How I use openclawd

Posted: 7:22 pm
February 6, 2026
AI
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I have been on a journey with my clawdbot -> moltbot -> openclaw bot and at this point I have dozens of agents running on multiple bots and multiple servers. If you want to spin up one of your own start here.

I am going to share some of the ways I’m using openclaw to make my life easier and more consistent but I want to be honest: this stuff is addictive. Much like ChatGPT suggest next steps as you’re using it to solve a problem, your LLM-driven-bot will make you aware how many multi-step tasks you do with technology can and should be done by a robot.

I am a huge fan of GTD and productivity todo lists and having managed and built multiple businesses staying organized is a core skill that I am constantly fine-tuning even in my retirement. As easy as all the list solutions are to set up – they are even easier to ignore. The way you adapt any new process is the same white-knuckle “do it for 21 days” until it becomes a habit. Most of the time, you find way sooner that it’s just not going to work for you. This is where openclaw is different: You program it to remind you why you got started, you program it to use the language that gets you back on track when you slip, and it’s right there in your usual chat stream so it’s hard to ignore and easy to get reminded. While I’m the king of ignoring notifications, I always seem to manage to get to all my messages and this works for me

Fitness & Health: Agent Allison

They say adulthood is just a neverending pursuit to lose the same 5-10lb. I still run and I use everything from Apple Fitness to Strava to LoseIt and more often than not I forget about them when I’m not trying to cut before the race. If you follow my Instagram you know I’ve never missed a flavor of Oreos and boy do they have a way of disappearing around my house.

Keeping track of everything is a PITA and tracking calories is a challenge when you’re cooking stuff for kids or throwing out leftovers – undocumented snacks pile up quick. So I built a bot to help me track my exercise and calorie intake. Now before I eat something I just take a picture and bounce it to her:

It keeps track of everything I eat, makes recommendations based on my diet plan, makes adjustments day-to-day and helps me stay on course. I also feed it my Apple Fitness data:

Since February 2nd I’ve automated this process and she has access to it daily and helps me structure the next day. It’s not without bugs but way more consistent than I am.

Logs & Alerts: Agent Watson

There is nothing more panic inducing than a call from your CTO/CIO after midnight.

Ignored and silenced alerts from thousands of different services (still mostly DNS and Amex) can be just as deadly.

I have an agent that is subscribed to all the notifications, alerts, warnings, and beeps in the dark I receive around the clock. In the context of monitoring tools, it is hard to define a creeping issue that will result in a production crash that will take out your entire service/network and it’s even harder to know which alerts should beep at 2AM and which one can wait.

Enter Agent Watson: I now have an LLM with my personality baked in that can triage the issue and figure out which ones I have to address first. Mysql docker crashed for a blog nobody has visited on this side of Covid? Ssssh. Certbot crashing in a loop on a production network and nobody has looked at it in hours? Yeah, let me know!

There is only one Vlad but I keep an eye on multiple Slack channels, multiple ntfy servers, I have 2 cell phones just for “urgent” alerts! LLM and the curated instructions the bot leverages don’t eliminate any of that – but they help facilitate getting important alerts to me quickly while leaving unimportant stuff for the scheduled time when they get my undivided attention.

TV Guide: Agent Joan Rivers

Back in the day it was easy to know what to watch: You either got it from Blockbuster or the network show reminded you of a hit show during every commercial break. With the new era of DVRs and streaming there are millions of options and sometimes I spend more time scrolling through stuff I don’t want to watch. Enter Agent Joan Rivers (remember TV Guide Channel?)

We use Jellyfin for our home entertainment and everyone has their own Jellyseer account to request the shows they want to watch. Every time a show is downloaded it generates an email that nobody reads.

What Joan Rivers does is enumerate my DVR email folder for all the downloads that completed that day. It parses the weird filename into an actual show, season/episode, and pulls similar shows and downloads images and summary from imdb with a youtube link for a trailer. All we get is a single email every day:

It takes unrecognizable filenames in a download report and spits out a tailored TV Guide for the whole family along with recommendations thanks to bots memory, soul, and documented instructions.

Finance: Agent Ron Insana

One of the most frustrating thing in finance is getting to the bottom of why certain stocks are making disproportionate moves. Now that NYSE is trading 24/7 the sun is set on Bloomberg Terminals and the process of discovery is usually digging through random Twitter comments, reading articles behind a paywall, going down the rabit hole of fake rumors and uncited press releases.

Ron Insana was a CNBC host that typically crushed the markets in the final hour of trading by slicing through the fud and nonsense of the IPO era. Now he is my agent that looks at developments across financial news, research newsletters, Twitter chart junkies and my trade groups. My bot looks at my portfolio watchlist and watches my Fintwit feed along with all the popular sites (not directly of course, this thing is so prone to prompt injection that everything is scraped, sanitized, and passed through an n8n workflow).

Bottom line: Every morning and evening I get a report that tells me what’s going on with that stock/security in under 140 characters.

Youtube: Agent Sweet Brown

As a geek I have a ton of Youtube subscriptions for all the random hobbies I’ve picked up in my retirement. They are fantastic but I understand everyone has to make a buck so sometimes a 30 second video is 20 minutes long. And do I really care about a new RG Abernic handheld? Say it with me:

Every evening my Sweet Brown agent enumerates my Youtube subscriptions and looks at all the new episodes published that day. It pulls the transcripts for the episode and runs it through the LLM. I get a TV Guide email that includes the link to the episode and a 140 character summary of what they covered.

It also has instructions on what I really want to see! This is where it’s magical. If the episode has transcripts (some don’t) and it meets the criteria of what I want to watch – it adds it to my playlist. This way I have a Vlad channel that is curated by my Agent Sweet Brown and I don’t open Youtube and go scrolling, I go straight to my playlist and let it rip.

