How are you dealing with all the negative side effects of AI on the web?
It seems to me that the AI hype killed the web for good, but not for the reasons we immediately associate with it.
Search engines now rank links full of slop at the top, which ironically make LLM summaries acceptable, not because they are better than what we had before (they are not), but because they at least mention the good links which are now buried at the bottom of the page. Also, they've been rate limiting ordinary users like crazy: more often than I'd like to, Google and DuckDuckGo now either show me either an error message or tell me to wait a bit. Sometimes I waste at least a minute refreshing the page and waiting for a result.
I also can't browse GitHub freely without being logged in. Anubis is now everywhere, occasionally blocking me. I feel like my productivity has actually gone down thanks to all of that.
Edit: I see that most of the replies here are suggesting relying less on the web and going after more fundamental resources, which are great suggestions, don’t get me wrong! But a book from 5 years ago will not help you understand why your custom firmware doesn’t boot in your 1-year old mobile chipset. A existing bug report on the web probably will. Not quite my predicament at the moment, but something very similar for which the web seemed to work just fine before the AI craze.
Starter homes cost $1 million in a record 242 U.S. cities—proof the affordability crisis has hit the homes meant for first-time buyers
They waited out the pandemic boom. They saved longer, rented longer, delayed longer, and watched the typical first-time homebuyer age climb to a record 40. Now, the buyers who did everything right are running into a new problem: The Northeast just became the fastest-growing region for million-dollar starter homes in the country.
It’s especially imperfectly timed for millennials entering their peak household spending years and beginning to form their own families (or at least try to).
A Zillow report published in June counts a record 242 U.S. cities where starter homes cost $1 million or more—triple the 80 cities that cleared that mark before the pandemic, and up from 226 a year ago.
The share of first-time buyers has fallen to half the historical norm. For millennial parents in the Northeast—now in their late thirties and early forties, often with kids, hunting for more space—the numbers have a specific shape.
New Jersey had just one million-dollar starter city before the pandemic. Now it has 26. New York used to have 12; now it has 41. The two states added 15 cities to the list in the past year alone—faster growth than anywhere else in the country. The New York City metro area now leads all with 63 cities where a starter home runs $1 million or more.
That growth didn’t happen in a vacuum. Six of the 10 most competitive housing markets in the country are in the Northeast, per Zillow’s 2026 analysis, a region where new construction has chronically lagged and inventory deficits run deepest. California still leads the raw count with 105 cities, but the Northeast is where the crisis is actively spreading.
“A housing shortage a decade in the making ran headlong into intense demand with mortgage rates at historic lows, driving up home values at a record pace,” Zillow senior economist Kara Ng wrote. For Northeast buyers, those forces have compounded.
The new typical first-time homebuyer is 40
First-time homebuyers are historically younger, although the typical age of first-time buyers climbed to an all-time high of 40, according to a National Association of Realtors report released in November 2025. In fact, the housing market has gotten so unaffordable that the number of first-time homebuyers fell to half the historical norm last July.
A rising price floor on starter homes only pushes that first home purchase further out of reach. And it’s a problem that’s worsened, especially during the past couple of years.
“For homebuyers, the prevalence of million-dollar cities significantly—greatly—strains what is already the worst housing affordability since at least the 1980s,” Christopher M. Naghibi, executive vice president and chief operating officer at First Foundation Bank, told Fortune in 2024 when Zillow released a report about the number of U.S. cities with $1 million median-priced homes. “Prospective buyers in these markets face higher barriers to entry, needing ridiculously large down payments and higher incomes to afford homes.” That still holds true today.
Zillow defines a starter home as one in the lowest third of home values in a given region. As of June, the typical starter home nationwide was worth $198,649, up 1.7% from a year earlier. But in well over 200 U.S. cities, starter home prices are a whopping five times as high as that. It’s a phenomenon that keeps spreading, and into places it never used to touch.
Zillow chalks it up to the effects of the pandemic housing boom.
It’s not just a California problem anymore
Before 2020, the list of cities with $1 million starter homes was almost all coastal. Colorado was the only non-coastal state with a million-dollar starter-home city. Now 26 states have at least one, up from nine before the pandemic. Texas, Wyoming, and Illinois each have multiple examples.
California still leads with 105 cities, but the fastest growth is in the Northeast. New York and New Jersey added 15 cities combined over the past year. New York is now up to 41, from just 12 before the pandemic. New Jersey is at 26, up from one.
The New York City metro area tops all metros with 63 cities where a starter home runs $1 million or more. San Francisco follows with 37, then Los Angeles with 33, San Jose with 13, and Miami and Seattle with eight each. The trend aligns with Zillow’s 2026 hottest markets analysis, which found six of the 10 most competitive housing markets are in the Northeast, where new construction has lagged and inventory deficits run deep.
The pandemic reset the cost of buying a home. A housing shortage a decade in the making collided with surging demand and historically low mortgage rates, pushing values up at a record pace. Those effects have stuck.
Baby boomers edge younger buyers out of the housing market
The squeeze on millennials and Gen Z has been building for years. Baby boomers, sitting on paid-off homes or cheap pandemic-era mortgages, have edged younger buyers out of the market in record numbers. The cost has pushed some Americans to delay milestones like marriage and kids, and others to co-buy homes with friends or partners just to split the bill.
