“We gave a profession of bullshit generators access to GPT-4. You won’t believe what happened next.” - If the work you’re doing is predictable - in this case, a lot of the junior level work at management consulting firms to come up with new strategies and GTM - the AI can help. The positive side: if you’re considering getting the consulting firms to bootstrap your annual planning, try a week with ChatGPT instead and see if it feels the same. Then don’t hire them, as much? Also, the AI is good at hype-marketing.
A new way of thinking about open source sustainability - If you’re using open source components in your IT stack, don’t forget that long term reliability and stability is costly, and worth paying for.
Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? - Plan to never get past slide one: “Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment."
Second Wave DevOps - The tools keep changing: “Let’s face facts: our implementation is what’s letting us down. What worked for John and Paul in 2009 is, in broad strokes, exactly what we have been asking every single DevOps practitioner to do since. We’ve replaced all the individual tools in the system multiple times (look at the CNCF Cloud Native Landscape for the evidence): less automated infrastructure, more infrastructure as code; less monitoring, more observability; less data centers, more cloud; less svn, more git; less virtual machines, more docker; less capistrano, more kubernetes; less hudson, more github actions. The problem isn’t that we haven’t optimized each individual part of the system enough. We’ve built more efficient tooling at every step. But the way the whole system is put together? The experience of using it? That’s basically identical to how it was in 2009, and it’s the reason we’re stuck."
Survey: Majority of US Workers Are Already Using Generative AI Tools, But Company Policies Trail Behind - “The new survey finds that 56 percent of workers are using generative AI on the job, with nearly 1 in 10 employing the technology on a daily basis. Yet just 26 percent of respondents say their organization has a policy related to the use of generative AI, with another 23 percent reporting such a policy is under development."
iOS 17 release: everything you need to know about Apple’s big updates - A concise list. The journaling app comes out later this year.
The Poetry of Pricing - “Pricing is a signal. It’s a conversation between seller and buyer containing information that both parties will exchange. On the part of the seller it suggests both the cost of the offering and the value it provides. Buyers are inclined to see if they can stretch to the next higher increment given the increased value proposition."
Taking a careful approach to AI in marketing - There’s a lot of analysis that we should all be doing with marketing, but it’s often hard to get at data and figure out what to do with it. // “Fifteen percent said that more than a quarter of their tasks today are intelligently automated, but they expect that to increase to 78% in five years."
The Artists and Cartoonists Who Designed Pee-wee Herman’s World - “I remember feeling giddy most of time we were in production, not from the legendary amount of pot consumed, but from anticipation that we were going to blow people’s minds. We were excited and felt lucky to have an audience for our artwork."
How Can CIOs Communicate the Business Value of IT? - Talk with biz-normals about how technology can make the organization better, not on the activities that’s required to do so: “IT demonstrates value when we enable business outcomes, not when we report effort expended, resources consumed or work done…. Highlight the impact technology can have on business outcomes, so the value in the investment is recognized and IT gets the funding it needs.”
UK.gov efficiency hurt as legacy tech upgrades stall - Security is always the FUD-stick: “Dame Meg Hillier MP, PAC chair, said: ‘Whitehall’s digital services, far from transforming at the pace required, are capable of only piecemeal and incremental change. Departments’ future-proofing abilities are hobbled by staff shortages, and a lack of support, accountability and focus from the top. In particular, a lack of cyber-security experts should send a chill down the government’s spine.'"
US Banks Must Get Ready For Open Banking Now - Banks and regulations: the source of enterprise tech spend! It’ll probably make banking better for individuals too.
What is an Authority to Operate (ATO)? - Governance in the military.
Salesforce CEO takes another bold stand on remote work - Another chapter in the no one knows WTF on WFH deal saga: “For my people that’s my message. They need to mix in person and remote together. Our engineers are extremely productive at home. We have lots of people who are extremely productive at home. But there also has to be sales people being productive in the office selling to customers and we need to make it all work."
DevOps Patterns for Private Equity: Technology organization strategies for high performing software investments - Wait, wut? As someone in the Software Defined Slack quipped, this should really be sponsored by Thomo Bravo, Silverlake, Vista, etc.
VMware Introduces Frameworks And Services At Explore Conference To Enable Enterprise Adoption Of Generative AI - Quick analysis of VMware’s AI strategy.
Everyone is Busy: Who Has Time to Transform? - Mark tries to crack the “how to engineer a corporate structure, plan, and incentive plan to actually change” problem of digital transformation. I think the answer is: make small goals that you do on a short (quarterly) basis instead giant, waterfall annual strategy plans. // “My role at USCIS involved a huge transformation project. Our initial mistake was to think of it as a monolithic effort; we were going to make all the agency’s paper processes into digital processes. It would have been better to clarify the business outcomes, which were achievable. We knew we wanted to reduce the amount of paper that moved between our offices; that let us prioritize addressing the parts of the business that moved the most paper. We knew we wanted to be better at detecting fraudulent applications; that clarity let us focus on the types of immigration benefits most susceptible to fraud. And so on for our other goals. With this clarity, we tied the transformation to everyday activities rather than going off and building technical infrastructure as a sideline project."
HashiCorp Retools Licenses And Software To Grow Its Business - Extensive look into the HasiCorp financials and talk of their OSS licensing shift.
Forrester’s Impressions: VMware Explore 2023 - A brief overview of VMware’s strategy and where Forrester thinks it going.
It’s Not You, It’s Me: What It Really Means When Budget Is The Reason For The Breakup - Something that’s not useful isn’t worth paying for.
The Works of Mars, 1671 - Fortification engineering.
Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird - Looks like fun, right?
Here’s Something Past Its Expiration Date: the Expiration Date Itself - “Food experts broadly agree that the expiration dates on every box of crackers, can of beans and bag of apples waste money, squander perfectly good food, needlessly clog landfills, spew methane and contribute to climate change.” // And, they’re gone for the most part in the UK.
Texas’s Biggest Barbecue City Is Attracting a New Crop of Exciting Restaurants - Lots going on in Lockhart.
Favorite coffee-making setups from the Ars Technica staff - I made coffee with a Chemex for a few years. The coffee was good, and the overall ritual of it was just fantastic.