Agent Prince Adewale

If you thought I was an asshole before, wait till you read this 🙂

I have spent most of my adult life killing SPAM for a living. Hand on the bible – “unsubscribe” processes don’t do shit. Yeah, they might unsubscribe you from one or two reputable companies but the new era of Zoomer businesses changes marketing tools more often than they change their underwear and I’m getting marketing emails from several “employees” of the soap company. The moment I unsubscribe from one of them there is a notification from another. Took a car to a dealership? You’re getting an email from the service department, from the sales department looking for a tradein, suddenly you’re learning about their awards and holiday specials. There is no unsubscribing from this shit. It’s endless because companies don’t care about unsubscription requests and they move their mailing lists a lot.

You know who cares? The designated ARIN IP block owner. OH THEY CARE ABOUT A DIRTY IPv4 BLOCK A LOT. Send an abuse complaint to that address and cc: an RBL and half a dozen nerds start sending nasty emails.

Enter Prince Adewale, son of a former Nigerian minister… but my dear friend finally got his money out of his war-torn country and now he works for your boy Vlad filing abuse reports on your fly-by-night dropship-from-Temu Instagram millionaire. Second email today about a new soap scent your company dropped? I’m not unsubscribing, I’m dragging your email to Adewale’s folder.

How it works: I have a background job that copies messages from Adewale to my agents mailbox daily. When I get bored I open a Chrome tab and send a message to Prince Adewale on Telegram to get started abusing the abusers. First, the bot downloads the message, explodes the SMTP headers and looks up the netblock owner. Then it scopes out abuse and postmaster contacts and drafts an official abuse email to send on behalf of ExchangeDefender. At the same time, a second supervised process opens up the unsubscribe link from the email, automatically fills out the form, captcha and navigates through the emotional messages marketers think make a damn bit of difference – screenshot of the unsubscribe gets attached to the ARIN abuse form and packed away.

My inbox hasn’t been this clean since the 90s.

Time Suck

Once you realize just how many of your pursuits have failed because you lacked adequate accountability or you let process friction hold you back from realizing your goals… you will waste an indefinite amount of time tweaking your bots. Personally, this way is more fun 🙂

It’s by no means magic – processes break, cron jobs don’t run on time, sites time out and I try to put an n8n & scraper in between everything these bots get fed to them. All in all, I spend way, way, way, way, way less time managing my workflow than I did wasting time on just one of the tasks these bots do.

Meet Stephy, my clawdbot

Posted: 9:43 pm
February 1, 2026
AI, Cloud
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Note: Updated on February 12, 2026 to reflect the name change. While most of this post still stands I encourage you to look at https://openclaw.ai/ first if you’re deploying it in the future as this product has changed the name twice since I’ve mentioned it — and I’m sure best practices will too.

I’ve been experimenting with AI for years now and this is the first project I’ve become absolutely obsessed with. Don’t get swayed by supernatural Twitter claims by lying “influencers” – no, it will not print money, no it will not make you a fortune trading crypto while you sleep, no it cannot run your entire business – as a matter of fact it’s a clunky pile of #vibecode npm nightmares that barely functions. When it does work though – it’s miraculous. It’s why I named mine Stephy, after the best admin/marketing miracle worker I ever had a pleasure of working with.

What is it? ELI5

It’s a robot that lives in your computer, with access to the same tools and web services you have access to. You chat with it through your favorite chat app and tell it what to do. It has a soul, personality, heartbeat, and a scheduler that enables it to remember your interactions and perform tasks for you on schedule.

At it’s core it’s a npm package that uses an LLM (OpenAI, Codex, Claude, etc) to coordinate and execute tasks based on instructions it keeps in markdown files. As you talk to it through your chat app (Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, etc) it references those files for instructions on how to perform a task, how to respond to you, which tools to use, etc. It also has skills which are npm packages that enable it to interact with web services and tools to get the job done. Over time as your md text files grow and you get the context down to exactly what you want, it can perform your tasks on a schedule in a cron it maintains on it’s own.

I’m sold, where do I put it?

Resist the temptation to buy a Mac mini. I know it’s all the rage right now and the potential is there — but it’s pretty half baked and just like every other npm project out there you’re likely to mess it up adding vibe coded skills and broken dependencies. YMMV.

You don’t need a dedicated PC or a laptop for this, unless you expect to have it use your Chrome browser (ffs don’t!) or edit video the resources of a free VPS from Amazon or Oracle Free Cloud are more than enough. I have one running on Raspberry Pi 4 for house stuff and it’s just as happy as the one that lives in a 16GB Proxmox container in my data center. If you don’t have Linux skills or aren’t in a mood for a learning curve to setup the free VPS instance, check out VPS providers like RackNerd or Digital Ocean.

February Update: This is the friendliest YouTube guide I’ve seen on getting started but it’s as outdated as this post – AI development moves fast! I still recommend watching it just so you can get an orientation on how to install the package, ssh tunnel, and a Telegram bot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DBpfB0ao50

How do I install it?

The installation is actually the simplest part of the process, you just run this command in your shell:

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash

This process will install all the required packages and the next thing you need to do is “hatch” your bot.

openclaw onboard

You’re now setting up your bot and I cannot encourage you highly enough to keep the documentation handy. I have only one recommendation here: when it comes to gateway bind it to 127.0.0.1. Idiots are binding their gateway to 0.0.0.0 and getting pwn3d left and right so please don’t do that. Lot’s of newbie YouTube walkthroughs are sponsored by VPS providers whose IP ranges are well known and it’s trivial to nmap the whole range for an open 18789 port and steal your credentials. Don’t be stupid.

Once you finish deploying your bot and onboarding it you have several ways of interacting with it. My favorite to get started is openclawd tui which will give you immediate access to your bot through the same terminal interface you used to install it. Give your bot a personality, name, what you want it to call you and how you prefer to interact with it.

