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 interests

• Did we just make platform engineering much easier by shipping a cloud IDP? - Google Cloud’s take on a platform (IDP). // Also, analyst coverage of Google Cloud in general from Forrester and Futurum.

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

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

• 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.

• Eject disk. - “You’re not burned out because you’re weak. You’re burned out because you’ve been relevant, valuable, over-functioning for too long—inside systems that reward your ability to endure dysfunction and call it leadership.” // Also, he doesn’t like the eggplant emoji.

• 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. // Coverage of new AI models is has turned into chip coverage: charts of weird performance metrics. It’s starting to be more product-oriented: focusing on what you can do with the models, what new things you can do. You know: business outcomes.

• A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products - 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.

• 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! // Also, this is a complain about every generation. That’s not to say it’s wrong, “yes, and” it’s worth question if the underlying systems and culture have changed and pondering that as well. // Speaking off, this dude, like, really wants those same kids off his lawn.

• Related.

• 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.”

Wastebook

• “mogging.” List that in your marketing tactics.

• “insouciantly” Word-watch.

• “Real Housewives of Uranus, here we come!” Punchy! Also:

• “aperçu”

• “Being sampled ≠ being obsolete. In hip hop’s logic, the breakbeat is eternal. James Brown’s drummer never vanishes; he becomes the pulse for a thousand new tracks. Accept the same fate.” ChatGPT o3

• “broodsacs.” I didn’t want to read the rest, but: good word.

Logoff

I’ve got two things I need to get to news lettering. First, we finally did our big “what’s up with Tanzu” annual event (all online, in video, along with lots of follow-up articles and such). The points are (1) we’re a private PaaS, and, (2) we have the services you need from developer to operator to start adding AI to your apps right now, today. And you don’t even need to be a customer (but, I would of course prefer you were!): you can use Spring AI for all your Java needs for free, as always.

We all did a lot of work on it. I love it when a build comes together :)

Second, I’m almost done editing the third video in my “learn MCP by playing D&D” video series. After that, I think I’ll get into MCP Prompts, which I think I finally understand. I haven’t finished listening to it, but this interview with two of the MCP people is helpful for understanding the intentions, “semantics” of the Model Context Profile: its hopes and dreams. Just like actually using generative AI tools daily lets you de-hype all the mythos around AI, actually coding up agentic apps (here, with MCP), grounds all the fancy talk about it and makes it more real and practical.