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.”

Of course, I immediately wanted to ask the logical follow up question, “yes, but why does it show respect and appreciation” which is the crux of the question, and then another: and why is that ‘nice’? This the important thing: saying the effect of something - saying “please” - doesn’t tell you the why and how of something. (In marketing, I’d call this outcomes based marketing, which you’re encouraged to do when marketing text to “executives.”)

But there were more important things in the five year old’s mind, and she moved on to the next question for The Circle: “Like, why do people need to cut off the skin of a pineapple in order to eat it? Why?”

It would be fascinating to observe her hang out with The Circle for a week. How many questions would she ask? Would it make her more knowledge or smarter? Would it harm our relationship, or have no effect? What would she ask?

She asked how dinosaurs died the other night, and when asked again recited back the asteroid (meteor, I guess…whatever) causing plant death causing dinosaur death theory. No Circle involved! So, she didn’t need to ask The Circle. Would her knowledge retention be the same from The Circle versus The Mother?

As with most AI things, I think it would be highly additive, not replace-itive.

(See some cloth monkey-mother versus wire-monkey mother thinking on the possible emotional landscape here - seems fine?)

Relevant to your interests

Looks like a lot of AI stuff. I mean, it’s so interesting, fun, and fascinating, and it works, so why not?

• 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.

Wastebook

• “You are 100% alive right now.” As summarized here.

• “bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.” Does this guy like anything? (He likes Disneyland, we know that much.)

• “a fleet of 18-wheelers, loaded with musical instruments and television equipment, rumbling down the highway below” Jimmy Swaggart Is Dead.

• “cottagecore”

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. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London. 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

Every few years I come across this picture that Josh Photoshopped in the late 90s with his mad-skillz: