Also: OpenAI’s enterprise play, Gemini voice acting, and airline antitrust

I’ve covered our announcements this week about Tanzu platform agent foundations in other posts, check that out if you’re into that kind of thing. Now, onto usual nonsense…

Related to your interests

• Private Cloud Data Intelligence: The Case for Running AI Where Your Data Lives - Public cloud economics, compliance regulations, and data gravity are pushing enterprises back to private infrastructure; a unified lakehouse architecture combining MPP analytics, in-memory grids, streaming pipelines, and open-format object storage lets organizations run AI models directly on sensitive on-premises data without moving it.
• AI-powered mainframe exits are a bubble set to pop: Gartner - Gartner not big on using AI to migrate from mainframes: “[M]ore than 70 percent of mainframe exit projects initiated in 2026 will fail to produce the intended benefits due to an overestimation of generative AI tooling capabilities.” And: “[F]or most large-scale enterprises, the sheer volume and interconnected complexity of this data make wholesale migration a physical and financial impossibility.”
• How OpenAI plans to win over the enterprise - Computing capacity, enterprise fit, agent-management platforms, AWS partnership, and platform identity.
• Anthropic ejects bundled tokens from enterprise seat deal - The crushing reality of having to pay for something that is valuable. // Or, the customer never likes it when you raise prices. Their revealed preference (do they keep buying it) is the only signal to watch.
• Anthropic, OpenAI and Palantir: Who Gains and Who Loses in the Federal Fallout
• OpenAI Unveils Codex “Superapp” Update with Computer Use, Automations, Built-In Browser, and More - “according to OpenAI, 50% of Codex’s users were already giving it non-coding tasks to complete.”
• A year of open collaboration: Celebrating the anniversary of A2A
• 🤖 The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess - Aphyr’s opening essay in a series on “AI”: LLMs as bullshit machines, the jagged technology frontier, and why the field doesn’t actually know why transformers work.
• The Courage to Stop - Yes, but: brevity is now possible for more people. You just ask the robot to make it shorter. It nails it most of the time. It’s great for readers too. I can force brevity on authors whose ideas I want to read but can’t find the capacity to enjoy. (I’m looking at you Substack writers.) Related: The Scope Creep Kraken. Enterprise related: now everyone can be the office spreadsheet expert, no longer stymied by VLOOKUP.
• I truly hate mostpeopleslop - I’m talking about “Mostpeopleslop.” “Most founders don’t know this yet.” “Most people aren’t paying attention to this.” “Most founders skip [thing my startup sells] because [bad reason].” “Most founders treat [normal activity] like [wrong version of activity].” “Most founders say they want [thing]. Few actually [thing] well.” “Most founders confuse [vague concept A] with [vague concept B].” You’ve seen it, you’ve scrolled past it, and you’ve maybe even liked one or two of these excretions before your brain caught up to your thumb.
• Gemini Text-to-speech generation (TTS) - Looks like fun: putting in tags like [giggles] and [panicked] to get better AI-generated voices.
• Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO)
• How to Use Google Chrome Skills: A Simple Guide for Everyday Users
• Details That Make Interfaces Feel Better - Nice UI touches. Also, delivering best reactive as a Skill is an interesting idea!
• 🤖 AI-assisted engineering: Q1 2026 impact report - DX’s Q1 2026 report shows AI adoption hit 93%, engineering managers using AI daily ship 4x the code they did six months ago, and junior engineers have overtaken Staff+ in weekly hours saved.
• 🤖 The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2026 - RedMonk’s Q1 2026 top 20 is essentially frozen, with C Sharp tying PHP at 4 and Dart passing Rust, while both axes of the ranking methodology face existential pressure from AI assistants eroding Stack Overflow and unexplained declines in GitHub pull request volume. // The sub-text of the whole piece is that RedMonk’s rankings are now measuring a world they weren’t designed for. // Coté: they should add surveys in to find out what all the enterprises are coding in.
• “Use links, don’t talk about them." - “The classic – but still important – rule of web design says to avoid labeling links ‘click here.'” // I use “click here” more than this, but it’s mostly been my linking style since the 90’s.
• Americans Feel Miserable. Why Do They Keep Spending? - Forrester’s Dipanjan Chatterjee names the “pessimism economy” paradox and identifies four forces keeping it stable: amplified bad news, personal-level economic reality, concentrated spending by affluent households, and present-focused indulgence as a rational response to a dimmer future.
• 🤖 Gen Z Lives in the Archive - Sam Buntz argues that streaming and TikTok have flattened cultural time into a Borgesian archive where every era is equally weightless, breaking the chain of generational influence that has driven every major artistic movement for centuries and leaving Gen Z unable to rebel or create their own vital popular music.
• American Airlines jumps on potential merger talks with United - That seems like an anti-trust minefield.

Wastebook

• “vaguebooking” - newer word for “sub-tweet”?
• “INSERT TECH HERE is dead” statements usually just mean TECH no longer in the top three things people talk about in the category.
• “Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs.” Here
• “feral databases” Here.
• “It must also, on some days, prove vexatious…” Here.
• VC said a thing journalism.

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