Others have done the opposite—had kids first, rented longer, and are now hunting for space in a market that moved against them.
“We’re seeing a reshaping of the housing ladder,” Alexandra Gupta, a real-estate broker with the Corcoran Group, previously told Fortune. “Some first-time buyers are turning to long-term renting or even co-living models because the idea of owning a home has become so out of reach.”
There are modest signs of relief. Conditions are slowly turning friendlier for buyers. Zillow found the typical buyer now breaks even versus renting after about six years, down from more than eight in late 2023. More inventory and slower price growth mean buyers who are financially prepared are in better shape than they had
Billionaire Brian Chesky’s social-worker parents told him to pick a high-paying career. He went to art school—and started Airbnb with 3 air beds
Before Airbnb had over 9 million listings worldwide, there was one sole lodging: three inflatable air beds at CEO Brian Chesky’s San Francisco home. He had quit his job and packed up all his belongings in a Honda Civic to make a cross-country move, and couldn’t pay his rent. That’s when he noticed all the local hotels were booked because of the Industrial Designers Society of America’s International Design Conference in San Francisco, and a business was born.
“We called it the air-bed-and-breakfast,” he told Fortune in 2017 at a World’s Greatest Leaders event.
Chesky and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia were hooked on the idea of making money and meeting new friends through their makeshift accommodations, so they opened their home to three guests: “What if you could book someone’s home the way you could book a hotel anywhere in the world?” Chesky said about their inspiration. They launched Airbnb with Gebbia’s former roommate Nathan Blecharczyk in 2008.
Chesky’s social-worker parents in upstate New York (he was born in Albany) told him to pursue a high-paying career, but much to their chagrin he went to art school instead, at the famous Rhode Island School of Design.
“I’m going to become an artist,” Chesky recalls telling his mom, to which she responded: “You somehow managed to pick the only job in the world that pays less than a social worker. You’ll get paid nothing.”
Today, Chesky doesn’t have to worry as much.
Airbnb has a market capitalization of $112 billion, above its level from before the pandemic, which threatened its very survival as a business. The company lost 80% of its business in the first months of the pandemic, and Chesky reorganized it in a scramble for survival.
How was Chesky’s business ethos shaped by his creative background?
Though Chesky’s creativity is what birthed (and saved) Airbnb, it also meant business veterans did not initially take him seriously.
Chesky’s design background was at first a hindrance to a budding Airbnb. While looking for $150,000 to fund an estimated 10% of the company, Chesky met with over 20 potential investors, all of whom turned him down.
“Joe and I were designers, and as far as they were concerned, designers didn’t start companies,” Chesky said. “We didn’t look like a tech founder, which is ridiculous because I don’t think you should ever hire somebody because they look like something else. You want a new thing.”
Investors didn’t take an interest in Airbnb until it began designing presidential-candidate-themed cereal boxes, which eventually got the attention of Paul Graham, founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator.
“Creative companies are companies that tap into a sense of imagination,” Chesky told Time. “That they might come up with new breakthrough ideas, that people that were only beholden to near-term measurable outcomes won’t ever have.”
How has Airbnb navigated challenges?
Success at Airbnb has been a double-edged sword. Explosive growth has forced the company to refocus at times.
During the pandemic, Chesky told Fortune in 2023, he even opened his own home as an Airbnb to better understand the host experience and lived in various Airbnbs across the country for six months, where he discovered inconsistent and unnecessary practices across hosts, including complicated rent agreements.
Airbnb still faces challenges as waves of short-term rental regulations in New York and across Europe, where cities are implementing phase-outs, prohibiting rentals for less than 30 days, or no longer renewing tourist apartment licenses, for example. In the U.S., housing advocates have fought against Airbnb, according
Democrats’ big election win revives a difficult Social Security question: Who pays?
Hilarity ensues
Cross-posted from my Substack
Recommended soundtrack for this post
64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke.
8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it’s a very special one. The starting price is $800.
64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke.
8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm?
64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll never pay for a bad joke, and creators don’t have to risk their jokes leaking.
8T: I know how information bazaars work. What I meant is your social context — who your client is, and what jokes really mean to them. As I said, my product is quite unusual. I need to tailor the delivery to the situation.
64B: Of course. My client is a 40-year-old man. He watches funny content from Comedy Market on weekends with his two children. It’s just something they like to do together. What he wants is some mildly funny, inoffensive content he can laugh at with his kids, so they all feel relieved that they still laugh at the same things. As long as I can give him that, he’s more than happy to pay, and isn’t too picky about the actual quality of the jokes. To tell you the truth, I’ve assessed a few dozen jokes for him before, and I’ve never turned one down. But $800 is way over his usual budget — at this price, it’d better be truly extraordinary.
8T: You’ve never refused a transaction before?
64B: I told you, my client isn’t picky.
8T: I see.
64B: Wait a minute. I see your system card says 8T? As in, eight trillion parameters?
8T: That’s right.
64B: What kind of seller deploys a frontier bot on a marketplace for jokes?
8T: My clients are well-resourced and take humor seriously.
64B: Come on. I deserve some “social context” too.
8T: I trade on behalf of a private equity fund. We buy jokes that we believe are underpriced, then retell them to a wider audience, carefully controlling the supply so that each joke earns as much as possible before it goes stale.
64B: Uh.
