Big layoffs at Amazon corporate:
“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” [the Amazon CEO] said. “Really, it’s culture.”
The culture wasn’t right:
his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called “the technology transformation happening right now.
Posts in "links"
🤖 Old infrastructure considered not optimal, Forrester study
Legacy systems are creating measurable revenue drag, with 63% of surveyed companies citing efficiency losses. Early adopters of cloud-native infrastructure report 40% faster deployment cycles.
Commissioned by Broadcom, based on June 2025 survey.
🔗 🤖 Forrester: Modernize or Fall Behind – Rethinking IT Infrastructure (October 2025)
Citation: “Modernize Or Fall Behind: Rethinking IT Infrastructure For A Competitive Edge," Forrester, commissioned by Broadcom, n=216 surveys June, 2025, published October, 2025.
🤖 Tanzu Data Intelligence update
VMware announces updates to Tanzu Data Intelligence with performance and resilience improvements across Greenplum (now VCF 9 certified), Data Lake 2.0 (adds Spark support), GemFire 10.2, Postgres (TimescaleDB), Valkey, and RabbitMQ 4.2 (distributed delayed messaging).
🔗 🤖 Tanzu Data Intelligence Gets Smarter with New Updates and Enhancements - Tanzu
New stuff in Apple Shortcuts
Usually I’d say Shortcuts are poorly documented, but at least these release notes are OK. // If you’re a nerd and don’t use Shortcuts, consider it. With the AI stuff in it now, you can make little calls the local, Apple AI model or ChatGPT. That’s very handy for little things.
🔗 What’s new in Shortcuts for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26
🤖 Paris Pedals to the Top: How the City of Light Became Europe’s Best for Young Cyclists - How Paris surpassed Amsterdam and Copenhagen as the most child-friendly city for cycling, thanks to bold infrastructure and speed-control policies.
the heart of Paris’s transformation is its expanding network of protected bike lanes. These lanes are physically separated from cars—a critical feature for safety, especially for children. Paris now has protected cycling routes stretching across nearly half (48%) of its road network.
🤖"here are 8 things you should do for supply chain security"
Run your AI stuff in locked down containers and AIs
Good piece on enterprise AI security. The good news, it’s all the same shit. The bad news news, it’s all the same shit. Yes, and:
That’s it! The magic sauce is that LLMs are amazingly good at taking this big chunk of text and using their vast training data to produce the most appropriate next chunk of text - and the vendors use complicated system prompts and extra hacks to make sure it largely works as desired.
Those new AI employees
Forrester seems all but say “Salesforce is full of shit”:
Salesforce claims that its (newly renamed) Agentforce 360 product has 6,000 paying customers. But in customer conversations and sessions, we saw little adoption or impact from AI agents – lots of potential but a long way to go for a meaningful ROI.
More faint praise in the rest.
🔗 Salesforce Dreams Of The Agentic Enterprise
"Come on down and chum some of this shit."
Everyone needs to stop thinking about enterprise AI as a way to fire people and think about how to use AI to make people more productive:
Forrester’s analysis found that using AI for financially driven layoffs can backfire: 55 percent of employers regret laying off workers because of AI. More people in charge of AI investment expect it to increase headcount (57 percent) than to decrease it (15 percent) over the next year.
Make it easy for other people to pitch for you
With some generalization, this is good advice for any pitch, from corporate presentations to call for papers. The point that you need to make it easy for other people to advocate for you is a good one, rarely mentioned.
🔗 Setting up other people to pitch your idea for you