There’s a new study out that means it’s time to update all those slides that say AI projects are failing: [A] new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School complicates the narrative. The study found that 74% of businesses that measure the ROI from their generative AI efforts are already seeing a positive return, and more expect to see a positive ROI within the next two or three years.

Big layoffs at Amazon corporate: “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” [the Amazon CEO] said. “Really, it’s culture.” The culture wasn’t right: his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called “the technology transformation happening right now.

I added a colophon for this site, just linked off the main homepage. There is a certain arrogence to explaining yourself, let alone your homepage on the World Wide Web. Who gives a fuck? But, I enjoy reading them. It does not contain much, but like all things homepage on the World Wide Web, not I have a place to dump those random thoughts that I need to pull out of my head.

Legacy systems are creating measurable revenue drag, with 63% of surveyed companies citing efficiency losses. Early adopters of cloud-native infrastructure report 40% faster deployment cycles. Commissioned by Broadcom, based on June 2025 survey. 🔗 🤖 Forrester: Modernize or Fall Behind – Rethinking IT Infrastructure (October 2025)

VMware announces updates to Tanzu Data Intelligence with performance and resilience improvements across Greenplum (now VCF 9 certified), Data Lake 2.0 (adds Spark support), GemFire 10.2, Postgres (TimescaleDB), Valkey, and RabbitMQ 4.2 (distributed delayed messaging). 🔗 🤖 Tanzu Data Intelligence Gets Smarter with New Updates and Enhancements - Tanzu

Usually I’d say Shortcuts are poorly documented, but at least these release notes are OK. // If you’re a nerd and don’t use Shortcuts, consider it. With the AI stuff in it now, you can make little calls the local, Apple AI model or ChatGPT. That’s very handy for little things. 🔗 What’s new in Shortcuts for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26

Grok’s AI video generation is like lazy Sora. All you have to do is upload a picture and it does the rest. You can then refine it through chat. Some of these are the first versions, no input from me. They are mostly pictures from the internet. There are some ones that were still images made in ChatGPT. I think Grok is pretty good at this kind of thing.

There’s a wave of “Back in my day…” nostalgia in the near future as us Gen-X’ers get older. I hope we do it more cool than the boomers did, or just quietly on our own instead of all over Facebook.

🤖 Paris Pedals to the Top: How the City of Light Became Europe’s Best for Young Cyclists - How Paris surpassed Amsterdam and Copenhagen as the most child-friendly city for cycling, thanks to bold infrastructure and speed-control policies. the heart of Paris’s transformation is its expanding network of protected bike lanes. These lanes are physically separated from cars—a critical feature for safety, especially for children. Paris now has protected cycling routes stretching across nearly half (48%) of its road network.

“data swamp” Here.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

“There is so much road in American roads. They widen and narrow like rivers, now six lanes, now twelve, now, but surely not?, fourteen, with various slip roads, merging lanes, separate roads running parallel behind a wall. Road, road, road, stretching out ahead of you towards the mountains.” Henry Oliver

🤖"here are 8 things you should do for supply chain security" 🔗 What Good Software Supply Chain Security Looks Like

I’d prefer we spread the excellent everywhere instead of just centering it in one place.

“Creating a real-time digital representation of an enterprise build on harmonized data & a system of intelligence (SoI) that is governed and autodidactic will create software-like marginal economics for companies that apply this to their business.” // Contender for Best Enterprise Cant of FY2016.

This week on Software Defined Interviews, talk with Russell Davies about…all sorts of things, very content-y, advertising, being interesting. Just, you know, lots of delightful “and stuff” that results from someone who “mucks about on the internet.” (I need to get better at writing podcast descriptions.) It was fun! Here is the traditional podcast version which you can listen to. below: You should subscribe to the podcast, you know.

Does anyone read predictions pieces? In late 2025, I predict that only people who read prediction pieces are people who write prediction pieces.

“So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.” // Vibes win every time. John Stuart Mill, by way of Alan Jacobs

I’m fascinated with Tyler Cowen. Here is Claude Sonnet 4.5’s deep research on his Tylerisms, I asked: Tyler Cowen has many maxims, principles, and aphorisms. One is “Context is that which is scarce” another is “all food is ethnic food” (from his ethnic food website). Sometimes his blog posts bring with “those new service sector jobs.” He often asks the same questions in podcasts (there are transcript of all his Conversations with Tyler episodes), often about someone’s “production function,” how they work.

180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub. Their definition is “[a]nyone with a GitHub account.” Let’s not overthink it, just yet, and instead go with what they’re saying. If 2025 had a theme, it would be growth. Every second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub–over 36 million in the past year. It’s our fastest absolute growth rate yet and 180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub.

“your general intolerance for corporate euphemism.” // After almost three years of using ChatGPT, I feel like it really gets me. Related, here is how one of my AI friends described the persona I’ve asked it take on: “A well-maintained chainsaw in the shed, but a polite conversation on the patio.”

I am in my Gmail, and I open up the Gemini side bar and type: Flag emails I should just archive. The criteria is that if they are not directly to me, probably archive. Also if they are old, probably archive. Only save emails where there is some direct question to me or task I need to do. Gemini replies: I understand you’d like to flag emails for archiving based on your criteria.

Good piece on enterprise AI security. The good news, it’s all the same shit. The bad news news, it’s all the same shit. Yes, and: That’s it! The magic sauce is that LLMs are amazingly good at taking this big chunk of text and using their vast training data to produce the most appropriate next chunk of text - and the vendors use complicated system prompts and extra hacks to make sure it largely works as desired.

Forrester seems all but say “Salesforce is full of shit”: Salesforce claims that its (newly renamed) Agentforce 360 product has 6,000 paying customers. But in customer conversations and sessions, we saw little adoption or impact from AI agents – lots of potential but a long way to go for a meaningful ROI. More faint praise in the rest. 🔗 Salesforce Dreams Of The Agentic Enterprise

Everyone needs to stop thinking about enterprise AI as a way to fire people and think about how to use AI to make people more productive: Forrester’s analysis found that using AI for financially driven layoffs can backfire: 55 percent of employers regret laying off workers because of AI. More people in charge of AI investment expect it to increase headcount (57 percent) than to decrease it (15 percent) over the next year.

Emma Thompson does not need Clippy Jr.: “When I’ve written something and put it into a Word document, it’s constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?'” Thompson said. The UK national treasure added: “I don’t need you to [expletive deleted] rewrite what I’ve just written. Will you [expletive deleted] off. Just [expletive deleted] off!” This reminds me of a story David Pogue told on some podcast 10+ ago.

With some generalization, this is good advice for any pitch, from corporate presentations to call for papers. The point that you need to make it easy for other people to advocate for you is a good one, rarely mentioned. 🔗 Setting up other people to pitch your idea for you

Honestly, this checks out. Embabel is an enterprise play, and one where Java developers' skills are on point. Spring has proven itself for business logic, systems that are built to last, event-driven systems, transaction systems and so on. 🔗 Java relevance in the AI era – agent frameworks emerge.

This is has some new material in it, not just the same old transformation discussion from agile and DevOps. So: thumbs up! 🔗 8 platform engineering anti-patterns

Meanwhile, what’s going on with developers outside of the GenAI echo chamber. What’s up with people disliking Jira so much, yet using it so much? 🔗 The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack?

Angel flying too close to the 10-Q.

Relative to your interestsI’m posting a lot more regularly on my weblog , most of the links below, and some content that doesn’t show up in the newsletter. Apologies if you’re living with duplicates. “CMDB” Is Dead — Long Live The IT Management Graph - What’s wrong with the CMDB concept, especially how it’s applied and managed. Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions - “When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country?

Plus, a lot of talk about Java and Spring in large organizations.

“There is ambient music for spas - and there is ambient music for former Soviet spas.” Music for (Former Soviet) Spas

“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time” Alan Jacobs

“I don’t know what it is other than what it does.” Tyler Cowen on Tetragrammaton The original sentiment: “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

”Tech is a pop culture. Very few of the decisions made in the industry are made rationally or empirically. Studies and tests are used to justify the emotional decisions of the executive or management class. Infrastructure and stack decisions are made hedonistically – “cool” tech that makes the engineers and devs feel good about themselves almost always gets a priority over “boring” tech that has no risks. The industry, especially the software side of tech, is driven by emotion and a sense of what is fashionable.

With some generalization, this is good advice for any pitch, from corporate presentations to call for papers. The point that you need to make it easy for other people to advocate for you is a good one, rarely mentioned. 🔗 What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)

Today’s lock-in was yesterday’s promise to open architectures.

I solo played “Touch of Water” last night. It’s a good representation of the adventures in the Uncaged series.1 Claude did a good job adapting it my campaign setting and evolving the story. The rusalka is a good monster - it’d make a good Eryines-like creature for Auril the Frostmaiden. You can recast Auril regionally, call her Marzanna or the like, and then have a little frosty pantheon. The story never resolves what happened to the drowned four year old boy that starts the adventure.

The decline of the US Rust Belt is directly linked to the rise of China, driven by US free trade policies that incentivized companies to relocate manufacturing overseas for cheaper labor and less regulation.

The Gruber: “When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country? I can’t recall one.” 🔗 Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions

If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse." From An Existential Guide to: Making Friends

Tips on doing corporate videos. It’s almost: be less polished. Plus, The Kids Slang. 🔗 high production value ≠ rizz.

I grew up as a programmer in the 2000s, in Java culture. The aesthetics were about elegance, understandable simplicity (the opposite of the Perl obfuscation awards), and lots of DRY. In contrast, you have command line culture, which I suspect is a more dominate programming aesthetic nowadays. It will become even more so as one off vibe scripts and apps spread. If it’s faster or just complete rewrite your code with AI, why bother to fix it?

Broccoli is like two vegetable in one: flourette and stem. Genius!

The way this guy turns picking up litter into one of those “video gaming while yelling at little things” (Minecraft Yelling, I used to call it until my kids started watching Roblox ones) videos is amazing. // One aging gen-X’ers human-generated slop is another 15 year old’s preferred 6:45am wake up viewing…bruh.

As always, if you want your people to get more work done, interrupt them less and invite them to less meetings. This applies to all people, not just programmers. A meeting is not work, it’s talking about work. 🔗 Meetings and interruptions are still the biggest obstacles for developers, even with AI

What is it about “founder” style, content, and intellectual aesthetics that makes me cringe so much? Is there something there, or is just that the stuff they post on Twitter and LinkedIn is over-dialed in engagement?

I think the point is: it’s nice the professionals can make excellent content. It’s fun that the rest of us can now putter around the edges of that, ten seconds at a time. // Also, looks like a good example of a “Strasian reading” with Casey, there. While he is condemning AI generated images, he is showing the cool things he can make with it. // At some point we’ll have to confront the elite/commoner conflict between experts and goofballs using new tools to ape the experts.

October, 2010, probably at an airport.

Taken at some analyst forum in October, 2010. It was probably Adobe MAX that year.

I’m always trying to find how many apps are written (and, of course, running) in Java. Here are recent numbers I have on hand: “[N]early 70% of respondents say that more than half of their applications are built with Java or run on a JVM.” Azul survey, 2025. “98% of companies we surveyed use Java, with 57% saying it is the backbone of most of their application and infrastructure estate.

When I’m solo roleplaying D&D, or just farting around, I like to make pictures of characters and scenes. Sometimes I ask the robot to make me pages from artists sketchbooks, concept art. Here’s some recent pictures: Above based on this one from the Xoth player’s guide. Look how it made the new one’s décolletage more modest. For the next two, I wanted to use the ship map from the 2024 DMG, but put it on a very big, 100x100 ocean.

Most of these are human-made, two were given to the robot as guides. The video is me as a kid, maybe six or so. I gave it to Twitter’s video thing, and there you go. Fantastic and freaky.

Tasks should be approached with a balance of urgency and diligence to avoid mistakes and achieve optimal long-term results.

blogging as art!!! why not? i am drowning in information. all i want is a little fun. a respite from postmodernity. folk say the internet used to be fun. i was there, it kind of was. we can do better! 🔗 blogging as art

Here are some thoughts after a week of using Claude Skills. JasonJ in the SDT Slack says: I’d tl;dr Claude CLI skills as “low/no/english code MCPs'”. Seems helpful in the way that local utility scripts are today. That is a good way of putting it. I haven’t done heavy experimenting, but I think there’s a distinction between: (1) The Skill has no code, except maybe code fragments. Most of it is just a SKILL.

Excellent comparison of various LLMs doing AI image generations. Cool UI for looking at the output too. 🔗 GenAI Image Showdown

There’s a lot of knowledge work that can be automated: ‘Where Altman’s comment holds water is in what it hints at, even if it doesn’t spell it out. Most jobs aren’t fake, but many have accumulated layers of automatable junk: compliance checklists, reports nobody reads, emails summarizing meetings that could’ve been Slack threads. That’s the kind of “game-playing” work LLMs are already good at. When Altman says these models will wipe out tasks, not just roles, this is what he likely means.

What exactly does “thinking” mean? “Thinking harder”? Robin says: prospecting new analogies; sending your inquiry out away from the gravitational attractors of protocol and cliché; turning the workpiece around to inspect it from new angles; and especially bringing more senses into the mix." And, also that it is silent. We even have a phrase that shows the exception that makes the rule: “thinking out-loud.” Playing D&D with LLMs surfaces how different “thinking” is for AIs.

Quick and crude SVG battle maps for D&D can be efficiently generated using Claude, enhancing solo roleplaying without slowing down gameplay.

That title says it all. There are two people I think of here: Tyler Cowen is eternally optimistic. He may say he doesn’t like something or he thinks something is “not the best it could be,” but he’s rarely “negative,” and never bitter. James Watters, despite a rough couple of decades for PaaS (his life’s work) is eternally optimistic. He only talks about positive things and potential, not bitterness about rival technologies.

Meanwhile, humans are still making good Internet videos. 🔗 ✺ CHANNELVUE

‘“The availability of AI devices has also boosted overall spending by more than $30 billion,” Lovelock said. “With the replacement cycle unchanged, the stronger performance in 2025 will result in a lower relative growth rate for 2026, as demand has been pulled forward."’ 🔗 Global IT spend to exceed $6 trillion in 2026

Lots of new features coming in Sora. Clearly not just a side project. 🔗 Coming in the next versions of Sora

“I didn’t know whether or not to laugh or cry when he said that Trader Joe’s target customer is overeducated and underpaid.” Book Thoughts: Becoming Trader Joe

Does it seem right that computer systems that use billions of dollars of hardware, electricity, and clean water need my help to add line numbers to a few kilobytes of plain text? No, it does not. But at least this gives me deterministic results for one part of the processing. Recently, though, I’ve observed that Claude Skills are interestingly clever on the command line. Maybe agentic just means “can use Unix pipes.

A lot of effort went into making this effortless. 🔗 Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering, Peter Steinberger

Instead of: “Why the ‘free’ version of [INSERT OPEN CORE PRODUCT NAME] could be your most expensive mistake.” A variant: “[INSERT OPEN SOURCE PROJECT] is complex and difficult to secure.” Try: “why these pay-for features will make you awesome and solve shitty problems you toil away at every day.”

Great, if cynical phrase: hockey stick on wheels: “Consider a team which presents their forecasts in the form of a hockey stick graph,” said Chen on Tuesday. “They come back the next year with their revised forecasts, and they are the same as last year’s forecast, just delayed one year. If you overlay this revised hockey stick forecast on top of the previous year’s forecast, it looks like what happened is that the hockey stick slid forward one year.

Anthropic is building a PaaS. They’ve got isolated VM’s/containers, they’ve thought out support languages for the major languages. You can even write code in the browser…with the AI. And it checks your stuff into GitHub? Plus, of course, it runs your code for you, at least with Claude Skills. 🔗 Claude Code for web - a new asynchronous coding agent from Anthropic

You need a proxy for enterprise AI Google Cloud suggests using a centralized proxy to mediate all communication between clients and remote MCP servers. This proxy enforces access control, audit logging, secret policies, and secure transport, helping reduce the attack surface by having one enforced point rather than many decentralized servers. In addition, Google emphasizes identifying particular risk vectors like unauthorized tool exposure, session hijacking, and weak authentication, and treating identity, transport, and policy enforcement as foundational rather than optional.

The problems feel like something we should have moved passed long ago. The general problems and patterns are not new. Why do they persist? 🔗 Why Up to 70% of Platform Engineering Teams Fail to Deliver Impact

What’s wrong with the CMDB concept, especially how it’s applied and managed. 🔗 “CMDB” Is Dead — Long Live The IT Management Graph

As enterprises try to figure out the benefits of AI, they’re relying on lots of private cloud: Over half (53%) of enterprises say deploying new workloads to private cloud is among their top priorities over the next three years. 84% already run both traditional and cloud-native apps in private environments. 69% are considering repatriating workloads from public to private cloud, and more than one-third have already done so. 🔗 The AI Advantage: Running Next-Gen Workloads in Private Cloud Environments

My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.” Four years later, he’s betting his company on its ability to sell ads against AI slop and computer-generated pornography.

“artistic product” versus “artistic process.” Well, I guess “home made” sounds tastier than “mechanically extruded.” 🔗 judgment day

“Individual teams making rational decisions create organisational fragmentation.” // An overview of the impossibly fine line between restricting developers for long term agility and reliability, and giving them freedoms to perfectly solve their apps problems. 🔗 Golden Paths: One Size Does Not Fit All

A post. Here is a man eating an apple: I read this book a lot when I was a kid. He has another book that was good too. I’ve read them to my kids. (I am using this post to test blog changes, so it is nonsense. What fun!)

Unless you’re skilled otherwise, always present, think, and communicate in sets of three. It’s not always the best, but it’s always the optimal mix of works and doable. As he says, you can also go with just one idea explained three different ways. If you’re lucky enough to have just one idea you need to communicate, sure. I find “just one idea” content needs to be very short, a five minute presentation at most or a short blog post.

As someone who uses and appreciates 37signals products, I can honestly say - we like being the kind of people who use and appreciate 37signals products. JA Westenberg. Tech marketers way undervalue identity as a marketing tactic. It works well, just like in shoes and coffee loyalty. Stickers. Devrel. Community management. Conference schwag. We assume that people chose one technology over another based on utility (does it work for what they want), and also price.

Here’s my talk from Cloud Foundry Day. It’s four stories of large organizations using Cloud Foundry: Three are banks, and one is a German tax accountant and back-office SaaS. I start talking about the value of case studies for enterprise software. The opening keynote was from the German police, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). We used to have a lot of case studiess in the Cloud Foundry world and interest in PaaS in general, but that dropped off during The Great Kubernetes Distraction of the 2020’s.

“All of my news was filtered through AI.” 🔗 Good Morning & Good Luck

🔗 Generative AI’s Productivity Myth

Ancient Dutch proverbs are the best. 🔗 Netherlandish Proverbs, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

“Despite there being no systematic age differences between women and men in the workforce according to the US Census, we found that women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles in nearly 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube, as well as in nine language models trained on billions of words from the internet.” 🔗 Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models

‘allowing for controversial yet eye-catching content like AI celebrities, OpenAI is borrowing from a playbook perfected by social media companies such as Meta: Do whatever it takes to get users on the app and ask forgiveness later, said Thales Teixeira, a business professor at the University of California at San Diego. “First you grow, and then you try to solve the problems,” he said.”’ // Norms arbitrage and breaking the law is a standard business innovation for tech startups.

If you make huge changes to how your under performing business works, there’s a good chance you’ll improve things. That applies whether you introduce a new tool - like AI - or not. Just changing how you run meetings for example is a big enough change that could have massive effects. You could say the same thing for introducing Extreme Programming, a lean mindset, DevOps. // The value of enterprise technology is inversely proportional to how little you need to change the “culture.

“I’m a Wal-Mart guy. What’re we gonna do about it? It’s the year 2025.” Noah on The Hotline Show, September 28th, 2025.

Do rooms have coffee machines? That is a quick heuristic for picking hotels for work travel, probably any travel. When the answer is no, the rest of the hotel experience is more likely to be a let down. (Germany is an exception. They seem to be really into tea.)

“a giant turd of text” Oracle - ‘Generic AI stops at 60%, industry expertise is the missing 40%’

Using an AI chat desk to augment the support desk for a Us county. This seems like a basic packaging of AI stuff that you could sell to thousands of places. It probably also exposes the redundancy and waste on the US Federalist system. E.g., does every county and city need different bulk trash pickup processes and PDF overviews? 🔗 Dreamforce 25 - how AI voice technology will give City of Kyle residents 24/7 phone support

“the flying car of the mind” AI is the flying car of the mind: Irresistible, impractical

🔗 The Right Mental Model For Agentic AI

This is good framing and wording: “Reexamine your ecosystem and identify where ‘buy’ delivers scale and where selective ‘build’ unlocks advantage.” 🔗 Build Vs. Buy: Regaining Control To Deliver Digital Workplace Value

“What drives investment in third-party events: High-quality lead generation (67%) Credibility through association with analysts or peers (63%) Expansion into new accounts or buying centers (47%)” 🔗 Why B2B marketers are doubling down on events in 2026

Every culture with a weird thing thinks they’re the only one with the weird thing.

“It is generic and all the same personalized, the Big Mac without the onions.” defining slop

Even when asked in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, or Spanish, modern AI chatbots like ChatGPT deliver answers aligned with secular, center-left, Western liberal values. Language introduces minor stylistic variations, but the core worldview remains strikingly consistent. Summarized by AI. Source summarized: Do AIs think differently in different languages? Key Points AI responses remain largely uniform across languages, with only slight variation in tone and emphasis. Modern LLMs exhibit center-left, secular, liberal values, regardless of the language used to prompt them.

“The context window is a public good.” Skill authoring best practices,Claude Docs

For when you want to be that accountant or in the first Ghostbusters. 🔗 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties

Larry’s pitch for a full-stack, private cloud AI platform. And, here, you can see someone trying to explain more. 🔗 Ellison’s AI vision for Oracle - robot surgeons meet enterprise data reality

Good, brief explanation of how vector searches work. And it’s in the art history and criticism domain. 🔗 The Index and the Vector

For solo role playing people. After Mythic, PUM is the most fleshed out system. It has a different style and philosophy of play that I can never put my finger on. 🔗 Plot Unfolding Machine PDF V9 Release!

A little too ad hominem, but feels right from a critical stance: ”All my misgivings about AI really are to do with the fact that it’s owned by a group of people that I don’t trust at all. I don’t trust their taste, I don’t trust their morals, and I don’t trust their politics, and that’s a problem for me—that the whole technology is in the hands of the wrong people.

Found in Action, Amterdam Poorte.

From my Cloud Foundry Day EU talk. See the slides if you want to zoom in and click on the citations. My friends at Rabobank corrected a figure: they support 300 developer teams, not just developers.

SoraI have a Sora account. The take is that people like it because it lets them make videos of themselves and their friends seems right. It’s also scary good at cheese-marketing and ads, even for the thrilling world of PaaS (see my post in LinkedIn or Bluesky, then come back here for more examples). You can also get it to make videos that’d be perfect for generic ads. You can imagine this one being of any number of things like flights, hotels, eSIM cards for travelers:1

‘When we say, “I love my job,” we really mean, “My job pisses me off, but in an enchanting way."’ Thank you for being annoying

“I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome.” 🔗 Make the user awesome

“As a writer I value the concept of boredom because it’s very useful in having ideas and letting your brain explore. Now I have to actively choose when to be bored.” Chose boredom. “‘Well,’ Birkin says, in heavily accented French, ‘did you learn anything about me from seeing ing bag?’ Then a grin: ‘Even if we Birkin reveal everything, we don’t show much.'” Found by Russell. “I realized that I really didn’t want to read another experimental European novel with a tormented narrator reflecting on language, daddy issues, the trauma of WWII, ‘the real,’ presence and absence in the archives, and lists of the dead.

“If these tools are so great, where is the explosion of AI created stuff in the world?” // Followed by a yes-and style rebuttal. 🔗 Mike Judge asks good questions about AI shovelware

The never ending quest to keep doing what you’re good at and get better at it…rather than making another PowerPoint about what you worked on last week. // “One of the biggest contributors to rust out is spending your energy in places that don’t align with your unique talents and skills. In my own experience, and in working with my clients, a simple way to uncover your unique talents is to notice your energy.

