Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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Datacenter NIMBYism: What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?
Tech people are amazingly bad at marketing to The Community. And by “the community,” I mean normal people, not the “open source community.” Take the datacenter problem. Tech companies need more compute, so they need datacenters. They plop them down in some small town, avoid paying taxes, and consume huge amounts of electricity and water.…
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Tanzu Platform 10.4: a private cloud platform for AI harnesses (or, “agentic AI”)
AI companies are building platforms for running agentic applications. Right now, those applications are primarily for software development, with a little bit of knowledge worker stuff. In each case, you get a “harness,” an application that wraps all sorts of functionality around a model. This harness app is way beyond the chat-based apps we grew…
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Never start deep work if you know you’ll be interrupted soon.
I wake up at six every morning to have coffee, read The Economist briefing, and read my “RSS feeds.” Everyone else is asleep, and it is quiet and dark. This is when I find things to bookmark and share, or just read and inform myself. Sometimes I start projects. Recently, getting all my janky AI…
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Enterprise AI needs new apps, enterprise AI doesn’t need new platforms
For your enterprise AI projects, what you want now is resilience. I’m using that term from a paper called “AI as a Normal Technology.” There, resilience means ” taking actions now to improve our ability to deal with unexpected developments in the future.” There’s a lot of great thinking in that paper, but I want…
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Enterprise ROI is elusive – maybe ROI is just headcount chopping, not revenue growth and “transformation”
From “that meeting could have been an email” to “that meeting could have been a ChatGPT session.” Recent Forrester survey summary: 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…
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Enterprise AI ROI is still elusive. What IT can do to fix it. It’s not “culture.”
Everyone is excited about AI improving how organizations’s work. Reducing costs, bringing in more revenue. You know “productivity.” How is it going three years after the release of ChatGPT? Here are some recent headlines and excepts: 56% of companies getting nothing out of AI, PwC research says; chairman blames forgetting the basics. (On the same…
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20 years of business travel – you’ll get there, or you won’t
The first thing is, the travel industry changes very slowly. What changes most frequently is the interior decorating. The seats in planes, the plugs in hotel rooms, the signs in airports. Even these don’t change structurally, just in aesthetically. The biggest change in 20 years has been Uber. I started traveling in 20051 which meant…
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An XDG library for Java – xdgj
Each time I write a small utility, either a command line one or for an MCP server, I need to store state and config in the file system. I’ve come up with many ways of doing it. You know, like, you want to store a default LLM prompt in a file. You want to store…
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Reject the rejection of your writing voice especially when you’re writing “enterprise grade” copy
More Writing Advice Once you identify your style, try pushing back against some suggested changes. People reviewing your work don’t always edit with your style in mind and will think it’s appropriate to change it. This is especially true in business writing, where people expect a sort of neutral, flat tone. That can be great…
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Survive the next meeting
This is a mode I catch myself in where all I’m focused on is getting through the next meeting. “Getting through” means running out the clock so that it’s over, getting out of it without any new work, and especially without “getting in trouble” for something. Obviously, this is bad most of the time as…
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AI video generation is very good, but its current prudishness will limit art and general use
I theorize that in reality, AI generated video and images are much better1 than we are currently experiencing. That’s because there are non-technological limits on them driven by prudence and prudishness. This several limits artistic and entertainment use. Most people are restricted to ten seconds or less and a limited number of generations a day.…
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Shocker! Reversal in AI ROI slide-wisdom: AI does works well
There’s a new study out that means it’s time to update all those slides that say AI projects are failing: [A] new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School complicates the narrative. The study found that 74% of businesses that measure the ROI from their generative AI efforts are already seeing a positive return,…
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What do we think of GitHub saying there are 180m developers in the world?
180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub. Their definition is “[a]nyone with a GitHub account.” Let’s not overthink it, just yet, and instead go with what they’re saying. If 2025 had a theme, it would be growth. Every second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub–over 36 million in the past…
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Claude Code for things that are not code – Claude Not Code
There’s a creeping notion that Claude Code (and OpenAI Codex, I guess) are very useful for things that are not code. In the Obsidian community, where you keep your decades of notes as plain text, markdown files, some people are using Claude Code to do analysis, reformatting, etc. of their notes. I can see that…
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How to use Tahoe’s new Use Model shortcut to summarize articles
The new Use Model shortcut in Apple Shortcuts opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, I like to summarize a lot of pages. Sometimes, ChatGPT can’t get the text for those pages, or I don’t trust the text it retrieves. There’s a shortcut that will retrieve the cleaned up text of a page (as…
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Things I Like
There are many things I like, but these are some I can think of now1: Above all else, I like making content and publishing it. I like reading short things (I used to like books, but now that I know a lot of the 101 stuff after ~40 years, I get frustrated/bored by how long…
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Publishing Versus Orchestrating
Publishing Versus Orchestrating You can focus on short term delivery, or long term delivery. Do you follow the Twitter drama day-to-day, or just wait every week or two to see what happened? Do you write an article in a day or two, or write a 40 page PDF in a month, 120+ page book in…
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The community is moving
The people in my tech community who talk about community find Twitter so vile that there’s little discussion of the good parts. It was a great place for discovering, building, and “doing” community. And it still is, though mixed in with all the other stuff1. This history of DevOps, cloud stuff, and everything that followed…
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The “Be Nice” product and marketing strategy for open source enterprise stuff
Early on in the life of a new open source project, some vendors will tell you it’s too complex and unreliable, and wrap their fixes on top of it, often hiding the project. They’re not wrong (early in, most OSS projects are literally not even 1.0 projects yet!), but it’s rhetorically risky strategy. With the…
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Open Source usage survey
Some commentary on a recent survey commissioned from my work, VMware. Unsurprisingly, open source is used by almost everyone. When it comes to what I care about software development, open source is indispensable. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a developer who only uses closed source software, if not whole systems like kubernetes or Cloud…
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