Also: Elon’s OpenAI lawsuit, build-vs-buy for agentic AI, and rethinking observability.

Related to your interests

• Amazon employees admit to using AI unnecessarily to pump up internal usage scores - workers complain of intense pressure to use AI tools - Tokens are the new lines of code. Also, yes, of course, “Goodhart’s Law," blah blah.
• The hidden cost of build vs. buy for agentic AI in regulated industries - “Building an internal agentic AI platform in banking or insurance demands a multi-year orchestration engineering commitment with a regulatory surface area that most organizations underestimate”
• Why AI is forcing enterprises to rethink observability
• How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI? - Using AI to hack tax codes is a bigger threat than hacking computers.
• Elon’s OpenAI Lawsuit Is Boring and Insulting, and It’s Already a Success - Winning in the court of opinion, and all that: “Musk, to be clear, has already succeeded. Regardless of what actually happened and what’s decided from here, he’s inflicted real pain. The trial has been an opportunity to make Altman and OpenAI’s founders look like greedy, sociopathic liars, which is a narrative that much of the public wants to believe.” // And, it’s worth asking if things could have turned out any other way than a non-profit kind of contorting its way to becoming a for-profit: “So go back to 2017. Would the world be better off if OpenAI had remained a nonprofit and slowly withered on the vine while being outspent 100 to 1, as Google secured a monopoly in the most powerful technology of the 21st century? And in that scenario, how much longer does it take for us to get great AI products if Google has no competitive pressure to gets it act together?”
• How to raise money without profit, and then profit
• Tax code hacking - maybe the biggest AI threat is tax scamming.
• Tatermaxxing - “We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knifes and carved a long, long evening in the kitchen. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.” // Maybe my new mindset on presentation should be: an excuse to use a cool font.

Wastebook

• “bonkbuster” Here
• “But what if I buttchug one potion and drink the other?” Here
• “The bus stopped, and Bill Gates stepped away from the steering wheel. It wasn’t a bus at all, but a yacht. I’d been pranked. This was my graduation from the grind. I’d made it. He gave me the yacht as thanks. The old lady was actually Jeff Bezos, he was in on the prank. He acquired my business immediately and now I’m sipping on champagne bottles. All thanks to Claude.” LinkedIn fanfiction
• “Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing.” Here
• “Carousel of justifications” Here
• “Future Asteroid farmer.”

ICYMI

• Got your deck ready? - my thoughts of slides as the primary corporate collaboration tool.
• Buy your platform, AI edition
• 5G versus The Grapes of Wrath
• Aesthetic Computing
• Datacenter NIMBYism: What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?
• Scenes from the weekend
• The world isn’t curl - Software Defined Talk #572 - “This week, we discuss how security gets sold to execs, where agentic coding and security collide, and Cloudflare vs. Datadog’s diverging paths. Plus, Coté weighs in on sugar cookies.”

Logoff

There is a lot of “what do I want?” thinking going on in my head recently. It is exhausting, and I’m not really interested. But Know that if I don’t resolve it, I’ll both regret it and resent past-me for not dealing with it.

Also, I hate calling people on the phone. There are some phone calls that would take just 10 or 30 minutes on my to do list that have literally been there for years. My life would be so much better if I could just pick up the phone - or “tap” it, I guess - and say, “Hello there, I’ve got this thing I need help with…”

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