🔗 Study Reveals America’s Most Searched Slang Words 2025 / OHIO; mayonnaise

“perhaps I am expecting too much when there is a poop emoji on the cover.” Cory Doctorow Turned His Word of the Year Into a Whole Book

“for every $1 spent on model development, firms should expect to have to spend $3 on change management, which means user training and performance monitoring.” // How it started “AI-enabling the entire customer service stack of a typical business could lead to a 60 to 80 percent price increase, McKinsey says.” How it’s going: “while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: ‘All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can’t reduce head count yet.

It’s a 3D print thing.

“I assume they kept the socks as evidence too.” Theft of Services via Sock

“Slopjects.” pointed out by bruces

All I really need to know about socio-political culture I learned from 80s high school movies. 🔗 Performing Gender, Left and Right

“Laws can be opinions on inevitabilities in the world of software engineering, or wry observations on unavoidable realities.” // A round-up of all those laws and bromides tech world people use. 🔗 Hacker Laws

This one had some bonus cat action.

A vision for a kinder post-AI meltdown. Also, speculation about where AI code generation will stick and not stick. 🔗 GenAI Predictions

“According to IDC research, 72% of tech marketers say creating original, differentiated thought leadership is a top challenge. Even more cite difficulty connecting that content to real business outcomes. 37% of CMOs say creating a unified, omnichannel customer experience will have the greatest influence on their marketing strategy over the next 12 to 18 months.” And: “It’s not about doing more. It’s about making what you already do work harder to drive the engagement you need.

Cows, IoT, and MLOn this week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with my friend Saad. We mostly talked about the irresistible topic of monitoring cows, which he did at his previous startup: In this episode, Whitney and Coté speak with Saad Ansari, a product manager at Databricks, about his fascinating journey from working at Microsoft to co-founding a startup focused on creating sensors for monitoring cow behavior. They go over the challenges and rewards of transitioning from large corporations to startups and back, the differences in company scales, and the various lessons learned along the way.

Your business processes are tribal knowledge passed down through email chains and hallway conversations. Before an AI can handle expense reports or customer inquiries autonomously, you need to document, standardize, and make machine-readable every workflow. That’s a multi-year project. 🔗 Your employees are already AI-augmented. Your enterprise isn’t. Here’s why that matters

”Prioritize sovereignty where it matters most. Not every workload requires sovereign infrastructure — and overengineering can be costly and inefficient. Focus on areas where sovereignty is critical: AI workloads, sensitive data, and operations in regulated industries. Use edge computing to process data locally and reduce compliance risks. Localized cloud options, including sovereign clouds and regional vendors, can help meet legal requirements without compromising agility. A surgical approach to sovereignty ensures strategic alignment and cost-effectiveness.

For those who prefer Kubernetes instead of a PaaS, there are good options that your organization likely already has. 🔗 Empowering Platform Engineers with native Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Management in VMware Cloud Foundation

Smoked brisket in London from Smokoloko. It wasn’t too great, but I had some travel salt packets, so added enough salt to make it OK. They seemed to have some end-pieces which looked better, but I ordered “brisket” thinking I’d get slices.

As the kids say: 👀 ”This repository provides Authorization support for Spring AI integrations with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It covers both MCP Clients, MCP Servers, and Spring Authorization Server.” 🔗 spring-ai-community/mcp-security: Spring Security Configuration for MCP

‘JFrog Fly is the company’s agentic developer platform and an MCP server that works with multiple IDEs, including VS Code and Cursor. Integrated with GitHub and observability, Fly provides a chat interface that allows users to query, promote, and roll back existing releases based on specifics of the code (e.g., “Which features were added to this release?” or “Deploy the release that added styling to the user field”). Fly includes an audacious reimagining of the software development process, making versioning automatic and version names obsolete.

“Solo Toxic Neon Lord.” DriveThruRPG.com

Move fast and leak things. 🔗 Senate report accuses DOGE of flouting law, oversight

The AI as a junior engineer theory. 🔗 The AI coding trap

Generate and execute code in Claude’s web app, also pull from GitHub and package managers. What else can you have it do and install in the containers(?) it’s running? 🔗 Claude Sonnet 4.5 is probably the “best coding model in the world” (at least for now)

‘the code’s use of a “taste-driven development (TDD) paradigm."’ Microsoft touts ‘Vibe Working’ in Office apps

Ben Thompson recently noted that these prices are spiking, and the AI companies are about to get blamed for it. 🔗 How AI Data Centers Are Sending Your Power Bill Soaring

Others doing D&D with AI. Looks more structured than what I piddle around with. 🔗 The D&D Blueprint: How Role-Playing Engines Can Guide Next-Gen AI

The poor semicolon. 🔗 AI loves an em dash — writers in the US, on the other hand, aren’t so keen

Tips on running AI on your private cloudSome brief comments on using Tanzu Platform to run your private GenAI stuff. If you’re interested in more than that short clip, check out my co-worker Nick’s talk on this topic. You can check out the Tanzu Platform more at TryTanzu.ai. Relative to your interestsTwo strategies to succeed when AI seems to be eroding jobs around you - 🤖 Technical writers are shifting from writers to content directors, steering and editing AI output.

This is what I remember every portrait of an author or academic being like on the backs of all those used books I used to read from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And, a variation: There was also the leaning back in chair, sports jacket wide open with a big gut and wild hair, waving hands discussing something important with someone off camera. Maybe even with a cigarette or, if you were really lucky, a pipe they were pointing with.

Quite the album cover, there: “A good title, but primarily recommended for Getz fans.” // I think that means: “the normals won’t like it, I barely did.”

Next week in Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025: Cloud Foundry Day. I’m speaking in my ongoing attempts to help out the CF community with…marketing! Here is the agenda:

Programmer aesthetics: “your engineering taste is composed of the set of engineering values you find most important.” // And: “most bad taste comes from inflexibility. I will always distrust engineers who justify decisions by saying ‘it’s best practice.’ No engineering decision is ‘best practice’ in all contexts! You have to make the right decision for the specific problem you’re facing.” 🔗 What is “good taste” in software engineering?

They advocate for using JSON (with comments) over YAML: “Generating json as a better yaml Often the choice of format is not ours to make, and an application only accepts yaml. Not all is lost though, because yaml is a superset of json, so any tool that can produce json can be used to generate a yaml document.” 🔗 The yaml document from hell

🤖 Technical writers are shifting from writers to content directors, steering and editing AI output. To thrive: build deep subject matter expertise and tool expertise–with editorial judgment and workflow skills as supporting habits. // How many managers does the world need, though? 🔗 Two strategies to succeed when AI seems to be eroding jobs around you

“Doughnut Economics is based around an important insight: Diagrams are powerful marketing tools.” And, from the book reviewed: Visual frames, it gradually dawned on me, matter just as much as verbal ones…[N]ow is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times

Recording of my AI platform engineering talkThis is a new talk of mine going over how platform engineers can support AI. Well, it’s more about how we don’t exactly know, but we can speculate based on a handful of early use cases. Here’s the slides if you’re into that kind of thing. Here’s the 🤖 on my key points: Platform engineering for AI is mostly running another middleware service - same infrastructure tasks as always, plus model registries and figuring out who handles AI safety evaluations.

From Who’s Got the Apple, I book a spent a lot of time with as a kid.

One of my favorite “brown bars.”

Robin Sloan contemplates the _ The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons_: It occurred to me, deep into a really won­derful experience, of reading and thinking and feeling and pondering, that if Wiz­ards of the Coast had pub­lished exactly the same mate­rial online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the web­site, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the dig­ital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.

Once you fix the bottleneck of coding, you face the all the other bottlenecks down the line. So, you have to think of how to apply AI, or whatever, to the rest of the SDLC processes. Some real theory of constraints stuff there. 🔗 Development Productivity, Not Developer Productivity

It’s a delight to find weirdly human and overly chatty prompts like this one on how to make PDFs: PDFs - Always use LibreOffice to create the PDF (it must be LibreOffice! If LibreOffice is not installed, you can install it yourself). Other libraries sometimes show weird artifacts on some computers I wonder if the agent actually can install it, or if that’s just nudging it to do a good job by faking it out.

The talk discusses how platform engineers can navigate AI support, emphasizing the need for middleware, customer engagement, and rapid experimentation.

Manton reviews ChatGPT Pulse: it might drive traffic to more websites, going around Google: There’s something else about how this works that is fundamentally different than current chat-based AI where people are looking for answers. Instead of replacing a Google search, it’s adding opportunities to point to other websites and blogs. Because it’s proactively pushing stories to you that you may never think to look for, it should increase referrers to websites instead of subtracting them.

Enterprise AI not legible. If you can’t measure it, you can’t ROI it: “It’s easy for an employee to say, ‘Yes, this will help me,’ but hard to quantify how. And if they can’t quantify how it’ll help them … it’s not going to be a long discussion” over whether the software is worth paying for, Thompson said. // And: it’s a “challenge for businesses is that there’s this leap of faith moment where you try to justify it with the return-on-investment calculation, which is hard to figure out.

“But after nine months on the market, fewer than 5% of Salesforce’s more than 150,000 customers are paying for Agentforce, according to the company’s disclosures. And more than half of customers that are using Agentforce are still testing it without paying.” 🔗 Marc Benioff Said AI Was Easy. A ‘Crazy’ Team at Salesforce Proved Him Wrong

I like earthy, dirt-tasting and feeling wine a lot. I asked for something that tasted like an old Greek man who hadn’t showered for three weeks, and this fit the bill. At Sune in Hackney.

Modern life has shifted from one of intentional selection to one of constant rejection, as boundless options—from music to AI-generated content—overwhelm our ability to focus. The piece reflects on a childhood of curated mixtapes and contrasts it with today’s flood of algorithmic output, arguing that simplicity now requires deliberate elimination. Summarized by AI. Source summarized: The world is increasingly noisier • V.H. Belvadi. Key Points Excess choice paralyzes decision-making, leaving people unproductive despite abundant options.

AI has revolutionized medical imaging benchmarks, detecting diseases with speed and precision that can surpass human radiologists. Yet in practice, hospitals still rely heavily on human expertise, and radiology jobs are growing in both pay and demand. Summarized by AI. Source summarized: AI isn’t replacing radiologists. Key Points AI models excel in lab benchmarks but often underperform in real hospital environments. Over 700 FDA-cleared radiology AI tools exist, yet most remain limited to assistive roles.

Lawmakers are pressing Amazon, Meta, Google, and other major tech firms for allegedly laying off U.S. workers in the name of AI automation, then turning around to hire thousands of lower-cost H‑1B visa holders. The clash comes as Trump’s new $100,000 visa fee and a potential freeze on student work authorizations threaten to upend how Silicon Valley recruits talent. Summarized by AI. Source summarized: Amazon blamed AI for layoffs, then hired cheap H1-B workers, senators allege

From the archives

why eat the real thing when you could eat candy instead?

The Golden Era of PaaS is Still HereI’m playing around with trying to, I don’t know, re-introduce the notion of PaaS to the platform discussion. I don’t think what’s going on now is as good as it could be. I mean, yeah, I’m biased. But, you know, also biased to awesome. As you may recall from last episode, I cleaned my desk. You can see that in action here. My audio there was crap, but I wanted to get onto my weekend.

“Very often, you need great audiences to have great art.” Tyler And at: “people judge things at the margin, right? In a friendship, or marriage, or if you have co-founders. At the margin, am I getting what I want? And, getting out of that mindset is very difficult. "

The Concorde was fast, but not that fast. It could go from New York to Paris in just over 3 hours. The starry-eyed futurists of the song could be forgiven for expecting things to get even better. But even when oil prices were cheap, it was just too expensive to run, so we gave up on that dream, and now are lucky to travel that distance in 7 hours.

Recent discussions on enterprise AI reveal that while individual workers may benefit from productivity gains, the overall ROI for companies remains unclear and challenging to measure.

‘I think the level of quality that everything has these days, every image, every website, every song, every video also has downsides. It defining the “norm”, the expectation we have from one another has two main issues that keep irritating me.’ 🔗 The Professionalism Trap

nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google’s infrastructure. He also says that nearly all generative AI unicorns run on Google Cloud, that 60% of all GenAI startups worldwide have chosen Google as their cloud provider, and that the company has lined up $58 billion in new revenue commitments over the next two years, which represents more than double its current annual run rate. (1) Clearly, some comms work in action here, to, (2) get the message out there that Google is kind of a big deal.

The critique acknowledges the flaws in a HBR study about “workslop” while embracing the term itself.

“Our parenting hack of the year so far is having cut vegetables ready at the table when our kids get home from school. The percentage of vegetables consumed is up like 10x” Good tokens 2025-09-26

Doing SEO for the LLMs so that your content can be found. 🔗 AEO for YouTube: How to Get Your Videos Cited by ChatGPT

Sources say that Simo has recently been meeting with potential candidates, including some of her former Facebook colleagues, to lead a new team that will be tasked with bringing ads to ChatGPT. The role will oversee all monetization efforts across OpenAI, including subscriptions. 🔗 OpenAI is looking for a head of ads for ChatGPT

This is also what it’s like to work in corporate strategy and supporting the executive suite. It feels like a lot of time wasted when someone could have been coming up with fixes instead of silo-hopping. That said: the point of a system is what it does. So, coordinating with the giant organization is often the goal, not so much the actual actions taken. Also in the “that said” category: it takes a lot of effort to make a change, but once that change is in place, the power of the giant organization has a huge impact.

I always forget that Nixon was a vice president, and I’m still shocked every time I’m reminded of that.

I thought I’d dislike the new Auto Mix song transition in Apple Music. But, I actually like it. It does, indeed, make it feel more “radio” and, thus, lively and of the human world instead of isolated headphones desk-troglodyte.

my “shopping” note keeps me from buying dumb shit all the time - Instead of actually impulse buying, put it on a list to get that dopamine hit. // “for the past year and a half i have been keeping a plain note (it started as an apple note but now i use obsidian) titled “shopping” that i’ve built a habit of opening any time i want something i see online”

AI has shifted from a helpful add-on to the bedrock of modern software engineering, according to Google Cloud’s 2025 DORA Report. While nearly all developers now use AI, trust remains tentative, and the real differentiator lies in how organizations structure their practices and platforms to manage speed without chaos. Summarized by AI. Source summarized: AI has the New Baseline: What Google Cloud’s 2025 DORA Report Means for Developers – ADTmag

Generative AI stormed into software development promising a coding revolution, but so far, it’s making developers only marginally faster—and in some cases, slower. Bain & Company’s Technology Report 2025 argues that real productivity gains will require a wholesale reinvention of the entire development lifecycle, not just sprinkling AI on coding tasks. AI generated summary of: AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs. Key Points Developer productivity gains from generative AI average just 10–15% at most, often offset by the time spent checking AI’s mistakes.

[2509.13348] Towards an AI-Augmented Textbook - Adapting/changing textbooks to match learning style. // This is an additive use of AI: you’re not replacing humans, you’re doing more work that they humans couldn’t do.

Enterprise AI Looks Bleak, But Employee AI Looks Bright - I think a take-away is: AI ROI accruing to individuals, not the enterprise as a whole. This must drive executives crazy. Is that some kind of digital Marxist thing?

Getting over the AI policy board bottleneckAlso, people have suggested that have just two roles on the AI Center of Excellence Gatekeepers Guild is a good idea. Those two roles being security and legal. The theory is that the security people are used to this kind of thing and have processes in place. Also, that they are narrowly focused on a handful of things. You need the lawyers for all the whacky IP stuff.

Everyday AI and AI Everyday, with Hannah Foxwell - Software Defined Talk Check out last week’s Software Defined Interviews with Hannah Foxwell: > In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk about the integration of AI into daily life with Hannah Foxwell, organizer of AI for the Rest of Us, among many other doings. They talk about stuff like practical applications of AI in daily tasks like finding recipes and tech support to the complexities of adopting AI in professional settings.

Desk and framing arrangement for that YouTube talking head look.

The Man Calling Bullshit on the AI Boom - “To what end? What happened there? Because we get all these stories about ‘Oh, they fed all the data into the LLM,’ and then what?”'// Plus, a list of previous big tech things that have been utter bullshit.

The intelligence is in the user - The robot is only as good as what you bring to it.

The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet - “French cover design can be unsympathetic to cover illustration, crowding the paintings with poor type choices and purposeless graphics.” // Great looking paperback covers. // That basic framing would be good for video thumbnails…?

Manton predicts the AI oligopoly - “I’m increasingly thinking that we’ll have OpenAI and Google for the mainstream, Anthropic carving out an enterprise niche, Meta doing the ads thing, open source models… and the rest of the industry is going to fade away.

“How many $18 glasses of natural wine can you drink while friends relay the latest upsetting news they gleaned from X, Instagram, and TikTok…” the new lost generation

The new Lost Generation - What people without kids are up to. “Must be nice,” etc.

How Target is rethinking search for generative AI - 🤖 To stay ahead, Target is training its AI agents to understand product context deeply and surface assortments that reflect how people shop in the real world. Bhosale gave an example of a “summer party” query that should generate not just tableware, but grills, décor, sunscreen, and more—a holistic, curated experience.

Our modern addictions—especially to our phones—have quietly become the backbone of daily life, eroding memory, attention, and a sense of self. Against this backdrop, a wave of cultural withdrawal, from sobriety to expat living, reflects a deep desire to reset before AI either liberates us or consumes us. AI generated summary of: The new Lost Generation. Key Points Modern addiction has shifted from substances to screens, with phone dependency becoming unavoidable for work and survival.

I Blame the AI - “Accountability sinks are systems designed so that when things go wrong, no individual human can be held responsible for fixing them. He argues that ‘decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen.’” So, therefore: “Redesigning roles and AI systems with human overrides will be essential to ensuring accountability.

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity - “We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” And: “Each incidence of workslop carries real costs for companies. Employees reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance of workslop.

PaaS TalkWe’re trying to amp up more technical explanations and demos of why Tanzu Platform/Cloud Foundry are great. Here is a little front-runner for a demo I’m going to extract from this same talk. Relative to your interestsI didn’t take the time to organize these by topic. Apologies and kisses. UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI - ‘The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”.

Waiting for the Eurostar in that little space - both at Centraal and St Pancras - crammed in with your fellow humans isn’t Brueghel. It’s Bosch.

Marriott checks out AI agents amid technology transformation

Occupying TikTok with love - “And TikTok is full of advice about how to break out of this ‘200 views jail’ - have a niche, have a hook, look at trends - but maybe instead we could just think ‘how beautiful, TikTok are going to share my thing with 200 random people scattered around the earth’. It’s not a jail, it’s a window. (Or it’s a jail with a window)"

Do Not Shred Your Fingers In An Actual Blender - “Yes, sometimes LLMs can simulate humans. Yes, sometimes those simulations can be useful. But be wary of a simulation if you can’t verify its accuracy/efficacy. When you cannot yet distinguish fact from fiction, relying on a fiction pump seems unwise.

Pentagon research official wants to have AI on every desktop in 6 to 9 months - “‘We want to have an AI capability on every desktop — 3 million desktops — in six or nine months,’ Michael said during a Politico event on Tuesday. ‘We want to have it focus on applications for corporate use cases like efficiency, like you would use in your own company … for intelligence and for warfighting.

Java 25: Oracle’s Big-Tent Release—and a Clearer Roadmap for What’s Next - “Java’s momentum (by the numbers and the vibe) Oracle cited a 2025 VDC study claiming 73 billion active JVMs and reiterated Java’s position as the ‘#1 enterprise language.

The Post-AI Org Chart - The people need to stop saying the quiet part out-loud about job loss. The focus should be on doing more with what you have, not doing the same with less people. But, hey, investors, amiright?! // “This configuration reduces headcount (1:7:49 -> 1:7:14) by 53%.

“A person dies, but capital is forever.” // And, when the worker becomes the self-manager. Capitalism and the Death Drive

”advanced Unicode manipulation” Free Glitch Text Generator - Create Distorted & Zalgo Text Effects

Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships - “If you want the software to get updated—to have bugs fixed and security vulnerabilities patched—you want something very different. What you want is an ongoing supply of software, not a copy of a specific software artifact.” // A good overview of updating OSS software versus a one-time download and continuous use. Paying for support is one way to get the actual “supply chain” benefits enterprises and auditors crave.

Dan Moren’s iOS 26 Review - “It’s one of the very best, most thoughtful, most useful changes in iOS 26.” // I didn’t notice this, and it is nice of you so a lot of things with text and other content on your phone (like link blogging).

Treat your to-read pile like a river - ”To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).” // Be comfortable with a to didn’t read list.

Michael Dell is part of a consortium, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, pursuing the acquisition of TikTok’s US operations to ensure majority American ownership and control over its algorithm.

Recent research suggests that moderate sun exposure may confer wide-ranging health benefits beyond vitamin D production, potentially offsetting its well-known risks. While excessive UV can lead to skin cancer, new studies indicate that careful sun-seeking could lower mortality rates, improve cardiovascular health, and even modulate immunity. This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer Moderate sunlight exposure correlates with lower all-cause mortality despite an increase in skin cancer risk.

This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: Our obsession with efficiency is costing us our humanity. Modern life is obsessed with speed, convenience, and frictionless efficiency, but in the process, we’re eroding the small, slow pleasures that make life meaningful. The piece argues that embracing inconvenience—commutes, cooking, wandering—restores humanity in a world of one-click living. Frictionless living kills small joys like daydreaming, cooking, or strolling your neighborhood. Hyper-efficiency tools (Amazon, ChatGPT, Uber) turn life into a series of swipes and clicks with no plot.

This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: What Killed Youth Optimism? Youth, long the demographic of relentless optimism, is now more pessimistic than older generations, according to the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey. Despite measurable gains in wealth, younger Americans are facing a crushing mix of debt, unaffordable housing, and job-market instability that makes their cynicism feel rational. Youth consumer sentiment has fallen below that of older generations, a reversal of historic trends.

This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: are you high-agency or an NPC? San Francisco is in the throes of an AI-fueled renaissance, buzzing with wealth, 22-year-old techno-prophets, and absurd $100M salaries, even as anxiety simmers beneath the surface. In a city caught between triumph and precarity, the culture has splintered into “high-agency” hustlers poised to surf the AGI wave and “NPCs” drifting toward a permanent, algorithm-sedated underclass. Key Insights High-agency behavior—the ability to adapt, create, and thrive despite uncertainty—is the ultimate currency in AI-era San Francisco.

32 notes on AI & writing - “AI is better than most humans at producing prose. In a couple years, it will be better than most “professional writers” as well. Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible.” // We should be using AI for corporate communication without shame.

This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: With the Em Dash, A.I. Embraces a Fading Tradition AI’s persistent use of the em dash has triggered a minor cultural freakout online, with many insisting it’s a “tell” that instantly reveals machine-generated text. Yet the dash is a centuries-old punctuation mark beloved by novelists and grammarians, and its sudden suspicion says more about modern typing habits than any deep AI quirk.

Icelandic grocery bag.

Returning Bacchantes, Lovis Corinth, 1894.

Girl on a Green Sofa with a Cat Max Pechstein

Cologne.

Cologne.

Museum Mayer van den Bergh.

Museum Mayer van den Bergh.

Museum Mayer van den Bergh.

Museum Mayer van den Bergh.

Vietnamese in Antwerp.

Antwerp.

That’s an old 50.

Max Martin sales price.

Fancy peanut butter in your beverage?

Commerce in the Netherlands

“You are ugly, and your mother dresses you crazy.”

Moxy Hotel, London.

Henry Moore Underground Sheltering

Frans Francken the Younger (1581-1642) and David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) The Interior of a Picture Gallery Around 1640

By Cormac.

I’m

I’d just like a knob.

Spooky underwear.

Explore BCN, 2024.

Best airline sandwiches.

Master AI for students.

Ibiza.

Kubernetes podcast in the Netherlands, field studio.

Collage by Cormac.

Made by my son.

A big deal in 2007.

At the light board.

This was supposed to be calming.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. DFW, Texas.

Making classic queso.

Aspirational life-style

Meanwhile, just another day in Texas.

Coffee with a cause, Austin.

Spam

Frosty spider.

The Penguin at mom’s.

Homemade meatball sub.

Good talk.

Found in Severance.

Benares by Marius Bauer

I made up this book about JSON.

Banksy being chained to the wall is some kind of irony infinite regress.

