Google has many overwhelming advantages. It has vast access to data, access to customers, access to capital and talent. It has TPUs. It has tons of places to take advantage of what it creates. It has the trust of customers, I’ve basically accepted that if Google turns on me my digital life gets rooted. By all rights they should win big.
On the other hand, Google is in many ways a deeply dysfunctional corporation that makes everything inefficient and miserable, and it also has extreme levels of risk aversion on both legal and reputational grounds and a lot of existing business to protect, and lacks the ability to move like a startup. The problems run deep.
Posts in "links"
This matters politically because it means that in Latter-day Saint theology, coercion is not merely misguided policy or poor governance. It is literally Satanic. The negation of agency, forced conformity, compulsory salvation–these align with the devil’s rebellion against God’s plan.
Slop-reading
If you’re not gonna bother writing it yourself, I ain’t gonna bother reading it myself.
Yes, but…that is often a better way to read. Editorless writing (Substack) has lead to blog posts that way too long, and summarizing them is very nice as a reader.
🔗 If you’re not gonna bother writing it yourself, I ain’t gonna bother reading it myself.
all the AI structured formats in Spring AI
As always, if you use Spring, you get the latest and greatest…so long as you’ve architected your socialtechnocal system so you can upgrade.
🔗 Beyond JSON: Converting Spring AI Tool Response Formats to TOON, XML, CSV, YAML, …
Playing D&D is the perfect test case for this. Can Claude “remember” the lengthy sessions from last month? // Managing that memory has been a huge part of the toolchain for playing D&D with Claude. It often gets the gender of characters wrong, as a simple example. Recently, just have access to previous chat sessions has been great and helpful. If you keep your sessions in one project, it’s good at looking at the past chat sessions. We’ll see if this claim of memory over longer sessions pans out. It probably will: Anthropic is a trustworthy company when it comes to product.
🔗 Anthropic releases Opus 4.5 with new Chrome and Excel integrations
Office hours, DaShaun's secret to juicing up your enterprise devrel
DaShaun became a great devrel by developing a new way to work with our community. I’ve seen it pay off in all ways, big time. Here is his key differentiation for devrel.
The business if devrel:
There’s more to developer advocacy than just conferences and content. The real thing that companies [that hire devrel] want, is they want to see it move the needle. They want to see us driving adoption, or driving sales, or driving perceptions, or sentiment.
tl;dr: “Nobody likes a smartarse”
People are not rebelling against economic elites,” writes Heath. Instead, this is “a rebellion against [cognitive] executive function”. In this view, populism is a movement that appeals to people who trust their gut, rather than those who rely on some too-clever-by-half argument.
There is a lot that rings true about this suggestion. Consider the following intuitive, common sense ideas: if we let immigrants come here and work, they’ll take our jobs; we should levy taxes on imports to help protect our economy from foreign competition; crime can only be controlled by getting tough on criminals.
Kubernetes, AI, and platform engineering, build, build, build
AI is here. It’s hungry. It’s expensive. And Kubernetes is the only thing big enough to feed it. … Kubernetes is no longer the platform for apps. It’s becoming the substrate for AI-driven systems.
And then you add platform engineering to build a platform around it for self-service access to AI, so long as you satisfy: “Security wants policy and audit trails. Leadership wants predictable costs and explainability.”
There’s probably around 50 million developers world-wide, and 20.5m professional developers. That’s what I’d start saying after seeing a chart from IDC’s September 2025 developer study update. They forecast it to be ~59 million in 2029. If you want to be very precise, a breakdown of the survey puts “professional developers” at around 20.8m in 2025. But even that includes “DevOps professionals” and “platform engineers.” So, to me, that’s something more like 20.5m or even 20m developers.
Compare that to GitHub’s claim that there are at least 180 million developers, just GitHub account holders.
Also, see more numbers in previous round up, from July, 2023
AI uses in finance, survey
Three use cases stood out as they have been adopted by more than a third of respondents that had implemented AI in their function. Knowledge management - helping organizations organize, retrieve, and leverage information for better decision-making – is the most common AI use case (49%) in finance organizations, followed by accounts payable process automation (37%), and error and anomaly detection (34%)
🔗 Gartner Survey Shows Finance AI Adoption Remains Steady in 2025