Charu and I are calling it chums. Chums have long stretches of individual progress on the friendship, punctured with an unleash of affection, thoughts, clarity and vulnerability.

Chamber-fellows, if you will.

In contrast, mates are traditional best friends. Mates are present, supportive, available. Chums and mates help us grow in different ways.

It’s important to have one life-level mate. I think I know who that person is in my life: for some people, it’s their partner.

The most impressive people enjoy the process of their craft.

They enjoy the deep pits of resistance and challenge as much as the delight of the highs. The prize is the adventure itself.

Is it something you want to do or something you want to have done?

In 2002, Paul Graham proposed a mindset shift in his breakthrough essay A Plan for Spam. More than a decade later, I believe we need to once again shift our mindset on spam technology. We need to shift from content-based filtering to active anti-spam.

While the spam business model works because it is virtually free to send emails, it’s actually very costly to respond to replies. (see Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?)

Meanwhile, we’ve gotten a lot better at emulating human conversation and we are remarkably close to devising AI chatbots that beat the Turing Test.

What if an AI programmatically responded to spam emails? The spammers would quickly become overwhelmed with responses and the business model would tip into unprofitability.

I call this active anti-spam.

By establishing honeypot email addresses and submitting them to widely distributed email databases, we can spam the spammers and beat them at their own game. Even a very small deployment of this technology has to potential to have a powerful effect on worldwide spam levels.