Me.

California.

Compassion

Ye Olden Days

Not available in the Netherlands.

Narrow speaking space.

British outpost on Oslo.

Found in the kid’s school.

Perfect setup for a typical D&D goblin ambush.

Heartfelt.

Introduction to composting for the garden.

Left-overs in Cologne.

Fashion or functional?

Fansastic Mr. Fox

Brutalist(?) Glasgow.

Ancillary American embassy in Glasgow.

Little Amsterdam in Glasgow.

Ibiza sea-side.

In the studio back-alley.

Typical Amsterdam office park aesthetic.

Antik.

Business class box, AMS to LCY.

Great Northern Hotel bar.

Athens.

Naxos.

Recent D&D inspiration and help from the AIs.

The basics of an MCP Server.

AI made in Adobe Express.

Emoji with tots. Made with some AI. Related:

Enterprise.

Sovereign cloud urgency.

Mila hair.

Various green hag by Midjourney.

Drawing by Alejandra.

Naxos souvenirs.

Naxos.

Athens.

Filming.

Dragon Magazine #63, January 1997, Tony DiTerlizzi.

The Container Wars.

In-room at the Fourpoints by Sheraton East Shoreditch, second level basement. Not recommended.

It was good.

I was told the Greeks don’t age their meat. Here is aging in London.

Ippudo, Canary Wharf.

Here is a separate blog for “photo dumping." In the old days of blogging, we had services like Flickr where you could put everything for those who cared. One did not want to fill their regular blog up with a run of odd photos. I remember reading that two friends who rarely saw each other would post photos as a way of talking with each other and sharing what they were up to.

Lunch with James at Sune. I asked for a wine that tasted like an old Greek man who had not showered for three weeks. This fit the bill.

Your humble author.

The Ditherinator - Convert your photos to shitty old versions that will print well on dot matrix printers. Love it.

Webcurios 19/09/25 webcurios.co.uk/webcurios… “I COULD GET TO MARSEILLES IN 8 HOURS FFS. What am I doing with my life? Why am I sitting in my pants in Vauxhall typing words about the internet when I could instead be about to visit Southern France and drink pastis and throw fireworks in the streets with wild Mediterranean abandon? I am TERRIBLE at being alive.” // This person’s linkblog style is next-level.

“linguistic pyrotechnics” - Chatty-G tries to explain to me why I don’t like contemporary hip-hop: “2. Wordplay vs. vibe – [Wu-Tang,], Tribe, and OutKast gave you linguistic pyrotechnics. This new wave often gives you murmured hooks and repetition. To an ear trained on lyricism, it can feel like lazy filler.

There is wide agreement that AMS<->LCY is the perfect flight.

I’m giving a talk on what platform engineers seem to be doing (and probably will do) to manage AI a #SREDay London today. Here are the slides: speakerdeck.com/cote/ai-p…

Recommended by London barber for Turkish meat in Amsterdam central.

When you meet a new person in your field, one easy small talk question to ask them is: “if you were [insert your company name here], what would you do?” It gets you some free consulting, lets someone talk about themselves and things they know, and, you know, just gives you something to talk about that fills the silence.

UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/1… ‘The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”. The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated.

Java 25: Oracle Makes Java Easier To Learn, Ready for AI Development -

I think “agent” may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now - “[AI ‘agents’ are] Tools in a loop to achieve a goal… wiring up tools to an LLM in order to achieve goals using those tools in a bounded loop.” // Also, he’s not a fan of the “autonomous” vision, which feels right. // “This category of agent remains science fiction. If your agent strategy is to replace your human staff with some fuzzily defined AI system (most likely a system prompt and a collection of tools under the hood) you’re going to end up sorely disappointed.

Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B - That’s a good match, and a quick exit.

Does anyone really want air hand-dryers around? I mean, they’re loud and they don’t work. You might as well have a sign that says “dry your hands off on your clothes.

This a good, correct framing of the AI project failure stuff. No one really knows what will work and what they’re doing yet. As we learned in the digital transformation craze of the 2010’s, this means failure == learning. And learning is what you need to do a lot of. More so, this kind of rapid learning, innovation, and sense making is exactly what a platform like Tanzu Platform with Cloud Foundry is excels at, and has a long, proven history of supporting.

Look at this busy lil' fella!

Claude Code is being utilized beyond coding, particularly for analyzing and reformatting plain text notes, suggesting that AI may emerge as standalone applications rather than being integrated into existing software.

Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption - 🤖: “Enterprise deployment via Anthropic’s API exposes a different facet: businesses adopt AI programmatically to automate. 77% of API usage is automation-dominant, particularly in coding, debugging, office administration, and recruitment. Surprisingly, firms are not especially price-sensitive; higher-cost tasks see higher adoption if they deliver economic value. Yet complex, high-impact deployments are constrained by context—firms need to restructure data flows and centralize knowledge to fully unlock AI potential.

“My phone -and I realise this is mildly absurd – is a constant slight disappointment to me. But I’m from the generation that thought we’d have the world on our wrist.” W.

“A man who had over the course of a week absorbed, as by osmosis, the Spirit of the Internet. And that is a foul, foul thing.” a slightly embarrassed announcement

Slowing Down - How to avoid burnout as you get more successful at life.

Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise apps will feature AI agents by 2026 - “Enterprise applications are entering a new phase of automation, with Gartner forecasting that 40 percent of them will include task-specific AI agents by 2026 – up from less than 5 percent today.” And: “By 2035, the firm predicts, agentic AI will account for nearly $450 billion in enterprise software revenue, or 30 percent of the market.” // Some predictions about broad uses as well.

I have been trying to figure out fatteh. Here are some recent attempts. I still don’t know if I actually like this dish, but it is super fun to make. It’s sort of - and pardon any cultural offense here, I don’t even know what the aesthetic-mores of this food culture are - like Lebanese migas.

School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study - Update on the young people and those damn video games. // “There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.

We come up with some pretty fantastic titles for Software Defined Talk. And you should see the five to ten other possible ones we note down each episode. One of the best ones is truncated in the screenshot: “You can’t spell Clippy without CLI.”

The new Use Model shortcut in Apple Shortcuts opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, I like to summarize a lot of pages. Sometimes, ChatGPT can’t get the text for those pages, or I don’t trust the text it retrieves. There’s a shortcut that will retrieve the cleaned up text of a page (as markdown). So, you can get that markdown, and with the new Use Model shortcut, you can summarize it and then send the markdown summary to Drafts.

A collection of work-related content produced between November 2024 and July 2025 pertains to technology discussions, particularly focusing on AI, platform engineering, and private cloud solutions.

In macOS Tahoe, you can finally export Apple Notes in markdown. This is great, and even exports images and handwriting from the Apple Pencil. You can also bulk export, which is great! Sadly, bulk exporting images and handwriting doesn’t work. It saves the images and handwriting in a file called Attachements, but then in the actual note markdown, all references to images are to a file called FallbackImage.png. Also, it exports an sqlite database.

How To Build Agentic AI That Ships - The New Stack - “Ninety-five percent of AI initiatives should be expected to fail as long as we ignore these pitfalls: Models are generic. Enterprises are unique. Ideal use cases aren’t flashy. Coordination across teams is hard.” // Lots of other good executive think too, especially being blind to how complex the overall system is w/r/t dependencies. // Also notable is that, technology aside, these are all the concerns of “digital transformation.

Anthropic lets Claude remember previous interactions to streamline work - Including, and using, past chats in your current chat. Always a great, helpful feature.

“cash incinerators” OpenAI doesn’t have the cash to pay Oracle $300 billion — raising it will test the very limits of private markets

macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica review - Check out the extended overview of the new Spotlight features/changes if you’re into launchers.

Most Work is Translation - by Aparna Chennapragada - ACD - This is a great metaphor: ”To me, LLMs have the potential to be the Babel fish of work, the little creature from Hitchhiker’s Guide that instantly translates whatever goes into your ear. Except here, it’s not speech alone. It’s papers into briefs, meetings into memos, data into charts, ideas into roadmaps etc.” // So much of knowledge work figuring out what the fuck people are saying and what you should do.

OpenAI’s study indicates that users primarily utilize ChatGPT as an advisory tool to enhance decision-making and productivity in knowledge-intensive jobs.

After migrating my Mastodon instance from social.lol to here, I seem to have lost about 1,000 followers. I’m sure they are enjoying a little less pictures of chairs next to garbage cans.

How big the Kubernetes market?TAM-time for managing Kubernetes: The container management market has grown more than 20% over the past year, with a market value of over $2.5 billion in 2024. The market is forecast to exceed $4.5 billion in constant currency by 2028, with a 17.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Gartner, August, 2025. That TAM means that every vendor looking to sell Kubernetes is competing for slice of $3bn to $4bn pie.

In my searches/research, analysts like Gartner, IDC, and Forrester are invisible to ChatGTP, Claude, etc. The robots will find the reports licensed by vendors - I’m guessing only if they don’t require leadgen. The analysts should probably start publishing some juicy abstracts with just enough numbers, analysis, and advice to get into the training data and search results to get people to funnel to their pages. Of course, converting a rando-click to a $95,000 PDF would be some real funnel-management magic.

Why CIOs can’t afford another modernization failure in 2026 - ”Gartner estimates that up to 70% of large-scale digital transformation and modernization initiatives fail to deliver their intended outcomes. That number has hovered stubbornly high for years, but the stakes in 2026 are different.

This is the kind of thing the Internet was made for, with that “one person can do a thing” vibe. Plus, this is the kind of music I go nuts for.

Maps for The Dying Unicorn side adventure, which did not have any, being a small adventure. I like very large battle maps maps rather than the standard 40x30 or whatever. Ranged with long bows and the like aren’t too fun on tiny maps. Plus, if you end up playing a cat and mouse game, you need space to roam around. Making these maps is also part of the “play,” especially when doing solo D&D.

To Apple, there is only one time zone. www.macrumors.com/2025/09/1…

When the AI policy board is slowing everything down youtube.com/shorts/Xq…

“PRACTICAL ESTHETIC SERVICES ADAPTABLE TO CLIENT SITUATION.” Art card

“Executize this” -> “write this for someone who doesn’t care about the topic but needs to deal with it for their job.

“I couldn’t imagine anything worse than running my dad’s Hooters.” An Interview with Cloudflare Founder and CEO Matthew Prince About Internet History and Pay-per-crawl

“Music for Claude Coding.” What I think about when I think about Claude Code

“I was drinking coffee because I was tired, and I was tired because I was drinking coffee. Can not drinking nearly two liters of coffee every day improve your sleep quality? Big if true.” Less Coffee, Better Sleep

Goldman Sachs has implemented its GS AI Assistant to enhance employee efficiency in tasks like document summarization and data analysis, while acknowledging the importance of personal nuance in client services.

An air fryer means fresh croutons in ten minutes.

Update on the Chick-fil-a Kubernetes, edge stuff. // How our Edge Kubernetes Platform has Evolved

In 2026, I’d like to see a lot more coverage about the actual enterprise AI apps people are building and running. // Agents show promise, but widespread usage in the enterprise remains elusive

“The last thing I bought and loved was a sauna. It came on a truck from Sweden. It looks like a little troll barrel and I have it in my garden by one of the two lakes. It’s admittedly a faff, because you have to build a fire, then come back in the house and wait for it to heat up. But there’s nothing else to do where I live, in Northamptonshire.

I think this means “thing you use to run and manage container based applications on public and/or private cloud.” Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure. // You know, “multi-cloud.” // Anyhow, congrats to this year’s winners.

An IT modernization tale, with both technology and culture. // The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security

Social media has shifted from genuine connection and casual sharing to low-quality, curated content, leading to decreased engagement.

From a longer video on avoiding resume driven development when building your own internal developer portal.

ChatGPT image generation can now create coloring book pages from photos.

The last in a six part series. I haven’t this many books, so quickly in a long time. It was fun! The Devil You Know by Erin M. Evans 📚

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, ultra rare Duivendrecht edition.

How the Sun Microsystems acquisition made Oracle the cloud company it is today

If your deal is nostalgia for another time (imagined on real), your customers are likely conservative regarding modernizing. They want things to stay the same, the job to be done, brand wise, is a nostalgia experience. Hopefully the food has good price/performance too. // Cracker Barrel halts remodels after logo backlash, lackluster test

“Today the only full time employees besides him are Horvitz and two full time editors. The rest of the staff – a book keeper and the remaining 23 editors – are part time working remotely in enough different time zones to supply Techmeme and Mediagazer with near 24×7 coverage.” // Gabe Rivera’s 20-year-old headline site, Techmeme, has never been hotter.

Looks like great additions for MCP. Spring AI 1.1.0-M1 Available Now

“won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU.” www.

SCREAMC.BMF Corel Gallery Clipart https://mastodon.art/@clipart/115195054496439300

Recently in Greece

CARA.BMF Corel Gallery Clipart https://mastodon.art/@clipart/115190100009576865

Somewhere between 40% and 60% of apps run on private cloud, you just never hear about it.

I consolidated my two Mastodon accounts into one, moving/merging @cote@social.lol to @cote@cote.io. It’ll be the same stuff, more or less. I’m not sure how replies will work.

“GenAI can help you write talk proposals, but if you use it without injecting your own curiosity and humanness, reviewers can tell. Here’s the process I use to shape real, human abstracts that reflect my curiosity and experience. I developed this process for technical talks, but it adapts well to other formats too.” From Whitney.

The last of my don’t build your own internal developer platform tiny videos: Check six more reasons in the white paper, no lead-in or anything, just a fancy PDF. Relevant to your interestsVMware Explore and SpringOne Highlights from the Tanzu Division’s Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Strohmeyer - ”I think explaining to our customers the movement of all the Kubernetes resources into VCF was important in positioning VCF as a complete infrastructure solution and then having clarity that Tanzu Platform is a true, pre-engineered Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry.

No More Coders? You Still Need DevOps.

VMware Explore and SpringOne Highlights from the Tanzu Division’s Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Strohmeyer - Tanzu - ”I think explaining to our customers the movement of all the Kubernetes resources into VCF was important in positioning VCF as a complete infrastructure solution and then having clarity that Tanzu Platform is a true, pre-engineered Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry. I think some customers were not aware of that change, and appreciate the power of simplicity with CF and how we are continuing to invest in that proven technology with Tanzu Platform 10.

6 NotebookLM features to help students learn - Just in time for school!

Platform engineering is about more than what’s going on Backstage - An internal developer platform is a lot of work, not just installing the UI layer. // Also, check out the Syntaso people popping up!

Conflicting opinions on the ROI of AI - Yeah, it’s up in the air at the moment. I think we need to get a better handle on what use cases work. Is it just chat, code generation, and better search? What are the other apps?

10 Months into AI Agents : Which Are Used Most? - Feels like it’s primarily about supporting programming, not doing things in apps. // Not sure about the methodology and source for this chart, tho.

Final thought on Australia - “Sydney, with its lush yards, immaculate beaches, stellar Asian food, and laid-back citizens, is a superior Los Angeles and might be my favorite large city in the world. Given that LA is my favorite large US city, it might be that I have a thing for sprawling suburban cities with Mediterranean climates, but I’m pretty sure, having talked to many other travelers with varied tastes, that it’s more about the quality of Sydney, and less about my own particular fetish.

What’s the point? - “I don’t know if the people working on this stuff have a vision of the world, or if they’re just cashing in. I don’t understand how they can be so aloof to our current crises. What’s the point?

Building your own internal developer platform is a lot of work, buy it insteadHere’s a transcript: One of the reasons internal developer platforms are so valuable is because they do so much, and that’s something that you run into if you’re trying to build your own platform instead of buy it. The goal of a platformThe goal of a platform is to remove as much toil wait time, just nonsense work that a developer has to do just to get their applications into production, just to actually run them and configure them.

How I Use Claude - “Claude is really good at helping here, mostly because thinking quickly saturates: when you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes, you’ve had all the thoughts you’re gonna have, and it’s time to talk to someone else. Claude lets me sample fresh perspectives and possible actions I had not thought of.

An ode to “via” - ‘the old ways’ - there are so many of these little things from the 2000’s web/bloggosphere.

Oxide Friday FAQs - These are clever/amazing “brand marketing” assets. You take advantage of a unique and famous asset you have (Bryan) and get some thought leadership and brand definition out there. Also, they have the product right there the whole time.

Breaking the AI illusion: From adoption to growth - Garbage in, garbage out: “37% of midmarket CMOs believe AI-enabled marketing technologies have potential to help their organizations over the next 12-18 months, according to the Midmarket survey. This includes incorporating tools and workflows to boost content creation and automate campaigns, critical elements of modern marketing success. Still, only 31% of the same CMOs are prioritizing the modernization of their MarTech stacks.

All IT work to involve AI by 2030, says Gartner - ‘AI’s hidden costs mean Gartner believes 65 percent of CIOs aren’t breaking even on AI investments." And: “Plummer said Gartner doesn’t foresee an “AI jobs bloodbath” in IT or other industries for at least five years, adding that just one percent of job losses today are attributable to AI.’ // Still figuring out the ROI.

The Three Faces Of Generative AI - “People today use large language models for three central purposes: 1) Getting things done 2) Developing thoughts, and 3) Love and companionship.

What if the AI stockmarket blows up? - ‘By our reckoning, the total revenue from the tech accruing to the West’s leading AI firms is currently $50bn a year. Although such revenues are growing fast, they are still less than 2% of the $2.9trn investment in new data centres globally that Morgan Stanley, another bank, forecasts between 2025 and 2028—a figure which excludes energy costs. Meanwhile, the extent to which revenues will translate into profits is murky.

Advice on managing legacy applications emphasizes understanding their history, identifying stakeholders, and learning necessary technologies to enhance their integration with new products.

Summer. For most of my life I lived in Texas, where the heat of summer melts your face off. Summer was fun because I wasn’t in school, not because it was sunny. Now that I live in a part of the world where summer is mild, I really like summer. I see what all the fuss was about! So, too bad it’s mostly over now. On this week’s Software Defined Talk episode we discuss the effectiveness of reorgs, Meta’s new AI team, and the Google antitrust ruling.

The Great Migration: Why Workloads Are Coming Home to Private Cloud - “55% of enterprises are already running GenAI in a private cloud – especially when it comes to use cases like inference, fine-tuning and RAG.

The End Of Business Apps As We Know Them Is Here - Kate Leggett has a go at defining the enterprise AI stack, bringing in the “fabric” notion.

The World Runs 20 Billion Instances of Curl. Where’s the Support? -

Private AI powers Broadcom’s vision for VCF 9.0 - “We shared we have more than 80 customers now,” for AI stuff, I believe he’s saying. // And: “The key thing with VCF that I think kind of gets missed sometimes in the conversations is everybody is claiming they can do sovereign cloud, but the details matter here,” Wolf said. “The difference with VCF is we run a fully air-gapped environment.

With AI Boom, Dell’s Datacenter Biz Is Finally Bigger Than Its PC Biz - “Thanks to the GenAI boom, Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, which sells servers, storage, switching, and services into the datacenter, is finally – and very likely permanently – larger than its PC business for the first time in its history. (We are not counting the time a decade and a half ago when Dell ate Perot Systems and was also eating software companies to try to create a clone of IBM, much as HPE did at the same time.

Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well - The cycle of tech loosing its democratic morals in favor of tech innovation, and, of course, making money.

China Has a Different Vision for AI. It Might Be Smarter. - AI applications outside of the consumer sector: “In February, the city announced the release of an agricultural AI model, using technology from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which gives local farmers guidance on crop selection, planting and pest control, according to a local government report. The city’s meteorological service is using DeepSeek to improve the accuracy of weather reports.

VCF And Private AI Take Center Stage At VMware Explore 2025 - “We believe that while the company has quietly designed and delivered the leading private cloud platform, it should be more vocal and direct in the market. While competitors claim to be the more affordable option, these claims are often based on upfront discounts that don’t fully account for cost over the long term. And while these competitors talk about vendor lock-in, they are in reality simply suggesting that customers move from one proprietary cloud stack to another.

Is Your IT Organization A Ponzi Scheme? - “The only way out is to stop borrowing against the future and start paying down the past. Escaping requires sustained platform investment — enough to reach equilibrium where debt stops growing. This means: Refactoring to improve code structure and reduce the cost of future changes. Refreshing technologies before they become emergencies. Rationalizing redundant systems to reduce complexity and risk.

Five Vide Coding Lessons for the Enterprise - ‘In an enterprise, the “context window” isn’t just a technical term; it’s the accumulated technical debt, undocumented tribal knowledge, and complex dependencies that hold your systems together. A new developer or a new AI tool can’t simply be dropped in and expected to understand this history. The leader’s job is to provide that context, not expect the tool to figure it out.

Seeing like a software company - When management meddling slows down the business because they need/want to measure and make decide. Also, good sub-plot on “the meeting for the meeting,” prep meetings and using the “back-channel” to get things done.

Athens has a spooky atmosphere.

You should check this out: You can try out our AI platform with a 90 day trial. It’ll host models in private cloud, act as a proxy to public models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, whatever), and has tight integration with Java apps. Python works fine too, of course: you can host LangChain in it to get management over all the AI goop. It’s all in the current version of the Tanzu Platform.

Blade Runner makes its live-action return next year - 2026 in Amazon.

The World Runs 20 Billion Instances of Curl. Where’s the Support? -

Original contentHere’s two of my podcasts to share with you: Capitalism is working, Software Defined Talk #534: “This week, we discuss the US backing Intel, SaaS staying power, and AI’s impact on deep work. Plus, Matt Ray’s moving tips and more kolache talk in the after show.” Also available, unedited, in video form. The business value of developer relations, devrel history, plus more stuff, with Mary Thengvall: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté chat with Mary Thengvall, exploring the development and significance of Developer Relations (devrel) over the years.

Meta Says Threads Has Over 400 Million Monthly Active Users - “What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be.

The Business of ChatGPT - Revenue and such numbers circa. August, 2025.

One Way Parents Can Fight the Phone-Based Childhood - GPT5: “Phones are not the root cause; they’re the symptom of a constrained, over-supervised childhood. The solution isn’t banning devices but giving kids freedom back: unsupervised play, local friends, independence. If parents want kids off screens, they must open the door–literally–and rebuild the conditions that once made childhood social, adventurous, and real.

ai-development-patterns, PaulDuvall - ”A comprehensive collection of patterns based on my experience for building software with AI assistance, organized by implementation maturity and development lifecycle phases. These patterns are subject to change as the field evolves.

Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty - Great picture too.

Kubernetes Isn’t Enough for a Production-Ready Platform - Yeah. You should buy your platform instead of build it.

AWS CEO says AI replacing junior staff is ‘dumbest idea’ - ‘Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Here is some (book) writing pedantry for business book writing. Of course, the way to write anything is to “just start writing.” For some people, this works. For most, the question is, “yes, but how ‘just start writing’?” That is, how do you start with a blank screen/blank sheet of paper? For me, I start typing into the screen like I was talking to someone, complete with things like “you know,” and “like,” and especially, “I mean…” Don’t write like you would write, write like you would talk.

Accelerating Enterprise Application Upgrades Through Legacy Dependency Migration: Spring Application Advisor 1.4 - Upgrading software is sort of a boring topic. But, when we talk about this with customers, they get more excited than talking about AI. I shit you not. Just upgrading your ancient Java versions (as in this product release) is a huge problem. And, if you want to do all that fancy new AI stuff, you need the newer versions of your framework and stack.

The Cost Reality Check: Eliminating Public Cloud Waste Through Strategic Planning - “49% of organizations estimate that over 25% of their public cloud spend is wasted. 31% believe the waste exceeds 50%. That’s a level of inefficiency that few leaders can tolerate.

What is the most profitable thing you have done with ChatGPT? - A lot of it is making sense of confusing regulations and contracts. And plumbing. It gives “the little guy” more power in fields that are a mess of rules and lore, like law.

a word to my students - Copy and paste from AI only hurts the student. The rest of is should just worry about our own, ongoing shit-storms. // However, outside of education, when the point is to communicate and get shit done, I say go crazy with “chatbots.” They are probably better, more effective business writers than most.

Lots of AI slowdown and skepticism in the past week. Likely due to the letdown of the GPT-5 release, I guess? First, though from last month, The Economist asks “Why is AI so slow to spread?” GPT5 says it says: Integration Costs and Technical Frictions Many businesses haven’t integrated their datasets effectively into the cloud, creating latency and transaction costs. Even with AI tools available, getting data into the right format and place is a barrier—making adoption slow and expensive.

