PaaS Talk

We’re trying to amp up more technical explanations and demos of why Tanzu Platform/Cloud Foundry are great. Here is a little front-runner for a demo I’m going to extract from this same talk.

Relative to your interests

I didn’t take the time to organize these by topic. Apologies and kisses.

• UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI - ‘The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”. The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated.’

• Java 25: Oracle Makes Java Easier To Learn, Ready for AI Development

• Atlassian acquires developer productivity startup DX for $1B - A little bit on DX’s product.

• I think “agent” may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now - “[AI ‘agents’ are] Tools in a loop to achieve a goal… wiring up tools to an LLM in order to achieve goals using those tools in a bounded loop.” // Also, he’s not a fan of the “autonomous” vision, which feels right. // “This category of agent remains science fiction. If your agent strategy is to replace your human staff with some fuzzily defined AI system (most likely a system prompt and a collection of tools under the hood) you’re going to end up sorely disappointed.” // “If someone surveys Fortune 500s about their ‘agent strategy’ there’s a good chance that’s what is being implied. Good luck getting a clear, distinct answer from them to the question ‘what is an agent?’ though!” // Sadly, this implies that McConaughey will still find dinner reservations tricky. // Other opinions differ.

• Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B - That’s a good match, and a quick exit.

• 🤖 Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption: “Enterprise deployment via Anthropic’s API exposes a different facet: businesses adopt AI programmatically to automate. 77% of API usage is automation-dominant, particularly in coding, debugging, office administration, and recruitment. Surprisingly, firms are not especially price-sensitive; higher-cost tasks see higher adoption if they deliver economic value. Yet complex, high-impact deployments are constrained by context—firms need to restructure data flows and centralize knowledge to fully unlock AI potential. Without this, sophisticated tasks remain underutilized, delaying broader productivity diffusion.”

• Anthropic lets Claude remember previous interactions to streamline work - Including, and using, past chats in your current chat. Always a great, helpful feature.

• Slowing Down - How to avoid burnout as you get more successful at life.

• Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise apps will feature AI agents by 2026 - “Enterprise applications are entering a new phase of automation, with Gartner forecasting that 40 percent of them will include task-specific AI agents by 2026 – up from less than 5 percent today.” And: “By 2035, the firm predicts, agentic AI will account for nearly $450 billion in enterprise software revenue, or 30 percent of the market.” // Some predictions about broad uses as well. The uses are mostly (all?) the idea of having an assistant in your tasks, yes, a “copilot.”

• School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study - Update on the young people and those damn video games. // “There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.” // See Tyler Cowen’s disclaimer. // I mean, it could be one of those “phones don’t ruin kids lives, kids using phones to ruin their lives ruins their lives” situations.

• Even fantasy money can buy lots of power – ask Larry Ellison - “But serious questions remain over whether OpenAI has got the money. Its revenue is reportedly just $10 billion annually while it is not expected to make a profit until at least 2029. It is likely to get around $30 billion from another VC round and SoftBank, an early backer, might cough up more cash. Still, it seems a long way from the $300 billion it needs to pay Oracle, if Big Red’s forcasts are ever to become reality.” // Also Larry wants to rebuild Oxford, England.

• Introducing the MCP Registry - ”The preview emphasizes federated discovery rather than a single walled list. The team describes the official service as a “primary source of truth” that public marketplaces and private enterprise sub-registries can mirror and extend, all against a shared OpenAPI. There’s a moderation process (including deny-listing) and, for now, a clear caveat about breaking changes and no durability guarantees during the preview period. The code and API surface are open, with the reference implementation and schema published on GitHub and a hosted API for client integration.” How To Build Agentic AI That Ships - The New Stack - “Ninety-five percent of AI initiatives should be expected to fail as long as we ignore these pitfalls: Models are generic. Enterprises are unique. Ideal use cases aren’t flashy. Coordination across teams is hard.” // Lots of other good executive think too, especially being blind to how complex the overall system is w/r/t dependencies. // Also notable is that, technology aside, these are all the concerns of “digital transformation.”

• macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica review - Check out the extended overview of the new Spotlight features/changes if you’re into launchers.

• Most Work is Translation - This is a great metaphor: ”To me, LLMs have the potential to be the Babel fish of work, the little creature from Hitchhiker’s Guide that instantly translates whatever goes into your ear. Except here, it’s not speech alone. It’s papers into briefs, meetings into memos, data into charts, ideas into roadmaps etc.” // So much of knowledge work figuring out what the fuck people are saying and what you should do. And, on the other end, figuring out how tell people that. Using GenAI to de-BS business talk, and hopefully generate more actionable (hah!) talk would be great.

• 🤖 What do people actually use ChatGPT for? OpenAI provides some numbers. – OpenAI’s first usage study reveals ChatGPT’s massive growth, demographic shifts, and main use cases. // More concise list of uses here. // And, the actual study.

• Dan Moren’s iOS 26 Review - “It’s one of the very best, most thoughtful, most useful changes in iOS 26.” // I didn’t notice this, and it is nice of you so a lot of things with text and other content on your phone (like link blogging).

• Treat your to-read pile like a river - ”To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).” // Be comfortable with a to didn’t read list.

• 32 notes on AI & writing - “AI is better than most humans at producing prose. In a couple years, it will be better than most ‘professional writers’ as well. Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible.” // We should be using AI for corporate communication without shame. There is little value in internal, corporate communication to be “genuine.” The very important except is when you lay people off. // That said: I should test this theory by having Gemini rewrite my inner-comms for a week.

• The Ditherinator - Convert your photos to shitty old versions that will print well on dot matrix printers. Love it.

• Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships - “If you want the software to get updated—to have bugs fixed and security vulnerabilities patched—you want something very different. What you want is an ongoing supply of software, not a copy of a specific software artifact.” // A good overview of updating OSS software versus a one-time download and continuous use. Paying for support is one way to get the actual “supply chain” benefits enterprises and auditors crave. // The next question is: is it the job or the people running the project to do this supply chain stuff?

• Marriott checks out AI agents amid technology transformation

• Occupying TikTok with love - “And TikTok is full of advice about how to break out of this ‘200 views jail’ - have a niche, have a hook, look at trends - but maybe instead we could just think ‘how beautiful, TikTok are going to share my thing with 200 random people scattered around the earth’. It’s not a jail, it’s a window. (Or it’s a jail with a window)”

• Do Not Shred Your Fingers In An Actual Blender - “Yes, sometimes LLMs can simulate humans. Yes, sometimes those simulations can be useful. But be wary of a simulation if you can’t verify its accuracy/efficacy. When you cannot yet distinguish fact from fiction, relying on a fiction pump seems unwise.”

• Pentagon research official wants to have AI on every desktop in 6 to 9 months - “‘We want to have an AI capability on every desktop — 3 million desktops — in six or nine months,’ Michael said during a Politico event on Tuesday. ‘We want to have it focus on applications for corporate use cases like efficiency, like you would use in your own company … for intelligence and for warfighting.’”

• Java 25: Oracle’s Big-Tent Release—and a Clearer Roadmap for What’s Next - “Java’s momentum (by the numbers and the vibe) Oracle cited a 2025 VDC study claiming 73 billion active JVMs and reiterated Java’s position as the ‘#1 enterprise language.’”

• Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B - That’s a good match, and a quick exit.

• The Post-AI Org Chart - The people need to stop saying the quiet part out-loud about job loss. The focus should be on doing more with what you have, not doing the same with less people. But, hey, investors, amiright?! // “This configuration reduces headcount (1:7:49 -> 1:7:14) by 53%.”

Wastebook

• “A man who had over the course of a week absorbed, as by osmosis, the Spirit of the Internet. And that is a foul, foul thing.” a slightly embarrassed announcement

• When you meet a new person in your field, one easy small talk question to ask them is: “if you were [insert your company name here], what would you do?” It gets you some free consulting, lets someone talk about themselves and things they know, and, you know, just gives you something to talk about that fills the silence.

• “Data, Bratwurst and Beer. The perfect combination!” Here.

• “advanced Unicode manipulation” Glitch.

• “I COULD GET TO MARSEILLES IN 8 HOURS FFS. What am I doing with my life? Why am I sitting in my pants in Vauxhall typing words about the internet when I could instead be about to visit Southern France and drink pastis and throw fireworks in the streets with wild Mediterranean abandon? I am TERRIBLE at being alive.” // This person’s linkblog style is next-level.

• Does anyone really want air hand-dryers around? I mean, they’re loud and they don’t work. You might as well have a sign that says “dry your hands off on your clothes.”

• “My phone -and I realise this is mildly absurd - is a constant slight disappointment to me. But I’m from the generation that thought we’d have the world on our wrist.” W.E.

• “you should be very suspicious that the smart phone banners take absolutely no interest in measuring their possible benefits.” From the comments

• “the boring Macedonian dentist” Sly Tyler.

• “I code therefore I Claude” Weekend Reading.

• “Is Observability just the GenZ version of ‘export to CSV’? Many people are asking.” Brian.

• Waiting for the Eurostar in that little space - both at Centraal and St Pancras - crammed in with your fellow humans isn’t Brueghel. It’s Bosch.

• When you meet a new person in your field, one easy small talk question to ask them is: “if you were [insert your company name here], what would you do?” It gets you some free consulting, lets someone talk about themselves and things they know, and, you know, just gives you something to talk about that fills the silence.

• “linguistic pyrotechnics” // Chatty-G tries to explain to me why I don’t like contemporary hip-hop: “In other words: 2001 is like taking a fat blunt and then hitting the studio with laser precision. Post Malone is like nodding off on codeine in the back of an Uber.”

• “A person dies, but capital is forever.” // And, when the worker becomes the self-manager. Capitalism and the Death Drive

• There is wide agreement that AMS<->LCY is the perfect flight.

Conferences

Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London, speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025, speaking. AI for the Rest of Us, London, October 15th to 16th, London, speaking. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th, speaking.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

Here are two new web site things:

1. I created a new blog for dumping pictures. That is, not just “nice” ones, but pictures I think are fun, curiosities, etc.: “Here you will find a stream of photos and other visual from me unless noted otherwise. I have another blog, but in the spirit of “pictures as a wastebook,” this one is for dumping all of the pictures and other media. Most of these photos are ones taken or made by me, but sometimes there’s something from beyond me that’s just too good not to share.” // I am always hesitant to split content, but ever since I stopped paying for and using Flickr, I haven’t had a place like that. So I think it will be fine.

2. I’ve come up with a great way to summarize articles with ChatGPT. This is thanks to the new Use Model shortcut in Apple Shortcuts. It makes doing it super easy and doesn’t fill up your ChatGPT session with one off chats. I added saving the summaries to Obsidian, like a good little information hoarder. I also experimented with posting some of the summaries to my blog (see here). I aspire for my blog to be as much of my “off board brain” as possible (only public stuff), so this seems natural for me. I enjoy scrolling through the river of other people’s stuff. But maybe it’s a bad idea, unethical even! I’m not sure about either. What do you think?