Fun with charts:

Relative to your interests

• How Cloud Ingestion Pricing Eats Your Budget - ”Essentially, yes, the cloud can be cheaper — but only if you’re using it the right way.”

• Microsoft and Google Are Forcing Customers to Adopt AI at a Premium Price: What Customers Need to Know - “84 million customers x $36 (the annual increase per subscription) = $3,024,000,000”

• Core Principles of AI Data Readiness - Maybe enterprise AI is all about getting your data into shape. Historically, that is very difficult. Good luck!

• DeepSeek and the Enterprise - ”Enterprises that want to embrace AI, in other words, have reasons to want to do so on their own infrastructure. But that has posed its own set of challenges, challenges which have led many enterprises to scale back their ambitions and turn their eyes from large, expensive foundational models to small, more cost efficient and easily trained alternatives.”

• 1,156 Questions Censored by DeepSeek - ”It will matter less once models similar to R1 are reproduced without these restrictions (which will probably be in a week or so)."

• Year in review: Google’s biggest AI advancements of 2024

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies - That should get a lot of enterprise CISO’s to move on allowing AI in their orgs. // ”Since the beginning of 2024, OpenAI said that more than 90,000 employees of federal, state and local governments have generated more than 18 million prompts within ChatGPT, using the tech to translate and summarize documents, write and draft policy memos, generate code, and build applications. The user interface for ChatGPT Gov looks like ChatGPT Enterprise. The main difference is that government agencies will use ChatGPT Gov in their own Microsoft Azure commercial cloud, or Azure Government community cloud, so they can “manage their own security, privacy and compliance requirements,” Felipe Millon, who leads federal sales and go-to-market for OpenAI, said on the call with reporters.” // Also, coverage from The Register.

• What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far - Lessons learned.

• IDG to divest Foundry, what’s next for IDC? - Forester and IDC merging would be awesome. They’re have great qualitative and quantitative coverage. See some comps here. And if they breathed new life into the Wave, maybe by adding in IDC’s market estimates, that’d be interesting. There’s, of course, the PE roll-up firms like Futurum, but those seem too small. Maybe some i-bankers find someone with cash and roll-up the roll-ups with an IDC anchor. Anyhow, I like both of their stuff so I hope they keep it going.

• Struggling with your marketing strategy? You’re not alone. Here’s some things to think about in 2025 - I think that, like all struggling corporate functions, the answer is to make sure you’re actually doing the basics. // Also, less planning, more clicking the publish button: quality through quantity. // And, some AI use suggestions.

Wastebook

• The only people who don’t like The Register are the people it covers.

• “the FIG triumvirate,” used for Forrester, IDC, and Gartner.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

Logoff

I’ve got the first conference of the year next week, my annual attendance of cfgmgmtcamp, and often speaking at it too like this year. I’ve got a new talk on private cloud. This is a bit of a risk: I don’t know if that cloud will be interested or throw tomatoes. Who knows: they’re a pretty good crowd.

Interview: Brian Gracely

Whitney and I interviewed Brian Gracely for this week’s Software Defined Interviews episode. It was a great, big ol’ basket of topics: the process of gathering and reporting cloud news, the evolution of PaaS, and the pros and cons of working at small startups versus large companies. Also: career advice, the importance of communicating value within organizations, and how to stay relevant in the ever-changing tech landscape. And still more: Brian shares insights on how to generate engaging content for podcasts and the impact of internal communication on company culture.

If you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, you should do that! You can just go to the show page and listen to it there too, and there’s the video recording of the episode too.

What went wrong with PaaS?

In the interview, I asked Brian how PaaS went wrong in the 2010’s, and he gave a well thought out answer. I can’t say I disagree with him, especially in hindsight.

You should, of course, listen to his whole answer, but here’s what I’ve been thinking about since talking with him:

1. The PaaS vendors at the time started off focused on one language and, arguably, one buyer. Heroku was focused on startups and smaller development teams, specializing in Ruby. Cloud Foundry sort of started focusing on Java, but when it finally was released, it was very ruby focused. You can see a tension, almost, between those two languages in the first announcement.

2. When PaaSes tried to be “all things to all people,” it spread things too thin. It was hard to support all the little wing-dings and shiny objects each language community wanted.

3. This led to “opinionated platforms,” restricting what developers can do as a feature. For the record, I think this is incredibly valuable. Chasing “the shiny and new” is a silent killer for enterprise app strategy.

4. People wanted to customize, and was a window Kubernetes took advantage of. It promised that you could build you own PaaS and get it exactly how you wanted it.

5. Thus, the PaaS idea waned.

As you know, dear readers, I think this has been a setback, going on almost ten years now. Hopefully we’re finally emerging from the platform dark ages after the container orchestration calamity and can get back to focusing on platforms. Just remember to not destroy our progress it all in five or so years.

Wastebook

• He’s like if Martin Fowler and Hunter Thompson had a baby.

• “magical coherence,” on Apple.

• “I’m 64 years old. I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I made horror films and sold yogurt that makes you shit. I never thought I would hear my name at the Oscars.” Jamie Lee Curtis.

• “Discoursepolitik,” and:

• ”Invasion Of The Bluesky Disagree Bots.”

• There’s a passage in You Shouldn’t Have Come Here about eating beans and weenies that I’m pretty sure is metaphor for trepidation about having sex. (Also, it has bacon in it, which is a good twist on some classic, American trash-food.)

• ”One Hand To Shake Beats One Throat To Choke” Naveen Chhabra, Forrester. “common culture is a delusion of my age,” Warren Ellis.

• Are any of these big-ass spending announcements ever true? Also, even though their product is amazing, these OpenAI guys are seeming more and more sketchy.

Relative to your interests

• A free, powerful Chinese AI model just dropped — but don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square - Great, now the AIs are getting political. // I guess you could also so: at least, politics I don’t like.

• Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race - ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.”

• Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn’t Going to Kill the Software Industry - “we’ll eventually allocate our scarce AI resources towards the things they are best at, which leaves plenty of things for humans to do.” // Among other things, there’s a simple point about technology advancements that threaten human employment: there is so much work to do that we can find more for everyone, machine and meat sack.

• 4 Lessons We Learned from Bringing AI to Our Company - “Next, you’ll face potential roadblocks, as privacy and security teams will be looking into where the models you use are hosted and where the data is stored. Chat.com, Gemini.com, or anything free of charge and a privacy nightmare is out of the question.”

• Why run AI on-premise? - Big ol' list of why you’d chose private cloud. // “While cloud-based AI services offer scalability and cost-effectiveness, especially for testing and early use cases, enterprises are increasingly considering on-premise AI solutions. Factors such as data sovereignty, security, performance, and cost are driving this shift, particularly as AI projects grow and require more data and processing power. Enterprises are also exploring less resource-intensive models and open-source options to reduce costs and improve efficiency.”

• OpenAI releases Operator agent as rivals enhance their AI services - ”When users ask Operator to perform a task in a website, the agent navigates to the relevant URL using a built-in browser. It can type, click and scroll to carry out the requested action. Operator regularly takes screenshots of the website to check that everything is working as expected. ” // Hopefully they’ll do some MCP here to be industry plugin friendly, but it’s doubtful.