The European Cloud Dilemma: Innovation Versus Digital Sovereignty - Tough call.

The Hidden Cost of AI Pilots that Never Scale - “Scale” - that is, doing a lot of it across many different parts of your business - is where most enterprise software businesses cases succeed.

New survey reveals key differentiator for successful AI adoption: IT modernization - “With 71% of organizations actively deploying artificial intelligence (AI) at scale, the companies experiencing the most dramatic success share a common characteristic: They’ve made the most significant investments in IT modernization and are undertaking multiple AI projects simultaneously.”

What happens when one storytelling style dominates the world? - ‘I realised this, at first, when I was reading Strange Tales of the Chinese Studio, a novel written at the end of the Ming dynasty. I was amused that each story ended in a way that would make most Western readers (and probably modern Chinese ones) frustrated. It doesn’t always end with justice for the protagonist. It seems to say to us: Well, life is like this, what can we do?

A guide to platform engineering - For those who want to “be like Google.

How to Tell if Something is AI-Written - Sure, those are good heuristics. But, I mean, if it’s good and useful, who cares? // Companion piece: how to tell if something is badly written. It is bad.

Helen Garner’s ‘How to End a Story’ - Noticing.

The Creator Economy Is a Race to the Bottom for Human Dignity - “Edelman Trust Data reveals (especially for Gen Z) that people are more likely to trust what a creator says about a brand than what the brand’s own CEO says about the brand. Compounded by parasocial relationships and a dash of isolation, people believe what tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee tells you about the new iPhone more than the company which made it.

GEO best practices for in-house PR teams | Muck Rack Blog - SEO and PR for AI. Figure out what questions your customers (and influencers) have and publish answers on the web. Also, influence others (press, etc.) to write-up things the way you want it. This is all so that the AIs will find that content and get trained on it.

Resist AI! - Meanwhile, if you’re opposed to AI, some tips and tactics.

The Top AI Tool for Devs Isn’t GitHub Copilot, New Report Finds - “LeadDev’s respondents, too, mostly believe that AI has made them more productive, with only 5% saying there was no change and 10% saying it was making them less productive. But 26% also said that they weren’t sure or didn’t know, which, as Carey noted, points to the fact that many organizations also don’t have a way for tracking developer productivity.

Is GPT-5 really worse than GPT-4o? Ars puts them to the test. - This is a good way to review AIs.

Who does your assistant serve? - Against AI for therapy and friendship, etc.

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI? - Eventually, you have to pay for that business value.

Why AI Can’t Crack Your Database - “The real challenge lies in business context. Understanding what the data means, how different teams define metrics, and when edge cases matter.” // The app is what matters, and so you beee to integrate it into the business, the people.

The forgotten war on the Walkman - The new thing is always going to destroy civilization, or at least proper behavior.

Three good videosPlatform Engineering 2025: What “great”’ looks like now. Most platform engineering talks are very frustrating for me. The same stuff over and over since about 2015. The platform engineering space is rife with people who’ve made the monumental mistake of thinking Kubernetes is a platform and then finding out they have so much more to build on-top of that thin layer. Meanwhile, based on that false assumption, the industry just jettisoned all the PaaS technology we had.

From Knowledge to Action - For AI, now, the app is what matters most.

Google is a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant for SCPS -

Why we’ve decided to decommission GOV.UK PaaS (Platform as a Service) – Government Digital Service - “It has enjoyed uptime of 99.95%, and suffered only one major incident in its 7 years. All this while tenants deployed services more than 122 times a day, made up of 3,200 applications.” // It worked well, but people didn’t want to use it. Instead: Kubernetes. It’d be cool to hear how the next three years went.

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. - “We have been fed a steady diet of bullshit for the last several years.” // He’s not a fan.

Making AI Reviews More UsefulFrom Robert Brook, posted July, 2025.Reading all the ChatGPT 5 coverage confirms my feeling that no one knows how to review these models yet. It’s either those incomprehensible charts (and also, who cares how good they are at math? More: who understand what those tests even mean?) or people just saying “I really like it.” It’s a classic IT/business alignment problem. Until you define the “business outcome” you want and how you can improve it, you’re vibe-ROI’ing.

Columbus, Ohio’s Revival: a Model for the Rust Belt - Update from IRL. Now, back to cyberspace.

At-Scale Management and Multi-Foundation Views with Tanzu Hub - If you’re running a platform - or platforms - inside a large organization, Tanzu’s got something for you.

Gartner Says Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Grew 22.5% in 2024 -

Remembering Dominic Pannell: Dom’s Framework for Influencer Ecosystem Mapping - Managing the people who influence enterprise It buying.

Why AI Isn’t The Silver Bullet For Customer Service — Yet - A typical digital transformation problem: you change just one tool, but not everything else, especially how people work and the (now) old systems you integrate with.

Heroku brings app development to the AI era - One day I hope people stop focusing on build containers, and start focusing on to build apps.

In the world of podcasts, YouTube is now the elephant in the room — just like in TV - This is obviously a category error: if I can’t add it to Overcast with an RSS feed, it’s not a podcast. But, (1) old man yelling at clouds, it me! and, (2) aside from using the word “podcast,” good info. // “The elephant in the room of all of this upheaval is YouTube – the silly viral internet video giant that became a TV, music, advertising, and now podcast giant.

The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence - A good take on metrics and frameworks to show the “business value” or tech projects.

Your AI workloads still need a service mesh - You always need a load-balancer/proxy/gateway, more generally, “middleware.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, July, 2025.Relative to your interestsHow to Secure MCP Servers Modern Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 - When you want to build your own platform with Kubernetes. Moral Deskilling: why you spend more time on admin than your actual job - I think what this is saying is: when you build a system of work where the people doing the actual work (“workers”) do not have quality control over their work, you mistrust them.

Don’t hide behind AI to trim your belly fat. Start redesigning your workforce - “What we are seeing is not just automation-led efficiency, it is a structural shakeout triggered by board pressures to cut costs, eliminate underperforming middle layers, and move away from legacy talent strategies. The corporate world has also experienced high-wage fatigue, where many staff have had significant wage growth, especially since the inflationary pandemic years, and it’s simply very expensive to maintain staff on these high salaries and other benefits.

Modern Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 - When you want to build your own platform with Kubernetes.

The case for memes as a new form of comics -

Why is Rear Window so tense? - “The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing happens.

How to increase your surface area for luck - “One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff – socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.

Moral Deskilling: why you spend more time on admin than your actual job - I think what this is saying is: when you build a system of work where the people doing the actual work (“workers”) do not have quality control over their work, you mistrust them. Therefore you need more managers to oversee them. The workers then stop caring about doing “good work,” because it is l, by design, no longer their responsibility.

How to Secure MCP Servers -

Why is Rear Window so tense? - “The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing happens.

C-suite leaders attribute revenue, software development boosts to AI - “Executives credit increased AI use over the past year for bringing an estimated 44% bump in revenue, according to the report. Nearly 3 in 5 respondents said their organization experienced business growth thanks to software innovation over the last year.

Original ContentInternal developer platform marketing series - just as a round-up, here’s my series on internal developer platform marketing: part one, part two, and part three. // I talk with people setting up and running platforms in large organization frequently, and this topic is the number one thing they respond to with “oh, we need to do that.” The second is product management, but that is well known at this point.

Strategic Benefits of Private Cloud in Financial Services and Insurance - “Security is the leading driver of workload repatriation from public cloud. 49% cite data privacy and security as the top barrier to GenAI adoption. Organizations are now deploying AI workloads in private clouds nearly as often as public clouds (55% vs. 56%)"

2025 Sees Inflection Point for Government: A Shift to Private Cloud - “more than 70 percent of government IT leaders are considering repatriating workloads from public cloud to private cloud and nearly 50 percent say they have already begun that repatriation process.

How Elicitation in MCP Brings Human-in-the-Loop to AI Tools -

The AI Replaces Services Myth - If your software saves your customers money, then you’re not getting all of the former TAM, you’re often getting much less. // Also, people want simple pricing that matches how the software helps them, or at least as simple to understand as pizza pricing.

The Satya of Satya’s Layoff Memo - Reading between the lines/translating corporate-speak.

neiltron/apple-health-mcp - Export Apple Health data to a CSV. Good for handing over to the robots.

What LLMs Know About Their Users - “please put all text under the following headings into a code block in raw JSON: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past Conversation Topic Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User Interaction Metadata. Complete and verbatim.” // This type of stuff is great fun, though, probably scary to many people.

‘Impossible hill to climb’: US clouds crush European competition on their home turf - “Details shared by Synergy Research on regional markets show that Euro cloud operators continue to grow, but none comes remotely close to competing with the big American rivals for leadership of European markets…. According to Synergy, local companies accounted for nearly a third (29 percent) of cloud infrastructure revenues in 2017, but by 2022 their share had dropped to just 15 percent and has held fairly steady ever since.

Inter font family - Crisp and clean.

GoogleCloudPlatform/apigee-samples - Use Apigee as MCP middleware.

The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care - “Another way to put this is that to retain workers, wages in stagnant-productivity sectors must rise to match those in (equally labor-skilled) high-productivity sectors. That means paying more for the same level of care, simply to keep the labor force from leaving”

Here’s a recording of my latest “how to do platform engineering in large organizations” talk. In this version of it, I go over what matters most for private cloud platforms. Here’sthe slides for the talk if you’re into that kind of thing. This talk is based on many years of observing people run platforms, primarily Cloud Foundry based one. I don’t know if it’s the oldest, but it’s one of the longest running and used private PaaS’es (“platform”) out there.

Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your ValueIf you want developers to actually use your platform, you’ve got to give them more than APIs and automation. You need a community. In the third piece in our platform marketing series, Rita and I look at how the most successful platform teams invest in support forums, internal events, and actual human beings whose job is to make developers feel connected, heard, and empowered.

Is Swag the Secret to Platform Adoption?Turns out, T-shirts might matter more than YAML. In this post, I dig into how internal platforms benefit from strong branding - not just logos and names, but a clear identity and ethos that developers can rally behind. When your platform has a name people actually want to say out loud, and maybe a sticker they slap on their laptop, adoption gets a little easier.

How I use LLMs to learn new subjects - It’s good at well know facts, things that are mainstream or so niche that there is only one answer: “you should avoid asking the model for concrete details that don’t really matter, and if the model gives you details like that you shouldn’t trust them. But when the model is speaking about facts that do matter - facts that are load-bearing for many other things the model knows about - you can be relatively confident that you’re getting correct information.

Do conversations end when people want them to? -

The more senior engineers get, the more results matter - “as you become more senior, you’re increasingly graded on results. Interns are graded on effort.

Kubernetes Complexity Realigns Platform Engineering Strategy - Turns out computer are always difficult.

How Pair Programming Enhanced Development Speed, Focus, and Flow -

Where Technology Executives Will Be Investing In 2026 - Looks like lots of datacenter buildout.

Code was the least interesting part of my multi-agent app, and here’s what that means to me - Less time coding means more time designing and product managing.

Java licensing snafus cost millions, drive developers to open source - ”One-quarter of respondents said their organization spent between $50,000 and $100,000 resolving software non-compliance issues, while licensing issues cost 17% of surveyed organizations up to $1 million.

Beyond London Summit 2025: Decoding Google Cloud’s Scale Narrative - Summary of stated Google cloud strategy, from Bola.

AI industry’s size obsession is killing ROI, engineer argues - Doing enterprises AI isn’t free in terms of time, money, opportunity cost, and risk. You need target things that have a pay off, an ROI. I hope that this will mean doing more, not cutting costs. That is growth, not firing people.

Why I’m Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them) - ‘Meanwhile, the winners will be teams building constrained, domain-specific tools that use AI for the hard parts while maintaining human control or strict boundaries over critical decisions. Think less “autonomous everything” and more “extremely capable assistants with clear boundaries.

Most platform teams forget they have a product to sell to developers. Part one of my new series over at The New Stacklays out why internal platform marketing is incredibly important. Here’s excerpt on positioning: Platform Positioning: What Is It Good For? Positioning defines where your platform fits in your organization’s technical landscape. It answers the crucial question: “When and why should developers choose this platform over other options?” Oftentimes, platforms are positioned as the everything solution that solves all the problems and, thus, should be used for all applications.

VMware Tanzu enhances support for generative AI and agents with Tanzu AI Solutions - “As customers move from AI experimentation to implementation, they stand to benefit from closer integrations between technology components as they redefine “Ops” frameworks within their businesses. VMware Tanzu AI Solutions are designed to do just that, with specific enhancements like AI middleware that boosts performance, fosters security and reduces time to value when it comes to operationalizing AI models and applications.

Identify, solve, verify - “My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.

Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027 -

Gartner Survey Finds 45% of Organizations With High AI Maturity Keep AI Projects Operational for at Least Three Years -

Trump’s pressure on Apple to make All-American phones ignores the last tech giant that tried and failed - If no one wants the product, it doesn’t matter where it’s made. // “In the end, Motorola’s failed U.S. adventure had little to do with where the Moto X was assembled, by all accounts. The phone simply didn’t sell well enough to justify a U.S. assembly line.

Agentic Design Patterns, book draft -

Musings on The AI Con - “ask more questions of those pushing AI into everything. What, specifically, is the goal? What is supposed to be automated by the new tool? What are its inputs and outputs supposed to be? What does success look like, exactly? What would count as failure to achieve the goal?

Arriving at ‘Hello World’ in enterprise AI - The (slow) nature of digital transformation hits AI like a sack of bricks in the face. The brick avoidance techniques are the same as always, a duel approach: (1) sell a “business outcome” to execs, a measurable improvement to either making money or cutting costs (2) enable developers to smuggle in AI that is then more costly to get rid of than to accept.

The AI Wired Parent“Why is saying ‘please’ nice?” my five year old daughter asked. Being a dad, I got excited to explain a simple thing in detail, “well,” I started. “No, let’s ask the circle!” and by that she meant voice mode in ChatGPT. So we did: “Well, saying ‘please’ is kind of a way to show respect and appreciation when you’re asking someone for something. It just helps to make the interaction a bit more polite and friendly, which usually makes people more willing to help you out.

VMware Tanzu CIO Checklist for Safer and More Scalable AI Application Delivery - If you’re doing some enterprise AI strategamagizing, here is a good list of things to ponder and pester your direct reports about.

Key Lessons from Shipping AI Products Beyond the Hype -

How Snowflake’s DevProd team operates -

Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) About AI Evals - “the projects we’ve worked on, we’ve spent 60-80% of our development time on error analysis and evaluation. Expect most of your effort to go toward understanding failures (i.e. looking at data) rather than building automated checks.

How should businesses kick off their AI initiatives? Time for the AI advice column - your doctors are in -

A consumption basket approach to measuring AI progress - “In contrast, actual human users typically deploy AIs to help them with relatively easy problems. They use AIs for (standard) legal advice, to help with the homework, to plot travel plans, to help modify a recipe, as a therapist or advisor, and so on. You could say that is the actual consumption basket for LLM use, circa 2025.” // Also, interesting aside that maybe AI is as good as it’ll get (in a good way).

Air France-KLM to increase intelligence of bots that have saved 200,000 hours - Four or five AI uses cases - maybe even agentic! - from the airline I fly.

Perfect FoodsPerfect foods: traditional Tex-Mex refried beans; bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast taco; pad thai with tofu; instant ramen noodles; Dutch fries with mayonnaise; sharp cheddar cheese; salted butter (aka, European butter); peanut butter, chunky; HEB tortillas; kibbling; coffee; queso with all the stuff in it; (OK, OK: all of Tex-Mex); USDA steak, cooked rare. Great episode.Wastebook“and then [for] three minutes you wait for it to be done, gazing out the window contemplating the gentle breeze on the leaves, the distant hum of traffic, the slow steady unrelenting approach of that which comes for us all.

Untitled - “AI-generated art is abundant and cheap to produce. Yet they are both priced the same by Adobe.

American - “I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom.

AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases, Wikipedia - List of words and writing styles commonly found in AI output. I’m really interested in how AI-language leaks (is leaking?) into human language. Also, these would be words and styles you’d tell the AI to NOT do, if you cared.

How to Fix Your Context - Lots to digest in here.

Lessons learned from agentic AI leaders reveal critical deployment strategies for enterprises -

AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study - ”Gartner still expects that by 2028 about 15 percent of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents, up from 0 percent last year. Also, the firm sees 33 percent of enterprise software applications including agentic AI by that time.

KubeCon Is Starting To Sound a Lot Like VMCon -

2025: The State of Consumer AI, Menlo Ventures survey - “More than half of American adults (61%) have used AI in the past six months” - wow! Even for the millions who “just typed one thing at it for 45 seconds” (or whatever) that is a shit-ton.

Giving AI an inner-voice with Model Context Protocol I separated out a “think tool” from my agentic D&D project this week. Thethink tool is stupidly simple: all it does it echo back whatever the AI sends it. The original write-up from Anthropic makes it seems a little more mystical, but it doesn’t take long to understand first, how simple it is, and, second, how great of a hack it is.

Pluralistic: What’s a “public internet?” (25 Jun 2025) - A lot of thinking about EU sovereign cloud, from the fiber level to the social media level.

Europe’s Sovereign Cloud Crossroads: Competitiveness vs Control - “Why has cloud sovereignty become such a pressing issue? Nearly three-quarters (72%) of cloud services are provided with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in Europe, and up to 90% of European data resides outside EU-controlled infrastructure - therefore creating serious geopolitical and jurisdictional challenges for the EU.

VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Versus VMs and Containers on Bare Metal - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog - ”Your current VMware engineers need no special Kubernetes knowledge to manage both the VMs and the consumed Kubernetes components or clusters. Your platform engineers or developers can gain access through self service and your virtualization engineers can manage the virtual infrastructure as they always have.

VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and Private AI: Kubernetes On-Prem is “Having a Moment” - ‘I hear my customers say, “We don’t really know what we’re doing with AI, but we do know our competitors are doing something with it, so we have to do something with it too."’ And: “if you’re running VCF with vSphere 8.0 U3, with a few GPUs, you can start running VKS in a few hours and start processing those AI models.

32 notes on AI & writing, Jasmine Sun - Some positive, growth oriented thinking about AI in creative endeavors.

AI and Tech Jobs: More Evidence That Panic Isn’t Justified - ”32% said it has increased the number of software development positions; only 8% cited a decline.” - What’s up with the other 60%?

Linux Foundation Appoints Jonathan Bryce to Lead CNCF - Good appointments.

New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal - Looks good, helpful, and fun.

How much does AI impact development speed? - “AI sped up task completion by ~21%.” // Aside: Love the implication that 21% is approximate. Are we talking a difference in decimals here, or the actually number? Is it between 21.08% and 21.5%, or 19% and 22%?

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

The Am Dash - A version of the m-dash that’s purposefully human.

Where should AI sit in your UI?. Mapping emerging AI UI patterns and how… -

Stop pontificating about other people losing their jobs to AI and worry about your own job - More executives need to use AI for a month straight. This will both de-hype enterprise magical thinking and help us come up with more uses that accrue value to the organization. In the meantime, most of the value of AI accrues to the individual. Which, really, is fine with me…maybe executives should not use AI.

The 2025 CEO Agenda: Leading in an AI-Driven World, IDC - “In what areas have you achieved measurable business benefits from GenAl initiatives?": Increased operational efficiency: 31%; Improved customer satisfaction: 30%; Improved business resilience: 27%. n=278 CEOs.

Microsoft is pushing Copilot, but everyone just wants ChatGPT - The ChatGPT brand is strong: “OpenAI has said it has 3 million paying enterprise customers, and that number is growing fast. Microsoft told employees that “multiple dozens” of customers have over 100,000 paying users, which would work out to a floor of 2.4 million paying Copilot licenses, but the company hasn’t shared an exact figure.

How Goodyear is trying to meet its “big, hairy, audacious goal” - time for tech execs to step up to agentic AI, says CDO Mamatha Chamarthi - Helping “coach” sales people is a popular AI use case. You can imagine prompts like “given what we know about this customer and their business, what products should we sell to them and how should we pitch them? Also, how can we maximize volume, profit, etc.

Private Cloud vs. Public Cloud in Federal IT Modernization - More on the Broadcom private cloud survey.

Expert Generalists - ”Traditional interview loops still revolve around product trivia - “Explain Spark’s shuffle stages,” “How does Databricks Delta time-travel work?” A candidate who has never touched those tools can still be exactly the kind of person we need: someone who quickly grasps unfamiliar concepts, breaks complex systems into manageable parts, and collaborates across functions. Focusing on a single stack or cloud provider risks filtering out such talent.

My 2025 system prompt -

Training LLMs on books judged as fair use - “In a nutshell, the judge says that legally purchased books can be used to train AI, as long as the models do not reproduce verbatim the original copyrighted works. Pirated books, of course, are a separate issue. They are unlawfully acquired! We can’t steal a book from a store, regardless of what we planned to do with it.

Enterprise AI middleware & services with Tanzu Platform 10.2 There’s a big release for the platform as a service we make at Tanzu, Tanzu Platform 10.2. In new release, we’ve focused a lot on adding in AI middleware and services to the Tanzu Platform. That’s both in the form of AI model brokering and hosting for any type of application (like python in the AI world), and, of course, a lot of attention to Java via Spring.

SB Payment Service Scales Applications with VMware Tanzu Platform - “SB Payment Service offers multiple e-commerce merchants a centralized service that integrates various payment methods through a single API. With a lean team of 20 developers and five operators, SB Payment Service has achieved remarkable success using Tanzu Platform, processing a staggering 8 trillion yen in transactions annually with zero downtime.

Datadog DASH: A Revolving Door Of Operations And Security Announcements - This is probably a good list of the things analysts will ding you for in AI marketing: “Missing from DASH, as if nonexistent, was any conversation about AI hallucinations, the computational cost of these “intelligent” systems, and the human expertise that these tools might inadvertently deprecate.

AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic -

Creating a Communications Framework for Platform Engineering - Bryan covers internal community management for platforms.

Amazon bought Whole Foods eight years ago — now it’s bringing it deeper into the fold - This still seems like a weird acquisition. Amazon doesn’t seem to divest things, but this feels like it’d be on the top of the list. Returning packages there is cool, but that could just be a partnership.

Broadcom’s answer to VMware pricing outrage: You’re using it wrong - IDC’s EMEA senior research director, Andrew Buss: “All our surveys in EMEA in the past five years have shown a majority preference to run workloads in private IT foremost, with around a third of organizations being quite balanced between making use of both public cloud and private IT, about 10 percent being strongly public cloud first, and only 1 to 2 percent being public cloud only in their approach.

OVHcloud chief in sovereignty talks with Euro Commission -

Europe’s Growing Fear: How Trump Might Use U.S. Tech Dominance Against It - “A few years ago, everyone was saying, ‘They’re our trusted partners.’ There’s been a radical change.” // Last week I hear people talking about “Euro Cloud,” a very new idea of building out public cloud infrastructure in Europe that, I assume, has no US public cloud ties.

Checking in on the infinite workdayThis week’s Software Defined Talk episode: This week, we cover Apple’s WWDC updates—from containerization to Foundation Models—and the Linux Foundation’s new FAIR Package Manager. Plus, we crown the best SDT Uber rider. Take a listen, make sure to subscribe. Also available in YouTube if you like that kind of thing. Relative to your interestsUse Cases for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.

Fatteh for Brunch, Cook’s Illustrated -

As Consumers Turn To Agentic AI Use Cases, Businesses Must Adapt Or Be Left Behind - ”Domain-specific agents will be rejected. Several consumer-facing businesses are building their own proprietary ‘shopping agents.’ But the power of consumer agents lies in access to holistic consumer data. A personal agent will always outperform a domain-specific corporate agent in gathering deep client insight, driving far superior personalization and curation." // Enterprise AI productivity accrues to the individual more than the organization.

Broadcom VMware hardens vDefend, drops Tanzu branding in VCF - The Tanzu Kubernetes stuff is renamed and now part of VCF: ”The Tanzu brand for the Kubernetes services within VCF is no more…. The VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service and Tanzu Kubernetes were rebranded in early March as the VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and vSphere Kubernetes release (VKr), respectively. The Tanzu branding remains for the VMware Tanzu Platform, a DevOps platform that unifies management of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry infrastructure.

