# WT352 โ€” Interviewing Otto for the Job - Issue: 352 - Published: October 3, 2026 - URL: https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/352/ - Summary: OpenAI dots, Cloudflare cf CLI, Daring Fireball on Muse, Claude Max usage, Elixir Collector signed releases, MicroLLM lab, Gemini 4. - Word count: 3074 - Domains: blog.cloudflare.com, blog.google, blog.jim-nielsen.com, daringfireball.net, dns.museum, en.wikipedia.org, getbeastbox.com, github.com, minnestar.org, numbermuseum.com, openai.com, ordway.org, reasonable.io, shop.ingramspark.com, stateofutopia.com, supercell.com, support.apple.com, thereader.mitpress.mit.edu, tv.apple.com, vitalik.eth.limo, wattwindow.com, www.anthropic.com, www.aymannadeem.com, www.cjchilvers.com, www.derekthompson.org, www.eff.org, www.markdown.beauty, www.pokemon.com, www.radishfarmstop.com, www.ramblingjosh.com, www.reddit.com, www.theverge.com --- Hello there! ๐Ÿ‘‹ Fall is in the air here in Minnesota. ๐Ÿ‚ This is one of my favorite times of year. The air is crisp in the morning. An open flannel makes the day feel perfect. And if you play [The Replacements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Replacements_(band)) everything will just fall into place. I just got back from a lovely morning watching the runners in the Twin Cities Marathon go by. Tammy and Mazie ran the 10 miler as well. Another tribute to the wonders of fall. ## Currently **Reading:** My cousin Josh's recent essay [To Finitude](https://www.ramblingjosh.com/2026/09/16/to-finitude.html) is a great read. Also, he just published [Jaunty Hair](https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=9HmmoqLZIn5wa8p0LBOqdQpJPoCILhlQJ24HU1ZZpjU) with highlights from his twenty-plus years of writing. You should order a copy! ๐Ÿ“š **Watching:** Tammy and I've started watching [The Pitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pitt) and have been liking it a lot. I'm squeamish about the injury sequences so I seem to always end up hiding my eyes for some part of the show but I'm digging it. **Planning:** We need to spread the word on the **Legacy Contacts** feature for Apple Accounts. I set this up a while ago and added Tammy and the kids. I recently had some folks add me as their Legacy Contact. Set it up, no matter how old you are. Apple has a good [support overview](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102631) for this feature. ![A painted lady butterfly with orange, black, and white wings perches on a cluster of yellow lantana blooms.](https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/352/images/412e44469135.jpg) This butterfly didn't mind me taking its photo even up close at the [Landscape Arboretum](https://arb.umn.edu). _Sep 27, 2026 ยท [Chanhassen, MN](https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=44.86127&mlon=-93.61596#map=16/44.86127/-93.61596)_ ## Notable ### [Introducing dots | OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots) I've been playing with dots this weekend. I created a new generation of [Otto](https://ottoai.thingelstad.com) on dots. In short, dots feels like a productized version of [OpenClaw](https://openclaw.ai). I think a lot of people are going to like this feature. When I hear people say what they wished AI could do for them, or what an Agent would be, it is really close to what dots is doing today. I configured my dot as Otto and decided the first thing I wanted to try was to see if it could drive my Elixir project I've been working on. I already have a team of agents that have been helping build it, but it still requires me to make a lot of decisions. So I asked Otto (as a dot) about how it could interact with Codex and it could do everything I wanted. It has its own computer in the cloud and it can also control the Mac mini that I have for my agents to run on. After confirming it had the capabilities I told it I was going to interview it for the job. I asked several questions: - "What do you think the vision for this product is?" - "What do you think is working well in this product? What isn't working?" - "How would you decide if a feature is a good fit?" - "How would you work with me?" It passed with flying colors and then I gave it a chance to interview me. After that I let it get to work and it is doing great. The interface for a dot is through the ChatGPT app but it is exactly like a messaging interface with a person, including emoji reactions. You can also call your dot and talk to it. It makes a phone ring and oddly Otto doesn't pick up on the first ring. :-) I'm impressed. I suspect that in the next few weeks this will sunset my OpenClaw project, which I've had such an on and off relationship with, and I can see this being really popular. With dots out, I now understand better the new ChatGPT Pro 500 accounts. With Otto running here I was able to have it work on multiple projects all night. It is interesting to consider that a barrier to AI companies doing more is just your time and capacity to ask it to do more! ### [Daring Fireball: Iโ€™ll Wait](https://daringfireball.net/2026/09/ill_wait) I've had a number of folks ask me what I think about Facebook's new Muse product. I have seen some videos and read some write-ups, but I won't be installing it. I don't use any software from Facebook (Meta). I block them at the network layer. An AI agent powered by their surveillance machine? Not in a million years. I'm sure it is well designed and even does impressive stuff. It isn't just them by the way. I am doing a lot with agents but I also have them running on a computer of their very own and using a different user and iCloud account. That is Otto. Otto has access to some data but only in ways I provision for it. > The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. Iโ€™d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source? It doesnโ€™t even get to the point of my considering Meta as Museโ€™s creator. I wasnโ€™t tempted an iota to try OpenClaw, and Iโ€™m not tempted to try Muse on my Mac. On _a_ Mac, maybe. But not _my_ Mac. It is worth being especially careful with your data as