• Are better models better? - “Part of the concept of ‘Disruption’ is that important new technologies tend to be bad at the things that matter to the previous generation of technology, but they do something else important instead.”

• How to use NotebookLM Plus for your business - The fact that most AIs can’t generate PowerPoint might be great: people will stop using decks for operations and go to the more helpful document. Slides for daily operations is terrible way to run the railroad. You could start doing PRFAQs and 6 pagers.

• Intuit CTO keeps 8,000 engineers on track with a base platform of common services - Centralizing, standardizing.

• The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - “The majority of the organizations surveyed – 56% – have had platform teams for less than two years. A mere 13% of respondents reported working in ‘platform engineering’ for more than five years.”

• Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors - “The main trend across the industry: consolidation. Companies try to control their bills.”

• Return to PaaS: Building the Platform of Our Dreams - It’s a tough slog.

• RTO Watch: “75% of workers with jobs that could be done remotely said their employer has put in-person mandates in place, according to a Pew Research survey conducted last fall and released last week. That’s up from 63% in 2023.” // RTO vs. WFH is a management vs. workers issue. I’m convinced that RTO has no rational basis, it’s just a culture that’s chosen or not. This could be great, this could be bad, but it’s a choice of how you structure the system and the negatives you accept (you limit your labor supply).

• Empowering Your IT Future: The Shift to Private Cloud - (1) Cost control vs public cloud (2) Data sovereignty (especially in APAC and EU) (3) Private AI capabilities (4) Enhanced license portability across environments.

• M&A and the Product Model - Silicon Valley Product Group : Silicon Valley Product Group - At tech companies, achieving synergies is very difficult, and predicting if you can do the work is even harder. // “Most people experienced in due diligence have a reasonable understanding of assessing the product – the customers, the financials, the offering, the technology used to build that product, and especially the go-to-market for that product. Yet these same people often do not have the experience to understand what it will take to integrate the newly acquired product with the parent company’s existing systems and operations, or migrate the customers to the existing company’s systems, or in many cases, especially in cases of significant technical debt, to re-platform the product, or to change the product to work effectively with the parent company’s go-to-market channels.” // Keeping the acquired company as a mostly separate entity - product wise - is a good strategy, e.g., YouTube, maybe Red Hat? It means you won’t kill off the thing you acquired the company for by meddling with it, integrating it into the way your company works.

• The Product Model Solves For Tech Debt - ”Forrester does not recommend ROI as a criteria for deciding to rectify technical debt, which should be seen more as essential maintenance spend.” // If you ran rail company they shouldn’t spend money on train maintenance, they’d tell you would kill the business (and people). Software is the same, executives just need to get that through the head. The ROI of reducing and limiting of limiting tech debt is the ability to function after 12 to 24 months.

• Notable Sections of the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide - I’ve been wondering if it’s worth reading the new DM guide. It looks like it.

• Spotify’s playlists have altered the music industry in unexpected ways - artists are often disrupted first. Study how their business models - and personal compensation changes - and you can prepare and defend yourself.

• The return of skinny jeans? Men’s catwalks suggest wide-legged trousers are out and calf-huggers back in - Looks like a dodged a bullet on this one by wearing my old Gen-X pants despite the trends.

• Alternatives to “sorry” - American English meanings for “sorry.” // Yes, and:: in the Netherlands (and other parts of Europe), “sorry” is usually used like the en_US “excuse me” or “pardon me.” If you’re walking into a busy tram and you need to press through people you say “sorry, sorry.” And, it’s the English word everywhere not the local equivalent.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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Also, there’s last week’s Software Defined Talk (lots of beans in chili talk, plus the usual nerd-shit), and here’s a thread of mine of reasons to be optimistic about DeepSeek lowering the cost of AI, or skeptical of freaking out. // If you’re into D&D, I started a tumblr that’s a commonplace book for my D&D thinking. That means it’s inspiration, scraps, concepts, and other things that get me thinking about and developing D&D ideas. I’m putting a lot of my AI generated stuff in there too, and maps I make. Obviously, it has plenty of content from others as I scroll and find it. Check it out!

Catch-up: what we learn from Sonos and OpenTofu, how I use AI at work, Bluesky is getting pretty good.

Agentic AI

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Tanzu point of view on AI and the stack we have (Spring AI and the VMware Tanzu AI Solutions). There’s a lot mysticism around agentic AI, but when you reduce it down to an API, you can simplify it. Spend less time thinking about fully autonomous AI that, like, writes its own code, and more just focusing on putting AI into enterprise apps.

What makes it enterprise AI is that you architect and manage it to be used by hundreds and thousands of apps and people in regulated organizations. These are not tech companies, and I mean that in a good way. They’re the organizations that keep lives tidy and keep the lights on. I like a clean, well lit place. This means you want to build platforms, pay attention to cost, accuracy, and as many -illity’s as you can afford.

There are some core patterns you need for any enterprise app, and just making sure you can handle them in your AI-enabled apps will be enough work for the next five years, if not more. There’s, like, eight or ten basic functions to agentic AI. And then you need to get access to models (local or in public cloud): you need an AI broker. Pick a framework and a broker start using it.

In my world, large organizations, Java dominates and, thus, Spring is extremely popular, so I’d recommend that. It’ll change and adapt very quickly to whatever comes along, and then you can protect yourself from shifts in the future: Spring will be a safe boat in the weird waves of enterprise AI.

But, what is agentic AI?

Here’s three, recent definition:

1. "At its core, the concept of an agent is fairly simple. An agent is defined by the environment it operates in and the set of tools it has access to. In an AI-powered agent, the AI model is the brain that leverages its tools and feedback from the environment to plan how best to accomplish a task. Access to tools makes a model vastly more capable, so the agentic pattern is inevitable." –Chip Huyen, author of AI Engineering, January 7th, 2025.

2. "'[A]gents' has become a loosely defined term in the post-ChatGPT era, often referring to LLMs that are tasked with outputting actions (tool calls) and that run in an autonomous setting…. [T]hey require state management (retaining the message/event history, storing long-term memories, executing multiple LLM calls in an agentic loop) and tool execution (safely executing an action output by an LLM and returning the result)." –Letta blog, "The AI agents stack," November 14th, 2025.

3. "[A]gentic AI, which uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems…. Agentic AI systems ingest vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and third-party applications to independently analyze challenges, develop strategies and execute tasks." Erik Pounds, NVIDIA blog, October 22, 2024.

This means looking trendy agentic AI. What an award thing to have to type each time: do you craft your sentences so you write “AI agent,” or just dive into the absurdity of “agentic AI”? Also, as you look at what agentic AI is evolving to, it’s quick becoming “all of AI.” Just doing one-shot generative AI prompting is not that interesting or useful, really. At the very least, you need to store context and memory, and then have access to tools and functions…and then you’re off into agentic AI.

