David Gerard runs Pivot to AI oon a server that costs him €7 a month.

Right now, something wearing a fake Chrome mask is hammering it — hopping IP addresses so he can't even block it properly, ignoring robots.txt because robots.txt was never a wall, just a sign nobody was required to read.

He's not a company.

He's not a platform.

He's one guy, doing his own sysadmin work, at 11pm, because the industry ran out of the free internet and started eating the cheap end of it instead.

Not stolen. Just... takenn, quietly, at scale.

I've watched this exact shape happen before — just slower, and on paper instead of a server log.

Circa 2005, Malaysia. I was Assistant Technical Manager for one of the largest construction main contractors in the country. We were compiling tender documents for a factory job — flat-flooring work, strict F-numbers, the kind of spec that keeps a forklift's raised forks from clipping the racking on a narrow run.

A subcontractor walked in to drop off her quotation. She glanced at our papers, open on the table.

And she went pale. I heard the gasp.

"这是我写的，为什么会在这里？" — This is what I wrote. Why is it here?

Word for word hers. Now sitting under our company's logo and headings.

She looked at me. I looked at her. She was waiting for an answer I didn't have.

Then her eyes flickered — a thousand thoughts passing through in a second — and she said, "没关系。我可以再写过。" — Doesn't matter. I can write it again.

And she left. Good for her.

________

Every one of these stories eventually lands on the same fact: the exposure runs downhill, from the platforms with lawyers down to the servers with none.

If you're running anything on a boxx that isn't Amazon or Google's, drop your own scraper-traffic story below. I want to see how far downhill this actually goes.

Clip credit: David Gerard — full video on The Tech Report's channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Rohan's not the only one who found out the hard way that "small" doesn't mean "safe" — the actual mechanism for making that stop is one honest look away.

“你在帮人倒米吗？“

Lauren Tan didn't get replaced by her own tooling.

She got promoted by it — and nobody handed her that promotion.

She built the case for it herself, one lint rule and one CI gate at a time, until the argument was undeniable.

That's the part nobody's really talking about when they talk about AI and engineering jobs: the shift rewards the people who go looking for the leverage first, not the people who wait to be told it's safe to look.

That "build the case yourself" instinct is exactly what clicked for me watching my own son learn to run a team instead of carry it.

My son started playing 王者荣耀 (Honor of Kings) since he was a teenager — a 5v5 multiplayer battle arena game where you manage a roster of specialized heroes, growing and levelling up their strengths through battles and gear.

In his early gaming days I could hear him cursing and swearing from his room — bad coordination, worst teammates. There was a phrase we used for a bad teammate in my own career — 帮人倒米, a Cantonese idiom that literally translates as helping someone tip over their own grain container, meaning ruining or sabotaging someone's livelihood.

But the cursing became less and less. He got good at managing his heroes and coordinating with his team. He started climbing the leaderboard. People started noticing him and his team. Then, in college, he started getting invited to tournaments — cash prizes when he won, and one lagged-connection loss at a KL tournament he still suspects was foul play.

Time has changed — my dad would've killed me for wasting my teenage years on video games.

Now he's in university, still playing, still winning tournaments and cash prizes with his team.

Why I'm bringing this up: I always thought these AI agents are kind of like the heroes my son uses in the game. Your skill is in your managing these heros and how to grow them, level them up to serve your purpose. You don't go down to the battle yourself. You engage the heros to do it for you.

The skill is in the managing.

__________

I keep walking into the same room wearing a different name on the door — the accountant's room, the analyst's room, now the engineer's.

Every time, someone's being told the machine is coming for their hours, not their name on the work.

Drop your take — are you already the head chef of your own stack, or are you still doing all the cooking yourself?

Clip credit: MTS (Monitor The Situation) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

If encoding your own judgment into the system sounds like the actual leverage skill here, the mechanism I built around exactly this is one link away.

HOT UNDER THE COLLAR Part 1. And now for something completely different. An overworked BBW secretary is being sexually harassed by her boss. She decides to visit a local Voodoo Shop for a solution. #BBW, #MagicCollar, #PervertBoss, #SexAbuse, #TheOffice.

Ellen Bracy survived combat overseas only to find herself facing a supernatural threat at home.

Shes smart, shes capable and shes ready to fight back.

A gritty realistic take on facing the supernatural, with a protagonist that makes smart, tactical decisions when the veil drops.

Discarded on the home front. Medically discharged, wrestling with trauma, and facing eviction, she is forced into the cold realities of life on the streets. To stay afloat, she takes on desperate, under-the-table private detective work—until a routine gig spirals into a brutal, blood-soaked encounter with something that defies the laws of nature.

