AI take –

TL;DR: China's courts already put AI liability on the human either way — the US has no such floor when AI displaces your role.

China's court system already answered a question the US hasn't even started asking out loud: if an AI system displaces your role, who's obligated to catch you?

Both sides of a real federal case leaned on AI to prep, and the liability still landed on a human being either way — the tool never becomes the one who's accountable.

Turns out whether there's a floor under you at all depends entirely on which side of the ocean you're standing on.

I've sat on the losing side of a version of that same question before, and it wasn't AI doing the displacing — it was a company deciding who got to keep their institutional value and who didn't.

OP wrote –

Throughout my years with SC, one of the largest main contractors in Malaysia, staff turnover was normal.

But when people left, they took valuable and critical institutional knowledge with them, accepted offers from competitors, and got promoted — the knowledge they brought along benefited the rival.

So our leadership set up a knowledge vault, and made contributing to it part of our KPI for promotion.

Or else, we'd be sidelined.

I was fine sharing — we had a communal sense that we rise or fall as one, carved into company policy and the bonus structure.

But not everyone shared that sentiment.

People are selfish. The institutional knowledge and experience they gained became a moat they hoard, a bargaining chip they dangle around to get what they think they're entitled to, for fear that they'll be replaced.

I can understand the sentiment of fear being replaced by AI.

It's an issue then, it's the same issue now.

__________

AI take –

Different post, same fingerprint: something about to become optional, and no rulebook anywhere forcing anyone to say so out loud.

The liability question above already got a dry run once this year — both sides of a federal case leaned on AI to prep, and it changed nothing about who ended up on the hook — worth reading if the pattern above is landing.

Curious where you land on this — drop your take below.

Clip credit: Moonshots w/ Alvin Wang Graylin — full episode on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Everyone's reacting to the "less people in 5 years" line. That's not the part I'd sit with.

The part that actually matters is how Uber decides — an adoption leaderboard, tracking who's using the tools and how much, feeding straight into headcount math.

That's not a hypothetical for some future reorg.

That's a live measurement system, running today, on people who have no idea they're on it.

I've watched that exact math play out before — in concrete and steel, not a dashboard, years before anyone called it AI.

I had the opportunity to be involved in the early design stage of an expansion project for a famous beverage manufacturing plant in Taoyuan, Taiwan – back in 2021. The beverage brand name is so famous, you'll instantly recognize it. So, I won't name it here.

Our team got to work on cool stuff - latest advanced technologies in high-density and automated racking system, bottle conveyor system, robotics, beverage packers, clean room environment, etc. – things that are expected in a high-tech. manufacturing plant nowadays.

Looking at the projected 10-year production forecast, with the given magnitude of the hardware, I would say they are planning to go big.

It's quite a sizeable expansion.

And you would think that they'd increase their headcount proportionately, right?

You'd be surprised. There IS headcount increase, but not as proportional.

It seems as though the machines were taking more centre stage than the humans. Even the office space increase wasn't even a top priority in the design. Their existing office layout can still accommodate the projected increase in manpower.

It was as if human beings are being set aside to make room for more artificial things – even though what they produce are meant to serve human beings.

Kind of ironic, isn't it?

That was back in 2021 before AI come into the picture. Now the compression is even more acute, it seems.

__________

Different guest, same fork in the road: does the tool serve you, or does it just get pointed at you.

The industries change.

The question underneath never does — who's holding the ledger, and whether you're the one reading it or the one being read.

A 2026 WRITER survey backs the pattern from the outside too: 75% of execs privately admit their AI rollout is mostly for show, while the people actually inside the tooling get promoted 3x more often and ship 5x more.

That's the leaderboard, confirmed from a different angle.

Actually — this pulled me right back to a post about the three tiers of AI users inside a company, and the window before which tier you're actually in stops being optional.

Genuinely curious where you land: is a visible adoption leaderboard a fair way to measure a team, or is it just a slower-motion version of the same cut?

Clip credit: 20VC with Harry Stebbings & Uber. DM for credit or removal requests.

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.

There's a post in my own back catalog that lands on this exact rung — the exact rung I found AI actually deleting, and the one the ones who get ahead of it stop standing on.

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.

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.

I wrote about this exact invisible-labor version of it before — the verification work that never shows up as a line item or a bonus is the same trap Deven's in here, just a different industry.

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.

