Relative to your interests
I’m posting a lot more regularly on my weblog , most of the links below, and some content that doesn’t show up in the newsletter. Apologies if you’re living with duplicates.
“CMDB” Is Dead — Long Live The IT Management Graph - What’s wrong with the CMDB concept, especially how it’s applied and managed.
Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions - “When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country? I can’t recall one.”
Scripts I wrote that I use all the time - Great list. Also, I am envious of what CLI lifestyle this person is living. Solid nerd-culture.
high production value ≠ rizz. - Tips on doing corporate videos. It is almost: be less polished.
Meetings and interruptions are still the biggest obstacles for developers, even with AI - As always, if you want your people to get more work done, interrupt them less and invite them to less meetings. This applies to all people, not just programmers. A meeting is not work, it’s talking about work. Related in Enterprise Business Culture:
Microsoft’s ‘hockey stick on wheels’ rolls on optimism - Great, if cynical phrase: ‘“Consider a team which presents their forecasts in the form of a hockey stick graph,” said Chen on Tuesday. “They come back the next year with their revised forecasts, and they are the same as last year’s forecast, just delayed one year. If you overlay this revised hockey stick forecast on top of the previous year’s forecast, it looks like what happened is that the hockey stick slid forward one year.”’
blogging as art - “blogging as art!!! why not? i am drowning in information. all i want is a little fun. a respite from postmodernity. folk say the internet used to be fun. i was there, it kind of was. we can do better!”
Slop that slaps - I think the point is: it’s nice the professionals can make excellent content. It’s fun that the rest of us can now putter around the edges of that, ten seconds at a time. // Also, looks like a good example of a “Strasian reading” with Casey, there. While he is condemning AI generated images, he is showing the cool things he can make with it. // At some point we’ll have to confront the elite/commoner conflict between experts and goofballs using new tools to ape the experts.
GenAI Image Showdown - Excellent comparison of various LLMs doing AI image generations. Cool UI for looking at the output too.
ChatGPT chief Sam Altman says AI could eliminate jobs that aren’t ‘real work’ - There’s a lot of knowledge work that can be automated: ‘Where Altman’s comment holds water is in what it hints at, even if it doesn’t spell it out. Most jobs aren’t fake, but many have accumulated layers of automatable junk: compliance checklists, reports nobody reads, emails summarizing meetings that could’ve been Slack threads. That’s the kind of “game-playing” work LLMs are already good at. When Altman says these models will wipe out tasks, not just roles, this is what he likely means. And on that point, he could be right.’ // If it’s bullshit work, have the bullshit artist do it.
Global IT spend to exceed $6 trillion in 2026 - ‘“The availability of AI devices has also boosted overall spending by more than $30 billion,” Lovelock said. “With the replacement cycle unchanged, the stronger performance in 2025 will result in a lower relative growth rate for 2026, as demand has been pulled forward.”’
Coming in the next versions of Sora - Lots of new features coming in Sora. Clearly not just a side project.
LLM proofreading update - A representative case of the oddly simple things that LLMs are bad at: “Does it seem right that computer systems that use billions of dollars of hardware, electricity, and clean water need my help to add line numbers to a few kilobytes of plain text? No, it does not. But at least this gives me deterministic results for one part of the processing.” // Recently, though, I’ve observed that Claude Skills are interestingly clever on the command line. Maybe agentic just means “can use Unix pipes.”
Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering, Peter Steinberger - A lot of effort went into making this effortless.
The AI Advantage: Running Next-Gen Workloads in Private Cloud Environments - As enterprises try to figure out the benefits of AI, they’re relying on lots of private cloud. “Over half (53%) of enterprises say deploying new workloads to private cloud is among their top priorities over the next three years. 84% already run both traditional and cloud-native apps in private environments. 69% are considering repatriating workloads from public to private cloud, and more than one-third have already done so.”
