“They say all foxes are slightly allergic to linoleum, but it's cool to the paw, try it.”

Enshittification considerificated

This week’s Software Defined Talk, episode 451: How does anyone use the Internet? This week, we discuss what “enshittification” is, what causes it, and whether it can be prevented. Plus, stay tuned until the end to hear the Software Defined Talk origin story. (Sadly, we made no 451 Research references.)

Relative to your interests

• Enterprise developers: what they do, where, and how - Highlights for a recent survey of developer types.

• Container Networking: From DIY to Buy - People don’t cover Kubernetes networking, they say. And it’s yet another hassle: “the networking burden falls on DevOps teams who have not traditionally been (and should not be) responsible for network deployment and management. To do so, they need to learn about Layers 3 to 7, border gateway protocol (BGP), subnetting, network address translation (NAT), and the like, but that’s a fairly long training path.”

• Everything’s a Dungeon: A Different Approach to Exploration Design - How to think about the “node-paths” of an adventure, in a dungeon-crawl, city, etc.

Wastebook

• “I was trying to play a simple fantasy rogue adventure, but the AI is obsessed with half naked busty women.” Yup.

• “1 hour of flying toasters.” Here. (I feel like there’s not enough toast in this one.)

• Looks like we need to re-send the memo.

• “Displeased unhappy bearded Caucasian man with cone hat on head and party horn in mouth looking at camera with bored dissatisfied expression as his birthday party sucks.” Here. (And, see below for said bearded Caucasian man.)

• “Some research has found that asking people to simply set aside half an hour a day for worrying allows them to avoid worrying during the rest of their day.” Here. By “simply,” they mean “only.”

• “Also, for the record, this woman is the woman who was thrown out of a Walmart for cleaning their bathroom, but she is NOT the woman who went and stocked shelves at a Target.” Here.

Logoff

I’ve done a lot of slide work today for my upcoming “We Fear Change” talk.

As Mark Cathcart, Distinguished Engineer at Dell and previously IBM, once said to me, shit-eating grin on his face looking up from his cubical, “I used to be good at my job. Now I’m good at PowerPoint.”

This presentation I’ve been worked on today gets buck-wild right from the start:

First, we’ll see if I actually use this. Second, what’s going on here is this. I really want to use that Wayne’s World bit.1 It’s what I named this presentation after! But, when you start a presentation you don’t just go cold into the title slide, you have to mess around with wires, wait to get the signal to start, etc. So I needed some kind of resting slide before the title slide. What better than toasters? Then, you can just put “slide zero” up - the toasters - and go into the title slide when needed, making sure you can time the, you know, joke.

Yeah.

We’ll see if I actually use it next week.

IT COULD BE TOO MUCH.