Via geralt on Pixabay When an executives says layoffs were driven by AI, what exactly is the AI doing that removes the need for those humans? Here’s some dog-walk speculation. Decks, Meetings, etc. All the prep work around The Meeting. Things like: the agenda, slides, the pre-read, notes during the meeting, and followup tracking. There’s the careful synthesis of who said what so it can be presented in a different room to a different set of people for the next round of synthesis.

Image by geralt on Pixabay. The mystery is why everyone is using presentation software for communication that is not a presentation. Predicable, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this post since first reading it. The mystery of this is that everyone complains about slides-driven work cultures, but the revealed preference is that people like it because everyone does it. So…slides must…work…? (One answer is that it’s not the people who make the slides that like them, it’s management whose staff makes the slides for them that like it.

The agency in agentic AI feels a lot more like giving the users - the humans - agency they didn’t have. That’s what’s making it useful for me, from sorting out dumb-shit home-networking incompatibilities, figuring out taxes, and otherwise sorting my shit out. When you unleash something like Claude code on all the messy and neglected rooms in your life, you start to clean-up and pay attention more. There’s a very bottoms-up thing here.

The iterative design process for the Mac calculator app highlights the challenges of executive feedback and suggests that executives should use AI to better articulate their visions.

Focusing solely on surviving meetings can lead to challenges when dealing with both well-meaning and malicious colleagues in a corporate environment.

Early on in the life of a new open source project, some vendors will tell you it’s too complex and unreliable, and wrap their fixes on top of it, often hiding the project. They’re not wrong (early in, most OSS projects are literally not even 1.0 projects yet!), but it’s rhetorically risky strategy. With the early adopters, you have to show how you make it better and are evolving the project without hiding it.

I've proposed an open spaces for DevOpsDays Amsterdam, 2021. The idea is: The DevOps community pushes for people to change how they think and operate. When it comes to working better, we have proven tools, techniques, and even big picture ways of thinking like CALMS. You’re more than likely eager to try these new things, get better, change. However, many more people seem less than eager to change - your co-workers, managers, and the countless “others” in your organization.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan. In most enterprise tech marketing copy, it’s an anti-pattern to do the whole “you must first invent the universe” thing. Buyers and curious people already know that there’s market headwinds, things change faster than ever, new technologies, etc. They want to know exactly how you solve the problem, not that it exists.

According to the confidential memo, Oracle's routine tactic is to threaten based on incompliance and to maximize potential licensing issues. After that, software licenses and the looming costs of such licenses can be negotiated from such a beaten problem. The result can then be a relatively better than expected amount for the shocked customer, but is not a low amount. Source: ‘Rijksoverheid al 4 jaar in de clinch met Oracle’