A Final October Visit
This has been a heavy month. I am writing this simply because I have two specific things that need to be said. First, I am incredibly grateful that we reordered the deployment schedule for our Guaranteed Minimum Income initiative. By moving Mercer County, West Virginia to the front of the line in October 2025, I was able to spend crucial time in my father's county. I knew he was close to the end, and that trip was the very last time I saw him.
We both knew it was coming. There is no real loss when you understand that nothing ever truly ends. The experiences I shared with him, especially on that final trip, will stay with me permanently. We navigated the peak of capitalism, and now we are using those resources to ensure opportunity and democracy are strengthened for rural communities.
The Data Behind the Global Brain
My second point requires a direct thank you to every single person who ever contributed to Stack Overflow. The massive artificial intelligence wave we are currently riding was built directly on your shoulders.
Modern large language models operate as global brain statistical engines. They are remarkably capable, but they would be fundamentally useless for programming tasks without access to the extremely high quality, creative commons Q&A dataset that the community built together. If you doubt this, boot up any top tier AI model in its most capable reasoning mode and ask it where it learned to code. The models will openly admit their reliance on community generated data.
Do Not Kill the Golden Goose
This brings me to a strict warning for the companies building these generative AI products. If these platforms operate in a way that hollows out the exact communities responsible for producing their training data, they will deeply regret it.
When I left Stack Overflow, I gave Joel Spolsky one piece of fundamental advice. I told him never, under any circumstances, to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The community is the asset. My advice to the current crop of AI executives is exactly the same. Treat the people who actually build the internet with the respect they have earned. Without the human beings generating the original knowledge, the statistical engines will simply starve.