Also: AI makes marketing opaque, execs value humans less, and clown world logic.

You’re either left holding the bag, or pro-activity delivering “value creation”

The answer is pretty clear: TryTanzu.ai.

Related to your interests

• What’s New in Tanzu Platform 10.4: Powering Agentic Apps at Scale - Nick and Keith walk through it.
• Quit VMware and you’ll emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure - “One is that few organizations will be able to quit VMware entirely, as they run applications with dependencies that aren’t easy or economical to unwind. Reducing or eliminating a VMware rig therefore means adopting multiple replacements, which creates more infrastructure to manage and therefore extra complexity.”
• Redis and the Cost of Ambition - “You’re probably not the target for the landing page.” // Nerds forget that someone has to pay for all their no caring about money. Oh, and those options are not going to increases in value on their own. Related:
• Governed enterprise AI drives IBM’s strategy - ‘“The role of a CFO is you have to be focused on creating long-term sustainable competitive advantage and value creation,” he said. “Underneath that, you might ask, ‘Well, what does agent of transformation mean? What is the day in the life of a CFO?’ I would tell you, it’s a fundamentally different mindset and I put it in three buckets. Number one, a CFO has to have strategic vision. Second, you’ve got to be able to enable business model innovation. And the third, very important is organizational agility”’
• Execs admit AI makes them value human workers less - “Sixteen percent of companies saw a negative ROI from AI investments last year, and 73 percent of executives whose AI efforts did pay off said ROI fell short of expectations, according to the report.”
• AI Makes Advertising Less Transparent and Harder to Justify - As with coding, when you use AI for marketing, the decision process and internals of strategy become opaque. The robot says: “The result is a steady transfer of control and transparency away from marketers and toward systems whose internals they cannot inspect.”
• Gartner Predicts 40% of Organizations Deploying AI Will Use AI Observability to Monitor Model Performance by 2028
• Burnout and Cognitive Debt
• James Shore: You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs - Caught in the legacy trap: “According to our crowd’s maintenance estimates, you’ll spend more than half your time on maintenance after 2½ years. After ten years, you can hardly do anything else.”
• I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment
• 🤖 Inside the Geofence: Faster Pickups Start Here - McDonald’s QA team explains how geofencing-based field testing validates mobile features like Ready on Arrival under real-world GPS, network, and device variability. “Concentric geofence zones around stores trigger promotions, kitchen prep, and pickup confirmation as customers approach.”
• Why Most App Modernization Efforts Fail, and How a Capabilities-Driven Strategy Can Stop the Billion-Dollar Bleed
• Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose - Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee? - Private equity and execs who are not subject matter experts is a bad idea, in tools at least.
• Why Dunkin' failed in India - “A global doughnut icon was suddenly selling hash brown burgers.”
• A Library of Distractions - The McDonald’s flâneur reads Aristotle.
• RPG Evolution: The reverse chase

Wastebook

• “One small problem with that: what you are suggesting makes sense. We live in clown world with clown world logic. Why would we be allowed to have things that make sense in clown world?” GitLab layoffs.
• “The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.” Here
• “NAT in my backyard” is up there with “MIBs and aOIDing.” Here
• A series of “little butlers.” Here
• “Sorry, darling. There I go, going on and on about performing life saving heart surgery on little children. How was your day as a Pac-Man ghost at the arcade?” Here
• Once cooked, you’ll always end up with more rice than you thought would. So, unless you know what you’re doing, make half of what you think you should.
• AI analysis and summaries end up being very positive. “Most pieces like this are worth skipping,” a summary will open with, “but this one is worth sitting with.” They need a counterpoint. A cynical human is a good source for that.

ICYMI

• Because it seems fancy pants
• Fat sidecars

Logoff

People don’t trust large organizations. And, I guess, why should they? Large organizations are optimized around making money, they have policy, they are “faceless.” There are countless HBR articles written about going above and beyond with customer service (the perineal Four Seasons case study in different robes).

A counter point is that the very faceless Amazon retail division. I prefer buying from them instead of resellers because I know the price will be good (enough), it’ll get here fast, and that I can return no questions asked. Apple is sort of trustworthy, but they are very goofy in with the non-core products.

Trust in government seems highly relative, and often requires you first asking what the person responding wants. Do they want less government? Do they want government to impose their morals and rules? Do they rely on government for services, and/or wish to pay less taxes? Is there a pothole in the road, or do they ride public transit successfully. Maybe they don’t leave their ranch, and just want people to get off their lawn.

I ponder trust in parents (me!) a lot. That seems to be mostly about keeping your promises and making sure family members are safe and happy.

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