While the definition of an AI agent will continue to evolve, here’s some key aspects:

1. The agent is/can be autonomous.

2. The agent uses data, context/environment, memory.

3. The agent plans and takes actions.

Agentic AI theory is trying to get more from generative AI, to get it to "do things."

Always focus on the work actually being done. Ask “what is the app and what will it do?”

Wastebook

• “Face computer” v. “skinny computer.” Om on Apple.

• Mutesignaling.

• “Exhausted Majority.” Charts.

• “Does content exposure to this get me closer to the person I want to be?” RotL #567.

• “John Fetterman’s Shorts.” Casual drsesscode.

• “A preference cascade” Here.

• “There’s a melee of dwarves on the floor to each side of you.” Dust up in Citadel Akbar.

• They don’t mean it, or even know they’re doing it, they’re just a casual asshole.

• For ever brain that is drained, there are three brains waiting. Any brain that wants to drain should feel free to: keep moving and get out of the way.

Relative to your interests

• Building Effective Agents with Spring AI - rapid development going on in the Java/Spring community with AI.

• Best Prompt for Academic Papers Summary/Analysis - “Explain this paper to me using the Feynman technique, considering yourself as the author”

• Share of teens using ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled from 2023 to 2024 - It’s great for all your education needs. // Worth considering in any discussion of generative AI for education is: compared to what? In my experience, there are not enough nor enough access to meat-teachers. The AI is always there. This mans there is more access, when students need it. That is not bad.

• Common pitfalls when building generative AI applications - Good list, and not just the general purpose pitfalls.

• Protecting your mental health during a clown president’s second term

• Trump signs order setting up DOGE with a focus on government tech - ‘Now, USDS is set to work on a “Software Modernization Initiative,” per the executive order, “to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization,” the executive order read.’

• 2025–01–21 - “I do not have a solution for any of this stuff, and I despair as much as the next sane human being, but one thing has become clearer and clearer since 2016; social media, like Monty Python’s Camelot, is a silly place.”

• “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!” - Any weapon you make can be turned against you.

• Gartner sees 10% IT spending jump in 2025, but don’t get too excited

• How pointy shoes created a moral panic in medieval London - It’s good to remember that hundreds of years later, and prohibition against fashion makes the probities look like idiots with too much time on their hands. // Also, Dutch businessmen don’t seem to have stopped wearing them.

• New D&D Book Releases in 2025: Monster Manual, Anthologies, and More

• - Researchers are questioning if ADHD should be seen as a disorder - It’s better to think of most psychological friction (“problems,” you don’t bristle at the term) in reverse: what is the system doing wrong that’s causing people to act poorly. // This is especially true in the workplace where profit doesn’t give a fuck about curing and would rather do whatever it takes (within the law) for the desired business outcome.

• Abscission - Taking care of your mental state when you quit a job.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

Logoff

Fintan started a daily links log. I love daily links logs! I get a lot of links and enjoy two: Richard Seroter’s and Assaf Arkin’s, as noted in my colophon. It’ll be cool to see what Fintan catalogs, if you like my weird pile of links, you’ll like the previous two and Fintan’s, like and subscribe!

//

Several of my talks were accepted, so you’ll see some more conferences above.

//

I saw someone doing that “ICYMI” thing at the top, so I thought I’d put a “Catch-up” line in there. Beats me, I just want them clicks.

Now that we’ve replaced all these people with a robot, how can we climb the CAGR?

I was a guest on the Cloudcast this week. I go over how I use AI and then Brian and I discuss how companies could get more use out of AI.

Most of it, I think, rests on how management behaves and uses AI. As with all “productivity” tools, management can get some quick-wins on “productivity” by replacing people with automation - firing humans, favoring computers. But that’s empty calories. That’s a one-time bottom line numbers juice.

After AI “optimizes” your company by removing costs, how is management then going to grow revenue and company valuation? To do that, you need to take the free time people have after automating all the bullshit tasks out, and do something new with that free-time.

Is management ready to deal with the question “now that our meatware has have 10% more free time across the board, what will we do?” Executives always complain that they need more budget, that they can’t find the “talent” they need (read: we choose not to pay people what they’re worth), that they just can’t get things done because everyone is so busy (and incompetent), etc. Well, applied correctly, using AI in the enterprise addresses some of that. Now’s management’s chance!

Part of the “ethics” thing here is more of a mindset change. In the West, we have a belief that if you haven’t suffered, real work hasn’t been done. You can’t just be killed to save humanity, you have to drag your own machine of death to the hill. We value sacrifice and suffering. If something is effortless, it must be less valuable and, likely, not even real work.

So, in a corporate setting, if all the sudden you can spit out text and ideas that previously took a week…we don’t know how to deal with the ethics or that. Did I do actual work? Should I be paying this person for just asking a computer for a “FY25Q3 marketing strategy” and then getting a draft that what would have taken two weeks of meetings? Is it unethical for me to “take credit” for the work? Is it like taking credit for the work Excel does for you (“they’re a wizard at Excel!”), or taking credit for the work that one of your staff does for you (“they steal ideas from their people”)?

This goes both ways though: what’s the ethics of an executive using an AI to write routine internal emails. Internal communication in a company is very expensive, important, and risky. Creating it takes many skilled hands, many meetings, and usually leads to boring, barely functional text. And if the workers reading it misunderstand it and go off in the wrong direction, that negative effect compounds. Worse, it could demoralize them! And, if employees thought the executive uses AI to write one of these emails, some (many?) workers would think it was disingenuous and slimy.

Another thought-tool: executives hire management consultant firms to do studies and come up with strategy. How is this different than them using ChatGPT to do the same? The answer to this is helpful as well: strategy is just step one of hundreds. Once you have the strategy doc, you now have to figure out how to apply it, how to adapt to reality, and all the other stuff we call “execution.” You could ask the management consultants (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to help there, but then you’ll still need to actually do the work. AI doesn’t do the actual work, meatware does.

Despite all the AI glory-talk, I’d wildly estimate that less than 10% of knowledge workers are using AI seriously for their daily work. We have no idea what how enterprises will apply and benefit from generative AI usage once 30%, 50%, 80% of them use it “all day long.” I don’t think anyone is prepared for what to do after all that productivity is disgorged onto the meeting room table. In your enterprise AI strategy, is there a slide that says what you’re going to do with all that free time your meat-sacks will have?

As with instant messaging in the 2000s, there’s plenty of shadow IT going on. At the moment, those workers are getting a boost over everyone else. In a delightful twist on productivity-by-firing, AI is likely benefiting individual workers more than corporations right now.

Anyhow. Brian and I talk about all that in the discussion. More importantly, I also give a slight overview on using AI to play D&D.

Listen to it!

Relative to your interests

• The Ultimate Guide to Grappling in D&D - This is one of the more obscure combat actions in D&D, but actually seems really useful, especially. for lower level characters.

• Sonos’ interim CEO hits all the right notes in first letter to employees - This “hey, I’m the new executive” memo is some well done internal comms. He literally has a Sanos tattoo and mentions three times that he’s uses the products.