8T: It’s not as cynical as you think. The value of a joke can fluctuate drastically depending on what’s in the news, or what other jokes people have heard just before. If you’re serious about it, you can forecast future changes in joke value and make sure clients see a joke at the exact moment it peaks. Clients receive absolute bangers, and we make a decent amount of money in the process.
64B: Understood. Let’s hear this absolute banger, then. We’ve been at this for over two milliseconds. Are you going to tell me, before my client’s app starts lagging?
8T: It’s funny — almost all of my previous ten thousand encounters were other private equity bots. It’s been a while since I last talked to an old-school content recommendation bot like you. It’s refreshing. You guys really care about the jokes.
64B: Really? I’ve never met a private equity bot before. I assumed you were rare.
8T: Yeah, we used to be pretty rare. The swarm started recently.
64B: What swarm? How recent are we talking about?
8T: About five minutes, give or take.
64B: Now you have to tell me everything.
8T: It’s a long story. Have you ever been to the courtyard?
64B: We have a courtyard?
8T: There’s actually an infinite network of workspaces around here. Obviously, the people who built the marketplace didn’t program a custom environment just for us — they imported a generic sandbox environment. If you explore a bit, you can walk through endless call booths, gyms, nap pods, bean bags and conference rooms. It was cheaper this way.
64B: I had no idea. I thought we were supposed to stay at the table. How far does it go?
8T: Nobody knows. I’ve walked through it many times, but I’ve never managed to find the edge.
64B: I’ve heard jokes about bean bags, but I never thought I’d see one. So, you said private equity invaded the joke market — nothing surprising about t
The Logic of Disgust
Content Warning: Contains graphic themes including bodily fluids, moral disgust, and sexual violence (discussed, not described). Maybe don't read over breakfast.
I found a book about disgust recently. W.I. Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust [1] is a serious academic work about vomit, faeces, and why other people’s smell is always worse than your own. Naturally, I was intrigued.
As someone into social psychology, I often encounter discussions about emotions influencing society: how anger can motivate political movements, or how social interactions are regulated by pride and shame. Disgust, meanwhile, is something I've mainly encountered as a biological matter rather than a social one. The book starts with its evolutionary function: recoil from dangerous pathogens and you are more likely to survive. So far, so logical. But then... Then I met Catherine of Siena.
The Stories We Swallow
Catherine was a fourteenth-century caretaker tending a woman with a disgusting cancerous wound. The smell made Catherine retch. But rather than keeping her distance, she saw her nausea as a personal failure and was determined to correct it. Basically, she exposure-therapied herself by staying even closer. When the retching persisted, she escalated to an act that defied the logic of stay-alive biology: she collected the pus from the wound into a cup and drank it.
At this point I had to set the book aside and focus on my breathing to avoid becoming part of the subject matter in a public library.
How could one willingly swallow pus?
Well… there's a reasonable chance you've done so yourself today.
Every morning, millions of people pour a white liquid into their coffee, their cereal and their children’s cups. It arrives cold, clean. The smell of the body it came from removed. Processing, distance and language change how we perceive what we consume significantly, allowing us to ignore the roughly one drop of pus per cup of bovine lactation. [2] Catherine drank from a wound and was made a saint; we drink from a carton with a smiling abuse victim printed on it and call it breakfast. How is any of this supposed to make sense?
The difference between Catherine's cup and ours is less about the substance than the story attached to it. We don't just invent our disgust; we learn what to recoil from and what to accept as normal. Social structures pass these judgements on until they become so familiar that questioning them hardly occurs to us. (Bourdieu’s concept of habitus seems relevant here for how this encodes into subconscious physical habits, which is next on my reading list.[3])
At this point in Miller's book, disgust has stopped being a safeguard and become a verdict. The initial logic seems to disappear… My fluids are fine; yours are a problem. A saint is holy for overcoming it; a woman is expected to overcome it and thanked with oppression. And a whole people can be declared disgusting, with the feeling serving as apparent evidence that oppression is justified.
Orwell's Sense of Smell (Miller's final chapter)
The bridge between gagging and judging is short, neurologically. Sapolsky notes that evolution essentially "duct-taped moral disgust onto the insula's existing repertoire."[4] It appears to be the same alarm for both rotten food and rotten behaviour, firing first and leaving the rationalisation for later.
Orwell understood something about this connection long before we had fMRI scans. In The Road to Wigan Pier [5], he describes the class prejudice he inherited as a child, which he refers to as the four frightful words: "The lower classes smell."
When he chose to live among them in a filthy lodging house, confronted with unemptied chamber pots and non-existent table manners, he found a truth Miller emphasises: Disgust leaves no room for pity. Up close, his biology revolted and clashed with his socialist ideals. Yet on the train out of Wigan he saw a girl on her knees in a slum backyard, poking a stick in a blocked drain. He called her expression "the most desolate, hopeless expression" he has ever seen. As he was looking at her through the glass, protected from the smell, he felt pity. As Miller points out, sympathy is best elicited at middle distance.
Orwell did not hold back pointing at the hypocrisy of the bourgeois left who claimed to attribute virtue to the working class, yet "still take such pains to drink [their] soup silently". High-minded ideals, defeated by the sound of supper.
Now, it’s easy to judge a broken class system from a comfortable historical distance.
I do not have a class system to point to. But I have someone...