If you’d rather interact with it through the powerful web interface, bring up an SSH tunnel. I’m assuming you’ve downloaded your VPS issued ssh key to your ~/.ssh so mind your paths and filenames

ssh -L 18789:127.0.0.1:18789 vladbot@demo.vlad.net -i ~/.ssh/vladbot-demo-vlad-net

vladbot@demo.vlad.net is my username and my vps server, the part at the end is path to my ssh key. Yours will be different but once you launch this you’ll be able to talk to your clawdbot at https://localhost:18789

What else do I need?

Next you have to pick a chat agent. I’ve personally used it on my infrastructure through Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack and Mattermost but it supports a TON of chat platforms. I loathe Facebook properties and I’ve found that it’s the most reliable on Telegram. On Telegram you just start a chat with Botfather, /newbot and follow the instructions to get your bot. By default this is locked down to you and tui or webUI make configuring the chat part of this super easy.

Some Tips

Most of what you see on social media is pure hype and fantasy. Remember these dudes hype and cut scenes to get the clicks and go viral… and if you follow them step by step at best you’re going to get hacked. Here are some of my suggestions when it comes to use:

  1. Make backups. Keep your bots markdown files backed up often. This is perhaps the best way to learn how clawdbot works, instruct it to make backups in ~/backups/ every day at midnight and report back. You will mess up your bot and your config as you play with it and copying back the *.md files will get you back to the experience quickly without having to recreate everything.
  2. DO NOT GIVE IT ACCESS TO YOUR ACCOUNTS. But Vlad, how am I going to get rich if I don’t give it access to my Polymarket and Coinbase accounts? Just like every other crypto influencer that hasn’t blown their brains out in the back of a rented Lambo – you won’t. And if you’re reading this post you likely don’t have a body for OnlyFans so calm down and give your bot it’s own accounts. It is much easier to create a forwarding rule for mail or to share a read-only calendar than it is to get your accounts back once someone has hacked it.
  3. Take it easy with skills and plugins. Remember that most of these addons are community built and have not gone through any sort of a security audit. Same caveats as Chrome plugins. It might be able to run your entire company but it also might send all your data to an intermediary, use your brain.

Have fun!

If you’ve ever used ChatGPT or Claude or CoPilot you know how much fun they can be but you’ve also probably experienced hallucinations and outright wrong answers. What makes Clawdbot special in my experience is the memory and instructions. It knows how to interact with the LLM to get the answer that I am looking for and it knows how to format it right. By giving it additional instructions and corrections it keeps adding specs to your markdown files which makes it far more fun and personable that ChatGPT – even when used in context with projects.

Leveraging automation with memory feels like a giant new step in the AI evolution. Happy to be alive to see what this thing does next.

Removing Microsoft Copilot

Posted: 6:13 am
December 21, 2025
AI, Microsoft, Windows
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If Microsoft Windows 11 hasn’t compelled you to switch to a Mac or Linux yet, you’re likely seeing way more Copilot in your day-to-day. For my fellow geezers that lived through MSN and Bing, every so often Microsoft invests an enormous amount of money in a second-rate release that the only way they can get you to use it is by forcing it on you. Repeatedly. As of Windows 11 25H2 the history repeats itself and your boy Vlad is here to help you get rid of it (somewhat).

Start > Run > gpoedit.msc

This will open Local Group Policy Editor. Go down to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows CoPilot and double tap Turn off Windows CoPilot.

Select Disabled and click on Apply / OK.

Now either reboot or run gpupdate /force from the command prompt and you shouldn’t see Windows Copilot again.

I want it gone-gone!

Read the opening paragraph again. Like herpes there is no getting rid of it, at best you’re managing outbreaks until the next major update where oops they’ve enabled it again. If GPO doesn’t do it for you, you can also remove the actual package. To do so launch powershell as an Administrator and run this:

Get-AppxPackage CoPilot -AllUsers | Remove-AppPackage -AllUsers

You now have Copilot-free Windows.

Saa(pocalyp)S(e)

Posted: 11:57 pm
March 1, 2025
Cloud, IT Business
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It has been years since I’ve felt like I’ve had a thought I wanted to share that needed more than 140 characters to fully explain. In the two years that have passed since my last blog post I have mostly been trolling my developer friends with AI and using it to learn and build cool stuff. With each passing month, those jokes get less and less funny as the AI tools become more and more sophisticated… to the point that I have no doubt this stuff is going to automate most of the present day white colar work.

For context, the last time I published a post on Vladville I was still spending my whole day in Microsoft Office. Any software solution that needed to be built required meetings, planning, skilled designer, skilled developer, documentation writer, training and marketing collateral, and most expensive of all – time.

Few months ago I got dragged into a Slack huddle at one of my businesses and the team was discussing a diagnostics and troubleshooting SaaS solution, contemplating developing one vs. licensing, frameworks, security, resources, timeline, all the usual software architecture stuff. I was at home, enjoying The Great Garlic 6″ (highly recommended) sub and typing in bits and pieces of their conversation into Claude AI. Naturally, what it spit out was absolute garbage but I kept on snacking and tweaking it and as the group was ready to wrap the meeting I asked if I could share my screen. I showed them a fully functional SMTP header analyzer, to many laughs and mockery.

Me: Ok, I know it’s ugly but watch this “Please make the interface minimalist and beautiful, use Tailwinds CSS. Use a blue color scheme. Oh, and add the latency between each hop, if it’s under 60 seconds only show the seconds s, if it’s over 60 seconds show the minutes m : seconds s.

Team: Laughing, please STOP!!!

Me: OK, now I want you to add a graph. Make it a bar graph with the hostnames on the Y axis and seconds latency on the X axis.

Team: STOP!!!