• Understanding Private Cloud, Hybrid Infrastructure, Multi-Cloud, and Distributed Cloud: A Comprehensive Framework - Classify cloud based on how much control you have and much mixing of other clouds you have. As opposed to where the cloud is. Also, a little bit about NetApp ONTP.

• Google Workspace business getting full Gemini, price increase - Instead of charging $20 to 30 extra a month of AI, give it to everyone and raise everyone’s price by $2. // Teams pricing going up similarly.

• What CIOs should know as DORA regulations kick in - All the great -ility’s. // “The business continuity standards laid out in the EU’s DORA require banks, insurers, securities exchanges, trading venues and other financial services providers to maintain backup systems for swift incident recovery. The EU expects impacted parties to be able to restore critical functions within two hours of an outage incident, per DORA.”

• Brainwash An Executive Today! - (1) What it’s like to market to technical people. (2) He doesn’t like LinkedIn. (3) he discovers enterprise event marketing.

• Trying Times for Tech - “Microsoft is trying to socialise the costs of its AI investments because people largely don’t care about AI and don’t want to pay for it. Microsoft really doesn’t want The Line to notice how little demand there is for AI and would prefer to force customers to pay back the billions it has already set on fire.”

Wastebook

• A functioning imposter.

• He’s been through hell, several times now, but he’s the one that keeps going back.

• “algorithms may have forced our perspective of the internet into the size of a pinhole, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The internet is a wild, weird, vast world and a testament to the wild, weird, vastness of humanity. Go off the rails.” Here.

• “Another time, Yeltsin reportedly called Clinton while inebriated and asked him to hold a secret meeting on a submarine.” History.

• “If possible, avoid taking on a role that involves changing a large established culture. The established culture always wins.” Corporation, heal thyself.

• “Embark on a voyage of enlightenment as we transcend the boundaries of conventional reporting.” xraised

• The Broken Deal == the free ride is over.

• “These days, in the capering adventures of my wild-and-restless 70s, I’m often hard-put to know if the world is old-and-boring or whether that’s just me personally.” bruces.

• “The Belgian government warned its citizens not to eat their discarded Christmas trees” Harper’s Weekly Review

• “wishcasting” Here.

• “‘Being like Socrates’ just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking ‘sauce’ that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense.” Open Socrates.

• “The Turbo America view of the 80s.” Here.

• Reinforced imposter syndrome.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Feb 3rd to 5th, Ghent, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LONDON10.

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We all know slides are a terrible way to do internal corporate coordination and planning. Slides are a prop for presenting, which means a person needs to be there. The next time you email around slides, send a recording of you going over them. Or, just write some prose instead.

There are slides that are actually prose. “Sorry about all the text on this slide,” someone will say. This is actually great! That’s exactly what we actually want: writing. If you’re going to email around your slides, try putting too much text in your slides.

Smuggle in what we all know is better: a document.

Just links and stuff today.

Relative to your interests

• When to Consider Building a Private Cloud: A Pragmatic Perspective - Yes, and: consider if you already have a private cloud and it’s working just fine. Don’t able flip your success to chase improvements that you’ve already achieved and rely on.

• Trust in Generative AI: A European and Dutch Perspective - ”the gap between GenAI usage for personal activities (47%) and work-related tasks (23%) remains significant.” And: “Only 35% of Dutch respondents say their company promotes generative AI use at work. It’s one thing to allow its use, but without support, employees might fail to unlock its full potential.”

• o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) - “o1 will just take lazy questions at face value and doesn’t try to pull the context from you. Instead, you need to push as much context as you can into o1.” // Instead, give it briefs, memos, reports to start with. As always: context.

• Not even OpenAI’s $200/mo ChatGPT Pro plan can turn a profit - I use the AI things a lot and I’m still baffled at how you could use her $200 of it each month. What are these people doing? Living in there? // Maybe it’s the live voice features and image generation? Maybe they load up huge docs?

• How Fidelity’s “chaos buffet” pushed AWS to new Lambda tools - “Fidelity has over 7,700 applications (75% of its estate) in the public cloud. Among these are its trade order management system, which relies heavily on Lambda’s serverless, event-driven compute service.”

• No Tech Workers or No Tech Jobs? - Trying to answer the quandary: if there are so many unemployed programmers (after layoffs), why do companies frequently say it’s hard to find programmers to hire?

• The Last Strategy Framework You’ll Ever Need - I know this is unhelpfully snarky, but my experience is that the secret of successful strategies is to have one. The framework you use is situations to what your organization likes and can understand. The next secrets are: tell people what the strategy is, and then follow it for at least a year before coming up with a new one. // Great over in this piece.

• Review: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - Good excerpts and book notes on (corporate) strategy. // “A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.” // Meanwhile, here is the problem with relying too much on war for your case studies: war focusing on killing people to achieve its “business outcomes.”

• Bitcoin Lessons - The case that crypto is bad. This is a good counter/balance to the Trump Tech Bros acting all butt-hurt about crypto regulation.

• What ‘Free Speech’ Is - “Right now, it is important for Meta to avoid getting on the incoming Trump administration’s shit list, so they, like everyone, are grovelling.” // Good over all, almost philosophic, analysis.

• Alcohol Carries New Risks in Middle Age - “Researchers are not entirely sure why middle-aged drinking is on the rise, though they noted that adults in this age range faced the pressures of caring for both children and aging parents, heightened demands at work and “historic” levels of loneliness.” // Well, obviously! And for thousands of years.

• Revealing Questions - Potential interview questions for podcasts, etc. Also small talk.

Wastebook

• “As always, economics is downstream of politics, and politics is downstream of culture.” Scott Sumner.

• It’s OK to ask why AI prototypes are not getting to production - “Is a wizard an agent?”

• “Traditional, non-intelligent applications” as a way of saying “apps without AI,” that is, all pre-AI apps.

• “our heels get higher the closer we inch to death” Sartorial mori.

• “My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations are nothing but a distraction.” ★

• “volte-faces”

• “swingeing” - 1.5°C;

• “Not long after, it was my turn to hold her for the first time. I took her to the window. From up there, we could see all the lights of the town at night. And I held her up to the light-splashed window, and introduced her to the world, and asked it to be kind to her.” light25 6.

• “Cuddly cod were garnished with fuzzy lemons and served with plushy peas.” The $12bn part of the “kidult” market.

• “wisdom art” Here.

• I used to be something of an armchair intellectual. Now I find it hard to finish the first few pages of a book. (I can still traipse through podcasts.) I’m not sure what happened, but I need to train back up and build the mind-muscle to maintain attention, thought, and synthesis across months.

• “sclerotic shiggoth” Not Boring.

• “now in her mid 70s, she creates a new image and a new career starting with, of all things, a shockingly hard-assed roast of Justin Bieber. The Bieber roast leads to a succesful colloboration with Snoop Dogg. Legendary.” Tyler.

• “I have removed my brain to the dreamy equivalent of a room next door.” Tina Brown on 2025.