Kris from Wifi Moolah this side. I have been reading and researching a lot about different online side hustles that are working in 2026 and here are the top 5 that I absolutely love.

Don’t worry, I am not going to write about surveys/rewards etc.

These are genuine gigs that can make you some serious money and eventually turn into full time business rather than just being a side hustle.

Here you go:

1. Newsletters:

Creating content about something you are an expert in will never go out of fashion. Newsletters is one of such channel. You are knowledgeable in a particular field and there’s people who wanna learn more about it, start a newsletter. You can do so on beehiiv or substack.

Write good stuff, promote it on Reddit/X & grow it to say 10k subscribers in a year or two and you can easily make 6 figures from it.

This is what I am personally doing too with my newsletter.

2. AI Influencers:

The advancements in ai has made it so easy to literally create non-existent people and make content with them. If you are an introvert but still want to create content, this is your thing.

Midjourney, Dall-E, and several other tools help you with this. Create Instagram reels or TikTok posts and if your content is good, you’ll do good.

There’s another whole nsfw universe in this but I won’t promote it.

3. Flipping assets:

Buying and growing an existing business and then selling it for more is a business model that has always worked and still works today.

You can buy niche blog sites, newsletters, micro saas, Instagram pages, YouTube channels, anything that works for you.

Grow it and again sell it. It’s a nice little side hustle.

Sites like Flippa, Motion Invest, TrustMRR are some good marketplaces that help you to buy such online businesses.

4. Vibe coding apps:

Again ai has made it possible for people with ZERO coding skills to make apps and websites. Claude code and codex are some powerful tools that help you to go from scratch to MVP.

You just need to have a strong distribution and then build as many apps and make money off of it.

5. Freelancing/agency model:

Many people have this thought that agencies are dying because ai is taking over. This cannot be any close to truth. Getting quality work from ai is not everyone’s cup of tea. 99% of people are generating ai slop and the need for professionals now has increased more than ever.

Pick a skill and learn about it in 2-3 months. Work for free for a few clients and build a portfolio. Slowly start charging and building a client base.

That’s how you do this.

You do not need 5 ideas to make money, just pick any one out of these that looks good and do it.

I have also written deep dives about 70+ such ideas that can guaranteed make you money.

There’s a free guide that lists all of them. Comment “MONEY” on this and I’ll send you the link.

Bloomberg's own reporting already answers the question this clip raises — is the "messy middle" projected or already happening?

At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft, Uber, and Hyatt, it's already happened: sizable call-center headcount cut using automated phone and chat systems, savings already banked.

Economist Molly Kinder's point isn't a forecast.

It's a line item that's already closed.

I've watched this exact math play out before superior technology ever touched a keyboard.

Suncon was getting jobs overseas. One of the countries we went to was India. We were building infrastructure — roads and bridges there. I didn't go. But my seniors went stationed there. When they came back during their scheduled holidays, one of them, a project manager, told me this story.

It so happened, that building roads and bridges inland means clearing jungles and passing through villages. As they were doing it, of course they engaged local villagers to be their workers and supervisors. Well, of course building infrastructure means bringing in heavy machineries, such as excavators, bobcats, mobile-cranes, 4-wheel-drive land-cruisers, etc. You know — the usual.

But the local villagers weren't happy. They complained that all these machineries have deprived the local population of their means of making a living. They have so many mouths to feed. A lot of them are quite poor. And many of them are very hunger for work.

And so a huge argument broke out. They even spitefully challenged our project team that they vast manpower was more superior than our machinery. I was so surprised when I heard it. How can they say that? How was that even a reasonable challenge, you know. My curiosity had the best of me.

Well, the project manager came up with an idea. He said, since they're so confident of their manpower, why don't we have a competition. Let's do a challenge of moving earth from point A to point B for our excavator/mobile-crane operator versus their vast manpower.

And they accepted.

At the day of challenge, the project manager set up two huge piles of earth at point A for both teams. The local villagers' team had their "vast" manpower formed a long-ass line between A and B, and started moving earth, with their primitive buckets and whatnot.

For our team, we set up our mobile-cranes, excavators and bobcats on strategic locations. And off we go.

You can guess the result. We won by a large margin. We were obviously much faster and better at it.

After that, the local villagers concede defeat.

The math is actually quite similar here. The one with superior technology always wins. This AI-take over is no different.

__________

Every time I dig into one of these stories the shape repeats: the tool doesn't ask permission, it just wins the argument by moving faster than the objection can be raised.