This went on for a few minutes and the laughter definitely died down while the STOP turned more into a nervous whimper. Before I even finished my Subway sandwich I had a complete and functional project that the team of 8 highly competent people was going to spend an entire month or more putting together, testing, designing, optimizing, securing. If that sounds like a lot, consider that the SaaS we were going to license this solution from would have cost us several thousand dollars – per month.

You’re already dead, you just don’t know it yet

The AI tools have only gotten better in the few months since that huddle and the era of highly profitable SaaS solutions may be looking at a sunset. The way you make money as a SaaS business is by dragging every employee into it. It doesn’t work if everyone isn’t working in the same system, with the same data, and the same SOP. There is no money in solving a small problem so often these platforms become bloated in order to maximize profits deliver great value.

The way you deliver even more value is by tiering your solution. You want to secure your cloud service with MFA, LDAP integration so you don’t have to manage and reconcile accounts across different platforms, that’s gonna be extra! Mobile apps? Oh that’s gonna be extra. You want to remove branding? Call for pricing. Hint: It’s gonna be a lot. And you’re gonna need a software maintenance and support contract too.

Meanwhile, the real world is moving from co-pilot to auto-pilot. AI agents and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) are driving efficiency at a level that obsoletes people. You see, as a SaaS developer you spend a lot of time designing dashboards, data grids, charts, reports and spend an eternity trying to deliver information to a human. Information, that in context and with expertise, can lead to better business decision making. Well, if the AI agent is the one consulting you on a business process, it does not care about the menu, the styling of the report, the workflow, the dark theme, or the features – it just consumes the API and data. All that extra stuff we do for humans.. rapidly loses value.

As does the overall value of a massive platform. As data based decisions go from co-pilot to auto-pilot, all those human “creature features” become irrelevant. Inedvidably, the power users and large organizations suddenly need way less seats. The licensing model built on “pay-for-features” suddenly has way fewer users and the entire model collapses.

That’s not even accounting for the resurgence of middleware, where companies can quickly mock up a software solution with relatively little expertise. I’m old enough to remember when Visual Basic came out and suddenly high school kids that were editing the yearbook last year were building software interfaces with the same basic skill set. The sales conversation around SaaS goes from “what problem does your software solve” to “how does your software work with my AI agent, or integrate better into our workflow”

And that’s a difficult environment in which to make a profitable software business. Or to justify a career in software development.

It’s actually worse..

In my retirement, I’ve actually moved to a Mac. I know, I know, I feel dirty about it too but the transparent way in which AI and agent workflows are integrated makes me far more efficient. Instead of sitting in Outlook all day and setting Benjamin’s on fire every year for every PC, Apple Mail shows me a quick summary of the whole email instead of just the sender and the subject. I know I’m not the only one based on the amount of people big tech seems to be sending to unemployment lately.

I’m not saying that this is going to wipe out SaaS, or that it can even affect solutions that require delivery of millions of transactions at scale. But it’s going to make the business of software a lot more difficult when people aren’t paying for features but for outcomes. When you’re getting paid per transaction it’s a lot harder to make a massive profit off a company licensing software that most of the employees barely use.

Yet, that’s been the model of wealth for Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, and most other Chrome tabs on your work PC.

P.S. I have a shoulder surgery coming up that’s going to put me on the sideline for a while. It’s going to be a minute before I can come back to the gym, November Project, motorcycles, and cool nature stuff. I am going to test my hypothesis and see if I can replace something we charge a fortune and some things we pay a fortune for…. with something free.

It’s been a minute…

Posted: 11:59 pm
April 12, 2023
Uncategorized, Vladville
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Hard to believe that it’s been 5 years since I retired and nearly 3 years since I logged out of most socials & blogs. While I’ve really been enjoying the peace and quiet, I find myself in a similar predicament as when I started this blog: Everyone I hang out wants to know about the same stuff and I keep on having the same conversation over and over: AI.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an AI bro nor do I have the set of promps/process to sell you to make extra cash. Nor am I about to post 3,000 Midjourney images. That aspect of the AI in our media (along with endless doom & gloom) is on the same level as popups that tell you MILFs in your area are looking for you – you know better than to bite that clickbait.

The technology around AI is getting more and more impressive by the day. I’ve been playing with it for the past few months and it truly feels like back when Google came out and suddenly there was a new group of superhumans that were good at writing Google search queries that got the right data.

Well, it’s 2023. That data query now has a batch process, memory, agents, state, queueing and it get’s infinitely more complex and cool from there.

The potential AI has to make us more productive, more resourceful and more knowledgeable is enormous.

And since that’s what everyone everywhere wants to talk about, I figured I’d get back to Vladville and keep notes here as I learn. Most people I hang out with aren’t CS nerds but they still have business challenges that AI could address in fun new ways so I look forward to playing with different use cases and posting my notes/ideas on here.

I hope you find them useful and they inspire you to go tinker with this AI stuff on your own.

Love, -Vlad.

Social Media Against Society

Posted: 11:35 am
November 3, 2020
Social Media
2 Comments

I originally wrote this blog post back in March. I didn’t post it because I thought this subject of Americans vs. Americans was touchy as we were entering Covid quarantines. Then I didn’t post it during the riots. Then I didn’t post it during the election season. Then I gave up on social media entirely. This year has seemingly found a way to drive us all further and further from each other, and I hope this in some way serves as either enlightenment or a goodbye because I am not willing to lose more friends and family due to a difference in opinion. I love you all. Except vegans.

In my opinion…

1997. I’m sitting at the next table over from my boss who is fighting with a Juniper rep over some BGP configuration issue. I am not sure what they said to him but the words that came out of his mouth were:

“Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.”

At that moment I was building our new Usenet server (Linux software raid with experimental kernel drivers), to host one of the first and largest distributed discussion/bulletin board systems. And, alt.binaries.* aside, the largest pile of opinions nobody asked for.

