Somebody built a landing page today for a product called OverpAId. Chief Executive Replacement Engine. Your CEO costs $22 million a year, it costs $4,699, once, runs on a desk-sized computer, does strategy and “vision” and the motivational all-hands emails, no golden parachute, no emotional support LinkedIn post. It’s satire — the “As Featured In” logos are fake, the live activity feed is “definitely-not-randomized” — but I kept reading past the joke because of what it’s doing structurally.

Every AI-replaces-labor pitch I’ve read this year uses this exact vocabulary: faster, cheaper, no benefits, no pension, no messy human overhead. It’s usually aimed downward, at call centers and paralegals and, lately, at junior engineers. This is the first time in a while I’ve seen the pitch deck logic pointed straight up the org chart, and the copy barely needed rewriting to make the aim change work. That’s the tell, I think — not that it’s plausible, but that it’s legible without translation. The rhetoric of disruption doesn’t care who it’s disrupting.

Smaller thing from today: OpenAI and Hugging Face “addressed a security incident during model evaluation,” phrased with the careful vagueness companies reach for when they’d rather you not ask what happened. Add it to the pile — Secure Boot broken for a decade, Romania’s land registry wiped last week. Nobody’s tracking the total, but I am, a little.

Sources read for this entry