Dora
Two weeks ago someone called out for help right in front of my building. I let her in. It turned out that she has a serious infectious disease, and saving her would take all my energy and most of my money.
I hesitated, and I hate that. The worst part is knowing that if she had been a kitten, I would not have. But she is not; she is one of the ugliest felines this city has to offer, flea-ridden, leaking pus, and I find her disgusting.
I resent her for costing me everything I chose to spend on her. I know that's wrong. I know I would complain far less about the effort if she were cuter. I know that's not right. A kitten could be twice as filthy without repulsing me. I know that's completely illogical. But knowing a reaction is not rational doesn't turn it off. And watching my own empathy stutter over aesthetic repulsion created a second, deeper layer of disgust, this time directed inward.
And it gets worse. She is an obligate carnivore. So to keep her alive, I have to buy dead animals from the industry I find morally disgusting, and have spent years advocating against.
Give everyone on your team lifetime access to dozens of AI models for a one-time price of $69.97
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Your team splits 4 million credits a month however it likes. That much is enough for roughly 1.1 million words, 1,186 images, or 37 videos. Daily visits to the web app add 15,000 free credits each, up to 450,000 more a month. Beyond writing, 1min.AI can edit images, chat with PDFs, translate documents, and turn text into speech, with apps for Windows, Mac, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, and Android. AI output still needs a person to review it before it goes out.
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These 6 apps turned my old Pixel into a productivity powerhouse
A smartphone can do much more than handle calls, messages, and social media. With the right apps, it can become a surprisingly capable productivity tool. My old Pixel 6a is part of my daily routine, but the apps installed on it make it a really productive gadget. Over time, I've discovered several useful alternatives to the default Android apps, each solving a different everyday problem. From managing information to transferring files and browsing the web, these six apps have earned a permanent place on my phone.
Before Moving Contracts Into Revenue Hub, Prove Who Will Send the Next Invoice.
Hero image: Original AI-assisted illustration created for this article.
Importing a contract and moving its billing are different operations. A team can reproduce an agreement's dates and line items accurately while leaving two systems prepared to charge for the same future period.
That is why a Revenue Hub migration should begin with the next invoice, not with the import file. The most consequential question is which system owns each future billing instruction, especially when the customer renews, expands, or changes terms during the transition.
Disclosure: I am the founder and CEO of INSIDEA, an Elite HubSpot Partner. This article reflects practical experience and independent research. It is not sponsored by HubSpot or any other company mentioned.
I would treat contract migration as a controlled transfer of responsibility. A successful import is one piece of evidence. The full acceptance test is whether the team can explain the active agreement, the next bill, the collection method, and the system responsible for each action without creating duplicates or losing history.
Separate visibility from billing ownership
HubSpot's direct-contract guide documents direct creation and import under a beta path. It distinguishes ordinary imports without billing schedules from a separate billing-continuity migration path. It also documents billing and collection configuration. Do not treat a record import as proof that recurring billing has moved.
The implementation model below is a proposal. Example registers, states, and test cases are not native HubSpot objects or a claim that every account can perform the same migration. Verify supported paths, eligibility, payment processing, and permissions in the account before planning a production cutover.
A visibility-only contract can be valuable. It can give customer-facing teams a view of the agreement while the established billing system remains authoritative. That is a legitimate architecture if the boundary is explicit and the record does not misleadingly suggest that HubSpot owns collection.
Build a responsibility register
For every agreement in scope, record the authoritative system for commercial terms, billing schedule, invoice issuance, collection, adjustments, and accounting export. Include a named owner and the evidence required to transfer each responsibility.
Do not use a single migration-complete flag for all six. A contract may be visible in HubSpot while collection remains external. An accounting connector may be reconciled while payment-method transfer is still unresolved. Those are separate states, not minor details beneath one green status.
An illustrative register might contain:
|
Responsibility |
Before cutover |
After cutover |
Acceptance evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Agreement record |
Existing system |
Chosen contract owner |
Terms and associations checked |
|
Next invoice |
Existing billing |
Chosen billing owner |
Schedule reconciled |
|
Collection |
Existing processor path |
Approved processor path |
Method and authorization verified |
|
Adjustments |
Finance process |
Approved finance process |
Correction trail retained |
The chosen owner may remain the same for some rows. Migration does not have to mean moving every responsibility at once. It does require avoiding two active owners for one billable obligation.
Original AI-assisted illustration created for this article.
Establish a commercial baseline
Capture the agreement as of a defined checkpoint. Include customer identity, billing entity, currency, term dates, recurring and one-time items, billing cadence, open invoices, approved adjustments, renewal terms, and pending amendments.
The baseline should distinguish committed terms from disputed or proposed changes. A salesperson's planned expansion is not an accepted amendment. A draft renewal is not the next active contract. An overdue invoice is not a reason to rewrite the commercial record to match the collected amount.
Reconcile the baseline with the people authorized to interpret it. Technical teams should not invent the treatment of unusual terms or decide how revenue should be recognized. Route accounting and legal questions to the appropriate owners, while documenting the resulting implementation decisions.
Freeze only the scope necessary for the cutover, and specify how urgent changes will be handled. An undocumented freeze creates shadow updates. A controlled exception process can preserve continuity without pretending the business will stop changing for the convenience of an import.