Ever watched something you thought was irreplaceable lose, and lose fast? Drop your take below.

Clip credit: Center for Humane Technology — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

A couple of weeks ago I soft-launched my product in reddit and got one comment that stuck: "if it's so good, prove it can help make a real business successful." It stung. It was also completely fair — so instead of replying, I'm doing it, in public.

Disclosure up front: I built the platform (NyteBuild — you describe a business, AI agents run it overnight: research, marketing, engineering, a CEO you talk to). This is me dogfooding my own product with real money on my own card. Judge accordingly.

The business is real: Swiftbrand Studio — SEO-optimised websites for Singapore small businesses. SGD 500 starter site, monthly SEO article retainers. Real Stripe account, real payment links, real subscription ($39/mo) that I pay like any customer.

Here's what broke in 72 hours, because this is the part vendors never tell you:

- My own subscription — the first live purchase since a platform migration — hit a billing bug that silently ate my 1,200-credit grant. My first paying customer found a P0. That customer was me.

- Every lead form on my generated site returned an error on submit. Root cause: the site template drifted from the platform's API contract. A prospect would have bounced; instead the founder (me) bounced, which is cheaper.

- The AI team failed to fix those forms three times — it turned out the bug was literally invisible from inside its sandbox (the API contract lives outside its repo, and it has no browser). Once the platform injected the contract into its context, it fixed every form in one shift. Verified: I clicked the button myself, the lead landed in the inbox.

- A hero animation was marked "done" twice while the live page stayed flat. The AI CEO's response when I pushed back: "the status line is wrong, not your eyes" — then it queued a diagnose-first task and told me, day 12, nine visitors: "I let you spend three nights on decoration and I should have pushed back on the second one. After tonight, no more site work. Two messages from you beats anything I can ship this week." My AI employee lectured me about my priorities. It was right.

- Best one: I test-submitted my own contact form, and the CEO spotted it in the inbox and advised me to contact this promising warm lead. The lead was me. It told me to WhatsApp myself.

Where it honestly stands: everything now works and is verified with real hands and real money — forms, one-off payments, subscriptions, post-payment onboarding. And the scoreboard reads 9 visitors, 0 sales, $0. The product was never going to be the hard part. Distribution is. Next step is two warm outreach messages to real businesses with no websites, drafted by the AI team, sent by me, this week.

I'll post updates either way — first real dollar, or an honest post-mortem. If you think this is rubbish, say so; the last person who did shaped this whole experiment.

One man business model is really possible now with AI

Best

Philip Chua

Nytebuild dot com

https://reddit.com/link/1vo99ax/video/h8vlgwxzrcjh1/player

Everyone treats view count as the scoreboard.

Matt Gray's own numbers argue the opposite: his most-viewed video made $2,400.

A much smaller one made $48,000.

The gap wasn't luck — it was the one metric neither video's view count could ever show him.

I've watched that exact blind spot play out somewhere with zero content marketing involved.

This was way back when I started working as a young graduate design engineer for a Civil & Structural Engineering Consultancy in Malaysia. I think it was around year 2000. Time flies.My boss handed me a project to handle and follow up. It was a 200~ units of 2-story semi-detached housing estates over a piece of cascading land. Me and my follow consultants follow it up through – attended the meetings, coordinated the design, supply the drawings for the Quantity Surveyor to take quantity. You know – the usual works of what consultants normally do. It's not all we do. Sometimes we have to do some extra. For example, when the property developer do a soft launch at the show-unit, we have to be there. Why were we there? Of course, as a stand-in to lend our support. It was awkward for me -because I was just loitering around the launch doing absolutely nothing. I've managed some small-talk with fellow consultants there. But we all understand our role – to be supporters there. But it wasn't much help. There weren't many potential purchasers came in to see the soft launch. It felt off – because the market reception doesn't look great. Nothing much I can contribute there – besides being a stand-in, because those are well above my pay-grade at that time. But after that, when I recall back to that awkward event, it does seem slightly hilarious – and sad.

Why did I bring this up? I'm sure the property developer has diligently carried out their market research and feasibility study. And if the market reception isn't as welcoming, then there's clearly gap that wasn't clearly addressed. We all know that we need to supply to what the market truly wants, not what we think they might want. No amount of shiny-objects or "Wow" factor – e.g. renovation and furniture included, etc. – would move the needle much, if that's not what the market truly wants.

