Coté
Coté
“We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.”
Perfect Foods
Perfect 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.
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.” A calm moment.
“‘Big Balls’ Is Back.” Didn’t want to spend more time with family?
“We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.” The olds.
Also: “we should limit ourselves to 15 minutes of bleakness about how there is no future and everything’s awful.”
And: “AI can’t go through the bin on a home visit in the bathroom, which was essential back in the day.” That is: stop fretting about AI and focus on the human competitive advantage.
“There is also a CupNoodles Museum located in Yokohama, which features four stories of exhibitions and attractions.” There are two!
“The irony of a resource-extraction conglomerate funding a movie about the sins of American oil imperialism was hardly lost on Friedkin, who planted a Gulf and Western corporate photo in a crucial scene, causing one executive to have, in Green’s words, ‘a shit hemorrhage.’” Funding from odd sources.
“The ‘brain in a jar’ lifestyle is a privacy nightmare.”
“For instance, stop saying “Everything sucks.” Unless you’ve personally verified the entire known universe and confirmed it is irredeemable, just say ‘I am mildly inconvenienced by the long line at Chipotle.’” Inner voices.
“Originality, which is rewarded by the Michelin system, too often is a negative in Italian food.” Tyler on Italy-eating.
“This is the song that made even Johnny Cash weep.”
We asked an expat returning home if they were excited about ice. And they said, “I’ve not encounter them yet.” And there was a long, confused pause. And then we said, “no, like ‘ice.’ Not ‘ICE.’”
Shout out to my homie playing online chess while we wait for Lucinda Williams to come on stage. Speaking of:
“[S]he gave Austin songs that feel like ghost stories scribbled on bar napkins.” ChatGPT gets poetic about Lucinda Williams.
People who want to do things want less regulations, people who want to stop things being done to them want more regulations.
Relative to your interests
Manton “AI-generated art is abundant and cheap to produce. Yet they are both priced the same by Adobe.”
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.”
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
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. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth–as you please–that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.”
Conferences
SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, September 18th and 19th. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.
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.
Logoff
I’ve been messing around with the AI video generation. As you know, I play solo D&D a lot. Here’s two fun things to do with that tool. The key with both is that you can give it a picture to start with.
First, you can extend maps. This is easily possible to do by “panning” in Midjourney, but the video is a fun way:
And:
Now, what I want to do with these is extract out the frames and stitch together larger images. In the AI video tools you can extend your videos by 7 or so seconds, so I could keep doing that to get more and more. Then you have an image you can upload the VTT tools (where you love little “tokens” of your players and masters around as you do combat).
If you have a wide enough view - more at a satellite image level - you can also do some idle world-building by having it pan around. A video like this feels like something you could use for a hex crawl.
That said, I think my old way of extending D&D battle maps it faster and easier. A second thing is that you could have the AI not pan and just have it animate a few things (a fire, birds, etc.). Then you can have it loop the video, and then export a gif and have a slightly animated battle map.
Speaking of looping…
And then, of course, you can make videos out of character and NPC pictures (or “tokens” as they’re commonly called), like this one that I made out a token in the JC Connors adventure The Beast of Black Keep:
Now, there’s two things you can do here. One, is you can go through frame-by-frame to find the image you want. Instead of doing a lot of image generation to find that, you can describe what you want the character in the video to do, and then pick one image of them doing it. You could, for example, do that with this little dragon, picking just the right image out of the many in the video.
The second fun thing to do is convert the video to an animated gif (as I did with the above), then when you load these tokens into a tools you use to play D&D (called “virtual table-top,” or, VTT), you get animated profile pictures instead. Which is, you know…fun!
So far, Sora is the best for this because it has looping built in.