If you ask me, that is what made America great: everyone had an opinion, they were smart enough to keep the idiotic ones to themselves, and anyone that shouted it from the corner with a megaphone was a nutjob that you ran away from faster than a dude handing out hooker business cards on the Las Vegas strip.

We all have personal thoughts and opinions – and they only matter to us.

The age of dimlightenment…

Your opinion is worthless.

Your opinion of my opinion, equally worthless. Even more so, because you’re free to misinterpret what you think I said. Social media makes that easy.

Yes, it’s fun to debate, to argue, to joke, to tease, to post memes – but it does not carry any value. Yes, debating and defending your opinion might excite you, empower you, educate you – but it’s very much a personal and internal matter that is of no consequence to the real world. Yes, I love Florida Gators and I think they are the best despite the record, but there is a profound difference between screaming at the TV and getting tackled full speed by a 300lb linebacker.     

I’m sure you can all relate and agree.

But things get a little tricky when you throw in social media and some Psychology 101 on a quest for eternal profits.

Suddenly, your opinion is no longer some irrelevant BS you’re slinging with your buddies over wings & beer.

Your opinion, nearly instantaneously, is delivered in black and white to your friends, family, and people that hate your guts. They are free and encouraged to “react” to your opinion, or share it out of context with their friends and associates.

Your opinion now not only matters, it has a score. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. Love. Care. Sarcastic care. Sadness. Retweet. Heart. Shared. Screenshotted. Reposted. Facebook does a great job of delivering constant notifications and reactions to your opinion, compelling you to react back in an environment that is designed to embrace your short attention span and need for frequent dopamine.    

Your opinion, that you likely formed and decreed from your porcelain throne while regretting your lunch at Chipotle, is now how your friends and family see you.

Your afternoon started with saying yes to queso on your burrito, but 15 toilet paper sheets and flushes later you’re sharing a joke on Facebook and some dude you haven’t seen in a decade is calling you a racist. 

Facebook enabled all of us to be that crazy guy shouting at people passing by. Facebook not only normalized and boosted sharing unpopular opinions, it’s gamification and algorithms outright weaponized it for profit. They handed us the megaphone and surrounded us with familiar people/pictures/names so we’d feel safe being ourselves.

By all means – share. And then to reward you and incentivize you – here is a way to react. Because it’s a way to have an emotional outburst without the effort of actually thinking of a response. It drives engagement, which can either positively or negatively validate the poster.

On social media you’re never a raving lunatic – you’re an influencer!

But that’s not how Facebook makes it’s money. Just like a drug dealer, Facebook makes money by getting you addicted to the neverending stream of opinions that will glue you to your phone and keep you scrolling. The longer you scroll the more likely you are to make their job even easier, by emotionally reacting to something that further perfect the trap. Cause the longer you scroll, the more paid me$$ages they can get in front of you. The hell with western civilization, they are just innocently broadcasting everyone on a mission as an advocate of freedom of speech. Except, they operate more like Al-Qaeda. Here is a process in a nutshell:

  1. Fill out a survey when you join Facebook to show your interests so that they can build a model for the type of content you’re into.
  2. Based on what you like, and how you “react” to content, Facebook suggests additional content that is along the same lines.
  3. They track which links you click on, what you scroll back on, who you mute/ignore or become a top fan.

Facebook actively incentivizes you to share your opinion. Whether it’s through dopamine/validation hits when others react or engage with the content you share, or by showing you content that they know you can’t resist commenting on, it is always your eyeballs that and mindless clicks that are relevant. Never forget: They want you scrolling and clicking, not reading and thinking.

Tell Facebook what you like. Tell Facebook what you hate. Tell Facebook which charities you support. Put it on your profile picture. Show it how you react (directly, or indirectly by leaving it as you scroll past something unsavory) – and rest assured that they’ll give you endless content to keep you glued to your stream.

That last algorithm, the one that looks for more addictive and blood pressure raising content, is the most dangerous one: the one that suggests pages and groups to follow. Where Facebook’s “community standards” police is usually looking the other way because those very same places produce shareable and engaging content that draws people in.

The biggest problem

The biggest problem with all of social media, according to me, is:

Social media tricks you into thinking that your opinion matters.

You are stupid (or emotional) enough to sit there and defend it. You take opinions of strangers as if they are attacks on your very core, as if they carry value and meaning and as if they aren’t musings of someone bored on their toilet.

And all these groups, all these pages, virtually everything you can feed into Facebook, is there to monetize your inability or unwillingness to close the window.

It even goes one step further, by providing you convenient ways to justify your opinions along with easy access for anyone that has a different opinion to disagree with you. Now go on, feed it more.

Real World

In the real world, your opinions don’t matter and you rarely have to defend them. Your thoughts, your interests, your values – they all drive your actions – and that is what defines you.

On Facebook (and social media in general), it’s the exact opposite: there are no actions, just a lot of hot air. Incentivized and monetized by a company pretending to be about free speech while developing and profiting from the technology designed to drive us apart and pin us against each other. For some of you observing and participating in that is a form of therapy, and I understand and appreciate that. It’s not worth the tradeoff for me anymore.

We cannot let our cities and our civilization burn down just so some weirdo dweeb that couldn’t get laid can stack a few more billion.

We cannot let the opinions and the outrage over opinions stall our progress as civilized people.

We are allowing things that even we’re not that passionate about break up friendships, marriages, families – over our limited understanding of the world around us, our lack of empathy, our inability or unwillingness to see someone else’s point of view and do something about it.

For me, it’s doing something that I in good conscience am not willing to feed because I firmly believe that we’re stronger together than apart, when we work on solutions to common problems, not when we just debate our disagreements.