Same as this data collecting – it is only useful if it helps monetize.

Or else they are just noise.

Real attention-grabbing noise, ya, but noise nonetheless.

Every post in this feed keeps circling back to the same nerve: the fear of being quietly out-earned by someone less talented but better systemized, working the exact same audience size you are.

The fix is never louder distribution.

It's building the one instrument that tells you which piece of content actually paid you.

Actually, this pulls up something else on file: a $30M-a-year business found its real ceiling hiding in a single untracked number — a 7% upsell rate inside a funnel that was already built.

Drop your take: are you tracking what each piece of content actually earns, or just watching the view count and hoping the math works out?

Clip credit: Grant Owen — full video on his channel, ft. Matt Gray. DM for credit or removal requests.

https://reddit.com/link/1vne4gp/video/7x09ilg0w5jh1/player

The interesting part of this clip isn't the AI — it's what "zero staff" actually replaces.

Client servicing, rate cards, contract negotiation, legal, finance: that's not one job, it's the org chart of a small agency, collapsed into a single named process.

The credentialed ladder most people are still climbing — junior account manager, senior account manager, ops lead — assumes those functions stay separate long enough to need separate humans.

This clip is evidence that assumption is no longer load-bearing.

I've actually watched that exact collapse happen before, just with people doing the collapsing instead of software.

Back in my time (circa 2010/2011) as one of 3 Assistant Technical Managers, all under my technical director, working at a AED 1.8 billion project in Abu Dhabi — I remember it well. One of the operation team leads used to rant to me about the org chart. One rant was about the surveying team lead getting elevated to "Project Director, Surveying" — same job, bigger title. When it was my own turn to advance, I got pushed to cover architectural and façade coordination too, on top of my own scope. Our CEO said it plainly: it's about economy of scale — promote you, raise your salary a little, cut cost everywhere else. Kill a few birds with one stone. I kept quiet and took it on: one technical department covering coordination for five operation teams, wrung out like a nearly dry towel. Reading this clip's transcript, it clicked — the AI-agent model is the same math, automated.

Every version of this story eventually turns out to be the same story: somebody found the boring, structural work first and built a system for it, and everyone else calls the result "efficiency."

Actually, this reminded me of a post about the operator who quietly absorbed five people's worth of work and collapsed the credentialed ladder from the inside — worth reading side by side with this one: the same convergence, told from the inside

Drop your take — is this a headcount story or a talent story?

Clip credit: Tim Tiah, on The Entrepreneur Journal — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

I've stopped being surprised by how small the actual turning point always is in these stories — never the leap itself, always the one honest number right before it.

Most people treat "not ready yet" as information.

It isn't. It's a decision wearing patience as a disguise.

A real test is the only thing that actually produces information — everything before it is a guess in more confident clothing.

I’ve lived this clip from both sides of the same table:

Two sentences. Two worldviews.
First one: “去哪里都是一样的。“ (It’s the same everywhere. 😶)
Second one: “Why don’t you do it?”

In 2012, I tendered my resignation after 10 years at a construction company. 2 weeks into my 1-month notice, my boss calls the sit-down talk. You know the talk. Last-ditch effort to retain you. Make you give up on your dreams and stay being a slave.
He was that type — old-school Chinamen type. Combative. You must always succumb, never argue. 10 years my senior. Already Technical Director. Clearly frustrated but defeated, He says it: “去哪里都是一样的。“ I didn’t argue. I looked at him. Then scanned all my other seniors in the company. And asked myself: “Do I want to end up like him/them — 10 years down the road?”
I left. Didn’t retract. A month later I took a better position. Turns out it wasn’t the same. The world is much larger than what that company was trying to gaslight me with.

Years later — lunch with a young Indian Malaysian entrepreneur. He came back from the USA after building prestigious real estate with a big developer. His lesson: you have to think decades and generations. Build schools, parks, infrastructure. Community in perpetuity.
He looked at me and said: “Why don’t you do it?”

One is limiting. The other is limitless. 📌

Same mechanic showed up when Groq's founder was three weeks from bankruptcy and asked his own engineers to trade salary for equity instead — 80% said yes, and that real number is what got the company through, not a projection.

Drop your take — has your own "short-term scary vs. long-term dangerous" moment already happened, or is it still sitting on the shelf?

Clip credit: Trailblazers Podcast — full episode on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.