Just links and stuff today.

Relative to your interests

• 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.

• 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.” And: “Only 35% of Dutch respondents say their company promotes generative AI use at work. It’s one thing to allow its use, but without support, employees might fail to unlock its full potential.”

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.”

• No Tech Workers or No Tech Jobs? - Trying to answer the quandary: if there are so many unemployed programmers (after layoffs), why do companies frequently say it’s hard to find programmers to hire?

• The Last Strategy Framework You’ll Ever Need - I know this is unhelpfully snarky, but my experience is that the secret of successful strategies is to have one. The framework you use is situations to what your organization likes and can understand. The next secrets are: tell people what the strategy is, and then follow it for at least a year before coming up with a new one. // Great over in this piece.

• 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.”

• 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.

• 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.

• Alcohol Carries New Risks in Middle Age - “Researchers are not entirely sure why middle-aged drinking is on the rise, though they noted that adults in this age range faced the pressures of caring for both children and aging parents, heightened demands at work and “historic” levels of loneliness.” // Well, obviously! And for thousands of years.

• Revealing Questions - Potential interview questions for podcasts, etc. Also small talk.

Wastebook

• “As always, economics is downstream of politics, and politics is downstream of culture.” Scott Sumner.

• It’s OK to ask why AI prototypes are not getting to production - “Is a wizard an agent?”

• “Traditional, non-intelligent applications” as a way of saying “apps without AI,” that is, all pre-AI apps.

• “our heels get higher the closer we inch to death” Sartorial mori.

• “My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations are nothing but a distraction.” ★

• “volte-faces”

• “swingeing” - 1.5°C;

• “Not long after, it was my turn to hold her for the first time. I took her to the window. From up there, we could see all the lights of the town at night. And I held her up to the light-splashed window, and introduced her to the world, and asked it to be kind to her.” light25 6.

• “Cuddly cod were garnished with fuzzy lemons and served with plushy peas.” The $12bn part of the “kidult” market.

• “wisdom art” Here.

• I used to be something of an armchair intellectual. Now I find it hard to finish the first few pages of a book. (I can still traipse through podcasts.) I’m not sure what happened, but I need to train back up and build the mind-muscle to maintain attention, thought, and synthesis across months.

• “sclerotic shiggoth” Not Boring.

• “now in her mid 70s, she creates a new image and a new career starting with, of all things, a shockingly hard-assed roast of Justin Bieber. The Bieber roast leads to a succesful colloboration with Snoop Dogg. Legendary.” Tyler.

• “I have removed my brain to the dreamy equivalent of a room next door.” Tina Brown on 2025.

• “We need to drink our own champaign, even if it tastes like dog food at first.”

• See the “shoes of history drop.”

• Hateful chaos.

Logoff

I’ll be at cfgmgmtcamp, Feb 3rd to 5th. I’m speaking. I now go to this conference every year, and it’s great. Ghent can be a little tough to get to, but it’s worth it. The conference is a unique mix of people and topics that you won’t get in any other conference. And Ghent is a fantastic, under-appricated city to be a tourist in if you’ve never been. If you’re in the (enterprise) infrastructure software world, you should go.

//

I’ve been working on a longer piece about the “Trump Tech Bro Vibe Shift.” I haven’t done the math, but there’s a minority of prominent tech people who are suddenly in favor of Trump. There are obvious stand-outs here. I don’t really understand their math in moving over. It feels like anything multiple by zero is always zero. That is, aside from just the pure mechanics and outcomes, in a quality of life and moral sense: so, you want to have a life where you sign-up for full-on Trump think? Is that who you want sitting at the Thanksgiving table every year?

I don’t know: “what am I missing?” as they say. So, I’m trying to at least characterize it. So far I’ve listened to about three hours of Marc Andreessen talk, and now there’s this! I think I have something finally, but I need to sit on it for a little beyond the off-the-cuff chunks I’ve done so far.