The unc-rising

It really is. I could spend a week just walking around taking interesting architectural photos.

Escalator up to second level of the Marin County Civic Center, a key shoot location for the movie Gattaca

Jury duty is no one’s idea of a good time, but at least in Marin you get to feel like you’re entering Gattaca

That's to say nothing of banks and other financial institutions, whose systems are usually more hardened and less likely to deploy new tech.

Beyond that, every major crypto chain, protocol, bridge, and other infrastructure stands to be tested like never before.

Anthropic Claims Its New A.I. Model, Mythos, Is a Cybersecurity ‘Reckoning’

This should send a shiver up the spine of any major professional services/knowledge work firm. McKinsey (codewall.ai/blog/how-we-...) and BCG (codewall.ai/blog/how-we-...) have both been compromised this year by a whitehat using AI tools. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The best marketing of this century came from giving up control. What Formula 1's Netflix deal teaches every company trying to go direct.

personfamiliar.substack.com/p/the-best-...

When you have senior white male military officers willing to end their career by raising concerns about the blocking of Black and female officers, it feels safe to say this isn't about ending DEI: the better historical parallel is Wilson's resegregation of the bureaucracy
bsky.app/profile/nbcn...

Hell yeah @shutdownfullcast.bsky.social

The Tech IPO Playbook Is Missing Half Its Audience Retail participation has exploded and transformed public markets. But you'd never know it from the current "best practices" for public offerings. Here's how to change that.

Read the full piece here: www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-tech-...

Enter the Stock Stans The most engaged retail investors don’t function like, sound like, or behave like “shareholders.” They’re more like online fandoms. This shift is behavioral and cultural. I’m calling them Stock Stans. These are individual investors whose relationship to a stock is identity, not just investment. They build their thesis around it, argue about it online, create content evangelizing it, recruit their friends into it, and treat attacks on the company like personal affronts. Think Taylor Swift’s Swifties or BTS’s ARMY, but with brokerage accounts. Organized, vocal, fiercely protective, and loyal through the rough patches in a way fair-weather followers never are. “Bang-up job, Jim, you discovered meme stocks five years late,” you say. But while Stock Stans are certainly involved in meme-y tickers, what’s novel now is every major stock now has them. Costco (~30% retail ownership) shareholders treat the stock the way they treat their Costco membership: as a lifestyle

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Retail participation has exploded and transformed public markets. But you'd never know it from the current comms "best practices" for IPOs. Here's how to change that, and what Taylor Swift and BTS have to do with it.

IMO, one of the virtues of the Apple brand is they've always made the user the hero, never the company. They save the plaudits for others to give them. So this seems fitting for the brand, but perhaps off because we're now so used to tech company solipsism.

GitHub - jimprosser/obsidian-web-mcp: Secure remote MCP server for Obsidian vaults -- access your notes from Claude, your phone, or any MCP client, anywhere. OAuth 2.0 auth, Cloudflare Tunnel, atomic ... Secure remote MCP server for Obsidian vaults -- access your notes from Claude, your phone, or any MCP client, anywhere. OAuth 2.0 auth, Cloudflare Tunnel, atomic writes safe for Obsidian Sync. - ji...

Built an MCP server that runs on your Mac and connects your @obsidian.md vault via Cloudflare Tunnel to Claude or ChatGPT anywhere: phone, browser, laptop. No cloud storage, no open ports, your files stay local, and doesn't break Obsidian Sync. (cc @stephango.com) github.com/jimprosser/o...

Jensen Huang Doesn't Sell Chips. He Sells Inevitability. One comms lesson worth stealing from Nvidia's keynote that isn't a leather jacket.

Subscribe for a weekly dose of what’s actually happening in tech communications.
www.personfamiliar.com/p/jensen-hu...

Jensen Huang walked onto the floor of San Jose’s SAP Center yesterday and held a capacity crowd’s attention for over two hours, no teleprompter, announcing $1 trillion in projected chip orders through 2027, a new rack architecture called Kyber, a prototype data center designed for space, and a live robotics demo starring Olaf from Frozen. He closed with singing robots and an animated lobster performing a campfire song.1 If you’re a communicator looking for actionable takeaways from all this, I can save you some time. Here’s one version of a playbook: Be the CEO of the most important company in the world for the most important technology in the world right now. Have cool jackets or some other signature piece of clothing. Double your revenue estimates once or twice a year. If you can be Jensen Huang and Nvidia, I highly recommend it. It seems to be going great and really fun. But most of us and our executives can’t be Jensen and Nvidia, sadly.

