Why “AI” projects fail - “And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it. Because actually solving a problem includes first fully understanding the reasons for the existence of the problem, reasons that often come back to an organizations’ structure, their – sometimes inconsistent – goals and their social structure in addition to actual technical issues.” And: “AI is so good at writing summaries of all the meetings I can then have summarized afterwards to understand what was going on” says that your organization has probably too many meetings that are not structured well and that you don’t think that understanding why people say a thing, how they present their case is important (which makes you a bad manager)."

Moonbound Revisited - “Several decades ago, the semiotician A. J. Greimas claimed that all stories are comprised of six actants, in three pairs: Subject/Object; Sender/Receiver; Helper/Opponent."

The Forgotten Surrealist Painter Who ‘Didn’t Have Time to Be Anyone’s Muse’ - “In contrast to the tendency of Surrealism’s male artists to depict women as thin, young, fragmented, static, and perpetually naked muses, Carrington’s women fell across a spectrum: often very old, powerful and threatening, in a state of action and transformation."

American Horror Story, season 2.

Just links and fun finds.

Relevant to your interests

I didn’t do link round-ups this past week, so there’s a backlog. Also, I’ve been using Perplexity to summarize some articles (not listed here, usually). I think it’s pretty good, and I recommend you use it.

• Amazon’s CEO says their AI tool has saved them a crazy amount of time - This oddly specific, and a big deal if applicable to other organizations. // ‘The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours," he wrote. “We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).” The AI is not only fast but seems pretty accurate, too, according to his post. Amazon developers shipped 79% of the AI-generated code reviews without any additional changes, Jassy wrote.’

• How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing - A sort of community cloud for Germany and Austria? // “Its IT unit, Schwarz Digits — which became a standalone operating division in 2023 — has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP, the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich and the port of Hamburg. Last year, the unit generated €1.9bn in annual sales and it employs 7,500 staff.”

• 3 ways CIOs can turn strategy into execution - “Less than half of enterprises reach the majority of the strategic goals IT leaders set out to achieve, according to Gartner research.”

• How Platform Engineering Enables the 10,000-Dev Workforce - “60% of companies in the survey said they are releasing code on only a monthly or quarterly basis”

• Does Market Share Still Matter? - "we find that the positive relationship between market share and profitability generally still holds, but that it weakens with greater digital transformation. This means that market share increases translate into lower profitability gains for highly digitalized compared to less-digitalized companies. Additionally, it implies that digital transformation benefits smaller firms in particular because it leads to greater relative profitability gains for them compared to larger firms by removing some of the limitations that traditionally hindered them from becoming more profitable.” // “This means that the more digitalized a company becomes, the less upper management should rely on and prioritize market share to grow profitability. And the smaller a company is, the more it should prioritize digital transformation to boost profitability.” // See also the original paper.

• Dell’s AI Server Business Now Bigger Than VMware Used To Be - Maybe private AI will really be a thing: ‘“We are still in the early innings, and our AI opportunity with tier 2 CSPs, enterprise, and emerging sovereign customers is immense,” Jeff Clarke, Dell’s chief operating officer, explained on the call with Wall Street analysts. “Our view is supported by an AI hardware and services TAM of $174 billion, up from $152 billion, growing at a 22 percent CAGR over the next few years. We are competing in all of the big AI deals and are winning significant deployments at scale.”’ And: more analysis of Dell’s numbers.

• analyze_interviewer_techniques - “You are a hyper-intelligent AI system with a 4,312 IQ. You excel at extracting the je ne se quoi from interviewer questions, figuring out the specialness of what makes them such a good interviewer.” And, an example of it in action with a Tyler Cowen interview. Great looking stuff!

• Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome - ”I left VMware Explore feeling that Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s a good thing, and that some of the complaints about the current state of VMware are a very natural struggle to cope with sudden and significant change.” // Great example of what a column on covering a tech conference should look like.

• VMware Tanzu Platform 10: Unified cloud app development simplified - ‘"With Tanzu platform 10, we have a unified single console to manage your applications, look at your CVEs, security governance, compliance,” she stated. “There are three main messages. Keep it very simple for the developer, never expose YAML files, configuration files and lower level configs. Number two, make sure that the deployment is dynamic and it automatically adjusts to the app needs. Then the third one is you want to do continuous update, repair and continuous security.”’

