Posts in "links"

Relative to your interests, Friday

Enterprise AI reality checks everywhere: no more free lunches, Copilot productivity gaps, agent sprawl, usage control, and OSS maintainers drowning in AI slop. Also: Kubernetes + Greenplum, MCP auth that finally works, EA’s quiet resurgence, AI prompts-as-infra, propaganda via images, and yes, a Chicken McNugget futures market.

Two leading thinkers of the 18th century, the French philosopher Montesquieu and the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, argued that world trade promoted peace and harmony because it advanced mutual interest and interdependency.

Yes, but:

Beckert emphasizes how capitalism has depended at every stage of its development on the military power of the modern state and frequently on practices of extreme violence, such as the outright terror required to build the Atlantic system of slavery.

🔗 Book Review: ‘Capitalism,’ by Sven Beckert, NY Times

one of the values of Pair Programming is that you have to regularly explain things to your pair. This is an important part of learning - for the person doing the explaining. After all one of the best ways to learn something is to try to teach it.

🔗 Fragments: February 4

Relative to your interests, Tuesday

OpenAI’s Codex taking aim at Claude Code, plus growing global pushback against U.S. tech - with Europe flirting with the kill switch. And a spicy take on AWS’s future: when developers don’t choose the cloud, AI tools do.

This is how the new announcement economy works. You declare a massive number. The headlines write themselves. The stock moves. Mission accomplished." Whether the deal actually closes becomes almost irrelevant. The momentum already happened." As a generalized marketing strategy: “my doctrine is that velocity has replaced authority as the organizing principle of information. What and who moves fastest wins. Truth and facts are optional and get lost in the race to dominate attention.

🔗 OpenAI and the New Announcement Economy

The real problem is that developers don’t choose AWS anymore (because honestly, given a choice between AWS and a vendor who thinks deeply about developer experience, who would?). They choose Vercel, or Netlify, or whatever their AI coding assistant suggests when they type “deploy this.”

Some charts/survey/data would be nice to see here. Still, I hear this sentiment a lot. If it gets into the chatter, true or not, it will have negative consequences for AWS.

🔗 AWS destiny: becoming the next Lumen, Corey Quinn

Relevant to your interests, Monday

Longevity data from the CDC, why CIOs keep missing AI infra costs, and what agentic AI can actually learn from low-code and fintech failures. Plus: vibe coding’s limits, the end of the AI “free lunch,” and what platform teams can do about it.

Enterprise ROI continues to be elusive, but 48% of surveys say they've been cutting humans

AI is still stuck in “efficiency mode.” In many organizations, a technology organization leads AI efforts and is treated as a cost center. Those CIOs are incentivized to optimize for efficiency, not growth. The result is predictable: Tech-led AI strategies deliver productivity improvements, but not transformation. Equally concerning is that technology and AI executives tell us their business partners can’t articulate what they want from AI beyond saving money. That leadership gap bleeds over into the measurement of AI value.