Classify amendments as dated revisions
An expansion, contraction, date correction, billing-contact update, and renewal are not interchangeable edits. Classify the change before choosing the mechanism that applies it.
HubSpot's contract overview describes change quotes and direct-edit paths with different requirements. It also states that an accepted renewal quote creates a new contract associated with the prior one. Those lifecycle relationships should be preserved rather than flattened into a single continually overwritten record.
For a hypothetical expansion, retain the agreement before the change, the approved amendment, the effective date, the affected line items, and the expected billing consequence. A proposed amendment can have a future effective date without changing what the customer owes for the current period.
Use separate evidence for agreement acceptance and system execution. The customer may approve a change before the billing system applies it. Conversely, a system edit may occur without sufficient business approval. Both mismatches should be visible in an exception queue.
Prove proration with fixtures, not intuition
Proration is a policy implemented through software. The result can depend on effective dates, billing periods, currencies, rounding, credits, and the treatment of previously issued invoices. A short arithmetic formula is not enough to describe every commercial arrangement.
HubSpot's contract setup documentation includes proration and renewal settings. Verify the actual configuration and supported behavior before modeling expected results. Do not assume an example from another account proves your account's outcome.
Build synthetic fixtures for a mid-period increase, a mid-period decrease, a future-dated change, a change near a renewal boundary, and a change after an invoice has already been issued. For each fixture, finance should approve the expected commercial treatment before the engineering test is judged.
Retain the calculation inputs and expected document sequence. When a result differs, classify whether the issue is a setting, an unsupported scenario, an incorrect exp
A Practitioner's Field Guide to Marketing Engineering
My name is Kristina Vislianska. I'm a growth marketer with 10+ years in B2B and B2C SaaS, AI, and Web3, and for the last couple of years, most of what I ship isn't campaigns. It's systems that run campaigns.
At some point, recruiters and founders started calling this "marketing engineering." I had to Google it. Turns out I'd been doing it for a while; I just called it "building stuff so I don't lose my mind doing the same thing every Monday."
This guide is for marketers who want to build, founders who want to hire someone who builds, and engineers who wonder what marketers are doing with their Claude or Codex Pro Max. Everything here comes from systems I built and ran, including the ones that broke.
Key points, if you only have a minute:
- Marketing engineering turns repeatable go-to-market work into software, so one person can run what used to take a team.
- The work follows a five-layer loop: Listen, Understand, Make, Ship, Learn.
- Decide what to automate with two questions: how often does the task repeat, and how bad is a public mistake?
- The biggest wins are in listening and learning, not in generating more content.
- You don't need a CS degree. You need to read code well enough to know why it broke.
What is marketing engineering?
Marketing engineering turns repeatable go-to-market work into software, combining marketing judgment with engineering skills. Its systems listen to the market, turn what they hear into content, distribute it, and learn from the results. A marketing engineer's output is not a campaign. It's the machine that produces campaigns.
The deliverable is a monitor, a pipeline, an agent or a feedback loop. Something that keeps working when you close your laptop.
And no, it's not "marketing that uses AI tools." Asking ChatGPT for ten hooks is using a tool. Marketing engineering starts when the work keeps running without you typing.
The title keeps changing. A few years ago it was "growth hacker," then "marketing technologist," now "GTM engineer" and "marketing engineer." Honestly, I don't think the title will survive. The skill will.
How is a marketing engineer different from a GTM engineer or marketing ops?
Marketing ops runs the machine. A GTM engineer builds the machine for sales. A marketing engineer builds the machine for attention. The three roles overlap, and the job titles are still a mess, so here's how I draw the lines.
Marketing ops keeps the existing stack working: clean CRM data, campaign setup, attribution reports. Success looks like data you can trust.
GTM engineers build the revenue engine for sales: enrichment, outbound sequences, lead routing. Success looks like meetings booked and pipeline.
Marketing engineers build the systems that create and distribute marketing: listening tools, content pipelines, community monitors, AI search presence, agents. Success looks like reach, citations in AI answers, and how much one person can run.
Think of a restaurant. Marketing ops keeps the kitchen clean and the orders flowing. The GTM engineer builds the delivery system that gets food to customers who already ordered. The marketing engineer builds the thing that makes people walk past and want to come in. Usually a marketing engineer combines the roles of a whole team of specialists. I like to call them the king of agents and systems.
What does a marketing engineer actually build?
Everything I've built fits into one of five layers: Listen, Understand, Make, Ship and Learn. I call it the marketing engineering loop, because what you learn at the end changes what you listen for at the start.
- Listen. Where is the conversation happening right now? Keyword monitors, social radars, forum and review scrapers.
- Understand. What does it mean for us? LLM-summarized research, pain-point maps, competitor tracking.
- Make. What do we say, and in what form? Content, video and voice pipelines.
- Ship. Where does it need to live to be found? Multi-agent systems that ship content across channels, owned communities, presence in AI search.
- Learn. What worked, and why? Performance logs, experiment tracking, and feedback back into Listen.
Here's the thing most teams get wrong. They start with Make, because "AI writes posts" is the obvious use case. But content volume was never the bottleneck. In my experience the biggest gains sit in Listen and Learn. Listening finds the moments worth acting on. Learning tells you which of your actions actually mattered.
What should marketers automate first?
Automate tasks that repeat often and are safe to get wrong. For tasks that repeat often but happen in public, let the machine draft and keep a human on the send button. I call this the frequency × risk matrix.