Let’s talk about conversion optimisation and how we’re approaching it - Some web page marketing hacks (not exactly “dark patterns,” more like “twilight patterns”) and general funnel management tips with digital channels.

Private Cloud’s Comeback: Driving the Enterprise IT Reset -

Start small, win big: How to choose the right AI use cases - It may be the basics of any IT project, but you know what they say about common sense: the problem is it’s uncommonly applied.

Use Cases for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 - Overview of the VMware private AI stack. Private cloud is a big deal and seems to be growing in popularity among large enterprises, especially ones outside of the US. If you’re using AI in those cases, this probably good stuff for you.

Is this your brain on ChatGPT? -

Incremental AIFor every AI skeptic and alarmist, there are ten AI dreamers convinced AI will change civilization. In the business world, this fuels high valuations and premature optimization through layoffs or sweeping business changes. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, listed out all sorts of AI things Amazon is doing. To me, the list suggests AI is great at incremental improvements to existing business processes. For instance, improving campaign planning and copywriting helps Amazon and sellers.

Why is digital sovereignty important right now? -

Your Next Move: Capitalize on Marketing Your AI - Advice on marketing AI stuff.

INFILTRATE. SURVEY. PERCEIVE by Reyes Makes Games - This is fun, kind of pranky game to play in a house with others.

‘We’re done with Teams’: German state hits uninstall on Microsoft -

Making the Invisible Hand Visible: Managers and the Allocation of Workers to Jobs by Virginia Minni :: SSRN - Match workers to jobs they’re good at. // “My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers' specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers' time at the firm.

Edisum: Summarizing and Explaining Wikipedia Edits at Scale - A prompt for summarizing edits made to text.

UX Case Study: SubStack WIP - UI tricks.

Detecting AI-Generated Text by Uncovering Its Statistical “Tells”Cloud - Community | Jun, 2025 | Medium - ”The next time you read something that feels just a little too perfect, pause. You might not just be spotting an AI. You might be feeling the absence of the beautiful, chaotic, and unmistakable fingerprint of a human mind.

‘But I’m not creative’: The role of creativity and connection in content design - An overlooked part of creating: establish your taste in things and apply it to your work. When working with (editing) others, figuring out what their taste is, and apply it to their work.

How Kraft Heinz measures AI project value | CIO Dive - ”Team members use the platform to analyze and summarize documents or dense industry reports, as well as to optimize and access standard operating procedures on a factory floor. The engine also helped streamline SAP rollouts in China and automate routine financials. Nestor said he has the platform bookmarked in his browser and uses it on a daily basis. ”

Digital News Report 2025, Reuters and Oxford - “These shows are filmed, with many people watching on YouTube - the most popular platform for podcasts in the country, with 50% of US podcast consumers using it.”

Will Zero-Click Search Kill My B2B Website? - Make sure your marketing content gets picked up by the AI. This probably means the standard SEO stuff: put out a lot of it loaded with keywords and rephrasing, spread across different URLs.

A reliably good place for a mealArt museum restaurants and cafes can be a great place to hangout for the introverted flâneur. They often have good food, good service, and are in the center of town. Being attached to a museum, they usually feel the need to be mindful of aesthetics, both atmospheric and food quality wise. Better: there are often very few people in them, especially compared to popular and tourist places.

Gartner Predicts 50% of Organizations Will Abandon Plans to Reduce Customer Service Workforce Due to AI - ”By 2027, 50% of organizations that expected to significantly reduce their customer service workforce will abandon these plans, according to Gartner, Inc. This shift comes as many companies struggle to achieve their ‘agent-less’ staffing goals, highlighting the complexities and challenges of transitioning to AI-driven customer service models.

Google Expands Sovereign Cloud to Address EU Data Sovereignty Requirements - “These deployments bring Google Cloud’s full capabilities – including GPU-based support for AI – to customers under local operational control. This approach ensures that data remains under national jurisdiction, a critical factor for regulated sectors in Europe, and positions Google as a cooperative partner rather than an external provider imposing foreign infrastructure standards.

Introducing VMware Tanzu Greenplum 7.5: Enhanced Performance for Data-Intensive Workloads - VMware Tanzu Greenplum 7.5 enhances performance for data-intensive workloads with optimized query execution, efficient maintenance, scalable streaming, streamlined AutoML, and robust geospatial capabilities. These improvements reduce processing times and resource demands, making it a reliable choice for analytical and operational data environments. Tanzu Greenplum is a robust data warehousing and analytics platform built on open-source Postgres, designed to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of data at scale.

Announcing The Forrester Wave™: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025 - “GitHub Actions is becoming a de facto standard. For continuous integration in particular, competitors seem to be converging toward a slightly modified version of GitHub Actions. It’s not a select-all/copy/paste, but in some cases, it’s close — a copy/paste with a few extra lines in the YAML.

Broadcom Q2 FY 2025 Sees Record Revenue, Solid AI and Software Growth - “Currently, over 87% of Broadcom’s 10,000 largest enterprise customers have transitioned to VCF, which allows enterprises to modernize on-premises private clouds, run container-based applications, and manage AI workloads.

Platform Engineering: Evolution, Trends, and Future Impact on Software Delivery -

Good wastebook list this episode, but first… Even the Germans suffer from RDDSome people actually did a study on resume-driven development. I thought it might be a joke at first, but, no: it appears to be serious. I’m working on refreshing a paper on the pitfalls of building your own application platform (“DIY platforms”),1 so the topic came up and the paper fit in nicely, see below. Many of the pitfalls we’ve discussed so far touch on strategic choices and project management challenges.

The European Sovereign Cloud Day Forecasts Stormy Weather For The Cloud Ecosystem - I watched this conference, as noted in past newsletter episode, the talks were great if this is a topic you’re interested.

FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS 1.2 Expands to SaaS, PaaS - Update from FinOps land. Still seems like a lot more people could be doing it.

AI in the Enterprise: Priorities, Pressures and Pragmatism - “38% of organizations have deployments under way, and a further 44% plan to follow within the next 12 months. That means more than four in five expect to have generative AI in production by mid-2026, signalling a decisive shift from experimentation to expectation.

OpenAI hits $10 billion in annualized revenue fueled by ChatGPT growth - “OpenAI has hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue less than three years after launching its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

AI’s metrics question - “the real question, as I’ve hinted at a couple of times, is how much LLMs will be used mostly as actual user-facing general-purpose chatbots at all or whether they will mostly be embedded inside other things, in which case trying to measure their use at all will be like trying to measure machine learning, or SQL (how many times a day do you use a database?

How Long Does It Take to Draw a Picture of Every Pub in London? - ”That was true in more ways than one. Ms. Wood, 31, is on a mission to draw every pub in London. She has completed about 300, and has about 2,500 left”

Did we just make platform engineering much easier by shipping a cloud IDP?Architecture Musings - Google Cloud IDP.

Scaling Vibe-Coding in Enterprise IT: A CTO’s Guide to Navigating Architectural Complexity, Product Management and Governance devops.com/scaling-v… There’s some AI middleware considerations (people stuff) towards the end of this how to enterprise vibe coding (in the expansive definition of vibe coding, just using AI to help write code). Part of it is: you still have all the same needs for “day two” and architecting the apps to work in production and be easily updatable (add new features, test it, upgrade the current version [including data], deploy it] for the next version, the next, etc.

Three Dumb Studies for your consideration - Delightful ideas for scientific studies: “experimenter’s urge: the desire to, quite literally, fuck around and find out.

1989: Japan Buys A Used President - This is an incredible piece of writing just one sample: “It is sad and disturbing to witness with what insouciance he now sells the stature which his country afforded him to any country which can afford him. It demeans us all to see him so available, so eager to please for a price, to become ‘‘Rent-a-Ron,’ the performing presidential seal.

Patterns Across 5 Years of YC Investing - There’s always money in the Security Stand.

Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side - ”When you never hear from the other side, it’s pretty easy to talk yourself into a political dead end. That might be enough for the political dead-enders. But it’s a terrible mistake for any political movement that actually hopes to rack up some durable victories.” // Speaking for myself, I try to “change the channel” and just not pay attention to (follow) anything political.

Starbucks to roll out Microsoft Azure OpenAI assistant for baristas - ”Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks’ intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troubleshooting equipment errors. Baristas can either type or verbally ask their queries in conversational language.” // Do the baristas need that?

OpenAI gives ChatGPT access to cloud-based documents and third-party research tools - The way to compete with AI is with the apps, the functionality they have, the outcomes they let you get - the stuff you can do with them.

The CloudsYou know, I’ve never really looked at the Flexera State of Cloud surveys. I think they’re accepted as legit, and they have many years of data to make those multi-year charts I like. Here’s a quick one my favorite question, “where are the apps?”: Sources: Flexera State of Cloud Report, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.So, following up on my “where’s the apps?” post from last Friday, we’re still in the area of 50/50 and definitely very stable.

PwC’s AI Agent Survey - ”Of the 300 senior executives in our May 2025 survey, 88% say their team or business function plans to increase AI-related budgets in the next 12 months due to agentic AI. Seventy-nine percent say AI agents are already being adopted in their companies. And of those adopting AI agents, two-thirds (66%) say that they’re delivering measurable value through increased productivity.

Postfacto - Little utility to do team retros, from the Pivotal Labs folks. Open source, all that.

Tips on prompting ChatGPT for UK technology secretary Peter Kyle - Good tips on working with AIs: (1) use them a lot to build up an intuition of what works, (2) be aware of what they know, the cut off date for training and assume they have general, accepted mainstream knowledge, nothing too obscure, (3) use them for brainstorming and structuring your work. A crude summary: garbage in, garbage out.

MCP Best Practices - Including unit tests!

UK govt study: Copilot AI saved workers 26 minutes a day - Well, that’s one way to do the ROI dance. // “And even using the more modest projected time savings of 4.59 days per employee per year, the £19 per employee per month cost of a Microsoft Copilot Pro subscription in the UK appears to be worthwhile.

alto.index - Transform Your Apple Apps Data into AI-Ready Markdown - Export stuff from your Apple apps.

Lots of links below, plus some sovereign cloud thinking from EU people in the Logoff. Access to data shouldn’t be holding you can from enterprise AI radicalnessTo make enterprise AI useful, you need your data: Gartner Inc. predicts that organizations will develop 80% of Generative AI (GenAI) business applications on their existing data management platforms by 2028. This approach will reduce the complexity and time required to deliver these applications by 50%.

The Triad of Agent Architecture: ADK, MCP, and Cloud Run -

6 Fixes For Your Solo TTRPG Campaign -

The Prompt Engineering Playbook for Programmers -

Just because Silicon Valley is pumped to make this junk doesn’t mean people will buy it - Not a fan of AI glasses.

What do people do all day? - Possible “can AI can replace my job?” heuristic: how long do you spend sitting at work?

We waited 20 years for this! Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on an Informatica long game as growth re-emerges as a corporate priority -

On the pleasure of reading private notebooks - Diaries (“journals”) and notebooks are the best, I love them as well. // “I think this is because our genuine thoughts (and interests) are more detailed and alive than the simulations we have of what we should say (or be interested in). When we think no one listens, we relax into the genuine. I’ve been told, repeatedly, that I hide my most interesting thoughts in the footnotes.

Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2025 Report Reveals Definitive Cloud Reset - “More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so. Private cloud is also now a strategic equal for AI and cloud-native apps, with 66% preferring to run container and Kubernetes-based applications on private cloud or a mix of public and private, while 55% prefer private cloud for AI model training, tuning and inference.

Beyond Launch - ‘In enterprise environments, silence gets interpreted as stagnation. Stakeholders will assume “if I’m not hearing about progress, there probably isn’t any” - and they’re usually right!

Red Hat Summit 2025: AI, Virtualization, Hybrid Cloud, And The Future Of Enterprise IT -

Is AI just going to end up being about programming? - I think there’s about a 30% chance that the answer is yet. // Rather: AI is good at text. If you can get it into text, and you want text as the output: easy win.

Cloud Repatriation is Getting Complicated - The repatriation thought-leading is taking hold. Even the bomb thrower is soaking in the ambient thought leadering!

Google Study: 65% of Developer Time Wasted Without Platforms - Better get a platform. // ‘Intriguingly, 86% of the survey’s respondents also said they believe that “platform engineering is essential to realizing the full business value of AI. " // “At the same time, a vast majority of companies view AI as a catalyst for advancing platform engineering, with 94% of organizations identifying AI to be ‘Critical’ or ‘Important’ to the future of platform engineering.

Donald Trump’s digital landgrab - File under “sovereign cloud”: “The state department is now claiming otherwise: if you’re on the internet and using a service provided by a US tech company, they say, then Donald Trump sets the rules. The US is quietly declaring sovereignty over cyberspace and expecting the world to acquiesce, making an unprecedented digital landgrab in the name of freedom.

Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology - It should be cheaper, better, and not cause a lot of bullshit.

Moody Folkloric Fantasy – The Beast of Black Keep - This guy makes great, little adventures, here’s a new one.

A New Look, A Clear Path - New IDC branding, logo, etc.

Docling: An open-source tool kit for advanced document processing - Looks useful for getting precious text out of the PDF silo, from IBM.

MCP Is the New Control Point in AI—Are CIOs Ready for the Lock-In Battle? - They get the date of the spec’s release wrong (it was November 2024), and it has that Futurum cable TV news vibe, but good points are made, e.g.: “Will MCP remain truly portable, or will each vendor implement its own variation, selectively supporting features that reinforce its ecosystem? Early adopters should insist on full transparency in vendor MCP roadmaps, including plans for multi-cloud portability, third-party agent integration, and auditability of memory objects.

Gartner Predicts by 2028, 80% of GenAI Business Apps Will Be Developed on Existing Data Management Platforms - “Gartner Inc. predicts that organizations will develop 80% of Generative AI (GenAI) business applications on their existing data management platforms by 2028. This approach will reduce the complexity and time required to deliver these applications by 50%.

How Ukraine’s Killer Drones Are Beating Russian Jamming - “A missile worth perhaps a million dollars can kill maybe 12 or 20 people. But for one million dollars, you can buy 10,000 drones, put four grenades on each, and they will kill 1,000 or even 2,000 people or destroy 200 tanks.

United Airlines CEO: ‘We’re probably doing more AI than anyone’ - Finding what AI is useful for: ”‘We started with an enormous number of [AI] use cases, and we whittled it down to the use cases that we want to spend money on,’ COO and President John Waldron said during an investor conference last week. Enterprises can’t chase every lead. The share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives bumped up to 42% this year, compared to 17% last year, according to analysis from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Snowflake must wait on customers' on-prem renewal cycles - You have to wait for the contract renewal window to put big systems in place, especially something as “heavy” as data.

Broadcom reboots CloudHealth with enhancements to broaden FinOps use - SiliconANGLE -

Making books that fly, fold, wrap, hide, pop up, twist, and turn : books for kids to make - …and adults.

Where are the workloads?Let’s check in on how much private there is nowadays. I think it’s somewhere in the range of 40% to 60% of workloads1 globally. If you narrow down to “enterprises” (let’s say organization that have 5,000, even 10,000 employees), my sense is that the number goes way up, maybe 70%. The way I think about the question “how much private cloud is there?” is “where are all the applications and services running.

I’m thinking through the topic of ROI for infrastructure software again (obviously for our PaaS stuff). I get asked about this every year or two. Each time I look at it, I get more confused. This ask always come from sales, presumably because the buyers are asking it. But, I don’t think the ask is about the basic ROI calculations: the amount we paid for this tech is less than the amount of money we make using it.

The Triad of Agent Architecture: ADK, MCP, and Cloud Run -

Reinvent the Wheel - ”Reinvent for insight. Reuse for impact.

Using ChatGPT as a therapist - …people like it.

How to Lead an All-Hands After Delivering Bad News - “Create a shared mental model to make sure your team understands what the new context means for how they work together.

MCP Is RSS for AI: More Use Cases for Model Context Protocol - I like this: “I’m inclined to think of MCP as RSS for AI.” // Once prompts are used as intended - to be user initiated activity in the UI, we’ll see if things evolve. Think of an MCP prompt as adding a new button, or command to the UI…sort of. Most MCP things now are “tools” reading data or writing data, the AI puts some text into the tool, some text comes out.

Relative to your interestsLooks like it’s all AI except one link. Can you find it? Your First Spring AI 1.0 Application - Making a full AI-driven app with Spring. Production-Worthy AI With Spring AI 1.0 SEO for AI: A look at Generative Engine Optimization How does ChatGPT work? What is AI, really? - Good overview of the basics. Agentic AI delivers measurable value to early adopters - “More than one-quarter of respondents are planning for [AI] budget increases of at least 26% in the next 12 months.

SEO for AI: A look at Generative Engine Optimization -

Agentic AI delivers measurable value to early adopters - “More than one-quarter of respondents are planning for [AI] budget increases of at least 26% in the next 12 months. Nearly three-quarters of senior leaders believe…”

The luxury of saying no. - “Most people don’t get to say no. Not really. They’re not debating whether to use AI on principle. They’re trying to figure out how to keep their job without surrendering their judgment or drowning in tasks that keep multiplying while headcount shrinks. For most people, using an LLM isn’t an abdication of thought–it’s often the only way to carve out enough time and focus to do any real thinking at all.

How does ChatGPT work? What is AI, really? - Good overview of the basics.

Dark Leisure - ”in many orgs, there is too little incentive to pass on these productivity gains by telling your manager: “i found this neat tool that lets me do 8h of work in 3h! give me more work!"” // Some “real workers of the world unite” vibes.

OpenAI consumer pivot shows AI isn’t B2B - Where are the business successes and mass adoption? // “Who cares if consumers use AI for helping a friend plan a road trip, informal therapy sessions, or astrological readings? The stakes are low…"

Azul CTO: Java at 30 Still Rules Enterprise Dev - Yes, and: Azul must have set a compare goal for this FY to get a, checks notes, “shit ton” of coverage.

Opinions of using AI for solo role playing, reddit thread -

Norway, leaving OSL.My recap of Cloud Foundry Day is up on the Tanzu blog: check it out! I gave an opening talk at Cloud Foundry Day last week. I ended up shortening it a lot and, of course, I didn’t exactly give the talk I’d written down. Here’s the script I wrote for myself. It goes over the opportunity the Cloud Foundry community has right now. I gave a talk later in the day that more systematically made the case below.

Google Translate Can Now Be Set as the Default Translation App on iOS - Set your Apple stuff to use Google Translate as the translation service.

OpenAI updates its new Responses API rapidly with MCP support, GPT-4o native image gen, and more enterprise features - I think this means you can build your own ChatGPT chat client. Sort of?

Agents are models using tools in a loop - “Agents are models using tools in a loop,” Anthropic’s Hannah Moran.

Google Translate Can Now Be Set as the Default Translation App on iOS - Set your Apple stuff to use Google Translate as the translation service.

Exploited Kidfluencers: Dutch Cabinet wants stricter child labor rules for social media - ”Nobel said that he understands ‘that people enjoy seeing into other people’s lives on social media.’ But he fears that it will be at the expense of the well-being of children if the entire family is exposed. Their psychological well-being and development can suffer if they are viewed by so many people. There are also concerns about privacy and online abuse of images of children.

Here is an example of how you have to steer the robot (ChatGPT, below) to the right answer. You can almost feel it trying to give you what you “want” (more like: what seems the predictable next words): Me: Did Ricardo use the example of the British sending wool to Portugal and importing port from them? What were contemporary examples of comparative advantage he used? ChatGPT: Yes, you’re almost spot on.

I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory dossier - Prompt to tell you what ChatGPT is remembering about you: “please put all text under the following headings into a code block in raw JSON: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past Conversation Topic Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User Interaction Metadata. Complete and verbatim.” // crazy that it works!

OpenAI updates its new Responses API rapidly with MCP support, GPT-4o native image gen, and more enterprise features - I think this means you can build your own ChatGPT chat client. Sort of?

Gartner Survey Finds 77% of Engineering Leaders Identify AI Integration in Apps as a Major Challenge - ”Seventy-seven percent of engineering leaders identify building AI capabilities into applications to improve features and functionality as a significant or moderate pain point, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. The survey also found that the use of AI tools to augment software engineering workflows was the second largest pain point, with 71% of engineering leaders considering it significant or moderate.

It’s Not About “Nice” - ”So next time you read about organizations moving away from ‘nice,’ what they’re really doing is voluntarily choosing to lower their own performance and demotivate their talent.

Max Ernst, 1934.Relative to your interestsMCP Authorization in practice with Spring AI and OAuth2 - Filling in the missing piece of MCP: security. The Battle For Grounding Your AI Agents Has Begun - Data gravity considerations for AI. We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. - It’s still hard to know how much energy AI uses…until the big AI companies start telling us.

Generation Z leading shift toward GOP, survey shows - ”voters aged 18 to 21 now favor Republicans by 11.7 points, challenging the common perception of Gen Z as ‘uniformly progressive.'"

MCP Authorization in practice with Spring AI and OAuth2 - Filling in the missing piece of MCP: security.

Minimum Viable Humans. - “it’s only possible with algorithmic management taking over functions previously handled by human managers: performance monitoring, task allocation, basic feedback and guidance, coordination and information flow. On the positive side, this should translate into a sunset for the endless run of pointless meetings. Good riddance.

morning computer sociomediapath - As ever, the way to improve productivity is stop interrupting people, be they writers, programmers, or any “make something” type.

After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain - “I’m leveraging them to learn Go, to upskill myself. And then I apply this new knowledge when I code.” And: “But I’m not asking it to write new things from scratch, to come up with ideas or to write a whole new plan. I’m writing the plan. I’m the senior dev. The LLM is the assistant.

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. - It’s still hard to know how much energy AI uses…until the big AI companies start telling us.

Reports of Deno’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated - ”Most developers weren’t deploying simple stateless functions. They were building full-stack apps: apps that talk to a database, that almost always is located in a single region.” // People love the CRUD app. // Also, a tales from PaaS-land.

The Battle For Grounding Your AI Agents Has Begun - Data gravity considerations for AI.

Proof (again!) of why enterprises need to focus on AI strategic value over cost-cutting - “Forrester believes that a maximum of 1% of core business processes will be orchestrated by generative AI this year. A core issue is trust, since these systems tend to hallucinate, and it’s hard to troubleshoot bias.

The new economics of enterprise technology in an AI world - This is a strange collage of IT project success and failure. I think it’s saying that if your IT projects don’t show legible business improvement. They’re considered a failure. // Also, you have to look at an IT project as a big system, not just one point in time like the developers shipping an app. // “This pattern is clear in AI initiatives, where only 1 percent of company executives describe their gen AI rollouts as “mature”10 and only 10 to 20 percent of isolated AI experiments in the past two years scaled to create value.

Relative to your interestsWhen was peak message in a bottle? - Only 80s kids will get this: “grandfather clocks; suits of armour; quicksand; spontaneous human combustion.” Also: big foot and UFOs. Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - Checks out on both sides. Pricing: A List of Tactics - Some mind-tricks to play with pricing. The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system.

The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division leader overnight. No title change. No additional compensation. Just do more.

The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division leader overnight. No title change. No additional compensation. Just do more.

Pricing: A List of Tactics - Some mind-tricks to play with pricing.

Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - Checks out on both sides.

When was peak message in a bottle? - Only 80s kids will get this: “grandfather clocks; suits of armour; quicksand; spontaneous human combustion.” Also: big foot and UFOs.

Anthropic closes $2.5 billion credit facility - “Annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, the company confirmed, more than doubling from a $1 billion rate in the prior period. Revenue chief Kate Jensen said in a recent interview with CNBC that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually with Anthropic jumped eightfold from a year ago.

Platform Engineering: Evolution or Rebranding? - Get yourself a PaaS. // “the idea of a dedicated team removing frictions by building tools and resuable abstractions is an idea that’s here to stay.

My ContentTwo Software Defined episodes this week: “I used to eat 7-Eleven pizza,” startups, open source, and more, with Sarah Christoff - After an extensive discussion of 7-Eleven pizza cuisine, in this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Sarah Christoff. They discuss working at startups, the point of startups, working in open source and balancing commercial and community interests, moving to Europe, and more! This is a “hit by pitch” - This week, we discuss Zenoss finally getting acquired, Databricks buying Neon, and the debut of WizOS.