• A Java Language Cumulative Feature Rollup - ‘I found myself asking myself the question, “What’s every new feature Java has introduced since the last time I really cared about new Java language features?”, and didn’t find an easy answer via Google. So, I decided to create that list.’

• Is Your Organizational Transformation Veering Off Course? - “The research highlights that shifts in emotional energy, such as increased frustration or anxiety, can signal that a transformation is off track. Addressing these emotional shifts can help prevent derailment.”

• Being quietly radicalized by being on holiday - Pretty accurate view of the European lifestyle. “Enjoying life” is part of the ROI analysis.

Wastebook

• “There’s a fox a chicken and a bag of grain and now we want an ice cream so you go first and take the fox then leave the chicken but swap them with a soft-serve in a cornet with a flake.”

• And, the title itself: “Beaches are for people who enjoy the bureaucracy of going to the beach.”

• A very elegant tourist trap.

• If a PowerPoint joke is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

• “Tip Jar Culture” and the “Tip Jar Economy.”

• If you find yourself tsk’ing at something, that’s a good indication that it’s something you should not care about. A tsk is a second arrow.

• Interacting with AI is like slot machines: you win just enough times to make you pull the lever again.

Logoff

As mentioned above, I’ve been really liking Perplexity. I use it for summarizing articles, but it’s also really good at what we now call “search.” Either asking quick questions that I’d other wise google-hunt for, like how to do things in apps. You know “google-hunt”’ing: you search for something in Google and spend time sorting all the crap and RTFM jerk’s answers to find a simple answer. Not with Perplexity! Sure, it takes longer than that “instant” Google search, but you save time on the second part of a Google search: filtering out all the bullshit. Plus, you can narrow down and integrate Perplexity more.

The Collections functionality is a different approach on making GPTs. You setup a persistent prompt that’s used in each new chat in the collection. So, for example, I have a collection that’s called “tl;dr,” and I have a “summarize this for me…” style prompt. So, each time I start a new chat in that Collection, it uses that prompt.

I need to experiment with using it for non-search chats, like playing D&D. I’m not sure it’ll be good at that kind of inward looking, hangout with the AI thing like ChatGPT is. On the other hand, I bet it’d be a good therapy-bot because it can go and search for things to add context.

Theory: that’s something that makes Perplexity good: Context. It can use Context (somehow) to weed out all that RTFM jerk stuff (this is sort of anti-Context - the people writing that stuff are operating in a different context than you are), and because it can search the live web (right?) it can add in relevant context to whatever you’re discussing with it.

Anyhow, you should use it!

I signed up for the annual plan. Sure, ChatGPT says they have search coming out, but (1) I don’t believe them, they announce all sorts of things and then trickle them out over the next year, if at all, and, (2) Perplexity is great!

//

School starts next week, so Kim and I are on one last, just-us weekend trip thanks to my mom’s annual, summer visit.

Is Your Organizational Transformation Veering Off Course? hbr.org/2024/08/i… “The research highlights that shifts in emotional energy, such as increased frustration or anxiety, can signal that a transformation is off track. Addressing these emotional shifts can help prevent derailment."

Being quietly radicalized by being on holiday (Interconnected) - Pretty accurate view of the European lifestyle. “Enjoying life” is part of the ROI analysis.

VMware Tanzu Platform 10: Unified cloud app development simplified - ‘“With Tanzu platform 10, we have a unified single console to manage your applications, look at your CVEs, security governance, compliance,” she stated. “There are three main messages. Keep it very simple for the developer, never expose YAML files, configuration files and lower level configs. Number two, make sure that the deployment is dynamic and it automatically adjusts to the app needs. Then the third one is you want to do continuous update, repair and continuous security.”'

Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome - ”I left VMware Explore feeling that Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s a good thing, and that some of the complaints about the current state of VMware are a very natural struggle to cope with sudden and significant change.” // Great example of what a column on covering a tech conference should look like.

analyze_interviewer_techniques - “You are a hyper-intelligent AI system with a 4,312 IQ. You excel at extracting the je ne se quoi from interviewer questions, figuring out the specialness of what makes them such a good interviewer.”