With AI Boom, Dell’s Datacenter Biz Is Finally Bigger Than Its PC Biz - “Thanks to the GenAI boom, Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, which sells servers, storage, switching, and services into the datacenter, is finally – and very likely permanently – larger than its PC business for the first time in its history. (We are not counting the time a decade and a half ago when Dell ate Perot Systems and was also eating software companies to try to create a clone of IBM, much as HPE did at the same time.)” // Weird parenthetical?

Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well - The cycle of tech loosing its democratic morals in favor of tech innovation, and, of course, making money.

China Has a Different Vision for AI. It Might Be Smarter. - AI applications outside of the consumer sector: “In February, the city announced the release of an agricultural AI model, using technology from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which gives local farmers guidance on crop selection, planting and pest control, according to a local government report. The city’s meteorological service is using DeepSeek to improve the accuracy of weather reports. DeepSeek is also helping local police analyze case reports and decide how to respond to emergencies."

VCF And Private AI Take Center Stage At VMware Explore 2025 - “We believe that while the company has quietly designed and delivered the leading private cloud platform, it should be more vocal and direct in the market. While competitors claim to be the more affordable option, these claims are often based on upfront discounts that don’t fully account for cost over the long term. And while these competitors talk about vendor lock-in, they are in reality simply suggesting that customers move from one proprietary cloud stack to another."

Is Your IT Organization A Ponzi Scheme? - “The only way out is to stop borrowing against the future and start paying down the past. Escaping requires sustained platform investment — enough to reach equilibrium where debt stops growing. This means: Refactoring to improve code structure and reduce the cost of future changes. Refreshing technologies before they become emergencies. Rationalizing redundant systems to reduce complexity and risk."

Five Vide Coding Lessons for the Enterprise - ‘In an enterprise, the “context window” isn’t just a technical term; it’s the accumulated technical debt, undocumented tribal knowledge, and complex dependencies that hold your systems together. A new developer or a new AI tool can’t simply be dropped in and expected to understand this history. The leader’s job is to provide that context, not expect the tool to figure it out.'

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.

Spooky in Athens.

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!

Logoff

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.