To that end, I hope you keep on following Vladville if you’re interested in what I do and how I can be of some value to you. As for Facebook, I’ll just let it know when I post stuff here, but it’s license to bother, manipulate or profit off my attention and my relationships is hereby revoked.

Kindness over Everything

Posted: 12:45 pm
March 17, 2020
Uncategorized
1 Comment

While social media has achieved an amazing feat of connecting us all, it has done at the expense of our kindness. You see, social media enables us to express ourselves freely with a delusion that our opinion actually matters. The kinds of antics that are common on Facebook and Twitter these days have historically been the game of town drunks and crazies that yelled at people that passed by. The guy that stood on the street corner with a megaphone and a sign yelling at strangers – he got Twitter and followers now. Not only is that insanity tolerated (instead of briskly distanced from), it’s actually rewarded.

You get a higher rank on social media by offering your opinion – about food, about politics, about sex, and increasingly about things you have no clue about. The kinds of statements that would get you punched in the face on the street are rewarded with likes, followers, emojis. Suddenly we’re not just able to share freely, with no consequences, we even have platforms and mediums to support our right to have an opinion and scream it at complete strangers. And lord have mercy on your poor soul if you disagree. We don’t see each other as human beings anymore – we see walking labels, stereotypes, threats – and while that may always have been true to a certain extent we’ve never had an entire army behind us to reinforce our shitty attitude towards one another.

It has made us lose faith in each other as friendly people that are just trying to enjoy life.

It’s become a game – of winner take all, where winning is not just everything, or the only thing – far too many people are actively celebrating the defeat of someone we don’t like. Suddenly it’s not just about the pursuit of happiness, it’s also about the pursuit of misery of those who dare disagree.

Watching and observing humanity pass by on Facebook has been a fascination of mine. This coronavirus panic is shining the light on the way we cope – through disbelief, rage, disappointment, satire, jokes, fear, and anger.

We all want to help.

When pressed, we want to help our fellow man. Even the quiet shuntins and loners, who under ordinary circumstances had little more than a coffee / cat / Netflix obsession, are on Facebook several times a day trying to share tips and hints for making it through a self-quarantine.  

…

Ok, it’s about to get cringeworthy and for that I apologize in advance.

I am typing this blog post at 35,000 feet in the air, aboard a practically empty Delta 2323 flight to Los Angeles.

On a ticket I booked about 10 hours ago.

Fully aware that when I return to Orlando I will not see my friends, my team, or my family for two weeks.

Why? Well, I had to explain this insanity to my son Timmy last night, as he was laying on the floor crying freaking out about . And now I’m going to share it with you.

Son, not everyone out there is as fortunate as we are. I build software that helps people manage small businesses. And those folks are about to go through the kind of pain and suffering that you can’t even imagine. These aren’t just folks who work for a company and will just easily hop to the next job at the earliest opportunity. These are folks that take out loans they have to repay, who believe they can do something better than anyone else. And they make things happen, at their own cost, all the time. Sometimes it’s financial, sometimes it’s time to train someone, sometimes it’s to give someone an opportunity, sometimes it’s to provide something special or unique to their community. In a sense son, these are people that look to serve.

I am going to Los Angeles tomorrow because I am going to give away something we’ve built for ExchangeDefender, something that has made all the difference in building our business and afforded everything you see around you. It’s going to take some creativity, some repurposing, and some lifting to make it happen. Yes, it’s not an ideal time to go. Yes, I probably could force/pay someone else to go.

But people are hurting right now son. They need to be able to go home and take care of their families and stay safe – but they need to continue working too. Because nobody is coming to their door with a handout. I’m in a good shape, I will be careful, but…

But son, I have the ways and means to help people right now. And yes, I could just go hide in the master suite and spend the next two weeks in the hot tub trading stocks and watching cartoons. But I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror if I did that. I would not be able to go into all the small businesses that you enjoy because if they are out for weeks or months they won’t get back on their feet. And son, they can’t afford to work the same level that Fortune 500 companies can. Jerry (his guitar teacher) is not making money if you aren’t next to him. Our economy is dependent on the movement of money and spending (Yes, I preach economics at home nonstop) and when Jerry doesn’t get your money he can’t go spend it on food. And then the food store doesn’t need as many employees or as many items. And then the people that make the food, that deliver the food, that test the food, etc don’t have money to spend. Everything that we enjoy, comes to a halt. (and now we’re both crying)

I have the means to help son and I’m going to. I’ll be fine. Or I won’t, I could crash my Corvette on the way to the airport and die. You don’t live your life expecting the worst case scenario, life is too precious and you have to live it.

And you have a purpose.

….

My team at ExchangeDefender has built Wrkoo (formerly Shockey Monkey) as our business management platform. We do literally everything in it from managing our staff, punching the clock, keeping track of spending, collecting $ from clients, provisioning services, storing passwords, working on projects, solving problems.

We’ve spend millions of dollars building it over the decade, and yes, we offer it as a successful commercial product at https://www.wrkoo.com. #ABP

You could have paid for it as a monthly subscription until yesterday.

But right now, we’re in this together. Right now, it’s our moral responsibility to help as many companies like ours survive a sudden downturn in activity. We can help people go home and still keep track of all their employees, vendors, and clients. And Wrkoo is yours just for asking. It will stay free for months, until we get out of this uncertain time and things get back to normal. No bait and switch, you will not be prompted for a credit card.

As a matter of fact, my team has worked relentlessly through the weekend to rewrite the onboarding process and make it something that will deliver immediate results in about 3 minutes after landing on the splash page.

We’ll be making a big deal about it over at https://www.exchangedefender.com/blog in a few hours when the team has dumbed the thing down to the level than anyone can do it without looking at documentation. We’ll also be running ads on Facebook – cause I get it – if you’ve suddenly got to adjust your operations and minimize travel, if you can’t get all your folks to the office, or if you’re just being smart and prudent and NOT even attempting to do so because you live in a major metropolitan area. I’ve got your back. We’ve got to help each other out. This is no time to shame people for not having anything, and it’s definitely not the time to take advantage of people and gauge the small guys that are just trying to survive.