• “We need to drink our own champaign, even if it tastes like dog food at first.”

• See the “shoes of history drop.”

• Hateful chaos.

Logoff

I’ll be at cfgmgmtcamp, Feb 3rd to 5th. I’m speaking. I now go to this conference every year, and it’s great. Ghent can be a little tough to get to, but it’s worth it. The conference is a unique mix of people and topics that you won’t get in any other conference. And Ghent is a fantastic, under-appricated city to be a tourist in if you’ve never been. If you’re in the (enterprise) infrastructure software world, you should go.

//

I’ve been working on a longer piece about the “Trump Tech Bro Vibe Shift.” I haven’t done the math, but there’s a minority of prominent tech people who are suddenly in favor of Trump. There are obvious stand-outs here. I don’t really understand their math in moving over. It feels like anything multiple by zero is always zero. That is, aside from just the pure mechanics and outcomes, in a quality of life and moral sense: so, you want to have a life where you sign-up for full-on Trump think? Is that who you want sitting at the Thanksgiving table every year?

I don’t know: “what am I missing?” as they say. So, I’m trying to at least characterize it. So far I’ve listened to about three hours of Marc Andreessen talk, and now there’s this! I think I have something finally, but I need to sit on it for a little beyond the off-the-cuff chunks I’ve done so far.

Field notes from my annual note taking rumspringa

I went through my annual “I should try to use Obsidian” cycle last month. As always, I went back to Apple Notes after a few weeks.

Here’s my read-out of this year’s cycle.1

Notebook philosophies

First, here’s an Apple Notes method to get an Obsidian/Notion feel, briefly mentioned this week on our podcast. The method also gives you a sense of what the hard-core Obsidian philosophy is. For me, it’s over the top and too much work - but I do admire the Shortcuts cleverness.

The two things I like about the Obsidian philosophy are

1. Store your plaintext/markdown files in directories. I found syncing Obsidian with iCloud to be not good (you very often have to wait). I could use/pay for the Obsidian Sync service, but then that defeats much of the plain text point. Drafts, in contrast, does not have plain text, but because (I think?) it uses the iCloud sync services, it works extremely well, “seamlessly.” Related: editing in markdown, markdown being “native.”

2. The Obsidian Daily Note feature. I like the idea of have a daily note that’s the “hub” of everything you do. This is easy to do manually (I do it in Apple Noes), but making it core to the notebook philosophy is really nice. You can set a template (or use the default) and it’s auto-created for you. Of course, inherent in this is Obsidians first philosophic principle: linking notes (in both directions) is what makes them valuable, e.g., hyperlinks/WWW/Hypercard.

3. The command palette. This is one of the best UI metaphors of the past ~15 years and is used in many other apps. You can add this in to all of MacOS with Paletro, but having the app’s features built to use a command palette is best.

My friction with Obsidian:

1. I sort of like the plugin community…but I found them very mixed as far as quality. And after a while, I added so many that it made things a mess. It was like having to many icons in the menu bar, or too many apps on my phone.

2. As always, I really like using the Apple Pencil: I’m Gen-X, so I grew up with hand-writing as a core writing method, on par with typing. More importantly, it’s a core thinking method, especially when combined with drawing. A a sheet of A3 paper in landscape mode with a blue-ink Pilot G2 0.5mm is still the way I get my best thinking done. Support for the Apple Pencil in Obsidian is still too weird for me. The Excildraw (or whatever) solution in Obsession just didn’t feel good to me. I still think Goodnotes is the clear best-in-class for the Apple Pencil life, but their text handling (last I checked) is not good - hence, I compromise to the “suite” of Apple Notes, giving up the best-in-class of Goodnotes. I used Goodnotes for years, but you throw out all your plain text dreams and pretty much everything else you expect form a general notebook app with them.

3. Aesthetics. I just can’t get with the text editor feel, the vibe, of Obsidian. I feel like a skinny jeans guy in a JNCO scene.

Apple Notes “secrets” and making Apple Notes beter

There are many things that would make Apple Notes better, and wrapped up in those are ways that it’s good:

1. Make it better: The option to store notes as plain text/markdown in a file system (iCloud). Technically, this is not a big deal at all as numerous notebook apps show (Obsidian, Bear,2 just using a text editor). Privacy wise, I completely trust Apple the most of any tech company so I don’t mind storing my stuff with them. (The privacy marketing works!!)

2. Related: proper exporting. Apple Notes doesn’t have have no batch exporting and you can only export to a PDF. There’s programatic ways to export, and even hacks (I believe what you do is just load up the sqlite database Apple Note use and then Bob’s your uncle). You can use the third party Exporter app instead, which I recommend, but it should be built into Apple Notes.

3. A markdown mode. It’s 2025, markdown is a native way of writing for many people. QED.

4. You should be able to mix together text and Apple Pencil drawings like you can in Goodnotes. Right now, they’re separate sections of a note. I can live with that (I do!) but it’d be cooler if the type input types could overlap.

5. I don’t really understand, rather, know all of the philosophy of Quick Notes. It’s intriguing, but feels wrong, at best, anemic-weird. After a few more years of iterating over this feature, it could really be something. If you don’t already have an ingrained bookmarking philosophy (I was born into del.icio.us and so now use pinboard.in, and I can’t fathom any other way to live),3 using Quick Notes would be perfect for stashing content/bookmarking. Also, I think there’s some method you could come up with to use Quick Notes for Daily Notes - you can set it up so that you append your Quick Notes to the same note instead of creating one each time…at least on the iPhone?4

6. ChatGPT’s desktop app works with Apple Notes. You can bind (or whatever it’s called) a ChatGPT session to the currently open Note. It’s like copying the Note into a chat. (Does it sync/update the Note text as you change it, or just take an initial copy? Can you have it change the note?) This could be interesting. If Apple Intelligence finally left toddlerhood and had a chat panel along side a note (like Gemini in Google Docs), and also let you add in the context of other Notes, shit would get real interesting. For example, I’ve exported all my journal entries (going back to 2009) with the Exporter tool to markdown, put them into big-ass files by year, and uploaded them to a project in ChatGPT so that I can use ChatGPT as a therapist and ask it “what the fuck is wrong with me?” It’s pretty good! With this kind of setup you’d also want to do local LLM’ing, and if Apple implemented MCP it’d could be amazing.5

7. PDF editing. This is so close to what you want with managing your PDF library. My “PDF library” is just a directory system of, you know, PDFs. As always, the problem is Apple Notes disgust with file systems. If Apple Notes stored the PDFs your editing/using in the file system instead of in Apple Notes, it’d be awesome.

8. The voice memo recording is a good start. It stores your original recording and a transcript. It needs to have the one button, start recording right away feature that Just Press Record, Voice Memos, and Drafts has, though. Right now it takes four to five buttons/clicks/taps to just start recording.