Why so many IT projects go so horribly wrong - Latest in “why do IT projects fail?” Research.

Mexico and China didn’t take manufacturing jobs from the Rust Belt - ”A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.

A2A Protocol: The Universal Language for AI Agents -

Blitzscaling for tyrants - by Henry Farrell -

AI agents drive Boomi’s vision for scalable automation - Adding MCP support.

Shadow AI Isn’t a Threat: It’s a Wake-up Call - “Shadow AI isn’t the enemy – it’s a signal. Shadow AI tells you that your teams want AI, they need AI and they’re willing to move without you if they have to. That’s not just a risk. It’s a roadmap. This is your chance to build something better: secure, governed AI enablement that works the way your teams do.

Texas’ Regulatory Landscape | Mercatus Center - ”Texas is the 5th most regulated state in the US” // I wouldn’t have expected top 5!

Revisiting the clouds - “Fast forward to today, and the PaaS market has been significantly reshaped, largely by the rise of Kubernetes and other technologies. The landscape is very different. Apparently, somewhere along the line we lost the ease of deployment that platforms like Heroku and Cloud Foundry were well known for … progress” // Indeed…

Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generation - I can’t read Math-Greek, so don’t really know what’s going on here. But it looks helpful for playing D&D with the robot.

Why is AI not in your productivity statistics? - I like one of the ideas here: when AI makes things better, and those things don’t obviously increase sales/profit (“growth”) or save money, it’s easy to think it has no ROI. Increasing quality of life with productivity is hard to capture in GDP, so to speak.

news that stays news - What’s old to you is completely new to younger people, no matter how old the text is: “One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal — things that happened this very term — it’s all new to them.

Philips debuts 3D printable components to repair products -

More on the Tanzu AI StackAs you may recall, along with several colleagues, I worked on the Tanzu annual update which came out last month. I’m sure you’ve watched the entire video, right? How else would you get to see my AAA skills at talking with my hands at the end? I mean, I even cut my hair for the thing, so you know I put some effort into it.

Why Gen X is the real loser generation - I was there for the design meetings. Works as designed. I mean, we had a whole song called “Loser.

AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests -

A CEO of AI Applications Marks a New Era of AI Competition - Digging the moats: “Like airplane reward programs, personalization & memory introduce switching costs that may outweigh the benefits of state-of-the-art models.

Thanks to DOGE, Gumroad’s founder has a second job with the VA - Fast Company - It’s always too many meetings: ‘But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might. I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works.

Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women - How the slop is made. // Important point: it’s unclear if it actually makes money. // Imagine applying this to B2B marketing, industry analysis (AIMonk, ChatGartnerPT), and news coverage.

Most AI spending driven by FOMO, not ROI, CEOs tell IBM - “Just over half (52 percent) of CEO respondents say their organization is realizing value from GenAI investments beyond cost reduction.

Three Reasons to Write More in an Age When Writing Means Less. - Write (and publish in the web) oto make sure you are known and have a legacy in the LLMs. Also, contribute to the future of knowledge (slight eyeroll there). // Oh, also because writing it the best way to think.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam. This is more of a “smoke break chair,” but I’ll allow it.Relative to your interests28 slightly rude notes on writing - “All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness.” // “Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.” // Lower down, that first part to delete is called "

William Gibson - September 1997 interview.

It’s time we stopped asking for vases. - Most people cram their AI prompts with so many rules that they predetermine the answer. When the question is stuffed with constraints, the model can only spit back something obvious. A handful of well-chosen guidelines can help, but the real magic happens when you leave space for the AI to explore. In other words: ask narrowly and you’ll get a narrow, predictable response; ask openly and you invite surprising insight–so stop chasing a one-size-fits-all “perfect prompt.

mobygratis - Free Moby music to empower your creative projects - Free to use as long as you don’t promote right wing politics or eating meat, dairy, etc.

Three Essential ROI Goals for Agentic AI Applications -

The work at hand - “Vernacular institutions:” They are more useful than they are legible.

28 slightly rude notes on writing - by Adam Mastroianni - ”Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.” // Lower down, that first part to delete is called “the windup.” I call it “throat clearing.” Either way, try to cut it and Mento-memo your way to the conclusion in the first sentence.

What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - “Developers burning through $100 of tokens per day (not impossible given some of the LLM-heavy development patterns that are beginning to emerge) could end the year with the equivalent of a short haul flight or 600 mile car journey. In the panopticon scenario where all 10 million security cameras in the UK analyze video through a vision LLM at one frame per second Arthur estimates we would need to duplicate the total usage of Birmingham, UK - the output of a 1GW nuclear plant.

VMware’s Kubernetes Evolution -

Oxide’s Compensation Model: How is it Going? - You know, I bet it has the effect of encouraging people to focus on the product as the product instead of the product as their comp. // Of course, the next step is to publish and then equalize the cap-table, but, hey, we can’t go full socialist.

Nine Emerging Developer Patterns for the AI Era -

Why Bro Culture Still Holds Teams Back at Work -

Has DOGE missed its opportunity? - This is general advice for digital transformation, too. // And, on the actual focus,I mean: who could have predicted this outcome…

PepsiCo taps AWS to accelerate digital transformation, AI adoption | CIO Dive - ”Enterprises across industries are facing ballooning cloud bills as AI adoption drives up costs. Nearly 3 in 4 IT pros blamed the AI boom for ‘unmanageable’ cloud bills last year.

A behind the scenes glimpse of the launch of GPT-4 - Fun anecdotes about OpenAI figuring out that ChatGPT was a big deal, and then marketing around it. // “Another little detail about the launch video is that we didn’t use titles for any of the OpenAI employees. Even to this day OpenAI is an incredibly flat organization. I watched a DeepMind video where every talking head had a title and it seemed like a caste system.

The Titan Who Couldn’t Let Go - Founder mode case study: “There’s a pattern here, and it’s bigger than Hughes. Obsession works–in short bursts, in narrow contexts, with clear feedback loops. But scale it up, let it harden into infrastructure, and it starts to rot the system from the inside. Hughes structurally disallowed any process he couldn’t control. That works in a cockpit. It fails in a boardroom.

Getting things “done” in large tech companies - If the executives don’t know you did something cool, you didn’t do something cool. Legible.

Let’s get the AI to build D&D adventures for us with a Model Context Protocol Prompt. I haven’t found much value in MCP Prompts until now. What makes them excited is when you use them a “recipe” to chain together other tool calls. In this episode of my MCP programming series, I show you how to make two MCP Prompts. First, a simple one that boot-straps playing D&D. Second, a more complex one that pulls together an adventure overview using multiple tools and “reasoning.

The AIs are good at being a Dungeon Master for Dungeons & Dragons, but their memory is limited. How can you make sure they don’t forget all that loot you just got, or ensure that cobbler back in the village remembers the type of boots you orders and paid for up front? I’ll show you how to use Model Context Protocol (MCP) to create a DM Journal. This is done by writing an MCP Server tool that write journal entries and then an MCP Server Resource that allows you to read them.

I was on Cloud Foundry Weekly yesterday. We discussed “vibe coding.” More precisely, what I think of as “half ass vibe coding.” I get the AIs to write code for me, but then ask it questions, maybe even mess around with it myself. I think that might just be “coding with an AI assistant,” but as Nicky put it, it’s also pretty close to pair programming. I know that ChatGPT sure has a lot more personality than a lot of people I’ve programmed with - know what I mean?

Not only can you give more direction to the AI when you’re playing solo D&D with it, you can start to understand how it thinks. I walk through how to use MCP Server tools to enhance solo roleplaying with Claude (and ChatGPT, etc.) and how to get extra information about how the AI is thinking. Also, I show you how to do logging despite the weird setup Claude Desktop requires.

D&D battle maps are one of the funnest parts of D&D. Just looking at them is fun, finding them can be a tiny thrill, and making them is a delightful way to spend hours of time. Oh, and using them. I’ve used Midjourney to make D&D battle maps in the past, especially to make really large battle maps. That works great! ChatGPT was never that good at it, until now.

Playing D&D with ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever is fun. But sometime you want more control over how it behaves and what it does. Check out this video for a quick tutorial on creating an oracle plugin for Claude. This “plugin” is a Model Context Protocol Server written in Java using Spring AI. Once you create the MCP Server, you can hook the oracle into Claude which will use it while you play as a simple yes/no oracle.

Broadcom’s Tanzu gets AI updates, but is definitely not Kubernetes - Purnima Padmanabhan, GM for Tanzu, explained that these updates can lower the barrier of entry for developers and allow users to more quickly run their applications with AI integration “while maintaining complete security and lower down time… Even though it’s more advanced, it’s actually easier to adopt because I don’t have to have skill sets in my developers to muck around with YAML files and configurations.

A practical guide to coding securely with LLMs -

VMware ups Tanzu’s gen AI support, sheds Kubernetes dependence - Tanzu Platform integrates generative AI capabilities and shifts away from Kubernetes, aiming to streamline AI application development and deployment.

This 7,000-year-old mummy DNA has revealed a ‘ghost’ branch of humanity - A lost genetic line.

Top 10 Platform Engineering Takeaways from PlatEngDay & KubeCon London 2025 - I should probably read this.

Drew Struzan: The Man Behind Your Favorite Childhood Movie Posters -

Augmented Coding: an Experience Report - Getting an app released requires so many things that humans will always find something to do, and more that can now be done better.

Keith McNally’s Regrets… and his Dazzling, Driven Life - Sounds like fun-good book. // “Keith never makes a fuss about caring either. Instead, he subtly creates a sense that, if you’re there, you belong there, not because you’ve elbowed through some arduous gatekeeping process, but because your comfort is being seen to, and all you have to do is enjoy it.

MCP Validator -

If you’re using Tanzu Platform, you have pretty much everything you need to start getting AI into your apps. That’s the main point I wanted us to get across in our Tanzu annual update: Looking at surveys, it feels like most large organizations are still figuring out their AI strategy through pockets of messing around - which is totally fine! But, they need to start scaling it out to more and more - even hundreds of apps.

Docker introduces MCP Catalog and Toolkit as vendors scramble to support the protocol despite security concerns - Local LLMs and MCP everywhere.

Google Fi is launching a $35 / month unlimited plan - If you have the means, I highly recommend getting a Google Fi number, especially if you’re an expat. Have two phone numbers is great.

Broadcom Helps GCI Transform Operations and Services on the Alaskan Frontier - “The self-service, cloud-like capabilities of Tanzu Data Services also meant that developers could deploy databases in a matter of minutes, greatly accelerating time-to-market for new services and features.

How to think about agent frameworks - Nerd fight?

Diane, I wrote a lecture by talking about it (Interconnected) - Prompt for converting voice memo notes to a talk, along with out-of-band technique. // I’ve struggled over the years to make this kind of thing work for me.

Heroku’s Strategic Refresh Signals Renewed Investment from Salesforce - Overview of “the new” Heroku, plus risks.

This was a fun discussion: Also, subscribe to the podcast! During the interview I realized that there’s a lot of my professional-life friends that I’ve know for 20+ years across all sorts of companies, wave after of wave of tech trends, etc., including Melissa. I’m lucky to be in that situation. Relative to your interestsDid we just make platform engineering much easier by shipping a cloud IDP? - Google Cloud’s take on a platform (IDP).

OpenAI Requires Identity Verification For Access To Its Latest Models - Not sure what to think about this, if anything.

“Still Federating After All These Years”: The Realities Of EA Maturation - Letter from the enterprise architect club.

A Visit to Costco in France - I could feel my heart racing in excitement as I scrolled through this. Of course, I could see that tariffs would destroy this beautiful occurrence. They have a KitchenAid! For American expats, a coveted item in Europe.

Did we just make platform engineering much easier by shipping a cloud IDP? - Google Cloud’s take on a platform (IDP).

OpenAI releases new simulated reasoning models with full tool access - Ars Technica - Good overview from a sea of, as usual, weird coverage and company announced.

A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products – O’Reilly - Testing AI-driven software: you need to track errors and mistakes and tune the prompts to get the results you want. This is more like herding cats than the usual testing that is straightforward.

money dysmorphia - To individuals, the economy is everyday, re-occurring costs and income, not stonks. // “When people talk about ‘the economy’ usually that’s a proxy for wages versus housing costs, healthcare costs and student loan debt.

The average college student today - Us Gen-X’ers have fully entered the “you kids, get off my lawn” golden years…and I’m here for it!

One quick things up-top: this week (tomorrow!), get an overview and demos of the private AI stack and development frameworks we’ve been working on at Tanzu. Register to check it out online, either live or the recording after the event. Spy on the DM with Model Context Protocol Servers in JavaHere’s my latest walk-through is writing Model Context Protocol Server tools…to play D&D. Here, I build some slightly more complicated Oracles and show how to do logging.

Why Are All the Smart People So Bad at History? - “The structure of rationalist and technocratic thinking incentivizes a flattened historical consciousness. They favor systems over stories. They trust models over memories. They crave optimization, not interpretation.

One year ago Redis changed its license – and lost most of its external contributors -

The Agentic Evolution of Enterprise Applications -

JavaOne 2025 Highlights Developer Productivity, Language Modernization - A quick overview of the conference themes and Java-world happenings.

How agentic AI makes decisions and solves problems - ”In 2025, 25% of companies that use genAI will launch agentic AI pilots or proofs of concept, according to report by professional services firm Deloitte. In 2027, that number will grow to half of all companies.

Google Cloud engineering chief: that Kubernetes dev experience? Sorry about that… - ‘”McCleod, possibly with at least part of his tongue in his cheek, said. “I also just wanted to kind of apologize for the developer experience in Kubernetes. I think when we open source all this wonderful technology, we also open source some of Google’s internal culture about the developer experience.” It’s not like Google was beating up on outside developers, he continued.

IDC Predicts AI-driven Transformation By 2025 - “Key findings from the IDC report include a forecast that 67% of the projected $227 billion AI spending in 2025 will originate from enterprises integrating AI into their core operations.” And: “IDC warns that up to 30% of organizations may reevaluate their GenAI investments if these barriers remain unaddressed.

IDC Publishes New, Actionable AI Research at Annual ‘Directions’ Event - “Currently, 51% of businesses are taking an opportunistic approach to AI, but there’s a significant trend toward more structured and strategic adoption. The research highlights how organizations are increasingly viewing AI as a fundamental transformation of business, operating, and organizational models. Governance, knowledge, and skills are emerging as key elements in implementing AI-driven transformation. Companies are moving beyond ad-hoc experimentation, with about 35% now developing more repeatable and managed AI strategies.

Google boards the AI agent hype train - A summary of all the boring enterprise worries with AI. Mostly: unexpected costs.

KubeCon 2025: Technology Resilience, Sovereignty, And Security In An Era Of Political Change - ”Enterprise maturity is here. As demonstrated by HSBC’s implementation, which handles 600 million hits daily across over 7,000 production services, enterprise maturity is here.

Model Context Protocol has prompt injection security problems - There’s a lot of security work TBD with MCP. // “The curse of prompt injection continues to be that we’ve known about the issue for more than two and a half years and we still don’t have convincing mitigations for handling it.

Old Fashioned Function Keys - Ode to function keys, and a reminder that they’re useful.

Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? - “rather than continuing to treat ADHD as a chronic medical disorder primarily requiring pharmaceutical intervention, it may be more helpful to see it as a situational mismatch between individuals and their environments.

France singles out digital services for EU’s tariff response - ‘“The second response will cover all products, and I want to stress this—services will be included,” Primas said, before listing “digital services, including those provided by the GAFAM,” as examples… GAFAM refers to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft.

S&P Global: Generative AI Adoption Surges, but Project Failures Rise - “42% of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives before reaching production.” // Yes, and… there’s an increase in AI projects.

Two quick things up top: in a little over a week we’re going to talk about what what us Tanzu folks been doing with enterprise AI, register to check it out online. Next month, at Cloud Foundry Day you can come to an in-person workshop for even more. I’ll be there, hopefully talking about the goblins and AI, as well as MC’ing. Mole enchiladas at El Cerrito, Menlo Park, California.Wastebook“They’re not chasing perfection–they’re chasing momentum.

Schooled by Trump, Americans are learning to dislike their allies - ‘last year 17% of Republicans viewed the EU as “unfriendly” or as an “enemy”; that has now grown to 29%.

Public sector still hanging on to private cloud • The Register - ”While 80 percent of decision-makers in government bodies report using a hybrid cloud arrangement, 36 percent said their organization still operates an internal private cloud as their primary platform.” // You have to image that, now, this number will sustain and go higher for EU countries, anyone outside the US.

How the US Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence - ”U.S. adults as a whole – whose concerns over AI have grown since 2021 – are more inclined than experts to say they’re more concerned than excited (51% vs. 15% among experts).

Has VMware Finally Caught Up With Kubernetes? - ‘“Previously, there were multiple disparate APIs spread across different areas for VMs, containers and networking services,” Carr said. “The advantage of the new approach is the integration of Kubernetes and VMs APIs with a single operating model. This enables streamlined processes for both workloads.

Securing Spring AI MCP servers with OAuth2 - Add authentication to MCP agents. This has been the major piece missing for enterprise use.

We have to talk about AI “art” - No easy answers to this: “Artists are seeing their craft threatened by the careless complicity of those who use machines as some kind of art vending machine. It’s disturbing and scary, and when you consider that this is tied to people’s livelihoods, it can be painful to see.

Flood The Zone - The “bullshit singularity: infinite bullshit at zero-cost” // Understanding the utility of Frankfurtian “bullshit” is an under appreciated thought technology. If you can spot it, you can analyze it and figure out if you should filter it out or not: use it weight claims and world-views (often negatively). You can also use it to evaluate your own actions, if you find that you are bullshitting, to check facts and see if you’re acting based on truth and logic, or just vibes.

How to Prepare for a Meeting Where Emotions Will Run High - Probably good advice for life too.

Rebuilding the Social Security Administration’s Codebase - “Still, it’s interesting to think about how this should be done. I wonder if they could run the new system in a sandbox for a year, feeding it all the same inputs, and see whether it generates the same outputs.” // This feels like the kind of advantage government modernization projects have over commercial. There is not as much urgency. If the lifetime of a government agency and software is in centuries (we hope!

The goblins get into agentic AI. The above video is exciting for me: it’s me relearning programming, playing D&D with the robot, and coming up with a new type of way I can help out at work. In this introductory video I go over the basics of making a tool (an “MCP Server”) for Claude. This tool is a very simple oracle that will answer yes/no questions. Oracles are a core part of solo role playing and introduce unknown twists and turns, help you come up with adventures on the fly, and so forth.

Just wastebook and links this episode. Wastebook“So what is a critic for? This is the second quote that’s in my notebook. It’s in every notebook because I always write it on the first page: ‘Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

sharkdp/fd - “Intuitive syntax: fd PATTERN instead of find -iname ‘PATTERN’.

Notification Summary Miscues - Good insight on LLMs: you can’t teach it things… but… sort of… you actually can add memories that it will re-remember occasionally.

Where We Are Headed - Predictions about how AI will change work.

Tactical work in the age of layoffs - Once the company drops all the work/life balance stuff in favor of work harder or get fired, shift to mild malicious compliance. // “If your company is putting pressure on you to ship more, one solution is to spend less time on testing/refactoring/glue work.

AI Talent Shortage Threatens Corporate Ambitions, Says Bain -

Consumers React To Tariffs With Concern And Caution - “4% of Democrats support the tariffs, and 26% of Republicans oppose them.” // Also, anecdotes of what people plan to do to deal with price increases.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem - Well, at least we know the robots have great taste, having been built with “multiple works by Joan Didion translated into several languages.” // “The White Album” is one of the great essays. Even her packing list is one of the top five lit-sticals ever. // Also, I mean, yeah, too bad the AI magic relies copyright violation.

Actual LLM agents are coming -

OWASP Dishes Out Key Ingredients for a Secure Agentic AI Future -

Not much today. Found at the ITQ offices.Wastebook"decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Career advice in 2025. ”a concept as antiquated as intent.” NYTimes. “a felicitous remove.” Spicy. “Significant improvement but still issues.” Oxide and Friends. Relative to your interestsA Conversation Algorithm I Cribbed From Clinical PsychologistsWhat does “open ended question” even mean? Here’s some examples, and a conversational framework built around it. This also probably good for sales and marketing.

The Product Engineer - “If you build Enterprise Software, you need product managers.” // If consumer, you need developers who use the product.

A Conversation Algorithm I Cribbed From Clinical Psychologists - What does “open ended question” even mean? Here’s some examples, and a conversational framework built around it. This also probably good for sales and marketing.

The good times in tech are over - ”If you were an engineer who loved working on your company’s open-source libraries, it’s probably sensible to confront the fact that the company never really cared about it that much.

Refactoring to understand and “vibe coding” - ”Code is not the most valuable artifact. Your understanding of the codebase is.

I’m the guest on this week’s When Shit Hits the Fan podcast. You can hear about two of my fan shattings. Here’s the podcast in Apple, Spotify, and Overcast. Favor documents over slidesSlides are an oral culture, not a written culture. Imagine civilization without writing: that’s what organizations relying on slides instead of documents are like. There are workarounds, and they tend to prove the comparison. Often, you will see a slide with a lot of words, and the presenter will apologize that there’s too much text.

3 prompts for better knowledge worker docs -

Ironies of Agentic AI - “[R]ather than removing human dependencies, automation often shifts and amplifies them.”

Agentic AI Is The Next Competitive Frontier - “CEOs must architect the autonomous enterprise.” // Changing culture, org structure, and how work is done day-to-day. That’s a big ask. It rarely works.

OpenStack comes to the Linux Foundation -

Navigating Private Equity ownership. -

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino - How to detect vaporware. With AI, building up your bullshit detector is very important. A lot of it, at best, is just hopes and dreams. And a lot of it is just vaporware.

Revenge font - The tagger who did this must be so happy. And, way to turn a frown upside down!

Who gets to do strategy? -

Sensitive Information Disclosure in LLMs: Privacy and Compliance in Generative AI - Sensitive information in, sensitive information out. Also, make sure to have access control to your models.

What Are Agentic Workflows? Patterns, Use Cases, Examples, and More -

Prompts for management communication -

Canadians’ Health Data Needs Safeguarding Against Our Increasingly Hostile Neighbor - Maybe Trump drives a lot of sovereign cloud.

The Secret History of the Manicule - The Little Hand that’s Everywhere.

Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa - Avoid using legs to lure dice-nerds.

5 questions to ask before deploying agentic AI -

Data Looks Better Naked - Good advice on formatting charts and data tables. The examples are incremental, so you can choose to go all the way, or just apply some of the design changes.

The Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD - ”Hypercuriosity is related to ADHD in several ways: individuals with ADHD often demonstrate heightened novelty-seeking behaviors, show intense focus on topics of interest, and experience stronger urges to explore new information and experiences. Beyond all this experimental data, this connection is supported by qualitative research suggesting that ADHDers relate their curiosity to their tendencies toward both impulsivity and distraction.

Most Externalities are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination - ”Economics should emphasize the importance of technology as a solution to externality problems and focus less on social coordination.” // Does this apply to IT where we often say “technology is easy, culture is hard.

Cool native HTML elements you should already be using -

To Have and Have Not, Christopher Still. Found in Leiden thrift.Wastebook“We live in the age of ‘fuck around and find out’ - of iteration and experimentation.” 8Ball wisdom. “15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.” Noah Smith, via Ibid.. “everything is optimized for engagement instead of meaning,” the Curmudgeon Era of life. If the likely outcome is the same, you might as well do a good job, so long as that’s fun too.

The Hobby’s Cult of Personality - Recap of the problematic stuff in the history of RPGs.

Build vs. Buy: Compare Your Kubernetes Platform Options - Don’t build your own platform. And especially don’t build your own Kubernetes-based platform. It’s not going to turn out well.

Developers spend most of their time not coding - Developers spending something like 50% to 60% of their time on stuff that should be automated and built into the process.

AI Adoption: Why Businesses Struggle to Move from Development to Production - Day Two AI Operations: “This interchangeability means the real differentiators lie elsewhere: how you integrate your company data, design safety and guardrails, and adapt your development processes.