We got you. Till at least June, possibly longer. There is no tip jar, no contract, no commitment, you don’t need to name the kids you accidentally make during the quarantine Vladimir (for the love of god don’t do that under any other circumstances either), you don’t need a computer science degree to set it up. If you can figure out Facebook, you can figure out this…. Start here:

https://www.wrkoo.com/signup

And I might be biased but it’s just friggin beautiful.

It powers my dream. I hope it can do the same for you. Or, at the very least, get you through this mess while keeping you sane and productive.

Be safe. Be kind. #BeBest

Do Something

Posted: 6:49 pm
September 2, 2019
Cloud, ExchangeDefender
1 Comment

About a year ago, I retired. More on that later.

 

                          What if an outage meant compromise/breach?

Over the past year or so, I’ve done quite a bit in terms of email security research, bouncing ideas at random hours and even more random levels of sobriety with my team @ExchangeDefender. And while there is a thin line between genius and insane, there is a very clear red line when it comes to compliance, standards, international/national/state/industry/blah regulations that are governing email at an increasingly detrimental value to the email user. At one point earlier this year a large email provider went lights out for an entire day and this post caught my eye:

“We’re rerouting email. We cannot afford for the client to be down, but we also can’t just point it direct and risk that someone clicks on something that gets them hacked.”

unknown/paraphrased

Since then I’ve talked to some of my industry friends about a concept of a non-profit email research service focused on sharing security information. Much like my pile of Corvette projects, it remained in random stages of discussion and whiteboarding.

Then Dorian came up. Ever since the earliest days of ExchangeDefender (and it’s ETRN predacesor at DialISDN) we’ve offered free email failover MX service to folks in a way of a disaster, and it’s always been popular. But thanks to the red tape, freebie anonymous access to the ExchangeDefender would blow compliance on many levels. That bugged me but, really, not much I can do.

WineFast forward to Friday afternoon, while enjoying a lovely glass of pinot noir waiting for my 4-hour-delayed flight… Dorian got upgraded to a category 4 hurricane. My flight got delayed again due to storms in Dallas, and my glass of wine got upgraded to a bottle. I called my boy Travis (CTO, ExchangeDefender) and after hearing “No” about 94 times, he agreed to vlan off some decomissioned hardware for the project. Three days of writing, testing, and tweaking the first inbound node went up at inbound.xdwall.com. It’s already up and running and queueing/delivering mail for servers in the way of this storm.

Once I come up with a less stupid name, I will announce it here. Once the nonprofit is organized, licensed, etc we’ll make a big deal of it but here is the skinny:

$x is an email security/resiliancy project. Nearly all the security problems organizations have start with an email and relying on the user to stop them is just simply naive. Commercial email operations are more concerned about selling advertising / productivity software and devices than they are about a working communications product, further discouraged by an excessive regulatory process that is slowing down innovation. I am building $x as a free email security layer, designed to provide a layer of common sense security at the edge of the network.

DorianMore on all that later. If you are in the way of the storm, send me an email at vlad@exchangedefender.com and point your secondary MX (of a significantly higher weight) to inbound.xdwall.com.

We’ll make it through this storm together. There will be more storms. There will be stronger storms. And when we’re not fighting mother nature, we’ll be fighting a random assortment of Russians, Chinese military, and an occasional African prince that really, really, really needs to get his fathers money out of the country. Worst case scenario, an unscrupulous marketing scammer will be forced to get a real job. And no matter how funny, all of these people pose a direct threat to you. So.. you can sit at the airport and get drunk or you can do something.

Confessions of a Facebook troll

Posted: 12:30 pm
March 8, 2019
Gaypile, Social Media
Comments Off on Confessions of a Facebook troll

Forgive me father, it has been a while since my last blog.

Now that I’m at my ripe, old age of 40, retired, living the dream (more on that later), I really wanted to see if I can help so many of you that are struggling with a social media fighting addiction and you don’t even know it. Namely, have you ever gotten into a random argument on Facebook and an hour or two later you can’t even figure out how you got there?

Technology that gets you addicted and keeps you in social media fights is written by the generation who never got it’s ass kicked for having a stupid opinion. Or got it’s ass kicked period. That coddled no-spank generation, who knew that any in-person confrontation would get recorded and tagged online for all eternity, learned how to keep it’s blood pressure down while keeping all the nastiness and pettiness online.

Now, what happens when that technology gets weaponized, gamified, and introduced to older people that do know which kinds of arguments will get your ass kicked? Interestingly enough, depression and even more irrational and emotional arguments.

There are too many studies, too much research to quote but I’ll help you double check this quickly: Compare Wall Street Journal articles to Fox News opinion pieces. Now compare them to Breitbart comments. All conservative sources, all discussing pretty much the same event (yes, it works for liberal content, too). Notice how much more combative, derisive, and offensive content gets the further away you get from actual fact reporting and into opinions?

But what you probably didn’t notice is how much more time you’ve spent reading that juicy Breitbart comment thread than the boring WSJ report. There is a reason for that.

HINT: We are naturally drawn more to the content that triggers an emotional response than a dry factual one that requires logic and reasoning.

I’ve personally made millions of dollars on that simple bit of Psychology 101. If you excite people, if you engage people, if you get an emotional response they are far more likely to remember you and engage you than if you appeal to them facts and logic alone. And it doesn’t matter if you’re rude and abrasive while making your argument either – they won’t remember that, they’ll just remember the thrill.

Welcome to the Thunderdome

Far too many of you simply don’t know when you’re being gamed.