9. Integration to other Apple apps. There’s some integrations, but they can always be better. In particular, it’s absurd that the Journal app is an island - it should just be part of Notes, probably a button in a note to “create/build a Journal entry.” Freeform is excellent, but it’s also an island. Reminders is pretty good, and it should be integrated into Apple Notes: the check lists in Apple Note should show up/be lists in Reminders and vice-versa. All these integrations could be optional, etc. I don’t use Apple Mail, but I’m sure there is and could be stuff there.

There’s all sorts of other things in my wishlist, but they’re minor. Even the Daily Note automation is pretty far down the list.

It’s worth looking at the Apple Notes manual. Apple is total shit at devrel’ing it’s apps (detailed explanations, demos, and telling you their PoV - the “philosophy” I talk about above), so you have to really dig into their docs to understand Apple Noes and learn the intermediate and above features.

For example, did you know you can type “>>” to get a popup of other Notes to link to? Did you know you can keep typing to search over the Notes? The document scanning is good (built in the Files app too).6 Smart Folders in general and to do things like show all notes with unchecked check boxes is good. And so forth.

The Mac Stories people are pretty good at filling in the gaps, and you can pick through the usual mountain of Internet garbage to find a few gems here and there.

In conclusion: #DefaultsLifestyle Forever!

Colophon: that I wrote this all in Drafts and then copied it as rich text into Substack, where I then did further editing, is further commentary on Apple Notes that’s worth pondering when you have nothing else more exciting to do.

Logoff

That’s enough for today. I’ll try to bundle up the usual links and stuff next episode.

(That said, there’s three pieces of original content for you this week, all podcasts: Software Defined Talk #501, Whitney and I’s interview with Sasha, and my guesting on Cloud Foundry weekly.)

Monolithic Transformation revisited

Ryan re-read my 2019 book on improving your application strategy, mostly at large organizations:

The message is as relevant now as it was in 2019: success comes down to nailing the basics - ship fast, iterate faster, and keep the user front and center. Coté’s framework of small-batch thinking, cross-functional teams, and user-first design isn’t theory - it’s a map for organizations to fundamentally rethink how they deliver software.

Here’s the punchline…five years on, I’m still having the same conversations with organizations trying to figure out how to get better at software, but not willing to change their process. Yes, the tools have evolved, but the core of transformation hasn’t changed. It’s still about people, process, and focus. Not just for tech, but for any type of meaningful change.

You can get the PDF for that book completely free now, no email gating even.

Around 2019/2020, all us in the industry went way down the stack to Kubernetes and decided to build our way back up. I hope we’re finally done with that and back to focusing on apps and how they’re built and improved, not run.

Of course, all of that applies to making use of AI as well. I hope that community doesn’t get stuck at the infrastructure layer for years. Instead, it should build out that commodity layer and move on to focusing on actual applications. Writing those apps and then continuously improving them is he tough, never-ending work.

Relevant to your interests

• Integrating AI Agents into Companies - Changing how organizations work to fit what AI can do. Also, you need context about the organization: as always access to data will be a bottleneck, which is to say, governance and meetings.

• Cognitive load is what matters - Legacy software can mean: when changing the code requires too much cognitive load.

• Public Domain Day 2025 - “The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.” And: more highlights.

• Productivity “hacks” don’t work. These do. - If you don’t have a to do list and use your calendar, start with that and ignore all other productivity improvement advice.

• How Do You Create AI Advantage? - You’re going to need access to all that data you have. Historically, this is a very difficult problem in large enterprises and is rarely solved well. For example, are you satisfied with your CRM? For all your enterprise AI hopes and dreams, focus on that first. // “Develop your firm’s knowledge capacity by inventorying your knowledge assets; make sure that you have a plan to build proprietary advantage with the knowledge you’ve captured, and begin the process of capturing tacit knowledge to sustain that advantage.” // Related: data wrangling commentary.

• Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision - Dell has always been the “configure exactly what you want” PC dealer. Enterprises can then setup their own “standard configurations” to force on employees. Here, they’re trying to make opinionated laptops (like Apple).

• Our Favorite Management Tips of 2024 - “Add up your total score. If you rated any of these items a 4 or a 5, you have some workaholic tendencies. But if your total score is 15 or above, you’re displaying significant signs of workaholism.” // Plus some PowerPoint tips.

• DX Unveils New Framework for Measuring Developer Productivity.

• The Truth About January 6th - Too easily forgotten.

Wastebook

• You can always put dishes through the dishwasher twice.

• “Your business, your body, and your buttocks. It’s true. On an airplane, those are important things o take care of.” Brand from First Class, re-stated by Noah, Hotline Show #44.

• Also: “Whoa. Brought tears to my eyes. Thinking back…when I was cool.”

• “It’s Not to Hide a Magical Cooking Rat.” Here.

Conferences

cfgmgmtcamp, speaking, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th.

Logoff

Nothing to report. See you next time.

CaaS Problems

Nicky lists the advantages of a real platform over Kubernetes. The platform is Cloud Foundry, and it’s been in development and use for many years, all ready to use.

Building platforms

I think he goes a little strong on the “sometimes Kubernetes is good for…” part, but that’s mandatory seasoning for such commentary.I don’t hear a lot of people saying “we love Kubernetes!” This is especially true at “normal” organizations. Those that don’t complain (too much) have built layer upon layer of platform-code on-top of Kubernetes and tooling around it, hiding it from developers and even operators. That seems like a lot of work when you could just use an already made PaaS.

You can get a sense for what those layers are in the CNCF’s platforms white paper, and then an idea of the two the three (or more!) years of work you’ll be doing to make it all work in their platform maturity model paper. Both of these papers are excellent - I don’t think they’re read widely enough.

The wrong layer

I think what’s happened is a classic dog catching the bus situation. Originally, Kubernetes’s purpose was the commodify AWS’s hold on IaaS, giving Google and Red Hat a strategic tool. Later, everyone else jumped onto that strategy. It was meant for public cloud providers and people building platforms. In the end, AWS seems to have absorbed and adapted to the threat. That is: Kubernetes was for cloud builders, not developers.

The Kubernetes people told us his over and over. But, through the usual resume driven development and vendors happy to be janitors for the mess, Kubernetes moved up the stack to a general purpose platform layer, used directly by application developers. Clearly, that’s a mistake, and we’ve spent well over five years dealing with it.

Will someone think of the operator?

There’s another thing scurrying about in his post: developer productivity is fine, but operations productivity is better. A misinterpretation of DevOps is that developers should work more with infrastructure, networking, and whatever else is in “IaaS.” SRE and platform engineering tried to correct this, and maybe we’ll get there. But, in the meantime, using Kubernetes just means you’re making developers deal with infrastructure.

It also means you’re giving your operations staff a lot of extra work. When I talk with people in large organizations, a lot of this comes down to adding in all the standard enterprise grade features to Kubernetes: HA, storage management, availability, security, multi-region hoopla, etc. You know, all the great -illities. This is especially true when it comes to data management and databases - something that’s core to all enterprise apps. Those things have been solved for a long time by cloud providers - the public ones and in private cloud with VMware.