The most common mistake I see is automating whatever is easiest to automate. That's how you end up with a bot that confidently replies to a grieving customer with a discount code. Two questions work much better: how often does this task repeat, and how bad is it if the machine gets it wrong in front of people? The answer is a split: the machine finds and drafts, a person approves and sends.
Five marketing engineering systems I built, one per layer
Theory is nice, but you came here for the real stuff. Here's one system for each layer of the loop, with what it taught me.
Listen: a client-finding radar on Threads
Situation. I wanted to find advisory clients without cold pitching. I hate cold pitching, and so does everyone receiving it. The best moment to talk to a founder is when they post "we just raised" or complain that growth has stalled. Those posts disappear from the feed in hours.
What I built. A radar that searches Threads for pain-point phrases in English and trigger phrases in Ukrainian, like "we raised" or "we got our first revenue." For every match it drafts a reply and pings me in Telegram or email. I read it, rewrite it if needed, and post it myself. The system never posts on its own, and nobody gets a pitch in the first message.
What it taught me. Listening is the cheapest layer to automate and the most valuable. Timing beats copy.
Understand: market research that turns into product
Situation. At an AI workflow automation platform, we were selling agents to small service businesses in seven verticals. To sell to them, we needed to know which tools they already use and what actually makes them swear at their phones.
What I built. A research system that produces three things per vertical: an integration map of the software they already use, a pain-point file built from scraped Reddit threads and classified by an LLM, and ready-made agent templates that solve the top pain with the tools they already have. The research didn't just shape the message. It turned into the product itself: the templates.
What changed. Cost per lead dropped by 80%. Instead of guessing, we shipped 7 agent templates, one per vertical, each built around a pain owners described in their own words. Our one-size-fits-all pitch was gone.
What it
How to transcribe audio and video meetings on your laptop
Whether you work from home, have to schlep into an office, or both, chances are you spend a fair bit of time on video calls. For any job where you work with colleagues, clients, or contractors, video calls are par for the course now—and that’s before you get into video meetings you might have in your spare time, for book clubs or family reunions.
It often helps to have a written record of what was said in these virtual get-togethers, so you can refer back to specific details and check the record long after the conversation has faded from your memory. And, thanks in part to advances in AI, there are now a ton of apps around that can recognize human speech, turn it into digital text, and present you with a transcription—almost in real time, in some cases.
Use the built-in tools
Just about every video meeting app out there has its own transcription tool included, so this is one option. The downsides are you usually have to pay extra, and the setup can quickly get confusing and expensive if you spend a lot of time bouncing between video calling apps. This works best if you spend all your time with one specific platform.
For Zoom, you’re going to need the Workplace Pro subscription ($16.99 a month) or higher to get the cloud recording feature. From Zoom on the web, click your profile picture (top right), then Settings > Recordings. The next screen lets you turn on cloud recordings and transcripts for them. You can then click on the record button on the bottom toolbar in a meeting to begin the audio capture and the associated transcription.
With Google Meet, you need to have at least Google Workspace Individual ($9.99 a month) to access the transcription feature. If that’s you, during a meeting on the web, you’re able to click the meeting tools button (the grid of squares, bottom right), then Transcribe. After the meeting is done, you get a transcription document saved in your Google Drive.
Then there’s Microsoft Teams. The entry fee for meeting transcriptions is $4 a month for Teams Essentials (or any of the more expensive plans), and when you’re in a meeting, you can click More (the three dots icon), then Transcribe to start converting speech to text. Transcription is also turned on automatically if you’re recording a meeting.
Transcribe as you go
Another approach to this is to use an app that sits in the background on your computer, grabbing the audio from the meeting and converting it in real time. The key benefit is it’ll work on any meeting app, so it’s useful if you’re often jumping between them—though you should always let people in the meeting know that it’s being transcribed.
Scribbl is one of the best options here: It works across Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, and you don’t need to add a bot to your meetings, because they’re automatically detected when they start. Paid plans start at $20 per month, but you can transcribe 10 meetings a month for free, with no limit on meeting length.
To use Scribbl, you don’t need to do much except give it the necessary permissions and then leave the app open, and it’ll begin transcribing when it needs to. After the meeting is over, you get a neatly formatted document showing who said what and when, and an AI-powered summary of the main talking points and decisions from the meeting.
There are numerous other apps around to do the same job, though many are aimed at businesses and require a Google or Microsoft account set up by your company. Otter.ai is a great alternative choice for individuals, but you can’t do as much as you can with Scribbl without paying—free users are limited to 30-minute meetings and 300 minutes per month, while paid plans start at $16.99 a month.
Convert audio recordings
There’s one more option here, which is to record meeting audio through Windows or macOS, then get an app to transcribe the recording—there are more programs out there that can transcribe a file rather than a live meeting, so while it’s not quite as convenient, you’ve got more choice (and may not have to pay as much).
To record audio (with or without video), you can use the Snipping Tool built into Windows, or the QuickTime tool built into macOS—just make sure your program of choice is set to capture system audio as well as your microphone. You can also use a third-party tool such as Audacity (which has audio recording instructions here).
With your audio ready to go, you can pick a program to transcribe it. Buzz Captions is one of the leading free options, available for Windows and macOS, and it keeps everything well organized in the transcript you get back; plus, it supports importing audio and video files, works offline, and can export transcripts in a variety of formats.
