Take a walk with me and ponder cheaper AI:

I found some good charts for this one:

1. "State of Enterprise Tech Spending," Battery Ventures, September, 2024.

2. “Where's the Value in AI?" BCG, October, 2024.

3. 🍃 Spring AI, an open source SDK for using AI.

4. 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! - AI apps in production:

Hopefully that number will go way up on the next 12 to 24 months. Don’t over exuberant, though: as with the migration to public cloud, “the future can take a long time.”

Wastebook

• “God in a spray can,” PKD.

• ”wordcel,” here.

• “January 25th.- I have fallen in love, or imagine myself to have fallen in love. It happened at an evening party. I quite lost my head. I have bought a horse which I do not need.” Tolstoy, via Russell.

• “Tonight was waffle night, where I make waffles for the next 6 weekends.” Aaron.

• “It’s the longest ‘next week’ of my life.”

• “Enterprise data landfill,” inspired by Lars.

Relative to your interests

• All in the mind? The surprising truth about brain rot - “The erosion of my brain is a function of time and small children. I do not believe there’s a force in technology that is more deleterious than the beauty of life.” // Amen, brother. // And: ‘As for screen exposure, he says, what do we even mean by that? “It could be anything. The screen is just a medium but what matters is content. So when you talk about screen, you might as well talk about paper. Paper is another medium, and anything can be written on paper.”’

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.

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

• 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…

• 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.” // Yes, and see a closer read by Corey Quinn.

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.”

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

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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