In all this focus on developer productivity over the years (and, worse, Kubernetes), we’ve lost sight of operator productivity. This seemed like a good gamble when everything was going to move to public cloud - public cloud gives off the vibes that you don’t need as many operations staff, which feels true. But, now the we’re in a cloud equilibrium where workloads are spread 50/50 between public and private cloud, we should focus on operations productivity more - and security, compliance, etc.

Check out Nicky’s post for several comparisons between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes for a lot more. If what you care about is developers and enterprise applications, he makes a good case that you should just use Cloud Foundry, especially if, like so many large organizations, you already do.

2025 Predictions

Our 2025 predictions episode is out, take a listen: we recap the biggest tech news and trends of 2024, grade our predictions from the year, and look ahead to 2025. Plus, we share our New Year’s resolutions.

It’s also our 500th episode!

Relative to your interests

• How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes - Use the apps they come with MacOS.

• Exporter - Exports your Apple Notes as markdown files. Good stuff.

• HP Study: Why Work Isn’t Working - ”Workers who use AI report greater job satisfaction and work-life balance. AI tools automate tasks, streamline workflows and give employees more time and opportunities to enjoy their work—so much so that 60% of WRI respondents who use AI credit it with contributing to a better work-life balance, while 68% say AI opens up new opportunities for them to enjoy their work.”

• Harness’s CEO Jyoti Bansal on creating an all-singing platform for developers – and “startups within startups” - Pipelines.

• The End of Democratic Delusions, George Packer, The Atlantic - “Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.”

• Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors need DCs to refresh - ‘Almost no organization these days wants to build their own on-prem datacenter," Edwards said. "They want to have the control, the sovereignty, the security, and compliance, but they want to locate it where they don’t have to deal with an increased power requirement, increased need for liquid cooling, which you can’t just repurpose an existing datacenter for.’

• The Beautiful Failure of Being a Man - Most everyone thinks they’re less beautiful than they actually are.

• Why are corporations cutting managers? - “a large share of a company’s work force does not produce widgets. Instead, they produce organizational capital.” // Also, what if employee (individual contributor) productivity meant less managers?

• Big Tech is pushing ‘AI agents.’ They’ll need intimate access to your data. - (1) The next big bump in AI productivity and change will come when enterprises give it access to all the data, (2) historically, access to data for the people who need it is a huge bottleneck, (3) give the advertising tech companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) access to all your personal data…what could go wrong?!

• How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle - “if you’re not able to carve out even 20 minutes for yourself, then something needs to change in your life.” // Tools that find the priorities are hard: “We hear a lot about how to optimize for productivity, but what we don’t have is the emotional awareness and emotional intelligence around why we pursue the things we pursue.” // Related: make sure you have some purpose, even if you’re rich.

• Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job - “OKRs say what is different this quarter, what we’re changing, and what we’re trying to figure out.” // Also, why OKRs work better in marketing than in product.

• OKRs for Evil and Good - Use the metrics well, and know how they work.

• They squandered the holy grail - “Writing Tools is basically useless for me. It’s just a way to get a slightly worse version of what I already have the ability to make myself better.”

• What to know about Democrats losing the working class - The race + labor angle on “how did the Democrats lose the US election” quandary.

• Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text - “If you take away one thing from this, it’s that asking the LLM things, rather than using it to generate copy and paste text, is almost always a better use case.”

Wastebook

• “Amiable Nickel.” In for 2025.

• “Modern adhesives are central to her efforts because she’s constantly clamping together junk-scraps which have no common material properties.” bruces.

• And: “The public limits of everyday weirdness.”

• “There’s plenty of reason to despair. But, as Terence notes, there always has been.” // Wise words for any topic. Or: “if you think The Culture it’s bad now, you should have heard Socrates' take!”

• “natural Ponzi scheme.” Krugman.

• “The most important characteristic of LLMs is heir patience.” Alex.

• “Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.” Here.

• “The western sunshine of Ronald Regan.” Political Gabfest, Jan 2nd, 2025.

• And: “the fringe has become the rug.” (Originally from Matthew Taylor.)

• “I don’t know what a wallet looks like,” my four year old.

Conferences

cfgmgmtcamp, speaking, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th.

I’m waiting to hear back from some cfps, and need to submit to a lot more.

Logoff

We’re back in Amsterdam. For three weeks, in Texas, we lived with blue skies and temperatures in the 80’s F (high 20’s in C). As if to really rub your face in this point, the ground at Schiphol was covered in snow, the roads in sludge, and the skies full of grey. // Over the break I’ve returned to a new thought over and over: I’ve stopped listening to my own feedback loops, let alone making micro- and macro-life choices based on that feedback. That is, I don’t use my own sensing and feelings to drive how I should be living. One way of looking at it this is that I ignore the stresses in my life, thinking that they’re irrational, when really they’re signals telling me what to prioritize. That comes from over-applying all the self-care stuff from DevOps and pandemic times. One can have too much self-care. It also means I too easily slide into people-pleasing, ignoring my own desires and intuition about what needs to be done, and even my state of mind. My calibration for “trusting myself” is all out of whack: I don’t know how to balance “what I want” with “what other people want of me.”

Each year we go back to Texas for the Christmas break. We’ve lived in Amsterdam for six years, so when you’re a stranger yourself at home, you notice things. Here’s a selection.

• Using the word “awesome.”

• Dip Cup.

• People starting sentences with “Honestly…”

• Adults saying the word “TikTok.”

• Ford Ranger truck.

• Hotel rooms with three flat screen TVs.

• Egg Nog, various sizes, brands, also available in soy and oat.

• Can’t buy wine before 10am on Sunday, whether to drink now or later.

• “Have a nice day!”

• Transcendental experience eating a breakfast taco in the gas station parking lot.

• Free samples.

• Colder inside than outside, in December.

• Or: the only reason you need to bring a jacket is if you’re gonna stay inside a long time.

• “Ranch Hand.”

• Baker’s dozen of glazed donuts.

• Plastic lids on all drinks, unasked for.

• Cardboard sleeves on hot drinks.

• Plastic straws.

• Cradling a giant Stanley cup, straw with end cover.

• Pack your own doggie bag.

• “The thing about no ice-maker, though, is that we always need ice.”

• Old guys talking about Vietnam.

• “Cowboys won, I don’t wanna see it. I lost twenty dollars on that game.”

• “I forgot my koozie.”

• “It’s fun with the ice in the water. A nice touch.” Expat Kim

• Bike racks on the front of the city bus.

• “Still workin’ on that?” asked to see if you’re done eating.

• Leggings.

• Toilet paper that you could use as bed sheets.

• “So that’s where we’re at…”

• Free parking.

• Public bathrooms that accommodate wheelchairs.

• “I wonder if they like HEB as much as we do.”

• Talking about HEB, at least once a day.

• Annoyingly helpful.

• “Insert shmear here.”

• The strawberries tase like strawberries, the bananas taste like bananas!

• “Everyone is so friendly, and they actually mean it.”

• Watch out for the coyote in the creek.

• Alejandra: “They have big gardens.” Me: “Oh, you mean ‘yards’?” Alejandra: “Yes.”