Claude Code for web - a new asynchronous coding agent from Anthropic - Anthropic is building a PaaS. They’ve got isolated VM’s/containers, they’ve thought out support languages for the major languages. You can even write code in the browser…with the AI. And it checks your stuff into GitHub? Plus, of course, it runs your code for you, at least with Claude Skills.
judgment day - “artistic product” versus “artistic process.” Well, I guess “home made” sounds tastier than “mechanically extruded.”
Is Sora the Beginning of the End for OpenAI? - Cal Newport - “My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.” ‘Four years later, he’s betting his company on its ability to sell ads against AI slop and computer-generated pornography.’”
CHANNELVUE - Meanwhile, humans are still making good Internet videos.
Why Up to 70% of Platform Engineering Teams Fail to Deliver Impact - The problems feel like something we should have moved passed long ago. The general problems and patterns are not new. Why do they persist? // I mean, I don’t get it Paula Kennedy was saying how to do this back in 2019, 2018 even. What’s the failure to get better here?
Golden Paths: One Size Does Not Fit All - “Individual teams making rational decisions create organisational fragmentation.” // An overview of the impossibly fine line between restricting developers for long term agility and reliability, and giving them freedoms to perfectly solve their apps problems.
Why Do People Like 37signals? - “As someone who uses and appreciates 37signals products, I can honestly say - we like being the kind of people who use and appreciate 37signals products.” // Tech marketers way undervalue identity as a marketing tactic. It works well, just like in shoes and coffee loyalty. Related:
The inevitability of anger - ”Tech is a pop culture. Very few of the decisions made in the industry are made rationally or empirically. Studies and tests are used to justify the emotional decisions of the executive or management class. Infrastructure and stack decisions are made hedonistically – ‘cool’ tech that makes the engineers and devs feel good about themselves almost always gets a priority over ‘boring’ tech that has no risks.”
Setting up other people to pitch your idea for you - With some generalization, this is good advice for any pitch, from corporate presentations to call for papers. The point that you need to make it easy for other people to advocate for you is a good one, rarely mentioned.
I’m Exhausted By My Own Cynicism. - That title says it all. There are two people I think of here: Tyler Cowen is eternally optimistic. He may say he doesn’t like something or he thinks something is “not the best it could be,” but he’s never “negative.” James Watters, despite a rough couple of decades for PaaS (his life’s work) is eternally optimistic. He only talks about positive things and potential, not bitterness about rival technologies.
Walking Zhengzhou (China) - ‘Comparing China now to the US in the past isn’t just a convenient rhetorical trick, it’s arguably causal. While the full, more nuanced story deserves its own piece, the decline of the US’s Rust Belt is definitely directly linked to the rise of China. A fate sealed by political decisions, primarily in the US, to go full ‘free trade,’ which has meant factories leaving Ohio for Henan Province, where people work for less and companies can pollute more. Or as Wall Street called it, “changes in policy, starting in the early 80s, but blossoming in the 90s, have allowed US companies to benefit from global labor and regulatory arbitrage, which has increased both their profits, size, and subsequent influence on labor, industrial, and regulatory policy.”’
Wastebook
Today’s lock-in was yesterday’s promise of eternal open architectures.
“If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse.” An Existential Guide to: Making Friends.
An awkward conversation at the death-metal mini-golf place. RotL, #600.
“I don’t know what it is other than what it does.” Tyler Cowen on Tetragrammaton. Related, of course: “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
“I didn’t know whether or not to laugh or cry when he said that Trader Joe’s target customer is overeducated and underpaid.” Book Thoughts: Becoming Trader Joe.
“Shaq’s new ride gets jaq’ed in haq attaq” El Reg.
“He often categorizes knowledge by geography and culture (as per his rule, every person is interesting if you know something about their,” ChatGTP on Tyler.
“There is ambient music for spas - and there is ambient music for former Soviet spas.” Music for (Former Soviet) Spas
“[A]n encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time” Alan Jacobs.
Logoff
I, like a handful of olds, am enjoying getting back into blogging. After interviewing Manton awhile ago, I was pulled into that vortex of enjoyment. Here is my weblog.