🔗 Coherence Is the New Moat

Another post restructure - and reissue.

… but not with good news.

I’m reaching out to let you know about a security incident that resulted in the email address from your Substack account being shared without your permission.

I’m incredibly sorry this happened. We take our responsibility to protect your data and your privacy seriously, and we came up short here.

What happened. On February 3rd, we identified evidence of a problem with our systems that allowed an unauthorized third party to access limited user data without permission, including email addresses, phone numbers, and other internal metadata. This data was accessed in October 2025. Importantly, credit card numbers, passwords, and financial information were not accessed.

What we are doing. We have fixed the problem with our system that allowed this to happen. We are conducting a full investigation, and are taking steps to improve our systems and processes to prevent this type of issue from happening in the future.

What you can do. We do not have evidence that this information is being misused, but we encourage you to take extra caution with any emails you receive that may be suspicious.

This sucks. I’m sorry. We will work very hard to make sure it does not happen again.

This is one of the reasons I use a different email forevery service I sign up for - so if that email does find its way into unauthorised hands - it is obvious. (So far so good).

Identified on Feb 3rd - EMail sent Feb 5th - good

BUT - this data was accessed in October 2025.

So what was going on in October, November, December, January and into February where it was not spotted?

Who dropped the ball?

🔗 Robin Sloan - Pace layers

As you climb the pace layers, your sources of infor­ma­tion get fewer and far­ther between.

The Full Quote

As you climb the pace layers, your sources of information get fewer and farther between. Everyone has something to say about nature. But to remain relevant in the higher and more turbulent layers you must update rapidly, and be correct more often than not. Few people are worth listening to about commerce or fashion. Most people’s ideas are simply out of date. At a certain point you reach the edge of what is known or talked about at all, and there are only a few people left. I will find you there, among the researchers, the reporters, the shamans and the spies.

💬 ‘Deepfates’

I was referencing 🖇️🔎Pace Layers a few times through 2024 - and it very much ties to some of my recent thinking. More to come as I fold it all together.

🔗 Vanguard – The Government Project to get British Businesses to use the Internet – Terence Eden’s Blog

In that late 80s period Terence is writing about - I was part of Oracle and had email on my DEC terminal for communicating with others in the company around the world. Just gnashing my teeth over why people outside the company couldn’t see the benefit.

Probably because they understood that …

a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that’s before you take into account message transmission costs.

… better than I did

When Oracle moved me to California - I even had one of those terminals at home.

Of course - come the PC and laptop revolution they were so slow in adoption it was hard to understand that it was the same company.

It was kind of like how use of mobiles in geographies with bad landline coverage resulted in exponentially faster adoption

The internet was supposed to celebrate differences. Instead, it’s weaponised conformity. We’ve narrowed acceptable discourse to a narrow band. A band where ±1 standard deviation seems to be too wide and anything outside the ‘consensus’ gets you piled on. (Consensus with a very loud and increasingly violent minority.) The phrase vive la différence is nearly extinct in modern English, and it shows. We are not ignorant of diversity - we’re terrified of it. So we hide the messy, interesting parts of ourselves and perform an acceptable vanilla version for the town square.

The result? A society suffocating under its own self-censorship. The crowd isn’t forcing us to conform - we’re doing it preemptively, trading authenticity for safety. We’ve accepted the bargain that you’re either with us or against us, and nobody wants to find out what happens if you dare explore the edges.

The road less taken isn’t less travelled anymore; it’s invisible.

This prompted on reading Om this morning: Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World, but it isn’t a new theme of mine … or indeed others …

🖇️🔎 Here’s a few from the archives.

🖇️ What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other

Quoting the quote:

I’ve been thinking about how quickly we’ve adapted to working with AI. We all understand the deal. If the output is bad, it’s probably on us. The prompt was vague. The context was missing. We didn’t give it enough constraints. So we revise. We clarify. We try again. No frustration. No judgment. Just iteration.

I know right? … and then the clincher

What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other. Somewhere along the way, we learned to treat machines as systems that need better inputs–but we still treat humans as if they should just know. And when they don’t, we judge competence, take it personally, make assumptions, or shut down.

Guilty. NO argument. Going to try harder.

The link above also references:

🔗 Wikipedia

But better to read 🔗 UXtopian