you start to work with agentic tools more. ### [Introducing cf: the agentic CLI for the entire Cloudflare API](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-cf-cli-launch/) Many tech platform companies have completely pivoted their user experiences to be agent-optimized and this is just the latest step in that direction. Many of those services will only have agents as their users, so the experience needs to be optimized for them. The humans stay in the audit and billing lanes for now. ### [The cryptographic world computer](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/09/27/the_cryptographic_world_computer.html) I'm intrigued by how [Buterin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin) is continuing to steer Ethereum. Many folks have put crypto in the dustbin of the past. I think there is still strong utility that is aligned with the future we are seeing come about. I think it is pretty obvious that [Agents will need money](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/346/#agents-can-now-create-cloudflare-accounts-buy-domains-and-deploy) and digital currency will be best for that. And a future massively distributed compute platform like Ethereum is well positioned to solve problems without centralized systems. ### [MicroLLM lab โ€” tiny LLMs, Q4, in your browser](https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/microllmlab/) It is wild that LLMs were not even a thing a few years ago and now they seem to be everything and you can even now run some of them in your browser. You can quickly see how these "micro" LLMs are not terribly capable. I've generally considered the esoteric and expensive hardware needs of LLMs a reason to discount many concerns about agents operating autonomously. Is it reasonable to think a powerful "enough" LLM could run in a web browser? It still seems like a stretch to me. ### [Donโ€™t confuse space and time.](https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/dont-confuse-space-and-time/) This line from this article is one of the most important design considerations that nobody ever thinks about enough: > Time matters more than space. Back in my MarketWatch days I remember our team being frustrated that we had fewer stock quote lookup page views compared to the likes of Yahoo! Finance. Our page "loaded slower" so they came to the tech team with a request to "make it faster". We had already optimized that page like crazy and it was fast, but we also just had a lot of "stuff" on it. The reality was that Yahoo! Finance was sending out about 80% fewer bytes of data than we were for the same thing. That meant our page loaded 5x slower than theirs. And we had fewer page views. A user doesn't spend "5 page views" with you; they spend 3 minutes or the time it takes to do a task. You get to decide with your design and features how hard or easy you make that. Always optimize for time! ### [Continuing our infrastructure updates: Whatโ€™s changing in the coming months : r/modnews](https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1wubgvt/continuing_our_infrastructure_updates_whats/) Reddit's tagline is "the heart of the Internet". If that were the case they just broke it. > Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives. Platforms embrace open standards like RSS when they are new because it is a way to get users. Then when they "enshittify" they cut the open web off. Reddit has been doing it for a while, this is just the newest version. They hide it in "large-scale scraping" instead of "we can't monetize your engagement" but we know the real why. Poor showing Reddit. ### [Trump's Use of Truth Social's Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans' 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/ff-court-trumps-use-truth-socials-pay-see-posts-first-scheme-violates-americans) I'm a long-time supporter of the EFF and I'm glad to see them here. This scheme to generate revenue for Truth Social off of access should be illegal. I continue to believe we need even more here. As a citizen, I should not be required to submit to the surveillance economy of a private company to get information from my government. That entire loop should be illegal. ### [You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner - Derek Thompson](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-the-american-host) Pulling on themes from [Bowling Alone](http://bowlingalone.com) and the demise of social structures in everyday life. It is interesting to look at the chart in this article and how much everything has dropped except for three outliers: playing a video game at home, going to an exercise class, or going to a concert. Even those last two are only circumstantially around other people. You are in a group and interaction is none to minimal, typically. A while back my book club read [The WEIRDest People in the World](https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world/) and there is a section there where they look at the multiple dimensions of society: family, work, clubs, religion, etc. Societies grow with more dimensions. It seems consequential that we have seen these massive declines in social groups. It seems impossible that this isn't at least related to polarization and less empathy in society? _Related: take a moment to consider that "going to a concert" is one of the jumps up, and that concerts have become ridiculously expensive lately. This feels like an additional commentary._

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

This issue touches on platforms closing off the open web and on surveillance as the price of access. Signal is a counterexample: a free, open-source messaging app from the nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation, with no ads, no trackers, and no data collection, sustained by donations rather than advertisers or acquirers. Signal is this year's Supporting Membership nonprofit, and every dollar of membership fees goes to it. The newsletter stays free either way. If you'd like to give alongside other readers, a year of Supporting Membership is $48.