HINT: It starts the moment you get on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or any other threaded conversation / direct message system.

Sometimes the opinion is so wrong, so stupid, so wildly uninformed and out of touch with reality – that you just have to say something. Gotcha, sucker!

The second you make a comment your argument becomes weaponized – now you’re on the receiving end of a barrage of likes, reactions, counterarguments, mentions, insults, and worse – your friends are likely to see your comments as well even if it’s not a post on your wall. Now strangers, most of whom you’d probably never go with beyond even the basic situational pleasantries, are discussing something with you that is deeply associated with your own values. Your brain interprets their opinion as a personal insult of your core values and the way you see the world around you. And because they are associated with a friend (or friend of a friend) there is an additional weight to them. And because social media will keep on reminding you and using it to drag in other comments and opinions – that attack gets amplified. Your social media profile also gets skewed to keep on showing you the kind of content you like to engage on – so whatever it is you’re arguing about online with strangers, that is weighing on you, is now getting stacked because they want you to keep on feeding it content. It’s really that simple.

So what now?

For far too many people, your own insecurity keeps you from recognizing that you’re being manipulated. Sorry. That same insecurity, that you try to overcome by trying to convince strangers of something you believe, has an unfortunate consequence of making you miserable online. I’ve lost count of people in real life that are trying to unplug just to run back to their accounts like a crackhead.

Now, some of you didn’t have central European grandparents chasing you around the table with a wooden spoon to teach you to act right. But the answer is surprisingly the same. Stupid hurts. Until you can associate stupidity with pain, you will continue being an idiot that wastes time in online fight and you’ll just be more miserable for it.

Get you a rubber band:

Every time you even look at a Facebook post that isn’t making you money or has anything to do with your subject matter expertise, instead of commenting pull that band and let it give you the physical and emotional feedback that you crave so badly.

“But Vlad, they are wrong, I can’t let them be stup…” – If you’re thinking this, your rubber band isn’t thick enough and you didn’t pull it far enough. Add more reps until your skin changes color.

Hopefully this bit of common sense (millennial translation: “life hack”) helps. Just remember: Nobody gives a fuck about your opinion and it’s probably worthless. Someone is making money out of baiting you into it: There are two kinds of people in this world: Those that keep on doing stupid shit that causes ruber band pain and those that use the ruber band to keep their benjamins rolled up. The choice is yours.

Encouraging Millennial Workforce

Posted: 7:00 pm
February 24, 2018
Boss
1 Comment

Last time I discussed how to build a great team with millennials and how some of the old “best practices” just don’t work in the new world. Now, I’d like to turn your attention to a subject of appreciation and encouragement, something that was essentially nonexistent when I started working (beyond token employee awards and the corporate ladder system, neither of which will do you much good with millennials in SMB):

The millennial language of appreciation is deep in encouragement, reinforcement and ultimately improving your team even if doesn’t directly benefit you financially.

Now that I’ve lost like 94% of my audience, yes, I acknowledge that the subject of employee empowerment that doesn’t directly feed the bottom line is somewhat taboo in business. And as alien as it may seem, you’re not going to get incredible employees from another planet, so you may as well just drop to your knees and thank whichever deity you believe in for giving you people you can develop into what you need them to be.

And for the sake of statistics, these are not your ordinary folks – you’re lucky if even 10% of your workforce has any bit of a genius and hustler mentality. The other 90% of your staff, that you have to hack, manage, provide alarm clocks and constant reminders and encouragement to do the basic parts of their job… I’ll cover that in another post. But for now, let’s focus on your geniuses.

Unicorn Millennials

If you’ve somehow managed to find these unicorns that speak your language while still having an open mind to be plugged into all the new technologies and trends, your old school appreciation language is not going to work. I mean that sincerely, I could fill up two books with all the ways I’ve failed to motivate and build up people over the years, and they would probably be word-for-word identical with what you can read in any business book: focus on corporate ladders, title, status, raises, promotions, written notes, perks.

Meanwhile your average millennial employee is more concerned about not having to fuss about their attire, being able to listen to their music as loud as they want to at work and they don’t care if you have them working out of an Amazon box – they care that they can do work somewhere outside of the “office” entirely.

Good luck reconciling all that. I will in another post. I know, I know, I’m teasing you but I want you to understand that I have been through this whole thing too and everything you’ve ever had work with grownups is going to backfire (sometimes horribly) with the new generation.

The reason I bring this up is simple: the new generation is magnitudes better than we are or ever were. The really good ones just don’t have the patience to play the game by the current rules which is why they’ll end up getting nowhere… but that too is for another day.

Geniuses

I want you to pay attention to the following, read it as many times as necessary for it to sink in:

When you have incredible people you can’t help them by cheering them on in what they are already doing, their ego doesn’t value your encouragement. It doesn’t need it. They they already know how to get moving.

They are doing it because they love to. It’s their passion.

You can help them, you can encourage them, you can build them up – but there is only one thing that they will value because nobody has done it for them before: push them past the point where they would ordinarily give up.

Your opinion, your cheerleading, your encouragement, your input, your work ethic, your contribution, your ____, should only show up when they have reached their limit. And working with them to get them past what they thought was the limit of their capabilities.

Pushing them past that point, through whichever means you have at your disposal, is how you’ll get great employees from the next generation. Treasure them, value them, build them up and build a mission together with them. Win-win.

…

It really is that simple and that time consuming. Yes, it’s gonna take time, money, research, effort – everything you thought you were going to worry less about by hiring people in the first place! And if you’re stupid, this is a great time to stop reading. If you aren’t, you have probably figured out what the payback is: These people aren’t going to be going on to another job at a different company: they will run the next company. The more you can teach them, the more value you’ll get out of them, the more aggressively you commit yourself to getting them to the next level the faster they will get your business and all your other employees above the typical corporate malaise and mediocrity.