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Jensen Huang spent two hours on stage yesterday arguing less for @nvidia's products and more for the inevitability of a world that runs on them. What tech comms people everywhere can learn and apply from yesterday's GTC keynote. (link in reply)

Ever since ChatGPT 3.5 set off an explosion of LLMs and other AI technology, communications agencies have been trying to figure out not just the consequences for their clients, but for their own businesses. Namely: what do we sell now? They needed new offerings to fit the new world. Enter “generative engine optimization”—GEO—positioned as the successor to search engine optimization (SEO), the roughly 30-year-old practice of reverse-engineering search ranking signals to make an organization appear more prominently in results. GEO claims to do the same thing for LLMs that SEO did for search. But it can’t. The people selling it should know it can’t. But they’re selling it anyway. And the only things getting optimized are their invoices.

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: It's time someone in comms said it: "GEO" is a racket, a fake optimization discipline being offered by some of the biggest agencies. If model makers can't tell you why these systems return what they do, do you *really* think Edelman can?
www.personfamiliar.com/p/geo-is-a-...

The way you guys explained the design philosophy made me think a bit of Miyazaki: there's a fuzzy, but I think still-real, through-line in the ambiguous design of a character creating attachment.

A Heated Rivalry, if you will

The Forward Deployed Context Engineer Is the Next Essential Job in Comms The role barely exists yet. It should (and will) exist everywhere.

www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-forwa...

A Forward Deployed Context Engineer in comms does three things. The unglamorous foundation is capturing the tacit knowledge. That means interviewing senior team members to codify the frameworks they use but have never written down. It means building a relationship intelligence layer—not a media list with email addresses, but the qualitative intelligence about every journalist, analyst, and stakeholder the team interacts with that actually makes outreach effective. It means documenting editing patterns, voice standards, crisis playbooks. All the institutional knowledge that currently lives in people’s heads and evaporates when they leave. Then comes building the context layer. Once the knowledge is captured, it needs to be structured so AI tools can actually use it. This is where the technical fluency matters. Meeting transcripts become queryable archives. Editorial standards become automated quality checks. Stakeholder intelligence becomes contextual input for outreach drafting. With

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The reason most AI implementations in comms disappoint isn’t the technology. It’s the *context*, or lack thereof.

That's why the next essential comms hire is the Forward Deployed Context Engineer, a person who blends comms knowledge with a systems brain.

This is what a spine looks like. And at the same time, how is any other CEO in AI signing up for a military domestic surveillance program? Did we learn absolutely nothing from PRISM?

When Fan Fiction Hits the S&P Why AI narratives are moving markets more than AI products

www.personfamiliar.com/p/when-fan-...

The Tomorrowland Effect Walt Disney’s original Tomorrowland was compelling because it was a narrative about the future first and an engineering project second. Walt worked with scientists and engineers, but what made it resonate was the storytelling, making you feel something about what was coming, not just showing you a spec sheet. The Citrini piece is a high-quality markets version of Tomorrowland: speculative fiction with financial fluency, built by people familiar with constructing market narratives. The Shumer piece is the gift shop version: mass-produced, shiny enough to catch the eye, but not something you’d put on a shelf. Yet both move the same audience to the same action, and that’s actually the more concerning case. If only the Citrini piece had moved markets, you could chalk it up to the quality of the analysis. But when a clearly-AI-generated blog post produces a comparable reaction, you’re seeing something structural: the audience is grading the narrative, not the prem

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Why are posts about AI from random Substacks and blogs moving markets more than AI products? It's a calibration gap between Narrative Consumers and Tool Users. (link in next post)

It's true, and I go into it eyes wide open. I do pay for the highest tier of Claude access, so there are some additional SLAs surrounding data privacy/not training on it that give me more confidence.

AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome A communications intervention

Read here: www.personfamiliar.com/p/ai-humani...

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Public trust in AI is already deteriorating. Execs' rhetorical focus on capital-H Humanity over real people isn't helping. I'm calling it Dr. Manhattan Syndrome—and the nuclear industry already showed us how it ends. (Link in next post)

Yeah, @obsidian.md Gang rise up. Seriously, though, Claude Code plus Obsidian is ridiculously powerful in ways no other productivity app's baked-in "assistant" can ever be. Has completely stopped my productivity app promiscuity. (For now.)

That's the one.

Rogen has quite a different recitation of this timeline in his book, including (crucially) that both he/his production company and Sony were warned by RAND researchers to harden their security systems well before the hacks likely took place.

I Wanted to Fit In With Hollywood’s Cool Kids. So I Made the Biggest Mistake of My Career. In an exclusive book excerpt, the former CEO of Sony Entertainment opens up about his role in unleashing one of the worst cyberattacks in corporate history.

If you've read Seth Rogen's book, you can't help but come away from this Michael Lynton excerpt feeling there's some serious retcon'ing going on. www.wsj.com/tech/cyberse...