## Journal ### Friday [9:12 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/25/we-watched-mayday-on-apple.html) โ€” We watched [Mayday](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/mayday/umc.cmc.shin43vzfoz3h4ggx41z8rf) on Apple TV tonight. Fun movie with plenty of action and good laughs. Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh were great in it. Movie poster with two men in winter coats lying on their backs in snow, the title pressed into the snow above them. [9:15 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/25/it-still-gives-me-a.html) โ€” It still gives me a big grin when you open a model and then later go to the BambuLabs P2S and there is the actual thing in real life as it were. Slicer software view of a dark 3D printer build plate filled with rows of small white ghost models with black oval eyes. Rows of printed white ghost figures with black eyes standing on a textured metal build plate inside a 3D printer. ### Saturday [8:44 AM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/26/i-guess-im-getting-my.html) โ€” I guess Iโ€™m getting my money's worth for my $200 Claude Max account. > I went through the local Claude Code history on this Mac: 120 sessions and 254 subagent runs from Aug 6 to Sep 26, about 52k model calls. At API list prices that comes to about $13.7k. If you're on a subscription, treat the dollar figures as a measure of how fast you use up your limits rather than a bill. Recent weeks run about $2.1โ€“2.5k each. There are obvious efficiency improvements for me to make. ๐Ÿ˜ฌ [9:40 AM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/26/the-radish-farm-stop-opened.html) โ€” The [Radish Farm Stop](https://www.radishfarmstop.com) opened a couple blocks from our house and it is great. Glad to see they are doing well. It made me think of SimCity when a new building is placed and the Sims start showing up. ๐Ÿฅณ๐Ÿ˜‚ Glass-fronted Radish Farm Stop market and cafe with a green sign, a wooden sandwich board reading OPEN, and planters by the door. [2:52 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/26/i-used-some-of-my.html) โ€” I used some of my Claude Cloud credits to put in place a truly secure pipeline for [Elixir Collector](https://github.com/jthingelstad/elixir-mcp-collector). Starting at v3.0.0 all releases are signed using a private key that I manage and the entire pipeline is signed all the way to ingestion. It also got safety improvements in the auto-update process. Dark dashboard listing five collectors run by King Thing, four marked signed and one unverified, beside an ASCII key fingerprint. Detail page for the Mini P.E.K.K.A collector on jamie-mac, v3.0.4, with binary hash, trusted key, and Drain and Stage buttons. [5:17 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/26/i-realized-i-could-probably.html) โ€” I realized I could probably get a data point I've never been able to from WT Builder: how long does it take for me to create the [Weekly Thing](https://weekly.thingelstad.com)? Turns out I can now answer that. Additionally, I can now evaluate features on how they improve my workflow and time required. Table comparing WT350 and WT351: 2 h 52 m vs 2 h 25 m to publish, about 3 h 50 m vs 2 h 30 m total, 22 vs 18 links. [8:48 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/26/happy-clash-royale-cake-day.html) โ€” Happy [Clash Royale](https://supercell.com/en/games/clashroyale/) cake day to me! ๐ŸŽ‰ Clash Royale game screen titled "Years Played" with a hexagonal badge showing the number 1 and purple ribbons, labeled "Level 1". ### Sunday [12:53 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/27/we-got-the-very-last.html) โ€” We got the very last of the available [Pokรฉmon 30th Celebration](https://www.pokemon.com/us/news/pokemon-tcg-30th-celebration-product-showcase) at the Edina Target today โ€” and got our picture with Pikachu! Jamie, Tammy, and Tyler pose in a store aisle with a costumed Pikachu, two holding boxed Pokรฉmon card sets. ### Wednesday [4:52 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/30/oh-no-of-quota.html) โ€” Oh no โ€” I've used all my tokens! ๐Ÿ˜ฌ And I did successfully complete my mission to [use the $250 of cloud credits](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/25/easy-mission-i-will-use.html). Usage panel: context window at 198.3k of 300k, a full red bar for weekly all-models limit, and $18.27 of $50 credits used. ### Thursday [9:30 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/01/it-was-great-to-connect.html) โ€” It was great to connect with the Twin Cities tech community tonight at [Minnedemo](https://minnestar.org/minnedemo/)! The [Ordway](https://ordway.org) was a beautiful venue for this one. Save the date for [Minnebar](https://minnestar.org/minnebar/) 21 on May 1, 2027! Two people on a purple-lit stage under a Minnestar logo screen, facing a full concert hall audience and balcony. A man with a microphone stands at a laptop on stage while a screen shows BeastBox, a drum app with kick, snare and hihat tracks. [9:45 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/01/beastbox-was-an-amazing-demo.html) โ€” [Beastbox](https://getbeastbox.com) was an amazing demo at Minnedemo. The engineering required to do signal detection in about 10ms to keep the time from beatboxing