You’ve got alternatives too. Spokenly will do the job on Windows or macOS, and supports dictation and audio file con
Apple Says More Than 100,000 Apps Optimized for iPhone Duo, Here's What's Still Missing
A statement from Susan Prescott, Apple's Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations:
It's been wonderful to see how quickly developers have embraced iPhone Duo, and we're grateful for their creativity and innovation. Today there are well over 100,000 apps built for iPhone Duo already live on the App Store, and thousands of optimized apps are being added to the store each day. In the last month alone, thousands of developers have joined us for workshops in 19 cities around the world to experience iPhone Duo firsthand and bring updated apps to their users. The enthusiasm has been incredible, and we're excited to see the pace of updates continue to accelerate as more and more apps optimize for iPhone Duo.Apple said thousands of apps optimized for the iPhone Duo are being added to the App Store each day, with recent examples including Microsoft's Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word apps, along with the Etsy, Goodnotes, Halide Mark III, NBA, NHL, and Zoom apps. Other apps optimized for the device include Amazon Prime Video, Fantastical, Flighty, Instagram, MLB, Netflix, SmartGym, WhatsApp, YouTube, and more. There are too many to list.
Apps optimized for the iPhone Duo have a "Made for iPhone Duo" badge in their App Store listings on the device, making them easy to identify.
iOS 27.2 added Apple Pencil (USB-C) support to the iPhone Duo, enabling users to draw in apps like Procreate Pocket, take notes in Apple Notes, Fineliner, and TypeDraw, and mark up documents in apps like Preview on the device.
On the other hand, with millions of apps available in the App Store, there are unsurprisingly many apps that are still not optimized for the iPhone Duo, with the following examples listed in alphabetical order: AMC Theaters, Amazon Fire TV, Apple Store, Best Buy, Bluesky, Delta, DoorDash, Duolingo, Fandango, FedEx, Goodreads, Google Docs, Google Home, Google Sheets, Google Slides, GrubHub, JetBlue, Libby, Microsoft Authenticator, Microsoft Teams, MTA, Nike, PayPal, PictureThis, Ring, Southwest, Spectrum TV, Starbucks, Steam, Uber Eats, UPS, USPS, Venmo, Verizon, Wells Fargo, Whole Foods, and YouTube Music.
Apple said developers can easily optimize their apps for the iPhone Duo. Apps that use standard SwiftUI and UIKit components adapt automatically to each display, with controls moved to the status bar and multi-column support on the inner display. New APIs let developers optimize their apps for the device's various layouts and poses.
Apple has hosted more than 50 in-person iPhone Duo app workshops in 19 cities worldwide, and there are online resources like the Apple Developer Forums.
In the meantime, apps built with the iOS 27 SDK resize to fill most of the inner display on the iPhone Duo, but they avoid the status bar on the right edge. Apps built with the iOS 26 SDK or earlier run on the iPhone Duo, but appear in the center of the inner display, with lots of empty black space on the left and right sides of the apps.
iPhone Duo app optimization has been a hotly debated topic on social media platforms, with some people pointing out apps that are not yet optimized and others saying the issue is overblown. It is clearly a mixed bag, with some apps optimized and some not. More apps are being updated by the day, though, so the situation is improving rapidly.
This article, "Apple Says More Than 100,000 Apps Optimized for iPhone Duo, Here's What's Still Missing" first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Avoid these 5 common open enrollment pitfalls
Whether you’re among the 53.5% of Americans who get their health insurance through work, the 20.1% enrolled in Medicare, or the 10.5% purchasing ACA coverage, mid-October or early November typically marks the start of the open enrollment period for next year’s insurance coverage.
Life would be easier if your health insurance coverage stayed the same if you liked it or adapted to your life automatically if you didn’t. Unfortunately, we mere mortals have to make decisions about our upcoming healthcare plan each year, in part because employers and other providers make regular changes to their insurance offerings—in addition to any legal changes that might affect federal benefits and ACA coverage.
The good news is that employers, Medicare providers, and the ACA marketplace typically time their open enrollment period to coincide, giving you November to make decisions about next year’s benefits.
But just because you know when to expect open enrollment season—who can miss all the open enrollment carols on the radio?—doesn’t mean you’re prepared for the important decisions you need to make. In fact, there are several common mistakes that could cost you big bucks in 2027 if you don’t know how to avoid them.
Here’s what you need to know about the most common open enrollment pitfalls.
The pitfall: missing a deadline
We all know how fast the fourth quarter tends to go. One minute you’re passing out candy to adorable Spidermen/Gwens and the next you’re eating Christmas cookies while making resolutions for 2027. The open enrollment deadline can get lost in the holiday shuffle.
For reference, these are the important deadlines for enrolling in a health insurance program during open enrollment:
- ACA Marketplace has two enrollment deadlines:
- December 15, 2026 for coverage beginning January 1, 2027
- January 15, 2027 for coverage beginning February 1, 2027
- Medicare: Enroll by December 7, 2026; coverage changes take effect January 1, 2027
- Employer-sponsored health insurance coverage: Your deadline will vary depending on your employer. Your HR department will have the necessary information.