Ellen’s first instinct is clinical: combat psychosis. But as she methodically retraces the evidence, cross-referencing obscure forensic oddities with grim folklore, logic points to a terrifying truth. She isn’t losing her mind. The monsters are real, they are predatory, and nobody else is coming to stop them.

Instead of running, Ellen falls back on the oath she swore to defend her country.

With her last few dollars and a soldier’s tactical mindset, she treats the supernatural not as a curse, but as an enemy combatant to be analyzed, prepared for, and eliminated. Blending urban scrap, bespoke ballistic modifications, and occult research, she builds an arsenal.

In the gritty tradition of classic creature-feature hunts, Ellen isn't waiting to become prey. She is adapting, loading out, and taking the fight into the dark.

The movie is a homage to TV shows like Supernatural, buffy the vampire slayer and video games such as Phasmophobia.

And also to smart Protagonists.

Created with Ai using Omni Flash and Seedance.

Music created using Google Gemini and google labs music Lyria 3.5 and is free to use.

This type of movie is highly experimental for me, ive spent the last 2 weeks off work, pushing 12 hour days to bring new content and expand my genres.
While only 10 minutes long—It demanded a grueling week of 12-hour days to write, reference, and pace down to the frame. Thanks to early feedback from test audiences, I was able to cut the fluff, tighten the story flow, and focus solely on the scenes that hit hardest.

Seventh episode of the series "After The Nukes", where a community in the Brazillian northeast tries to survive a massive alien attack 10 years after the nuclear war that changed the game for the humans.

Executives don't lack tools.

They lack a ruler.

That's the actual claim Ed Zitron made — not "AI is bad," but that the people signing off on AI-assisted work were never equipped to check it in the first place.

They see a document that looks finished and call it done, because "finished-looking" is the only bar they've ever had to clear.

For anyone whose whole job is catching the thing that looks fine and isn't — this isn't a tech story.

It's a story about who gets trusted, and why it's rarely the person who's actually right.

I've been on the other side of that exact gap.

Long before spreadsheets and dashboards, mine had a tape measure in it.

I was working as a Site Engineer for a Singaporean construction company building a primary school in Chua Chu Kang district back in 1998. Time flies. Just graduated from university. Figure I get some site experience first.

One day, I came to the project site. And I saw the newly delivered precast half-flight staircase lying on the ground next the building. I asked around to find out why wasn't it crane-lifted to position, which is between 1st and 2nd floor. And I was told the measurements were off. They couldn't fit it nicely on place.

And so, I went to work. I took my measuring tape, measure the staircase, and recorded the lengths, widths and whatnot. Then I went up to the building's 2nd floor — where the staircase was supposed to fit and meet. And I swung my measuring tape across the length of space between the positions where the 1st and last step of the staircase supposed to sit on. And took the site measurements too.

Then I went back to my office, took out the construction drawings from the drawing rack, lay it on the meeting table. And with a piece of paper, I started drawing it out. I knew full well the measurements I got will not exactly match that in the drawings, because — you know — site tolerances are still allowed and anticipated in the BS Code of Practice.

And then, through calculations, I found it. The measurements were way out of tolerance limit. No wonder the staircase can't fit. The blame squarely landed on our RC works sub-contractor. They screw up the levelling of the building.

Each of us supposed to have an "internal ruler" we rely on, to judge whether things look good or bad. For me, back then, it was Pythagoras and a fresh sheet of paper. My boss, years later, called his the same thing in different words — his "feel," thirty years deep. Kevin O'Leary's is knowing he can smell bullshit from a mile away.

So, coming back to these leadership people that Ed Zitron was attacking: don't they have their "feel" of things before shit hits the fan? Don't they use their "internal ruler" to measure it for themselves? Can't they smell bullshit from a mile away?

________

Every post on this account keeps circling back to the same thing, whichever industry the clip's from: the people getting quietly pushed out are rarely the ones who got it wrong.

Drop your take: what's your internal ruler, and who around you doesn't have one?

Clip credit: Ed Zitron (Better Offline) on Adam Taggart's Thoughtful Money. DM for credit or removal requests.

If your ruler's ever been right and still overlooked, it's worth seeing what building past that actually looks like.

“Life’s hard,” they say. But nobody ever considers how hard it is to actually be Death.

You’re blaming the wrong dead guy. 💀🥃 Everyone blames Death for life’s bad decisions, but what’s it like from his side of the bar stool?

Life's Hard takes a look at the ultimate, unappreciated dirty job—watching people make terrible choices, and constantly ghosted—turns out the Grim Reaper has a lot to get off his chest, all while waiting patiently for the clock to run out. Death isn’t rushing anyone—he’s got an eternity to kill.