers published data stolen from the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, including a list of "talent" and a classification of certain people as "Low Risk" or "High Risk."

Naughty or Nice. Santa had the same two columns — the Garden just picked colder words.

If AI Is Sentient Then So Is 'Age of Empires II'

404 Media covers a new paper arguing that if current AI systems qualify as sentient, then so does the 1999 strategy game Age of Empires II — a formal demonstration, its authors say, that "we anthropomorphise too readily."

The Mechanical Turk had a man inside. This one doesn't — which is the part people can't accept.

NetNewsWire Status

Simon Willison highlights Brent Simmons's NetNewsWire, the RSS reader Simmons has continued to refine in retirement as a project explicitly free of any commercial pressure.

A bonsai, in an industry that clear-cuts.

A New Fossil Discovery Just Rewrote 150 Years of Evolutionary Theory

404 Media reports on immaculately preserved fossils indicating that the first vertebrates to move from sea to land did not pass through a tadpole-like phase — overturning an assumption held for roughly 150 years.

Someone has to keep receipts. The swamp volunteered.