“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life."
- Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.
- Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.
- Ai, Big Tech, & Markets - “AI is the newest king of the economy and will end up making the rules.” // Plus, huge rise in tech company valuations since the US election.
- SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12) - ”There’s just one solitary naked boob on the screen — and metaphorically speaking, all life has been sucked out of it. This is Dawn of the Dead, the classic 1978 horror movie that we’re talking about.”
- Taco Bell puts AI front-and-center in drive-thru strategy - “Taco Bell’s drive-thru voice AI was designed for internal and external applications. An AI assistant takes orders and relays the information to the staff. The system is designed to help restaurant employees manage orders, reducing their workload, while enabling more accurate order fulfillment for customers.” // Makes sense. I bet this works pretty good. I could even see that the misunderstanding/error rate would be better with AI taking the orders. It could switch languages too.
- Navigating Private Equity ownership. - A memo template for R&D’s plans after private equity. Basically: here’s how we’ll spend less money and use attrition to lower staff costs (hire more junior people as senior people leave).
- IDC: VMware Explore 2024: A Shift to Private Cloud, AI, and AppDev Simplification - The VMware Private AI Foundation “platform appeals to Broadcom customers because of its ability to deliver advanced security and privacy, granular policy and control capabilities, resource sharing functionality, and centralized operations capabilities that deliver a lower TCO.” // Also, a good write-up of the overall VMware and Tanzu shift to private cloud stack. Lots of Tanzu and Spring coverage as well.
- Modernizing the Mainframe in Place: Transforming Core Technologies - Improve the mainframe app. // Likely some good patterns for talking/thinking about modernizing any type existing apps “in place."
- From Agile to Radical: conflict - How management can deal with: “There are at least three consequences of unresolved conflict that I’ve experienced in practice: unaddressed business areas, repeated patterns of unproductive behavior and undoing each other’s progress.” // A little bit on European work-culture too.