The Revenge of QA: How AI Code Generation Is Exposing Decades of Process Debt - “AI isn’t revealing new problems - it’s exposing decades of process debt we’ve been carrying all along.” / One bottleneck after another… Morally judging famous and semi-famous people - “spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people is one of the best and quickest ways to make yourself stupider.” best books, essays, and poems of 2025 - What a list!
Posts in "links"
More of AWS’s all-in EU public cloud, write-up from Nick Patience:
the ESC represents a total technical decoupling intended to satisfy the most cautious European customers and their regulators. By locating all data – including metadata, billing and identity management – entirely within the EU and staffed exclusively with EU residents (and eventually citizens), AWS is trying to neutralize the legal and geopolitical risks associated with the U.S. Cloud Act, which enables US law enforcement, under certain conditions, to compel US-based cloud providers (such as AWS) to hand over data stored anywhere in the world, even if that data belongs to foreign entities or is stored in a different jurisdiction (e.g. the EU).
And, pricing:
Customers will pay a sovereignty premium for the services compared to a region in Frankfurt. AWS estimated the premium at 10-15%. AWS users pay a similar premium for AWS’s FedRAMP-compliant cloud in the US and for similar services from rival cloud providers. For enterprises, the value proposition rests on whether this isolation provides enough regulatory peace of mind to justify potentially higher costs.
Side-note: I’ve been liking Nick Patience’s stuff. He’s a good analyst, from 451.
After years of playing [solo role-playing], I have developed a personal rule about rolling dice: only roll if the potential outcome _advances _or _enhances _the narrative. If rolling would throw the story off track in a way that doesn’t enhance the narrative or creates an unnecessary or nonsensical detour, I won’t roll.
Also, an interesting idea for solo-roleplaying in a shared world.
“Since we started using Application Advisor, we’ve seen a 70% reduction in engineering time tied to upgrades,” says Roberts. “Now we can focus more of our time and resources on the delivery of new value-added features for our customers.”
🔗 Alight Removes Roadblocks for App Innovation with VMware Tanzu Spring [PDF]
Relevant to your interests, Saturday
The rise of ‘micro’ apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them - Another go at LowCode: “It is a new era of app creation that is sometimes called micro apps, personal apps, or fleeting apps because they are intended to be used only by the creator (or the creator plus a select few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app.
“For the last year or two, we’ve been tinkering with it,” Daniel Danker, executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design at Walmart, said at the ICR Conference on Tuesday. “This is the year where tinkering becomes transformation. This is the year where we’ve built a level of mastery around that and we’ll start building things that deeply address customer problems.”
Relevant to your interests, Friday
Texas judge throws out second lawsuit over CrowdStrike outage | Computer Weekly - “the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in their entirety in part because the shareholders had failed to establish any plausible motive of intent to commit securities fraud on CrowdStrike’s part.” How Daimler Trucks North America built a living knowledge graph of its business - ”Analyze our recent warranty claims, correlate them with all available datasets, and tell me why they’ve increased.
Goes over lots of use cases for AI at a grocer. Some internal facing ones:
The platform provides Kroger workers with a single point of access to check their shift schedule, request time off, set shift availability and view their pay stubs from one mobile app, according to a video Kroger played during the panel. And from this, Kroger’s store leaders can get real-time labor data insights as well as view their shift changes, pending punches and time-off approvals
Relevant to your interests, Wednesday
RIP the metaverse - It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure. // The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?
Facebook shutting down metaverse.
It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure.
The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?)
Also, once again, we show that VR/cyberspace is a solution that will never find its problem.