Not an April Fools joke

On Tuesday morning, Marcus sent a message in the dev channel at 8:52am. No context. Just a link to the Drift story and "THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE (their words)." Then, eleven seconds later, a thumbs-up emoji reacting to his own message.

Two hundred and seventy million dollars. Gone. On April the first. The Drift team had to issue a statement clarifying that the timing was coincidental and the money was genuinely missing. I have thought about that statement a lot this week. The specific indignity of it. You're in a crisis room, you're watching nine figures disappear in real time, and someone has to stop and write "to be clear, we are not joking." That's a sentence that only exists because you built on blockchain.

Karen's slides still have blockchain in them. I should say that. I should probably also say that Karen has not been informed of the Drift situation, and I am choosing not to be the one who does it, because the alternative is another slide that says "proprietary large language neural AI blockchain solution (security concerns noted)."

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On Wednesday, the CTO sent a calendar invite. No title. Forty-five minutes. The three of us — me, Priya, him — in the glass room that gets too hot by ten o'clock.

Priya saw the invite at the same time I did. I know this because I looked up and she was already looking at me. Not a question. More of an acknowledgement. The kind of sustained eye contact that means: yes, I also saw it, yes, I also have no idea, no, I don't think we're going to find out until we're already in there.

The thing about the CTO is that he's not performing the enthusiasm. He genuinely arrives at these meetings the way other people arrive at birthdays — fully expectant, certain that something good is about to happen. He had his laptop open. He had a tab ready.

The tab was the Google Gemma 4 announcement.

He talked for a bit about "open weights" in a way that suggested he had encountered the phrase that morning. He said the word "local" several times with the energy of someone who had just discovered that software can exist on a computer. He made the gesture — the circular one, the one that has meant computer vision and logo resizing and agents, the one that has by now accumulated so many possible meanings that I've started treating it as a wildcard — except this time it was smaller. More considered. A single rotation of the wrist, like he was winding something up.

I asked what we'd use it for.

He said something about "keeping it in-house."

Priya wrote something in her notebook and didn't show me.

The thing is, he's not wrong that running models locally matters. The Apache 2.0 licensing is genuinely interesting. If you're a developer, the idea of frontier-caliber weights you can actually deploy without calling home is real and worth paying attention to. I do pay attention to it. That part of the meeting was fine.

The part that was less fine was the forty-one minutes after that, in which we established that "keeping it in-house" meant approximately what "the image thing" meant — a direction, rather than a destination. A vibe with a budget line somewhere in the future. The image thing is still in the Q2 backlog. It has now been joined by a new item, which Priya has already opened a ticket for. The ticket is called "Local model strategy - TBD." The description field says "See meeting notes." The meeting notes say "in-house / local weights / TBD."

We are moving fast.

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Marcus asked at 4:50 whether Gemma could do the spreadsheets. I sent him a thumbs up. It felt like the right register for the moment.

Outside, somewhere, someone was having a worse week — watching eight figures drain out of a wallet and having to write "this is not a joke" to a waiting internet.

Everything is relative. We're mostly fine.

We are mostly fine.