Coté

Seeing like a software company - When management meddling slows down the business because they need/want to measure and make decide. Also, good sub-plot on “the meeting for the meeting,” prep meetings and using the “back-channel” to get things done.

The airwaves are always there

You should check this out:

You can try out our AI platform with a 90 day trial. It’ll host models in private cloud, act as a proxy to public models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, whatever), and has tight integration with Java apps. Python works fine too, of course: you can host LangChain in it to get management over all the AI goop. It’s all in the current version of the Tanzu Platform.

Wastebook

  • “Create chaos to preach order,” used by Dickerson on Political Gabfest, August 21st, 2025.

  • Overheard on the street: One dude: “The airwaves are everywhere…when you think about it.” Other dude, after a pause: “Even when you don’t.” Ponderous, man.

  • “it’s funny, refreshing even, how the rollercoaster of emotions this week was mostly driven by me creating things, not by a c-level executive’s decisions. my mistakes empowering me to level up and try again to make something people love, versus making me feel like i’m in trouble over something i don’t really even find joy in…this week had its challenges but it was necessary to remind me i’m on a very good path.” jenn schiffer

  • “shaped by the logic of viral web series like Skibidi Toilet”

  • And: “the issue with AI isn’t really about what it’s good for - it’s what are humans good for?”

  • He’s like the British Cory Doctrow, only much more chill.

  • “What is the point of that? Well, if we started asking for a point, the entire tech industry would collapse, wouldn’t it? Pretty much every bit of software (looking at you, ‘AI’) created in the last decade is the digital equivalent of a leaf blower; an expensive, noisy, anti-social, environmentally disastrous answer to a problem no one had.” Cartoon Gravity 37 // Really finding the tech-doubters this episode.

  • “As for that midlife crisis, I think it already happened last year internally. I picked up a few quotes from Carl Jung on the second part of life as the Awakening: the sudden realization past all that career and success gunning that suddenly you are standing in the future you once imagined, feeling that things you once thought would make you happy won’t matter as much. According to Jung, a midlife crisis isn’t a crisis, it’s an initiation” A rare Jung reference.

  • Tyler Cowen never (very rarely?) posts photos. Does he not take them? Does he not care? Does he not want to share them? What would they be like?

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. 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!

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No links at the moment. Lots of conferences coming up in September, then more. See above. Maybe I’ll see you! We have some good Software Defined Interview episodes coming out over the next month too, and more were recoding. Catch-up with the back catalog and subscribe.

Blade Runner makes its live-action return next year - 2026 in Amazon.

The World Runs 20 Billion Instances of Curl. Where’s the Support? -

“Let’s face it, everything runs on computers now.”

Original content

Here’s two of my podcasts to share with you:

Capitalism is working, Software Defined Talk #534: “This week, we discuss the US backing Intel, SaaS staying power, and AI’s impact on deep work. Plus, Matt Ray’s moving tips and more kolache talk in the after show.” Also available, unedited, in video form.

The business value of developer relations, devrel history, plus more stuff, with Mary Thengvall: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté chat with Mary Thengvall, exploring the development and significance of Developer Relations (devrel) over the years. They discuss the transition from tech "evangelism" to the modern devrel roles, the challenges and successes in community building, the importance of internal support for devrel teams, and the impact of AI on content creation. Mary also shares insights from her book, The Business Value of Developer Relations, and her experience with the devrel Collective community.” Also available in video form.

Relative to your interests

Government Bureau, George Tooker, 1956.

Wastebook

  • “Reading productivity advice is really fun for me. It’s a great way to procrastinate.” Zhengdong

  • “Having a successful textbook is like being married to a very wealthy person you don’t like much anymore.” Friend of Hal Varian.

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. 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!

George Tooker A Purveyor of Modern Alienation
Lunch, George Tooker, 1964.

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This week, I’ve been doing a lot of research for the AI and platform engineering talks I have this fall. It’s fun to learn. Also, the Deep Research stuff in ChatGPT is really great for this kind of thing. Some of the outputs would even be good enough just to post as white papers. I mean, as far as I can tell…since I am using them to learn the topic.

As a marketer, looking at the sources it uses is interesting. For the tech topics I look at, it’s usually startups that are blogging their stuff. Here’s the sources-by-logo for a report on chain-of-though for enterprise audits:

There’s big companies there, medium ones, and also smaller ones. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t cite individual authors for things. I don’t know, like substack, blogs, etc.

Back to marketing think: as people have been saying this year, the new SEO is getting your chunks of text out there for the AIs to consume so that you show up in people’s AI chats.

Does it work? It just did! (On me at least.)

Meta Says Threads Has Over 400 Million Monthly Active Users - “What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be."

The Business of ChatGPT - Revenue and such numbers circa. August, 2025.

One Way Parents Can Fight the Phone-Based Childhood - GPT5: “Phones are not the root cause; they’re the symptom of a constrained, over-supervised childhood. The solution isn’t banning devices but giving kids freedom back: unsupervised play, local friends, independence. If parents want kids off screens, they must open the door–literally–and rebuild the conditions that once made childhood social, adventurous, and real."

ai-development-patterns, PaulDuvall - ”A comprehensive collection of patterns based on my experience for building software with AI assistance, organized by implementation maturity and development lifecycle phases. These patterns are subject to change as the field evolves.”

Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty - Great picture too.

@cote@hachyderm.io, @cote@cote.io, @cote, https://proven.lol/a60da7, @cote@social.lol