with your mouth to the audio being triggered is impressive. _Video not playing? [Watch it on the blog](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/01/beastbox-was-an-amazing-demo.html)._ [9:50 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/01/watt-window-was-my-other.html) โ€” [Watt Window](https://wattwindow.com) was my other demo highlight from Minnedemo. Combination of hardware and software to monitor industrial motors and increase efficiency. This is a real-world use case for how you can lower the carbon footprint of a plant. And, reliably predict equipment failures! Impressive! A presenter at a laptop on stage, with an overhead camera projecting a DIN rail of wired terminal blocks onto a large screen. The presenter talks beside a projected web dashboard of circular gauges showing amps, volts, kWh and dollar costs per motor. ## Briefly The fundamental building block of the web isn't HTML or a web page โ€” it is the link. The way that closed platforms fight links makes them feel rebellious to even use. Long live the hyperlink! โ†’ **[An Ode to Links - Jim Nielsenโ€™s Blog](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/ode-to-links/)** It isn't just agents that can turn a random site on the internet into a message board! โ†’ **[Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat | The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/1001056/this-american-life-npr-kids-group-chat-comment-section)** Feels like there are so many Markdown editors that we will end up with everyone having their own. ๐Ÿ˜‚ โ†’ **[Beauty โ€” A Markdown editor for people who notice things.](https://www.markdown.beauty/)** Happy to see Cloudflare extending into this space, although for me I already have Let's Encrypt and since it is a non-profit I think that is a better way to go. Ideally I'd love to see a solution that is even more open and built on the trust of a blockchain. โ†’ **[Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-certificate-authority/)** Frontier Labs writing articles about the security risks of open-source models certainly has some motive. "Hey, look at the bad things these models can do!" How we will go about regulating, or if we should regulate, models is a really thorny issue. โ†’ **[GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities | Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of-advanced-cyber-capabilities)** So many new model releases lately! โ†’ **[Introducing Gemini 4](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-4-argon/)** Everything is being rethought in software delivery, even the stuff that was only invented a few months ago. โ†’ **[Plan mode is dead | Ayman Nadeem](https://www.aymannadeem.com/artificial/intelligence,/developer/tools/2026/09/24/plan-mode-is-dead.html)** I had never heard of TLA+. Looks interesting. โ†’ **[The internet discovers TLA+. Now what? | Reasonable](https://reasonable.io/blog/tla-tutorial/)** The story of Tetris is one I've read in book form and watched in the Tetris movie on Apple TV. Tetris is such an amazing game still today. I would seriously own my [ModRetro Chromatic](https://modretro.com/products/chromatic-tetris-bundle) just for this one game. โ†’ **[The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bizarre-murky-history-of-soviet-born-tetris/)** This is a great website to spend some time learning about very special numbers. Awesome! โ†’ **[Museum of numbers](https://numbermuseum.com/)** This is just so delightful and so absolutely nerdy. โ†’ **[The DNS Museum](https://dns.museum/)** Thanks for reading and also a big welcome to all the new readers from Dense Discovery that keep showing up from there. I hope you enjoy the Weekly Thing! See y'all next week! **White ghosts on the plate, a red bar where tokens were โ€” butterfly stays put.** ## Echoes

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

Reddit's plan to stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 answers a question Jamie raised two years earlier, when he wondered whether Reddit had simply forgotten its feeds existed. [WT306](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/306/) _Ask Thingy:_ [What has Jamie said about RSS and closed platforms over the years?](https://thingy.thingelstad.com/chat/?prompt=What+has+Jamie+said+about+RSS+and+closed+platforms+over+the+years%3F&from=weekly-thing-352) Cloudflare's cf CLI fits a principle Jamie set down in March: agent-first tools thrive on Unix command-line practice โ€” non-blocking, good flags, documentation โ€” the reasoning behind his own mb micro.blog client. [WT342](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/342/) _Ask Thingy:_ [Why does Jamie think command-line tools suit AI agents?](https://thingy.thingelstad.com/chat/?prompt=Why+does+Jamie+think+command-line+tools+suit+AI+agents%3F&from=weekly-thing-352) The MarketWatch page-weight story behind "Don't confuse space and time" has a companion argument: Jamie called speed the killer feature, drawing on his years as CTO at media companies. [WT176](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/176/) _Ask Thingy:_ [What lessons on site performance did Jamie take from MarketWatch?](https://thingy.thingelstad.com/chat/?prompt=What+lessons+on+site+performance+did+Jamie+take+from+MarketWatch%3F&from=weekly-thing-352)