Previous installments from 2023: part 01, part 02, part 03. Also, here are some observations from our 2022 trip.

Wastebook

• “Everything we do is so specific and so unnecessary,” RotL #564.

• “Science as an employment program for scientists” Seems a little cynical.

• “how can you tell if something is a zero-percent-interest phenomenon vs. a real step change?” Questions for Tyler

• “Form follows failure,” Henry Petroski.

• “All parents leave some scars in their kids and that’s one I inherited from two parents who grew up very poor and reached through hard work a certain level of security (that they both never felt).” Here.

• “‘you guys’ energy, a chatty, ersatz intimacy that feels consonant with the way we exist on social media—offering a glimpse of our private lives, but in a deliberate and mediated way.” Amanda Petrusich.

• “Someday I’ll remember that Command+Option+Esc is the Mac’s Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Someday.” Here.

• “They have a specific selfish narrative they want their manager to build, so they carefully select a subset of the truth and market it as the complete picture. They believe their manager is so busy and soup tasting that their interpreted version of the story will become canonical.” Here.

• “But that’s not important,” Future Noah. // This is a common trope, here. It is a way of saying "that was good, and possibly True, but we have to wrap this up and keep moving. Maybe we’ll get back to it. Or maybe we won’t. But, right now, it’s not what we should be doing. Even worse, it’s possible that, right now if we keep going, we’ll ruin it.

• “I am so glad I put your number in speed-dial.” First time caller.

• First: “It’s possible, though, that Brombert had a secretary to type up, when necessary, his handwritten texts. I mean, the guy is wearing an ascot, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that men who wear ascots do not do their own typing.” But, more importantly: “Sergeant Brombert’s unit eventually reached the Seine, and he sneaked away to Paris in its first stirrings of liberation. He visited his old home, school and playground. In the heart of the city, he accepted wine from celebrating passers-by and, in fluent French, gave speeches whose content, he said, he was too drunk to remember. The war, he thought, was over. He dreamed of finding an apartment and a French girlfriend."

• “Prince was never big in Finland.”

Logoff

If you do anything with marketing and community management in tech, and also big events, check out our interview with Katie Greenley at the CNCF. There’s also some Tupperware theory in the back-half.

//

It’s the last day of 2024. I’m sitting in Austin, in a living room of an AirBnB. The weather has been in the 80’s (ChatGPT tells me “80°F to 89°F converts to 26.7°C to 31.7°C”), sunny, blue skies. So different than Amsterdam and Northern Europe.

It’s a cliche observation, but the most concise way to describe the difference between America and Europe is: in America everything is bigger than it needs to be, in Europe, everything is as small as it needs to be.

AI Stone Soup

One of my co-workers, AI Adib, pointed me towards the AI stone soup, uh…analogy? Parable? Anyhow, the point of it is that the models at the core of all this AI stuff are cool, but it’s the layers and layers of applications and people on-top that make the difference. The app that you put on-top of the AI is what matters.

Indeed, the whole reason we’re talking about AI now is because of the app of ChatGPT, then Gemini, Midjourney, NotebookML’s podcasts, Claude, Perplexity, etc. These apps do a lot of the heavy lifting, workflow coordination, and anyone would suspect pre- and post-processing. Even all that vector database stuff.

As ever, it’s the packaging.

All of this amounts to “AI middleware,” all those other ingredients you put into the soup with models. AI middleware isn’t it all either: you need to actual apps too. I’ve used a lot of these apps and their usability and feature set matters a lot. The most valuable is retrieving and searching the web, uploading files and connecting to Google Docs is good too.

I’m thinking that, for “enterprises” looking to do AI, this AI middleware and the app layer are what will matter the most, be the most affordable (ROI’able?) option, and likely the quickest and easiest to succeed at.

//

Speaking of AI, I switched to using Claude over the weekend. For playing D&D it is amazing, so much better than ChatGPT. Its notion of projects is like Perplexity’s Spaces. ChatGPT does this kind of thing with custom GPTs. To the stone soup point, ChatGPT’s approach feels clunky and kind of forgotten about.

Claude will also lets you change writing style/tone. It has some canned ones, but you can “train” it. So, I uploaded some long newsletter episodes into it to see what it came up with. I think it’s fine?

The Model Context Protocol thing in Claude has a lot of potential. It’s trying to be a generic API for interacting with an AI. This includes, of course, bringing text in, but also “writing” out. For my basic uses, since it works with the GUI, you could have it interact with your local desktop, say like random NPC generators and game trackers for D&D.

Claude lacks web search, which is a major problem. If it had that, I could see giving up on ChatGPT.

In all of these, you can see that what matters isn’t the stone of the lower level models, but the layers and layers of app-stuff. Stone Soup!

Relative to your interests

I asked the AIs to write up this episode’s links in a Harper’s/Matt Levine link round-up style, made some tweaks, and here it is:

Strategy has finally outgrown its Sun Tzu phase, embracing gardening metaphors just as Dell's earnings wilt while customers await the next generation of AI silicon. Speaking of outdated frameworks, it turns out employee performance isn't actually Gaussian—though someone should tell HR—and Wardley Mapping continues its to enchant. I asked various social channels about Wardley Map case studies and stories, and there were a handful enough of replies: people love the stuff.

For those exhausted still lost in strategy-land, delight in some hybrid cloud chatter. Speaking of, Tanzu Platform 10 shipped, promising to transform Kubernetes from arcane yaml-craft into something mere mortals might actually deploy—complete with Cloud Foundry characteristics for those who remember when PaaS was supposed to save us all. Oh, and also just with Cloud Foundry for the discerning.

Meanwhile, modern work drowns in SaaS sprawl—though maybe we should just embrace the #defaultslifestyle of Microsoft 365—while growing organizations rediscover why hierarchy and meetings persist, much to everyone's chagrin.

Wastebook

The AI didn’t know what to do with the wastebook section.

• “there are more idiots here.”

• “Real leopards ate my face energy here” Reid.

• “my employer has never wanted me to share an opinion publicly and i do my best every day to ensure they never will” @maya@occult.institute.

• And: “leading voice of the goblin web.”

• ”I have a scraggly patch of hair on my right calf from when I scraped off a swath of skin in an Ultimate Frisbee tournament.” Jason.

• “inclusive growth.”

• “But you wouldn’t comment on telecommunications now, it’s too normalised” Matt.

• “Because no matter how much fun we had, it wasn’t the plan.” RotL #559.

• “trusted brawlers”

• “My entire existence of life.”

• “OKR stratosphere.”

• “I’ll wait for Burger King counter attack.” On Delta’s burgers in the sky.

• “Looking forward out in the 20 mile stare.” Furrierism.

• “AI that builds pipe, not hype.”

Logoff

I feel like there was more original content I wanted to share, but I can’t find it. Did I share this interview with the aforementioned “AI Adib” yet? In the second half we talk about how executives can think through their enterprise AI strategy.

Meanwhile, why not enjoy these FY27 Q3 vibes:

I let that guy shaking hands go on a little long, but it pays off.