The Justice Department Accuses Apple Of Smartphone Monopoly - ’When you’re as big as Apple, there’s a target on your back. The company’s market capitalization flirts with three trillion dollars, but more importantly, it commands a resounding 60%+ share of the smartphone market in the U.S. Therein lies the rub – our phones are the primary portal into how we live every moment of our waking (and sleeping) lives. What Apple chooses to allow or disallow has outsized implications for every provider hoping to get in through the portal and play a role in the digitally addicted lives of American consumers.’ And: “Apple’s obsession with its customer experience leads it to control the experience tightly, make decisions on its customers' behalf, and maintain an ecosystem that consistently delivers on the experience the brand promises. That philosophy limits choices for consumers. To that end, there is no dearth of people who are irked by this handcuffing and choose not to frolic in Apple’s walled garden. Then there are others who are part of the Apple family precisely because of the carefully managed ecosystem’s ease of use and intuitiveness."
From Here to GitOps and Back Again - GitOps as a feature of CI/CD.
A few thoughts on the Apple DOJ antitrust case, from someone who isn’t riding his first rodeo - “In organisations that are under antitrust pressure, ideas that might get put forward are held back, because people would rather not spend the time having them checked through legal and compliance teams. Acquisitions which a company might make don’t happen, because it would rather not appear rapacious or that it’s stifling nascent competition. And contractual clauses with partners can’t be as aggressive in locking them out of doing business in a way which doesn’t favour you."
Ex-technology companies. - “Organizations that spun up dedicated in-house build and deployment infrastructure have fixed engineering costs to maintain that infrastructure, and the math that convinced executives earlier–some sort of argument about the multiplicative effect on the impact of other engineers–doesn’t make as much sense anymore. But often you can’t just stop maintaining those investments, because that would require slowing down to decommission the existing systems, and ex-technology companies have little capacity for maintenance. Instead they’re focused on survival or roleplaying the motions of rapid product development despite actually spending the large majority of their time on maintenance.” // This is pretty great! Finally, a business strategy model for deciding build vs. buy. Look at the costs of building, running, and maintaining your own stack over (whatever, let’s pick a number) 3 to 5 years. Is it higher than buying, assuming revenue is single digit growth? Put another way, with software, it’s the maintenance that kills your numbers. // Also, to ponder: “They no longer believe they can change the business' outcomes through R&D efforts, and as a result they shouldn’t include engineering as a major stakeholder in business decisions."
How People Are Really Using GenAI - It makes jargon-based work more accessible, and complex things easier to understand. Also, just some everyday uses. And: an alternative to the garbage filled results you get from search, a way to filter the Internet. // “just 10% use ChatGPT which enjoys 60% market share regularly”
Late Night With the Devil: why people are boycotting the indie horror - “I’m not going to boycott an indie movie and the work of everyone else for what amounts to 20 seconds of AI title cards, because that doesn’t help artists either”
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty - “The Exit, Voice and Loyalty model states that members of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change)."
First custom brand font for TJ Maxx built by McCann Design - ‘The Maxx typeface has a family of four weights and is apparently “chock-full of little gems in the Open Type features”. Typing out two X’s will bring up the option of the famous XX ligature that appears in the logo. There are also alternative shorter glyphs for the I and J, “to close the leading more naturally in tight typesetting”.'
101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago - “You are high in neuroticism, a trait that correlates with worse social relationships and an unhappier life. Sorry; there’s not much you can do about it other than be aware of it. Its saving grace is that it means you are attuned to what is wrong in the world and driven to fix it.” // Typical listical, but, sure, some fun stuff.
Battle of the Redis forks? - Commercialized open source is a mess right now…for the past ~3 years. Like other types of software, cloud has really been, uh, “transformative."