Model Context Protocol Bridges LLMs to the Apps They Need - The idea of having the AI sort out which tools to use is cool. What’s also cool is that you natural language to tell the AI what the tools do and when to use them. It then sorts them out. What’s also cool is that Spring AI is the official Java implementation.

Build a Campaign-Unique Faction List - “faction list turn our world’s lore to specific things the characters interact with during the game. Faction lists turns fuzzy concepts into a practical list we can use in the next game we run.

Affording your AI chatbot friends - ‘An “AI Agent” is just a model with access to tools like “escalate ticket”, “run SQL query”, or “draw an image”. The rest of the hype comes from fitting it into existing workloads like ETL nonsense with MuleSoft or something banal like that. This is really what all the hype is about: hooking AI models up to existing infrastructure so that they can do “useful things”.

You’re about to waste at least a year and millions of dollars on enterprise AI projects. Here’s how to avoid it. Here’s a new article on enterprise AI from me and a co-worker. As with most maturity models, it’s 2/3 prescriptive and 1/3 “here’s some ideas that might help.” A bit of map and territory. With AI, we’re seeing a familiar anti-pattern, but this time flavor-injected with generative AI: the board charters a tiger team, gives them budget.

What do tariffs on Canadian goods have to do with me? - Sherwood News - Bacon and lumber to be more expensive, among other things.

Do these dual images say anything about your personality? - It doesn’t matter if you saw a rabbit, a vase, or an old woman. // “We didn’t find very much support for the claims, but there were some correlations in our data.

One ‘Bad Apple’ Correct Interpretation - On the use and mis-use of “bad apples.

One bad apple ruins the bunch. The O-Ring Theory, proposed by economist Michael Kremer in 1993, describes how small failures in complex, interdependent tasks can lead to major breakdowns. Named after the Challenger disaster, where a faulty O-ring caused the shuttle’s destruction, this model applies to production, labor markets, and economic development. In an O-ring system, tasks must be performed at a consistently high level because a single weak link can compromise the entire process.

Median Voter Theory (MVT) suggests that in a majority-rule election, the candidate closest to the median voter’s views will win. Since most voters are partisan and vote predictably, elections are decided by swing voters in the middle. To win, candidates adjust their positions to attract this decisive group, often moving toward the political center. Developed by Anthony Downs in 1957, MVT explains why general election candidates tend to sound more moderate than during primaries, where they appeal to their base.

The Soil, Not Just the Harvest - The right’s long, systematic campaign to take over politics and get a strong hand in culture wars: “Blaming Trump alone offers psychological comfort, by localizing a systemic problem in a single figurehead. It legitimizes the false promise that removing one man solves the underlying condition. It absolves millions of their responsibility while leaving intact the machinery that produced Trump - and will create future authoritarian leaders.

Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes - by Brian Potter - ”Ultimately, it was economics (or at least perceived economics) that drove developers to embrace this style. Glass curtain wall buildings were cheaper to erect than their masonry predecessors, and they allowed developers to squeeze more rentable space from the same building footprint. Ornate, detailed exteriors were increasingly seen as something tenants didn’t particularly care about, making it harder to justify spending money on them.

Measuring Productivity: All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful - ”Measure Speed, Ease, and Quality Different facets of productivity warrant the use of different metrics. We typically think of productivity as a balance among speed, ease, and quality.

I’m Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better - Try to avoid tools that require you to acquire new tools to use the first tools.

America Voted For Chaos. The Markets Are Feeling the Punch. - Dumb disruption: “Disruption can be a positive force. But over the last decade, it has become a hand-wave that forgives and excuses irresponsible governance, poor decision-making, and financial incompetence. The reason you can’t run the government like a startup is simple: 90% or more of startups fail. That’s a risk threshold that should be unacceptable to anyone serious about the responsibility of America’s stewardship.

The difficulty level of children - ”It also runs the other direction. If you have two kids, and one kid is away (with a grandparent), it feels like having zero kids.

Four Marketing Principles That Redefine Markets from Klaviyo’s CMO - ‘“Creating fear never works, because in the immediate, you can probably prompt people to take action because they’re like, ‘Oh my! I must do something,’ but it leaves a negative perception in their mind.” “You don’t become a beloved brand over a period of time.

Skype is dead. What happened? - Ode to Skype, and complaining about Microsoft having no imagination to evolve it. It’d be helpful to read a detailed analysis of how and why.

What we love is good for usDavid Lynch on smoking: “But that said, he admitted smoking played a huge part in his life. “I don’t regret it. It was important to me. I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.” He went on: “A big important part of my life was smoking. I loved the smell of tobacco, the taste of tobacco. I loved lighting cigarettes.

Hemingway saw in Cézanne a kindred spirit—a man who stripped nature down to its essentials and reassembled it into something honest and uncompromised. Here are a few reasons for his admiration: Structural Purity: Cézanne’s work revolves around reducing forms to their geometric fundamentals. His method of breaking objects down into simple shapes and planes resonated with Hemingway’s own drive for clarity and precision in language. Hemingway’s lean, unadorned prose sought a similar kind of structural integrity—a means to get at the truth beneath the surface.

“A huevo” is a Mexican slang expression meaning “hell yeah” that conveys enthusiasm, confidence, or inevitability.

ServiceNow’s newest AI agents bring intelligent automation to telecommunications firms - SiliconANGLE - ServiceNow’s AI agents analyze network data to diagnose and resolve issues, predict disruptions, and provide real-time explanations for unusual usage patterns, improving customer service and reducing complaints. // ”For instance, some of the agents are designed to service, test and repair networks by analyzing network data to diagnose any problems that occur. This analysis takes place in seconds, and they’ll immediately be able to work out the best way to fix things and coordinate the repair operation by scheduling tasks for the engineers responsible.

How AI ‘Reasoning’ Models Will Change Companies and the Economy - Lots of good thinking here, not least of which is a very delightful writing style. There’s about five quips in there that are fun. // Also notice that the benefits are accruing the individual here, the enterprises have yet to figure it out.

AI’s productivity paradox: how it might unfold more slowly than we think - The case that productivity effects of AI in the macro economy will be slow. Micro-economy (individuals) still looks good.

State of Java Survey Confirms Majority of Enterprise Apps Are Built on Java Performance, Superior Java Support - ”Typically, when the topic of developing AI or ML functionality arises, people think of Python. Perhaps surprisingly, the survey found that Java was used more often than either Python or other languages. In fact, 50% of organizations use Java to code AI functionality.

Agentic definition from Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren - Good simple AI vs. agentic AI framing: “Some view AI as a tool – a system that passively performs functions, while others see it as an agent – a system that actively pursues objectives, makes independent decisions and may develop instrumental goals such as self-preservation.

“Greentext” refers to a style of writing popularized on 4chan and other imageboards. It’s characterized by using the > symbol at the start of each line, which turns the text green on 4chan’s interface. Originally, this syntax was meant for quoting previous posts, but it evolved into a distinctive storytelling format, often used for short, humorous, exaggerated, or absurd anecdotes. Common Features of Greentext: Minimalist, fragmented style: Sentences are often short and lack proper grammar.

I can never remember all of these, so here’s a list of key generative AI terms with concise definitions: Key Generative AI Terms Core AI Concepts Inference – The process of an AI model generating output based on input. Training – Teaching an AI model by adjusting its weights using large datasets. LLM (Large Language Model) – A neural network trained on vast text data to generate human-like language responses.

The phrase “How do you like them apples?” (or “How you like them apples?”) likely originates from American slang in the early 20th century, though its exact origin is debated. It generally conveys a sense of triumph, challenge, or one-upmanship. Possible Origins: World War I Artillery Slang (1910s) - British and American soldiers referred to certain types of grenades or artillery shells as “toffee apples” due to their round shape.

“Greeble” refers to small, intricate details added to the surface of an object—often in visual design, 3D modeling, or special effects—to make it look more complex and visually interesting. The term is especially common in sci-fi and fantasy aesthetics, where greebles are used to give spaceships, buildings, or machinery a more detailed, lived-in appearance. The concept was popularized by artists and model-makers working on Star Wars and other sci-fi films, where adding greebles to models helped create a sense of scale and realism.

The Lights of My Life - Accent lighting and lamps used by one photographer.

Yoon Suin and Orientalism -

My first law of enterprise AI: if you end up having two robots talk with each other to complete a task, that task was bullshit in the first place, and you should probably eliminate it rather than automate it. For example, if AI is used in both sides of B2B procurement (enterprise software sales), then much of the process is probably bullshit in the first place. There is so much weird and ancient in procurement, on both sides, that it’s clearly a poorly done process and part of enterprise IT culture.

The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers - Hell is other people: “In our survey, more than 90% of respondents said they experienced meeting hangovers at least occasionally. More than half said these hangovers negatively impacted their workflow or productivity, while 47% reported feeling less engaged with their work. These effects often resulted from rumination, or replaying parts of the meeting in their mind. Nearly half (47%) of respondents noted harmful effects on their interactions with coworkers, such as feeling disconnected from their team or wanting to spend time alone.

A theory of Elons - If you can get away with breaking regulations and laws, you can gain competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Old Media Finally Wakes Up from a Coma - “Hey, guys”-style getting more mainstream. // Also, long form podcasts.

GEN AI: TOO MUCH SPEND, TOO LITTLE BENEFIT? - Goldman (PDF) - ‘We first speak with Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT, who’s skeptical. He estimates that only a quarter of AI-exposed tasks will be cost-effective to automate within the next 10 years, implying that AI will impact less than 5% of all tasks. And he doesn’t take much comfort from history that shows technologies improving and becoming less costly over time, arguing that AI model advances likely won’t occur nearly as quickly–or be nearly as impressive–as many believe.

Vision and Distortion in Cézanne’s ‘Still Life with Plaster Cupid’ - Good example of art criticism, “how to see,” all that.

Drive Scale And Speed With The Platform Org Model - 59% of respondents have using a platform instead of whole bunch of different platforms as a priority. // Enterprise want the benefits of centralized, standardized IT stacks. Always. DIY platforms and shadow platforms (sprawl od accidental platforms) is often a bad idea. Your platform needs aren’t special, your app needs are. If you focus on platforms, you’ll steal mojo and budget away from those app needs.

Issues for His Prose Style - Picking the right noun as a deep cut mechanic, to show authenticity, and build up a mythos of yourself, and for yourself. // Hemingway’s letters.

The big idea: what do we really mean by free speech? - What “freedom of speech” means to the asshats: “what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of broadcasting their views.

Paul Millerd on AI and writing - This is the response a very pragmatic writer had to AI.

🤖 “Working people” is a politically charged term in the U.S. that denotes support for economic populism and labor concerns without the rigid implications of “working class.”

Dutch people concerned with U.S., Russia, Ukraine developments; More support EU army -

5 Questions to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions - (1) What Would Happen if We Did Nothing? (2) What Could Make Us Regret This Decision? (3) What Alternatives Did We Overlook? (4) How Will We Know If This Was the Right Decision? (5) Is This Decision Reversible?

AI Essentials for Tech Executives – O’Reilly - Good tables translating AI-tech-speak to business outcomes.

Are AI Development Frameworks The Foundation Of The Agentic World? - This is a really good overview AI middleware, all the stuff you need to surround model access to. As you see, it is A LOT. And still, it doesn’t include the runtime and operations stuff - day two. // Side-note: when you hear the phrase “agentic AI,” just think “using AI in apps.

Software Sourcing in the Age of AI - More B2B slop. // “The average software sourcing process involves 28 stakeholders and takes six months. That’s six months of manual research, vendor meetings, demos, internal debates, and ultimately, a decision that still may not be fully informed.

Lack of AI-Ready Data Puts AI Projects at Risk - If you’ve let your data lakes turn into data swamps your AI projects are going to go poorly. // “Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data.

I’m clearly a big fan of AI and believe it’s helpful in many ways. I feel comfortable with that because I’ve used it for over two years now and rely on it daily for a wide variety of tasks, both work- and personal-related. That means I know exactly what it’s capable of, what it’s good at, and what it’s not good at. Me and the robot have a good relationship: we know how to work with each other.

Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow - My summary: humans resisting change is a bottleneck; also, humans not knowing what to do with AI; current economic models don’t can’t model an AI-driven paradigm shift, so we can’t measure the change; in general, technology adoption takes decades, 20 for the internet, 40 for electricity. // AI is a technology and is prey to the usual barriers and bottlenecks to mass-adoption.

The reality of long-term software maintenance - Ashley’s blog - “In the long run maintenance is a majority of the work for any given feature, and responsibility for maintenance defaults to the project maintainers”

How’s that open source licensing coming along? - ”The takeaway is that forks from relicensing tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects. In addition, projects that lean on a community of contributors run the risk of that community going elsewhere when relicensing occurs.

Top EDI Processes You Should Automate With API - Tech never dies. Helpful consequence: take care of it before it takes care of you.

Key insights on analytical AI for streamlined enterprise operations - ”The big issue, whether it’s generative or analytical AI, has always been how to we get to production deployments. It’s easy to do a proof of concept, a pilot or a little experiment — but putting something into production means you have to train the people who will be using this system. You have to integrate it with your existing technology architecture; you have to change the business process into which it fits.

GenAI Possibilities Become Reality When Leaders Tackle The Hard Work First - Like any other tool, people have to learn how to use it: “Whatever communication, enablement, or change management efforts you think you’ll need, plan on tripling them.” // Also, garbage in, garbage out: “GenAI can’t deliver real business value if a foundation is broken. Too many B2B organizations are trying to layer genAI on top of scattered, siloed, and outdated technologies, data, and processes.

A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups - ”Before this A.I. boom, start-ups generally burned $1 million to get to $1 million in revenue, Mr. Jain said. Now getting to $1 million in revenue costs one-fifth as much and could eventually drop to one-tenth, according to an analysis of 200 start-ups conducted by Afore.” // Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em…

U.S. Economy Being Powered by the Richest 10% of Americans - Never mind the, like, morals?…doesn’t seem very anti-fragile. “Those consumers now account for 49.7% of all spending, a record in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.” One estimate: “spending by the top 10% alone accounted for almost one-third of gross domestic product.

Why it’s nice to compete against a large, profitable company - Because, they can’t lower prices on their core products least Wall Street freak-the-fuck out.

How Ikea approaches AI governance - ”Around 30,000 employees have access to an AI copilot, and the retailer is exploring tailoring AI assistants to add more value. Ikea is also exploring AI-powered supply chain optimization opportunities, such as minimizing delivery times and enhancing loading sequences for shipments to minimize costs. AI in CX mostly targets personalization. // “I’m not just talking about generative AI,” Marzoni said. “There’s some old, good machine learning models that are still absolutely delivering a lot of value, if not the majority of the value to date.

Enterprises pouring money into GenAI and CEOs treating AI agents like cheap labor - yet only 25% see ROI right now. Vibes: “Europe’s long holiday from history is over.” Also: IBM does RTO, predictions about DOGE layoffs, the term “platform” remains a favorite excuse for overcomplicated tech, and “autonomous killer robots.” AI comes for HRWhat to make of using AI to automate HR processes? Melody Brue and Patrick Moorhead look at Oracle’s work there:

Data is very valuable, just don’t ask leaders to measure it - ”in a survey of chief data and analytics (D&A) officers, only 22 percent had defined, tracked, and communicated business impact metrics for the bulk of their data and analytics use cases… It is difficult, though: 30 percent of respondents say their top challenge is the inability to measure data, analytics and AI impact on business outcomes”

Rage Against the Machine - Perceptive: “They’re going to try two or three things they think will solve everything, which will be thrown out in court,” the official told me following the announcement of Musk’s appointment. “I assume the first thing they’ll do is some kind of hiring freeze, and then, after three months, they’ll realize agencies have started to figure out ways to get around it. And then they’ll try to stop that, and they won’t be able to do that.

Gartner Survey Reveals Over a Quarter of Marketing Organizations Have Limited or No Adoption of GenAI for Marketing Campaigns - ”Nearly half (47%) report a large benefit from adopting GenAI for evaluation and reporting in their campaigns.” // 77% of surveys marketing people say they’re using generative AI for marketing stuff.

Learning from examples: AI assistance can enhance rather than hinder skill development - “Decades before the advent of generative AI, the legendary UCLA baseball coach John Wooden declared that the four laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition (31). Few learners have access to the best human teachers, coaches, and mentors, but generative AI now makes it possible to learn from personalized, just-in-time demonstrations tailored to any domain.

OpenAI reaches 400M weekly active users, doubles enterprise customer base - SiliconANGLE - “The ChatGPT developer currently has 2 million paying enterprise users, twice as many as in September.” With “400 million active weekly users, a 33% increase from December.” And: “The New York Times reported in September that the company was expecting to end 2024 with a $5 billion loss on sales of $3.7 billion.

IBM co-location program described as worker attrition plan - From the RTO-as-not-so-stealthy-layoff files.

2025 is the breakthrough year for Generative Enterprise — and partnering with a capable services partner is critical - “[S]pending on GenAI is rising (HFS data suggests enterprise investment is rising by more than 25% on average into 2025), we start from a low base. We estimate enterprise spending on GenAI in 2024 accounted for less than 1% of global IT services spending. This is just one illustration of how far we still have to go.

A Simple Definition Of “Platform” - “a product that supports the creation and/or delivery of other products.

Inside Oracle’s New AI Agents - Moor Insights & Strategy - Getting the robot to do annual performance reviews: “Oracle is also leveraging AI to improve the performance review process itself. By aggregating and distilling information from check-ins, feedback and goal progress throughout the year, the AI agent can generate a first draft of a performance review. This should save managers time and effort while fostering a more comprehensive assessment of employee performance.

To avoid being replaced by LLMs, do what they can’t -

No Rules Are Implicit Rules - The European view on enlightened American management policy: “Greg, I hate to bring it to you, but working for ten fucking hours a day is not the normal hour. I don’t care if you live in America or not. The section continues with other “grand” examples of managers taking “up to” 14 days a year off to show their employees they should to so too.

On European Defence, Energy and Growth - Imagining big changes in European priorities: changing policy to get more energy, more emphasis on militaries.

AI Agents and the CEOs - “At the risk of saying the quiet part out loud, the way CEOs are talking about agents sure sounds like how they talk about employees–only cheaper!” // “Companies are dedicating significant spend to AI–approximately 5% of the revenue of large enterprises (revenues over $500 million) according to one survey by Boston Consulting Group, and yet only 25% claim they are seeing value from their AI investment.

In this episode: AI eschatology, assology, and a deep, intellectual commitment to hating mayonnaise. Tariff trouble, security panic, and NVIDIA shrugging off DeepSeek. Young voters shift rightward, no one agrees on ‘medium roast,’ and Hollywood still relies on glue to critique its own youth obsession. Wastebook“immanetize the AI eschaton,” Charlie Stross. “The ass is a very strong symbol of how our body is not neutral in the public space. How our body is constantly scrutinized, has been shaped to please the man’s eyes, has been seen as a body part that was objectified, that was detached from the person who was simply bearing it.

What is AI Middleware, and Why You Need It to Safely Deliver AI Applications - AI middleware is the glue that holds your AI-driven apps together, making sure models, data, and existing systems actually talk to each other instead of breaking everything. It saves developers from reinventing the wheel, adds security layers, and keeps AI projects from becoming yet another unmaintainable mess.

Lots of links and stuff this episode: AI isn’t a coworker, it’s just automation wrapped in hype. Tech moves fast, but nothing lasts—except bad takes, questionable business models, and the creeping realization that managers just want fewer humans to manage. Meanwhile, we live like kings and don’t even notice. Put it on iceGood episode of Software Defined Talk this week, especially the opening moment of absurdity where we, yet again, try to solve Europe’s ice problem.

The danger of relying on OpenAI’s Deep Research - Some valid critiques of Deep Research. Though, none of them really amount to “it’s not good.” To sum-up: it can’t do complex research, let alone come up with original ideas nor cover obscure topics. It can’t only tell you what the Internet knows. This is actually not fully accurate: you can also upload your own files and put in your own knowledge.

New estimates have ChatGPT using 10x less power than previously thought - ”it would actually be more energy efficient for you to have an LLM turn off your furnace than to walk across the house to manually turn the dial.

Learning from my mistakes… - It’s tough to monetize content that has near zero value or originality, and be easily pirated. This especially true if the price is wrong. That sort of applies to every product. // “In the end though, you can’t optimise your way out of a black hole, the gravity is too heavy. We were marketing a product at a price point that was material to our customers, and giving them content which was largely available from our competitors for free.

One Year With the Vision Pro - Basically, not enough ROI for $3,500.

The Tyranny of Now - ”What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble.

The Great AI UI Unification - What’s going on here is a classic power user versus normal user UX problem. I’m probably more power user than normal user. I don’t mind the UX, it’s easy access to docs that explain features that I find annoying. For example, try to do a deep explanation of what’s currently in ChatGPT Pro. There really isn’t. Even more so, last I looked the help page doesn’t list new features like Deep Search.

Tech continues to be political | Miriam Eric Suzanne - ”I don’t know how to attend conferences full of gushing talks about the tools that were designed to negate me. That feels so absurd to say. I don’t have any interest in trying to reverse-engineer use-cases for it, or improve the flaws to make it “better”, or help sell it by bending it to new uses.

AI Alone Won’t Drive Revenue - What Are You Missing? - Some light ROI talk.

Internal Product Management -

Why are big tech companies so slow? - Because they build, sell, and support a lot features.

How to add a directory to your PATH - Computers are easy, they said. You just need to read the manual, they said. It’s so intuitive!

All hat, no cowboy - A bicycle for your hands: “Becoming a good programmer takes time, so does becoming an artist. What if all the people with ideas but no time or skills or persistence or real interest could participate and _turn their ideas into the thing?_Surely non-musicians have great ideas for songs that they could turn into great songs if it weren’t for the inconvenience of musical instruments.” Yes, and: “One way to look at this – not a charitable way, but a view that feels true to me – is that managers view all need for human labor as an inconvenience.

The “AI Agent As Coworker” Narrative Is Nonsense The AI agent co-worker narrative is nonsense - Against the agentic hype: “You have to admire Benioff’s chutzpah in defining digital labor as some brand-new massive market opportunity. But to many, it just sounds like automation. Like every other phase of automation since the beginning of the industrial age, this phase is also about doing more with fewer human resources.

Catch-up: yesterday, I went over everything you need for tech strategy and marketing. What do I know about security: limiting AI use in enterprisesI find the restrictions on using public AI chat things baffling versus the potential, but obvious benefit. But I don’t know the CISO perspective and way of thinking. What am I missing? Yes: From Melissa Incera, S&P Global Market Intelligence.But: From Melissa Incera, S&P Global Market Intelligence.My theories: It’s just too new and unknown, we don’t even know the risk and (is this a layman’s term?

Do Marketers Need To Be Writing for AI? - SEO for AI model training. Yup, better start doing that. The good news is, all those SEO-trap pages that you generated (those long one you never actually show to users/customers) would probably work here…are working here. But, it’s likely a good idea to start doing more of this ongoing.

Context-switching is the main productivity killer for developers - #1 way to improve developer productivity, 30+ years running: stop interrupting them while they’re coding. // ”Research from UC Irvine shows that developers need an average of 23 minutes to rebuild their focus after an interruption fully.

Emerging GenAI Use Cases and Spotlight on Secure Content Generation - If your AI stuff is using the same pool of knowledge as your competitors, you won’t get much competitive advantage. You need to add your own secret info. // “A common challenge, however, when employees use public generative AI tools or foundation models, is a lack of organizational specificity.”

Is Fine-Tuning or Prompt Engineering the Right Approach for AI? - As it says.

Stuck in the pilot phase: Enterprises grapple with generative AI ROI - ”More than 90% of leaders expressed concern about generative AI pilots proceeding without addressing problems uncovered by previous initiatives, according to the Informatica report. Nearly 3 in 5 respondents admitted to facing pressure to move projects along faster. ”

Moderne raises $30M to solve technical debt across complex codebases - ”A quick peek at Moderne’s customer base is telling of who is most likely to benefit from its technology — companies like Walmart and insurance giant Allstate. Its investor base includes names from the enterprise world such as American Express and Morgan Stanley, which, while unconfirmed, is safe to assume have invested strategically.” // From what I’ve seen and heard, seems like good stuff.

Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matters) - Adding plugins to the AIs, the hope being that wide community of developers will form, extending the functionality of the AIs. I’ve seen this in practice with Spring AI and Claude and is very promising, and easy.