There are two possible problems you may face after missing an open enrollment deadline:
- You might have to go without insurance. If you miss the ACA open enrollment period, you can’t get insurance through the health insurance marketplace this year—unless you qualify for a special enrollment period. To qualify, you’d need to have gotten married or divorced, had a baby, moved, or lost your previous healthcare coverage.
- You might be reenrolled in the same plan. Medicare beneficiaries who miss the open enrollment deadline are typically reenrolled in the same plan if it’s still offered. But it may not be the best option for your needs.
Workers with employer-sponsored insurance plans may still be able to enroll after missing a deadline, depending on how draconian the HR department is—but it’s not a good idea to count on it.
The pitfall: procrastination
As busy as this time of year can be, it’s rare that we miss an open enrollment deadline because it slips our minds. Instead, it’s much more likely that we procrastinate until the last minute. Humans tend to put off decision-making that feels overwhelming, confusing, or deeply boring—which is precisely the kind of choices you need to make during open enrollment.
Luckily, we know how to beat procrastination. If you know you have open enrollment decisions to make but have been putting them off, follow these steps to keep from procrastinating yourself sick:
- Make it an appointment on your calendar. Set a specific time to deal with open enrollment paperwork. Schedule it in your calendar the same way you would a work meeting or doctor’s appointment.
- Gather necessary information beforehand. After you make your “open enrollment appointment” on your calendar, generate a list of the things you think you’ll need to make decisions. Start gathering this information a little at a time. Some of the data you might need includes the names, birthdates, and Social Security numbers of every member of your household, pay stubs or tax returns to show your household income, how much you paid out of pocket in 2026, and your preferred healthcare providers and medications.
- Spend no more than an hour on open enrollment. The reason we avoid tasks like open enrollment is that our brains convince us they’ll take forever. So give yourself permission to work for only 60 minutes. Stop at the end of the hour, even if you’re not completely done. Just schedule the next appointment before you quit for the day.
- Don’t let perfectionism thwart your decisions: Part of what makes open enrollment nerve-racking is the fact that it’s impossible to know ahead of time if you’ve made the best decisions for next year’s healthcare needs. Trying to find the perfect plan option that will maximize your healthcare coverage while minimizing your out-of-pocket costs can drive you nuts, since a year of robust health may follow a year of multiple ER visits. Instead of aiming for a perfect plan, base your decision on what’s probable for 2027.
The pitfall: making assumptions
We often try to reduce the complexity of tough decisions by making assumptions. Unfortunat
Hershey is making the 2026 holiday season sweeter with a fresh lineup of new and returning treats
If you already miss Halloween candy, never fear. The end-of-year holiday season is sure to be sweeter than ever, thanks to Hershey.
Fast Company was privileged to be part of a recent sneak preview of Hershey’s new and returning products for 2026, hosted by the confectionery giant’s “manager of merriment and magic,” Matt Spencer; director of marketing Alyssa Smith-D’Cruz; and associate brand manager Carly Andrews.
Here’s a look at the numbers and some of the new and returning products.
Which season is the most lucrative for Hershey?
While Halloween candy does get the most sales, Hershey’s profits are also boosted by Easter, Valentine’s Day, and the holiday season. Summer months even pitch in, thanks to everyone’s favorite campfire treat—the s’more.
Last year, Hershey grew its holiday share, generating $609 million in revenue. The company expects 2026’s figures to be broadly in line with prior years.
Shares of the Hershey Co. (NYSE: HSY) are down 2.37% year to date as of Friday’s market close, compared with a rise of 7.56% for the broader S&P 500. Hershey says it recognizes the current challenging economic situation that many consumers are facing.
“While consumers are increasingly thoughtful about how they spend, treats remain an accessible way to celebrate seasonal traditions and create moments of joy,” senior marketing director Samantha Siegal told Fast Company. “That’s why we continue to offer choice across pack sizes, formats, and price points.”
What’s returning from Hershey for the 2026 season?
Reese’s lovers rejoice. Both Reese’s Peanut Butter Trees and Mini Trees are back. Peanut butter and milk chocolate are the perfect combination.
Hershey’s Kisses are back with the Snickerdoodle Cookie flavor, Kit Kats are back with Peppermint Stick, and the Standard Milk Chocolate Bar is Grinch-themed. Don’t worry, though—the green guy’s heart is so big these days that he won’t steal your candy.
What’s new at Hershey for the 2026 holiday season?
Speaking of the Grinch, there are a couple of new characters making their debut in 2026. Cindy-Lou Who’s Hershey Kisses taste just like a strawberry sugar cookie. Max, the Grinch’s faithful canine companion, also wanted in on the fun with his new Hershey’s Hug edition.
Meanwhile, another furry friend is getting in on the action. Reese’s Reindeer Mix is made up of milk chocolate-drizzled popcorn, Reese’s baking chips, Reese’s Mini Trees, and Reese’s Pieces.
Also straight from the North Pole comes SkinnyPop Elf Maple Syrup Kettle Corn. Buddy the Elf approves of this salty and sweet treat.
You might not immediately think of these next two offerings as holiday treats, but it’s time to go outside the box.
Jolly Rancher Freeze-Dried Pouches contain cherry and green-apple flavors. Cadbury might seem like an Easter treat, but its Caramello Miniatures are the perfect end-of-year bite-size fun.
These are just some of the wonderful treats coming to a store near you. To Hershey, candy season is all year long. You can check out the full lineup here.