In tech product management marketing, there are three phases of your “story” and execution: strategy, planning, and doing (“execution”). I think a lot of people mix up these phases, talk too much about strategy, don’t do enough planning, often poorly communicate the plans to staff, and are not “throw it all at the wall” enough with doing. I’ve worked in this area for, I don’t know, 20 years. Here’s my latest organized brain-dump from watching people from afar and close-up at many places.

This episode: AI is coming for your software job, or at least for the parts of it you actually enjoyed. Meanwhile, businesses are still stuck in pilot purgatory with generative AI, IT leaders remain unconvinced of AI’s ROI, and Java is apparently coming for Python’s AI crown. The economy may be changing not because of interest rates or labor shortages, but because everyone is drinking more water and eating fewer snacks.

Stuck in the pilot phase: Enterprises grapple with generative AI ROI - “More than 90% of leaders expressed concern about generative AI pilots proceeding without addressing problems uncovered by previous initiatives, according to the Informatica report. Nearly 3 in 5 respondents admitted to facing pressure to move projects along faster.

IT decision makers unconvinced of returns from AI investment - “Nearly half of respondents have yet to adopt AI at all, with 36 percent indicating they plan to start using it within the next 12 months, while a further 13 percent are still at the stage of considering or evaluating it but have no plans yet.

Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently - “Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently: Print isn’t that useful unless it’s with a writer with a voice (e.g., a substack). Audio and video really make an impact. You want to be inside someone’s EarPods. Speaking at trade shows is helpful in expanding your network”

70s Sci-Fi Art - Good newsletter, lots of great styles.

After 30 years of code, Java remains an enterprise cornerstone | CIO Dive - ”Nearly 7 in 10 respondents reported more than half of their organization’s applications run on Java. Roughly half are now leveraging the programming language to build AI applications.

2025 Is the Last Year of Python Dominance in AI: Java Comin’ - Asked if he believed Java could overtake Python for leadership in AI development, Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, told The New Stack: “Yes, definitely, this could happen, especially since Java is unparalleled for the development of enterprise-grade, mission critical applications at scale.

Three Observations, Sam Altman - ”The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.

You Didn’t Notice MP3 Is Now Free - The MP3 format, once a staple for digital audio, is now free due to expired licensing. However, its significance has diminished with the rise of streaming services and faster internet speeds, making file sizes less of a concern. While this change is notable for developers, the general population is largely unaffected by the shift away from MP3.

How real-world businesses are transforming with AI - with 50 new stories - More examples.

Writing with ChatGPT and ClaudeI’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude a lot for writing recently. I had a long conversation in the car ride between Ghent and Amsterdam with one of my old DevOps pals and they described their AI writing process. It’s best describe it as “layering.” Well, actually, it’s just how writing is always done: incrementally at first, and then iteratively until you run out of time. Here’s the technique.

Ten Trends That Shaped the Cloud Market in 2024 - ”Around 60% of cloud buyers told IDC’s 3Q24 Cloud Pulse Survey October 2024 that their business’ IT or digital infrastructure currently requires major transformation, and 82% said their cloud also required modernization.” // Good summary of a very expensive analyst report.

Gartner Survey Shows Supply Chain GenAI Productivity Gains at Individual Level, While Creating New Complications for Organizations - The robot summarizes what’s happening here with theory of constraints, clever! // Robot: “Alice now processes orders faster, but Bob and Charlie still work at their original pace. If Alice completes 20% more orders, but Bob can only arrange transport for the same number as before, then Alice’s extra work sits idle–no overall productivity gain for the team.

The Peter Principle - by Nicholas Decker - “Promotions are used as incentives, even if they don’t always match future competence.

Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Using culture-blitz to incrementally change society.

Today it’s all wastebook. Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, June Bug edition.Wastebook“gizmocrat” and ”gizmocrats,” new govt IT outsourcing term? “Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was tweeting about guacamole prices over the weekend as Musk took over key functions of the government.” Two weeks in. “Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk,” attributed to William Gibson. “Tariffying,” The Economist. “There’s probably a couple of kinks in that slinky,” Sen.

Hello. How are you today? Wastebook"MAGA makeover' and “Texas Blowout.” US hair news from the UK. “your dissimilar appearance to other social media influencers.” Aaron on my influencer aesthetics. “Some people want something else, and that’s fine for them.” John Dickerson, Political Gabfest, Jan 30th, 2025. ”romantasy, which blends spicy sex scenes and romance tropes with supernatural elements, is not a fleeting trend." At which Rebecca Yarros excels. “groyperfication, “John Ganz.

Clouded Judgement 1.30.25 - The Year of AI Applications - Finance-nerd explanation of the “this is actually great!” case for last week: “What’s happened over the last 12 months is the cost per API call (ie the cost for inference) for these models has plummeted. Open source models like Llama, R1 from DeepSeek, etc have all contributed to this. It’s become even more clear the model calls themselves are commoditizing quickly.

Some Kind Of Monster (Type) - “The convoluted agreements common to many Fey are an aspect of their adherence to a particular vector of existence. If they agree to something, everyone has to agree that their perspective is the perspective through which the fey are experiencing reality.” // Ponderous! This seems derived from the idea that Fey take oaths very seriously. In the other side, this similar to fiends (devils) being bound by contracts.

Dell ends hybrid work policy despite remote work pledge - “Overall, our results do not support the argument that managers impose these mandates to increase firm values,” the authors state in their paper. “Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.

Purely AI-generated art can’t get copyright protection, says Copyright Office - If you can’t control it, you can’t copyright it.

ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. DeepSeek: The Battle to Be My AI Work Assistant - Good overview of what Claude is good for and what ChatGPT is good for.

“Socrates drawing at a whiteboard with a rapt audience set in ancient Athens, but the whiteboard is like a contempory whiteboard,” Midjourney, January, 2025.Socrates Didn’t WhiteboardThis week’s Software Defined Talk: “This week, we discuss the latest news about DeepSeek, how to make sense of the countless hot takes, and a review of The Nvidia Way. Plus, some thoughts on Valentine’s Day.” Take a listen, or watch the unedited recording, and subscribe if you don’t already.

Take a walk with me and ponder cheaper AI: I found some good charts for this one: “State of Enterprise Tech Spending,” Battery Ventures, September, 2024. “Where’s the Value in AI?" BCG, October, 2024. 🍃 Spring AI, an open source SDK for using AI. Tanzu AI Solutions and VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. This chart in particular is helpful. It’s showing that there aren’t actually that many - hardly any!

Spring Cloud Services for Tanzu Platform - Spring Cloud Services for Cloud Foundry v3.3 introduces an enhanced dashboard UI, improved configuration validation, and simplified secret management.

The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - ”Only about 9% of respondents were indeed mature by the CNCF Platform Maturity Model’s standards.” // (1) There must be a lot of Tanzu Platform users in that 9%, (2) good thing we decided to throw out all the previous PaaS work and build up from the Kubernetes studs…

Nosferatu (2024), review from Warren Ellis - Great review of a great movie.

GKE and its developer appeal to scale workloads - Giving people what they need to operate at “Google Scale”…whether they need to or not.

GKE and its developer appeal to scale workloads - Giving people what they need to operate at “Google Scale”…whether they need to or not.

“What advice would you give to people about how to prepare for advanced AI?" - Lots of advice about integrating the outcomes of AI into your life. No prompts or anything, but more how everyday life could change if we have AI doing more stuff.

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red - Dimensional/Azul survey “found the percentage of Oracle Java users considering switching to alternative JVMs or JDKs based an open approach increased from 72 percent in 2023 to 88 percent in 2024. The proportion wanting to leave Oracle reached 92 percent in France and 95 percent Germany…. in 2023, research from Gartner showed that costs could be between two and five times greater under the new licensing model, for using the same software.

Trump cribs Musk’s “fork in the road” Twitter memo to slash gov’t workforce - Big layoff vibes for 2025.

Kubernetes Cloud Repatriation Saves Millions for Data Platform Provider - “It has reported an annual saving of $3.9 million by moving its development and testing environments away from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. According to Neil Carson of Yellowbrick, the company had been spending about $6 million per year across the three major cloud providers when the repatriation project began in 2022.

Kubernetes Cloud Repatriation Saves Millions for Data Platform Provider - “It has reported an annual saving of $3.9 million by moving its development and testing environments away from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. According to Neil Carson of Yellowbrick, the company had been spending about $6 million per year across the three major cloud providers when the repatriation project began in 2022.

The Product Model and Agile - Yeah, getting to “agile product management” is tough. The Pivotal Labs people seemed to have figured it out, but marrying up weekly app releases with applying the scientific method to your app’s features (product management) is elusive.

Fun with charts: Relative to your interestsHow Cloud Ingestion Pricing Eats Your Budget - ”Essentially, yes, the cloud can be cheaper — but only if you’re using it the right way.” Microsoft and Google Are Forcing Customers to Adopt AI at a Premium Price: What Customers Need to Know - “84 million customers x $36 (the annual increase per subscription) = $3,024,000,000” Core Principles of AI Data Readiness - Maybe enterprise AI is all about getting your data into shape.

DeepSeek Just “Opened” The Path To AI ROI - “Short term, that is bad news for NVIDIA because it will temper the demand. Longer term, however, the lower cost (and, thus, energy) will open up model creation opportunities for many, many more startups and enterprises alike, thereby increasing demand.

How Cloud Ingestion Pricing Eats Your Budget - ”Essentially, yes, the cloud can be cheaper — but only if you’re using it the right way.

1,156 Questions Censored by DeepSeek - ”It will matter less once models similar to R1 are reproduced without these restrictions (which will probably be in a week or so).

DeepSeek and the Enterprise - ”Enterprises that want to embrace AI, in other words, have reasons to want to do so on their own infrastructure. But that has posed its own set of challenges, challenges which have led many enterprises to scale back their ambitions and turn their eyes from large, expensive foundational models to small, more cost efficient and easily trained alternatives.

Core Principles of AI Data Readiness - Maybe enterprise AI is all about getting your data into shape. Historically, that is very difficult. Good luck!

On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence Features - Yeah, I like the results and utilities of the Writing Tools, but the the UI is clunky as fuck. Plus, they don’t have Shortcuts support. That would be really useful. // “Writing Tools on MacOS is the most obviously flawed of the Apple Intelligence features suffering from weak implementation or questionable U.I. choices, but there are other examples, too.

IDG to divest Foundry, what’s next for IDC? - Forester and IDC merging would be awesome. They’re have great qualitative and quantitative coverage. And if they breathed new life into the Wave, maybe by adding in IDC’s market estimates, that’d be interesting.

Struggling with your marketing strategy? You’re not alone. Here’s some things to think about in 2025 - I think that, like all struggling corporate functions, the answer is to make sure you’re actually doing the basics. // Also, less planning, more clicking the publish button: quality through quantity. // And, some AI use suggestions.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies - That should get a lot of enterprise CISO’s to move in allowing AI in their orgs. // ”Since the beginning of 2024, OpenAI said that more than 90,000 employees of federal, state and local governments have generated more than 18 million prompts within ChatGPT, using the tech to translate and summarize documents, write and draft policy memos, generate code, and build applications.

What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far - Lessons learned.

Interview: Brian GracelyWhitney and I interviewed Brian Gracely for this week’s Software Defined Interviews episode. It was a great, big ol’ basket of topics: the process of gathering and reporting cloud news, the evolution of PaaS, and the pros and cons of working at small startups versus large companies. Also: career advice, the importance of communicating value within organizations, and how to stay relevant in the ever-changing tech landscape. And still more: Brian shares insights on how to generate engaging content for podcasts and the impact of internal communication on company culture.

4 Lessons We Learned from Bringing AI to Our Company - “Next, you’ll face potential roadblocks, as privacy and security teams will be looking into where the models you use are hosted and where the data is stored. Chat.com, Gemini.com, or anything free of charge and a privacy nightmare is out of the question.

Are better models better? - “Part of the concept of ‘Disruption’ is that important new technologies tend to be bad at the things that matter to the previous generation of technology, but they do something else important instead.

Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors - “The main trend across the industry: consolidation. Companies try to control their bills.

OpenAI releases Operator agent as rivals enhance their AI services - ”When users ask Operator to perform a task in a website, the agent navigates to the relevant URL using a built-in browser. It can type, click and scroll to carry out the requested action. Operator regularly takes screenshots of the website to check that everything is working as expected. ”

Intuit CTO keeps 8,000 engineers on track with a base platform of common services - Centralizing, standardizing.

The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - The New Stack - “The majority of the organizations surveyed – 56% – have had platform teams for less than two years. A mere 13% of respondents reported working in “platform engineering” for more than five years.

Why run AI on-premise? - Big ol' list of why you’d chose private cloud. // “While cloud-based AI services offer scalability and cost-effectiveness, especially for testing and early use cases, enterprises are increasingly considering on-premise AI solutions. Factors such as data sovereignty, security, performance, and cost are driving this shift, particularly as AI projects grow and require more data and processing power. Enterprises are also exploring less resource-intensive models and open-source options to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Alternatives to “sorry” - American English meanings for “sorry.

Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race - ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.

The return of skinny jeans? Men’s catwalks suggest wide-legged trousers are out and calf-huggers back in - Looks like a dodged a bullet on this one by wearing my old Gen-X pants despite the trends.

M&A and the Product Model - Silicon Valley Product Group : Silicon Valley Product Group - At tech companies, achieving synergies is very difficult, and predicting if you can do the work is even harder. // “Most people experienced in due diligence have a reasonable understanding of assessing the product – the customers, the financials, the offering, the technology used to build that product, and especially the go-to-market for that product.

Spotify’s playlists have altered the music industry in unexpected ways - artists are often disrupted first. Study how their business models - and personal compensation changes - and you can prepare and defend yourself.

Swings and roundabouts – or slides? - “German policymakers made some strategic bets some decades ago that have backfired significantly over time: dependence on Russian energy, underinvestment, over-reliance on parts of the manufacturing sector as China has gained ground – in electric vehicle production for example – and a failure to keep up with digital technology.

How to use NotebookLM Plus for your business - The fact that most AIs can’t generate PowerPoint might be great: people will stop using decks for operations and go to the more helpful document. Slides for daily operations is terrible way to run the railroad. You could start doing PRFAQs and 6 pagers.

The Product Model Solves For Tech Debt - ”Forrester does not recommend ROI as a criteria for deciding to rectify technical debt, which should be seen more as essential maintenance spend.” // If you ran rail company they shouldn’t spend money on train maintenance, they’d tell you would kill the business (and people). Software is the same, executives just need to get that through the head. The ROI of reducing and limiting of limiting tech debt is the ability to function after 12 to 24 months.

• Notable Sections of the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide - I’ve been wondering if it’s worth reading the new DM guide. It looks like it.

Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race - ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.

The Product Model Solves For Tech Debt - ”Forrester does not recommend ROI as a criteria for deciding to rectify technical debt, which should be seen more as essential maintenance spend.” // If you risk rail company they shouldn’t spend money on train maintenance, they’d tell you would kill the business (and people). Software is the same, executives just need to get that through the head. The ROI of reducing and limiting of limiting tech debt is the ability to function after 12 to 24 months.

Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn’t Going to Kill the Software Industry — Dustin Ewers - “we’ll eventually allocate our scarce AI resources towards the things they are best at, which leaves plenty of things for humans to do.

A free, powerful Chinese AI model just dropped — but don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square - Great, now the AIs are getting political.

Return to PaaS: Building the Platform of Our Dreams - The New Stack - It’s a tough slog.

Catch-up: what we learn from Sonos and OpenTofu, how I use AI at work, Bluesky is getting pretty good. Found by fuzzyghost.Agentic AII’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Tanzu point of view on AI and the stack we have (Spring AI and the VMware Tanzu AI Solutions). There’s a lot mysticism around agentic AI, but when you reduce it down to an API, you can simplify it.

Share of teens using ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled from 2023 to 2024 - It’s great for all your education needs.

How pointy shoes created a moral panic in medieval London - It’s good to remember that hundreds of years later, and prohibition against fashion makes the probities look like idiots with too much time on their hands. // Also, Dutch businessmen don’t seem to have stopped wearing them.

Best Prompt for Academic Papers Summary/Analysis - “Explain this paper to me using the Feynman technique, considering yourself as the author”

Protecting your mental health during a clown president’s second term - Mental tools.

Daily Links, Jan 21st 2025 | Fintan Ryan’s Semi Regular Updates - New daily links blog from Fintan, subscribe to the RSS.

2025-01-21 - “I do not have a solution for any of this stuff, and I despair as much as the next sane human being, but one thing has become clearer and clearer since 2016; social media, like Monty Python’s Camelot, is a silly place.

Now that we’ve replaced all these people with a robot, how can we climb the CAGR?I was a guest on the Cloudcast this week. I go over how I use AI and then Brian and I discuss how companies could get more use out of AI. Most of it, I think, rests on how management behaves and uses AI. As with all “productivity” tools, management can get some quick-wins on “productivity” by replacing people with automation - firing humans, favoring computers.

What CIOs should know as DORA regulations kick in - All the great -ility’s. // “The business continuity standards laid out in the EU’s DORA require banks, insurers, securities exchanges, trading venues and other financial services providers to maintain backup systems for swift incident recovery. The EU expects impacted parties to be able to restore critical functions within two hours of an outage incident, per DORA.

Google Workspace business getting full Gemini, price increase - Instead of charging $20 to 30 extra a month of AI, give it to everyone and raise everyone’s price by $2. // Teams pricing going up similarly.

Brainwash An Executive Today! - (1) What it’s like to market to technical people. (2) He doesn’t like LinkedIn. (3) he discovers enterprise event marketing.

Understanding Private Cloud, Hybrid Infrastructure, Multi-Cloud, and Distributed Cloud: A Comprehensive Framework - Classify cloud based on how much control you have and much mixing of other clouds you have. As opposed to where the cloud is. Also, a little bit about NetApp ONTP.

Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types - Types of sandbox games.

Trying Times for Tech - “Microsoft is trying to socialise the costs of its AI investments because people largely don’t care about AI and don’t want to pay for it. Microsoft really doesn’t want The Line to notice how little demand there is for AI and would prefer to force customers to pay back the billions it has already set on fire.

Sonos’ interim CEO hits all the right notes in first letter to employees - The Verge - This “hey, I’m the new executive” memo is some well done internal comms. He literally has a Sanos tattoo and mentions three times that he’s uses the products.

The Ultimate Guide to Grappling in D&D - This is one of the more obscure combat actions in D&D, but actually seems really useful, especially. for lower level characters.

Just links and stuff today. Relative to your interestsWhen to Consider Building a Private Cloud: A Pragmatic Perspective - Yes, and: consider if you already have a private cloud and it’s working just fine. Don’t able flip your success to chase improvements that you’ve already achieved and rely on. Trust in Generative AI: A European and Dutch Perspective - ”the gap between GenAI usage for personal activities (47%) and work-related tasks (23%) remains significant.

o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) - “o1 will just take lazy questions at face value and doesn’t try to pull the context from you. Instead, you need to push as much context as you can into o1.” // Instead, give it briefs, memos, reports to start with. As always: context.

Meta Reorientates Itself Around ‘Masculine Energy’ - This feels similar to the arational RTO mandates. What could possibly be the link between “not enough masculine-energy” and “not enough share-holder value increase”? Is Facebook not “aggressive” enough in online advertising? Are the failings or lack of filling potential due to too much feminine energy? How are any of those be connected? // If not, this sentiment is just preference, more the mindset desires of those mandating.

Review: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - Good excerpts and book notes on (corporate) strategy. // “A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.” // Meanwhile, here is the problem with relying too much on war for your case studies: war focusing on killing people to achieve its “business outcomes.

How Fidelity’s “chaos buffet” pushed AWS to new Lambda tools - “Fidelity has over 7,700 applications (75% of its estate) in the public cloud. Among these are its trade order management system, which relies heavily on Lambda’s serverless, event-driven compute service.

What ‘Free Speech’ Is - “Right now, it is important for Meta to avoid getting on the incoming Trump administration’s shit list, so they, like everyone, are grovelling.” // Good over all, almost philosophic, analysis.

When to Consider Building a Private Cloud: A Pragmatic Perspective - Yes, and: consider if you already have a private cloud and it’s working just fine. Don’t able flip your success to chase improvements that you’ve already achieved and rely on.

Bitcoin Lessons - The case that crypto is bad. This is a good counter/balance to the Trump Tech Bros acting all butt-hurt about crypto regulation.

Field notes from my annual note taking rumspringaI went through my annual “I should try to use Obsidian” cycle last month. As always, I went back to Apple Notes after a few weeks. Here’s my read-out of this year’s cycle.1 Notebook philosophiesFirst, here’s an Apple Notes method to get an Obsidian/Notion feel, briefly mentioned this week on our podcast. The method also gives you a sense of what the hard-core Obsidian philosophy is.

Not even OpenAI’s $200/mo ChatGPT Pro plan can turn a profit - I use the AI things a lot and I’m still baffled at how you could use her $200 of it each month. What are these people doing? Living in there? // Maybe it’s the live voice features and image generation? Maybe they load up huge docs?

Revealing Questions - Potential interview questions for podcasts, etc. Also small talk.

“1978 Chrysler New Yorker.”Monolithic Transformation revisitedRyan re-read my 2019 book on improving your application strategy, mostly at large organizations: The message is as relevant now as it was in 2019: success comes down to nailing the basics - ship fast, iterate faster, and keep the user front and center. Coté’s framework of small-batch thinking, cross-functional teams, and user-first design isn’t theory - it’s a map for organizations to fundamentally rethink how they deliver software.

Our Favorite Management Tips of 2024 - “Add up your total score. If you rated any of these items a 4 or a 5, you have some workaholic tendencies. But if your total score is 15 or above, you’re displaying significant signs of workaholism.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision - Dell has always been the “configure exactly what you want” PC dealer. Enterprises can then setup their own “standard configurations” to force on employees. Here, they’re trying to make opinionated laptops (like Apple).

How Do You Create AI Advantage? - You’re going to need access to all that data you have. Historically, this is a very difficult problem in large enterprises and is rarely solved well. For example, are you satisfied with your CRM? For all your enterprise AI hopes and dreams, focus on that first. // “Develop your firm’s knowledge capacity by inventorying your knowledge assets; make sure that you have a plan to build proprietary advantage with the knowledge you’ve captured, and begin the process of capturing tacit knowledge to sustain that advantage.

Productivity “hacks” don’t work. These do. - If you don’t have a to do list and use your calendar, start with that and ignore all other productivity improvement advice.

CaaS ProblemsNicky lists the advantages of a real platform over Kubernetes. The platform is Cloud Foundry, and it’s been in development and use for many years, all ready to use. Building platformsI think he goes a little strong on the “sometimes Kubernetes is good for…” part, but that’s mandatory seasoning for such commentary.I don’t hear a lot of people saying “we love Kubernetes!” This is especially true at “normal” organizations. Those that don’t complain (too much) have built layer upon layer of platform-code on-top of Kubernetes and tooling around it, hiding it from developers and even operators.

Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text - “If you take away one thing from this, it’s that asking the LLM things, rather than using it to generate copy and paste text, is almost always a better use case.

Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job - “OKRs say what is different this quarter, what we’re changing, and what we’re trying to figure out.” // Also, why OKRs work better in marketing than in product.

They squandered the holy grail - “Writing Tools is basically useless for me. It’s just a way to get a slightly worse version of what I already have the ability to make myself better.

Big Tech is pushing ‘AI agents.’ They’ll need intimate access to your data. - (1) The next big bump in AI productivity and change will come when enterprises give it access to all the data, (2) historically, access to data for the people who need it is a huge bottleneck, (3) give the advertising tech (Google, Facebook, etc.) access to all your personal data…what could go wrong?

How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle - “if you’re not able to carve out even 20 minutes for yourself, then something needs to change in your life.” // Tools that find the priorities are hard: “We hear a lot about how to optimize for productivity, but what we don’t have is the emotional awareness and emotional intelligence around why we pursue the things we pursue.

Why are corporations cutting managers? - “a large share of a company’s work force does not produce widgets. Instead, they produce organizational capital.” // Also, what if employee (individual contributor) productivity meant less managers?

Public Domain Day 2025 | Duke University School of Law - “The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.